Those Medici | The Economist

MediciPalle

FLORENCE was the centre of the Renaissance. By no accident, it was also at the time the centre of an industry that has marked the West no less: banking. And at the centre of that sat the Medici family. This one family supplied four popes and two queens of France, and ran Florence, with a couple of interruptions, for almost 400 years. Its power emanated originally from the family bank. Italian financiers (known generically, and inaccurately, as “Lombards”, hence London’s Lombard Street) were pre-eminent in their age. And among them the house of the Medici was pre-eminent, the most powerful financial institution in all of 15th-century Europe.

Source: Those Medici | The Economist

UA-2750533-1