In the affluent but militarily weak city of fifteenth and sixteenth-century Florence, an ambitious family of financiers from a modest provincial country background rose through shrewdness and wealth to ultimate command of the state. Eventually, the House of Medici would lend its Tuscan mercantile bloodline to the royal dynasties of France, Spain, Austria and England. Their astonishing story is inextricably intertwined with that of Florence itself. Using their artistic patronage of such geniuses as Brunelleschi, Fra Angelico, Botticelli, Donatello, Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo to...

Some called him "The Scourge of Princes" whilst to others he was a rogue and a scoundrel. This is a new biography of Pietro Aretino, the sixteenth-century poet, satirist, journalist, publicist, propagandist, art critic, social climber, Lothario, pornographer and blackmailer of kings, popes and emperors. It is the astonishing story of a man who began life as the penniless son of a cobbler and his wife, the town harlot, who rose to amuse Pope Leo X, infuriate Pope Adrian VI with his acerbic pasquinades, and befriend Pope Clement VII. Minted as a Knight of Rhodes, given a pension (and a golden...