Portrait of Giovanni di Bicci de' Medici

This quiet-looking man is where the Medici fortune begins. Giovanni di Bicci de' Medici was a Florentine banker who, in the years around 1400, built the bank that would make his family the richest in the city and won the account that mattered most, the papacy's. He kept out of politics as far as he could and warned his sons to do the same. They did not listen. His son Cosimo the Elder would take quiet control of Florence, and four generations on the family would give the Church its popes and France its queens. Giovanni died in 1429, long before any of that, a rich man who had never held high office.