Florentine Tuscany : Structures and Practices of Power

The book collects the best recent research on the important dominion that was created by the Republic of Florence in Tuscany during the Renaissance. The essays include studies of state-building, fiscal policy, and the personal and political relations of Florentines with the inhabitants of subject communities.

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.