Excerpt from The Florentine History, Vol. 1 of 2 When first I resolved to write the History of the affairs, foreign and domestic, of the Florentine people, my intention was to begin my narrative from the year of our Lord 1434, at which date the House of Medici, through the merits of Cosimo and of his father Giovanni, obtained greater authority in Florence than any other family in that city. For I thought to myself that Messer Lionardo of Arezzo and Messer Poggio, both of them admirable historians, must have recorded at length all that had taken place before that time. But afterwards, having diligently studied their writings with a View to learn what order and methods they had followed, and by imitating these make my own History more attractive to the reader, I found that while they had been most circumstantial in their account of the various wars waged by the Florentines against foreign Princes and Peoples, as regards civil discords and intestine feuds, and the effects following from them, they had either been wholly silent or had treated them so briefly as to afford the reader neither pleasure nor profit. (this course I believe them to have taken, either because they thought such matters too trivial for written record or else through fear of offending the descendants of those persons whom, in writing of them, they would have had occasion to. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.