Who ruled Florence?

Florence lies in a basin of the Arno valley in Tuscany, ringed by hills, at a point where the river could be bridged on the road between northern Italy and Rome. It began as a modest Roman colony and became, in the late Middle Ages, one of the richest cities in Europe through wool, cloth and banking. That wealth paid for the art, architecture and scholarship of the Renaissance, the movement with which the city's name is most closely linked.

The Etruscans had their hill town at Fiesole, just to the north, but the city on the river was a Roman foundation. Florentia was established as a colony for army veterans in 59 BCE, traditionally under Julius Caesar, with a grid of streets whose outline still shows in the centre. After the fall of the Western Empire it passed through Ostrogothic, Byzantine and Lombard hands, then became part of the Carolingian March of Tuscany. In the 11th and 12th centuries, while the region was formally part of the Holy Roman Empire, the townspeople gained effective self-government, and by the 1110s Florence was a free commune.

The commune grew rapidly in the 13th century. Its merchants and bankers traded across Europe, and the gold florin, first minted in 1252, became a standard coin of international commerce. Politics were violent: Guelph and Ghibelline factions, and then rival Guelph parties, fought for control, and in 1302 the poet Dante Alighieri was exiled, never to return. The failure of the great Bardi and Peruzzi banks in the 1340s and the Black Death of 1348, which killed perhaps half the population, were heavy blows. In 1378 the wool workers known as the Ciompi briefly seized power.

From 1434 the banker Cosimo de' Medici dominated the republic without holding formal office, and his grandson Lorenzo, called the Magnificent, led it until his death in 1492. The city's workshops and patrons, with the Medici foremost among them, nurtured artists including Botticelli, Leonardo da Vinci and Michelangelo. Brunelleschi's great dome over the cathedral, completed in the 1430s, became the symbol of the city. The Medici were expelled in 1494, and the friar Savonarola briefly led a moral crusade before he was burned in 1498. Niccolò Machiavelli served the restored republic until the Medici returned in 1512.

After a long siege in 1529 and 1530, the Medici came back as hereditary dukes, and in 1569 Cosimo I became Grand Duke of Tuscany. When the family died out in 1737 the grand duchy passed to the house of Habsburg-Lorraine. Apart from the Napoleonic years, Habsburg-Lorraine grand dukes ruled until 1859.

Tuscany voted to join the new Italian state in 1860, and Florence served as the capital of the Kingdom of Italy from 1865 until the capital moved to Rome in 1871. Retreating German troops blew up all the city's bridges except the Ponte Vecchio in August 1944, and in November 1966 the Arno flooded, damaging thousands of works of art and manuscripts. Today Florence is a city of about 360,000 people, the capital of Tuscany and a centre of art history, fashion and tourism.