Prospering in the First Global Age: Florentine Patrician Merchants and Grand Ducal Tuscany

Postwar Anglophone scholarship accorded a heroic role to the Italian merchants and bankers whose activities underpinned the swaggeringly confident maritime republics, the flowering of Italian urban society, and the long-distance networks that knit together far-flung economies. Commercially active Florentine patricians, cast as mixing republicanism, capitalism, and competition to make Florence the cradle of the Renaissance, have thus been the subject of intense scholarly attention. Though half a century ago, Eric Cochrane’s Florence in the Forgotten Centuries drew scholarly attention to early modern Tuscany, that classic still embedded a form of the traditional decline narrative. In this account, the rise of the Medici as princes from 1530, their creation of Livorno, the decline of Florence’s wool industry, and the growth of the Grand Tour symbolically marked a transition to aristocratic provincialization, economic stagnation, and Florentine’s turn inwards to welcoming Northern European dynamism. Variant versions of this comfortable story have long served many historiographic interests, but a steadily accumulating body of scholarship has rendered the decline paradigm increasingly untenable. This paper takes up one aspect of revising this story by tracing Florentine patrician merchants, bankers, and plantation owners who embraced the possibilities of the First Global Age by trading and investing from Brazil, Peru, and Mexico to India, China, and Japan even as their families acquired aristocratic standing. It suggests a reconsideration of the meaning attached to Florentine patrician investment in palazzi and elegant villas in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Long taken as being emblematic of a pseudo-aristocratic turn to the land, I suggest instead that they represent a success for a patrician elite enjoying peace, stability, and honors at home while continuing to invest profitably abroad. Florence’s traditional industries and outsized cultural and intellectual importance may have declined, but the elite for whom it was governed prospered.