Here’s a fun History Fact for you: Florence…
is the freaking coolest. Whether you’re looking for art, literature,
political schemes, larger than life characters, things being set on fire, the historical context
for the best Assassin’s Creed game, or the single greatest dome in history, this city
at the beating heart of the Renaissance has it all. Thing is, Florence seems an unlikely candidate
for a civilization-changing rebirth of classical glory. Even within Italy, it wasn’t nearly the
most powerful player on the peninsula; Venice ruled the seas, and Rome held the Papacy. So, to find out what made little old Florence
so special, and see why their ideas had such a transformative impact on Italian art and
culture, let’s do some History. This video is brought to you by Audible, more
on that later. Florentine history has a pretty quiet start. First founded by Julius Caesar as a military
camp in 59 BC, Florence got caught in the up and down and up and down of the Roman and
Byzantine Empires, eventually getting nominally glomped by the Holy Roman Empire in the medieval
period. But the Alps are kind of a pain to cross,
and the HRE is closer to an unsupervised geopolitical kindergarten than an actual empire, so Florence
and their Italian neighbors were essentially independent, chilling out by themselves in
quiet Tuscan countryside through most of the middle ages. But Florence as we know it starts with the
adoption of a new constitution in 1293, which outlined a Republican system that placed power
in the hands of the mercantile and artisan elite. Rather than dumb stuffy aristocrats, Florence
was governed by a citizen Signoria, composed of 9 people chosen by the city’s guilds,
who each served on two-month terms. These Priori worked in tandem with specific
side-councils like the 10 of War and the 6 of Commerce. It was a small group, but since it rotated
so insanely fast, lots of Florentines had a say in how their city worked. While it’s certainly no Venetian Republic,
it got the job done pretty well for the next 2 centuries. Florence also had the good fortune to back
the winning side in a power-struggle between the Pope in Rome and the Emperor in Germany,
so they got the rights to play middle-man on Papal tax-collection. Shiny. It’s also during this turn of the 1300s
that Florence takes a recognizable shape by spending their newfound wealth on a flurry
of construction projects. The government got a new house in the Palazzo
Della Signoria, and Florence started on the church of Santa Croce. But by far, the most ambitious project was
Santa Maria Del Fiore, a magnificent new centerpiece church that promised to be the largest in
the world. One problem was that the design was so darn
big that the architects had no way to actually cap the thing with a dome that wouldn’t
collapse under its own weight. And the second problem was a tiny little kill-joy
by the name of Plague. See, for all the cash money that Venetian
and Genoese traders brought back to Italy from the near East, in 1347 they also brought
along the Black Death, and a year later its devastation spread to Florence. The population dropped in half, entire families
fell off the map, banks disappeared, farms went untended, and basically the entire ecosystem
of medieval Tuscany collapsed. To paraphrase contemporary accounts, this
was Un Grande Oof. But luckily, inconceivable amounts of death
really sets the mood for writing poetry, so it’s here that we get Bocaccio’s masterwork
the Decameron, an Italian-styled 1001 Nights, except the framing device is plague instead
of princes. At the same time, the poet Petrarch was reinventing
lyric poetry through the composition of his personal love sonnets. But we have to jump back half a century to
give credit to Florence’s greatest poet by far, our boy Dante. Exiled from the city in 1302, Dante soon began
composition of his Divine Comedy, an era-defining self-insert fanfic that combined Christian
theology with ancient Greek mythology in, dare I say, an even bolder crossover than
the MCU. For all of Florence’s getting beat up by
plague, these three smartbois gave the city a head start on rediscovering ancient ideas
and blending them into Medieval Christian culture with a new focus on individualism. Things started looking up with the capture
of Pisa in 1406, which gave the Florentines a direct route to the sea, more tax revenue,
and on-demand access to history’s best architecture meme. And one decade later, the Pope awarded the
honorable and extremely lucrative right of directly managing the Papal treasury to a
soon-to-be world-changing family: The Medici. With the job of counting the coins in God’s
very pocketbook, this family bank soon became the most influential and well-funded in Italy. But the Medici, and the young Cosimo especially,
had a uniquely ancient view of wealth, seeing it as a means to glorify both God and Florence
through great public works, rather than something to hoard in a bank-vault swimming pool. Don’t get me wrong, these guys lived large
and made it known, but they had a refreshingly patriotic attitude towards their wealth, and
felt a moral responsibility to spend it on Florence’s greatness through cultural patronage. For instance, the Duomo wasn’t going to
just build itself after a century spent domeless, so the Medici financed its completion under
the genius architect Filippo Brunelleschi. He created radical new construction equipment
and applied some straight-up wizardry to implement a self-reinforcing double-dome, and without
going off on a massive tangent, I’d say the results speak for themselves. GOOD. DOME. Meanwhile, our boy Cosimo returned from a
brief year in exile in 1434 to effectively become the leading citizen of Florence. He didn’t upend the Republic, but he pulled
an Augustus and got really good at encouraging the guilds to appoint agreeable priori to
the Signoria. Legal?—Yes, but still a little dubious. But with the funds of the Medici bank in one
hand and the reigns of Florence in the other, Cosimo put everything that he had into the
care of the city, from public buildings to privately commissioning artists like Donatello,
to even funding and stocking a public library to make the city’s knowledge accessible
to all. Cosimo loved the classics, and even had a
chief book scout who went on trips to the eastern Mediterranean to bring back rare ancient
manuscripts from the Greek and Islamic worlds. Cosimo was a pretty cool cat, but his grandson
Lorenzo took all this Renaissance-y business up to 11. He threw money at artists like Michelangelo,
Leonardo Da Vinci, and Sandro Botticelli, whose combined talents included painting,
drawing, sculpture, architecture, anatomy, and tanks. Everything Cosimo did, Lorenzo did shinier,
and only enhanced Florence’s reputation as the place to go for long-lost knowledge
and groundbreaking art. The Florentine Renaissance wasn’t just about
picking up ancient Greco-Roman ideas after a millennium hiatus, it was a continuation
of what Dante started, of applying ancient culture to a medieval Christian context with
a deep focus on individual expression. See, I’m only biased towards liking Florence
because I’m right. For all his splendor, Lorenzo’s Florence
was not without trouble. Half a decade after a mining debacle in Volterra
led to the city getting sacked, some conspirators in and around Florence decided that all that
Medici banking money would feel a lot better clinking around in their pockets instead. The Pazzi family had already buddied up with
Pope Sixtus and swiped the rights to manage the Papal treasury, so the next logical step
was to assassinate Lorenzo and his brother Giuliano, and basically coup their way into
ruling Florence. We’ve all had that thought, right? They’d wanted to kill them both simultaneously
during a dinner party, y’know, in private, but when Giuliano didn’t show, they called
it off. The only other option was in the middle of
Easter Mass at the Duomo. This had the added downside that it’s in
full view of the entire city, and added a lot more complications, causing several conspirators
to nope right on out, because murder is fine, but don’t make me do it in view of the pretty
dome. Giuliano was killed, but Lorenzo survived
on pure rage, and proceeded to purge every trace of the Pazzi and their supporters from
the city, confiscating all of their assets as an extra F-U. Lorenzo significantly tightened
his grip on Florence in the decade following, but the power of the Medici began to wane
with their biggest revenue source soured on account of all the attempted murder. But even with all this conspiratorial turmoil,
Florence was starting to have an outsized impact beyond its Tuscan hills, via coinage,
language, and all that sweet sweet art. The Gold Florin of the Medici bank became
the standard currency across Italy and parts of Europe, and where Florins went, Tuscan
followed. This dialect was already well-regarded in
Italy because of Dante, Petrarch, and Bocaccio, but it became a lingua-franca because of the
far-reaching mercantile influence of the Medici. And soon other cities wanted in on the artistic
action, so Leonardo got hired by Milan, and Michelangelo went to Rome to go paint a pretty
roof. When 99% of the Renaissance belongs to 1%
of the Italians, we gotta redistribute that. After Lorenzo’s death in 1492, the incompetence
of his first son Piero got the entire Medici family exiled, and into this power-vacuum
stepped Girolamo Savonarola, a friar with a particular attitude toward Florence’s
Renaissance splendor: “Burn it down”. Savonarola’s Bonfire of the Vanities claimed
countless artistic treasures in the name of restoring Florence to moral purity, and even
the artist Botticelli torched several of his paintings and joined in Florence’s collective
swan-dive back into the Dark Ages. 4 very long years later, Savonarola was burned
to death by fed-up Florentines. It’s like poetry, it rhymes. And for the next decade and a half, Florence
was free of ruling families. In the eyes of one Niccolo Machiavelli, this
was Florence in its truest Republican form. To mark their Freedom, the Signoria commissioned
the young Michelangelo to make what would become one of the city’s greatest treasures,
The David. Beyond being the most iconic work of classical
realism, you know, no biggie, this piece directly symbolizes Florence’s place in the world,
as a small player in a field of giants like France, Germany, and the Papal States. But like David, while Tuscany may have been
small, it was far from weak. Ultimately, the Medici weren’t out of the
picture for long, because Italy became the battleground for Europe’s big fancy empires,
and in 1512 the Medici were forcibly reinstated as de-facto monarchs. People like Machiavelli weren’t thrilled
about this, but people like Machiavelli were also tortured into keeping their mouths shut. During their brief exile, the Medici were
busy in the Vatican, and soon weaseled themselves into the Papacy on two occasions, first with
Leo X and again with Clement VII. In 1532, Clement solidified his family’s
hold on Florence by appointing Cosimo I as the Duke of Florence, officially swapping
the republic with a hereditary monarchy. For the next 2 centuries, Medici dukes ruled
over all of Tuscany. Though the republic was well and truly dead,
and it had never been harder to criticize the Medici, Florence’s prosperity and artistic
excellence didn’t miss a beat. Cosimo I politely confiscated the opulent
palace of the Pitti family in 1549 and built some sweet new gardens around it, and he hired
architect Giorgio Vasari to build a corridor across the Ponte Vecchio to connect Palazzo
Pitti with his Uffizi, a massive new administration complex adjacent to the old Palazzo Della
Signoria. You might know it today as the Uffizi Gallery,
one of the best museums in Europe. And 3 decades later, Duke Ferdinand replaced
all the butcher shops on the main bridge with goldsmiths because apparently Florence wasn’t
visibly rich enough yet. But probably my favorite product of the Grand
Duchy is the Medici Chapels at the back of the church of San Lorenzo. Take a guess why I like it. The centerpiece is the Chapel of the Princes,
a towering mausoleum built for the Medici Grand Dukes. It’s incredibly swanky in there, but most
hilariously, it’s still under construction. The entire line of Medici dukes died out before
the ceiling even got its fresco, and that only happened because the lead architect was
ordered to ditch his plans for a lapus-lazuli mosaic and just put something on the damn
roof. Jumping back a century, Cosimo expanded Florence’s
horizons by conquering the Republic of Siena and building a naval base on the Island of
Elba. Florence’s golden age at the forefront of
history was certainly behind it, as the Renaissance had long since spread to the rest of Europe,
and Florentine prestige had waned in comparison to these big shiny empires, but Florence was
still prosperous, beautiful, and most importantly, in one piece. Rome, for one, could not say that last bit. But at the end of the day, Machiavelli’s
worst fears about a Medici Monarchy would come true, and the last two Medici Grand Dukes
were the worst crossover of lazy, spendthrift, and repressive, and they left Florence weak
and nearly bankrupt. After them, Tuscany was swiftly gobbled up
by the soon-to-be Archduke of Austria and Holy Roman Emperor. For the sake of narrative convenience, and
also because European imperial politics are far too complicated for how boring they are,
I’m going to fast forward a century here to 1859, when Tuscany happily jumped on board
the Italian Unification band-wagon and annexed themselves to the Kingdom of Italy. Florence even served as the capital of the
kingdom for a few years before the final conquest of Rome in 1870. After joining the Kingdom, the Tuscan dialect
soon became the basis for universal standard Italian, and Florence also gave many of its
most famous churches some finishing touches, which is to say, the front. Yeah, so as it happens, Santa Maria Novella
was the only major church to actually have a finished façade, the Duomo was basically
faceless until the 1880s — but now that it’s done, I think it’s a really neat
touch that the red-white-and-green color-scheme of the cathedral is a perfect Italian tricolor. *chef kiss* So with all this History behind us, we’ve
got to answer our starting question: Why did the Renaissance start in Florence? Well, if it started anywhere else, it wouldn’t
have been the Renaissance. This movement was about Humanism, and what
Florence may have lacked in power compared to its neighbors, it more than made up for
in its people. From the great Medici patrons to their multi-talented
creators, Florentines worked together over the course of centuries to push the boundaries
of what was considered possible, and in doing so, they made Florence the world’s capital
of artistry. I mean, should we have expected any less for
a city whose name literally means “Flourishing”? Cosimo’s Public Library brought valuable
knowledge to the people of Florence, and if you too want direct access to a world of literature,
then you may be interested in today’s sponsor, Audible. With enough audiobooks to a Renaissance Florentine
faint, Audible is the #1 source for all your literary listening needs! Let's say you're walking home from the store
and you want something insightful to listen to, BOOM, Audible! Maybe you're making some food and wanna little
something something to stimulate your mind as you watch the spaghetti cook, BLAMO, Audible! If you want to learn more about the last years
Lorenzo de Medici and the dramatic Bonfire of the Vanities that ensued, I’d recommend
you listen to Death in Florence, which dives deep into this hot period of Florentine history. And for the Full Experience, then throw this
audiobook on while playing through the Bonfire of the Vanities sequence in Assassin's Creed
2. *That's* how you minmax an educational experience. Audible members who sign up get a credit for
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on Audible.com/overlysarcastic or text overlysarcastic to 500-500. If you do, you’ll be supporting the channel
and getting a good audiobook in the process. Again, if this sounds like something you’d
like, head to Audible.com/overlysarcastic. Thank you so much for watching, I freely admit
my bias here, because Florence is the reason that I started caring about History — But
that’s okay, because as I’m sure I’ve demonstrated, Florence is the single coolest
place in the history of ever, case closed. Jokes aside, I really hope you enjoyed this
video, and I’ll see you in the next one.
Would you look at that it's my hometown.
Wonderful video! The story of Savonarola always makes me sad, because of how many beautiful things he had senselessly burned. It's incredible how a Republic with so much beauty and culture would, even for a short time, devolve because of one charlatan in a potato sack.
From all the parts in this video, 1:38 is probably the best of them
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