Medici Archive Project

The **Medici Archive Project** (MAP) was founded by Edward Goldberg and Hester Diamond in the early 1990s to foster the study of the *Mediceo del Principato*, the epistolary collection of the Medici Grand Dukes, dating from 1537 to 1743. The Medici were the most famous and influential family in Renaissance and early modern Italy. For two centuries they ruled Tuscany as sovereign grand dukes, and their activity is the focus of intense interest of historians, especially of scholars in the history of art, music, theater, literature, diplomacy, natural science, material culture, medicine, wine and gastronomy as well as gender studies and Jewish studies. The *Mediceo del Principato* has survived virtually intact, offering the most complete record of any princely regime of the period. Comprising more than four million letters, and occupying a mile of shelf space at the Archivio di Stato in Florence, the *Mediceo del Principato* should be considered a global, local, and personal archive. Penned by an extensive network of Medici diplomats and informants, circa three million letters chronicle the political and cultural developments in Europe, Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Part of this diplomatic corpus are the *avvisi*, which were usually sent with the letters of Florentine ambassadors stationed in major Northern European, Mediterranean and Near Eastern urban centers. Aside from recording the world outside of Tuscany, the letters also document the mechanisms that connected the Medici court with its administrative capillaries, including the legislative, judicial, financial, and public health branches of government. At the same time, the *Mediceo del Principat*o also records the vicissitudes of the Medici themselves and events at their court. We learn of their passions and ambitions, their education and scholarship, their patronage and taste, their physical maladies and religious observance, and their everyday interactions with each other and with the world inside and outside their palaces and villas.