The aristocracy is losing power to a new commercial class of innovators. The new creed is not to rule, but to serve.

To be royal once meant to run the world, but no more. The royals now are out of money and they turn to the new wealth of a class of creatures who have seized on new technologies. These new technologies have, in turn, created new opportunities for unprecedented ways of making money. Instead of making things, these people are providing services people need, and this is making them enormously rich.

But every once in the while, the Black Death comes along to ruin it.

That's because the above description pertains to the 1400s in Italy, a time given beautiful cinematic life in the new series on Netflix, Medicis: Masters of Florence. The first season deals with the second generation of bankers during the lifetime of the founder of the empire, Cosimo di Giovanni de' Medici (1389-1464). His two sons struggled for the control of the growing empire.