This book explores two central and interconnected questions well established within Florentine historiography — the rise of a regional state, charted above, and the relationship between city and countryside. Both have roots going back to Niccolò Machiavelli and Francesco Guicciardini and both have been enlivened since World War II with new archival research and international discussion. For the second debate, argument has centered on whether Florence viciously exploited its countryside, taxing it to the extreme and thus draining it of its talent, manpower, and material resources, or whether taxation was light and even preferential to the surrounding countryside.

In the early years of the twentieth century, Romolo Caggese argued that the relationship between city and contado was wholly exploitative whereby the city drained the countryside of its resources through oppressive taxation. Fifty years later, Enrico Fiumi contested Caggese's arguments with more archival rigor. In place of oppression and conflict, Fiumi saw Florence's fiscal policy towards its contado as benign, maintaining that it taxed its own citizens more severely. But, although Fiumi's argument extended to the fifteenth century, his evidence focused on the period before the Black Death.

From evidence on taxation, the growth of Florence's funded debt, and the concentration of wealth in the hands of an oligarchy centered in Florence at the expense of the territory, Marvin Becker, Anthony Molho, David Herlihy, and Christiane Klapisch-Zuber attacked this picture of Florentine city–country relations, one describing it “as being little short of idyllic.”