Florence has often been studied in the past for its distinctive urban culture and society, while insufficient attention has been paid to the important Tuscan territorial state that was created by Florence in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Comprising a handful of formerly independent city-states and numerous smaller communities in the plains and mountains, the Florentine 'empire' in Tuscany supplied the markets and fiscal coffers of the Renaissance republic, while providing lessons in statecraft that nourished the political thought of Machiavelli and Guicciardini. This volume comprises seventeen original essays representing the new directions being taken by historians of the Florentine Renaissance. It offers new and exemplary approaches towards state-building, political vocabulary, political economy, civic humanism, local history and social patronage in what is one of the most interesting and well-documented of the states of late medieval and Renaissance Europe.

‘This impressive essay collection … is a work of much more than the local interest the title might suggest. In substance it marks a major contribution to the long, untiring debate about the nature and affinities of the Italian (and by extension non-Italian) Renaissance state …’.

Source: The English Historical Review

‘… a major indeed pathbreaking contribution to our understanding of the Florentine territorial state in the century and a half before the Medici principate.’

Source: The American Historical Review