Cosimo de' Medici

And there are these other great anecdotes about, you know, I think we'll be coming on in a moment to talk about the great Medici family, the banking dynasty that effectively are ruling Florence in the 15th century and had dominated the city for such a long time.

And Cosimo de' Medici, who was such a big figure at this moment, he supposedly was getting a bit frustrated, wasn't he, with Fra Filippo Lippi's antics.

And actually kind of puts him, basically locks him up in his house or a house in a building, says, you've got to get to work.

And the guy ends up constructing a rope of sheets and actually escapes.

Same device.

And on that medal brings us back to the Medici.

It's a likeness of Cosimo de' Medici.

It was one of the great Medici figures of the 1450s, 1460s.

And this was first founded by somebody called Marsilio Ficino.

Now, Ficino was actually working with Cosimo de' Medici at the time, and Cosimo de' Medici was starting to get a bit older and he knew that he didn't have long left.

So what happened is these, um, the alchemical books started to come into Cosimo de' Medici's lap, basically.

And Marsilio Ficino at the time was, um, he was starting to decode Plato's books for Cosimo de' Medici.

And he said to, he said to Mi- uh, Ficino to stop what you're doing with, with, um, with the Platonic solids and with Plato's works, and start focusing on this alchemical knowledge, to which he did, and he started transcribing these books for Cosimo de' Medici, and there basically formed what is known as the Platonic Academy of Florence.

Now, that academy is based on the first Platonic Academy in Greece or in Athens.

So Leonardo da Vinci then, he could possibly represent the Leo seventy or the demiurge or Brahma, depending on what we're looking at.

Um, I'd recommend get one of my cards and check my research, because this is very, um, very slight for what my research is.

Stefan's Moldavia was, in a sense, holding the line until Muscovy could emerge.

then what was going on in uh in western europe at the time the renaissance so 1450s you know you get the gutenberg press you get the first printing press revolutionized uh learning book literacy the spreading of information at that time 1470s florence venice and rome were cultural centers of art and humanism you know again we've talked about the the translating of Plato and the Hermetic Corpus and Marsilio Ficino and Cosimo de' Medici.

All that stuff was going on in Italy at this time.

And again, during the life of St. Stephen, you have the voyage of Christopher Columbus to the New World in 1492.

One convenient way of doing that was to fund a monastery.

So Cosimo Medici funds the monastery of San Marco, has his own cell there with an inscription over it, which refers to his hope that he's managed to escape condemnation.

That's one reason.

The second reason is that 15th century Florence was in the throes of millennialist terror.

The newest and finest of these houses was the Palazzo Medici.

It had been built by Cosimo de' Medici, the banker who founded his family's fortune and, from 1434, steered the city government as though it belonged to him.

Florence even honored him as its first citizen.

Romans' first emperors had used much the same title, calling themselves first among citizens while holding the power of dictators.

Including the Timaeus and Critias that contain the full Atlantis narrative, Marsilio Ficino's monumental Latin translation of Plato's complete works completed in Florence around 1484 marked the decisive moment in the Atlantis narrative's return to European consciousness.

Ficino, working under the patronage of Cosimo de' Medici, approached his translation project with both scholarly rigour and philosophical enthusiasm that reflected the broader Renaissance engagement with classical antiquity.

His translation made Platonic texts accessible to educated Europeans for the first time in nearly a millennium.

creating the foundation for renewed scholarly engagement with the Atlantis story.

The Metis are tied to the Black nobility also, From the beginning, the Priory of Sion has been committed to Hermetic magic, a type of black magic that originated with the ancient Egyptians and portrayed in the Egyptian Book of the Dead.

René d'Anjou, a descendant of the Merovingians, persuaded Cosimo de' Medici to establish in Sion in 1444 a non-church library at San Marco, where Plato, Pythagorean works, and books on Hermetic magic were translated.

Up until this time, the Catholic Church had control of all the libraries.

It was from Cosimo de' Medici's library that the spark of Greek and Egyptian teachings set off what developed into the Renaissance, which was revival of humanism and the occult.

It appears that during the Middle Ages, witchcraft and the mystery religions had seriously dissolved to the point that these modes of thought had to be relearned from the ancient writings.

Interestingly, the Middle Ages, when witchcraft and paganism were dissolving, have been branded the Dark Ages by the establishment and inaccurately painted as a time when learning went out.

Rinaldo degli Albizzi lost his prestige as a statesman.

He tried to recover his position by an attack on Cosimo de' Medici, and as Niccolo da Uzzano had died during the siege of Lucca, there was no one to hold him in check.

Giovanni was summoned from his villa to Florence and was imprisoned in the public palace.

At first he feared for his life, but he was able to use his money with good effect.

This success of the Venetians produced a strange revolution in the state of affairs.

Sforza hoped at some time to be Duke of Milan and he did not care to see his future duchy diminished by Venetian conquests.

Also, Cosimo de' Medici thought it better for the interests of Florence to preserve an equilibrium between all the States than to allow the predominance of one.

By his mediation negotiations were opened between Francesco Sforza and his father-in-law, and they were hastened by the impatience of the Venetians, who, suspecting the treachery of Sforza, attacked some towns belonging to him in Lombardy.