Acciaioli

The Acciaioli were a Florentine noble and banking house, traced to Gugliarello Acciaioli, said to have fled Frederick Barbarossa from Brescia to Florence in 1160. In the thirteenth century they founded a bank spanning Greece to western Europe; it fell in the crash of 1345, when Edward III defaulted, yet the family remained central in Florence.

Their wider fame came in the Levant, where Niccolò served Naples's Angevin kings and built Morea estates, while his kinsman Nerio I seized Athens in 1388 to become the first Acciaioli duke. They held the duchy, with a Venetian interlude, until the Ottoman Turks overwhelmed it in 1456 and 1458; Francesco II was their last duke.

In Florence the Acciaioli then attached themselves to the Albizzi and the Medici. They produced scholars such as Donato Acciaioli, and a branch settled on Madeira after 1512.