I have a thing for the Medici. At least I have a thing for the first few Medici. Once you get to Lorenzo the Magnificent the family takes a sharp turn down hill. However Giovanni di Bicci de’ Medici, Cosimo de Medici (I have a picture of him next to my desk and to a lesser extent Piero the Gouty are pretty awesome. The thing that I love about them is reading about them is like reading a Puzo-esque novel that actually happened. Paul Strathern’s book The Medici is an excellent overview of that family’s rise to greatness first as bankers then as rulers in medieval and renaissance Florence and finally as popes.

One of the things I really like about this book is that it tries to start at the beginning. Like many really old families The Medici’s past is obscured by time and their own propaganda. Many books just skip over the murky early years as well as glossing over Giovanni de Bicci de Medici and go straight for his son Cosimo as a starting point. Strathern does his best to trace the early days of the Medici as small time money changers and pawn shop operators. He also focuses a lot of attention on Giovanni as the foundation of the Medici’s overall governing philosophy.

Strathern also does a good job of describing the world of early Florence. He spends a great deal of time on how Florence was governed. Both its short comings and strengths. He does his best to explain how early banking worked. This is one area that I wish he had spent more time. In spite of having a complete and total terror of all things math related I find the development of banking in the Medieval period fascinating. For example you can’t charge interest since that’s usury and prohibited by the bible so bank depositors are given a “gift” once a year that just happens to be 4 to 6 percent of their original deposit. I would have found more of that great.

There is also a lot of time spent on the great artists that the Medici patronized. This starts with Giovanni who served on the committee that gave Filippo Brunelleschi the commission for the dome of the Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore. With every succeeding generation the Medici fund painters, sculptors, architects. Many of whom became legends in their own time: Leonardo da Vinci, Donatello, Michael Angelo and countless others.

In short this is a great book if you want to see the inner workings of a Renaissance power family and the world that they build.