Tuscan

The Tuscans are the people of Tuscany in central Italy, dwelling in the Arno valley and hills around Florence, Siena and Pisa. Their country was Etruria, whose Etruscan city-states flourished from the seventh century BC before Rome absorbed it by the first century BC. Etruscan left a substrate in Tuscan, an Italo-Dalmatian language whose varieties Dante classified in De vulgari eloquentia.

After the Lombards' duchy of Tuscia at Lucca, rival communes grew rich on the Via Francigena, Pisa as a port, Siena and Lucca as banking centres, Florence above them. Dante, Petrarch and Boccaccio made Florentine Italy's prestige literary language, later carried on by Machiavelli. From 1434 the Medici ruled Florence under republican forms until its 1530 dukedom, absorbed Siena in 1555 and became grand dukes in 1569.

The Medici died out in 1737, and Lorraine dukes inherited the grand duchy, keeping it through the Napoleonic Kingdom of Etruria and the French annexation of 1808–1814, while Lucca remained a separate republic.