Dan Snow's History Hit - Rise of the Medici

Episode Date: October 3, 2024

The House of Medici ruthlessly wielded control of Florence for nearly 300 years. Through financial and political machinations, they transformed the city into a cultural powerhouse and the epicentre of the Renaissance, spawning popes and royalty along the way. Across four special episodes, Not Just the Tudors takes a deep dive into this complex and controversial dynasty that left an indelible mark on Western civilisation.In this first episode, Professor Suzannah Lipscomb talks to Tim Parks, author of Medici Money, about the dramatic, frequently bloody story of how the Medici rose to power through their banking activities.Presented by Professor Susannah Lipscomb. The researcher is Alice Smith, the audio editor was Ella Blaxill and the producer is Rob Weinberg. The senior producer is Anne-Marie Luff.Not Just the Tudors is a History Hit podcastEnjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Sign up HERE for 50% off for 3 months using code ‘DANSNOW’.We'd love to hear from you - what do you want to hear an episode on? You can email the podcast at [e-mail] can take part in our listener survey here.

Hi, everybody. It's that time again when I get the chance to share one of our fantastic sibling podcasts on the History Hit Network. This time, it is Professor Susanna Lipscomb and her Not Just the Tudors, which is all about the Tudors, but not only the Tudors, all sorts of other Renaissance things that were going on in the world at the same time, from the Americas to Asia. But on this occasion, she's visiting Italy, where the Medici family are all powerful. Like the Tudors, one of the most famous families in European history. The banking family that moved into hard power. They ruled Florence and Tuscany. They produced two queens of France. They supplied popes. Quite a lot of them, in fact. It is an astonishing tale, and as

ever, Susanna Lipscomb delivers it better than anybody else. Enjoy. Hello, I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb, and welcome to Not Just the Tudors from History Hit, the podcast in which we explore everything from Anne Boleyn to the Aztecs, from Holbein to the Huguenots, from Shakespeare to Samurais. Relieved by regular doses of murder, espionage and witchcraft. Not, in other words, just the Tudors, but most definitely also the Tudors. The Medici, a name synonymous with wealth, art and power. Experts in commerce who became rulers of Florence, the Medici dominated the political and social landscape of Italy

for almost a century through war, exile and assassination. To tell the story of the Medici, you have to begin at the beginning. So in this, the first of our mini-series on the Medici, we go right back to begin our investigation with the founding of the first Medici bank, to figure out how they got all that money, before we trace the extraordinary rise of Cosimo de' Medici, a man whose ambition grew an empire. Today I'm joined by Tim Parks, novelist, essayist and translator, whose book Medici Money, Banking,

Metaphysics and Art in 15th Century Florence excavates the impact of the Medici banking dynasty on the political and artistic landscape of the Florentine Republic. I'm Professor Susanna Lipscomb, and this is Not Just the Tudors from History Hit. Tim, welcome to Not Just the Tudors. Hello, yes. I'm a bit daunted by the task you've given me, but we'll see. Well, we're both a bit daunted because this is very much not the Tudors, very much in an area where I know very little about it. So I'm going to be learning just as much as any listener today.

So we're picking up, I guess, the end of the 14th century, beginning of the 15th century, up, I guess, the end of the 14th century, beginning of the 15th century, and thinking about the fact that Italy was divided into separate city-states, which first of all have to say each with their own leaders. Could you give a sense of what position Florence held in terms of influence and power prior to the rise of the Medici? The bank is actually founded at the end of the 14th century, of the Medici. The bank is actually founded at the end of the 14th century, 1397. Let's remember a few key facts about the 14th century. In 1348, we have the Great Plague. The Great Plague reduced the population of Florence by 66%. Florence would not recover the population that it had in the early 14th century until the late 16th century. There was a huge loss of population. Florence at the center of Italy, a center of Italy divided into

basically five major players, Milan and Venice in the north to the west and the east. Then we have Florence in the center. There were obviously some smaller states around east. Then we have Florence in the center. There were obviously some smaller states around Florence. Then we have the papal states below Florence, which acted very much as a kind of imperialist power like any other. And then below that, Naples to the south. And all these five powers were more or less constantly at war through the 15th century in one way or another. constantly at war through the 15th century in one way or another. And they were wars fought by, usually by mercenary armies. The actual casualty level was incredibly low. Machiavelli, when he later wrote his history of Florence, complained bitterly about how ridiculous it was to have wars where nobody died. Obviously, you would feel differently about that if you were one of the soldiers.

But deaths were very low because the mercenaries were often a lot more worried about getting paid than about getting killed, of course. Florence is the weakest of the five states. So Florence never dominates the scene. But Florence is very much at the center and basically in a constantly shifting alliances so that no other state should ever try to unite Italy. The idea of uniting Italy is there in the background, but it's there as something that everybody fears might happen and destroy their own state. So Florence would be in an

alliance with Venice up until about the 1450s, and then it shifts into an alliance with Milan. But basically, it allies against the most powerful of the other states. In terms of trade, Florence was a society, deeply, deeply religious, which believed itself a sort of New Jerusalem in many ways, but at the same time obsessed with luxury goods. So it was a city whose wealth depended on the production of luxury goods, often reprocessing and working wool that came from England, but also silk, wool and silk factories.

And in fact, the Medici would set up two wool factories and one silk factory at a certain point. And that wealth depended then on trade. So they had to be free to trade with the rest of Europe. And of course, to trade, you need money, you need loans, you need to buy large amounts of goods so that you can move them and sell them. It often takes quite a long time to move goods around. So there's quite a long time between when you buy products and when you sell them. So money was required in terms of large loans. And the huge obstacle to banking and also to trade and really banking and trade were almost the same thing in this period. The huge obstacle

was the church's objection to usury, which was often written into state law as well in the various states. So usury was not just loans with high interest, it was any loan at all. Any loan at all for a return of interest was considered usury. And we know from Dante that usury comes at a very real threat to a man's soul. It's in the seventh layer of hell for usury. So give me a sense then of what was wrong with usury and how the bank could grow at any speed at all, given that it was forbidden to lend money at interest. So usury was considered unnatural, and it was a crime that was aligned with the crime of sodomy, which was also considered unnatural, and with blasphemy. So what was the real problem? Because the church was incredibly aggressive against usury. Usury was the sin that wealthy

people were most worried about because whereas if, for example, you committed adultery, which all our protagonists did, or whether you owned slaves, which all our protagonists did, you only needed to show penitence for those sins and you could be given indulgence. But for usury, you had to repay all the money that you had taken. And that was often impossible. And that was often impossible. So we find that bankers and rich men in general on their deathbeds would leave huge amounts of money to the church to cover any possible problems. a worker decides to buy his own loom to make wool, he starts to change his station in life. And the whole of medieval society depended on the idea that you did not change your station in life. You accepted the world that you were born into. You did not change it. That way, the rich people gave to the poor. Poor accepted that and so on and so forth. But you didn't try to move.

And that was really what the church was terrified of and what banking involves. Banking basically brings in an idea of freedom, the free movement of money, the possibility of making a fortune or losing a fortune, the possibility of spending differently. But for example, alongside the usury laws, there were also the so-called sumptuary laws, which indicated what levels of money you could spend on what, depending on your social class. So for example, a woman from a poorer class was not allowed to have, say, more than two buttons on her clothing, whereas a woman from a richer would be able to have five buttons, or you couldn't wear a certain kind of cloth, whereas another one, you couldn't wear

silk, whereas another woman could. And in fact, in Florence, there was a hugely creative industry of, for example, having buttons that weren't buttons because there were no buttonholes, so that was acceptable, but whereas if there was a buttonhole, there wasn't. And there were endless laws clarifying how many guests could you have to dinner. There was a sort of COVID rules kind of law that told you how many guests you could have to dinner, depending on your social class and so on. So the church was very interested in keeping people in a fixed position. And of course, people don't like that at some level, or not all of them do. How did they get around this?

They got around it by what are called exchange deals. And it largely had to do with the fact that trade moved between different countries. And we remember that even in Italy, there were about six or seven different currencies going around. What would happen was that somebody comes to my bank in Florence and he offers an exchange deal. He's going to take some money from us now and he's going to change it for us into pounds, say. Now, this is crazy, obviously, because he's the person who wants the money, but he offers it as if you wanted to change your money into pounds. It's quite difficult to get your mind around this. And in fact, there were very complicated manuals produced and theologians spent a long time discussing it. And almost always the premises exchange deals are very

difficult to understand. So for example, I take a thousand florins in Florence, and I say I'm going to give them to you in pounds at an exchange rate of 44 pence to the florin. Now, I have to give you that exchange inside three months, because three months is the time considered maximum that it takes to go from Florence to London. In fact, it takes a bit less, but it would take a galley, and they were actually rowing their boats, they would take a galley about that time or a bit less to go from Pisa to London up the tent, around the Atlantic up the tent. So at the given date in London, we changed the money. So the idea was this wasn't a loan because there wasn't a secure gain and because the exchange rates could change. But in fact, there was always more or less a 15% advantage.

In Florence, the florin was worth 15% more than it was worth in London. So when I change all my money into pounds at the florin exchange rate, if I then get a second deal to change them back at the sterin exchange rate. If I then get a second deal to change them back at the Sterling exchange rate, by the time I get back to Florence in three months time again, I will be 30% better off. So it all depended on fixing the exchange rates in such a way that you always made money if you moved it back and forth. I think out of all the deals that we have records of, very few were at a loss in the very rare occasions when there was a collapse in a currency and so on. Nobody really knew whether it was usury or not. Some theologians said it was,

some said it wasn't. There was particularly a problem when it turned out that actually no goods had moved from Florence to London, but that the whole thing had been notional. This was called a dry exchange when there was no actual goods, but they just did the deal. Everybody was terrified that they were going to go to hell because of this. But on the other hand, it was very profitable. of this. But on the other hand, it was very profitable. So as the Medici Bank gets started, Cosimo in particular, the Medici Bank starts in 1397 with a guy called Giovanni di Bici di Medici, and Cosimo was his eldest son. Cosimo was a profoundly religious man, and he would become deeply worried about the question of usury. And at a certain point in the late 1330s, he asks the Pope what he can do to save his soul if he has sinned. and the Pope says spend 10,000 florins to restore the convent of St. Marco.

So Cosimo does that and he gets into this situation where it's understood that this kind of donation supporting architecture, renovation, art, begins to have two functions. First, you become a very important person in town. The church accepts the fact that you've made the money in this way. And also, you can show your education and your taste by choosing the right artist and so on and so forth. So you become to be seen as a godfather figure, which is very much what Cosimo wished for. So is it fair to say that in this role as patron, establishing Florence's artistic legacy, but it's also about the relationship between the success of the bank

and Cosimo's political power? Is that right? If you're thinking of him as a godfather, can we see the money underpinning his political status as well? Okay. So Cosimo is really an extraordinary figure. And I think of all the Medici, the most extraordinary. And we have to think of three careers. The Medici bank never reached the same size as the banks of the early 14th century, which had collapsed thanks to the English king who borrowed so much money and then lost it in the War of the Roses. But nevertheless, Cosimo built up a huge bank with a network of branches all over Italy and all over Europe. So that's one career. Let me say that the Medici really didn't invent much in

banking, but they did invent one thing that was important. And that was the concept of the holding company. Because the problem in the past was that if a bank lent huge amounts to a king or a pope, and then that pope was on the losing side of a war or something, the whole bank would collapse. So the Medici created a whole number of banks with a complicated network of ownership where the local director was half owner and then the Medici holding bank was half owner in such a way that if a bank collapsed, the whole center would not collapse. And that worked for about 50 years when after Cosimo died, particularly, they really lost interest in banking, frankly. So about political power, we have to say a word

or two about Florence. Florence was different from, say, Milan, which was run by a duke, or obviously Naples run by a king. Rome was run by the Pope. Venice was a republic, but Venice had a system of lifetime doges. So once a doge was elected, he was like a duke for life, even though he wasn't a hereditary duke. So that in all these other four states, power was very stable, which meant that a banker was not a particularly dangerous figure. But power in Florence was very different in this sense. The Florentines had kicked out their aristocrats in the early 14th century and replaced them with an incredibly complicated electoral system. They elected a new government every two months. And this government was elected by putting the names of people who had a certain amount of wealth and who had paid their taxes into different bags for different areas of town and different bags for different professions.

And then from these bags, nine names were chosen every two months. Those two months, those nine people were almost prisoners in the signoria. They weren't allowed out of the signoria and they had to govern the state for two months as prisoners, more or less. And at the same time, there were around them three or four consultative bodies with different lengths of electoral time who were also elected by a system of bags and names. And it was pretty crazy. And you can imagine it was very, very difficult to have any long-term policy, which is very difficult when you're at war and when you need to raise money. So what tended to happen was that although that was the official way of running town, in reality, there would be a dominant family. And the dominant family at the

turn, as we turn between the 14th and 15th century, was a landowning family, the Albizzi family. And the dominant family at the turn, as we turn between the 14th and 50th century, was a landowning family, the Albizzi family. And they were rich because they had land. The kind of richness that somebody like Cosimo had, which was not based on land, but based on money, which can be moved around, money can be hidden much easily, it's much more difficult to tax people who just have money but don't have huge amounts of property. Cosimo frequently moved his money out of town when he feared there was danger. So you had this situation where the rich people were constantly terrified that their enemies would try to tax them out of business by changing the laws, which were indeed regularly changed. So in this kind of circumstance,

the presence of somebody with large amounts of money becomes a problem. There was a bank, for example, called the Strozzi Bank, Pallastrozzi, who had a bank that was actually slightly bigger than the Medici Bank, but he didn't spend money on patronage in anything like the same way. on patronage in anything like the same way. Instead, Cosimo gave large amounts of money in charity. He gave money not just to his own people, as it were, but to everybody on all sides of the political debate. By the way, political parties were illegal and all political gatherings were illegal because they were terrified that the town would split into separate parties and factions, because they were terrified that the town would split into separate parties and factions, which of course it inevitably did. As the 1430s particularly arrived, he was one of the few people who had money and was willing to spend it. And the town was desperately in need of money because

they were involved in a number of wars which they were losing. So as he began to be seen as the man who might save the town, so the Albizzi family began to be terrified by them. And in fact, Cosimo was arrested in 1433, I think it was, and the Albizzi family wanted to cut his head off. But he was a banker with so many clients. The Pope was a major client. The Duke of Bologna was a major client. The Duke of Milan was a major client. And all these people said, no, you know, you can't kill a banker. And also a lot of the Florentines themselves were indebted to him. So they decided to exile him. Well, he ended up in Venice, I think, via Padua. And then an extraordinary thing happened, which was typical of Florentine, I think democracy would

be the wrong word, but the way they ran the government. The Albizis ingenuously actually allowed, by chance, a government in favor of the Medici to be chosen from these famous bags. That is, they didn't fix the elections, which they had been doing on a number of occasions. And as soon as there was a group of people who were in favor of the Medici, they invited Cosimo back, upon which he immediately exiled everybody else and made sure that all the elections in the future were fixed. I'm Matt Lewis. And I'm Dr. Alan Orjanaga. And in Gone Medieval, we get into the greatest mysteries.

The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research from the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans. The greatest mysteries. The gobsmacking details and latest groundbreaking research. From the greatest millennium in human history. We're talking Vikings. Normans. Kings and popes. Who were rarely the best of friends. Murder.

Rebellions. And crusades. Find out who we really were. By subscribing to Gone Medieval from History Hit. Wherever you get your podcasts. It seems an incredible circumstance that you could be charged with treason on the point of death and yet able to come back to Florence with increased power and get to the point of being the head of its government? Well, it was clearly a huge error. The problem in Florence was this, the Florentines were extremely proud of being a republic and not bowing the knee to a king. and not bowing the knee to a king. At the same time, the reality was that you needed some kind of continuity and some kind of family in charge. So there was a constant ambiguity about how the

governments were actually chosen. Lots of the time people pretended they didn't know it was corrupt, or other times they would get so angry that they insisted that things were run properly again. So Cosimo benefited from one of the rare moments when the names were really chosen by chance, and by chance, enough names came out in his favor. The moment he was back, there was no question of anybody who had opposed him or even been neutral at the time of the crisis. I mean, he had been in jail expecting execution for quite a long time, some months. When he got back, he made absolutely sure that would never happen again. And in fact, what he did was he started tinkering endlessly with the system of voting. But it's interesting that he was always

very aware that it would be a mistake to try and present himself as a duke or a king, that people really didn't want that kind of solution. But at the same time, he couldn't allow the government to be chosen at random. So he started developing a very strange mentality in Florence, which maybe will sound familiar today when everybody talks about living in a republic and a democracy and so on. And at the same time, everybody knows that an awful lot of things are being fixed so that only limited solutions are possible. Cosimo was incredibly careful about that. And he's really a fascinating man in this, that he understood there was no permanent solution and that everything was a constant question of from day to day compromising, finding a new solution. and he would have to see if it could be smoothed over. And if he couldn't, he went down hard on people.

And in his dealings with the church too, Cosimo, for example, he loved to commission paintings of the Magi, who are almost the only positive rich figures in the Bible, bringing their gifts. And he would have his name saint painted in the painting. So there would be San Cosma in the painting, but he would never have himself painted in a painting until very, very late and only a painting in his own house, in his own chapel. So whereas later other bankers would come along and, you know, have themselves put right in the painting next to the Virgin Mary and so on,

Cosimo was very, very careful about that, about keeping a low profile, always being generous to everybody as long as they were on my side kind of thing. It was an intriguing mentality. And, you know, although one can be cynical about the way he behaved, it's clear that he was also a deeply religious man. Can I ask you then about his relationship with the papacy, given that his faith was deep? Because, you know, we see the Medici becoming the official papal bank. And does that relationship, in effect, And does that relationship in effect act as kind of carte blanche for his ambition?

Carte blanche? No. Giovanni de' Benci, right back at the beginning of the bank, had managed to become one of the Pope's bankers and then the main bank. Here we have to say that, funnily enough, the church, with its bad unusuary, was nevertheless one of the main clients for moving money around Europe. Because, of course, the papacy took a tenth, a tithe, from all over Europe. Every state was theoretically supposed to send 10% of its cash to the papacy. So that people were sending products from all over, for example, places like Finland and Norway to Bruges, where they were then sold. And then they had to be moved. The money had to be moved down to Italy, which was a dangerous thing, moving gold coin or silver coin. So being the Pope's banker was obviously had huge advantages.

At the same time, there were lots of people who wanted to be the Pope's banker. There was also competition. I don't think it gives them carte blanche, but it certainly put them in a very strong position. Actually, they had terrible difficulty moving money around Europe because most of the trade was going from Italy towards the north. There was English wool coming down from England to Italy, but more and more the English wanted to work the wool themselves and didn't want to send it to Italy. So there was this problem that Florence particularly was sending luxury goods to the north and collecting the money from it. And then they were also collecting money for the Pope.

So you've got all the money moving in one direction which is a problem because then you don't have money in the various places and also they preferred not to move coin itself but to move products because money moving in a cart can be obviously intercepted and stolen as it very frequently was with considerable loss of life. There were huge technical problems. It's worth noticing here that those usury laws, which meant that you couldn't lend money and interest, you could only do these exchange deals, meant that there was no lending money for local industrial development. So that instead of getting local industry developing, you got complicated trading going on, moving money around. And it's only really after the Protestant Reformation, when England is the first country to remove the usury laws and to allow loans and interest that you start getting investment in local industry, which of course was extremely beneficial to Britain at the time. But we need to say it had

a slightly humanist education. That is an education where it wasn't just religious questions, but they were reading Latin texts and then later Greek texts as well. And they became very interested in the idea of a nobility and a human value that was not just good or evil. Because the problem with the medieval church was it was all good or evil. You were either sinning or not sinning. And if you were sinning, you were going to hell. And in the baptistry in Florence, you had the last judgment on the ceiling was the only painting allowed. And it was a pretty frightening painting to look at for anybody who thought they might have been lending money at an interest. So one of the things that Cosimo and the other bankers would start to do is they started

investing in art and in beauty and in ideas of human nobility and stuff. They were starting to make the religious space, the churches, feel more comfortable for a rich man. You were starting to get depictions of noble, rich people in church. It was starting to feel like a place where you could go and not feel you were going to go to hell the next minute. Cosimo was really a very perceptive, intelligent man about how much could be done and how much couldn't be done in that regard. He was one of the few who remained deeply respectful of the church, even though he did introduce these paintings, whereas others would just start quite obviously putting their families more or less everywhere as if to say,

we are part of the Christian story. It isn't amazing, isn't it, how in this period we see what essentially seems to be the inversion of the Christian message. Jesus goes on and on about giving money to the poor, but actually it's the rich who are very much benefiting from the Roman Catholic Church. The Roman Catholic Church itself is immensely wealthy. Double speak really, isn't it? It's a fascinating period. Yeah, let me give you an anecdote about that, which I think is absolutely essential and helps you understand. When the Pope said to Cosimo, spend 10,000 on San Marco, which was this rambling old monastery, just a few blocks from where he lived. He said, I'm happy to do that, but not with the monks who are in there at the moment, because they had a group of monks in who were of the San Silvestre

order. And these monks, Cosimo complained, were not poor. And these monks were famous for being profligate and so on and so forth. So Cosimo said, I'll invest lots of money if you put the Dominicans in there who were the purest of all. So you've got Cosimo spending his money, but only for the poorest of the poor and the purest of the pure. Okay. Which was sort of made sense, except that the Dominicans, when they moved in, were kind of shocked by the luxury paintings in the building and saying, you know, this shouldn't really be happening. So what was going on then was that a huge tension was building up between a certain kind of religious person who deeply believed

in poverty and purity and a sort of growing eclecticism and liberalism, which eventually would produce the figure of Savonarola in the 1870s, who is the first person to say, no, I don't want your money. I'm not interested in being a cardinal, and I'm not interested in the Medici bank spending money on my church, and so on. He actually became the head of San Marco. In a certain sense, this eclecticism actually created the fundamentalism that then led to Martin Luther putting up his famous announcement. So at what point did the fortunes of Florence become fused with those of the Medici? When Cosimo comes back in 1834, he basically becomes the main man. From this point on, he changes all the rules so that he can

manipulate the government of Florence. When he is seriously challenged, shortly before his death in 1458 there was a constitutional challenge he declared what was called a so-called parliament which was when all the constitution was suspended and all the men of the town had to meet in the square to decide something and basically when you got to the square you found it surrounded by soldiers who Cosimo basically called in the Duke of Milan's army and forced the solution that he wanted on the town. He died in 1464 and his son Piero took over. Piero was overweight and had gout. Cosimo had also had gout older families suffered from gout

none of them was actually able to walk by this point there's a famous visit of the Duke of Milan's son to Cosimo's house in the 1470s and no member of the Medici family was able to show him around the house on foot. They had to be carried around on chairs. Piero was totally paralyzed. He could only move his face at this point. And the other members of the Patrician families in Florence thought, okay, so enough of the Medicis. And they tried to force the situation in their favor. But Piero was unbelievably efficient

man. He spent all the money that the bank immediately had available and borrowed a lot more to buy alliances. He bought all the food and all the wine in the town. He set himself up in a siege situation and he called for the army of Milan again to come. And in a very short space of time, he took over the situation and exiled everybody who was involved against him, except for Luca Pitti, who changed sides. So basically, it was at this point that it was absolutely clear that the Medici were running the show. And then of course, Piero dies and his son Lorenzo is only 20, 21. So again, there was, this is surely ridiculous that a 20-year-old is going to take over town, but they do manage

to have that happen. And the bank was already in decline. One of the major managers, a guy called Giovanni Benci, who had been a very brilliant manager, had died. The whole idea of the holding was let go. And at this point, the Medici family was so much a political institution that they began to use the bank basically for political loans to people like the Duke of Milan or like the King of England or like the King of England or like the Duke of Burgundy, and particularly the Duke of Burgundy. And of course, one of the early rules about the Medici Bank was you should never lend to somebody who could easily not pay you back. Like you shouldn't lend to somebody if they have the power to not pay you

back. For example, they have very strict rules about not lending too much money to priests, and also depending on the laws of the country and so on that they were in. Lending money to a king is a terrible error because, of course, the king, if you want the money back, he's just going to say, wait, or worse, he gets killed in battle, or he gets deposed. And so really, from this point on, from about 1460 on, the bank was in free fall. And banking general in Florence was in free fall because there were all kinds of problems with the movement of commercial products around Europe at this time. So we will pick up on Lorenzo the Magnificent as he becomes in a later episode. But I wonder if you can bring us to a conclusion then by characterizing Cosimo's legacy, his enduring legacy as one of the makers of

Florence. How would you have us think of him? Let's try and think of him in terms of this sort of generational change. You have his father, Giovanni de' Benci, who had no particular education beyond accounting and basic religious education. He allows Cosimo to have a humanist education. And you have a man who vastly increases the wealth of the bank, who said, you know, even if you could make money by passing a wand over something, I would still be a banker, because he just loved the complexities of money and the issues involved. And he was a man of brilliant compromise. I mean, a man who found artists like Donatello and architects like Michelotto and employed il Beato Angelico and Fra Lippi and Gozzoli.

So he was a man who actually invented the idea that art could be used as a way of legitimising power and of reconciling your position with the church. This was like such a major development and he was absolutely at the centre of what still exists today, the idea that somebody who patronizes art is necessarily good, which is what our banks do today, of course. And with Cosimo, there's this huge pathos that he genuinely understood all the moral problems and issues around this. When you get to somebody like Lorenzo, Lorenzo

was actually happy to say, I know nothing about banking and I don't want to know. And the kind of art that Lorenzo invested in was a much more personal art to do with being aristocratic, rather than major church developments and so on and so forth. But by the time the Medici's will return in the early 16th century as dukes, all that old tension about the legitimacy of power and how it should work, all of that had gone. But what remained, and I think was really Cosimo's legacy, was the perception that a Florentine duke could use art to promote a view of the city which would get international recognition as a place that produced beauty and produced art. This came out of Cosimo's experience and the bank's experience.

Well, thank you very much for giving us this sense of the rise of the Medici and money and art and power and how deeply these things are all interconnected in the 15th century. It's been very good at setting us up for thinking about the Medici over the course of the 16th century. Tim Parks, thank you so much for your time. Thank you. Thanks. Thank you. Thanks. Next week, join me when we find out about Cosimo's successor, Lorenzo de' Medici, the Magnificent, a man who funded the work of Botticelli and Michelangelo and himself narrowly avoided assassination. That's next week on Not Just the Tudors. Thanks for listening to this episode and also to my researcher, Alice Smith,

my producer, Rob Weinberg, and to Ella Blacksall, who edited this episode. We're always eager to hear from you, including receiving your brilliant ideas for subjects we can cover. So do drop us a line at notjustthetudors at historyhit.com

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