Medici Money: Banking, Metaphysics, and Art in Fifteenth-Century Florence

Not interested in Italian Renaissance History? No problem! Aside from the fact that Parks is a good enough writer to make any subject interesting, this book is about far more than the Medici clan (though it's also a good place to start in relation to them). It's equally about the nature of money, and banking - with plenty of contemporary resonance.

For example:

"Usury alters things. With interest rates, money is no longer a simple and stable metal commodity that just happens to have been chosen as a means of exchange. Projected through time, it multiplies, and this without any toil on the part of the usurer. Everything becomes more fluid. A man can borrow money, buy a loom, sell his wool at a high price, change his station in life. show more Another man can borrow money, buy the first man's wool, ship it abroad, and sell it at an even higher price. He moves up the social scale. Or if he is unlucky, or foolish, he is ruined. Meanwhile, the usurer, the banker, grows richer and richer. We can't even know how rich because money can be moved and hidden, and gains on financial transactions are hard to trace." [pg13]

Parks talks about the book in interview with TMO here show less

Surprised by being so unsatisfied with Medici Money. I was expecting a great read but I found it confusing when it should have been easy to bring out the deeper contradictions within the legendary Medici. I didn’t appreciate what felt like a Wall Street Journal type of writing that didn’t offer a single theme (Achilles coupled with Savonarola). Not recommended, and I would think twice about trying to read anything else by the author. Parks seems talented enough to do great work, but this one isn’t.

This was a great fun book. It's an easy introduction to 15th Century Florence. I've read bits and pieces here and there about that time and place, but this book put the pieces together nicely. Of course it is not a long book and not a dense book either, so it is far from comprehensive. Really it is more of a starting point, a trigger to go read more.

Egads I don't think I ever realized that the Pope that Luther fought against was the son of Lorenzo the Magnificent. How about that!

I did find the writing style of the book a bit annoying. There are sentence fragments all over the place. It's not carelessly done - it's too consistent for that. It's just sort of deliberately informal, chatty. It wasn't a total obstacle - it was clear enough show more what the author was saying.

There were many fun references to our current social/political environment. That's a major theme of the book, the way that 15th Century Florence was the birthplace of our modern society. Of course any such hypothesis has to be simplistic to the point almost of absurdity. But the cartoon starkness of it makes it clearer. Maybe the reader will be motivated to study further, to fill in the subtleties. How was Luther different than Savonarola?

The tight relationship between money - banking - and politics: that's the core of it. How money has erased old family power. (There's one of those sentence fragments!)

Ah, there was a sentence in the book somewhere... in a productive economy, banks can make money by investing in productive enterprises. When all the productivity has moved elsewhere, the only money to be made is by encouraging the powerful to overspend on grand gestures, military and otherwise. Definitely many pointed references to present circumstances, though not always clearly labeled as such! show less

The very thing that made the Medici rich (usury)made them vulnerable. The antidote, emblematic of the pragmatist patriarch Cosimo Medici, was to link their wealth to the public, cultural good. The other centrepiece in this story is the Renaissance with its accompanying inquiry into the nature of man, science and beauty (along with the predictably prickly relationship with the Church). Tim Parks is a wonderful raconteur and this book is another winner in his repetoire.

Tim Parks Medici Money is a somewhat peculiar look at the famed Medici family of renaissance Italy and the banking organization they were most recognized for. The book suffers from rather poor editing, with timeline jumps, poor sentencing and at times overbearing waffle - his explanation of monetary connections between the Medici provincial banks left me confused. His writing style doesn’t seem too far removed from that of a script to a light hearted documentary. I would say this is a good introduction to the 15th century Europe and the fame Medici family but sadly nothing more.

A pretentious title to a moderately well written but sometimes poorly edited book. Because unnatural. Yup, that's what got printed on page 193. Plus the author seems to have equated religion or the Catholic Church of the time with metaphyiscs. Or he just wanted to sound fancy. I think the book would have been better without the pretentiousness.

My biggest complaint is that if this is supposed to be a non-fiction work, then a true bibliography and a notes section should have been included. Instead there is a "Bibliographic Notes" section where he gives his opinion of other works on the Medici.

Excellent