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In 1417, when he was elected, Pope Martin was living in Florence where a banker named Giovanni de’ Medici was immediately keen to win his favour. Already rich from papal business, Medici personified the rising prosperity of Florence, a landlocked Tuscan city state, a republic ruled by the Signoria, a nine-man committee, and several other councils, all elected by its trading guilds and dominated by its mercantile dynasties who competed for power. These oligarchs juggled their urge to flaunt their magnificence in clothes, palazzos and churches with the populist austerity and Christian philanthropy expected of a prosperous Florentine. The Medici, descended from apothecaries who inspired their name and insignia – the palle or red balls that represented pills – had served as gonfaloniere (commander) several times but now seemed to be in decline.

Giovanni changed that. Florentines were experts in refining, dyeing and exporting wool shipped to them from England, Flanders and Burgundy, a trade aided by their capture of Pisa and its port, Livorno. Medici was the owner of two wool workshops, but then he expanded into the other Florentine expertise, banking,^* which was aided by the widespread use through Europe of the city’s gold coins, florins. In 1401 Giovanni had played a role in commissioning the new doors of the Baptistery, a thanksgiving for Florentine emergence from a spasm of the plague, to be decided by a competition. It was jointly won by Lorenzo Ghiberti and Filippo Brunelleschi, and Giovanni then commissioned the latter to build a Medici family basilica, the San Lorenzo. Afterwards Brunelleschi created the 138-foot-diameter dome of the city cathedral, Il Duomo, which was consecrated by the pope.

Medici had become rich through his friendship with the most unlikely pope since Marozia. A Neapolitan pirate, Baldassare Cossa, had flourished in the chaos of multiple popes, murdering his predecessor, winning election as John XXIII, his papacy and wars funded by ‘my very great friend’ Medici. Often accompanied by Giovanni’s son, Cosimo, Cossa hoped to end the schism of popes but in 1414 he was deposed, accused of sodomy, piracy, murder, incest and the seduction of 200 girls. Cossa escaped but was captured and imprisoned. Medici ransomed his piratical patron, but he now backed a rising cardinal, Oddone Colonna, a Florentine monk and descendant of Marozia. Ecclesiastical potentates then elected Colonna as Martin V in order to reunite the Church. In September 1420, Martin formally processed from Florence to Rome, where he appointed Medici as papal banker assisted by his son Cosimo.

Already experienced in trading in Rome and Flanders, Cosimo, now thirty, had been educated by Florence’s humanist scholars. As the Medici became richer, their rivals in the Signoria became jealous. ‘Don’t appear to give advice, but put your views forward discreetly in conversation,’ Giovanni advised Cosimo on his deathbed. ‘Don’t make the government house your workshop, but wait until you are called to it … and always keep out of the public eye.’

Just after his father’s death, an anti-Medici party on the Signoria had Cosimo charged with treason and he was lucky to be banished: ‘Should you send me to live among the Arabs, I’d go most willingly.’ Politics is often simply the art of waiting. In 1434, he was invited back. He ruled while contriving to appear a private citizen, rarely serving as gonfaloniere but becoming ‘king in all but name’, according to one of the popes, for the next thirty years. He poured money into the embellishment of Florence and continued his father’s patronage of the artists, which he regarded as a bet against the upheavals of politics. ‘I know the moods of the city,’ he said. ‘Before fifty years have passed, we shall be expelled, but my buildings will remain.’

When his Tuscan friend and fellow bibliophile Tommaso Parentucelli was elected Pope Nicholas V, Cosimo helped fund an astonishing project: the new Rome. He opened banks all over Europe, with the slogan ‘In the Name of God and Good Business’, trading wool, spices, brocades. But much was based on the trade in alum, a mineral necessary for dyes, glassmaking and tanning. As the Ottoman advance cut off eastern supplies, alum mines were developed in the papal lands. Medici was appointed papal alum agent and alum became the windfall that funded the start of a two-century enterprise of urban regeneration: a Christian sacred city grafted on to the pagan splendour.