Renaissance and

The gold florin was the "transferable ruble" of its day,
providing-Florentine bankers and merchants in all of
Europe with a monetary instrument of established
value and prestige, and allowing them to "cornet"' the
market of goods and capital. From this same worldmarket
perspective, Florence concentrated her industry
in textiles, the heavy industry of the day,
especially woolen cloth. The merchant -- who often
organize d the supply of raw materials and the
distribution of the finished product -- became the
proto-capitalist entrepreneur, regulating production
by means of the market by concentrating production"
in larger ateliers and dividing the stages of production.
The breadth of worldly experience and the
responsibil!ty for managing complex commercial and
financial operations gave the Florentine merchants a
self-conscious awareness of their ability to command
and of their own resources, within the overall context
of a highly urbanized Italian peninsula, only the
Florentines -- other than the Venetians -- developed
their own political institutions of direct bourgeois rule, :
in the late 13th century.
(The paradox of Medici rule in Florence is that the
city's own 'productive economy declined, relative to
the rest of Europe, in the 15th century. It was also true
that the republican institutions which had first
elevated Cosimo de' Medici to power became rapidly
eroded through the 15th century, especially as Part oftheMedici-sponsored"coldcoupd'etat"by
Cosimo's grandson Lorenzo was forced to take more which the condottiere Francesco Sforza took power
and more autocratic measures to retain his de facto in Milan was his marriage to Bianca Maria Vispower.
This fact sheds light on the apparent conti in 1441, shown in this miniature.
preference of Ficino and others for the "contemplative
life" -- keeping on good terms with both the century crisis, the Milanese Visconti tyrants ensured
Medici and their opponents. While Ficino was deeply their rule by a series of great canalization and,
indebted to Cosimo, he rightly considered his funda- irrigation works. They introduced rice cultivation,
mental obligations tO humanity and to Florence on a created artificial meadows for the breeding and
broader plane.) stabling of cattle far beyond the levels existing in the
rest of Italy, where cattle served largely as beasts of
Visconti Milan burden. These projects of agricultural conversion and
transformation were largely carried out by "new
From the perspective of the strengths and men" (novi homines) from the urban middle classes
we.aknesses of 15th century Florence, Cosimo de' or even from the countryside; simultaneously, the
Medici's genius in linking the city's diplomatic for- scale of the new agrarian systems forced a transtunes
to Milan becomes most evident. Under the formation in the distribution of property as
Visconti seignieurial dynasty which, ruled Milan leaseholders were awarded refunds by the owners for _
continuously from the late 13th century onward, Milan making capital improvements in the land. Gradually,
and its surrounding countryside, the lower Po Valley: much property -- including many Church lands --
became a unique area of agrarian development in all changed hands and came under the control of the
of Italy, a splendid exception to the general decline, state. The superiority of Lower Lombardy in
(The Viscontis were a family of feudal origin in this agricultural technology, particularly in the dairy
commune which never developed independent sector, has persisted to this day!
bourgeois political forms, but a family which It was in the Milan of the Sforza -- the Medicinonetheless
ruled in close collaboration with mer- backed inheritors•of the Visconti dukedom -- that
chant:entrepreneurs who copied the Florentine Le0nardo da Vinci developed his great civil
economic model.) Partioularly after the mid-14th engineering projects in the late 15th century.
68