Travel Italy About The History of Florence

The Roman colony of Florentia was established in 59 BC; expansion was rapid, based on trade along the Arno. In the sixth century AD the city fell to the barbarian hordes of Totila, then the Lombards and then Charlemagne's Franks . In 1078 Countess Mathilda of Tuscia supervised the construction of new fortifications, and in the year of her death - 1115 - granted Florence the status of an independent city . Around 1200, the first Arti (Guilds) were formed to promote the interests of traders and bankers in the face of conflict between the pro-imperial Ghibelline faction and the pro-papal Guelphs . In 1260, the Guelph-backed regime of Florence's Primo Popolo , a government of the mercantile class, was ousted after Siena's Ghibelline army defeated Florence. By the 1280s the Guelphs were back in power through the Secondo Popolo ; the exclusion of the nobility from government in 1293 was the most dramatic measure in a programme of political reform that invested power in the Signoria , a council drawn from the major guilds. The mighty Palazzo della Signoria - now known as the Palazzo Vecchio - was raised as a visible demonstration of authority over a huge city: at this time, Florence had a population around 100,000, a thriving mercantile sector and a highly developed banking system (the florin was common currency across Europe). Strife within the Guelph camp marked the start of the fourteenth century, and then in the 1340s the two largest banks collapsed and the Black Death struck, destroying up to half the city's population.

The ascendancy continued under Cosimo's grandson Lorenzo il Magnifico , who ruled the city at the height of its artistic prowess. Papal resentment of Florentine independence found an echo in the jealousy of the Pazzi family, one of the city's main rivals to the Medici. The two camps colluded in the Pazzi conspiracy of 1478, in which Lorenzo was wounded and his brother Giuliano murdered. Before Lorenzo's death in 1492, the Medici bank failed, and in 1494 Lorenzo's son Piero was obliged to flee. Florentine hearts and minds were seized by the charismatic Dominican monk Girolamo Savonarola , who preached on the decadence and corruption of the city. Artists departed in droves. In a symbolic demonstration of the new order, Savonarola and his child spies set about collecting all the trappings of Florence's Medicean culture - books, paintings, tapestries, fancy furniture and clothes - and piled them high in Piazza della Signoria in a Bonfire of the Vanities . But such a graphic assault on the past signalled a turning-point: within a year, Savonarola had been found guilty of heresy and treason, and burned alive at the same spot.

After Savonarola, the city functioned peaceably under a republican constitution headed by Piero Soderini, whose chief adviser was his friend Niccolò Machiavelli . In 1512 the Medici returned, and in 1516, Giovanni de' Medici became Pope Leo X , granting Michelangelo and Leonardo da Vinci major commissions. After the assassination of the tyrannical transvestite Alessandro de' Medici in 1537, Florentine power was handed to a new Cosimo, who seized the Republic of Siena and, in 1569, took the title Cosimo I , Grand Duke of Tuscany. The great traditions of Florentine art descended into farce as sycophants such as Giorgio Vasari plastered the city with fawning images of Medici power and glory.

Florence's decline was slow and painful. The later Medicis were each more ridiculous than the last: Francesco spent most of his thirteen-year reign indoors, obsessed by alchemy; Ferdinando II sat back as harvests failed, plagues ran riot and banking and textiles slumped to nothing; the virulently anti-Semitic Cosimo III spent 53 years in power cracking down on dissidents; and Gian Gastone spent virtually all his time drunk in bed. When Gastone died, in 1737, the Medici line died with him.

Under the terms of a treaty signed by Gian Gastone's sister, Anna Maria Ludovica , Florence - and the whole Grand Duchy of Tuscany - passed to Francesco of Lorraine, the future Francis I of Austria. Austrian rule lasted until the coming of the French in 1799; after a fifteen-year interval of French control, the Lorraine dynasty was brought back, remaining in residence until the Risorgimento upheavals of 1859. Absorbed into the united Italian state in the following year, Florence became the capital of the Kingdom of Italy in 1861, a position it held until 1875.

After 1890, large swathes of the medieval city were demolished by government officials and developers; buildings that had stood in the area of what is now Piazza della Repubblica since the early Middle Ages were pulled down to make way for undistinguished office blocks, and old quarters around Santa Croce and Santa Maria Novella were razed. In 1944, the retreating German army blew up all the city's bridges except the Ponte Vecchio and destroyed swathes of medieval architecture. A disastrous flood in November 1966 drowned several people and wrecked buildings and works of art. Restoration of damage caused by the flood, and by a 1993 Mafia car-bomb that killed five people outside the Uffizi, is still going on. Indeed, monuments and paintings are the basis of Florence's survival in the new century, a state of affairs that gives rise to considerable popular discontent. The development of new industrial parks on the northern outskirts is the latest and most ambitious attempt to break Florence's ever-increasing dependence on its seven million annual tourists.

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