La storia di Firenze fra Bruni e Machiavelli

The last historiographical work of Poggio Bracciolini (1380-1459), the Historiae Florentini populi, is composed of eight books, of which only four have survived in their original draft. In 1472 Poggio’s son, Iacopo Bracciolini (1442-1478), dedicated this work to Federico da Montefeltro in a radically revised version. We publish here, for the first time, the edition of the original draft of the first four books of the Historiae Florentini populi. Machiavelli criticized both Bracciolini’s Historiae and Leonardo Bruni’s Historiarum Florentini populi libri for their lack of attention to the internal social and political dynamics of Florence. In reality, if Bruni describes the history of Florence from its origins to 1402, Poggio focuses on the wars sustained by the city between 1350 and his day, identifying the Peace of Lodi (1454) as the watershed event of the fifteenth century.