Grand Duchy of Tuscany

The Grand Duchy of Tuscany was the Medici, then Habsburg, monarchy of central Italy, lasting from 1569 to 1860. It replaced the Republic of Florence: Cosimo I, having crushed Siena and gathered nearly all Tuscany, was raised by Pope Pius V's bull to Grand Duke in 1569, with Florence as his capital. Under Cosimo and his sons the grand duchy knew unprecedented prosperity, a model administration, a navy that swept Barbary corsairs, and the patronage that kept Galileo at court. The long decline under Cosimo III emptied the treasury and the dynasty together; in 1737 the last Medici died out and Tuscany passed to Francis Stephen of Lorraine, the future emperor, whose Habsburg-Lorraine line ruled through viceroys. The grand duchy holds one humane record: the first sovereign state to abolish the death penalty. In the revolutions of 1859 the dynasty fled, and in 1860 Tuscany voted itself into the Italy that Sardinia was building, ending three centuries of grand dukes.