Abstract
The early thirteenth century saw the introduction, first in Venice, and then across northern Italy of stable larger good silver grossi in contrast to the small increasingly debased piccoli, which turned into black money and eventually copper. The later thirteenth century saw the introduction, first in Florence, and then across northern Italy, of stable gold coinage, which revived the three metal coinage of ancient Rome. More importantly, beginning at the end of the twelfth century in Genoa, the means of cash-less payments, both internationally and locally, evolved across northern Italy. There were precursors in the Islamic world, but the evolution in northern Italy had no counterparts elsewhere. I touch on bills of exchange, cheques, international groups of companies, public banks, state bonds, and stock markets, which also developed in the same period.
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Notes
- 1.
The table on p. 94 of Spufford (2002) gives my suggested changing populations for the largest cities of western Europe at half century intervals between 1300 and 1500.
- 2.
- 3.
Bernadino of Siena and other writers are quoted in Gilchrist (1969).
- 4.
Descriptions of the separate coinages of the large number of Italian mints, for this and later periods, can now be found in the two immense volumes of Travaini (2011).
- 5.
Pesce and Felloni (1975: 342–350) print many references to gold in the city between 1147 and 1335.
- 6.
- 7.
Villani (1990: book vii, Chap. 53). I believe he based this chapter largely on now lost mint documents.
- 8.
The whole of the second half of Udovitch (1970) is devoted to this sort of partnership.
- 9.
This and other inventories can be found among the illustrative documents translated and annotated in Lopez and Raymond (1955).
- 10.
The first half of Udovitch (1970) is devoted to partnerships in general.
- 11.
Mucciarelli (1995). Branches evidently included London, Champagne, Paris, Provence, Rome and Naples and nearer home Pisa, Perugia, Massa Maritima and Viterbo.
- 12.
- 13.
There had been a tradition of copper as well as gold coinage in southern Italy and Sicily up to the twelfth century. However three metal coinage did not come about then because the copper follari, inherited from an arabic and byzantine past, were replaced, not supplemented by northern silver pence, in 1194. There was no continuity with the copper cavalli of fifteenth century (Grierson and Travaini 1998: 149–151, 358, 370–372, and plates 26, 57).
- 14.
- 15.
Lucia Travaini, unpublished paper for the Royal Numismatic Society, starting from Statuti di Verona 1327, ed. S.A.Bianchi and R.Granuzzo, pp. 556–561. This is the first time this has been looked at for northern Italy. It has been discussed in other parts of Europe, for example in England and the Low Countries.
- 16.
Bernocchi (1976: 5–14) gives a complete rundown of the officers of the Florentine mint, including the master goldsmith employed to look after the shop where florins were sealed into pouches.
- 17.
Details are given in the table in Spufford (1988: 322).
- 18.
Entries on ‘suftadja’ and ‘Ibn Taymiya’ in the Encyclopaedia of Islam (1997: ix, 769−770 and 1971: iii, 951–952).
- 19.
Cambridge Economic History of India (2003: 346, 362).
- 20.
- 21.
From the ‘Diary of Girolomo Priuli’, quoted by Lane (1973: 328). A long list of the names of those who pledged is to be found in Register CN15 in the Venetian Archivio di Stato. Mueller (1997: 241–251) gives the whole context of the panic and crash of 1499–1500, in which two of the four banchi di scritta, the Garzoni and Lippomanno banks did collapse.
- 22.
For an extensive description of local banking in late Medieval Venice see Mueller (1997: 3–251).
- 23.
- 24.
The population of the city had already dropped from 189,000 to 142,000 between 1607 and 1624, before the plague of 1632 reduced it to 102,000. It never recovered even to the level of 1624. One of Venice’s specialities, the production of soap, shrank spectacularly, from forty manufacturers in 1603 to eight in 1677. The production of cloth similarly shrank from just under nineteen thousand rolls of woollen cloth per year in the second decade of the century to little over two thousand at the end of the century. From the largest European trader with the Levant in 1604, Venice dropped to fourth place in 1687, far below the scale of the trade of England, the United Provinces and even France (Pezzolo 2003: 151, 172, 167, 184, 189, 209).
- 25.
Joost Jonker of Amsterdam is currently working with a group of colleagues on the early history of this company, which by 1620 had become larger than any of the north Italian companies with which I am concerned.
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Spufford, P. (2014). The Provision of Stable Moneys by Florence and Venice, and North Italian Financial Innovations in the Renaissance Period. In: Bernholz, P., Vaubel, R. (eds) Explaining Monetary and Financial Innovation. Financial and Monetary Policy Studies, vol 39. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-06109-2_9
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