This bank was the largest in Europe in the 1400s and facilitated the Medicis' rise to political power in Florence, although they officially remained citizens rather than monarchs until the 16th century.

The Medicis' wealth and influence was initially derived from the textile trade guided by the wool guild of Florence, the Arte della Lana.

The Italian Renaissance was inspired by the Medici along with other families of Italy, such as the Visconti and Sforza in Milan, the Este in Ferrara, the Borgia and Della Rovere in Rome, and the Gonzaga in Mantua.

The Medici family financed the construction of Saint Peter's Basilica and Florence Cathedral, and were patrons of Donatello, Brunelleschi, Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci, Michelangelo, Raphael, Machiavelli, Galileo, and Francesco Redi, among many others in the arts and sciences.

[15] The next year, however, a pro-Medici Signoria (civic government) led by Tommaso Soderini, Oddo Altoviti and Lucca Pitti was elected and Cosimo returned.

When Lorenzo died in 1492, however, his son Piero proved quite incapable of responding successfully to challenges caused by the French invasion of Italy in 1492, and within two years, he and his supporters were forced into exile and replaced with a republican government.

[21] Lorenzo de' Medici (1449–1492), called "the Magnificent", was more capable of leading and ruling a city, but he neglected the family banking business, which led to its ultimate ruin.

He groomed the headstrong Piero II to follow as his successor in civil leadership; Giovanni[22] (future Pope Leo X) was placed in the church at an early age; and his daughter Maddalena was provided with a sumptuous dowry to make a politically advantageous marriage to a son of Pope Innocent VIII that cemented the alliance between the Medici and the Roman branches of the Cybo and Altoviti families.

The conspirators approached Sixtus IV in the hopes of gaining his approval, as he and the Medici had a long rivalry themselves, but the pope gave no official sanction to the plan.

Despite his refusal of official approval, the pope nonetheless allowed the plot to proceed without interfering, and, after the failed assassination of Lorenzo, also gave dispensation for crimes done in the service of the church.

I have decided, with your approval, to sail for Naples immediately, believing that as I am the person against whom the activities of our enemies are chiefly directed, I may, perhaps, by delivering myself into their hands, be the means of restoring peace to our fellow-citizens.

Following the assassination of Duke Alessandro, power passed to the "junior" Medici branch—those descended from Lorenzo the Elder, the youngest son of Giovanni di Bicci, starting with his great-great-grandson Cosimo I "the Great".

They were generous patrons of the arts who commissioned masterpieces such as Raphael's Transfiguration and Michelangelo's The Last Judgment; however, their reigns coincided with troubles for the Vatican, including Martin Luther's Protestant Reformation and the infamous sack of Rome in 1527.

[citation needed] Another outstanding figure of the 16th-century Medici family was Cosimo I, who rose from relatively modest beginnings in the Mugello to attain supremacy over the whole of Tuscany.

Against the opposition of Catherine de' Medici, Pope Paul III and their allies, he prevailed in various battles to conquer Florence's hated rival Siena and found the Grand Duchy of Tuscany.

[27] In foreign affairs, he shifted Tuscany away from Habsburg[28] hegemony by marrying the first non-Habsburg marriage candidate since Alessandro, Christina of Lorraine, a granddaughter of Catherine de' Medici.

[citation needed] Despite all of these incentives for economic growth and prosperity, the population of Florence at the dawn of the 17th century was a mere 75,000, far smaller than the other capitals of Italy (i.e., Rome, Milan, Venice, Palermo, and Naples).

Maria Maddelana's temperament was analogous to Christina's, and together they aligned Tuscany with the papacy, re-doubled the Tuscan clergy, and allowed the heresy trial of Galileo Galilei to occur.

[36] In 1657, Leopoldo de' Medici, the Grand Duke's youngest brother, established the Accademia del Cimento, organized to attract scientists to Florence from all over Tuscany for mutual study.

Johann Wilhelm, Elector Palatine, Anna Maria Luisa's spouse, successfully requisitioned the dignity Royal Highness for the Grand Duke and his family in 1691, despite the fact that they had no claim to any kingdom.

Gian Gastone despised the electress for engineering his catastrophic marriage to Anna Maria Franziska of Saxe-Lauenburg; while she abhorred her brother's liberal policies, he repealed all of his father's anti-Semitic statutes.

In collaboration with the Holy Roman Emperor and Grand Duke Francis of Lorraine, she willed all the personal property of the Medici to the Tuscan state, provided that nothing was ever removed from Florence.

[51] The "Lorrainers", as the occupying forces were called, were popularly loathed, but the regent, the Prince de Craon, allowed the electress to live unperturbed in the Palazzo Pitti.

The extinction of the main Medici dynasty and the accession in 1737 of Francis Stephen, Duke of Lorraine and husband of Maria Theresa of Austria, led to Tuscany's temporary inclusion in the territories of the Austrian crown.

Giovanni di Bicci de' Medici, the first patron of the arts in the family, aided Masaccio and commissioned Filippo Brunelleschi for the reconstruction of the Basilica of San Lorenzo, Florence in 1419.

[citation needed] After Lorenzo's death the puritanical Dominican friar Girolamo Savonarola rose to prominence, warning Florentines against excessive luxury.

Cosimo in turn patronized Vasari, who erected the Uffizi Gallery in 1560 and founded the Accademia delle Arti del Disegno – ("Academy of the Arts of Drawing") in 1563.

The simplest, though also unproven, theory suggests that the balls represented coins copied from the coat of arms of the Guild of Moneychangers (Arte del Cambio) to which the Medici belonged.

[75] As an Italian vocabulary word, "medici" means "medical doctors" and identifications with the family members as physicians may be found among their names as early as the eleventh century.

Although knowledge of vitamins did not exist at the time, the benefit of oranges for certain diseases was recognized and their association with recommendations by medical doctors suggests to Ruggiero that this likely is the imagery intended in the coats of arms for the Medici family.