History

A brief history of Florence follows.  This is useful to allow for an understanding of the importance of the Medici family in the time of the commissioning of the Laurentian library. 


Though Florence (Firenze in Italian) can lay claim to a modest importance in the ancient world, it did not fully emerge into its own until the C11.  In the early 1200s, the city, like most of the rest of Italy, was rent by civic unrest.  Two factions, the Guelphs & the Ghibellines competed for power.  The Guelphs supported the papacy, & the Ghibellines supported the Holy Roman Empire.  Bloody battles tore Florence & other Italian cities apart.  Sometimes the Guelphs were in power & exiled the Ghibellines, at other times, the reverse was true.  By the end of the C13 the Guelphs ruled securely & the Ghibellines had been vanquished.  This didn’t end civic strife, however -  the Guelphs split into the Whites & the Blacks for reasons still debated by historians.  Dante, author of the Divine Comedy (arguably Italy’s greatest work of literature) was banished from Florence in 1301 because he was a White. 

Local merchants had organized themselves into guilds by 1250.  In that year they  made a landmark attempt at elective, republican rule.  Though the episode lasted only 10 years, it constituted a breakthrough in Western history.  Such a daring stance by the merchant class can be attributed to its new-found power, as Florence was emerging as one of the economic powerhouses in C13 Europe.  Florentines were papal bankers; they instituted the system of international letters of credit; & the gold florin became the international standard of currency.  With this economic strength came a building boom.  Public & private palaces, churches, & basilicas were built, enlarged or restructured.  Sculptors such as Donatello & Ghiberti were commissioned to decorate them; painters such as Giotto & Botticelli were commissioned to fresco their walls. 

Though ostensibly a republic, Florence was blessed (or cursed, depending on your point of view) with one very powerful family, the Medici, who came to prominence in the 1430s & were the de facto rulers of Florence for several hundred years.  The city flourished in the C15, when, under the leadership of the brilliant & shrewd Cosimo de’ Medici (or Cosimo the Elder), it became the most important centre of artistic & intellectual achievement since the Classical era.  The Medicis, who came from middle-class origins to produce Popes, Queens & powerful Dukes, oversaw Florence’s most prominent periods.  With money to spare, the family supported the arts, amassing grand collections while nurturing the masters.  Cosimo was patron to Donatello, Ghiberti & Brunelleschi.  His grandson, the charismatic Lorenzo the Magnificent, supported Botticelli & the young Michelangelo; Lorenzo’s son Pope Leo X, is known both for commissioning Raphael & excommunicating Martin Luther.   Florence produced “Renaissance men” in the arena of political thought as well.  Machiavelli’s The Prince, penned in an attempt to regain favour with the Medici clan when he was charged with conspiracy, praised their cold brutality & willingness to torture; his masterpiece is the source of the hardball political philosophy that the “ends justify the means”.   Lorenzo’s son, Piero (1471-1503) proved inept at handling the city’s affairs.  He was run out of town in 1494, & Florence briefly enjoyed its status as a republic while dominated by the Dominican friar Girolamo Savanarola (1452-98).  Savonarola preached against perceived pagan abuses & persuaded his followers to destroy their books, art, women’s wigs & jewellery in public “bonfires of the vanities”.  Eventually, he so annoyed the Pope that he was declared a heretic & hanged. 

After a decade of internal unrest, the republic fell & the Medici were recalled to power.  But even with the return of the Medici, Florence never regained its former prestige.  By the 1530s most of the major artistic talent had left the city – Michelangelo, for one, had settled in Rome.  The now-ineffectual Medici, eventually attaining the title of grand Dukes, remained nominally in power until the line died out in 1737, after which time Florence passed from the Austrians to the French & back again until the unification of Italy (1865-70), when it briefly became the capital under King Vittorio Emanuele II (1820-78). 


References.
Hale, J.R., c1977, Florence and the Medici, Phoenix Press, London.
Strathern, Paul, c2003, The Medici - Godfathers of the Renaissance, Jonathan Cape, London. 
http://galileo.rice.edu/lib/student_work/florence96/alexc/medici.html