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

TO HAVE A proper understanding of Cosimo’s management of the Medici bank, one must study the 600 densely detailed pages of Raymond de Roover’s The Rise and Decline of the Medici Bank. To gain a thorough grasp of the way Cosimo ran Florence while apparently retaining the role of an ordinary citizen, one must settle down for at least a week with the 450 pages and labyrinthine complications of Nicolai Rubinstein’s The Government of Florence Under the Medici. To have just some inkling of the ambiguity of Cosimo’s relationships with the Christian faith and humanism, the contradictory impulses driving his commissions of so many buildings and works of art, one must tackle Dale Kent’s exhaustive and quite exhausting Cosimo de’ Medici and the Florentine Renaissance.

These books rarely communicate with each other. Sometimes you might be reading about three different, equally remarkable careers. Yet whichever side of Cosimo you are looking at, you are always aware of this fatherly man’s special genius for holding things in check. What exactly? The destructive energies generated by the collision of irreconcilable forces: faction and community, Milan and Naples, commercial appetite and Christian morals, the love of liberty and the need for order. To hold the fort — the bank, the family, the state — in the midst of chaos, you must reconcile the irreconcilable. How? The language rebels. In the short term, is the answer, with the aid of considerable sums of money, a genius for ad hoc solutions, and the utmost discretion. Only a banker could have done it. When the money runs out, or is used without tact, your time is up.

In 1442, in his early fifties, Cosimo was the main supporter behind the formation of a new religious confraternity: the Good Men of San Martino. The idea was to help the “shamed” poor, those who had fallen on hard times but were too proud to ask for charity. The Good Men went around the town asking for donations, after which they brought relief and preserved anonymity. Fifty percent of monies collected were registered as coming from the Medici bank. The contribution is entered in the bank’s books under the heading: God’s Account.

The arrangement is emblematic of the way Cosimo works. A largesse with political implications is hidden behind a religious organization and the name of a commercial company. The amount of money felt to be coming from oneself is doubled by also having donations collected from others. The sense of guilt arising from sinful lending operations and constant tax evasion is attenuated. The danger of economic unrest in the town is reduced. By not asking for recognition or imposing yourself as benefactor, you actually attract even greater recognition. Most crucial of all to the scheme’s success, however, was a genuine charitable impulse. “The poor man is never able to do good works,” Cosimo wrote thoughtfully to his cousin Averardo. The poor get to heaven, wrote Archbishop Antonino, by bearing their tribulations with fortitude, the rich by giving generously to the poor. Such is the providence of social inequality. A Christmas or Easter handout of wine and meat distributed by the Good Men of San Martino cost Cosimo 500 florins, three bank managers’ annual salaries.

BUT SUCH SUMS were nothing compared to the cost of that greatest irreconcilable of them all: How could an international merchant bank function when most European trade was going only one way — from the Mediterranean northward — a situation exacerbated by the fact that Rome was drawing huge sums toward itself in Church tributes without even giving anything in return? Had the pope, the Curia, been based in Paris or Bruges or London, how easy everything would have been! Italy could have sent silk and spices north, then used at least part of the income in situ to pay its dues to the Church. Not too much cash need have been moved. But the opposite was the case. The Italian bank had to recover not only the payment for products sent north but also the papal dues that it was responsible for collecting. This in a world where to move money in coin was extremely dangerous. Much of the territorial expansion of the Medici bank was undertaken to deal with this chronic imbalance. The upheavals that led to the bank’s eventual collapse stemmed in large part from the growing desperation of the measures used.

In 1429 it was decided that the Rome branch would operate without capital. Deposits from clergy, together with what coin did arrive, would be sufficient. Other monies due to the Curia from abroad would provide the capital for other branches. This move freed up perhaps twenty or thirty thousand florins. Not a solution.