Era 01 · 1300s — 1600s

Medici & Monarchs

Who speaks

A single family

Pulse cycle

4.5s

Information was property of whoever owned the fastest couriers. The Medici bank, founded 1397, was the Bloomberg terminal of its era — papal accounts, royal debts, grain prices across the Mediterranean, all passing through one family's ledgers in Florence.

Events in this era

1397

Medici Bank Founded

Giovanni di Bicci de' Medici opened the bank in Florence that would become Europe's dominant financial intermediary for the next century. Letters of credit replaced the need to ship physical gold across borders, a logistical advance that reshaped Mediterranean trade. By 1420 the bank held the papal account, the single most valuable financial relationship in Christendom. The ledgers tracked not only money but information: who owed whom, what grain sold where, which prince was solvent.

Medici controlled papal banking for 200+ years

1440 — 1455

Gutenberg invents the printing press

Around 1440 in Mainz, Johannes Gutenberg combined three existing technologies — movable metal type, oil-based ink, and a screw press adapted from olive and wine production — into a system that could reproduce text faster than any scribe. By 1455 he had completed the 42-line Bible, the first major book printed in Europe. Within fifty years, an estimated 20 million books had been printed across the continent, more than the entire scribal output of the previous thousand years. The Catholic Church's monopoly on text reproduction, and therefore on the authoritative version of any document, was structurally over. Every later narrative-control inflection — Luther in 1517, the penny press in the 1830s, broadcast radio, the internet — is a downstream consequence of this single workshop.

Cost of reproducing one page: 100× lower in fifty years

1517

Luther's 95 Theses

Martin Luther posted his 95 Theses on the door of the Castle Church in Wittenberg on October 31, 1517. Within two weeks copies printed on Gutenberg-style presses had circulated across Germany. Within two months they were in France, England, and Italy. The Catholic Church's monopoly on religious authority, built over more than a millennium, broke against a technology that had existed for only seventy years. It was the first mass-media decentralization event in European history.

Broke Catholic monopoly over Europe's narrative

Apr 26, 1478

The Pazzi Conspiracy

A rival Florentine banking family, backed by Pope Sixtus IV, attempted to assassinate Lorenzo and Giuliano de' Medici during Sunday Mass in Florence Cathedral. Giuliano died. Lorenzo escaped. His retaliation was decisive enough that Medici rule tightened for another fifteen years.

Medici control of Florence strengthened

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Central Banks & Chartered Co.

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