In many ways, he was the father of the Renaissance, or at least its midwife, taking the reins of Florence in 1433 and leading it to a cultural apex that has, perhaps, yet to be rivaled by any municipality since.

Cosimo De' Medici, master of a city-state, diplomat and statesman, ruled a Florence that was "in miniature an empire," as this 1899 biography calls it, where painters and thinkers created new movements of art, philosophy, and science that, in turn, created our world today.

This is a fascinating look at the man who shepherded Florence through that dramatic period, from his foreign policy that nurtured the city's cosmopolitanism to his fostering of a social and cultural environment in which literature and art flourished.