Short description:

This book explores how the Medici Grand Dukes pursued ways to expand their political, commercial, and cultural networks beyond Europe, cultivating complex relations with the Ottoman Empire and other Islamicate regions, and looking further east to India, China, and Japan.

Long description:

This book explores how the Medici Grand Dukes pursued ways to expand their political, commercial, and cultural networks beyond Europe, cultivating complex relations with the Ottoman Empire and other Islamicate regions, and looking further east to India, China, and Japan.

The chapters in this volume discuss how casting a global, cross-cultural net was part and parcel of the Medicean political vision. Diplomatic gifts, items of commercial exchange, objects looted at war, maritime connections, and political plots were an inherent part of how the Medici projected their state on the global arena. The eleven chapters of this volume demonstrate that the mobility of objects, people, and knowledge that generated the global interactions analyzed here was not unidirectional?rather, it went both to and from Tuscany. In addition, by exploring evidence of objects produced in Tuscany for Asian markets,this book reveals hitherto neglected histories of how Western cultures projected themselves eastwards.

"[T]he essays in the volume are overall very strong, and the volume is a major contribution to this area of inquiry."

--CAA Reviews

Table of Contents:

Introduction: Eurasian Tuscany, or the Fifth Element

Francesco Freddolini

Part 1: Mediterranean Connections







1. Making a New Prince: Tuscany, the Pasha of Aleppo, and the Dream of a New Levant

Brian Brege

2. To the Victor Go the Spoils: Christian Triumphalism, Cosimo I de? Medici and the Order of Santo Stefano in Pisa

Joseph M. Silva

3. Medici Patronage and Exotic Collectibles in the Seventeenth Century: the Cospi Collection

Federica Gigante

Part 2: Livorno: Infrastructures and Networks of Exchange

4. Disembedding the Market: Commerce, Competition, and the Free Port of 1676

Corey Tazzara

5. Red Coral from Livorno to Hirado: British Early Trading Networks and Maritime Trajectories, c. 1570-1623

Tiziana Iannello

6. Ginori Porcelain: Florentine Identity and trade with the Levant

Cinzia Maria Sicca

Part 3: Asian Interactions

7. Of Rhinos, Peppercorns, and Saints: (Re)presenting India in Medici Florence

Erin E. Benay

9. Eurasian Networks of Pietre Dure: Francesco Paolsanti Indiano and His Early Seventeenth-Century Trade between Florence and Goa

Francesco Freddolini

10. The Russian Fata Morgana of Cosimo III: The Fluctuating Portraits of Kangxi between Florence and Beijing

Marco Musillo

11. Postscript. Textual Threads and Starry Messengers: The Global Medici from the Archive to the Fondaco

Marco Musillo