Filippo Strozzi the Younger

Filippo Strozzi the Younger (January 4, 1489 – December 18, 1538) was a Florentine banker, and the most famous member of the Strozzi family in the Renaissance. He is best remembered as a tragic hero and defender of the lost Florentine republic against the Medici dukes – yet this is almost entirely a nineteenth-century fiction of nationalist historians and dramatists. He had been one of the staunchest supporters of the House of Medici in Florence and Rome. Biography Born in Florence as Giambattista Strozzi, he was rechristened by his mother with the name of his father Filippo Strozzi the Elder, who had died two years after the child's birth. From the late fifteenth century, Medici power rendered the Florentine nobility, including the various branches of the Strozzi family, more courtiers than citizens. Filippo the Younger was merely rich until 1515, when he entered the service of Pope Leo X as depositor general of the Apostolic Chamber. From here he built a financial empire stretching from Naples to the Atlantic. When Leo X (Giovanni di Lorenzo de' Medici) ascended to the papacy in 1513, Florence effectively ceased to be an independent state. A few bankers benefited enormously, none more so than Filippo the Younger, who married Leo's niece, and who was instrumental in a massive transfer of wealth from Florence to Rome. These money transfers between the depositories of Florence and Rome were an internal affair of the Strozzi bank. Filippo and his associates camouflaged carefully these transfers and doctored records before presenting their accounts to the Florentine government.