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

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.

After Geneva, Bernardo rode on to Basle, where Cosimo had set up another branch — not to trade, but simply to service the cardinals and bishops meeting there in acrimonious general council since 1431. Papal authority was the matter in dispute. By 1436, the Church was once again on the brink of schism. Pope Eugenius, still living in Florence, had abandoned proceedings. The Holy Father’s banker needed to have a sense of who would gain the upper hand, though of course he would never shrink from taking deposits from both sides.

Traveling on to Bruges and London, Bernardo’s brief is to get the local agents to speed up their sale of goods sent by the bank and, even more important, the return of money to Italy. He has special powers of attorney to have particularly recalcitrant debtors taken to court and imprisoned. The sad truth is that your debtor priest in Basle is a safer bet than your merchant debtor in London. Threatened with excommunication through Cosimo’s papal connections, a bishop must pay up. His livelihood and identity are at stake. But there were merchants who took no more notice of a bull of excommunication than a condottiere would of this or that count’s title to some citadel or town. “If only he was a priest,” comments one Medici accountant, preparing to write off a bad debt, “there might be some chance.”

But the real reason for Bernardo Portinari’s trip north was to see if conditions were favorable for opening Medici branches in Bruges and London. Were the local merchants solvent? Were the judges fair to foreigners? What was the level of anti-Italian sentiment in the English wool trade? Considerable. Would the king waive the wool-export monopoly run by the English Merchants of the Staple if the Medici bank lent him ready cash? If lent cash, would the king pay it back? Was the Anglo-French War threatening trade between London and Bruges? How long was the king likely to be king anyway?

Bernardo Portinari’s father died while he was away. He returned to Italy, gave a positive report, then went back to England with a papal bull regarding the appointment of the bishop of Ely and the collection of 2,347 Flanders grossi (about 9,000 florins), much of which was dispatched to Geneva hidden in a bale of cloth. Risky stuff. But profitable. In 1439, a Bruges branch was opened with a secondary office in London. The initial capital was a mere 6,000 florins, all provided by the branch in Rome. In 1446, London became a branch in its own right, with capital of £2,500. At this point, the Medici bank has eight branches of its own and agents in at least eleven other banking centers.

FROM THE GREEN-CLOTH — COVERED table in via Porta Rossa, from the palatial rooms of his great house, now home to the Medici holding, from his private prayer cell in the Monastery of San Marco, Cosimo’s mind reaches out across Europe. He has no phone, no e-mail. The letters arrive regularly, bringing last week’s exchange rates, coded secrets, the latest politics and war news. Replies are dictated, copies made. The director in Rome is complaining about the director in London. I won’t accept second-rate cloth as payment! I want cash. The duke of Burgundy is again defying the French. The coin arriving from Geneva is no longer current and will have to be re-minted. Aren’t my managers spending too much time retrieving money from each other? That boy you sent us, Bruges objects, he can’t even read or write! Why won’t the women of Flanders buy Florentine silks? Our sales rep is so handsome, speaks French so well! You were told not to underwrite insurance on shipping, Cosimo reminds London. The ship was sunk before the premium was paid! Perhaps the theologians are right in complaining how exchange deals in Geneva always run from one fair to the next. It amounts to a loan with interest. But what can a banker do? What can I do to pay less tax? The balance sheet must show only half of the capital invested, Cosimo instructs the director of the Venice branch. And then there was Lubeck. Will the Hanseatic League never let us into Eastern Europe?

Cosimo has Giovanni Benci beside him now as general director of the Medici holding. They work together among the tapestries and sculptures of Cosimo’s house. Benci had made quite extraordinary profits in Geneva. He is astute and gifted and devout. Pondering the accounts together by the light of an open window, do the two men occasionally exchange a snigger over the slave girls, the days in Rome? Are they in agreement with the general Florentine complaint that it’s getting hard to distinguish an honest girl from a prostitute? Do they discuss their contributions to religious institutions, exchange the names of favorite artists — Donatello, Lippi — discuss the latest translations of Cicero, the seductive ideas of the humanists? Why aren’t the Florentine whores happy to wear bells on their heads? Why can’t the Western and Eastern churches agree about the nature of the Trinity? Does the preacher Bernardino di Siena really believe, as he has been claiming in his sermons, that Jews take delight in pissing in consecrated communion cups? Cosimo is now an important figure in the religious confraternity dedicated to the Magi. Contessina fusses over what cloaks he should wear when he rides down the city streets to reenact the three kings’ adoration of the Holy Child.

Together, Giovanni Benci and Cosimo open a Medici branch in Ancona in 1436. This Adriatic port was important for exporting cloth to the East and importing grain from Puglia, farther down the coast. But could that justify the huge capital investment of around 13,000 florins, far larger than the Medici investment in the more important commercial centers of Venice and Bruges? Florence was at war. Once again the Italian scenario was fantastically complicated: a succession dispute down in Naples between the Angevin and Aragon families; the two condottieri , Francesco Sforza and Niccolò Piccinino, at each other’s throats in the Papal States; the pope marooned in Florence, afraid of going back to Rome, worried about developments in Basle, casting about for allies; Duke Filippo Visconti in Milan, with Piccinino in his pay, seeking to capitalize on the turmoil in every area, sending expeditions to Genoa, Bologna, Naples. And now Rinaldo degli Albizzi has left his place of exile and is begging Visconti to attack Florence and restore his family’s faction to power. Undaunted, the incorrigible Florentines are once again launching an assault on Lucca and calling on the Venetians to help them out when it comes to the crunch with Milan. We would, if the Mantuans hadn’t switched sides, the Venetians reply. In the midst of this confusion, Cosimo made a long-term decision to back the great soldier Sforza. The money down in Ancona was not to finance trade at all. Or not exclusively. Ancona was in Sforza’s sphere of operation. It was the Medici bank’s first serious move into funding military operations that were not specifically to do with Florence. Why?