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

This was the duke of Burgundy, a principality that at that time occupied an area in the east of modern France stretching as far north as the English Channel, where it bordered with English territories around Calais, and then farther east up the Channel coast into modern Belgium. The dukes of Burgundy had occasionally been tempted to get involved in the Hundred Years’ War, usually on the English side against their traditional rivals, the French. Tommaso, with no prompting or brief from the bank, had got himself made counselor to the young regent and later duke of Burgundy, Charles le Téméraire, usually translated in English as Charles the Bold, though the more accurate rendering would be Charles the Rash. A duke who had earned such a name might well need a counselor, but who would lend him money? Tommaso, of course, had been given the position of counselor precisely because he was able and willing to lend money. Not his own, but the Medici bank’s. Just as Giovanni Tornabuoni in Rome had run down his boss, Leonardo Vernacci, in letters to the Medici family back in Florence, so Tommaso began to write nasty things about his director, Agnolo Tani. “A Turk!” he told Piero. “The customers hate him!”

Tani, like Vernacci, was of the old school, a cautious, crotchety, capable banking man with no particular family connections. “I will resign from the bank if he comes back,” Tommaso threatened when Tani was away on a trip to Florence. This was 1465. Overwhelmed by other worries, Piero gave Tommaso what he wanted, the top position. After all, the two men had been brought up in the same home, presumably shared the same interests. At this point, the Rome, Milan, and Bruges branches of the bank were all being run by directors who felt they had special claims on the Medici family, special privileges, men who didn’t like to think of themselves “merely” as bankers. In 1470, Lionetto di Benedetto d’Antonio de’ Rossi was given the directorship of the once-prosperous branch in Geneva, which had now moved, together with Europe’s main trade fairs, to Lyon in France. Lionetto had recently married Piero’s illegitimate daughter, Maria, and thus was Lorenzo il Magnifico’s brother-in-law. Which makes four key branches in the hands of men who can’t be fired.

No sooner is he director of the Bruges branch than Tommaso Portinari decides that the bank needs a palazzo comparable with the one his brother presides over in Milan. Hotel Bladelin, one of the finest buildings in Bruges, costs 7,000 Rhine florins. “And I do not live in pomp and show!” he protests in a letter to Piero. Impatient with ordinary banking trade, Tommaso goes remorselessly for the deal to end all deals. Giovanni Arnolfini — made famous by Jan van Eyck — has a concession to collect the customs duties on goods passing by cart or mule train from English-held Calais to the Low Countries. The collection point is the small coastal town of Gravelines. Counseling the duke, Tommaso takes over the contract for the Medici bank for 16,000 francs a year. Rash Charles has just banned the import of finished English wool cloth. Surely, Tommaso reasons, this will lead to a huge increase in raw wool imports, taxed at a higher rate. Can’t lose. Instead, the English take reprisals. They want to work that wool themselves. They refuse to be pushed around like this. Trade falls drastically. By the summer of 1471, income from the Gravelines concession is close to zero.

The duke of Burgundy has built a couple of galleys for Pope Pius II’s planned crusade against the ever-threatening Turk. The crusade is abandoned when Pius dies while waiting at the Adriatic seaside for his army to materialize. This in 1464. The duke now has two expensive galleys on his hands. Can counselor Tommaso sell them? With trade declining, there are no takers. To do le Téméraire a favor, the enterprising Tommaso buys the galleys for the Medici bank with Medici money. They can trade under the flag of the duke of Burgundy (the duke is flattered), thus evading Florentine taxes when they unload in Pisa. It’s another white elephant. Come 1469, when it’s time to renew Portinari’s five-year contract, Piero, now in the last stages of terminal illness, introduces a special clause to the otherwise-standard branch director format:

With the court of Burgundy or other lords or princes you must deal as little as possible … because the dangers are greater than the profits and many merchants have ended up badly in this way…. From this and other great enterprises you must steer clear, because our intention is to do business to conserve what we have of material goods, of credit and of honor, not to seek to get richer at great danger.