A network of economic relations linked the glorious house of the Medici princes to the humble peasants who worked their lands, the leaseholders who rented them, and the artisans and shopkeepers who serviced both the estate and the village population. The economic changes of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries did not affect the landowner, his tenants, and his laborers in precisely the same way. At times the interests of these different groups placed them in stark opposition.

This and the two subsequent chapters will dissect the village economy, study its movement, and assess the welfare of its constituent parts. But the economic organization of the Medici lands will first be described before the performance of the economy over roughly two centuries is assessed. Our description might well begin by discussing the building blocks of any economic system – the factors of production: land, labor and capital.

It will be recalled that the estate sprawled over two different types of soil and terrain. The area of low hills or knolls, which was known as ‘cerbaia’ and characterized by tight yellow clay mixed with gravelly pebbles, contrasted with the expanse of low, flat land that lay in the Plain, rich in alluvial deposits but always threatened by the proximity of the rivers and the poor drainage that could ruin the crops. Whenever the water level in the Fucecchio lake or the Arno river changed the slope of the waters flowing off the Plain, the backlog impeded drainage, the crops suffered, and the land rendered little.