Such is the case with Florentine ruler Cosimo I de’Medici (r. 1537–1569) whose city and family had long participated in diplomatic and cultural relationships with Muslim cultures and rulers during the late-middle ages and early modern era. Information about Islam and Islamic countries arrived in many forms, from traveler’s tales to market stalls of imported fine arts. Each artifact or description provided an echo of their origins, all of which accumulated in Florence for its citizens and rulers as a sign of their growing international prestige.
I propose to trace the history of this gathering of knowledge as it came to pertain specifically to the Medici family of Florence as a way for them to strengthen their political power through the actual or imagined acts of gift-receiving. Central to this investigation will be traveler’s diaries/memoirs that stirred the imagination of Florentines, diplomatic texts whose language informed an understanding of the Medici as powerful peers to their Muslim counterparts, and artworks that mythologized the reception of diplomatic embassies by the Medici created for the Palazzo Vecchio. All three of these sources instructed the Florentines in a knowledge of Islamic cultural magnificence, and that acts of gift-reception by the Medici implied a continuity of international diplomacy in which gifting had long demonstrated unequivocal signs of mutual respect between rulers.