Hello and welcome to this episode of Epoch's where as promised I'll be talking all about the Medici family

So it will be a bit of an overview episode a bit of a sweeping one since it's about 300 odd years of history

And I won't be able to talk about every single member of the

family of any note I'll only really be able to hit the highlights so if I miss out

ones that you find particularly interesting I can only apologize but I shall try and do all the

most important ones okay so let's dive straight in so the person that a lot of historians

usually say is the founder in inverted commas of the dynasty. He's not the first

Madichi but the first really really important one is Giovanni de Bicke de Madichi.

And already by this point the Madichi family, the Medici bank is already established.

They're very, very, very rich.

But it's under this Giovanni that it becomes kind of super rich.

And here we're talking the early 15th century, just the turn of the 15th century into the 1420s.

In fact, it's by 1421 that this first of the Giovanni Medici, oh first to say,

there are lots of Giovanni's, lots of Pierros,

more than one Lorenzo, so I have to make it clear,

more than one Cosimo, I have to make it clear

which one I'm talking about.

But this first most important Giovanni, he actually seems that he didn't actually want to be

involved in politics in sort of the dirty game of

Florentine politics all that much. But he became, the family became so

rich and powerful and influential that they just sort of, it was almost foisted upon him he almost

couldn't avoid it in 1421 he was voted gone fairly on it i.e. the sort of

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