The ancestors given to the Medici are many, and their origin is not easy to trace amid the conflicting accounts of friends and foes. The latter declare they sprang from the very dregs of the people, and that a charcoal-burner in the Mugello was their progenitor, whose son was a doctor (_medico_). Their friends say they descend from Perseus, from a Roman consul, or even from an emperor. Others state that a brave knight, Averardo de’ Medici, came into Italy with Charlemagne and killed the fierce giant Mugello, who for years had kept Tuscany in bondage; while those who cling to the _medico_ story, on account of the name, tell of a learned physician who saved the life of Charlemagne by applying cupping-glasses of his own invention. The well-known arms, six red balls on a field or, are accounted for in as many different ways. Doctors’ pills, cupping-glasses, apples from the gardens of the Hesperides, dents made by the giant’s mace on Averardo’s golden shield, and heads of enemies slain in battle by a valiant knight who killed eleven of his assailants, because the oldest shield of the Medici bore eleven balls. According to genealogists the real progenitor of the Medici was a certain Giambuono. He appears to have been a priest, as is indicated in an ancient inscription on the wall of the church of the Assumption near S. Piero a Sieve in the Mugello. What is certain is that the family owned houses and towers in Florence in the twelfth century in the Piazza de’ Medici, afterwards called de’ Succhiellinai, near the church of S. Tommaso, which was in the Ghetto, now swept away. There a little inn, Del Porco, used to be pointed out as standing where once was the loggia of the family. We have historical proof of the brothers Chiarissimo and Bonagiunta de’ Medici, descendants of Giambuono. Chiarissimo was a member of the council which made an alliance with the Sienese against Semifonte in the Val d’Elsa, when that strong castle was razed to the ground in 1201. Ardingo, a great-grandson of Bonagiunta, was the first of the family to hold high office in Florence. He became Prior of the city in 1291, Gonfalonier of Justice in 1296, and again in the following year. This proves decisively that the Medici were not of the old nobility, which had been excluded from all magisterial offices by a law passed in 1293, called the _Ordinamenti della Giustizia_, which Bonaini terms the Magna Charta of the Republic of Florence.[1] Ardingo’s brother Guccio, who was Gonfalonier in 1299, made himself so popular that when he died he was buried with great pomp in a sarcophagus of the fourth century, which stood outside the baptistery. Later it was removed into the cathedral, and in the eighteenth century was placed in the courtyard of Palazzo Riccardi (once Medici), where it still is. The cover, bearing the Medici arms and those of the Arte della Lana, or Guild of Wool, to which Guccio belonged, was made by order of the Priors at the time of his burial.