Acciaioli

The Acciaioli were a Florentine noble and banking house whose line runs back to the twelfth century, when family legend brings them from Brescia to Florence as Guelph refugees from Frederick Barbarossa. In the thirteenth century they built a bank with branches from Greece to Western Europe, and its collapse in 1345 redirected their ambitions. Niccolò Acciaioli, sent to Naples in 1331, became Grand Seneschal of the kingdom and count of Melfi, amassed estates in the Morea and Corinth, and patronised Petrarch and Boccaccio.

In Greece the family reached for a crown: Nerio I Acciaioli seized Athens in 1388 and ruled the Duchy of Athens, which his house, after a brief Venetian interlude, held again from 1402 until the Ottoman conquest extinguished the last duke, Francesco II, in 1460.

In Florence, Bishop Angelo Acciaioli briefly governed the city after the fall of Gauthier de Brienne in 1343, and later Acciaioli allied first with the Albizzi and then with the Medici.