Florentine Tuscany

Florence has often been studied in the past for its distinctive urban culture and society, while insufficient attention has been paid to the important Tuscan territorial state that was created by Florence in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Comprising a handful of formerly independent city-states and numerous smaller communities in the plains and mountains, the Florentine ‘empire’ in Tuscany supplied the markets and fiscal coffers of the Renaissance republic, while providing lessons in statecraft that nourished the political thought of Machiavelli and Guicciardini. This volume comprises seventeen original essays representing the new directions being taken by historians of the Florentine Renaissance. It offers new and exemplary approaches towards state-building, political vocabulary, political economy, civic humanism, local history and social patronage in what is one of the most interesting and well-documented of the states of late medieval and Renaissance Europe.

• This book presents aspects of the whole Florentine territory, not merely of the city of Florence and its culture • A new atttempt to place the Florentine Renaissance in a wider context • Explains what makes late medieval and Renaissance Tuscany so important

Preface William J. Connell; 1. The ‘material constitution’ of the Florentine dominion Andrea Zorzi; 2. The language of empire Alison Brown; 3. Constitutional ambitions, legal realities and the Florentine state Jane Black; 4. Fiscality, politics and dominion in Florentine Tuscany Giuseppe Petralia; 5. Market structures Stephan R. Epstein; 6. State-building, church reform and the politics of legitimacy David S. Peterson; 7. The humanist citizen as provincial governor William J. Connell; 8. Territorial offices and office holders Laura De Angelis; 9. Demography and the politics of fiscality Samuel K. Cohn Jr; 10. Florentines and the communities of the territorial state Patrizia Salvadori; 11. Patronage and its role in government: the Florentine patriciate and Volterra Lorenzo Fabbri; 12. San Miniato al Tedesco: the evolution of the political class Francesco Salvestrini; 13. The social classes of Colle Val d’Elsa and the formation of the dominion Oretta Muzzi; 14. Arezzo, the Medici and the Florentine regime Robert Black; 15. Rubrics and requests: statutory division and supra-communal clientage in Pistoia Stephen J. Milner; 16. A comment Giorgio Chittolini.

‘This impressive essay collection … is a work of much more than the local interest the title might suggest. In substance it marks a major contribution to the long, untiring debate about the nature and affinities of the Italian (and by extension non-Italian) Renaissance state …’. The English Historical Review

‘… a major indeed pathbreaking contribution to our understanding of the Florentine territorial state in the century and a half before the Medici principate.’ The American Historical Review