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

Inevitably, the debt of the bank’s northern operations toward its Rome branch grew. They couldn’t find ways to send the monies they owed. This was not too worrying when the operation in question was another Medici branch, but it was dangerous when the organization holding the money was an independent agent operating on the bank’s behalf. In the first decade of the century, the Medici had established relations with such agents in London and Bruges. These were other Italian banks that collected papal dues and sold luxury merchandise for the Medici bank. They were under instructions to seek out quality wool to send back to Italy (and the Medici factories) in order to balance the flow and make the return trip worthwhile for the galleys that had brought Italian products north. The banks thus aimed to create the trade that they had come into being to assist and exploit.

But there was a problem. The English now wanted to work all their wool themselves and imposed severe export restrictions and exorbitant duties. The flow did not balance and never would. In 1427, Ubertino de’ Bardi in London and Gualterotto de’ Bardi in Bruges owed the Medici bank the huge sum of 22,000 florins, most of it due to the Rome branch. Those Bardi! Did their slowness in paying really have to do with problems finding merchandise or letters of credit going south? After all, holding someone else’s cash interest-free is always convenient. Was there some connivance, perhaps, between Ubertino de’ Bardi, a free agent in London, and his brother Bartolomeo de’ Bardi, the Medici director in Rome? Not to mention the Medici’s general manager, Ilarione di Lippaccio de’ Bardi, in Florence. This couldn’t go on. At some point, the Medici bank would have to form its own branches in both Bruges and London, if only to invest the income that couldn’t easily find its way back to Italy.

ON RETURNING TO Florence from exile in 1434, Cosimo cut all the Bardi family out of his extensive operations. A clean sweep. What had they done in his absence? We don’t know. The richest Bardi, related by marriage to Palla Strozzi and working for Cosimo’s cousin Averardo’s bank, was exiled. The man was dangerous. Averardo himself had died in exile. Bringing families together in complex relationships might make for strength, but it could also create the conditions for conspiracy and betrayal. Here was another balance that would have to be struck and restruck, year in and year out. What Cosimo’s Bardi wife thought about it, we do not know.

The Portinari family now took the place of the Bardi. Running the Venice branch, Giovanni Portinari was one of the most important men in the organization. Still nervous about the political situation in Florence, Cosimo had shifted much of the home bank’s capital to Venice. In 1431, Giovanni’s brother, Folco, running the Florence branch, had died, leaving seven children. Cosimo took three boys into his own family: Pigello aged ten, Accerito aged four, and Tommaso aged three. All would eventually hold key positions in the Medici bank.

Was this what Cosimo, who only had two children of his own — two legitimate children — planned? That the Portinari boys, brought up in his home, would be more indebted to him, better servants of the bank than any Bardi could be? If so, it was an error. Nothing is less certain than the gratitude of those who have seen us in the role of father, those who have sensed, perhaps, that the real sons are being preferred. There was some question as to whether the Portinari boys had received all the money they should have when their real father died. Folco had had considerable investments in the Medici bank.

Meantime, it was another Portinari, Bernardo, son of Giovanni in Venice and older cousin of the boys in Cosimo’s care, who set out for Bruges and London in 1436 to look into the ever-present problem of the trade balance. Traveling through the Alps on horseback, Giovanni goes first to the Medici branch that Giovanni Benci has set up in Geneva. With Paris in chaos thanks to the interminable Anglo-French War, Geneva is a big success. Merchants come to its four annual trade fairs from all over Western Europe; the town is thus an important sorting house for much of Europe’s currency. Everybody needs credit; exchange deals abound. Merchandise from the north can be brought at least halfway to Italy, turned into cash, and then sent on by messenger. The city even coined a new currency for all international dealings at the fairs: the golden mark, first hint at the euro perhaps.