St. Antoninus — Antonino Pierozzi, born at Florence in 1389, Antoninus Florentinus on his Latin title pages — entered the Order of Preachers as a youth and spent his life in its work of reform. He governed houses of the order at Cortona, Naples, Rome, and Florence, and was the first prior of San Marco, the convent Cosimo de’ Medici rebuilt and Fra Angelico painted.
In 1446 he was made archbishop of Florence, and held that see until his death in 1459, sought out as a counselor by popes and by the city alike, and remembered above all for his care of the poor in the plague and famine years. He was canonized in 1523.
He wrote a great Summa of moral theology, one of the first to treat the questions of trade, credit, and the just price that the merchants of his city lived by, and the Chronicles, a history of the world from the creation to his own age in three parts. The Chronicles are offered here in full, in English for the first time, a part at a time as each is finished. The first part is complete: the ages of the world from Adam to Christ, the Church of the Apostles, and the persecutions to that of Diocletian, closing with the alphabetical register he made of everything in it. The second and third parts, carrying the history down to his own age, are in translation and will follow.