The Mediaeval Money Economy

Abstract

Modern banking, and Swiss banking in particular, is a direct descendant of the Italian commercial banks of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The exhaustive research of the late Professor Raymond de Roover, economic historian at Harvard, establishes this with scarcely any doubt. These early banks were developed at the same time that Italian city-states achieved an ascendancy in the fields of commerce and trading, when Italy had become the major industrial and commercial power of Europe.¹ This coincidence of commerce, trade, and banking is not fortuitous; indeed, there is ample historical evidence that banking thrives and develops in just such an environment. Italy, or rather the city-states of Florence, Venice, and so on, being the major commercial powers of the time, created an environment of political and economic security for banks and made possible their growth and development in response to the needs of commerce.