Between the later middle ages and the early modern period Florentine citizens managed money, pen and ink for princes and sovereigns in all of Europe. But this clear fame in finance has not stopped modern historians from passing severe judgment on these same men when it came to the fiscal administration of their own state. The most recent historiography has emphasised the inability of the Florentines to separate reasons of state from personal, family and factional interests. Its hypotheses are rooted in an alleged Florentine abandonment during the fifteenth century of the mainstream of simplification and rationalisation of the fiscal system. After the return of Cosimo il Vecchio to Florence in 1434, it is asserted, major fiscal confusion and less rigour in the administration of state finances were consonant with the rising political fortunes of the Medici family. This recent understanding was arrived at in the study of Florentine domestic politics, through reconstructing the vital ties between the public debt, short-term credit, and the political connections of the governing families of Florence. The interpretation has also been extended ‘outward’, as it were, to involve the history of the Tuscan regional state. Medicean hegemony, it is said, interrupted relevant processes that had started during the decisive period of territorial expansion, namely the administrative integration of the Florentine dominion, the erosion of the power of the local intermediaries between the central fisc and its taxpayers, and the reinforcement of direct taxes on subjects.