Medici Money: Banking, metaphysics and art in fifteenth-century Florence

Across the banker’s green table you could make the move from one world to another, from silver to gold, modesty to riches. At the price of a small commission. Needless to say, the poor man’s money tended to be worth less and less. In 1252, when the florin was first minted, it could be bought with a lira of piccioli, which is to say 20 piccioli. Around 1500, you needed 7 lire of piccioli—i.e., 140. This was partly because the merchant who belonged to the Arte di Calimala (the Merchants’ Guild), the silk manufacturer who belonged to the Arte di Por San Maria (the Clothmakers’ Guild) earned in florins but paid salaries in piccioli. When profits were down, they encouraged the mint, which was controlled by the government, which in turn was formed mainly of men from these powerful guilds, to reduce the silver content in the picciolo. That way it would take fewer florins to pay the same salaries in piccioli to the unsuspecting poor. Archbishop Antonino condemned this practice. The archbishop was well loved for his constant work to improve the lot of the poor. He even went around personally to put bread in the hands of dying plague victims. But nobody was ever excommunicated for fiddling the currency, as they were when a debt to the pope wasn’t paid. Nor was anyone publicly whipped, or put in the stocks, as when a silk-worker stole some of the material she was weaving.

So separate currencies guaranteed that despite all the social turmoil, some salutary hierarchical distinctions were maintained. Assessed for tax in 1457, 82 percent of Florentines paid less than a florin and 30 percent nothing at all, because destitute. This monetary apartheid, however, came at the price of some serious accounting problems. Dealing only in florins, Giovanni di Bicci’s bank could use the double-entry system, with debits and credits on opposite pages, Venetian style. But when the family opened a wool-manufacturing business, more primitive methods had to be adopted. Who was to say what the exact relationship between purchases, earnings, and salaries was, when one side of the company dealt in florins, the other in piccioli? In any event, when business was bad and neither gold nor silver was to be had, the workers were obliged to accept payment in woolen cloth, which they hated, and which messed up the books even further, though it did benefit the pawnbrokers, who had a habit of turning cloth into cash at rates that suited them. However potentially evil money may be, the mind does long for the clarity and convenience of the transferable unit of value.

HOW MUCH WAS the florin worth? A slave girl, or a mule, could be bought for 50 florins. To purchase the piccioli that would pay a maid’s wages for a year might cost 10 florins. Thirty-five florins would pay a year’s rent for a small townhouse with garden, or for the Medici’s banking premises on the corner of via Porta Rossa and via dell’Arte della Lana. Twenty florins would fresco the courtyard of a palazzo costing 1,000 to build, or pay an apprentice boy at the bank for a year, while a barrel of wine would come in at just a lira de piccioli and a visit to the astrologer half that. “Don’t trade in wine,” Cosimo would tell his branch managers, “it’s not worth it.” But he regularly consulted astrologers. Money and magic go together. A leek cost one picciolo and an arm’s length of cheap cloth 9 piccioli, while the same length of gorgeous white damask would set you back 2½ florins, about twenty-five times the price, depending on the exchange rate. In general, luxury goods were expensive — the rich needed their florins — while the staples were cheap, so that, assuming they had been paid, the laborers could get by on their piccioli. But the city’s many wool- and silkworkers were on piece rates and demand was not steady. In hard times, you might be better off as a slave at a rich man’s table.

All the same, despite low wages and separate currencies, the scandal of moneymaking continued, for money will not stay still and the poor are rarely happy with their lot. So if you did manage to lay in a little store of cash, there were laws to prevent you from upsetting others by showing it off. No meal with more than two courses for the common classes. No more than a certain number of guests at any given meal. No clothes with more than one color, unless you are a knight or his lady. Or a magistrate, perhaps. Or a doctor. No fine materials for children. No soft leather soles on your white linen socks. No fur collars. No buttons on women’s clothes except between wrist and elbow, and for maids, none at all. For maids, in fact, no fancy headdress and no high heels, just kerchief and clogs.