Florence Guide: Small Republic, the Medici Question, and Playing Tall

Florence starts as small as a nation can start — one county — and the wiki doesn’t oversell it: favorable terrain, real urbanization, high literacy, and neighbors who won’t leave you alone long enough to enjoy any of it. This is a nation about patience and a specific late-game identity choice, not an opening full of scripted wars.

Where you start, and why it’s cramped

Florence begins in 1337 as a Republic, County rank, holding the single county of Tuscany, in the Guelph faction seeking Italian independence from the Holy Roman Empire. The wiki’s historical framing is worth reading for context alone: Florence’s real apex came under Lorenzo de’ Medici, whose Italian League briefly kept the peninsula’s city-states at peace and shielded it from external invasion — a peace that collapsed with his death, triggering the French invasions and the Italian Wars. Florence was also the birthplace of Dante, Da Vinci, and Machiavelli, which the wiki treats as more than trivia: it’s setting up the nation’s identity as a cultural and financial power rather than a military one.

Mechanically, the starting position is genuinely favorable terrain with high urbanization and literacy — good long-term fundamentals per our pops guide’s literacy-compounding framework — undercut by geography: small, aggressive protean powers surround you, and the standing wiki advice is blunt about the consequence — seek some basic expansion early specifically to avoid getting permanently hemmed in, rather than assuming your favorable terrain will let you sit still.

The unique advances

Florence gets 11 unique advances, five of which Tuscan culture broadly shares — concentrated in administrative and development bonuses, plus an army tradition bonus and access to the Florentine Citizen Militia levy. Two further Tuscan-only advances add research, minting, and loan bonuses, and the Italian Galleass ship unlocks specifically in the Reformation age. Read together, the tree rewards the same patient, institution-building playstyle the starting position already points toward.

The Medici Bank: a genuinely different nation

Florence’s signature mechanic arrives during the Renaissance: an event offers the option to become the Medici Bank instead of continuing to play Florence directly. The Bank can build banking houses inside other powers’ urban centers and issue manual loans to grow its wealth through interest — but unlike the Hanseatic League’s similar merchant-republic flavor, the Bank owns no physical land and can’t acquire any, which also means it can never raise an army. You cannot play both the city of Florence and the Bank at once, even if the Medici family happens to govern Florence at the same time. This is a real fork, not a bonus: taking it trades territorial statecraft for a landless, finance-driven game entirely — the wiki notes a mechanic allowing both simultaneously may be added later, but doesn’t exist yet.

If your actual goal is a Medici monarchy ruling Florence (rather than the separate Bank playstyle), a verified community fix exists for a specific stuck point: go to government reforms and swap the Signoria reform for the Dynastic Signoria reform. This came directly from a player who’d hit the same wall (including while using mods to prevent the Medici dynasty from going extinct) and is specific enough to trust as stated.

What we don’t have yet

We’re being direct about this rather than padding the page: the wiki’s own Strategy section for Florence is empty, and we don’t have a detailed, verified community opening sequence — no equivalent to the “first 50 years” walkthroughs on our other nation guides. What’s here is solid on identity, mechanics, and the Medici fork; it’s thin on turn-by-turn early decisions. If you’ve played Florence through its first few decades on the current patch, this is exactly the kind of page we’d revise the moment real strategic material surfaces.

Common questions, honestly answered

Sources checked

Starting position, historical framing, unique advances, and the Medici Bank mechanic are transcribed directly from the wiki, whose Strategy section is empty. The Signoria reform-swap fix comes from a specific, verified r/EU5 exchange between a player with the exact problem and a helpful reply — narrow but reliable. This page does not yet have a broader community strategy source and says so throughout rather than inventing one.