The Florentines merchants and bankers who patronized the Renaissance made their fortunes through the interaction of domestic manufacturing and a Europe-spanning network. With the fall of Florence’s republic in 1530 to the new Medici monarchy, these merchant patricians were traditionally thought to have retired into an inward looking, pseudo–aristocratic irrelevance. While the Florentine patriciate certainly enjoyed their country villas whose beauty still captures the imagination, it is now clear that both the merchant elite and the new Medici monarchy embraced the possibilities of global travel and trade, often working hand-in-hand. This paper pulls on a thread of that thin globe-spanning web to follow the story of Medici Florence’s connection with Ming China by way of Macau. It will consider both the objects, information, people, and financial ties that bound these distant places and some of the ways by which these tenuous connections shaped small elite sections of Florence.

 

Speaker 
Prof. Brian BREGE
Department of History, Syracuse University
Brian Brege is assistant professor of History at Syracuse University. His book, Tuscany in the Age of Empire (Harvard University Press, 2021) won the American Association of Italian Studies Book Prize in History, Society, and Politics. He is currently preparing a new translation of the Florentine merchant traveler Francesco Carletti’s account of his circumnavigation; co-editing with Giorgio Riello, Paula Findlen, and Luca Molà Trading at the Edge of Empire: Francesco Carletti’s World, ca. 1600; and researching a second monograph provisionally entitled The Global Merchants of Florence: Florentine Patrician Families and Early Modern Capitalism.

ZOOM Meeting ID: 990 8868 4183
Meeting link: https://cuhk.zoom.us/j/99088684183