Introduction

Summary

Piero de’ Medici’s life remains unstudied, despite being pivotal to the crisis faced by Italian states in the late fifteenth century. Following the French invasion in 1494, Piero was not only driven out of Florence but spent the remainder of his life in exile, drowning in 1503 in an overladen baggage train while fighting with the French in southern Italy against Spain. As Lorenzo il Magnifico’s eldest son and heir, he also experienced the problems of all Italy’s communal regimes as they transformed themselves into territorial states in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Since Florence was still nominally a republic, many of its citizens were alienated by the way Lorenzo – and his son Piero – were treated by other rulers as de facto princes and as the ‘idols’ of their adherents in Florence, and they later blamed Piero for the regime’s collapse in 1494.¹ This created great ambivalence towards him during his years in Florence and hostility afterwards. Yet as the narrative of his life will show, he was more intelligent and talented than his critics suggest, and he provides an invaluable prism through which to view these confused years of crisis for Florence and for Italy.