premodern european capitalism, christianity, and florence€¦ · 6jacques heers calls feudalism...

William Caferro

Premodern European Capitalism, Christianity,and Florence

The essay examines the role of Christianity in premodern Euro-pean capitalism, with regard to the city of Florence. It traces theformation of the historical construct and the influence ofWerner Sombart’s Der moderne Kapitalismus, a work muchneglected nowadays in the Anglophone academy. The articleseeks to historicize and contextualize faith and economy, tostress their fundamentally intertwined nature andmore specif-ically how notions of “negotiation” and diriturra (moral Chris-tian rectitude) connect the seemingly antagonistic sides, andconnect also Florentine finance and business history, whichare too often studied independently. It argues that Christianrectitude and service to the church (a noncynical quid proquo) were conjoined with a calculated, reasoned profitmotive–evident especially among papal bankers, a key sectorof the Florentine economy.

Keywords: Florence, Italy, early capitalism

A distinguishing feature of the vast literature on premodern Euro-pean capitalism is its disparate nature. Scholarly debates have

focused on a wide variety of issues, from accounting techniques to “tran-sitions,” and the establishment of proto-industries, the role of capitalcities, and world systems, to name a few.1 The discourse has been

I wish to thank the organizers of the conference, Sophus Reinert and Bob Fredona, and theparticipants, John Brewer, Maria Fusaro, Lauren Jacobi, Elizabeth Mellyn, Jeff Miner, DanSmail, Corey Tazzara, and Francesca Trivellato, for their comments and critique. I am gratefulto Steven Epstein and Julius Kirshner for their critical readings of the essay. The faults aredecidedly my own.

1 For a basic outline of the various debates for Europe in the period, see William Caferro,Contesting the Renaissance (Cambridge, U.K., 2011), 126–55. Maurice Dobb, Paul Sweezy,and others debated the nature of “transition” from feudalism to capitalism, with emphasison the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. See Rodney Hilton, ed., The Transition from Feu-dalism to Capitalism (London, 1976). Franklin Mendels and others have investigated the role

Business History Review 94 (Spring 2020): 39–72. doi:10.1017/S0007680520000045© 2020 The President and Fellows of Harvard College. ISSN 0007-6805; 2044-768X (Web).

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characterized not only by the force of argumentation of the participantsbut by an often startling lack of awareness of the alternative lines ofinquiry. The state of affairs is perhaps inevitable for a subject that hasengaged scholars from across fields, including sociologists, economists,historians, and political scientists.

A singularly enduring approach to premodern capitalism has beenthat which has focused on its developmental/evolutionary nature,expressed in stages, linked to a metaphysical “spirit.” The scholarshipdraws implicitly and explicitly on Voltaire and the Enlightenment(Whig) tradition of “history as progress” and on Hegelian notions of apurposeful unfolding of events guided by a Geist. The durability of theconstruct owes both to its amorphous quality and its inherent utility.The study of premodern economic history holds little value if it is not sit-uated in terms of the present. And as the renowned scholar John Halehas argued, the urge to divide history into stages may well be rootedin a basic human psychology that inclines us to align the contours ofour lives—youth, maturity, and old age—with the historical past.2 Inany case, few economic historians of the early period have shown interestin Kuhnian “paradigmatic shifts” or a Foucauldian “episteme” thatwould disconnect prior events from those that follow and render the pre-modern era, in Gregory Clark’s recent formulation, one of prolonged andrelentless stagnation.3 Focus on capitalism provides a means of cuttingthrough the layers of the past, functioning, to paraphraseWilliam Bever-idge in another context, like the headlights of a car, illuminating a narrowstrip that obscures the periphery while offering an escape from antiquar-ianism and irrelevance.4

of proto-industry in the countryside. SeeMendels, “Proto-Industrialization: The First Phase ofthe Industrialization Process,” Journal of Economic History 32 (1972). For capital cities, seeFernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, trans. by Sian Reynolds (New York, 1981–84), 396, 400, 621; and “world systems” in Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System, 3 vols. (New York and London, 1974–1989). The work on double entry includes,among others, Basil S. Yamey, “Scientific Bookkeeping and the Rise of Capitalism,”in T. A. Lee, Ashton C. Bishop, and R. H. Parker, eds., Accounting History from the Renais-sance to the Present: A Remembrance of Luca Pacioli (New York and London, 1996); Chris-topher Nobles, ed., The Development of Double Entry: Selected Essays (New York andLondon, 1984).

2 J. R. Hale, “The Renaissance Label,” in Background to the English Renaissance, ed. J. B.Trapp (London, 1974), 30–42.

3Gregory Clark, A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World (Princeton,2007), 1–2. See also Karl Gunnar Persson, Pre-industrial Economic Growth, Social Organiza-tion and Technological Progress in Europe (Oxford, 1988). A recent exception to the develop-mental/evolutionary model (using the methodology of Foucault) is Germano Maifreda, FromOikonomia to Political Economy: Constructing Economic Knowledge from the Renaissanceto the Scientific Revolution (Burlington, VT, 2012).

4William H. Beveridge, “Wages in the Winchester Manors,” Economic History Review(1936): 22; see William Caferro, Petrarch’s War: Florence and the Black Death in Context(Cambridge, U.K., 2018), 147–48.

William Caferro / 40



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The discourse on premodern capitalism is compartmentalizedand characterized by often stark oppositions and casual assump-tions. A basic term like “feudalism” functions for economists,especially those of a Marxist turn, as a synonym for medieval“unfree” labor that is antithetical to capitalism.5 At the same time,medievalists question whether feudalism existed at all and, if so,what its essential features were and where to place treatises likeWalter of Henley’s On Husbandry that provide evidence of rationaleconomic calculation in the countryside.6 Most problematic of allhas been the role of the church. Teleological notions of evolution ofcapitalist practice along with a metaphysical spirit have posed partic-ular problems with regard to religion. They encourage the portrait of amonolithic medieval church that is a synonym for “traditionalism,”which enforced the feudal landed structure of social stratificationand unfree labor that were the opposite of capitalism. For MaxWeber and R. H. Tawney it was the “spirit” of reform religion—Calvin-ism and Puritanism, respectively—that overturned traditionalism andfacilitated the advent of capitalism.7

The aim of this essay is to look more closely at the role of Christianityin premodern capitalism, with particular attention to Florence, an“epicenter” of capitalist activity, famously associated with modernity.Florence has a privileged place in discussions as a locus of modernityand capitalistic practice with regard to not only trade and merchant activ-ity (commercial capitalism) but also accounting technique (double-entrybookkeeping), business organization, and public finance (funded debt,or monte)—the latter associated with “financial capitalism.” Raymondde Roover declared in his classic study in 1966 that “modern capitalism”had “its roots” in Florence, and a recent comprehensive study of the Flor-entine economy affirms that the enduring “romance” of the city is “that of

5 The so-called transition debate sought to locate the point at which merchant capitalismtransformed into industrial capitalism, focusing on free labor and commercialization of thecountryside. Rodney Hilton, ed., The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism (London,1976).

6 Jacques Heers calls feudalism “a real custard pie of a term,” one that is weighed downwith “every implication of evil” and is “difficult to define and varied from place to place.”Heers, “The ‘Feudal’ Economy and Capitalism: Words, Ideas and Reality,” Journal of Euro-pean EconomicHistory 3, no. 3 (1974): 625. For the classic critique of the term, see Susan Rey-nolds, Fiefs and Vassals: The Medieval Evidence Reinterpreted (Oxford, 1994).

7Max Weber, The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. TalcottParsons (New York, 1958); R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (London,1922). An interesting, provocative teleological take on the medieval church is in RobertB. Ekelund, Robert F. Hebert, Robert D. Tollison, Gary M. Anderson, and AubreyB. Davidson, eds., Sacred Trust: The Medieval Church as an Economic Firm (Oxford,1996). The volume’s contributors treat the church in modern corporate terms as a “multidivi-sional firm.”

Premodern European Capitalism, Christianity, and Florence / 41



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emergent capitalism.”8 The connection between Florentine capitalism andthe church is conspicuous because of the city’s role in papal banking, whichwas a focal point of economic activity, most notably with regard to theMedici family, which itself has stood at the center of discussion.

The modest goal here is to look more closely at the relation betweeneconomy and faith, to historicize and contextualize the role of the church,which, owing to a deeply embedded long-term developmental/evolu-tionary view of capitalism, has been distorted and, worse, separatedinto separate spheres. The essay self-consciously eschews the verticalapproach in favor of a more horizontal one that seeks to better under-stand the complicated and intertwined relationship and, in theprocess, to connect the discourse on Florentine business history withthat on public finance—discourses that have been curiously detachedfrom each other. It follows recent studies that emphasize the symbioticrelationship between the Florentine church and society, and the negoti-ation attendant to the famous disputations regarding themonte, addinganother layer to the discourse, notably the importance of Christiannotions of diriturra that underlay both Florentine public finance andprivate business.9 The article treats the church not as a monolith butas multifaceted like the society it served.

Florentine Individualism/Merchant Capitalism and Sombart’s Dermoderne Kapitalismus

Mentalité—religious, economic, or otherwise—is notoriously diffi-cult to assess for the distant past. The obstacles are many, and for histo-rians the task is further complicated by periodization. Premodern

8Raymond de Roover, The Rise and Decline of the Medici Bank, 1397–1494 (New York,1966), 2; Richard Goldthwaite, The Economy of Renaissance Florence (Baltimore, 2009),esp. 35.

9On Florentine society and the church, see, among others, Roberto Bizzocchi, Chiesa epotere nella Toscana del Quattrocento (Bologna, 1987); Richard Trexler, Public Life in Renais-sance Florence (Ithaca, 1991); John Henderson, Piety and Charity in Late Medieval Florence(Oxford, 1994); David S. Peterson, “Out of the Margins: Religion and the Church in Renais-sance Italy,”Renaissance Quarterly 53, no. 3 (2000): 835–79; and George Dameron, Florenceand Its Church in the Age of Dante (Philadelphia, 2005). For discussion of the Florentinemonte, see Julius Kirshner, “‘Ubi est ille?’: Franco Sacchetti on the Monte Comune of Flor-ence,” Speculum 59, no. 3 (1984): 571; Lawrin Armstrong, Usury and Public Debt in EarlyRenaissance Florence: Lorenzo Ridolfi on the Monte Comune (Toronto, 2003); and Arm-strong, The Idea of a Moral Economy: Gerard of Siena on Usury, Restitution, and Prescrip-tion (Toronto, 2016). Odd Langholm examines the attitudes regarding economy of forty seventheologians, using many unpublished manuscripts. Langholm, Economics in the MedievalSchools: Wealth, Exchange, Value, Money and Usury according to the Paris Theological Tra-dition, 1200–1350 (Leiden, 1992); “Monopoly andMarket Irregularities inMedieval EconomicThought: Traditions and Texts to AD 1500,” Journal of the History of Economic Thought 28,no. 4 (2006): 395–441.




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merchants dwelled not only in the distant past but in a differentiatedpast for which historians erected signposts. Among the most formidableof these is that which separates the Middle Ages from Renaissance Italy.The scholarly distinction predates the discussion of capitalism and is thework of Jacob Burckhardt, who in the mid-nineteenth century famouslycontrasted a “corporate” Middle Ages that lay “half awake” and hidden“beneath a veil, woven of faith” with an “individualistic” RenaissanceItaly, where man was the measure of all things and inclined to followhis egoistic impulses, which was the hallmark of modernity.10 Burkhardtwas not interested in the economy, but the financial implications of histhesis were fleshed out by a cadre of subsequent writers including theGerman scholar Alfred von Martin, who equated Burckhardt’s “individ-ualism” with the “spirit of capitalism” that was evident in Florence, theprototype of the modern world.11 Von Martin made a sharp distinctionbetween aMiddle Ages whose “center of gravity”was land, characteristicof a “static order, sanctioned by the church,” and the Renaissance, whoseemphasis was the town, which was the changing element” of society.12

“Individualism” was a secular urban force that stood in opposition tothe landed and religious sector and therefore “deprived the world ofthe divine element in order to make it more real.”13 The Americanscholar H. M. Robertson, following von Martin, posited a similar con-trast, portraying the Middle Ages as “a divine ordering of . . . a gradedsociety” that was the opposite of individualism, which instead signified“free action,” “free trade, competition and private property.”14 It didnot seem to matter to these scholars that Burckhardt’s examples of indi-vidualism were lords, petty aristocrats/mercenaries, who in fact repre-sented the “ordered,” “graded,” church-sanctioned landed sector ofsociety.14

In any case, there is for Florentine economic historians an embed-ded tradition of equating the church with a feudal/medieval noncapital-istic order that was liberated by its antithesis: a secular individualism. Asubsequent “revolt of medievalists,” led by a generation of archivallytrained scholars, brought the search for modernity and capitalism toan earlier period but did little to change the basic opposition.15 Henri

10 Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. S. G. C. Middle-more ( New York, 1954), 100.

11 Alfred von Martin, Sociology of the Renaissance (London, 1944), originally published asSoziologie der Renaissance (Stuttgart, 1932), 2.

12 Von Martin, Sociology of the Renaissance, 1.13 Von Martin, Sociology of the Renaissance, 2.14H. M. Robertson, Aspects of the Rise of Individualism: A Criticism of Max Weber and

His School (New York, 1959), 34.15N. S. B. Gras, Business and Capitalism: An Introduction to Business History (New York,

1939).




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Pirenne applied the term “capitalist” tomedieval Flemishmerchants anddescribed them and urban merchants in general as constituting a“fringe” of a medieval society that otherwise remained feudal andlanded. For Pirenne the church was the epitome of feudalism, represent-ing “an idle fortune” that was “fixed motionless in the hands of an aris-tocracy, priestly or military.” Monasteries were the central feature oflanded accumulation and an anticapitalist spirit.16 Pirenne’s highly influ-ential construct appears in the work of R. H. Tawney, who took a morenuanced view of the medieval church but ultimately saw the institutionas enforcing an “unalterable” social system external to “pecuniary trans-actions” that occurred in an urban world, “at the fringe of a world ofnatural economy.”17

Pirenne and his contemporaries worked under the Marxian label of“merchant” or “commercial” capitalism, to distinguish their period fromthe industrial capitalism of the nineteenth century.18 “Capitalism in theage of the Medici,” wrote de Roover, was “commercial capitalism.” Thelabel de facto reified the distinction between the feudal/church/medievalsector of society and its urban/secular/capitalist counterpart. It allowedfor a reduction of the scale of economic activity and discussion of a fewenterprising men, who served as examples of capitalism and thus part ofan evolutionary process.19 It did not help that the scholars used the term“capitalist” loosely, nay, rhetorically. The great French historian AndréSayous applied “capitalist” to the merchants at the great fairs of Cham-pagne in the twelfth century.20 Yves Renouard referred to fourteenth-century merchant bankers at the papal court of Avignon as “capitalistmen of affairs,” as did Armando Sapori in his extensive studies on Flor-entine merchant bankers of that era.21 Even the most recent study of theFlorentine economy refers to the merchants of the era as “proto-capitalists.”22

16Henri Pirenne, “The Stages in the Social History of Capitalism,” American HistoricalReview 19, no. 3 (1914): 500.

17 Tawney, Religion, 25, 28–29, 56.18 F. L. Nussbaum, “The Economic History of Renaissance Europe: Problems and Solutions

during the Past Generation,” Journal of Modern History 13, no. 4 (1941): 527.19De Roover, Medici Bank, 7.20 “Des reports d’échanges furent pratiqués aux Foires plus largement que dans le passé par

l’intervention de capitalistes.” André Sayous, “Le capitalisme commercial et financier dans lespays Chrétiens de la Mediterranée occidentale, depuis la première croisade jusqu’à la fin dumoyen-âge,” Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial und Wirtschaftsgeschichte 29, no. 3 (1936): 295.

21 Yves Renouard, Les relations des Papes ďAvignon et des Compagnies commerciales etbancaires de 1316 à 1378 (Paris, 1941), 41; Armando Sapori, La crisi delle compagnie mercan-tili dei Bardi e dei Peruzzi (Florence, 1926), 147. A particularly forceful argument for thegenesis of capitalism in the Middle Ages is in Jacques Heers, La Naissance du capitalismeau Moyen Âge: Changeurs, usuriers et grands financiers (Paris, 2012).

22Goldthwaite, Economy, 238.




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Of critical importance to the construct—and too often ignored in thediscussion of it—is the influence of Werner Sombart’s Der moderneKapitalismus (1902). Sombart (1863–1941) is less known in the Ameri-can academy than his famous contemporary, fellow sociologist andscholarly interlocutor Max Weber. Sombart’s connection to Nazi politicsand ideology did much to discredit him, and Der moderne Kapitalismusremains untranslated into English. Sombart is best known in the Anglo-phone academy for his Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben (1911),written in opposition to Weber’s Protestant Ethic and translated intoEnglish in 1925 as Jews and the Rise of Capitalism. The book, whichargued for a Jewish “unlimited desire for gain” against Weber’s Protes-tant self-denial as the wellspring of capitalism, has been the source ofmuch dispute.23

But Sombart was a product of the German historical school of eco-nomics that had an important impact on the field. It favored historicizingtrends over theoretical models and stressed “stages” of development ofcapitalism. Der moderne Kapitalismus was Sombart’s hauptwerk,which he returned to often, revising it three times during his career—with a significant revision, 1916/19. The most comprehensive treatmentof capitalism in its day, it profoundly influenced the foundational gener-ation of premodern European economic historians. Der moderne Kapi-talismus offered a detailed, if at times rambling, portrait of Europeaneconomic history, backed up with a dizzying array of examples and sta-tistics and frequent quotes from Goethe.24 Like Weber, Sombart treatedcapitalism as a distinctly European phenomenon that manifested itselfas “a spirit.” Sombart saw the premodern period as a preliminary stagein the development of capitalism characterized by Bedarfsdeckung-sprinzip (pursuit of one’s needs), as opposed to Erwerbsprinzip(pursuit of gain), which was the ethos of full capitalism that did notarrive until the modern era. The medieval merchant was thus forSombart an adventurer, who carried out trade on a small scale andwhose profits inevitably returned to land, which represented the antith-esis of capitalistic investment. Trade had a transformative effect onlywhen it was freed from landed investment and “the disastrous circle of

23Die Juden was Sombart’s answer to Max Weber’s Protestant Ethic (1904–1905), adebate begun by Sombart himself in 1902, with the publication of Der moderne Kapitalismus.Natalie Zemon Davis, “Religion and Capitalism Once Again? Jewish Merchant Culture in theSeventeenth Century,” Representations 59 (Summer 1997): 56–84.

24Werner Sombart, Der moderne Kapitalismus, revised, 2 vols. (Munich, 1919–c. 1916).Max Weber had earlier written about medieval commerce, partnerships, and Italian mercan-tile practices. Weber, Zur Geschichte der Handelsgesellschaften im Mittelalter: Schriften1889–1894, ed. Gerhard Dilcher and Susanne Lepsius (Tübingen, 2008).




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low turnover, high expenses, [and] low profits.”25 Sombart reiteratedthese ideas in his Der Bourgeois (Quintessence of Capitalism [1911]),referring to the premodern economy as traditionalist—the term usedalso by Weber.26 Sombart devoted special attention to the importanceof double-entry accounting technique, which he described in a longsection of book two of Der moderne Kapitalismus. He saw doubleentry as the essence of the capitalist secular spirit, behaving “like formand content to each other.”27

It is important to stress that the comprehensive nature of Dermoderne Kapitalismus did much to set the modern terms of discussion.The work of the early pioneers like Pirenne and Sayous can only be prop-erly understood in terms of Sombart.28 Pirenne pointedly titled his famoussynthesis “The Stages in the Social History of Capitalism” (1913) inresponse to Der moderne Kapitalismus and the whole German historicalschool.29 Pirennemodified Sombart’s approach, arguing that rather than a“gentle ascent” in the history of capitalism, there was a more awkward“series of lifts.”30 “There are as many classes of capitalists as there areepochs in economic history,” he wrote, “each distinct and separate.” Heaccepted, however, Sombart’s basic distinction between capitalists andlanded aristocrats, noting that merchants of each era inevitably retreated“from the [capitalist] struggle,” invested in land, and then became aristo-crats. It was for this reason that “the capitalists of one era do not bringforth those of the next era” and a straight forward evolution did notoccur.31 Sayous’s response wasmore direct. He argued that “le capitalismecommercial e financier” was present in the Middle Ages despite the asser-tions in “the big book” of Sombart, whose thesis Sayous called stimulatingand “audacious.”32 Meanwhile, N. S. B. Gras, a founder of the modern

25 “Der Handel wird erst in großem Stile vërmogenbildend wirken können, wenn er ersteinmal aus dem verhängsnisvollen Zirkel; kleiner Umsatz, hohe Spesen, geringe Profitmengen,keine Accumulation, in dem wir ihn eingeschlossen fanden, herausgehoben ist.” Sombart, Dermoderne Kapitalismus, 1:319.

26Werner Sombart, The Quintessence of Capitalism: A Study of the History and Psychol-ogy of the Modern Business Man, trans. and ed. M. Epstein (New York, 1915), 13, 20.

27 “Man kann schlechthin Kapitalismus ohne doppelte Buchhaltung nicht denken: sie ver-halten sich wie Form und Inhalt zueinander.” Sombart, Der moderne Kapitalismus, 2:118.

28 Sayous, “Le capitalisme commercial et financier,” 271, 274.29 Pirenne, “Stages.”30 Pirenne responded also to Die Entstehung der Volkswirtschaft (1893) by Karl Bücher,

another proponent of the German historical school, translated as Industrial Evolution(New York, 1901). Pirenne, “Stages,” 494. See also Peter Koslowski, ed., The Theory ofCapitalism in the German Economic Tradition: Historism, Ordo-Liberalism, CriticalTheory, Solidarism (Berlin, 2013).

31 Pirenne, “Stages,” 495, 497.32 “Les historiens ont considéré comme audacieux et, en certains points, même fantaisiste,

le gros ouvrage sur les origines du ‘capitalisme moderne’ paru au début de ce siècle.” Sayouscites a French translation of the book published in Paris in 1936. Sayous, “Le capitalisme com-mercial et financier,” 270.




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discipline of business history, credited Sombart’s Der moderne Kapitalis-mus with influencing a “whole school of writers on the rise of capitalism”and “fertilizing” his own field.33 Indeed, Gras’s Business and Capitalismclosely follows Sombart’s method of tracing stages from “nomadic topetty capitalism,” from the traveling merchant to the sedentary one.34 Ina review of the scholarship on premodern European economic historyprior to World War II, F. L. Nussbaum pointed to the “encyclopedic”Der moderne Kapitalismus as having “a privileged place” in the discourseon capitalism. Accordingly, Nussbaum, in an oft-cited observation, statedthat economic history “knew no Renaissance” but was subsumed underthe Sombartian category of early capitalism.35

Sombart’s influence has been particularly strong among accountinghistorians, who focus on his lengthy discussion of double entry. BertYamey devoted his career to modifying Sombart’s analysis, arguing forthe importance of other accounting methods.36 Eve Chiapello’s morerecent essay systematically traces the influence of Sombart on a genera-tion of accounting historians, who continue to argue in terms laid out bythe German sociologist.37

For our purposes here, Der moderne Kapitalismus is importantbecause it was also highly influential among Italianists. It was publishedin Italian as Il capitalismo moderno in 1925, translated by the distin-guished economic historian Gino Luzzatto, who was himself a majorforce in the study of premodern trade and business.38 Sombarttouched a singular nerve when he denigrated Florentine economic devel-opment, calling into question Giovanni Villani’s famous figures (1338)that highlighted the potency of the city and arguing more generallythat Florentine business remained small in scale and that its commercialinvestments invariably returned to land. He reinforced the interpreta-tion with a quote from Leon Battista Alberti—whom Alfred von Martinwould later cite as a proponent of capitalism—about the profligacy ofpriests: how they desired “to surpass all men in splendor and

33N. S. B. Gras, “Business History,” Economic History Review 4, no. 4 (1934): 390.34Gras, Business and Capitalism.35Nussbaum, “Economic History,” 529–32. Nussbaum also helped introduce an American

audience to Sombart’s work. Nussbaum, A History of the Economic Institutions of ModernEurope: An Introduction of ‘Der moderne Kapitalismus’ of Werner Sombart (New York,1933).

36 Basil S. Yamey, “Scientific Bookkeeping and the Rise of Capitalism,” Economic HistoryReview, n.s., 1, no. 2–3 (1949): 99–113.

37 Eve Chiapello, “Accounting and the Birth of the Notion of Capitalism,” Critical Perspec-tives on Accounting 18, no. 3 (2007): 263–96.

38Werner Sombart, Il Capitalismo Moderno, trans. Gino Luzzatto (Florence, 1925).On Luzzatto’s career and difficulties with Fascist authorities, see Reinhold C. Mueller, “Perragioni di ordine generale: Gino Luzzatto vittima delle leggi razziali, 1938–1945,” Venetica55 (2018): 153–68.




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ostentation.”39 Church-related profligacy was the antithesis of thepursuit of gain and the apotheosis of the return of capital to land. It isnotable that Sombart fashioned his portrait at approximately the sametime that his German contemporary Alfred Doren depicted the Floren-tine woolen cloth industry as a capitalist enterprise, stressing the sizeof the firms, which he called Riesenateliers (giant plants), and comparedthem to modern factories led by industrial magnates.40 Meanwhile,Sombart’s older contemporary Heinrich Sieveking found fiscal moder-nity in Genoese public finance and in the practices of the Medicibank.41 As late as the 1950s, Italian economic historian Enrico Fiumiwas still situating his work on Florence in terms of Sombart, takingissue with his figures, which Fiumi called “tutto incoerente.”42

A Problematic Narrative: God, Trade, and Double-EntryBookkeeping

In any case, consideration of Sombart’s Der moderne Kapitalismusis critical to understanding the scholarly tradition of study of premoderneconomic history, the deep roots of the developmental/evolutionary(stage) approach and the association of landed wealth with the churchas an antipode of capitalism. This has been true despite the fact thatthe scholarly construct renders problematic and contradictory even themost basic narrative of premodern economic history. The startingpoint of the traditional narrative is the “take off” of the medievaleconomy during the Commercial Revolution (1000–1300), whenEurope’s population increased and commercial fairs in Champagnewere established, as were long-distance trade routes, aided by commer-cial instruments such as commende and partnership agreements thathelped manage risk. But the Commercial Revolution coincided withthe Crusades to the Holy Land (1095–1291), which brought men, oftenlanded aristocrats and churchmen (the antagonists of capitalism),along roads and seas, helping establish trade routes and createdemand for Eastern high-priced goods. The Crusades famously facili-tated the growth of commercial cities like Venice, Pisa, and Genoa,which served as middlemen in travel and trade. Indeed, Sayous beganhis account of the “rise of capitalism” precisely with the First Crusade,

39Quoted in Sombart, Quintessence of Capitalism, 15.40Alfred Doren, Die Florentiner Wollentuchindustrie (Stuttgart, 1901), 25, 34, 202, 249.41Heinrich Sieveking, Die Handlungsbücher der Medici (Vienna, 1905); Sieveking, Gen-

ueser Finanzwesen mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der Casa di S. Georgio (Freiburg,1898–1899).

42 Enrico Fiumi, “Fioritura e decadenza dell’economia fiorentina,”Archivio storico italiano115 (1957): 387–88.




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and modern textbooks on the Middle Ages continue to elide crusade withcommerce without any sense of ambiguity.43Meanwhile, the details of theeconomic effects of the “unholy” Fourth Crusade that led to the conquestof commercially rich Constantinople have still not received the scholarlyattention in the Anglophone academy that they deserve. And for all theemphasis on the role of coastal Italian cities in the crusading adventure,there remain curiosities for Italianists, such as the use, since the twelfthcentury, of the term “Biccherna” in Siena for communal budgets, takenafter the Blachernae district of Constantinople.44 The great Champagnefairs that brought merchants together from throughout Europe were thework of feudal aristocrats, who sought commercial gain. Count Henry ofChampagne (1127–1181) had in fact been on the Second Crusade, whichstimulated his interest in promoting the region. And the church’s role inthe fairs is evident from the fact that they purposefully coincided with reli-gious feast days to take advantage of pilgrim traffic. Lagny, Bar-sur-Aube,Troyes, and Provins hosted events on the major holidays of St. Croix Day,Toussaint, Fête, and St. Ayoul Day, respectively.45

In short, the church was so deeply woven into the system that it isimpossible to graft it out. The pilgrim, soldier, and merchant trod thesame roads, stayed at the same inns, and were sometimes, indeed, thesame person. The economic importance of pilgrim “tourist” traffic iswell known tomedievalists. The famous Englishmerchant Godric of Fin-chale (1065–1170), whom Pirenne singled out as the very first to possessthe “spiritus capitalisticus” and who is a staple of evolutionary/develop-mental narratives of capitalism, combined his merchant affairs with hispilgrimages to holy shrines.46 As Robert Lopez argued for Italy, it isimpossible at the outset of the Commercial Revolution “to tell apart mer-chants who bought real estate” from “noblemenwho sold their estate andinvested in trade.”47 Indeed, the major medieval road, the via Franci-gena, which linked Rome to Paris and facilitated the early commercialactivities of merchants from Asti, Piacenza, and other cities that lay on

43André Sayous argued that European capitalism came to America as a result of Spain’sconquest of the NewWorld. Sayous, “Le capitalisme commercial et financier.” In modern text-books, see Wim Blockmans and Peter Hoppenbrouwers, Introduction to Medieval Europe,300–1500 (London, 2017). Even the steadfast proponent of individualism H. M. Robertsonbelieved that the Crusades deserved “prominence in the history of capitalism.” Robertson,Aspects, 44.

44WilliamM. Bowsky,The Finance of the Commune of Siena, 1287–1355 (Oxford, 1970), 2.45 Janet L. Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System A.D. 1250–1350

(Oxford, 1989), 60, 70, 61; Robert S. Lopez and Irving W. Raymond, Medieval Trade in theMediterranean World (New York, 1955), 81.

46 Pirenne, “Stages,” 503; Reginald of Durham, “Life of St. Godric,” in Social Life in Britainfrom the Conquest to the Reformation, ed. G. G. Coulton (Cambridge, U.K., 1918).

47 Robert S. Lopez, The Commercial Revolution of theMiddle Ages, 950–1350 (Cambridge,U.K., 1976), 67.




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the road, was not a secular highway but a pilgrimage route in the firstinstance, established and maintained by the church, which had orga-nized a “rete” (network) of hostels (ospedali) by the twelfth century,built by the Templars to facilitate pilgrimage to Rome.48 The roaddiverged up north to the shrine of Santiago Compostela in northwesternSpain. And Florence, which was not on the road and whose trade andeconomic development was therefore not directly linked to it, neverthe-less saw its merchants invest in property along it. The Franzesi merchantbankers of the thirteenth century, who played a key role in financialaffairs of France’s King Philip the Fair, purchased the town of Staggiaand other properties along the via Francigena in the Valdelsa. Merchantbankers of the Alberti family bought possessions at Poggibonsi, alsoalong the via Francigena.49

Nowhere has the discussion of premodern capitalism beenmore sec-ularized and distorted than with respect to double-entry bookkeeping, asubject that constitutes its own subfield.50 Both Weber and Sombartassociated the practice with the type of rational abstraction and system-atic analysis that was an essential feature of capitalism.51 Sombartdevoted much space to the subject in Der moderne Kapitalismus, asnoted above.52 He described double entry as part of the same “spirit”that “first gave birth to capitalism.”53 The spirit was not only secularbut scientific. Sombart asserted that “double accounting was born ofthe same spirit as the system of Galileo and Newton, as the teachingsof modern physics and chemistry.”54

The pull of teleology is particularly forceful here. Jane Gleeson-White’s popular 2011 book credits double entry with nothing less thangiving birth to modern finance.55 Jacob Soll argues that double entrynot only represented a systematization and abstraction that was impor-

48Renato Stopani, La via Francigena: Una strada europea nell’Italia del Medioevo (Flor-ence, 1992), 72–74, 87–88.

49 Stopani, La via Francigena, 88–89.50 Yamey, “Scientific Bookkeeping”; Chiapello, “Accounting.”51Weber saw a rational capitalistic system as one with “capital accounting and calculation

according to the methods of modern bookkeeping and the striking of a balance.” Weber,General Economic History, trans. Frank H. Black (New York, 1927), 275.

52 The discussion is in book 2, section 2.3. Sombart, Dermoderne Kapitalismus, 2:110–24.53 “Die doppelte Buchhaltung erst den Kapitalismus aus ihrem Geiste geboren habe.”

Sombart, Der moderne Kapitalismus, 2:118.54 “Die doppelte Buchhaltung ist aus demselben Geiste geboren wie die Systeme Galileis

und Newtons, wie die Lehren der modernen Physik und Chemie.” Sombart, Der moderneKapitalismus, 2:119.

55 Jane Gleeson-White, Double Entry: How the Merchants of Venice Created ModernFinance (New York, 2011).




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tant to capitalism but, alongside financial accountability, applied also tothe realm of political economy and helped determine the success of earlymodern states.56 The hero of the narratives is the mathematician anderstwhile “father of modern accounting” Luca Pacioli, whose birthdayis celebrated yearly in his native San Sepolcro by accountants from allover the world. Pacioli wrote in Tuscan vernacular to describe the Vene-tian bilateral method (alla veneziana) of double entry, with debits facingcredits, which he saw as the best system. He devoted book nine, tracteleven of his Summa de arithmetica, a treatise on mathematics(1494), to careful description of double entry. Sombart called Pacioli“der Erster Systematiker des Buchhaltung” and described his methodas the first scientific and coherent expression of capitalism. Sombart ulti-mately judged the accomplishment incomplete insofar as Pacioli did notdiscuss balance sheets, which, according to Sombart, did not come intouse until the seventeenth century.

Scholars have engaged in seemingly endless debate about the originsof and the basis upon which to assess double entry. They generally agreethat the Genoese government accounts of 1340, rendered in bilateralform, as advocated by Pacioli, are an indisputable early example.57

Cases have also been made, however, for the priority of the accountbooks of the Florentine Fini and Farolfi firms in the early fourteenthcentury, as well as the Gallerani firm of Siena and others.58 Italianscholar Federigo Melis believed that double entry was widely used inFlorence after 1380, most strikingly in the books of the famousmerchantof Prato, Francesco Datini, for whom a mountain of archival materialremains.59 Raymond de Roover argued that the lack of a complete setof surviving account books made it difficult to know for sure. Neverthe-less, de Roover was certain that Florence’s “business organization”allowed for its economic hegemony, which in turn laid “the foundationof most institutions of today.”60

56 Jacob Soll, The Reckoning: Financial Accountability and the Rise and Fall of Nations(New York, 2014), xv; John Padgett, “Transposition and Refunctionality,” in The Emergenceof Organizations and Markets, John Padgett and Walter W. Powell (Princeton, 2012), 203.

57 Soll, Reckoning, 12–14.58Geoffrey A. Lee, “The Coming of Age of Double Entry: The Giovanni Farolfi Ledger of

1299–1300,” Accounting Historians Journal 4, no. 2 (1977): 79–95; Christopher W. Nobes,“The Gallerani Account Book of 1305–1308,” Accounting Review 57, no. 2 (1982): 303–10;Carlo Antinori, “La contabilità pratica prima di Luca Pacioli: Origine della partita doppia,”De Computis: Revista Española de Historia de la Contabilidad 1 (2004): 4–23.

59 Federigo Melis, Storia della ragioneria: Contributo alla conoscenza e interpretazionedelle fonti più significative della storia economica (Bologna, 1950); Melis, Aspetti della vitaeconomica medievale (Florence, 1962).

60De Roover, Medici Bank, 1–2.




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Florentine Double Entry and Mentalité

Accordingly, the first studies of the Medici account books in the Self-ridge collection at theHarvard Business School’s Baker Library focused onaccounting technique and business organization. Florence Edler deRoover used the collection to trace the stages of Medici bookkeepingmethods to the “perfection” of double entry, that is, the bilateral, alla ven-eziana style, with debits across from credits, as advocated by Pacioli. Edlerde Roover outlined an evolutionary process, starting with “paragraphform” in an account book belonging to Giovenco di Giuliano de Medici(1406–1418; MS 492), with credits in the front of the book and debits atback of the book, to bilateral form in another account book belonging toGiovenco di Giuliano (1417–1428; MS 493), with debits facing credits,to cross referencing of accounts in an account book belonging to Giovencodi Giuliano and his cousin Giovenco di Antonio (1431–1434;MS 496). Thelast account book had “many characteristics of double entry in rudimen-tary form,” she found, but it lacked the “most outstanding feature”:debits on left and credits on right. Finally, an account book belonging toAverardo Bernardo di Medici (1441–1444; MS 498) combined all the fea-tures of double entry, in bilateral form, debits on the left-hand side, creditson the right, and cross referencing to other books.61

Edler de Roover was careful to restrict her conclusions to the mate-rials she examined. But more recent studies trace Florentine double-entry accounting practice into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuriesand equate it with a distinct mentalité, a “culture of precise quantifica-tion,” that was unique to the city and that connected to, and helpedexplain, the broader cultural/Renaissance achievements for which Flor-ence is famous.62 By the seventeenth century, double entry was fullydeveloped in bilateral form and widely diffused, appearing not only inmerchant books but also in private household accounts, which survivein conspicuously large numbers and, according to the argument,reflect cultural sensibilities.63

The logic is convincing and fits well with the established view of thecity. But the logic is also uncomfortably familiar, retaining a distinctiveEnlightenment/Whig and Burckhardtian aspect. An “ethereal” notionof spirit is here replaced by an equally “ethereal” notion of culture.Accounting method still represents, as in Sombart, a distinctly secularmindset. What is obscured, however, is historical context. If accounting

61 Florence Edler de Roover,Glossary ofMedieval Business Terms (Cambridge,MA, 1970),348–49. The subsection is entitled “Medici Methods of Bookkeeping.”

62Richard Goldthwaite. “The Practice and Culture of Accounting in Renaissance Florence,”Enterprise and Society 16, no. 3 (2015): 611–47.

63Goldthwaite, 619, 641–42.




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technique is evidence of a unique Florentine way of thinking, linked tothe city’s economic and cultural success, then it is unclear why the wide-spread diffusion and perfection of the technique occurred in the seven-teenth century when the city was largely in economic decline, withmany of its most noteworthy “cultural achievements in the past,”embarking upon what Eric Cochrane famously called the “ForgottenCenturies.”64 More important, it is necessary to ask whether the exam-ples adduced by scholars regarding double entry are in fact equivalentand comparable, such that extrapolation of a distinct mentalité is war-ranted. In this regard it is troubling that the bilateral double-entryaccount book from Genoa in 1340 is a state account book, representingthe method employed for public finance. The account books for Florenceand Tuscany are those of private merchants and individuals. The exam-ples are not the same.

Indeed, at the time that Florentine merchants appear to have turnedto double entry in their private account books in the fourteenth century,the city itself, unlike Genoa, does not appear to have used double entry inits public account books. State budgets, managed by the camera delcomune, the chief fiscal office of the commune, recorded income andexpenditure separately in the middle of the trecento and employed sep-arate accountants (ragionieri) to oversee each side of the ledger. Inter-estingly, the accountant in charge of expenditure earned twice thesalary of the accountant in charge of income.65 The reason is unclear,but budgetary evidence suggests that the latter had a helper. Florentinebudgets became more complete by 1384, as Anthony Molho has shown,and began listing all communal income and expenses, including thosethat went directly to specific costs and bypassed the camera altogether.Molho argues persuasively that the budgets represented a “new sense oforder and discipline” in terms of the bureaucracy of the city. Neverthe-less, the accounting technique itself remained the same as earlier.66

The basic point is that the double-entry accounting innovation in theprivate sector in Florence did not have an immediate analog in the publicsector. And during times of heavy expenditure, large turnover of fundsand fears of fiscal confusion, Florence did not alter its accountingmethods but instead hired committees of additional accountants (rivedi-tori/regolatori) to oversee and review the work of the prior ones. Therecourse to auditors was a common expedient throughout Tuscany at

64Eric Cochrane, Florence in the Forgotten Centuries, 1527–1800 (Chicago, 2013). Origi-nally published in 1973

65 Caferro, Petrarch’s War, 55, 88.66 Anthony Molho, “The State and Public Finance: A Hypothesis Based on the History of

Late Medieval Florence,” in The Origins of the State in Italy, 1300–1600, ed. Julius Kirshner(Chicago, 1995), 110–15.




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this time, including in neighboring Siena, where the state instituted apermanent office of regolatori in 1362 to review, and rewrite insummary form, all communal budgets.67 But little evidence hasemerged thus far of innovation in public accounting technique, asubject that requires much more research.

What do we then say about a distinct Florentine “spirit” or “culture?”Why would Genoa, a city rarely associated with a “Renaissance,” arrangeits public finance more “rationally”? The question is all the more intrigu-ing given that both Florence and Genoa ultimately instituted public debtsthat have been associated with “modern” financial capitalism.68 What, ifanything, does the difference say about the political nature of the states,their business communities, and the relation between that communityand the fisc? Did Genoa have its own unique mentalité that was funda-mentally different from Florence’s, and did that mentalité differ withrespect to the public and private sphere?69 Or did the two states simplyuse different accounting systems for different types of public fiscal activ-ities and organization? And, still more fundamentally, does a singleGenoese budget suggest a continuous practice? The surviving budgetaryevidence for the city is fragmentary and difficult to generalize from.70

Such questions are important. If double entry invariably means a“rationalization” and “abstraction” that carried over to the culture orspirit of a people, then it is unclear why Genoa was so unsuccessful atpolitically disciplining itself. The city was often sold in the fourteenthcentury and subject, on and off, to the hegemony of Milan. Genoawould appear in this respect a cautionary tale about the dangers of apply-ing the rationalization of accounting method to politics that were in thatcity anything but rational.

In any case, it is critical to stress that the rationalization attributed todouble entry was not secular. Sombart argued that the “order” requiredof the method revealed its “power.”71 But the Franciscan friar Luca

67William Caferro, Mercenary Companies and the Decline of Siena (Baltimore, 1996),xviii–xix, 102–55.

68On public debt, see, among others, the following important studies: Luciano Pezzolo,“Government Debts and Credit Markets in Renaissance Italy,” in Government Debts andFinancialMarkets in Europe, ed. Fausto Piola Caselli (London, 2008), 17–32; andMaria Gina-tempo, “Il finanziamento del deficit pubblico nelle città dell’Italia centro-settentrionale (XIII–XV secolo),” inDebito pubblico emercati finanziari in Italia: Secoli XIII–XX, ed. Giuseppe DeLuca and Angelo Moioli (Milan, 2007), 39–82.

69 Yoko Kamenaga Anzai discusses “the utilization of public debt for the salvation of souls”in Genoa, as churches, hospitals, and monasteries held shares (compera) of the public debtthat they received from bequests, through donations, and in wills. Kamenaga Anzai, “Attitudestoward Public Debt in Medieval Genoa: The Lomellini Family,” Journal of Medieval History29, no. 4 (2003): 260–63.

70 Steven Epstein, Genoa and the Genoese, 958–1528 (Chapel Hill, 1996).71 Sombart, Der moderne Kapitalismus, 2:118.




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Pacioli, the most famous advocate of the method, stated specifically thatthe “order” of the system was a reflection of God, who embodied perfec-tion. The connection is no surprise to students of medieval and earlymodern Europe, who know well the association between the ChristianGod and order and symmetry. Pacioli states the point at the veryoutset of his discussion, arguing that the qualities necessary for a suc-cessful merchant were the same as those required for Christian redemp-tion.72 Pacioli’s “advice to the merchant” in chapter 4 of his treatisefocuses on the hardships endured “at sea” and “on land,” as well asduring “war, famine, health and pestilence,” which required that themerchant resemble a rooster (gallo), the “most alert of animals,”keeping vigil at night, not resting in winter or summer.73 “The Lawhelps those who do not sleep,” Pacioli wrote. And “God promises thecrown to the watchful ones.”74 He quoted St. Matthew, a tax collectorfor Herod: “Seek you Christians first the kingdom of God and then allother spiritual and temporal things will be obtained.”75

Pacioli exhorted merchants to meditate on God each morning, giveto charity, and begin entries in their account books with the name ofGod. The last has received substantial scholarly attention, particularlywith regard to Francesco Datini, whose account books began with“in the name of God and profit.” The famous phrase has become a short-hand formula for the connection between themerchant andGod. But as ashorthand and a formula, it has been easy for modern scholars to dismissit as a sort of lip service, associated with notions of merchant guilt, or as a“motto” that brought together two concepts (God and profit) that funda-mentally did not go together.76

Scholars (most notably economists) have made too much of the “Godand profit”motto. If we follow Edler de Roover’s lead in examiningMediciaccount books from the Selfridge collection, focusing not on the evolutionof double entry but on the religious invocations in the accounts, we do not

72 “La fede di real mercantante . . . in la fede catolica ognuno si salve.” Luca Pacioli, Summade arithmetica geometria: proportioni: Et proportionalita: Nouamente impressa (Tosco-lano, 1523), 416. See also Luca Pacioli, Trattato di partita doppia, ed. Annalisa Conterio(Venice, 1994); and Pacioli, Rules of Double Entry: Particularis de computis et scripturis,trans. John B. Geijsbeek (Denver, CO, 2016), 16.

73 “Ora per mare, ora per terra, ora a tempi de pace e dabondantia. Ora a tempi de guerre ecarestie, ora a tempi di sanita e morbi . . . e pero ben se figura e asimiglia el mercatante al gallo. . . el piu vigilante animale.” Later, Pacioli suggests that a merchant needs one hundred eyesbut that even this was not sufficient. Pacioli, Summa de arithmetica geometria, 416, at 199v.

74 “Ben dicano le legi municipali . . . videlicet vigilantibus et non dormientibus iura subve-niunt cioe a chi vegghia e non a chi dorme le leggi sovengono . . . e cosi neli divini officii se cantada la Sancta Chiesa che idio ali vigilanti a promesso la corona.” Pacioli, Summa de arithmeticageometria, 416, at 199v.; Soll, Reckoning, 19–22.

75 Pacioli, Summa de arithmetica geometria, 416–17.76Gleeson-White, Double Entry, 23–24.




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in fact find a simple formula. The oldest book in the collection, the ricor-danze of Giuliano di Giovencho de Medici (1375–1376; MS 491), beginswith the following: “In the name of God and the Virgin Mary and themost blessed saints Peter and John the Baptist and Saint James, SaintAnthony and Saint Julian and all the other saints of Paradise . . . andSaints Reparata, Lucia and Caterina.”77 Why this specific set of saints?John the Baptist was the patron saint of Florence, and the cathedral wasnamed for Reparata. But it is unclear why Giuliano also invokes SaintsPeter, Anthony, Julian, Lucia, and Caterina. Do they have a personalmeaning to the author? Are they intrinsic to the meaning or purpose ofthe account book? Why is there no reference to Saint Matthew, whomPacioli cites on biblical grounds? The questions are worthy yet are notpart of the current discourse. Interestingly, Giuliano de Medici qualifieseach male saint with the term messer—“messer San Piero, messer Gio-vanni Batista, messer San Jacopo,” etc.—used for earthly beings ofknightly status. The female saints are introduced as madonna.

The invocations cannot be lightly discarded. The personal memo-randa book of Giuliano’s son, Giovencho (1439; MS 497), begins thus:“In the name of God and the most glorious mother, Madonna SaintMary, and John the Baptist, ‘padrone’ and protector of this city andthe rest of the celestial court of Paradise.”78 Giuliano, unlike his son,includes only God, the Virgin Mary, and St. John the Baptist, the“padrone” of Florence. Giovencho follows a Tuscan linguistic traditionin transposing the r and l, such that he speaks of the groliosimamadre instead of gloriossima madre. And, like his father, he introducesJohn the Baptist, patron of Florence, as messer. But the references toAnthony, Julian, Reparata, Lucia, and Caterina are gone. Why?

In another of Giovencho’s account books, a ricordanze from 1444(MS 500), the dedication is to God, the “groliosa vergine” and “semprevergine” Mary, and the saints Peter, Paul, John the Baptist, and theentire “Celestial Court of Paradise.” Themale saints are again introducedwith the term messer. Although the alteration is less dramatic here, it isunclear why Giovencho decided to add the saints Peter and Paul.79

77 “In nome di dio e dela vergine Maria e de suoi benedetti santi di messer San Piero e dimesser Giovanni Batista e di messer San Jacopo and di Messer Santo Antonio e di MesserSanto Giuliano e di tutta gli altri sancti di Paradiso et di Madonna Santa Reparata e diMadona Santa Lucia e di Madonna Santa Caterina e di tutta la chorte di paradiso.” MS 491,f. 2r, Selfridge collection, Medici Collection, Baker Library Historical Collections, HarvardBusiness School, Boston (hereafter SC).

78 “Al nome di dio e dela groliosimamadreMadonna SantaMaria e di messer San GiovanniBattista padrone e prottettore di questa citta e di resto l’celestial corte di paradiso.” MS 497,f. 1r, SC.

79 “Al nome di dio e dela groliosa vergineMadonna santamadre sempre vergine e dimesserSan Piero, e messer San Pagholo e messer San Giovanni Batista . . .,” MS 500, f. 1r, SC.




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The point is that account books used a variety of invocations, whichnot only reveal something about them and their authors but also deserveattention from scholars. Some indeed have no invocation at all (perhapsalso revealing something about the transmission of the text, which is stillanother issue). But “God and profit” does not capture the complexity ofthe relationship between the merchant and faith, economy and religion,and should not be taken as emblematic of the genre. There were, as withaccounting method, choices made, conscious Christian choices. As JohnPadgett eloquently argues, Florentine accounts are best read not in termsof “an impersonal spirit of capitalism” but with an understanding thatbeneath the “dry entries” lay “multivocal relationships” and networksthat helped determine the social/political realities of the city.80 I wouldadd that they also reveal that the networks and relationships were tied tothe church, which cannot be factored out of the equation.

Merchants, Clerics, and Diriturra

What has I hope been clear so far is that God was woven into the eco-nomic system, and in ways that the current discourse has not accountedfor. A secular reading of business organization and accounting techniqueis prima facie impossible. And this is particularly true of Florence, whoseprosperity, as noted above, owed greatly to papal finance, the business inwhich the city’s merchant bankers took the lead for two centuries. It wasthe connection to the papacy and the need to remit funds from all overChristendom that necessitated the type of multibranch setup that wascharacteristic of Florentine firms and allowed their growth into “supercompanies,” as Edwin Hunt calls them, in the thirteenth and fourteenthcenturies.81 The size and scope of the Bardi, Peruzzi, and Acciaiuoli“super companies” is well known. The Florentine chronicler GiovanniVillani’s oft-quoted description of them as the “pillars of Christendom”should be read with stress on the last word. Armando Sapori, whowent the furthest in studying them, provided considerable evidence oftheir commitment to the faith. Indeed, Sapori spoke of the often “dra-matic contrast” between the “seemingly audacious and bold lives” ofthemerchants and their surviving account books, in which the obligationto God was systematized and piety blended into their businesspractices.82

80 Padgett, “Transposition and Refunctionality,” 37–38.81 Edwin Hunt, The Medieval Super-Companies (Cambridge, U.K., 1994).82 Armando Sapori, “La beneficenza delle compagnie mercantili del trecento,” Archivio

storico italiano 83, ser. 7, no. 4 (1925): 254; Sapori, The Italian Merchant in the MiddleAges (New York, 1970), 21–28.




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Charity to the poor and alms to the church were dispensed in a “pro-portional” way, funneled through the Florentine bishop and pious insti-tutions.83 The libri segreti of the firms, the internal books that containedinvestments and the profits of partners, included an account to God, whowas treated the same as an earthly living partner. The language of debitsand credits in the account books is consistent: “avemo dato per Dio” and“dovemo dare a Dio.”84 Meanwhile, Florentine silk merchants, who grewto great prominence in the fifteenth century, systematically set aside aportion of their profits for charity to the Ospedale degli Innocenti, theFlorentine orphanage, in whose archives their account books nowreside. In this sense, Francesco Datini’s oft-cited legacy to the Ceppopoorhouse in Prato and for foundlings at SantaMaria Nuova in Florence,attributed to his own personal experience (as a child without parents),should be contextualized as a more general practice.

When the great pillars of Christendom famously failed in the 1340s,the poveri of God were compensated like other creditors. The moneyowed them was settled specifically through confraternities such as Orsan-michele, whichwas a great beneficiary of the bank failures, receivingmuchof the rural patrimony of Bardi merchants in the Mugello.85 As Saporimakes clear in a less-cited part of his work, the Florentine banking crisisof the 1340s created a moral/religious crisis. A surviving testament ofthe merchant banker Bartolomeo Cocchi-Compagni, whose firm failedalong with the others and whose reputation for lending was dubious,shows that he decided to compensate in full all “victims” of usury.86 Bar-tolomeo consigned his books to the archbishop, and after the funeral, asrequested in his will, he sent banditori (criers) throughout the city andcontado to alert creditors to make claims against his inheritance, whichhe promised to settle quickly, in fifteen days for citizens and thirty daysfor contadini. Sapori admits that the act demonstrated more than a doseof egoism on the part of Bartolomeo, but it also represented a sincere com-mitment to God.87 There are many additional examples of restitution ofusury and ill-gotten gains byprestatori supegno such asAgostinoMiglior-etti and Angelo Corbinelli in Florentine notarile and church documents.And the clients of Agostino, amanifest usurer known as “il cane,” includedthe religious houses of Santa Maria Maggiore, the abbeys of San Salvi andSanta Trinita and the bishop of the city.88

83 Sapori, “La beneficenza delle compagnie,” 254–56.84 Sapori, 256.85 Sapori, 259–60.86Armando Sapori, “L’interesse del denaro a Firenze nel Trecento: Dal testamento di un

usuraio,” in Studi di storia economica (secoli Xlll–XIV–XV) (Florence, 1955), 225.87 Sapori, “La beneficenza delle compagnie,” 242.88 Sergio Tognetti, “‘Aghostino Chane a chui Christo perdoni’: L’eredità di un grande

usuraio nella Firenze di fine Trecento,” Archivio storico italiano 164, no. 4 (610) (2006):




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The evidence emphasizes the inherent tensions between merchantsand their faith, but it also lends support to Giacomo Todeschini’s impor-tant assertion that modern scholars have exaggerated the notions of“inevitable” and “everlasting conflict” between the two.89 Todeschinihas stressed the overlap between the language of Franciscan theologiansand that of merchants. The Franciscan emphasis on poverty, whichseems antithetical to commercial practice, maintained at its core asimilar ethos, first articulated by the Franciscan theologian Peter JohnOlivi (1248–1298) and plainly evident in Luca Pacioli.90 Christianvirtue involved “indefatigable commitment” to a task, a willingness toendure hardships and assume risk for the utility of society.91 Todeschiniadduces an array of writers, who compared monks to merchants in theirwillingness to suffer anxiety and deprivation to free their soul for thesake of family and society.92 With Pacioli firmly in mind, Todeschiniasserts that “between the 1400s and 1500s merchants, businessmenand the governors of cities spoke the language of Franciscan economicethics and implemented forms of association and economic networksthat were able to synthesize private profit, public usefulness, and virtu-ous practices in Christian cities.”93

Indeed, as we have seen, the Franciscan friar Pacioli stressed in hisdiscussion of double entry the hardships attendant to the life of the mer-chant and moral Christian rectitude that was requisite for success thatalso benefited society as a whole. The same language, however,appears also in the commercial manual of the Florentine merchantfrom Ragusa, Benedetto Cotrugli, who wrote about double entry in1458, before Pacioli, but whose work was not published until later.Cotrugli was not a Franciscan and his treatise, On Commerce and thePerfect Merchant, aligns more with the humanist tradition, containing

667–712; Lawrin Armstrong, “Usury, Conscience and Public Debt: Angelo Corbinelli’s Testa-ment of 1419,” in A Renaissance of Conflicts: Visions and Revisions of Law and Society inItaly and Spain, ed. John A Marino and Thomas Kuehn (Toronto, 2004), 173–200. See alsothe detailed study in Sylvie Duval, “L’argent des pauvres: L’institution de l’executor testamen-torum et procurator pauperum à Pise entre 1350 et 1424,” Mélange de l’École Française deRome – Moyen Âge 125, no. 1 (2013), https://doi.org/10.4000/mefrm.1157.

89Giacomo Todeschini, “Theological Roots of the Medieval/Modern Merchants’ Self-Rep-resentation,” in The Self Perception of Early Modern Capitalists, ed. Margaret C. Jacobs andCatherine Secretan (Hampshire, 2009), 19. See also Todeschini,Ricchezza francescana: Dallapovertà volontaria alla società di mercato (Bologna, 2004).

90 For disagreement with Todeschini’s reading of Olivi, see Julius Kirshner and KimberlyLo Prete, “Peter John Olivi’s Treatises on Contracts of Sale, Usury and Restitution: MinoriteEconomics or Minor Works?,” Quaderni Fiorentini per la Storia del pensiero giuridicomoderno 13, no. 1 (1984): 233–86.

91 Todeschini, Ricchezza francescana, 129; Todeschini, “Theological Roots,” 27.92 Todeschini, Ricchezza francescana, 22.93 Todeschini, 181.



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many classical references that do not appear in Pacioli.94 Cotrugli’s mer-chant, like Pacioli’s, endured physical hardship and “gran fatiga.” LikePacioli, he was ever vigilant, working “day and night,” traveling “onfoot and on horse” and “by land and by sea.” The merchant “set asideall other concerns,” including those things “necessary for the conserva-tion of life,” such as “eating, drinking and sleeping.”95 This, along withdedication to the Christian faith, allowed the merchant to succeed, andhis success contributed to the public welfare. Cotrugli goes so far as tocompare the merchant to a soldier in order to underscore the degree ofendurance necessary to handle the hardships. The comparison appearsalso in Pacioli, who employs decidedly martial imagery when describingthe task of merchants. “Mars never gave victory without a battle,” hewrote, and “the Apostle Paul said that no one is worthy of the crownwho does not do battle for it.96 Like Pacioli, Cotrugli also stressed thatmerchants had to keep correct books and that double entry was animportant component of this.97

The parallels are not, however, restricted to manuals or fifteenth-century Italy. A similar ethic can be found even in the story of Godricof Finchale, the eleventh-century English merchant whom HenriPirenne highlighted as the first to possess the “spiritus capitalisticus.”Godric lived before St. Francis and the Franciscans. But a close readingof Godric’s life reveals correspondences with Pacioli and Cotrugli.Pirenne stresses the hardships Godric endured, “trudging many hoursfrom village to village” and “traveling long distances by sea” to fairsand pilgrimage sites. Godric was “assiduous above all men”; he suc-ceeded by the “sweat of his brow,” which was reflected in his physicalappearance: his skin made “rough” from perpetual labor.98 Pirenneargued that Godric possessed all the elements of a capitalist if one

94 For an assessment of the genre, see Marcello Fantoni, ed., Il “perfetto capitano”: Imma-gini e realtà (secoli XV–XVII), Atti dei seminari di studi, Georgetown University a Villa LeBalze (Rome, 2001).

95 “È hordinata questa arte mercantile, è necessario, postposto ogni altra cura, vacare congran diligentia ad tute quelle cose le quali in qualche modo possen fare utile et giovare ad talprofessione. Unde si convene a le volte durare gran fatica di giorno et di nocte, caminare per-sonalmente a piè et a cavalo, per mare e per terra, e così afaticarsi nel vendere et nel comperareet adestrar le cose vendute et comperate, et usare in tucti simili faciende quanta diligencia èposibile, postponendo, como ò decto, ogni altra cura non solamente . . . ma ancora di quelesono necessarie a la conservacione de la humana vita. Et però ne occore alguna volta el differirelo mangiare e lo bevere e lo dormire, ançi è necessario di tolerare fame, sete e vigilie et similialtre cose che sono noiose et contrarie a la quiete del corpo.”Benedetto Cotrugli, Libro de l’artede la mercatura (Venice, 2016), 37–38, 51.

96 Cotrugli, Libro de l’arte de la mercatura, 53. “Non te para strana la fatiga che Marte nonconcesse mai la battaglia . . . e Paolo Apostolo dici che niun degno di corona salvo che hara . . .combattuto.” Pacioli, Summa de arithmetica geometria, 416.

97 Cotrugli, Libro de l’arte de la mercatura, 35–38, 51.98Reginald of Durham, “Life of St. Godric,” 415–20.




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omitted “the pious conclusion of his biography” in which Godric, grownold, withdrew from the world to a monastery, giving his money to thepoor. But Pirenne’s desire to omit the pious conclusion is impossiblebecause Godric’s biography is a Vita Sancti, a medieval saint’s life, agenre intended to demonstrate the Christian virtues of its subject,which exists only because of its pious conclusion. Pirenne’s assertion isthus striking evidence of a basic misapprehension of the medievalchurch that influenced much of the subsequent scholarship. Read criti-cally and in context, Godric’s decision to become a monk, which hasbeen taken as an example of the fundamental opposition between reli-gion and economy, is better understood as the natural conclusion of acareer as a Christian merchant, whose duty to the church and pious com-mitment reached a natural if seemingly contradictory conclusion.

The connection between the cleric and the merchant went beyondlanguage. Indeed, it is in the perception of the two as representing sep-arate spheres that the compartmentalization of study and the ghost ofSombart have cast their longest shadow. Rather than occupying a coreand periphery, the merchant and the monk shared the same space andworked closely together.99 Throughout Italy, state funds were handledby monks, who served as communal chamberlains and treasurers along-side merchants. Since the thirteenth century, Florence employedmembers of the Cistercian order of San Salvadore in Settimo and theUmiliati of Ognisanti as chamberlains of the camera del comune, thecity’s chief fiscal office.100 Neighboring Siena relied on monks fromSan Galgano, a brother house of San Salvatore, as treasurers of itsmain fiscal office, the Biccherna. One of the earliest of the famouspainted Biccherna covers depicts a monk/treasurer from San Galgano,holding an account book.101 Frances Andrews has pointed out the singu-larity of the portrait: a Cistercian with an account book rather than abible. She argues that that there is nothing in the rule of St. Benedict,which governed the Cistercian order, that would suggest monks shouldserve as treasurers for states. Nevertheless, it was a reality, not only inSiena and Florence but also in Parma, Piacenza, Cremona, and elsewherein Italy.Monks were good candidates for the job because they had signifi-cant financial experience, buying and selling property, collecting rents,and investing money.

99 Todeschini, Ricchezza francescana, 8.100 Bowsky, Finance, 7.101 Frances Andrews, “Living like the Laity? The Negotiation of Religious Status in the

Cities of Late Medieval Italy,” Transactions of the Royal Historical Society 20 (Dec. 2010):28–29; Andrews and Maria Agata Pincelli, eds., Churchmen and Urban Government inLate Medieval Italy, c.1200–c.1450 (Cambridge, U.K., 2013).




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The financial sophistication of the Cistercians is indeed well knownto medievalists.102 They possessed large landed estates throughoutEurope, performed sophisticated financial transactions, and carefullyorganized their patrimonies into “granges” that allowed for specializa-tion, technical innovation (mills, water power) that reduced labor costsand created surplus for sale. Cistercians provided credit, took deposits,and were by necessity skilled in mathematics.103 They played a promi-nent role in raising sheep on their granges for the wool cloth trade inEngland, where they dealt directly with Florentine merchant bankerswho dominated the export business there. Florentines thus workedextensively with monks in both public finance and private business,two economic worlds that were connected. And it is worth noting thatthe Cistercians and monasticism more generally have been the subjectof study of premodern capitalism, a discourse that Florentinists havepaid little attention to.104

The movement of personnel went in both directions. Monasteriesemployed merchants to help with their accounts. The priors of SanLorenzo in Florence hired members of Frescobaldi, Peruzzi, and Bardimerchant-banking families to handle their finances; secular abacusteachers served as managers of the monastery at Santa Croce.105 YvesRenouard, in his study of bankers in Avignon, stressed the social andpolitical embeddedness of the merchants, noting in particular thatfamily members of the major Florentine firms were directly involvedin the church. Bartolo Bardi of the eponymous banking clan was thebishop of Spoleto, and Angelo Acciaiuoli was bishop of Florence. Theconnection is most obvious with regard to the Medici family, whichnot only did extensive business with the papacy but brought forthseveral popes.106

I would go still further and argue that the connection was systemic.Business and public finance were connected by similar Christian

102 Sister James Eugene Madden, “Business Monks, Banker Monks, Bankrupt Monks: TheEnglish Cistercians in the Thirteenth Century,” Catholic Historical Review 49, no. 3 (1963):341–64; Peter King, The Finances of the Cistercian Order in the Fourteenth Century (Kalama-zoo, 1985); Andrews, “Living like the Laity?” 27–56; Constance B. Bouchard, Holy Entrepre-neurs: Cistercians, Knights and Economic Exchange in Twelfth-Century Burgundy (Ithaca,1991); William Day, “Cistercian Monks and the Casting Counter,” in Andrews and Pincelli,Churchmen and Urban Government, 251–67.

103 P. J. Jones, “Le finanze della Badia Cistercense di Settimo nel XIV secolo,” Rivista distoria della Chiesa in Italia 10 (1956): 106–7; Day, “Cistercian Monks,” 263.

104 For a useful review of the historiography, see Lutz F. Kaelber, Schools of Asceticism:Ideology and Organization in Medieval Religious Communities (University Park, PA, 1998).

105 Elisabetta Ulivi, “Gli abacisti fiorentini delle famiglie del maestro Luca,” in Calandri eMicceri e le loro scuole d’abaco (secc. XIV–XVI) (Florence, 2016); Ulivi, Benedetto daFirenze (1429–1479), un maestro d’abaco del XV secolo: Con documenti inediti e con un’Ap-pendice su abacisti e scuole d’abaco a Firenze nei secoli XIII–XVI ( Rome, 2002), 26–28.

106Renouard, Les relations des Papes ďAvignon, 77.




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principles. Julius Kirshner, Lawrin Armstrong, and others have out-lined the forceful theological debates in Florence about the fundedpublic debt (monte), which, in Kirshner’s sonorous phrase, “wascontested in city council halls, among theologians and in thestreets.”107 An important and overlooked communal tax imposed byFlorence was the dirittura gabelle, levied on all financial transactionsincluding payment of salaries and transfers of money from one commu-nal office to another.108 The impost received little attention inBernardino Barbadoro’s classic study of Florentine finance, whichfocused more on direct taxation and the foundation of the communalmonte, the subject of numerous subsequent studies.109 Nevertheless,the dirittura tax was imposed since at least the early trecento and pro-vided a steady and substantial source of revenue. The word itself isnoteworthy: it was used by Dante in Convivio (4.17.6) to signifyjustice and moral Christian rectitude and by Boccaccio in the Decam-eron for “uprightness” and “honesty/fidelity.”110 Accordingly, thegabelle was specifically intended to raise money for the public good,to convert public spending and financial dealings into beautifying thecathedral, the symbol of civic Christian pride. Soldiers comprised thelargest part of Florence’s workforce, and thus the return from thatsector, the most morally dubious, was the greatest.

Notions of dirittura were also operative among merchants andapplied directly to their activities. The famous Florentine merchantmanual of Balduccio Pegolotti (Pratica della Mercatura [1340]) startswith a much-overlooked poem about the virtues of the merchant. Thepoem refers in its first line to dirittura (“Dirittura sempre usando gli con-viene/lunga provedenza gli sta bene”), a moral/Christian rectitude thatwas a requisite for a successful career as a merchant.111 The rest of thepoem corresponds to the portrait of the merchant in the works of

107 Kirshner, “‘Ubi est ille?’” 557; Armstrong, Usury and Public Debt; Armstong, Idea of aMoral Economy; Gerard of Siena on Usury, Restitution, and Prescription (Toronto, 2016).

108 Caferro, Petrarch’s War, 20, 104–7. The tax in the early trecento is mentioned in Ales-sandro Gherardi, “L’antica camera del comune di Firenze e un quarderno d’uscita de suoicamarlenghi del anno 1303,” Archivio storico italiano 43 (1885): 320–21.

109 Bernardino Barbadoro, Le finanze della repubblica fiorentina: Imposta diretta e debitopubblico fino all’istituzione del Monte (Florence, 1929); Anthony Molho, Florentine PublicFinances in the Early Renaissance, 1400–1433 (Cambridge, MA, 1971); Roberto Barducci,“Politica e speculazione finanziaria a Firenze dopo la crisi del primo Trecento (1343–1358),”Archivio storico italiano 137, no. 2 (1979): 177–219; Giovanni Ciappelli, “Il cittadino fiorentinoe il fisco alla fine del trecento e nel corso del quattrocento: Uno studio di due casi,” Società eStoria 46 (1989): 823–72.

110 The money was paid through the Arte della Lana, which did the actual spending.A portion of the proceeds was sometimes also spent on bridge repair, the university, andother public projects, but the cathedral was always the priority. Caferro, Petrarch’s War, 105.

111 “Dirittura sempre usando gli conviene/ lunga provedenza gli sta bene . . . Fuori di ram-pogna con bella raccoglienza/ la Chiesa usare e per dio donare, crescie in pregio, e vendere a




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Cotrugli and Pacioli. It counsels him to maintain a good reputation andto always work hard, give to the church, and keep account books freefrom error. The same poem, in slightly different form, appears in DinoCompagni’s earlier work, Song of Worthy Conduct (La canzone delpregio), in a larger discussion of the virtues of various professions.112

Compagni also applies dirittura (“dritura sempre usare a lui conviene/lunga provendenza li sta bene”) to the merchant, underlining theutility of it, as we have seen in public finance. That Pegolotti likelycopied the poem from this earlier work emphasizes the Florentine mer-chants’ commitment to the practice.

The point here is that the Christian principles that lay behind propermerchant practice and profit were operative also in Florentine publicfinance. And it is in this respect that Andrews’s conclusion with regardto the secular participation of prelates in Florentine finance is mostapplicable. A basic tie between the Cistercian monastery and the statewas an economic quid pro quo—a fiscal negotiation and accommoda-tion—that Andrews views as a much-neglected “service for financialreward” embedded in church-state relations. In Florence, the Cisterciansreceived tax immunities in return for their service.113

Papal Banking and Pious Service

The connection returns us to papal banking, the business that gar-nered so much profit for Florence and so much scholarly attentionwith regard to premodern capitalism. Apart from a brief period duringthe War of Eight Saints (1375–1378) and its aftermath, Florence domi-nated papal banking from the second half of the thirteenth centurythrough the fifteenth century.114 Raymond de Roover’s discussion ofFlorentine capitalism focused squarely on the Medici, as have subse-quent scholarly critiques.115 And it is here that notions of negotiationand accommodation, of financial quid pro quo, were writ large and schol-arly assumptions have in many ways been most rigid, the

uno motto, usura e guoco di zara vietare . . . scrivere bene la ragione e non errare.” FrancescoPegolotti, La Pratica della mercatura, ed. Allan Evans (Cambridge, MA, 1936), 20.

112 “Dritura sempre usare a lui conviene e lunga provendenza li sta bene . . . fuor di rampo-gna con bell’accoglienza la chesa usare e per dio donare.” Isidoro del Lungo, Dino Compagni ela sua Cronica (Florence, 1879), 389. Robert Lopez freely translates this as “a merchantwishing that his worth be great must always act according to what is right.” Robert S. Lopezand Irving W. Raymond, Medieval Trade in the Mediterranean World, 425-426.

113 Andrews, “Living like the Laity?” 35–45.114 Arnold Esch, “Florentiner in Rom um 1400,”Quellen und Forschungen aus italieni-

schen Archiven und Bibliotheken 52 (1972): 496–525.115 Richard A. Goldthwaite, “The Medici Bank and the World of Florentine Capitalism,”

Past and Present, no. 114 (Feb. 1987): 3–31.




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developmental/evolutionary model most problematic, and the need tocontextualize the greatest.

De Roover stressed that despite themodern capitalistic bearing of itsbank, the Medici remained steadfast in their commitment to the Chris-tian faith. An important revision of Medici capitalism written after deRoover’s death, however, took a decidedly more secular and skepticalview. It dismissed notions of a “spirit” of capitalism as “ethereal” and“disembodied” and favored measuring the Medici capitalism withmore “standard” yardsticks such as “competition” and “power.”116 Fol-lowing a line of reasoning similar to that of Werner Sombart, theMedici bank fell short. Its operations were small scale, the market inwhich it operated was “fragmented,” and there was little competitionamong firms, little use of political “power” or an “urge for self-aggrandizement.”117

The problem of context is manifest here. What does “commitment”to the Christian faith look like for a papal banker? And what do “compe-tition” and “power” look like in the distant past? It is anachronistic toimagine that merchant banks “competed” in a modern way to reducetransactions costs by finding new and better methods of transportinggoods, in a world where transport was inherently uncertain and mer-chants knew well that the best expedient was to ship goods together.Competition and power had a decidedly personal aspect in the premod-ern world. Personal relations with lords and kings were essential forgaining access to the markets they controlled. This was particularlytrue of papal bankers, who, as Renouard noted, became, by necessity,deeply embedded in the social and political milieu in which theyworked and developed personal relationships with pontiffs. The personalnature of the relationship was in fact written into the papal banker’s“job description,” which referred to the men in Latin as romanamcuriam sequentes, or in Italian as quelli che seguono la corte di Roma,that is, “those who follow the Roman Curia/Court.”118 Papal bankerstraveled alongside the pontiff on his many journeys, to church councils,to visit dioceses, and so on. Popes were among themostmobilemen in allof Europe, and those who serviced them were similarly mobile, muddy-ing the distinction between N. S. B. Gras’s traveling and sedentarymerchants.

The rise of the Medici in the early fifteenth century resulted, asGeorge Holmes has shown, from their ability to obtain the office of the

116 Box 85, folder 1615, Spinelli Archive, Yale University, New Haven (hereafter SA).117 Goldthwaite, “Medici Bank,” 19, 23–24.118Melissa M. Bullard, “‘Mercatores Florentini Romanam Curiam Sequentes’ in the Early

Sixteenth Century,” Journal ofMedieval and Renaissance Studies 6 (1976); de Roover,MediciBank, 194.




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depositary—a lay office begun in the early fifteenth century, equivalent tothe chief treasurer of the pope—at the top of the institutional hierarchy ofthe church.119 The Medici gained this position by cultivating close per-sonal relations with Baldassare Cossa. Giovanni Bicci de Medici, the“father” of the Medici bank, befriended Cossa when he was a papallegate in the Romagna. When Cossa became Pope John XXIII (1410),he gave the post of depositary to the Medici.120 Medici profits grew dra-matically, and they dominated the office for much of the rest of thecentury. The close connection with the pope opened markets throughoutEurope in ways that association with no other lord or ruler could. Thepontiff gave access to the critical and lucrative high-end luxury marketamong clerics throughout Europe. And the pontiff had unparalleledclout, as association with him made customers more likely to heedtheir obligations to bankers. An extant balance sheet from the Medicibranch at Basel shows that the bank threatened a client with excommu-nication by the pope if he did not pay.121 The pope offered spiritual sanc-tion to enforce market rules for his bankers.

One could perhaps argue that the personal aspect of commercialcompetition is not without modern parallel insofar as playing golf witha prospective client is a common business strategy today. But it shouldbe stressed that premodern merchants cooperated with one anotherout of necessity, particularly in distant markets, where they arrangedthemselves into “nations.” Given the insecurity of travel, mutual ship-ping of goods helped to reduce transaction costs. But firms, includingthe Medici and their competitors, had their own trademarks, writteninto their articles of agreement and stamped onto their goods. Therewas thus a species of brand recognition. Buyers associated a trademarkwith the quality of the goods, and extant merchant letters frequentlyspeak of this and the need to sell cloths of brilliant color and finedetail that appealed to customers. And Christianity was woven into thetrademarks, which were variations of Christian crosses, making clearto customers the intersection between the faith and commerce.

The above point brings us to the question of the Christian commit-ment of the bankers. Crucial insight into this, and papal banking moregenerally, comes from the Spinelli archive at Yale University. Thearchive has not had the same impact on scholarly study as the Selfridgecollection at Harvard. It was held privately by the Spinelli family untilsold illegally in 1987 to Yale University; consequently, the Spinelli

119George Holmes, “How the Medici Became the Pope’s Bankers,” in Florentine Studies:Politics and Society in Renaissance Florence, vol. 1, ed. Nicolai Rubinstein (London, 1968),357–80.

120Holmes, “Pope’s Bankers,” 361–66.121De Roover, Medici Bank, 213.




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have not been well integrated into the overall literature. Their bankingactivities are further obscured by the fact that they were not, strictlyspeaking, a Florentine firm insofar as they were for a time part of the Bor-romei banking network, a family associated nowadays with Milan butoriginally from the Tuscan town of San Miniato.122

The focal point of the family archive is the merchant bankerTommaso Spinelli (“Tommaso il grande”), who established the familyfortune during the time of Medici ascendency. Spinelli is particularlyuseful for the discussion here because his business, more so than thatof the Medici, focused squarely on the church. Spinelli himself madethis clear, proclaiming in a surviving fragment of his ricordanze (1454)that he was “the oldest merchant at papal court,” having serviced thecourt for a full thirty-two years.123

Spinelli’s career confirms the personal nature of the premodern cap-italist world of papal banking. Like all papal bankers, he followed thepope in his travels. He began his career with the Alberti bank, represent-ing it in August 1419 in Florence, where Pope Martin V temporarilyestablished court (at Santa Maria Novella) on his way to Rome. Spinellileft the Alberti bank in 1433 and joined its competitor Galeazzo Borro-mei, who had branches in London, Bruges, and Venice and sought,through Spinelli, an entrée into papal banking. Spinelli followed PopeEugenius IV to the Council of Basel in 1435 and serviced him evenwhile his legitimacy as pope was being called into question. He madelittle profit, but in 1443 Eugenius, who had been friends with Spinellibefore he was pope, chose him as depositary general. Here issues of“political power” indeed played a role, as Eugenius opposedMedici/Flor-entine support for Francesco Sforza’s military expedition into papal ter-ritory in the Marches in 1442, which induced Eugenius to ceaseemploying a member of the Medici bank as depositary. As with theMedici, Spinelli’s business grew dramatically after his appointment.An extant account book from November 1444 shows that Spinelli’sprofits more than doubled and that he did business with prelates andtheir families from throughout Europe, including bishops, cardinals,the personal doctor of the pope, and the pope’s personal tailor. Spinellilost the position as depositary when Eugenius died in 1447 and his suc-cessor Pope Nicholas V chose Roberto Martelli, the manager of theMedici papal branch (and Medici politics were more in line with the

122William Caferro, “L’Attività bancaria papale e la Firenze del Rinascimento: Il caso diTommaso Spinelli,” Società e storia 55 (Summer 1996): 717–31. The Borromei banking enter-prises are the focus of an early and underappreciated study of double entry bookkeeping; seeTommaso Zerbi, Le origini della partita doppia: gestioni aziendali e situazioni di marcato neisecoli XIV e XV (Milan, 1952).

123 Box 85, folder 1615, SA.




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papacy).124 Spinelli then withdrew from his partnership with the Borro-mei and set himself up as an independentmerchant in Rome, opening upa fondaco in the city from which he sold high-priced cloth.125 A few yearslater Spinelli set up a silk firm and a wool cloth firm in Florence that mar-keted goods—high-priced cloths, linens, silver utensils, and other luxurygoods—in Rome through the web of correspondents he had set upthrough the papal curia.126

It is important to emphasize the degree to which Spinelli owed hisearnings to the church. The lack of libri segreti makes it difficult toassess the overall profits and structure of Spinelli’s banking operations,which were in any case less diversified and on a smaller scale than thoseof the Medici.127 Nevertheless, by 1458, after establishing his silk firm inFlorence, Spinelli was importing more goods into Rome than theMedici.128 Spinelli’s statement in a letter that year that “there was nota cardinal that he had not served” was not idle talk.129 His connectionsallowed him to evade even the guild restrictions of the Hanseaticleague and sell silks among the clergy in the city of Lübeck. And likethe Medici, Spinelli did not “compete” with other firms in the modernsense. He shipped his wares with others to reduce transaction costsand marketed his goods through some of the same intermediaries ashis competitors.130 Competition lay in jockeying for closeness to thepope and clerics and their substantial retinues. Spinelli, like his counter-parts, marked his goods with the trademark of his company and, like theMedici, used his standing at the papal court to keep his clients in line.Spinelli boasted openly of this power in a letter to a factor, instructinghim to threaten a recalcitrant lender with excommunication, whichSpinelli could obtain from the pope.131

Spinelli emerges from the documents as a merchant in the mold ofPacioli and Cotrugli, who behaved according to the principles of diri-turra. He followed the now familiar routine of systematically giving tocharitable causes, donating a portion of his earnings from his silk busi-ness to the Ospedale degli Innocenti, and spending generously on theneighborhood church of Santa Croce to build a new infirmary and cloi-ster. When Spinelli was depositary, he requested and received a portable

124 Caferro, “L’Attività bancaria papale,” 734.125 Caferro, 737.126William Caferro, “The Silk Business of Tommaso Spinelli, Fifteenth-Century Florentine

Merchant and Papal Banker,” Renaissance Studies 10, no. 4 (1996): 417–39.127 Caferro, “L’Attività bancaria papale,” 731–32; Holmes, “Pope’s Bankers,” 376–79.128 Caferro, “L’Attività bancaria papale,” 737.129 Caferro, 728.130 Caferro, “Silk Business,” 438.131 Philip Jacks and William Caferro, The Spinelli of Florence: Fortunes of a Renaissance

Merchant Family (University Park, PA, 2001), 47; de Roover, Medici Bank, 213.




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altar so that he could have mass said for him as he moved about with thepope.132 Meanwhile, an extant legal disposition by an employee, Gabri-ello Falcone, echoes Pacioli and Cotrugli in describing Spinelli as mer-chant always at work, “sitting fixed over the ledger books,” night andday, and demanding the same from his employees.133

The description may easily be dismissed as the complaint of anunhappy worker, but it takes on greater significance because Spinelliwas a close personal friend of the Dominican friar and archbishop ofFlorence, Antoninus (Antonio Pierozzi), author of Summa theologicamoralis, a treatise that Joseph Schumpeter lauded for its economicsophistication and that Raymond de Roover called the work of a “greateconomic thinker.”134 Spinelli and Antoninus became friends when thelatter was still a monk in Rome. Spinelli served Antoninus when hebecame Florentine bishop as collector of the papal tenth and collectorof money for Pope Calixtus’s crusade in 1453 against the Musliminfidel at Varna. Spinelli valued his correspondence with Antoninus somuch that before Spinelli died in 1472, he arranged to have the lettersburied with him.135 When Antoninus died years earlier, in May 1459,Spinelli had helped pay for his funeral, hiring the gravediggers, bell-ringers, and monks of San Marco for singing the requiem.136

Parallels exist between Spinelli’s commercial career and Antoninus’sportrait of the merchant in Summa theologica moralis, particularly inthe second and third sections of the work relating to matters ofeconomy and faith.137 Antoninus applied Christian ethical principles toreal-life issues and argued the now familiar point that the acquisitionof wealth was not displeasing to God provided that it was done in a prin-cipled, measured, and Christian way, such that earnings were moderateand spent in a manner that would be “virtuous.”138 Antoninus offeredexamples of “virtuous” spending: providing relief to the poor, providingsupport for one’s family according to social status, and, more broadly,providing for the welfare of the community. Although a Dominican, hisnotions are similar to those outlined by Todeschini connecting the

132 Caferro, “Silk Business,” 433.133William Caferro, “Tommaso Spinelli: The Soul of a Banker,” Journal of the Historical

Society 8, no. 2 (2008): 303–22.134 Raymond de Roover, San Bernardino of Siena and Sant’ Antonino of Florence: The

Two Great Economic Thinkers of the Middle Ages (Boston, 1967), 1–43; JosephA. Schumpeter, History of Economic Analysis (New York, 1954), 95–107.

135 Caferro, “Tommaso Spinelli,” 313–14.136 Box 24, folder 625 bis, SA.137 There is nomodern edition of the Summa. I have used St. Antoninus, Summa theologica

moralis, 4 vols., ed. Pietro Ballerini (Verona, 1740). See also John T. Noonan, The ScholasticAnalysis of Usury (Cambridge, MA, 1957), 77–80, 188–90.

138 Antoninus, Summa theologica moralis, rubric IV, 5, 17 column 254; rubric II, 3, 4column 120; rubric IV, 12, 3 column 623.




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Franciscans to merchants and were clearly broadly operative. Indeed, inhis legal deposition Gabrielle Falcone described Spinelli as not onlyalways vigilant and at work but concerned, during the papal jubilee in1450 when business was excellent and profits high, that Falconeabandon his lucrative speculation in gold because, Spinelli told him, “Ido not have such great need nor such great desire to earn as you maythink. It is enough that I preservemyself.”139 The statement not only cor-responds to Antoninus but also matches Cotrugli, who in the section ofhis work on the merchant and religion stressed the importance of“moderato guadagno” (moderate gain) in business, directly quotingAntoninus’s Summa.140

There are, to be sure, important theological distinctions and the aimof this essay has not, as stated at the outset, been to minimize them. Butwhat seems clear from the example of Spinelli is that he equated hisfinancial service to the church with a sense of Christian duty. In thisrespect, he lends support to Andrews’s assertion about a fundamentalfinancial negotiation between the church and commerce, monk andmer-chant. Spinelli wrote in his ricordanze, “I have tried to lead an exemplarylife and can say truthfully that . . . the highest pontiffs and the exaltedcardinals never requested any service which I did not render.” The state-ment conjoins Christian moral rectitude with economic service to thechurch and an essential and noncynical quid pro quo that was prominentin theworld of papal banking.141 PopeEugenius IV, who launched Spinelli’scareer, was himself a major holder of shares in the Florentine public debtwho, when the city was slow in paying interest, moved to sequester thegoods of Florentine merchants in Rome and in the papal states 142

And as the Cistercians received tax privileges from the Florentinestate for public service, Spinelli and papal bankers received tax breaksfor service to the pope. Items that Spinelli sold directly to the apostolicchamber were exempt from the usual import duty, including expensivesilk brocades for Pope Nicholas and mourning cloth for the funerals ofPope Eugene IV and Calixtus III.143 Spinelli, like other bankers, received

139 “Ghabriello, io nonn o si gran bisogno né o sı grande ansietà di guadangnare chome tucredi; bastami ch’io mi conservi e non faccia adrieto, non ne volere più di me, non conperarepiù oro.”Box 86, folder 1626, SA.

140 Cotrugli, Il Libro dell’arte di mercatura, 198, 203–4.141 “Credo essere lo piu antico merchatante che ci sia, et sono ora may stato in corte circha

ad anni XXXII; posso dire questo chon verità, che in questo tempo may fu’ richiesto ńe da’sommi pontefici ńe Signori chardinali d’alchuna chosa ch’io non li abbi serviti.” Box 85,folder 1615, SA.

142 Julius Kirshner, “Papa Eugenio IV e il Monte Comune: Documenti su investimento especulazione nel debito pubblico di Firenze,” Archivio storico italiano 127 (1969): 339–53.

143 Caferro, “L’Attività bancaria papale,” 738.




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highly lucrative tax farms including the gabelle of Ripa and Ripetta, animpost on all goods that came to Rome by sea in return for loans.144

The rewards further explain the otherwise unwise decision ofbankers to issue large loans to pontiffs. The large sum that Spinellilent to Pope Calixtus III in 1457 constituted Christian service in thestrictest sense, because it was raised for a crusade against Muslim infi-dels and enemies of the Christian faith. Calixtus pawned his papaltiara as surety, but he did not repay the loan. Crusades had provedunsuccessful since the thirteenth century, a fact that Spinelli undoubt-edly knew. Pious service was the only way to do business in thecontext of the papal court, which was still the largest market in Christen-dom. Christian rectitude and service to the church, were conjoined with acalculated, reasoned profit motive.145

It is important to stress again, by way of conclusion, that the purposeof the foregoing discussion has been to add nuance to the discourse onpremodern capitalism and Christianity, to expose the limits of an embed-ded developmental/evolutionary model, and to show that the two“spheres”were connected in intricate ways. There are no simple binariesor stark oppositions. There was conflict and debate, but the church wasnot monolithic, nor did it stand apart for the world of the merchant. Anintegrated approach to study is, to co-opt a phrase, the most “useful cat-egory” for future analysis. This is particularly true of Florence, for whichthe tendency to compartmentalize, secularize, and generalize has beenmost forceful and, ironically, reified by archival research in the Anglo-phone academy that has added vital detail but has left long-standingand outdated scholarly constructs alone. Even Renouard, who stressedthe embedded nature of Florentine merchant bankers in their politi-cal/religious milieu, ultimately posited a “peculiar mentality” that wasdistinctly “rational” and “individualistic” to describe the Florentine com-mercial world.146 But, to paraphrase Thomas Kuhn in another context,assimilating new facts “demands more than an additive adjustment oftheory.”147 It requires that historians examine their assumptions morecautiously, sift carefully through the various layers, and accept the

144 Sigismondo Malatesta, Statuti delle gabelle di Roma (Rome, 1885), 57–59; PeterPartner, The Papal State under Martin V (London, 1958), 168.

145 Caferro, “Tommaso Spinelli,” 321.146 Yves Renouard, “Affaires et Culture à Florence au XIVe et au XVe siècle,” in Il Quattro-

cento: Libera Cattedra di Storia della Civiltà Fiorentina, vol. 2, ed. Jean Boutier, SandroLandi, and Olivier Rouchon (Rennes, 2004), 169.

147 Thomas S. Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 3rd ed. (Chicago, 1996), 52.




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possibility that instead of a single origin or trend they may discoverseveral patterns that are so interwoven they may be difficult to extricatefrom one another.148

. . .

WILLIAM CAFERRO is Gertrude Conaway Vanderbilt Professor ofHistory and Interim Director/Professor of Classics and MediterraneanStudies at Vanderbilt University. He has written on public finance andthe business history of medieval Italy. His most recent book is Petrarch’sWar: Florence and the Black Death in Context with Cambridge UniversityPress (2018).

148 Caferro, Petrarch’s War, 8–10; Joan Scott, “Gender as a Useful Category of HistoricalAnalysis,” American Historical Review 91 no. 5 (1986): 1067.




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premodern european capitalism, christianity, and florence€¦ · 6jacques heers calls feudalism...

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