History & Netflix's Medici The Magnificent

hey everybody today I'm going to be talking about Medici the magnificent the second season of the Netflix show which follows the life of Robb Stark's grandson Lorenzo de'medici if you like Game of Thrones you will absolutely love Medici because it's all about family politics love and it also stars the entire cast of Game of Thrones I'll be looking at the historical accuracy of some of the larger plot points now just a disclaimer I am NOT a historian I have a degree in ideological history because I hate money so let's get this party started because it's Saturday and I'm allergic to parties we need to understand a little bit about the political situation in Italy in the Renaissance Italy was not a country as we understand it today in fact it was a collection of city-states of Republic's mainly ruled by oligarchy families that also extended their influence into the surrounding countryside this is why there's no mention of a king of Italy why nobody mentions the country Italy although at the time they did have a concept of what it was as a nation and as a place and why the balance of power is so chaotic especially in Florence where this is set the show centers around the ruling family of Florence the Medici the bankers to the Pope who will later become the Grand Dukes of Tuscany looking at Lorenzo there is one glaring discrepancy from history and that's that the real Lorenzo was ugly having a broad frame and short legs dark hair and eyes a squash nose short-sighted eyes and a harsh voice Daniel Sharman on the other hand is a very nice-looking lad and I will forgive casting for making me stare at him for six wonderful hours because ovary's Lorenzo was as brilliant as he's portrayed in the show and part of this is because he was coached by the best no not you Piero you 6 by Lucrezia turn Avanti Lorenzo's mother she was political she was intelligent she was artistic and she often had to run things while her husband was in bed speaking of Lucrezia's husband piero was as portrayed in the show a bit of a he was known as piero that gouty he made poor political decisions and he was just generally not fun to be around he's probably also allergic to parties there is one aspect that's pretty accurate though Lucrezia and Piero really did love each other right up until Piero's death of gout or being a dick or something in Episode one we see an assassination attempt made against Piero and his family now this actually did happen however the show really skims over the context of it and part of this is because the show runners and riders have decided to play with the time Cosimo died when Lorenzo was 15 and Contadina died when he was 24 now a lot of this conspiracy revolves around Cosimo's death cosmo was well respected and was generally cherished by the Florentine public whereas Piero was not as popular he was will use Piero he was advised to leave management decisions to his father's friend Neroni Neroni was a pretty bad dude he was out for his own gain and he advised calling in the debts of the merchants which we do see in the show even though he knew that it would make Piero really unpopular then joined a conspiracy with solder Eenie Lucca PD and Angelo hei Yoli whose name I can never say the assassination attempt was unsuccessful however because as it appears in the show Lorenzo was actually riding ahead of his father he saw armed men and was able to communicate with his father to take a different route so it didn't play out as dramatically as it does in the show but certainly the essence of truth is there and that's all it counts Lucca PD actually defected to the Medici side when he realized that Neroni planned to go full scar on him and drop them into a stampede of wildebeests be the leader of the government so in the end PD helped expose the conspirators a key plot point in this series is Lorenzo's marriage to Clarice Orsini a Roman noblewoman now in the show Lorenzo goes to Rome happens to see Clarice it's taken by her tries to convince her to marry him it's cock-blocked by God and then has to have his mom step up to pick up the pieces this is actually not so far off from where history takes us in real life Lucrezia travelled to Rome in secret to scout out a bride for her son Clarice was already a favorite but Lucrezia needed to meet her to ensure that she a was cool and B wasn't an echo Lucrezia's letters to Piero confirmed that Clarice was yes very cool though not as cool as their daughters and be possibly hot though she couldn't tell because she wore really schlubby clothing and then she throws in this bit of shade where she's like because that's the fashion in Rome and here's the weird part Lucrezia wrote extensively about Clarice's boobs and whether or not she thought they were big enough for Lorenzo I try to imagine what the conversation must have been like when Lorenzo was telling his mother what he wanted out of a bride like was he just like oh you know good personality really smart gigantic Clarice and Lorenzo wrote back and forth to each other and it's pretty clear that Clarice was very smitten with Lorenzo there was just one tiny problem and that problem was Lucrezia shaped yeah Lorenzo was in love with Lucrezia not that Lucrezia is sick Lucrezia Donati the famed Florentine Beauty again however the show does take liberties lorenzo wrote poems for Lucrezia as we see in the show he admired her and wished that he could but we have no evidence that there was an affair or that Lorenzo ever intended there to be see there was this thing called courtly love which was considered the purest form of love and basically it entailed a man horn dogging after a married woman writing her a bunch of poetry sighing when she walked by and just generally being cool because the woman couldn't forsake her marriage vows the love was considered pure can't have your sexy sexy poetry spoiled by sex now can you part of this stemmed from humanist ideals of its true largely from the classical era there were concepts of platonic love of unfulfilled love of love in a moral sense and in a way that could be intellectualized this was at the forefront of Florentine culture at the time and it explains why Lorenzo and Giuliano could both publicly declare their love for women who they weren't married to and who were married to other people and get away with it anyway Lorenzo wasn't ah go Lucrezia was one of the most beautiful women in Florence and Lorenzo's notebook was basically a jet Apatow movie so yes upon arrival Clarice and Lorenzo did have a rocky start Clarice was highly religious and Rome at the time was much more conservative further as in the show Florentine Nobles felt insulted by the fact that Lorenzo had married a noble from another state their marriage grew though not necessarily in the way that the show portrays it the thing about historical couples is that we can never really know how they felt about each other or what they said to each other in private what we can do is gather clues from the letters that they wrote to each other in contrast to the early letters where Clarice is clearly smitten with Lorenzo they didn't actually write to each other with much affection especially compared to other letters of the time there is a clear respect and strong friendship between them and they do speak very fondly and proudly of their children together on Clarice's death Lorenzo was absolutely wrought with sorrow especially because he couldn't be there for her since he himself was ill and bedridden I actually think this show did a really good job at not portraying Clarice and Lorenzo's relationship in a way that was too passionate or too romantic because in real life they were more like very well suited partners they had a very strong friendship and a very close bond it wasn't necessarily passionate romantic love like we see represented with Lorenzo and Lucrezia but it was its own kind of love now let's move on to the show's main couple Simonetta Vespucci and juliana de medici Simonetta was the most beautiful woman in florence at the time she was the inspiration for many of Botticelli's works including Primavera Venus and Mars and The Birth of Venus though some historians argue that Botticelli merely had a type and that these might have just been similar looking women the show explains this by having bought a Shelley draw see Mineta posthumously and suggests that maybe his impression of her features might have warped over time I thought that was pretty clever there is evidence to suggest that Juliana was the model for Mars and Venus and Mars however models didn't necessarily need to be there at the same time and there is no evidence that Giuliano and Simonetta ever had an affair sorry guys the show was developing this from a real historical moment in which Juliana wanted joust and gave the crown of the tournament to semen out of a spooky he pulled a full Rhaegar if you know what I mean but again we can't look at this as a modern audience this was again an example of courtly love of a guy lusting after some married lady preferably a hot one Juliana was actually engaged at the time of his death and even had a son the absence of whom is going to be a little bit weird in future seasons although we did see Giuliano doing the sex at a woman in Episode one so maybe she's the mother spoiler alert he becomes the Pope unlike Lorenzo Giuliano actually was quite handsome he was known as a golden boy which at the time was a compliment and after Giuliana's death Lorenzo adopted Giuliana's son and raised him okay now to the fun part the Pazzi conspiracy we don't know much about francesco de patsies so the show has had to take a lot of liberties we know that he was married to novella foscari the Venetian daughter of a wealthy merchant and that the two had five children together unlike in the show however Francesco was the one who convinced his uncle iacopo to take part in the assassination and by all evidence Jacopo took part very reluctantly now to those of us who don't go around murdering people in public murdering people in public might seem a little bit weird but there's a reason why the conspirators decided to assassinate Lorenzo and Giuliano at mass and let me tell you what it is all their other attempts didn't work so basically they had planned to assassinate the brothers when they took their Roman holiday but the brothers canceled their trip then they invited Giuliano and Lorenzo to a dinner party but Giuliano got sick so they couldn't assassinate them there and then they decided to meet them for a meal after Mass and assassinate them there but according to Lorenzo's diary Giuliano ate some bad fish and got really sick so they sent their regrets for that meal as well and the conspirators basically just panicked and we're like oh what's a really inconspicuous place to do this I know in front of the entire city the show adds an interesting detail which actually is true one of the conspirators refused to assassinate or to kill anybody on holy ground so they actually had a priest do it instead I always said you could hide a lot under those roads it's fishy if you ask me francesco was familiar with the medici brothers and we know this because he spoke to Giuliano before the fateful mass but we don't know how close they were likely the show made up this brotherly relationship for a drama just like in the show the people of Florence refused to back the patsy the conspirators ran through the streets waving flags and screaming Liberty and the people legit just threw rocks at them Juliana was stabbed 19 times and he dead Lorenzo was stabbed but he did manage to escape and hide in the sacristy much like what is portrayed in the show the conspirators were executed without trial with iacopo being caught several days after the conspiracy before being hung the show is actually less gruesome about this fun bit of trivia Leonardo da Vinci actually witnessed the hangings and sketched jakab el Patsy's lifeless body hanging from the palace I think he was cool at parties too after the deaths of the conspirators yeah Capo's wife and daughter were imprisoned in a monastery novella remarried a Scottish nobleman the Pope was actually much more involved in the conspiracy than the show lets on they should have been quite reluctant but it was in his best interest to get rid of the Medici at this time famously and they did do a good job of portraying this in the show the Pope did not condone the murders of Giuliano and Lorenzo because as a pope he couldn't do that he just kind of spoke between the lines and hinted at things like I don't don't want you to kill them I'm clever for several years after these events the Medici were practically at war with the papal States and with Naples now for a fun bit of trivia the little girl getting married in Milan is Catarina Sforza whose life requires its own series I actually went to see her estate at castle San Angelo which was fun because it was full of cats she occupied it in opposition to the Pope when she was seven months pregnant no stand-up special though so Galeazzo Sforza the Duke of Milan really was a dick he was known for being ruthless banishing his own mother so he could rule solely their stories of an executing people in torturous ways including the nailed to a coffin torn apart one limb at a time he was also a serial rapist and enjoyed acting out sadistic fantasies but not on peasant women like other Dukes night on noble women like people who want to get assassinated my long story short he was assassinated anyway that is my historical analysis of medici season 2 it is very broad and very brief so I suggest that you check out these readings [Music]

Channel: Amanda's History & TV

Views: 68,039

Rating: 4.8498497 out of 5

Keywords: history, netflix, medici, medici the magnificent, lorenzo de medici, tv, tv show, review, reviews, daniel sharman, bradley james, botticelli, art, renaissance, assassin's creed, florence, italy, italian history, commentary, screenwriting, acting, magnifico, lorenzo the magnificent, art history, lorenzo and clarice, clarice orsini, clarice and lorenzo, giuliano de medici, simonetta vespucci, sandro botticelli, giuliano and simonetta, milan, history blog, blog, vlog, i medici

Id: TTT3ZgYgYJo

Length: 14min 22sec (862 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 09 2019