The House of Medici: Its Rise and Fall was published by Allen Lane in 1974. Hibbert traces the Medici family from their origins as Florentine merchants through their ascent to become the most powerful dynasty in Renaissance Italy — bankers, patrons, popes, and eventually grand dukes of Tuscany — and their long, slow decline into insignificance.
The book’s first half is dominated by two extraordinary figures: Cosimo de’ Medici (1389-1464), who built the family’s banking empire and political power while maintaining the fiction that Florence was still a republic; and his grandson Lorenzo the Magnificent (1449-1492), who transformed the family’s wealth into the most ambitious patronage of art, architecture, and learning in European history. Under Cosimo and Lorenzo, the Medici funded Brunelleschi, Donatello, Botticelli, Michelangelo, and Marsilio Ficino’s revival of Platonic philosophy — effectively financing the Italian Renaissance.
Hibbert writes the Medici story as a family saga: the personal rivalries, the marriages (including two Medici queens of France), the assassinations (the Pazzi Conspiracy of 1478, in which Lorenzo’s brother Giuliano was murdered in the cathedral), and the constant maneuvering between Florence’s republican traditions and the Medici’s dynastic ambitions. The decline — from the burning of Savonarola through the increasingly undistinguished grand dukes to the extinction of the male line in 1737 — is told with the same narrative energy as the rise.
Collecting The House of Medici
First edition (Allen Lane, London, 1974): Cloth binding, dust jacket.
Market values:
- First edition, fine/fine: $30–$80
- Very good/very good: $10–$30