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It was in 1986 that Gian Maria Varanini invited historians, in their study of the Italian territorial states, to look beyond the phase of ‘accomplished stability’ to a ‘prehistory’ in which the characteristic practices of these states took shape. Convinced that the modes of governing of the Italian states were not new with the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Varanini argued that these political structures originated in the communal period: in the experience of establishing control over the countryside and in the development of a hierarchy among the north Italian cities. Seen from the perspective of this communal prehistory, the formation by Florence of a territorial dominion was not an inevitable process, but a process open to different possible paths for development. If, therefore, a linear understanding of political development is abandoned, I should prefer to speak of the ‘material constitution’ of the territorial state. This seems a term well suited to describing the early hierarchy of Tuscan cities and the asymmetries among them that historically preceded the creation of a Florentine dominion. To anticipate this chapter's conclusion, the Florentine process of expansion took place slowly, and in continual interaction with the territorial expansion of rival states. The ordering of the territory did not follow a unitary scheme, nor was there a progressive refinement of public functions; what took shape, rather, was a system characterised from the beginning by a low degree of integration among its components. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A sector of studies by now decades old, which has developed out of a renewed attention for the first constitutive circumstances of the State, has concentrated on the Florentine dominion and its definition as a subregional entity, as well as on the structures of its territorial government. Research has revealed, both on a general level and in the course of categorical and local studies, that the progressive growth of the old ‘contado’ (Lat. comitatus) that had belonged to the Florentine republic at the height of the communal period experienced, apart from any teleological considerations, a strong acceleration, and was more dense with changes beginning, more or less, in the late fourteenth century, with particular intensity during the Albizzi period. It has been remarked, in fact, that between 1300 and 1400 there took place both an institutional redefinition of the ruling city and a more organic structuring of the existing relations between centre and periphery. In particular, it has been shown that the relations between Florence and the subject communes underwent, in the decades of most rapid expansion, a profound re-elaboration of the institutions of government and of the methods of administration applied to the territory, even in the sense of an opening at a broader scale of the preceding organs for the administration of power, with a planning impulse in the institutional area that expressed an orientation towards forms of control and conduct that were more centralised. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Between the later middle ages and the early modern period Florentine citizens managed money, pen and ink for princes and sovereigns in all of Europe. But this clear fame in finance has not stopped modern historians from passing severe judgment on these same men when it came to the fiscal administration of their own state. The most recent historiography has emphasised the inability of the Florentines to separate reasons of state from personal, family and factional interests. Its hypotheses are rooted in an alleged Florentine abandonment during the fifteenth century of the mainstream of simplification and rationalisation of the fiscal system. After the return of Cosimo il Vecchio to Florence in 1434, it is asserted, major fiscal confusion and less rigour in the administration of state finances were consonant with the rising political fortunes of the Medici family. This recent understanding was arrived at in the study of Florentine domestic politics, through reconstructing the vital ties between the public debt, short-term credit, and the political connections of the governing families of Florence. The interpretation has also been extended ‘outward’, as it were, to involve the history of the Tuscan regional state. Medicean hegemony, it is said, interrupted relevant processes that had started during the decisive period of territorial expansion, namely the administrative integration of the Florentine dominion, the erosion of the power of the local intermediaries between the central fisc and its taxpayers, and the reinforcement of direct taxes on subjects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]