bastoncini di carote e salsa ranch
Listening to a lecture on the Medici family by William Landon, he mentioned two figures that made me wonder what kind of terms their bank, and more broadly, what types of financial instruments the 15th and 16th century italian bankers offered. And what types of legal guarantees they had.
The figures that sparked my interest were that the Medici bank was founded around the beginning of the 15th century with 8000 florins. And then towards the end of the 15th century, Lorenzo de' Medici went through the accounts of their banks and figured out that they had spent 600.000 florins on public works and sponsoring artists (this would imply the net worth of the banks books being several times larger than that figure). This massive multiplication of their fortune seems incredible to me, so I hope someone could shed some light on how these banks operated to generate so much money in such a relatively small time frame.
Does anyone recognize this statue? The photo is of a charm (about 3/4-inch high) that my wife got in Europe (she thinks Italy) when she traveled there in the late 1950s-early-60s. She collected charms (for a charm bracelet, duh) representing statuary in the places she visited, but can't place this one.
https://preview.redd.it/c6dsblum0d881.jpg?width=427&format=pjpg&auto=webp&s=8e2961f8199e3c653695fb9c4253c7e6bbe936c5
I remember being told in school that ancient Greek and roman texts were copied down generation to generation by gregorian monks in the millennium between the fall of Rome and the Italian renaissance (which seems to make sense), and I was recently told (by someone who is in no way a qualified historian) that these monks who copied the texts down lived primarily in the Eastern half of the roman empire (Byzantium), and that when constantinople fell to the Mongols it caused a mass exodus of folk back to whatever remained of the western part of the roman empire, and that they took these ancient texts with them, therefore instigating the Italian renaissance. So in a 'broad strokes of history' kind of sense, I was told, Ghengis Khan and his expansionism were responsible for starting the renaissance. It seems logical and is an absolutely fascinating idea, but is it at all true?
