Alessandro de' Medici e il Dominio. Per una rilettura degli inizi del principato (1530-1537)

Alessandro de’ Medici’s rule has been considered for centuries as a black tyrannical parenthesis between the republic’s crisis and the real foundation of the principality operated by Cosimo I. This article aims instead to read this period as a crucial phase of the wider process of consolidation of the Medicean State. Particularly, the understudied documentation produced between 1530 and 1537 by the Florentine magistracies in charge of the Dominio enlightens that the Medici government started to reform the territorial administration towards the financial protection of the subject communities, in order to better assure their collaboration to the prince’s projects.