Among the striking features of contemporary European society, none is more important than the modern centralized state. To understand how centralization came about, one must examine the mechanisms of state power – the bureaucracies, which serve as conduits for the transfer of power from the various strata of society to the executive level. This redirection of power is accomplished through the issuance and more or less effective enforcement of regulations that attempt to order relations between individuals, various collectivities, and the particular bureaucrats who head the institutions of government. Bureaucracies are thus contact points in a process of contest and compromise between competing sets of private and public interests.

Italy made some early contributions to the formation of the state during the Renaissance, when lay bureaucracies first appeared. Florence is particularly noteworthy because of the richness of its archives and the extensive literature devoted to its history. The rise of the sixteenth-century Tuscan state illustrates the transformation of a communal, traditional polity with a republican form of government into an aristocratic absolutist state. Until recently, few non-Italian scholars were interested in granducal Tuscany because they assumed that significant political development in Florence had ceased with the fall of the republic in 1530. Eric Cochrane attempted to stimulate interest in this period with his book, Florence in the Forgotten Centuries (1973).