How the 14th-Century Lombard Banks Created the Dark Age - by Paul Gallagher
The Bardi, Peruzzi, and Acciaiuoli family banks, along with other large banks in Florence and Siena in particular, were all founded in the years around 1250. In the 1290s, they grew dramatically in size and rapaciousness, and were reorganized, by the influx of new partners. These were “Black Guelph” noble families, of the faction of northern Italian landed aristocracy always bitterly hostile to the government of the Holy Roman Empire. Charlemagne, 500 years earlier, had already recognized Venice as a threat equal to the marauding Vikings, and had organized a boycott to try to bring Venice to terms with his Empire. Venice in 1300 was the center of the Black Guelph faction which drove Dante and his co-thinkers from Florence. In opposition to Dante’s work De Monarchia, a whole series of political theorists of “Venice, the ideal model of government” were promoted in north Italy: Bartolomeo of Lucca, Marsiglio of Padua, Enrico Paolino of Venice, et al., all of whom based themselves on Aristotle’s Politics, which was translated into Latin for the purpose. The same “coup” made the Bardi, Peruzzi, et al. Black Guelph banking “supercompanies,” suddenly two or three times their previous size and branch structure. Machiavelli describes how, by 1308, the Black Guelph ruled everywhere in northern Italy except in Milan, which remained allied with the Holy Roman Empire — and was the most economically developed and powerful city-state in Fourteenth-century Italy. . . .
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