Portrays the dominion of the Florentine Medici over the 15th to early 18th centuries, emphasizing the family’s contribution to the arts and latterly its dissolute lifestyle. Rising to power under the republican constitution as wool traders and then bankers with the papal accounts, the foremost Medici figures were Cosimo and Lorenzo; a subsequent Cosimo was Florence’s first duke. Hibbert seems most interested in the provenance of culture and architecture. Though he sketches civic matters, one cannot tell whether the decline of agriculture and trade results from poor leadership, the changing economics of (for example) Atlantic trade, or the Italian city-states’ inferiority to emerging nation-states north of the Alps. Undoubtedly learned but not particularly helpful for understanding society and statesmanship.