Florentine Individualism/Merchant Capitalism and Sombart's Der moderne Kapitalismus

Mentalité—religious, economic, or otherwise—is notoriously difficult to assess for the distant past. The obstacles are many, and for historians the task is further complicated by periodization. Premodern merchants dwelled not only in the distant past but in a differentiated past for which historians erected signposts. Among the most formidable of these is that which separates the Middle Ages from Renaissance Italy. The scholarly distinction predates the discussion of capitalism and is the work of Jacob Burckhardt, who in the mid-nineteenth century famously contrasted a “corporate” Middle Ages that lay “half awake” and hidden “beneath a veil, woven of faith” with an “individualistic” Renaissance Italy, where man was the measure of all things and inclined to follow his egoistic impulses, which was the hallmark of modernity.Footnote ¹⁰ Burkhardt was not interested in the economy, but the financial implications of his thesis were fleshed out by a cadre of subsequent writers including the German scholar Alfred von Martin, who equated Burckhardt's “individualism” with the “spirit of capitalism” that was evident in Florence, the prototype of the modern world.Footnote ¹¹ Von Martin made a sharp distinction between a Middle Ages whose “center of gravity” was land, characteristic of a “static order, sanctioned by the church,” and the Renaissance, whose emphasis was the town, which was the changing element” of society.Footnote ¹² “Individualism” was a secular urban force that stood in opposition to the landed and religious sector and therefore “deprived the world of the divine element in order to make it more real.”Footnote ¹³ The American scholar H. M. Robertson, following von Martin, posited a similar contrast, portraying the Middle Ages as “a divine ordering of . . . a graded society” that was the opposite of individualism, which instead signified “free action,” “free trade, competition and private property.”Footnote ¹⁴ It did not seem to matter to these scholars that Burckhardt's examples of individualism were lords, petty aristocrats/mercenaries, who in fact represented the “ordered,” “graded,” church-sanctioned landed sector of society.¹⁴

In any case, there is for Florentine economic historians an embedded tradition of equating the church with a feudal/medieval noncapitalistic order that was liberated by its antithesis: a secular individualism. A subsequent “revolt of medievalists,” led by a generation of archivally trained scholars, brought the search for modernity and capitalism to an earlier period but did little to change the basic opposition.Footnote ¹⁵ Henri Pirenne applied the term “capitalist” to medieval Flemish merchants and described them and urban merchants in general as constituting a “fringe” of a medieval society that otherwise remained feudal and landed. For Pirenne the church was the epitome of feudalism, representing “an idle fortune” that was “fixed motionless in the hands of an aristocracy, priestly or military.” Monasteries were the central feature of landed accumulation and an anticapitalist spirit.Footnote ¹⁶ Pirenne's highly influential construct appears in the work of R. H. Tawney, who took a more nuanced view of the medieval church but ultimately saw the institution as enforcing an “unalterable” social system external to “pecuniary transactions” that occurred in an urban world, “at the fringe of a world of natural economy.”Footnote ¹⁷

Pirenne and his contemporaries worked under the Marxian label of “merchant” or “commercial” capitalism, to distinguish their period from the industrial capitalism of the nineteenth century.Footnote ¹⁸ “Capitalism in the age of the Medici,” wrote de Roover, was “commercial capitalism.” The label de facto reified the distinction between the feudal/church/medieval sector of society and its urban/secular/capitalist counterpart. It allowed for a reduction of the scale of economic activity and discussion of a few enterprising men, who served as examples of capitalism and thus part of an evolutionary process.Footnote ¹⁹ It did not help that the scholars used the term “capitalist” loosely, nay, rhetorically. The great French historian André Sayous applied “capitalist” to the merchants at the great fairs of Champagne in the twelfth century.Footnote ²⁰ Yves Renouard referred to fourteenth-century merchant bankers at the papal court of Avignon as “capitalist men of affairs,” as did Armando Sapori in his extensive studies on Florentine merchant bankers of that era.Footnote ²¹ Even the most recent study of the Florentine economy refers to the merchants of the era as “proto-capitalists.”Footnote ²²

Of critical importance to the construct—and too often ignored in the discussion of it—is the influence of Werner Sombart's Der moderne Kapitalismus (1902). Sombart (1863–1941) is less known in the American academy than his famous contemporary, fellow sociologist and scholarly interlocutor Max Weber. Sombart's connection to Nazi politics and ideology did much to discredit him, and Der moderne Kapitalismus remains untranslated into English. Sombart is best known in the Anglophone academy for his Die Juden und das Wirtschaftsleben (1911), written in opposition to Weber's Protestant Ethic and translated into English in 1925 as Jews and the Rise of Capitalism. The book, which argued for a Jewish “unlimited desire for gain” against Weber's Protestant self-denial as the wellspring of capitalism, has been the source of much dispute.Footnote ²³

But Sombart was a product of the German historical school of economics that had an important impact on the field. It favored historicizing trends over theoretical models and stressed “stages” of development of capitalism. Der moderne Kapitalismus was Sombart's hauptwerk, which he returned to often, revising it three times during his career---with a significant revision, 1916/19. The most comprehensive treatment of capitalism in its day, it profoundly influenced the foundational generation of premodern European economic historians. Der moderne Kapitalismus offered a detailed, if at times rambling, portrait of European economic history, backed up with a dizzying array of examples and statistics and frequent quotes from Goethe.Footnote ²⁴ Like Weber, Sombart treated capitalism as a distinctly European phenomenon that manifested itself as “a spirit.” Sombart saw the premodern period as a preliminary stage in the development of capitalism characterized by Bedarfsdeckungsprinzip (pursuit of one's needs), as opposed to Erwerbsprinzip (pursuit of gain), which was the ethos of full capitalism that did not arrive until the modern era. The medieval merchant was thus for Sombart an adventurer, who carried out trade on a small scale and whose profits inevitably returned to land, which represented the antithesis of capitalistic investment. Trade had a transformative effect only when it was freed from landed investment and “the disastrous circle of low turnover, high expenses, [and] low profits.”Footnote ²⁵ Sombart reiterated these ideas in his Der Bourgeois (Quintessence of Capitalism [1911]), referring to the premodern economy as traditionalist—the term used also by Weber.Footnote ²⁶ Sombart devoted special attention to the importance of double-entry accounting technique, which he described in a long section of book two of Der moderne Kapitalismus. He saw double entry as the essence of the capitalist secular spirit, behaving “like form and content to each other.”Footnote ²⁷

It is important to stress that the comprehensive nature of Der moderne Kapitalismus did much to set the modern terms of discussion. The work of the early pioneers like Pirenne and Sayous can only be properly understood in terms of Sombart.Footnote ²⁸ Pirenne pointedly titled his famous synthesis “The Stages in the Social History of Capitalism” (1913) in response to Der moderne Kapitalismus and the whole German historical school.Footnote ²⁹ Pirenne modified Sombart's approach, arguing that rather than a “gentle ascent” in the history of capitalism, there was a more awkward “series of lifts.”Footnote ³⁰ “There are as many classes of capitalists as there are epochs in economic history,” he wrote, “each distinct and separate.” He accepted, however, Sombart's basic distinction between capitalists and landed aristocrats, noting that merchants of each era inevitably retreated “from the [capitalist] struggle,” invested in land, and then became aristocrats. It was for this reason that “the capitalists of one era do not bring forth those of the next era” and a straight forward evolution did not occur.Footnote ³¹ Sayous's response was more direct. He argued that “le capitalisme commercial e financier” was present in the Middle Ages despite the assertions in “the big book” of Sombart, whose thesis Sayous called stimulating and “audacious.”Footnote ³² Meanwhile, N. S. B. Gras, a founder of the modern discipline of business history, credited Sombart's Der moderne Kapitalismus with influencing a “whole school of writers on the rise of capitalism” and “fertilizing” his own field.Footnote ³³ Indeed, Gras's Business and Capitalism closely follows Sombart's method of tracing stages from “nomadic to petty capitalism,” from the traveling merchant to the sedentary one.Footnote ³⁴ In a review of the scholarship on premodern European economic history prior to World War II, F. L. Nussbaum pointed to the “encyclopedic” Der moderne Kapitalismus as having “a privileged place” in the discourse on capitalism. Accordingly, Nussbaum, in an oft-cited observation, stated that economic history “knew no Renaissance” but was subsumed under the Sombartian category of early capitalism.Footnote ³⁵

Sombart's influence has been particularly strong among accounting historians, who focus on his lengthy discussion of double entry. Bert Yamey devoted his career to modifying Sombart's analysis, arguing for the importance of other accounting methods.Footnote ³⁶ Eve Chiapello's more recent essay systematically traces the influence of Sombart on a generation of accounting historians, who continue to argue in terms laid out by the German sociologist.Footnote ³⁷

For our purposes here, Der moderne Kapitalismus is important because it was also highly influential among Italianists. It was published in Italian as Il capitalismo moderno in 1925, translated by the distinguished economic historian Gino Luzzatto, who was himself a major force in the study of premodern trade and business.Footnote ³⁸ Sombart touched a singular nerve when he denigrated Florentine economic development, calling into question Giovanni Villani's famous figures (1338) that highlighted the potency of the city and arguing more generally that Florentine business remained small in scale and that its commercial investments invariably returned to land. He reinforced the interpretation with a quote from Leon Battista Alberti—whom Alfred von Martin would later cite as a proponent of capitalism—about the profligacy of priests: how they desired “to surpass all men in splendor and ostentation.”Footnote ³⁹ Church-related profligacy was the antithesis of the pursuit of gain and the apotheosis of the return of capital to land. It is notable that Sombart fashioned his portrait at approximately the same time that his German contemporary Alfred Doren depicted the Florentine woolen cloth industry as a capitalist enterprise, stressing the size of the firms, which he called Riesenateliers (giant plants), and compared them to modern factories led by industrial magnates.Footnote ⁴⁰ Meanwhile, Sombart's older contemporary Heinrich Sieveking found fiscal modernity in Genoese public finance and in the practices of the Medici bank.Footnote ⁴¹ As late as the 1950s, Italian economic historian Enrico Fiumi was still situating his work on Florence in terms of Sombart, taking issue with his figures, which Fiumi called “tutto incoerente.”Footnote ⁴²

A Problematic Narrative: God, Trade, and Double-Entry Bookkeeping

In any case, consideration of Sombart's Der moderne Kapitalismus is critical to understanding the scholarly tradition of study of premodern economic history, the deep roots of the developmental/evolutionary (stage) approach and the association of landed wealth with the church as an antipode of capitalism. This has been true despite the fact that the scholarly construct renders problematic and contradictory even the most basic narrative of premodern economic history. The starting point of the traditional narrative is the “take off” of the medieval economy during the Commercial Revolution (1000–1300), when Europe's population increased and commercial fairs in Champagne were established, as were long-distance trade routes, aided by commercial instruments such as commende and partnership agreements that helped manage risk. But the Commercial Revolution coincided with the Crusades to the Holy Land (1095–1291), which brought men, often landed aristocrats and churchmen (the antagonists of capitalism), along roads and seas, helping establish trade routes and create demand for Eastern high-priced goods. The Crusades famously facilitated the growth of commercial cities like Venice, Pisa, and Genoa, which served as middlemen in travel and trade. Indeed, Sayous began his account of the “rise of capitalism” precisely with the First Crusade, and modern textbooks on the Middle Ages continue to elide crusade with commerce without any sense of ambiguity.Footnote ⁴³ Meanwhile, the details of the economic effects of the “unholy” Fourth Crusade that led to the conquest of commercially rich Constantinople have still not received the scholarly attention in the Anglophone academy that they deserve. And for all the emphasis on the role of coastal Italian cities in the crusading adventure, there remain curiosities for Italianists, such as the use, since the twelfth century, of the term “Biccherna” in Siena for communal budgets, taken after the Blachernae district of Constantinople.Footnote ⁴⁴ The great Champagne fairs that brought merchants together from throughout Europe were the work of feudal aristocrats, who sought commercial gain. Count Henry of Champagne (1127–1181) had in fact been on the Second Crusade, which stimulated his interest in promoting the region. And the church's role in the fairs is evident from the fact that they purposefully coincided with religious feast days to take advantage of pilgrim traffic. Lagny, Bar-sur-Aube, Troyes, and Provins hosted events on the major holidays of St. Croix Day, Toussaint, Fête, and St. Ayoul Day, respectively.Footnote ⁴⁵

In short, the church was so deeply woven into the system that it is impossible to graft it out. The pilgrim, soldier, and merchant trod the same roads, stayed at the same inns, and were sometimes, indeed, the same person. The economic importance of pilgrim “tourist” traffic is well known to medievalists. The famous English merchant Godric of Finchale (1065–1170), whom Pirenne singled out as the very first to possess the “spiritus capitalisticus” and who is a staple of evolutionary/developmental narratives of capitalism, combined his merchant affairs with his pilgrimages to holy shrines.Footnote ⁴⁶ As Robert Lopez argued for Italy, it is impossible at the outset of the Commercial Revolution “to tell apart merchants who bought real estate” from “noblemen who sold their estate and invested in trade.”Footnote ⁴⁷ Indeed, the major medieval road, the via Francigena, which linked Rome to Paris and facilitated the early commercial activities of merchants from Asti, Piacenza, and other cities that lay on the road, was not a secular highway but a pilgrimage route in the first instance, established and maintained by the church, which had organized a “rete” (network) of hostels (ospedali) by the twelfth century, built by the Templars to facilitate pilgrimage to Rome.Footnote ⁴⁸ The road diverged up north to the shrine of Santiago Compostela in northwestern Spain. And Florence, which was not on the road and whose trade and economic development was therefore not directly linked to it, nevertheless saw its merchants invest in property along it. The Franzesi merchant bankers of the thirteenth century, who played a key role in financial affairs of France's King Philip the Fair, purchased the town of Staggia and other properties along the via Francigena in the Valdelsa. Merchant bankers of the Alberti family bought possessions at Poggibonsi, also along the via Francigena.Footnote ⁴⁹

Nowhere has the discussion of premodern capitalism been more secularized and distorted than with respect to double-entry bookkeeping, a subject that constitutes its own subfield.Footnote ⁵⁰ Both Weber and Sombart associated the practice with the type of rational abstraction and systematic analysis that was an essential feature of capitalism.Footnote ⁵¹ Sombart devoted much space to the subject in Der moderne Kapitalismus, as noted above.Footnote ⁵² He described double entry as part of the same “spirit” that “first gave birth to capitalism.”Footnote ⁵³ The spirit was not only secular but scientific. Sombart asserted that “double accounting was born of the same spirit as the system of Galileo and Newton, as the teachings of modern physics and chemistry.”Footnote ⁵⁴

The pull of teleology is particularly forceful here. Jane Gleeson-White's popular 2011 book credits double entry with nothing less than giving birth to modern finance.Footnote ⁵⁵ Jacob Soll argues that double entry not only represented a systematization and abstraction that was important to capitalism but, alongside financial accountability, applied also to the realm of political economy and helped determine the success of early modern states.Footnote ⁵⁶ The hero of the narratives is the mathematician and erstwhile “father of modern accounting” Luca Pacioli, whose birthday is celebrated yearly in his native San Sepolcro by accountants from all over the world. Pacioli wrote in Tuscan vernacular to describe the Venetian bilateral method (alla veneziana) of double entry, with debits facing credits, which he saw as the best system. He devoted book nine, tract eleven of his Summa de arithmetica, a treatise on mathematics (1494), to careful description of double entry. Sombart called Pacioli “der Erster Systematiker des Buchhaltung” and described his method as the first scientific and coherent expression of capitalism. Sombart ultimately judged the accomplishment incomplete insofar as Pacioli did not discuss balance sheets, which, according to Sombart, did not come into use until the seventeenth century.

Scholars have engaged in seemingly endless debate about the origins of and the basis upon which to assess double entry. They generally agree that the Genoese government accounts of 1340, rendered in bilateral form, as advocated by Pacioli, are an indisputable early example.Footnote ⁵⁷ Cases have also been made, however, for the priority of the account books of the Florentine Fini and Farolfi firms in the early fourteenth century, as well as the Gallerani firm of Siena and others.Footnote ⁵⁸ Italian scholar Federigo Melis believed that double entry was widely used in Florence after 1380, most strikingly in the books of the famous merchant of Prato, Francesco Datini, for whom a mountain of archival material remains.Footnote ⁵⁹ Raymond de Roover argued that the lack of a complete set of surviving account books made it difficult to know for sure. Nevertheless, de Roover was certain that Florence's “business organization” allowed for its economic hegemony, which in turn laid “the foundation of most institutions of today.”Footnote ⁶⁰

Florentine Double Entry and Mentalité

Accordingly, the first studies of the Medici account books in the Selfridge collection at the Harvard Business School's Baker Library focused on accounting technique and business organization. Florence Edler de Roover used the collection to trace the stages of Medici bookkeeping methods to the “perfection” of double entry, that is, the bilateral, alla veneziana style, with debits across from credits, as advocated by Pacioli. Edler de Roover outlined an evolutionary process, starting with “paragraph form” in an account book belonging to Giovenco di Giuliano de Medici (1406–1418; MS 492), with credits in the front of the book and debits at back of the book, to bilateral form in another account book belonging to Giovenco di Giuliano (1417–1428; MS 493), with debits facing credits, to cross referencing of accounts in an account book belonging to Giovenco di Giuliano and his cousin Giovenco di Antonio (1431–1434; MS 496). The last account book had “many characteristics of double entry in rudimentary form,” she found, but it lacked the “most outstanding feature”: debits on left and credits on right. Finally, an account book belonging to Averardo Bernardo di Medici (1441–1444; MS 498) combined all the features of double entry, in bilateral form, debits on the left-hand side, credits on the right, and cross referencing to other books.Footnote ⁶¹

Edler de Roover was careful to restrict her conclusions to the materials she examined. But more recent studies trace Florentine double-entry accounting practice into the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries and equate it with a distinct mentalité, a “culture of precise quantification,” that was unique to the city and that connected to, and helped explain, the broader cultural/Renaissance achievements for which Florence is famous.Footnote ⁶² By the seventeenth century, double entry was fully developed in bilateral form and widely diffused, appearing not only in merchant books but also in private household accounts, which survive in conspicuously large numbers and, according to the argument, reflect cultural sensibilities.Footnote ⁶³

The logic is convincing and fits well with the established view of the city. But the logic is also uncomfortably familiar, retaining a distinctive Enlightenment/Whig and Burckhardtian aspect. An “ethereal” notion of spirit is here replaced by an equally “ethereal” notion of culture. Accounting method still represents, as in Sombart, a distinctly secular mindset. What is obscured, however, is historical context. If accounting technique is evidence of a unique Florentine way of thinking, linked to the city's economic and cultural success, then it is unclear why the widespread diffusion and perfection of the technique occurred in the seventeenth century when the city was largely in economic decline, with many of its most noteworthy “cultural achievements in the past,” embarking upon what Eric Cochrane famously called the “Forgotten Centuries.”Footnote ⁶⁴ More important, it is necessary to ask whether the examples adduced by scholars regarding double entry are in fact equivalent and comparable, such that extrapolation of a distinct mentalité is warranted. In this regard it is troubling that the bilateral double-entry account book from Genoa in 1340 is a state account book, representing the method employed for public finance. The account books for Florence and Tuscany are those of private merchants and individuals. The examples are not the same.

Indeed, at the time that Florentine merchants appear to have turned to double entry in their private account books in the fourteenth century, the city itself, unlike Genoa, does not appear to have used double entry in its public account books. State budgets, managed by the camera del comune, the chief fiscal office of the commune, recorded income and expenditure separately in the middle of the trecento and employed separate accountants (ragionieri) to oversee each side of the ledger. Interestingly, the accountant in charge of expenditure earned twice the salary of the accountant in charge of income.Footnote ⁶⁵ The reason is unclear, but budgetary evidence suggests that the latter had a helper. Florentine budgets became more complete by 1384, as Anthony Molho has shown, and began listing all communal income and expenses, including those that went directly to specific costs and bypassed the camera altogether. Molho argues persuasively that the budgets represented a “new sense of order and discipline” in terms of the bureaucracy of the city. Nevertheless, the accounting technique itself remained the same as earlier.Footnote ⁶⁶

The basic point is that the double-entry accounting innovation in the private sector in Florence did not have an immediate analog in the public sector. And during times of heavy expenditure, large turnover of funds and fears of fiscal confusion, Florence did not alter its accounting methods but instead hired committees of additional accountants (riveditori/regolatori) to oversee and review the work of the prior ones. The recourse to auditors was a common expedient throughout Tuscany at this time, including in neighboring Siena, where the state instituted a permanent office of regolatori in 1362 to review, and rewrite in summary form, all communal budgets.Footnote ⁶⁷ But little evidence has emerged thus far of innovation in public accounting technique, a subject that requires much more research.

What do we then say about a distinct Florentine “spirit” or “culture?” Why would Genoa, a city rarely associated with a “Renaissance,” arrange its public finance more “rationally”? The question is all the more intriguing given that both Florence and Genoa ultimately instituted public debts that have been associated with “modern” financial capitalism.Footnote ⁶⁸ What, if anything, does the difference say about the political nature of the states, their business communities, and the relation between that community and the fisc? Did Genoa have its own unique mentalité that was fundamentally different from Florence's, and did that mentalité differ with respect to the public and private sphere?Footnote ⁶⁹ Or did the two states simply use different accounting systems for different types of public fiscal activities and organization? And, still more fundamentally, does a single Genoese budget suggest a continuous practice? The surviving budgetary evidence for the city is fragmentary and difficult to generalize from.Footnote ⁷⁰

Such questions are important. If double entry invariably means a “rationalization” and “abstraction” that carried over to the culture or spirit of a people, then it is unclear why Genoa was so unsuccessful at politically disciplining itself. The city was often sold in the fourteenth century and subject, on and off, to the hegemony of Milan. Genoa would appear in this respect a cautionary tale about the dangers of applying the rationalization of accounting method to politics that were in that city anything but rational.

In any case, it is critical to stress that the rationalization attributed to double entry was not secular. Sombart argued that the “order” required of the method revealed its “power.”Footnote ⁷¹ But the Franciscan friar Luca Pacioli, the most famous advocate of the method, stated specifically that the “order” of the system was a reflection of God, who embodied perfection. The connection is no surprise to students of medieval and early modern Europe, who know well the association between the Christian God and order and symmetry. Pacioli states the point at the very outset of his discussion, arguing that the qualities necessary for a successful merchant were the same as those required for Christian redemption.Footnote ⁷² Pacioli's “advice to the merchant” in chapter 4 of his treatise focuses on the hardships endured “at sea” and “on land,” as well as during “war, famine, health and pestilence,” which required that the merchant resemble a rooster (gallo), the “most alert of animals,” keeping vigil at night, not resting in winter or summer.Footnote ⁷³ “The Law helps those who do not sleep,” Pacioli wrote. And “God promises the crown to the watchful ones.”Footnote ⁷⁴ He quoted St. Matthew, a tax collector for Herod: “Seek you Christians first the kingdom of God and then all other spiritual and temporal things will be obtained.”Footnote ⁷⁵

Pacioli exhorted merchants to meditate on God each morning, give to charity, and begin entries in their account books with the name of God. The last has received substantial scholarly attention, particularly with regard to Francesco Datini, whose account books began with “in the name of God and profit.” The famous phrase has become a shorthand formula for the connection between the merchant and God. But as a shorthand and a formula, it has been easy for modern scholars to dismiss it as a sort of lip service, associated with notions of merchant guilt, or as a “motto” that brought together two concepts (God and profit) that fundamentally did not go together.Footnote ⁷⁶

Scholars (most notably economists) have made too much of the “God and profit” motto. If we follow Edler de Roover's lead in examining Medici account books from the Selfridge collection, focusing not on the evolution of double entry but on the religious invocations in the accounts, we do not in fact find a simple formula. The oldest book in the collection, the ricordanze of Giuliano di Giovencho de Medici (1375–1376; MS 491), begins with the following: “In the name of God and the Virgin Mary and the most blessed saints Peter and John the Baptist and Saint James, Saint Anthony and Saint Julian and all the other saints of Paradise . . . and Saints Reparata, Lucia and Caterina.”Footnote ⁷⁷ Why this specific set of saints? John the Baptist was the patron saint of Florence, and the cathedral was named for Reparata. But it is unclear why Giuliano also invokes Saints Peter, Anthony, Julian, Lucia, and Caterina. Do they have a personal meaning to the author? Are they intrinsic to the meaning or purpose of the account book? Why is there no reference to Saint Matthew, whom Pacioli cites on biblical grounds? The questions are worthy yet are not part of the current discourse. Interestingly, Giuliano de Medici qualifies each male saint with the term messer—“messer San Piero, messer Giovanni Batista, messer San Jacopo,” etc.—used for earthly beings of knightly status. The female saints are introduced as madonna.

The invocations cannot be lightly discarded. The personal memoranda book of Giuliano's son, Giovencho (1439; MS 497), begins thus: “In the name of God and the most glorious mother, Madonna Saint Mary, and John the Baptist, ‘padrone’ and protector of this city and the rest of the celestial court of Paradise.”Footnote ⁷⁸ Giuliano, unlike his son, includes only God, the Virgin Mary, and St. John the Baptist, the “padrone” of Florence. Giovencho follows a Tuscan linguistic tradition in transposing the r and l, such that he speaks of the groliosima madre instead of gloriossima madre. And, like his father, he introduces John the Baptist, patron of Florence, as messer. But the references to Anthony, Julian, Reparata, Lucia, and Caterina are gone. Why?

In another of Giovencho's account books, a ricordanze from 1444 (MS 500), the dedication is to God, the “groliosa vergine” and “sempre vergine” Mary, and the saints Peter, Paul, John the Baptist, and the entire “Celestial Court of Paradise.” The male saints are again introduced with the term messer. Although the alteration is less dramatic here, it is unclear why Giovencho decided to add the saints Peter and Paul.Footnote ⁷⁹

The point is that account books used a variety of invocations, which not only reveal something about them and their authors but also deserve attention from scholars. Some indeed have no invocation at all (perhaps also revealing something about the transmission of the text, which is still another issue). But “God and profit” does not capture the complexity of the relationship between the merchant and faith, economy and religion, and should not be taken as emblematic of the genre. There were, as with accounting method, choices made, conscious Christian choices. As John Padgett eloquently argues, Florentine accounts are best read not in terms of “an impersonal spirit of capitalism” but with an understanding that beneath the “dry entries” lay “multivocal relationships” and networks that helped determine the social/political realities of the city.Footnote ⁸⁰ I would add that they also reveal that the networks and relationships were tied to the church, which cannot be factored out of the equation.

Merchants, Clerics, and Diriturra

What has I hope been clear so far is that God was woven into the economic system, and in ways that the current discourse has not accounted for. A secular reading of business organization and accounting technique is prima facie impossible. And this is particularly true of Florence, whose prosperity, as noted above, owed greatly to papal finance, the business in which the city's merchant bankers took the lead for two centuries. It was the connection to the papacy and the need to remit funds from all over Christendom that necessitated the type of multibranch setup that was characteristic of Florentine firms and allowed their growth into “super companies,” as Edwin Hunt calls them, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.Footnote ⁸¹ The size and scope of the Bardi, Peruzzi, and Acciaiuoli “super companies” is well known. The Florentine chronicler Giovanni Villani's oft-quoted description of them as the “pillars of Christendom” should be read with stress on the last word. Armando Sapori, who went the furthest in studying them, provided considerable evidence of their commitment to the faith. Indeed, Sapori spoke of the often “dramatic contrast” between the “seemingly audacious and bold lives” of the merchants and their surviving account books, in which the obligation to God was systematized and piety blended into their business practices.Footnote ⁸²

Charity to the poor and alms to the church were dispensed in a “proportional” way, funneled through the Florentine bishop and pious institutions.Footnote ⁸³ The libri segreti of the firms, the internal books that contained investments and the profits of partners, included an account to God, who was treated the same as an earthly living partner. The language of debits and credits in the account books is consistent: “avemo dato per Dio” and “dovemo dare a Dio.”Footnote ⁸⁴ Meanwhile, Florentine silk merchants, who grew to great prominence in the fifteenth century, systematically set aside a portion of their profits for charity to the Ospedale degli Innocenti, the Florentine orphanage, in whose archives their account books now reside. In this sense, Francesco Datini's oft-cited legacy to the Ceppo poorhouse in Prato and for foundlings at Santa Maria Nuova in Florence, attributed to his own personal experience (as a child without parents), should be contextualized as a more general practice.

When the great pillars of Christendom famously failed in the 1340s, the poveri of God were compensated like other creditors. The money owed them was settled specifically through confraternities such as Orsanmichele, which was a great beneficiary of the bank failures, receiving much of the rural patrimony of Bardi merchants in the Mugello.Footnote ⁸⁵ As Sapori makes clear in a less-cited part of his work, the Florentine banking crisis of the 1340s created a moral/religious crisis. A surviving testament of the merchant banker Bartolomeo Cocchi-Compagni, whose firm failed along with the others and whose reputation for lending was dubious, shows that he decided to compensate in full all “victims” of usury.Footnote ⁸⁶ Bartolomeo consigned his books to the archbishop, and after the funeral, as requested in his will, he sent banditori (criers) throughout the city and contado to alert creditors to make claims against his inheritance, which he promised to settle quickly, in fifteen days for citizens and thirty days for contadini. Sapori admits that the act demonstrated more than a dose of egoism on the part of Bartolomeo, but it also represented a sincere commitment to God.Footnote ⁸⁷ There are many additional examples of restitution of usury and ill-gotten gains by prestatori su pegno such as Agostino Miglioretti and Angelo Corbinelli in Florentine notarile and church documents. And the clients of Agostino, a manifest usurer known as “il cane,” included the religious houses of Santa Maria Maggiore, the abbeys of San Salvi and Santa Trinita and the bishop of the city.Footnote ⁸⁸

The evidence emphasizes the inherent tensions between merchants and their faith, but it also lends support to Giacomo Todeschini's important assertion that modern scholars have exaggerated the notions of “inevitable” and “everlasting conflict” between the two.Footnote ⁸⁹ Todeschini has stressed the overlap between the language of Franciscan theologians and that of merchants. The Franciscan emphasis on poverty, which seems antithetical to commercial practice, maintained at its core a similar ethos, first articulated by the Franciscan theologian Peter John Olivi (1248–1298) and plainly evident in Luca Pacioli.Footnote ⁹⁰ Christian virtue involved “indefatigable commitment” to a task, a willingness to endure hardships and assume risk for the utility of society.Footnote ⁹¹ Todeschini adduces an array of writers, who compared monks to merchants in their willingness to suffer anxiety and deprivation to free their soul for the sake of family and society.Footnote ⁹² With Pacioli firmly in mind, Todeschini asserts that “between the 1400s and 1500s merchants, businessmen and the governors of cities spoke the language of Franciscan economic ethics and implemented forms of association and economic networks that were able to synthesize private profit, public usefulness, and virtuous practices in Christian cities.”Footnote ⁹³

Indeed, as we have seen, the Franciscan friar Pacioli stressed in his discussion of double entry the hardships attendant to the life of the merchant and moral Christian rectitude that was requisite for success that also benefited society as a whole. The same language, however, appears also in the commercial manual of the Florentine merchant from Ragusa, Benedetto Cotrugli, who wrote about double entry in 1458, before Pacioli, but whose work was not published until later. Cotrugli was not a Franciscan and his treatise, On Commerce and the Perfect Merchant, aligns more with the humanist tradition, containing many classical references that do not appear in Pacioli.Footnote ⁹⁴ Cotrugli's merchant, like Pacioli's, endured physical hardship and “gran fatiga.” Like Pacioli, he was ever vigilant, working “day and night,” traveling “on foot and on horse” and “by land and by sea.” The merchant “set aside all other concerns,” including those things “necessary for the conservation of life,” such as “eating, drinking and sleeping.”Footnote ⁹⁵ This, along with dedication to the Christian faith, allowed the merchant to succeed, and his success contributed to the public welfare. Cotrugli goes so far as to compare the merchant to a soldier in order to underscore the degree of endurance necessary to handle the hardships. The comparison appears also in Pacioli, who employs decidedly martial imagery when describing the task of merchants. “Mars never gave victory without a battle,” he wrote, and “the Apostle Paul said that no one is worthy of the crown who does not do battle for it.Footnote ⁹⁶ Like Pacioli, Cotrugli also stressed that merchants had to keep correct books and that double entry was an important component of this.Footnote ⁹⁷

The parallels are not, however, restricted to manuals or fifteenth-century Italy. A similar ethic can be found even in the story of Godric of Finchale, the eleventh-century English merchant whom Henri Pirenne highlighted as the first to possess the “spiritus capitalisticus.” Godric lived before St. Francis and the Franciscans. But a close reading of Godric's life reveals correspondences with Pacioli and Cotrugli. Pirenne stresses the hardships Godric endured, “trudging many hours from village to village” and “traveling long distances by sea” to fairs and pilgrimage sites. Godric was “assiduous above all men”; he succeeded by the “sweat of his brow,” which was reflected in his physical appearance: his skin made “rough” from perpetual labor.Footnote ⁹⁸ Pirenne argued that Godric possessed all the elements of a capitalist if one omitted “the pious conclusion of his biography” in which Godric, grown old, withdrew from the world to a monastery, giving his money to the poor. But Pirenne's desire to omit the pious conclusion is impossible because Godric's biography is a Vita Sancti, a medieval saint's life, a genre intended to demonstrate the Christian virtues of its subject, which exists only because of its pious conclusion. Pirenne's assertion is thus striking evidence of a basic misapprehension of the medieval church that influenced much of the subsequent scholarship. Read critically and in context, Godric's decision to become a monk, which has been taken as an example of the fundamental opposition between religion and economy, is better understood as the natural conclusion of a career as a Christian merchant, whose duty to the church and pious commitment reached a natural if seemingly contradictory conclusion.

The connection between the cleric and the merchant went beyond language. Indeed, it is in the perception of the two as representing separate spheres that the compartmentalization of study and the ghost of Sombart have cast their longest shadow. Rather than occupying a core and periphery, the merchant and the monk shared the same space and worked closely together.Footnote ⁹⁹ Throughout Italy, state funds were handled by monks, who served as communal chamberlains and treasurers alongside merchants. Since the thirteenth century, Florence employed members of the Cistercian order of San Salvadore in Settimo and the Umiliati of Ognisanti as chamberlains of the camera del comune, the city's chief fiscal office.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ Neighboring Siena relied on monks from San Galgano, a brother house of San Salvatore, as treasurers of its main fiscal office, the Biccherna. One of the earliest of the famous painted Biccherna covers depicts a monk/treasurer from San Galgano, holding an account book.Footnote ¹⁰¹ Frances Andrews has pointed out the singularity of the portrait: a Cistercian with an account book rather than a bible. She argues that that there is nothing in the rule of St. Benedict, which governed the Cistercian order, that would suggest monks should serve as treasurers for states. Nevertheless, it was a reality, not only in Siena and Florence but also in Parma, Piacenza, Cremona, and elsewhere in Italy. Monks were good candidates for the job because they had significant financial experience, buying and selling property, collecting rents, and investing money.

The financial sophistication of the Cistercians is indeed well known to medievalists.Footnote ¹⁰² They possessed large landed estates throughout Europe, performed sophisticated financial transactions, and carefully organized their patrimonies into “granges” that allowed for specialization, technical innovation (mills, water power) that reduced labor costs and created surplus for sale. Cistercians provided credit, took deposits, and were by necessity skilled in mathematics.Footnote ¹⁰³ They played a prominent role in raising sheep on their granges for the wool cloth trade in England, where they dealt directly with Florentine merchant bankers who dominated the export business there. Florentines thus worked extensively with monks in both public finance and private business, two economic worlds that were connected. And it is worth noting that the Cistercians and monasticism more generally have been the subject of study of premodern capitalism, a discourse that Florentinists have paid little attention to.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

The movement of personnel went in both directions. Monasteries employed merchants to help with their accounts. The priors of San Lorenzo in Florence hired members of Frescobaldi, Peruzzi, and Bardi merchant-banking families to handle their finances; secular abacus teachers served as managers of the monastery at Santa Croce.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ Yves Renouard, in his study of bankers in Avignon, stressed the social and political embeddedness of the merchants, noting in particular that family members of the major Florentine firms were directly involved in the church. Bartolo Bardi of the eponymous banking clan was the bishop of Spoleto, and Angelo Acciaiuoli was bishop of Florence. The connection is most obvious with regard to the Medici family, which not only did extensive business with the papacy but brought forth several popes.Footnote ¹⁰⁶

I would go still further and argue that the connection was systemic. Business and public finance were connected by similar Christian principles. Julius Kirshner, Lawrin Armstrong, and others have outlined the forceful theological debates in Florence about the funded public debt (monte), which, in Kirshner's sonorous phrase, “was contested in city council halls, among theologians and in the streets.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷ An important and overlooked communal tax imposed by Florence was the dirittura gabelle, levied on all financial transactions including payment of salaries and transfers of money from one communal office to another.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ The impost received little attention in Bernardino Barbadoro's classic study of Florentine finance, which focused more on direct taxation and the foundation of the communal monte, the subject of numerous subsequent studies.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ Nevertheless, the dirittura tax was imposed since at least the early trecento and provided a steady and substantial source of revenue. The word itself is noteworthy: it was used by Dante in Convivio (4.17.6) to signify justice and moral Christian rectitude and by Boccaccio in the Decameron for “uprightness” and “honesty/fidelity.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ Accordingly, the gabelle was specifically intended to raise money for the public good, to convert public spending and financial dealings into beautifying the cathedral, the symbol of civic Christian pride. Soldiers comprised the largest part of Florence's workforce, and thus the return from that sector, the most morally dubious, was the greatest.

Notions of dirittura were also operative among merchants and applied directly to their activities. The famous Florentine merchant manual of Balduccio Pegolotti (Pratica della Mercatura [1340]) starts with a much-overlooked poem about the virtues of the merchant. The poem refers in its first line to dirittura (“Dirittura sempre usando gli conviene/lunga provedenza gli sta bene”), a moral/Christian rectitude that was a requisite for a successful career as a merchant.Footnote ¹¹¹ The rest of the poem corresponds to the portrait of the merchant in the works of Cotrugli and Pacioli. It counsels him to maintain a good reputation and to always work hard, give to the church, and keep account books free from error. The same poem, in slightly different form, appears in Dino Compagni's earlier work, Song of Worthy Conduct (La canzone del pregio), in a larger discussion of the virtues of various professions.Footnote ¹¹² Compagni also applies dirittura (“dritura sempre usare a lui conviene/lunga provendenza li sta bene”) to the merchant, underlining the utility of it, as we have seen in public finance. That Pegolotti likely copied the poem from this earlier work emphasizes the Florentine merchants’ commitment to the practice.

The point here is that the Christian principles that lay behind proper merchant practice and profit were operative also in Florentine public finance. And it is in this respect that Andrews's conclusion with regard to the secular participation of prelates in Florentine finance is most applicable. A basic tie between the Cistercian monastery and the state was an economic quid pro quo—a fiscal negotiation and accommodation—that Andrews views as a much-neglected “service for financial reward” embedded in church-state relations. In Florence, the Cistercians received tax immunities in return for their service.Footnote ¹¹³

Papal Banking and Pious Service

The connection returns us to papal banking, the business that garnered so much profit for Florence and so much scholarly attention with regard to premodern capitalism. Apart from a brief period during the War of Eight Saints (1375–1378) and its aftermath, Florence dominated papal banking from the second half of the thirteenth century through the fifteenth century.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Raymond de Roover's discussion of Florentine capitalism focused squarely on the Medici, as have subsequent scholarly critiques.Footnote ¹¹⁵ And it is here that notions of negotiation and accommodation, of financial quid pro quo, were writ large and scholarly assumptions have in many ways been most rigid, the developmental/evolutionary model most problematic, and the need to contextualize the greatest.

De Roover stressed that despite the modern capitalistic bearing of its bank, the Medici remained steadfast in their commitment to the Christian faith. An important revision of Medici capitalism written after de Roover's death, however, took a decidedly more secular and skeptical view. It dismissed notions of a “spirit” of capitalism as “ethereal” and “disembodied” and favored measuring the Medici capitalism with more “standard” yardsticks such as “competition” and “power.”Footnote ¹¹⁶ Following a line of reasoning similar to that of Werner Sombart, the Medici bank fell short. Its operations were small scale, the market in which it operated was “fragmented,” and there was little competition among firms, little use of political “power” or an “urge for self-aggrandizement.”Footnote ¹¹⁷

The problem of context is manifest here. What does “commitment” to the Christian faith look like for a papal banker? And what do “competition” and “power” look like in the distant past? It is anachronistic to imagine that merchant banks “competed” in a modern way to reduce transactions costs by finding new and better methods of transporting goods, in a world where transport was inherently uncertain and merchants knew well that the best expedient was to ship goods together. Competition and power had a decidedly personal aspect in the premodern world. Personal relations with lords and kings were essential for gaining access to the markets they controlled. This was particularly true of papal bankers, who, as Renouard noted, became, by necessity, deeply embedded in the social and political milieu in which they worked and developed personal relationships with pontiffs. The personal nature of the relationship was in fact written into the papal banker's “job description,” which referred to the men in Latin as romanam curiam sequentes, or in Italian as quelli che seguono la corte di Roma, that is, “those who follow the Roman Curia/Court.”Footnote ¹¹⁸ Papal bankers traveled alongside the pontiff on his many journeys, to church councils, to visit dioceses, and so on. Popes were among the most mobile men in all of Europe, and those who serviced them were similarly mobile, muddying the distinction between N. S. B. Gras's traveling and sedentary merchants.

The rise of the Medici in the early fifteenth century resulted, as George Holmes has shown, from their ability to obtain the office of the depositary—a lay office begun in the early fifteenth century, equivalent to the chief treasurer of the pope—at the top of the institutional hierarchy of the church.Footnote ¹¹⁹ The Medici gained this position by cultivating close personal relations with Baldassare Cossa. Giovanni Bicci de Medici, the “father” of the Medici bank, befriended Cossa when he was a papal legate in the Romagna. When Cossa became Pope John XXIII (1410), he gave the post of depositary to the Medici.Footnote ¹²⁰ Medici profits grew dramatically, and they dominated the office for much of the rest of the century. The close connection with the pope opened markets throughout Europe in ways that association with no other lord or ruler could. The pontiff gave access to the critical and lucrative high-end luxury market among clerics throughout Europe. And the pontiff had unparalleled clout, as association with him made customers more likely to heed their obligations to bankers. An extant balance sheet from the Medici branch at Basel shows that the bank threatened a client with excommunication by the pope if he did not pay.Footnote ¹²¹ The pope offered spiritual sanction to enforce market rules for his bankers.

One could perhaps argue that the personal aspect of commercial competition is not without modern parallel insofar as playing golf with a prospective client is a common business strategy today. But it should be stressed that premodern merchants cooperated with one another out of necessity, particularly in distant markets, where they arranged themselves into “nations.” Given the insecurity of travel, mutual shipping of goods helped to reduce transaction costs. But firms, including the Medici and their competitors, had their own trademarks, written into their articles of agreement and stamped onto their goods. There was thus a species of brand recognition. Buyers associated a trademark with the quality of the goods, and extant merchant letters frequently speak of this and the need to sell cloths of brilliant color and fine detail that appealed to customers. And Christianity was woven into the trademarks, which were variations of Christian crosses, making clear to customers the intersection between the faith and commerce.

The above point brings us to the question of the Christian commitment of the bankers. Crucial insight into this, and papal banking more generally, comes from the Spinelli archive at Yale University. The archive has not had the same impact on scholarly study as the Selfridge collection at Harvard. It was held privately by the Spinelli family until sold illegally in 1987 to Yale University; consequently, the Spinelli have not been well integrated into the overall literature. Their banking activities are further obscured by the fact that they were not, strictly speaking, a Florentine firm insofar as they were for a time part of the Borromei banking network, a family associated nowadays with Milan but originally from the Tuscan town of San Miniato.Footnote ¹²²

The focal point of the family archive is the merchant banker Tommaso Spinelli (“Tommaso il grande”), who established the family fortune during the time of Medici ascendency. Spinelli is particularly useful for the discussion here because his business, more so than that of the Medici, focused squarely on the church. Spinelli himself made this clear, proclaiming in a surviving fragment of his ricordanze (1454) that he was “the oldest merchant at papal court,” having serviced the court for a full thirty-two years.Footnote ¹²³

Spinelli's career confirms the personal nature of the premodern capitalist world of papal banking. Like all papal bankers, he followed the pope in his travels. He began his career with the Alberti bank, representing it in August 1419 in Florence, where Pope Martin V temporarily established court (at Santa Maria Novella) on his way to Rome. Spinelli left the Alberti bank in 1433 and joined its competitor Galeazzo Borromei, who had branches in London, Bruges, and Venice and sought, through Spinelli, an entrée into papal banking. Spinelli followed Pope Eugenius IV to the Council of Basel in 1435 and serviced him even while his legitimacy as pope was being called into question. He made little profit, but in 1443 Eugenius, who had been friends with Spinelli before he was pope, chose him as depositary general. Here issues of “political power” indeed played a role, as Eugenius opposed Medici/Florentine support for Francesco Sforza's military expedition into papal territory in the Marches in 1442, which induced Eugenius to cease employing a member of the Medici bank as depositary. As with the Medici, Spinelli's business grew dramatically after his appointment. An extant account book from November 1444 shows that Spinelli's profits more than doubled and that he did business with prelates and their families from throughout Europe, including bishops, cardinals, the personal doctor of the pope, and the pope's personal tailor. Spinelli lost the position as depositary when Eugenius died in 1447 and his successor Pope Nicholas V chose Roberto Martelli, the manager of the Medici papal branch (and Medici politics were more in line with the papacy).Footnote ¹²⁴ Spinelli then withdrew from his partnership with the Borromei and set himself up as an independent merchant in Rome, opening up a fondaco in the city from which he sold high-priced cloth.Footnote ¹²⁵ A few years later Spinelli set up a silk firm and a wool cloth firm in Florence that marketed goods—high-priced cloths, linens, silver utensils, and other luxury goods—in Rome through the web of correspondents he had set up through the papal curia.Footnote ¹²⁶

It is important to emphasize the degree to which Spinelli owed his earnings to the church. The lack of libri segreti makes it difficult to assess the overall profits and structure of Spinelli's banking operations, which were in any case less diversified and on a smaller scale than those of the Medici.Footnote ¹²⁷ Nevertheless, by 1458, after establishing his silk firm in Florence, Spinelli was importing more goods into Rome than the Medici.Footnote ¹²⁸ Spinelli's statement in a letter that year that “there was not a cardinal that he had not served” was not idle talk.Footnote ¹²⁹ His connections allowed him to evade even the guild restrictions of the Hanseatic league and sell silks among the clergy in the city of Lübeck. And like the Medici, Spinelli did not “compete” with other firms in the modern sense. He shipped his wares with others to reduce transaction costs and marketed his goods through some of the same intermediaries as his competitors.Footnote ¹³⁰ Competition lay in jockeying for closeness to the pope and clerics and their substantial retinues. Spinelli, like his counterparts, marked his goods with the trademark of his company and, like the Medici, used his standing at the papal court to keep his clients in line. Spinelli boasted openly of this power in a letter to a factor, instructing him to threaten a recalcitrant lender with excommunication, which Spinelli could obtain from the pope.Footnote ¹³¹

Spinelli emerges from the documents as a merchant in the mold of Pacioli and Cotrugli, who behaved according to the principles of diriturra. He followed the now familiar routine of systematically giving to charitable causes, donating a portion of his earnings from his silk business to the Ospedale degli Innocenti, and spending generously on the neighborhood church of Santa Croce to build a new infirmary and cloister. When Spinelli was depositary, he requested and received a portable altar so that he could have mass said for him as he moved about with the pope.Footnote ¹³² Meanwhile, an extant legal disposition by an employee, Gabriello Falcone, echoes Pacioli and Cotrugli in describing Spinelli as merchant always at work, “sitting fixed over the ledger books,” night and day, and demanding the same from his employees.Footnote ¹³³

The description may easily be dismissed as the complaint of an unhappy worker, but it takes on greater significance because Spinelli was a close personal friend of the Dominican friar and archbishop of Florence, Antoninus (Antonio Pierozzi), author of Summa theologica moralis, a treatise that Joseph Schumpeter lauded for its economic sophistication and that Raymond de Roover called the work of a “great economic thinker.”Footnote ¹³⁴ Spinelli and Antoninus became friends when the latter was still a monk in Rome. Spinelli served Antoninus when he became Florentine bishop as collector of the papal tenth and collector of money for Pope Calixtus's crusade in 1453 against the Muslim infidel at Varna. Spinelli valued his correspondence with Antoninus so much that before Spinelli died in 1472, he arranged to have the letters buried with him.Footnote ¹³⁵ When Antoninus died years earlier, in May 1459, Spinelli had helped pay for his funeral, hiring the gravediggers, bell-ringers, and monks of San Marco for singing the requiem.Footnote ¹³⁶

Parallels exist between Spinelli's commercial career and Antoninus's portrait of the merchant in Summa theologica moralis, particularly in the second and third sections of the work relating to matters of economy and faith.Footnote ¹³⁷ Antoninus applied Christian ethical principles to real-life issues and argued the now familiar point that the acquisition of wealth was not displeasing to God provided that it was done in a principled, measured, and Christian way, such that earnings were moderate and spent in a manner that would be “virtuous.”Footnote ¹³⁸ Antoninus offered examples of “virtuous” spending: providing relief to the poor, providing support for one's family according to social status, and, more broadly, providing for the welfare of the community. Although a Dominican, his notions are similar to those outlined by Todeschini connecting the Franciscans to merchants and were clearly broadly operative. Indeed, in his legal deposition Gabrielle Falcone described Spinelli as not only always vigilant and at work but concerned, during the papal jubilee in 1450 when business was excellent and profits high, that Falcone abandon his lucrative speculation in gold because, Spinelli told him, “I do not have such great need nor such great desire to earn as you may think. It is enough that I preserve myself.”Footnote ¹³⁹ The statement not only corresponds to Antoninus but also matches Cotrugli, who in the section of his work on the merchant and religion stressed the importance of “moderato guadagno” (moderate gain) in business, directly quoting Antoninus's Summa.Footnote ¹⁴⁰

There are, to be sure, important theological distinctions and the aim of this essay has not, as stated at the outset, been to minimize them. But what seems clear from the example of Spinelli is that he equated his financial service to the church with a sense of Christian duty. In this respect, he lends support to Andrews's assertion about a fundamental financial negotiation between the church and commerce, monk and merchant. Spinelli wrote in his ricordanze, “I have tried to lead an exemplary life and can say truthfully that . . . the highest pontiffs and the exalted cardinals never requested any service which I did not render.” The statement conjoins Christian moral rectitude with economic service to the church and an essential and noncynical quid pro quo that was prominent in the world of papal banking.Footnote ¹⁴¹ Pope Eugenius IV, who launched Spinelli's career, was himself a major holder of shares in the Florentine public debt who, when the city was slow in paying interest, moved to sequester the goods of Florentine merchants in Rome and in the papal states Footnote ¹⁴²

And as the Cistercians received tax privileges from the Florentine state for public service, Spinelli and papal bankers received tax breaks for service to the pope. Items that Spinelli sold directly to the apostolic chamber were exempt from the usual import duty, including expensive silk brocades for Pope Nicholas and mourning cloth for the funerals of Pope Eugene IV and Calixtus III.Footnote ¹⁴³ Spinelli, like other bankers, received highly lucrative tax farms including the gabelle of Ripa and Ripetta, an impost on all goods that came to Rome by sea in return for loans.Footnote ¹⁴⁴

The rewards further explain the otherwise unwise decision of bankers to issue large loans to pontiffs. The large sum that Spinelli lent to Pope Calixtus III in 1457 constituted Christian service in the strictest sense, because it was raised for a crusade against Muslim infidels and enemies of the Christian faith. Calixtus pawned his papal tiara as surety, but he did not repay the loan. Crusades had proved unsuccessful since the thirteenth century, a fact that Spinelli undoubtedly knew. Pious service was the only way to do business in the context of the papal court, which was still the largest market in Christendom. Christian rectitude and service to the church, were conjoined with a calculated, reasoned profit motive.Footnote ¹⁴⁵

It is important to stress again, by way of conclusion, that the purpose of the foregoing discussion has been to add nuance to the discourse on premodern capitalism and Christianity, to expose the limits of an embedded developmental/evolutionary model, and to show that the two “spheres” were connected in intricate ways. There are no simple binaries or stark oppositions. There was conflict and debate, but the church was not monolithic, nor did it stand apart for the world of the merchant. An integrated approach to study is, to co-opt a phrase, the most “useful category” for future analysis. This is particularly true of Florence, for which the tendency to compartmentalize, secularize, and generalize has been most forceful and, ironically, reified by archival research in the Anglophone academy that has added vital detail but has left long-standing and outdated scholarly constructs alone. Even Renouard, who stressed the embedded nature of Florentine merchant bankers in their political/religious milieu, ultimately posited a “peculiar mentality” that was distinctly “rational” and “individualistic” to describe the Florentine commercial world.Footnote ¹⁴⁶ But, to paraphrase Thomas Kuhn in another context, assimilating new facts “demands more than an additive adjustment of theory.”Footnote ¹⁴⁷ It requires that historians examine their assumptions more cautiously, sift carefully through the various layers, and accept the possibility that instead of a single origin or trend they may discover several patterns that are so interwoven they may be difficult to extricate from one another.Footnote ¹⁴⁸