The Medici - Godfathers of the Renaissance Part 1 - The Birth of a Dynasty

The Medici - Godfathers of the Renaissance. Part 1 - The Birth of a Dynasty.

Florence 1389. A boy is baptized into a medieval world. He was not of noble birth. He was the son of a local merchant. His name was Cosimo de Medici. From humble beginnings, his dynasty would seek power and influence and not stop until they secured the papacy itself. Theirs was a world where power came at a price: intrigue, murder, assassination, and war.

The city of Florence was also a cauldron of creativity. For the greater glory of the family, the Medici would protect and pay for the greatest artists and thinkers of their age: Michelangelo, Brunelleschi, Botticelli, Leonardo, Galileo. An explosion of ideas which would shatter the medieval world and resonate from the centuries in a single phrase: Rinascimento. Rebirth. Renaissance.

Behind it stood the Medici, godfathers on the Renaissance.

--- Cradle of the Renaissance --- 2:00

At the dawn of the fifteenth century an illicit trade had begun. Men scoured Europe in search of treasure. Somewhere in the confines of the holy church lay their prize. Not the jewel-encrusted relics or sacred icons of medieval Christendom. Nor were they seeking to loot the bodies of the dead, victims of war and plague. But hidden in the darkest vaults of the church lay a prize far older and more precious and sometimes far more dangerous.

What these men were really after was knowledge. Cosimo de Medici and his friends were searching for lost secrets from the ancient world.

MARCELLO FANTONI: The shared feeling at the time was that the achievements of the classics in many fields, from philosophy to architecture, from rhetoric to sculpture, were unsurpassed.

JAMES SASLOW: At the beginning it was just sort of fun to dig up old sculptures or interesting to discover lost manuscripts in faraway monasteries and bring them down and read them. It took them a long time to realize that there was a whole other way of life being embodied there. So, there's this sense of excitement about the past. But it's also dangerous.

From across Europe ancient learning was carried back to Florence the city of Cosimo's birth

Florence in the year 1400 was a city unlike anywhere else in Europe. This major trading center in the heart of Tuscany was a republic in which powerful families vied with each other for political control.