FLORENCE was the centre of the Renaissance. By no accident, it was also at the time the centre of an industry that has marked the West no less: banking. And at the centre of that sat the Medici family. This one family supplied four popes and two queens of France, and ran Florence, with a couple of interruptions, for almost 400 years. Its power emanated originally from the family bank. Italian financiers (known generically, and inaccurately, as “Lombards”, hence London’s Lombard Street) were pre-eminent in their age. And among them the house of the Medici was pre-eminent, the most powerful financial institution in all of 15th-century Europe.
Source: Those Medici | The Economist