Technology had not yet removed the ordinary things of life from view. Piss did not stream into clear water to be sucked away beneath gleaming porcelain. Shit steamed in the pan. If you were a florin kind of person, you could pay a picciolo person to take it away for you and empty it elsewhere. In a back alley, perhaps. The plague victim did not die in starched sheets, nor was his agony alleviated by analgesics. Where there was a perfume, that was because an unpleasant smell was lurking beneath. Your mortality was ever present. People died young.
What he's not so good at, however, is the chronology, the list of events, which in this book are sketched out somewhat impatiently; and the individuals who work for the Medicis, borrow from them, marry them, conspire against them and try to assassinate them, most of whom feel like under-developed characters in a novel.
I had also hoped for a little more detail of the Medici's financial arrangements, given the title. There are some tantalizing details, like the mechanics of the 'discretionary deposit', a device developed to circumvent the ban on usury:
The holder's return on the money he deposits is at the discretion of the banker, and thus is a gift and not a contracted interest rate at all, even if it can usually be expected to work out in the region of 8 to 12 percent per annum.
But, again, it's a little bit short on substance.
Nevertheless, the arc of the family's ambition is colourfully drawn: two generations of skilful empire building, then the hopeless squandering of money by men who were more interested in hobnobbing with aristocracy than keeping accounts, culminating in the pursuit of political power at all costs.
What interest Parks most, and what makes this book worth reading, is the depiction of the tension that existed in the lives of the leading members of the Medici family, particularly Cosimo and Lorenzo, between the conflicting imperatives of religion and humanism, spirituality and sensuality. It was the continual manoeuvring with which they sought to reconcile those tensions that created room for an outburst of creativity which still dazzles and is the reason the name of the Medicis resonates five hundred years later.
