Director of The Medici Archive Project
Key Takeaways:
Being able to visit the Medici Archives and learn about their history in a personal way helped me better understand the city I live in. It is well known that the Medici were everything Florence stood for, but I had never understood why. After speaking with Dr. Assonitis, I now understand that the Medici gave to the community and fostered an environment of peace, knowledge, and culture. As a result, they impacted hundreds of discoveries from the New World and countless works of art from artists around Europe. I am proud to call Florence, Firenze, Fiorenza, my home just as the Medici once did.
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On March 7th, 2022, Ponte Nuovo students were honored to be invited to the office of Alessio Assonitis, the Director of the Medici Archive Project. The Medici Archive Project is a research institute, the mission of which is to disseminate, publish, and teach archival studies, paleography and the cultural legacy of the Medici Grand Dukes. Dr. Assonitis explained the history of the Archive Project and the Medici's relationship with the world. This visit fits well with the Ponte Nuovo focus on international relations because so many of the documents in the Medici Archive are the correspondence between the Medici Court and their Ambassadors in capitals around the world.
The Medici Archive Project was started in the early 1990s with Dr. Assonitis as one of the few Medici scholars. In the early years, historians would transcribe each document in Italian onto a computer program and then write a brief synopsis in English. The process was extremely time-consuming and not always accurate due to different degrees of legibility. Additionally, the researchers had no way of validating whether the scholars were providing true information. Using this original system would have required approximately 158 years to digitize the entire collection. There are five to six million letters that needed to be transcribed before they could be studied.
Dr. Assonitis explained that for every 30 letters the Medici received from an Ambassador, they sent one back out. The ambassadors were required to report everything so that the Medici had information of events faster than anyone else in the world. They were the first to know when the Pope died, when there was a new plague, when there was a new head of state, if a new head of state was looking for a spouse, and countless other pieces of information that helped them grow in power. In many ways, the archives were like the internet of the past if they could only be searchable.
Luckily, the Medici Archive Project eventually moved to a system that allowed photos to be uploaded, even when they hadn't yet been transcribed, and the researchers could decipher the documents themselves with no reliance on the scholars.
It was most interesting to me to learn and think about the idea that the Medici were not colonizers. In fact, they only ever conquered Sienna, but when given the opportunity to colonize the new world, they chose not to. They had the money and the power to do so, but they were content with other people doing the discovering. That seems unusual for the time, but I imagine it has something to do with the Italian way of life–content with where they were and who they were.
The Archive documented that the Medici received gifts from all over the world such as lion cubs, unicorn horns (later revealed to be narwhal tusks), and the first tomato plant. The Medici experienced the world via others and the Medici Archive Project displays their history and the history of the world through the Medici's insistence on record-keeping.
Dr. Assonitis left us with the thought, "Don't think about how the Medici affected the world, think about how the world affected the Medici." which I thought was a beautiful representation of how, no matter how powerful someone becomes, they can still be influenced by their environment just as the Medici were.
