Medici Truth vs Power Flashcards
Alessandro, Duke of Florence and illegitimate son of a pope, is murdered in his bed by Florentines who are sick of being under the thumb of the Medici. The Florentine Signoria elects Cosimo, a 17 year old cousin, to succeed the murdered duke because they believe they can control him.
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Cosimo, abolishes the Signoria, becomes de3 facto king of Florence and Tuscany, and being basically uneducated, begins to train himself to be both a warrior and a politician.
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The new pope hires an artist laughingly referred to as Braggatoni (“large underpants man”) to cover up the privates of the nudes in Michelangelo’s painting The Last Judgment.
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Michelangelo dies after living in Rome for the last 30 years of his life to avoid the Medici.
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The Florentine government steals Michelangelo’s body and sneaks it back to Florence for a huge burial, claiming him as the greatest of Florentine artists.
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Cosimo II marries a Spanish aristocrat who brings him important allies, then conquers the territory between Florence and the coast and builds a navy.
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Vasari and Cosimo fix the arm of Michelangelo’s David that had been broken during the Savonarola Frenzy.
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Vasari and Cosimo form an alliance to promote the Medici family and the arts: Vasari paints frescoes with the Medici insignia all over Florence and helps Cosimo form a new art school.
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In his book Lives of the Artists, Vasari states that the world had been dark for 1000 years, until the renasciamento, rebirth, or renaissance occurred in Florence under the Medici.
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Cosimo’s wife buys the Pizzi Palace, a fortress, because the Medici Palace is not impressive or large enough.
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Cosimo must pay 300 bodyguards to protect himself and his family.
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Cosimo appoints Vasari to build the Uffizi Palace, centralizing all of the offices and providing protection from assassins.
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Following the Protestant Reformation, the Catholic Church faces a growing clamor for individual freedom from the dictates of the church. As a response, the church begins the Counter Reformation, including the Inquisition, in an attempt to salvage its power and make people obedient.
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The Inquisition bans 583 heretical works, many of which are in Cosimo’s library; Cosimo organizes a token public book burning when the Inquisition comes to Florence.
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Galileo invents the astronomical telescope and discovers sun spots, the weird shape of Saturn, the Milky Way, the moons of Jupiter and demonstrates that Copernicus is right: the earth revolves around the sun not the sun around the earth. He also discovers the law of buoyancy and establishes the basis for Newton’s theory of gravity.
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A priest named Giordano Bruno publishes his theory that the universe is infinite.
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Bruno is burned at the stake for his scientific beliefs.
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Galileo publishes his heliocentric theory as a dialogue between two friends because his theory contradicts the Bible and church doc trine, The book becomes very popular, the first book of popular science.
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Galileo is summoned to the Inquisition and threatene3d with excommunication and death if he does not deny Copernicus’s theory that the earth revolves around the sun.
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The pope tells the Duke of Florence to stay out of the controversy with Galileo, that it will not help Galileo and will hurt the dukedom. Duke Ferdinand II stops financially supporting Galileo.
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Galileo has to deny the truth to avoid torture and save his life.
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Galileo is sentenced to house arrest for the rest of his life. When he dies, the church refuses to let the Florentines have a big funeral for him.
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In 1992, the Catholic Church finally restores Galileo’s good name.
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August 23, 1572, Catherine de Medici, Queen Mother of France, has the gates of Paris locked and thousands of French Huguenot Protestants killed in what becomes known as the St. Bartholomew’s Day Massacre.
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In a letter to Brand Duchess Christina, Galileo Galilei says this: “some years ago, as your Serene Highness well knows, I discovered in the havens many things which had not been seen before. The novelty of these things stirred men up against me, as if I had placed these things in the sky with my own hands in order to upset nature! But I do not believe that the same God who has endowed us with sense, reason and intellect has intended us to forgo their use. He would not require us to deny sense and reason, To ban Copernicus now would seem in my judgment to be a contravention of truth…”
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