Money and Credit in Early Modern Europe. The banco Capponi in Florence and at the fairs of Lyon and Besançon, 1553-1584

Fernand Braudel remarked that the evolution of capitalism was the history of the chances that were «offered or denied» to merchant-bankers and, latu senso, businessmen, rather than being that of the opportunities they seized or caused. In brief, notes the French historian, that of capitalism is a «history of structures», of the complex interplay of institutions, techniques, and cultures, that shaped the socio-economic landscape in which capitalists were playing. This research aims at studying the nature of early capitalism by taking the privileged eye of one of the most prominent families of merchant-bankers of Sixteenth century Florence, the Capponi, focusing on their financial activities. By taking the merchant’s perspective, the objective of this research is to discuss the institutional forms taken by the monetary and credit systems of the early modern period, with particular attention to the international fairs of monetary exchange of Lyon and, later, of Besançon, in the second half of the Sixteenth century. The two fairs, with swinging fortunes, were to be the two most important European commercial, credit, and financial centres in the XVI century: there, at quarterly intervals, exchange fairs were held and, at the moment of the payments, the effects of commerce, centralised at the venue, were compensated one against the other, with the aim of minimising the disbursement of cash and facilitating European-wide commerce. The vicissitudes of the banco Capponi between 1553 and 1584 will result then in an observatory to try and add something to the extant literature, to our current understanding of monetary exchange, of credit, of the impact of monetary policy on the mercantile activities, and of the effects of the flows of bullion in the last decades of the century. Between the merchant and the prince, money and credit will be the very object at the heart of this inquiry. The hypothesis that animates this research is that the monetary exchange practices of the XVI century represent a cleavage in the history of how money and credit were conceived and related to in the Western world, a turning point between two worlds, two systems, two different conceptualisations of what were money, capital, and credit. At the same time, the fairs in themselves are a living embodiment of this transition, where multiple levels coexist: the gatherings of Lyon, apogee of the preindustrial monetary system, embody as well, in their démise, a paradigm shift towards what would then constitute the financial revolution of capitalism, representing a case of coexistence of two different world-paradigms. What was at stake then, as it is today, is the generativity of monetary capital in itself, that is, ex ante, the pretence of commanding a price for money defined before it has been exposed to the perilous tides of commerce and uncertainty, which harvest, eventually, a profit ex post. The working hypotheses outlined in the introduction will be then the object of the last chapter, where they will be discussed by taking good stock of the analysis developed to that point.