Massimo Bomboni - MAP FORUM

MAP FORUM - 28 October 2025

The Medici and the Dutch Golden Age: Spies, Merchants, and Hidden Networks between Florence and Amsterdam (1600–1668)

During the first half of the seventeenth century, as the Dutch Republic challenged Habsburg hegemony on land and sea and Amsterdam emerged as a new centre of international trade, the Medici turned their gaze northwards to forge ties with this rising European and global power. In the absence of Tuscan ambassadors or a merchant community in the Republic, these connections took shape through a hidden network of informants and clandestine agents—often supported by the newly established Dutch nation in Livorno—that supplied the Florentine court with intelligence on global commerce and the progress of the Eighty Years’ War. Examining these networks sheds new light on Tuscany’s involvement in the Dutch Golden Age, repositioning the Grand Duchy within the broader dynamics of early modern globalisation and illuminating the decades that prepared the way for Prince Cosimo’s celebrated journey to the Netherlands in 1668.

Massimo Bomboni (PhD in Global History of Empires, University of Turin, 2025) is currently a Scholarship Holder at the Royal Netherlands Institute in Rome (KNIR). His research explores the Grand Duchy of Tuscany in the early modern period within a global perspective, focusing on economic, maritime, and diplomatic history and on the networks that linked Tuscany to wider Mediterranean and Atlantic worlds.