House of Medici

When the bells ring wildly suddenly in the middle of mass on Easter and screams fill the streets and men and violence start running all over and young Machiavelli like everyone in Florence asks what's happened what's happened and the answer is they've murdered the Medici brothers in the cathedral in the middle of mass.

That, of course, was Ada Palmer, as always, University of Chicago historian, musician, science fiction writer.

Literally every time we talk, I learn about something else you're doing.

But it means that he's born expecting to grow up into a life as a scholar secretary statesman.

So his father and his uncle are both secretarial diplomatic statuses, his uncle more than his father.

And he is born expecting to grow up in this and expecting specifically to work for the family his family has long worked for, which was the Medici family.

So they are in the Medici family.

So there were several of

The inscription of the statue in Livorno, it's known as the Four Chained Moors.

It's a marble statue of a Medici prince above four people who he's obviously enslaved.

One of them is visibly African.

It's difficult to tell with all of them, but it's clearly an image of imperialism for him.

Yehudi Geber with Jewish History Soundbites, and this episode is The Medici and the Jews.

This is going to be a little bit about, a little bit of a broader perspective, a little bit of a, you know, more of a look from above.

Something I've been looking into recently about the Jews in the cities of Florence and Livorno, in general the Jews of Tuscany, and especially during the time of the Renaissance and the time of the ghettoization period.

of Italian Jews in various different cities, in Rome, in Venice, in Florence, and then in other places where there was no ghetto, such as Livorno.

And in that context, it's Tuscany and Florence specifically and Livorno specifically.

are an interesting case study because the Medici, who were the rulers, the ruling family, first of Florence and then later of most of Tuscany, all of Tuscany, for hundreds of years, on and off, a couple of times they were kicked out, and it was the Republic of Florence, but that's a different part of the story.

So how did the Jews do under this rule? And was there a variation in different time periods in history and also where Jews lived? And what type of Jews? Italian Jews, Sephardic Jews, even Ashkenazi Jews? And was there a difference between Florence and Livorno? And why were those differences? And how did things change? And what was going on in the world that led to those changes? And not only do I think it's a fascinating story on its own merits, and we never do enough, as I've said many times on this podcast, several times, I don't think I've said it many times, several times on this podcast, we don't do enough Italian Jewish history here.

But I also think in a broader sense, it can teach us a lot about Jewish history in general and give us a little bit more context how to view these things.

Pisa regained its independence briefly at the end of the 15th century before Florence conquered it again in 1509.

Later, under the Medici, the Navicelli Canal linked Pisa with the developing port of Livorno and the wider Tuscan waterway system.

So when you look at the Arna, remember that it helped shape the fortunes of the city.

Its role went far beyond the view from a bridge, and we'll return to it today when we discover Pisa's June celebrations.

So if Piazza dei Miracoli represents the Catholic Church and international ambition, this square is the civic government.

And when Florence conquered Pisa, that changed everything.

In 1558, Cosimo I de' Medici ordered the square redesigned, and the architect he chose was someone who we've even counted in the series, Giorgio Vasari.

Vasari transformed the political center into a Renaissance square expressing Medici authority.

It's not perhaps widely known that one of my ancestors was in fact Julius Caesar, and Garibaldi was a distant relative on my mother's side.

I am 17th in line to the Doge of Venice, and my great-great-grand-uncle was a Medici, hence my great interest and patronage of the arts.

I myself have a very fine collection of paintings and sculptures of myself.

Many's the night as a young fella I would bang out a tarantella on the old mandolin with relatives in Lombardy and Tuscany, and Dean Martin was my best man.

Leonardo is famous, but fame does not automatically create the right job.

So he has rooms and support and status through Giuliano de' Medici.

Medici, we heard the name a lot.

He's the Pope's brother, but he does not produce the kind of huge Roman projects we might expect from this name.

Sometimes the right person arrives at the wrong moment, and sometimes another network is stronger.