The Rise and Fall of the House of Medici

Oct 19, 2024 4:38 AM

Author:Christopher Hibbert

At its height Renaissance Florence was a centre of enormous wealth, power and influence. A republican city-state funded by trade and banking, its often bloody political scene was dominated by rich mercantile families, the most famous of which were the Medici. This enthralling book charts the family’s huge influence on the political, economic and cultural history of Florence. Beginning in the early 1430s with the rise of the dynasty under the near-legendary Cosimo de Medici, it moves through their golden era as patrons of some of the most remarkable artists and architects of the Renaissance, to the era of the Medici Popes and Grand Dukes, Florence’s slide into decay and bankruptcy, and the end, in 1737, of the Medici line.

Reviews

Excellent mightily researched and readable. Absorbing through so many pages

—— Scotsman

Splendidly painstaking and enormously readable

—— Arthur Marshall , New Statesman

With a keen sense of precedence and an admirable grasp of the British peerage system, he darts from duke to duke... racing up and down the genealogies

—— The Economist

McLynn is an astonishingly prolific historian. His books are always elegantly written, highly opinionated and enormously enjoyable

—— Sunday Times

Has anybody done more – done as much – as Frank McLynn in writing intelligent, combative, thoroughly researched and thoroughly readable history?

—— Independent

This new biography is of profound importance and will ... quickly establish itself as the standard work on Hitler and his regime

—— Thomas Childers , Boston Globe

Reading A. N. Wilson's The Victorians provides ongoing pleasure in handsomely researched, beautifully written prose about an age which we have come to think disparagingly. We thought wrong

—— Clement Freud , Mail on Sunday

The Victorians was one of the books that gave me greatest pleasure during the past year... A brilliant evocation of an age

—— Ian McIntyre , The Times

Rarely have author and subject been found in such deep and contented harmony... Wilson's tour de force

—— Robert McCrum , Observer

Wilson's panoramic survey is the best attempt so far to describe and explain what was happening in that fascinating time

—— Literary Review

The Victorians finds Wilson writing at the height of his powers

—— The Independent

I can't recall a history book furnishing so many laughs en route ... The Victorians is a work of scholarship, a labour of love, a persusasive polemic

—— John Sutherland , Mail on Sunday

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