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

Crucially, then, we must imagine a mind that believes that moral codes are based not on the well-being or otherwise of our fellow man — the poor are not mentioned here — but on metaphysics. The distance between believing that lending at an interest is always a sin, because unnatural, to the modern notion that interest rates are quite normal, but iniquitous when so high that they push a Third World country into poverty, might be one way of measuring the distance between fourteenth-century man and ourselves. That said, however, and granted the good faith of Aquinas and Dante, the sheer violence of the Church’s hostility to usury makes it hard to believe that priests and pope didn’t have some urgent, worldly interest in the matter. One’s “toil,” after all, in the medieval world, meant one’s station in life — miller, knight, butcher, peasant — which was largely fixed from birth. To refuse one’s station was to refuse the fixed order of society in which the Church had a considerable investment, and to throw the world into turmoil.

TURMOIL. “IN OUR change-loving Italy,” wrote Enea Silvio Piccolomini, later Pope Pius II, “where nothing stands firm, and where no ancient dynasty exists, a servant can easily become a king.” Politically, at the time of Giovanni di Bicci’s birth in 1360, the peninsula was on the edge of chaos and had been for some long time. Basically, the twenty or more tiny states of central and northern Italy were kept in a constant ferment of revolution and usurpation by the two opposing and interminably disruptive poles of the Papal States to the south and the Holy Roman Empire to the north, each claiming to be the rightful inheritor of the Roman Empire but neither able to impose its claim. Cities declared independence. Mercenary adventurers carved out little kingdoms for themselves, then went to pope or emperor, or pope and emperor, to buy a piece of parchment conferring legitimacy: “As legal over-lords of Rimini, or Cremona, or Bologna, we grant you the right to rule there.” This in return, of course, for a sum of money, or a share of the taxes. Nobody was impressed. Least of all the next adventurer.

In the country, the nobles’ feudal rights depended on recognition of the Holy Roman Emperor as ultimate feudal overlord, so they supported him (the Ghibellines); in the cities, the middle classes, who sought to free themselves from the nobles, tended to side with the pope (the Guelfs). Often it was hard to tell who controlled or legitimately taxed a given territory. Factions abounded. In the cities, the more powerful families built towers to defend themselves against each other. In 1200, Florence had about a hundred such constructions, many more than one hundred and fifty feet high. Even today, Florence doesn’t seem large enough for a hundred towers. People threaded the narrow streets between armed camps. Crossing the river Arno at different points meant passing from one family’s territory to another. Weapons abounded. The murder rate was frightening. Meanwhile, amid the confusion and in the absence of any recognized authority, two factors came powerfully to the fore: individual charisma and money. “No trace is here visible,” writes the great historian Jakob Burckhardt, “of that half religious loyalty by which the legitimate princes of the West were supported; personal popularity is the nearest approach we can find to it. Talent and calculation were the only means of advancement.”

But what were talent and calculation without cash? The usurer, the banker, is more dangerous, more powerful, when the traditional structures of society have given way. There is nothing now to obstruct the progress of money. There is nothing more solid and reliable now than the golden florin of Florence, on which, in defiance of ancient hierarchies, no sovereign’s head is stamped, just the name Florentia on one side and the lily, emblem of the city, on the other. With no king on his coins, the banker is more or less obliged to be a kingmaker himself. He funds this or that side, or is plundered by them. He either controls the fiscal system or he is taxed out of business. Needless to say, the literature of the time was full of attacks on the “lowborn pleb who rises from the depths to great prosperity.” Could anyone be more callous, wicked, and proud? “A couple of lengths of red cloth,” said the wry Cosimo de’ Medici, “and you have your nobleman.”

HERE IS A little poem written in the first half of the fourteenth century:

Money makes a man visible

Money makes him seem knowledgeable

Money hides every sin

Money shows what he buys and bought

Money gives him women to enjoy

Money keeps his soul in heaven

Money makes a nobody noble

Money brings his enemy down to earth