This chapter aims to provide stimulus to a debate already under way concerning the identities, activities, social origins and careers of the officials who administered the Florentine territory in the decades from the late fourteenth to the mid-fifteenth century. This was precisely the period that witnessed the intensification and fulfillment of a process whereby, over the forty years from Florence's acquisition of Arezzo in 1384 to that of Livorno in 1421, the Florentine territorial state attained the basic configuration it would retain down to the mid-sixteenth century. The study will discuss the composition of the body of officials who were dispatched by the state to administer the territory, their social and professional backgrounds, and Florentine attitudes towards them and towards the subject communities they were sent out to govern.

The territorial state that took shape at the end of the fourteenth and beginning of the fifteenth century retained many institutional characteristics of the fourteenth-century Florentine state, particularly the markedly Florentine composition of its corps of territorial officers. Such a state was a product both of a predilection for ambitious projects that characterised Florence's rulers during the Albizzi regime, as well as of long-standing debates and creative encounters with subject communities, which retained a lively desire to preserve intact the privileges and fiscal immunities contained in their original pacts of submission.