Old Banking

Medici were more gangsters than stickers: a small-time clan, notable more for lowly violence than for high finance. Between I 343 and I360 no few than five Medici were sentenced to death for capital crimes. 31 Then came Giovanni di Bicci de Medici. It was his institutionalize to make the Medici legitimate. And through hard work, sober living and bookish calculation, he succeeded. In I385 Giovanni became manager of the Roan branch of the situate run by his relation Vieri di Cambio de Medici, a m cardinalylender in Florence. In Rome, Giovanni built up his reputation as a silver trader. The papacy was in m both ways the perfect(a) client, given the number of different currencies flowing in and clapperclaw up of the Vaticans coffers. As we have seen, this was an age of sevenfold systems of coinage, nigh gold, many silver, some base metal, so that any long-distance call trade or tax pay was complicated by the need to covert from one currency to another. But Giovanni all the way saw even greater opportunities in his native Florence, consequently he retuned in I397. By the time he passed on the business to his eldest countersign Cosimo in I420, he had naturalised a branch of the argot in Venice as good as Rome; branches were afterwards added in Geneva, Pisa, London and Avignon. Giovnni had in addition acquired interests in 2 Florence wool f figure outories.

Of particular importance in the Medicis early(a) business were the bills of exchange (cambium per literas) that had developed in the course of the meat Ages as a way of support trade. 32 If o ne merchant owed another a pith that could ! not be paid in money until the coclusion of a transaction some months hence, the creditor could draw a bill on the debtor and either use the bill as a means of honorarium in its own right or obtain cash for it at a discount from a banker willing to act as broker. Whereas the charging of interest was condemned as rake-off by the Church, on that point was nothing to prevent a calculating trader making profits on such transactions. That was the nitty-gritty of the...If you want to go a full essay, order it on our website: OrderCustomPaper.com

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