The rich, fiercely independent cities of late-medieval and Renaissance Italy — above all Florence, Venice, Genoa, and Milan — whose banking, trade, and civic rivalry funded the explosion of art and ideas we call the Renaissance, taught a Florentine clerk named Machiavelli to write about power as it truly works, and whose fatal disunity left Italy easy prey for foreign invasion after 1494.
A handful of warring towns helped build key pieces of the modern world. Between roughly 1100 and 1530, the cities of northern and central Italy — Florence, Venice, Genoa, Milan — grew so rich on trade and banking that they bought the most dazzling art in Europe and threw off every outside ruler who claimed them. Their bankers financed kings and popes. Their painters and architects made the Renaissance. Their scheming and betrayal taught Niccolò Machiavelli how power really works. Yet the same independence that made them brilliant kept them at each other's throats, and when French and Spanish armies marched in after 1494, the quarrelsome cities could not unite. The world they built outlived the freedom they could not keep.