The Rise and Fall of the House of Medici

What It Is

A narrative history of one family across three centuries, published in 1974, and still the book most people are handed when they want to know who the Medici were. Christopher Hibbert wrote around fifty of these: popular history in the English tradition, aimed at the intelligent general reader and not at the seminar room.

What he is superb at is people. Hibbert builds a chapter the way a novelist builds a scene — what a man looked like, what he ate, what his enemies said of him, what a Florentine street was like on a feast day. He works from printed sources and the standard scholarship rather than from the archives, and he never pretends otherwise.

What he is not interested in is mechanism. If you want to know how the Medici bank actually functioned, with its branches, its exchange contracts and its workarounds for the Church's ban on usury, this is the wrong book and Tim Parks's Medici Money is the right one. Hibbert wants to know what a family does once it can afford anything.

Why It Matters

The Medici are the great case study in the relationship between money and culture, and it is not a flattering one. Nearly everything a modern person means by the word Renaissance — the buildings, the sculpture, the libraries, the humanists, the painters everyone can name — was paid for by bankers who wanted something from God and something from their neighbours. Hibbert never lets you forget the invoice.

It also lets you watch a process that has been repeated ever since: private money working on public life, and never quite admitting to itself what it is doing. The gap between what Florence called itself and how Florence was actually run is where this story lives. Nobody in this book announces that. That is precisely how it works.

And it is the best available door into the Italian Renaissance for a reader who has none. Machiavelli, Savonarola, Michelangelo, the popes, the guilds, the mob and the French are all here, arranged around a family rather than around a theme, which is the easiest way for a newcomer to hold a complicated century in their head.

Before You Read

Twelve to fourteen hours. It is not difficult. It is crowded.

The one real obstacle is nomenclature. This family recycles about six first names across three hundred years, and by the second half you will be holding two men called Cosimo in your head at the same time. Keep the genealogical table open and consult it twenty times without embarrassment.

A little Florentine geography pays for itself immediately. Find a map of the city and locate the Palazzo Medici, the Duomo, the Signoria and the Arno before you begin. Hibbert assumes you can see the streets.

Which Edition to Read

• Penguin, The Rise and Fall of the House of Medici — recommended. The standard edition of the 1974 text, with the genealogical tables, the plates and a real index, and it has stayed in print for half a century. The cost: the plates are a thin black-and-white gathering, which is meagre for a book so concerned with what these people commissioned. View on Amazon →
• The House of Medici: Its Rise and Fall (William Morrow, US). The identical book under an American title. Worth knowing about mainly so that you do not buy it twice, which people do.
• The Tantor audiobook, read by Michael Page (2016). A good performance. The cost: you lose the family tree and the plates, and in a book containing four men named Piero that is not a trivial loss.

Read it in print with the genealogy open. Then take Tim Parks's Medici Money for the banking Hibbert skips, and Paul Strathern's The Medici if you want a second narrative pass over the same ground.

Getting the Most From This Book

Do not go hunting for a thesis. Hibbert does not have one, and readers who look for an argument decide the book is shallow. It is not shallow. It is narrative, and the narrative is the argument.

Read it with a browser open on the paintings, the palaces and the faces. Hibbert refers constantly to works he assumes you can picture, and a reader who does the looking finishes a completely different book from one who does not.

Pay attention to the patronage. Each time Hibbert tells you what a Medici commissioned and what it cost, ask what was actually being purchased: piety, forgiveness, legitimacy, or simply the impossibility of being ignored. The art history that follows from that question is far more interesting than the art history that does not.

And read it fast, straight through, like the family saga it is. It was never meant to be consulted.