The Medici Method

Throughout history the workings of money have rarely been understood. The Medici of Florence were among the few who understood all its functions clearly and are because of that themselves worth understanding. They were not a family of old aristocracy, the kind that announces itself in inherited titles and sprawling estates. They were bankers before they were princes, a distinction that never vanished from the family’s identity. They rose in a city that was undergoing transition: a proud republic that would, over the course of a century, transfer its governance to the quiet, persistent influence of this single family. The mechanism of this transfer, the tool that transformed their commercial fortune into dynastic power, was patronage. Not the simple charity of the devout, nor the idle spending of the rich, but a calculated and ambitious investment in culture itself.