ELI5: Explain Like I'm 5

Florentine military reforms

Okay, so imagine you and your friends are pretending to be soldiers. But you don't have any rules or ways to organize yourselves. It's kind of confusing and makes it hard to win any battles. That's how it was in Florence a long time ago.

But then, some really smart people came up with some new rules for how soldiers should work together. They decided that soldiers should be organized into groups called companies, and that each company should have a leader called a captain. The captains would all work together with other people in charge to make sure that the soldiers knew what to do and when to do it.

They also decided that soldiers should all wear the same kind of uniform, so that they could tell each other apart from people on the other side. And they made sure that soldiers were trained really well, so that they knew how to fight and what to do in different situations.

These new rules and ideas were called the Florentine military reforms. They made the soldiers in Florence much stronger and better prepared for battles. And that was really important, because back then, there were a lot of wars and battles going on all the time.