Interest and Curiosity

Abstract

This chapter addresses the role of Florentine consular agents in Iberian ports in the circulation and consumption of new products and information from lb er o-America. From a global and transnational perspective, these agents were new instruments of the Medici who converged with converso and Jewish merchants and religious networks (principally the Jesuits) tied to Iberian ports and the Americas. The focus we bring to bear should provide new information that allows us to move beyond a state-centric analysis based on theory and international equilibrium and instead to consider the breadth of Tuscan integration manifested by networks and agents in a continually expanding world. The Grand Duchy of Tuscany offers a useful means for analyzing these questions precisely because, politically as well as in theory, it lay outside the Spanish imperial framework, though its networks intersected with information and products from America. The Medici consuls implemented and improved upon previous channels of commerce and communication (mostly diplomats, travelers, and explorers), enabled the regular arrival of new products and information greatly valued by the government in Florence and the Tuscan elites, and established stable circulation flows between the Atlantic and the Mediterranean.¹ It will be instructive to calibrate the impact and nature of these American “inputs” in a concrete geopolitical setting such as the Grand Duchy of Tuscany as well as rulers’ interest in and curiosity about these objects.