Tuesday, March 20, 2012

More about Florins and the Wealth of the Medici

According to Hibbert's The House of Medici:  It's Rise and Fall, Lorenzo came across an account book covering the thirty-eight years 1434 to 1471 (so spending by Cosimo, Piero, and Lorenzo himself), a total of 663,755 florins were spent on "buildings, charities, and taxes."  In the middle of the quattrocento the Palazzo Medici was said to be worth about 5000 florins.  The Medici contributed significantly to rebuilding their neighborhood church, San Lorenzo, shown in my own photo above.  Other buildings included the Duomo, San Marco, and the Ospedale degli Innocenti.  The Archbishop of Florence was a good friend of Cosimo's, and so it was said, they talked often of usury and how that "besetting sin of a banker life might be expiated."   Fortunately for us, most of the buildings the Medici built or restored are still in use today.  But one has to wonder if that's the amount they spent on building, charities and taxes,"  what was the profit of the Medici bank and their investments over that time?

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