Filippo Strozzi and the Medici: Favour and Finance in Sixteenth-Century Florence and Rome

9780521223010

0521223016

Filippo Strozzi (1489-1538), the Florentine aristocrat and banker, is usually remembered fot the dramatic exploits at the end of his life. Forced into exile, he became an outspoken defender of the last Florentine Republic against the tyranny of the city's new dukes. His place in Florentine history, however, changes drastically when we focus not on his final years but on his extensive career as a Madici favourite and loyal financier. At the courts of the Medici popes he furthered the grandiose schemes of Leo X and Clement VII and accumulated a personal fortune of legendary size. Dr Bullard's study reassesses Strozzi's place in Renaissance history and considers the more general problems of paper economy and war finance, and Florentine political life, in the early sixteenth century. It documents the intricate financial ties between Florence and the papal court, and Strozzi's key role as a manipulator of the city's public funds to pay for papal wars. As the first study of Flippo Strozzi grounded in extensive research in Florentine and Roman archives and incorporating his unpublished correspondence, the book will interest a wide range of historians of the early modern period.