February 2024
Book Group: Medici Money: Banking, Metaphysics, and Art in Fifteenth Century Florence, Tim Parks, 2005.
My initial impression, after one chapter, is that it will be a pretty straightforward read – it is not clear to me if it will be anything other than a slightly-dramatized history of the Medici’s. Parks is not a historian, cites no references, and has a 4-page “Bibliographic Note” which makes it clear that he doesn’t think much of academics. All this does not make me optimistic.
Final impression: My initial impression was accurate, but I did learn some very general things.
- Most interesting was to understand how chaotic the Italian City States were at the time.
- There were continual wars conducted by mercenary armies; citizens were taxed to support the wars, and some smaller towns were sometimes looted or ravished, but mostly the wars didn’t involve civilians
- Many governments were nominally ‘elite republics’ that were governed by councils of members of powerful families, but in practice it appears that one family would typically be in power, and would uses a combination of nepotism and favoritism to stay in power.
- Italy consisted of five power centers that were continually shifting alliances: Naples in the south, Rome farther north, and then Milan, Florence and Venice. When one would become dominant, a couple others would enter an alliance against ti.
- Also of interest was the way banks worked
- While banks loaned money and effectively collected interest, that counted as usury and so they used various facades to avoid the appearance of usury
- Banks also needed to participate in trading to create means of getting repayment for their investments
- Bankers also, apparently because they were really concerned about their souls, cultivated close relationships with the catholic church to achieve absolution.
- As time went on
- the Church became more and more corrupt, and became of less use as a way of allowing bankers to ‘purify’ themselves by association
- bankers, in an effort to cultivate a high social status, made more and more loans to princes and others who could not be counted on to repay them in anything but social capital.
- the generations of Medici morphed from
(1) just bankers who kept a low social profile (e.g., Giovani),
(2) bankers and behind-the-scenes political operators (e.g.,Cosimo);
(3) primarily politicians and elite patrons with little compentence in banking (e.g., Lorenzo)
- the Church became more and more corrupt, and became of less use as a way of allowing bankers to ‘purify’ themselves by association
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