By Christopher Hibbert

FROM THE AUTHOR’S NOTE: “Although there are very many books on the lives and times of the Medici, not since the appearance of Colonel G. F. Young's two-volume work in 1909 has there been a full-length study in English devoted to the history of the whole family from the rise of the Medic bank in the late fourteenth century under the guidance of Giovanni di Bicci de' Medici to the death of the last of the Medici Grand Dukes of Tuscany, Gian Gastone, in 1737. This book is an attempt to supply such a study and to offer a reliable alterative, based on the fruits of modern research, to Colonel Young's work, which Ferdinand Schevill has described as 'the subjective divagations of a sentimentalist with a mind above history'…..”

New York Morrow Quill Paperbacks. 1980.