✦✦✢✦✦QUICK FACTS✦✦✢✦✦ Medici family, French Médicis, Italian bourgeois family that ruled Florence and, later, Tuscany, during most of the period from 1434 to 1737, except for two brief intervals (from 1494 to 1512 and from 1527 to 1530). It provided the church with four popes (Leo X, Clement VII, Pius IV, and Leon XI) and married into the royal families of Europe (most notably in France, in the persons of Queens Catherine de Médicis and Marie de Médicis). They were the patrons of Filippo Brunelleschi, Donatello, Fra Angelico, Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci , Galileo Galilei, and many more. April Blood: Florence and the Plot Against the Medici by Lauro Martines On a Sunday in April 1478, assassins attacked Lorenzo and his brother as they attended Mass in the cathedral of Florence. Lorenzo scrambled to safety as Giuliano bled to death on the cathedral floor. April Blood moves outward in time and space from that murderous event, unfolding a story of tangled passions, ambition, treachery, and revenge. The conspiracy was led by one of the city's most noble clans, the Pazzi, financiers who feared and resented the Medici's swaggering new role as political bosses--but the web of intrigue spread through all of Italy. Bankers, mercenaries, the Duke of Urbino, the King of Naples, and Pope Sixtus IV entered secretly into the plot. Florence was plunged into a peninsular war, and Lorenzo was soon fighting for his own and his family's survival. The failed assassination doomed the Pazzi. Medici revenge was swift and brutal--plotters were hanged or beheaded, innocents were hacked to pieces, and bodies were put out to dangle from the windows of the government palace. All remaining members of the larger Pazzi clan were forced to change their surname, and every public sign or symbol of the family was expunged or destroyed. . . . . . #bloglovin #books #bookswerecommend #instabook #bookblogger #bookphotography #booknerd #booksofinstagram #reading #bookaholic #bookish #bookaddict #goodreads #booklover #ilovebooks #atx #austintx #historicalfiction #fiction #ilovereading #readersofinstagram #AprilBlood #LauroMartines #Renaissance #Italy #Medici . Photo by @willowsmock_books (at Round Rock, Texas) https://www.instagram.com/p/BnXDrThlJGW/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=1953576bx8jh2
