The Venetian money market: banks, panics, and the public debt, 1200-1500

Abstract

In 1985, Frederic C. Lane and Reinhold C. Mueller published the magisterial Money and Banking in Mediaeval and Renaissance Venice. Now, after ten years of further research and writing, Reinhold Mueller completes the work that he and the late Frederic Lane began. The history of money and banking in Venice is crucial to an understanding of European economic history. Because of its strategic location between East and West, Venice rapidly rose to a position of preeminence in Mediterranean trade. To keep trade moving and credit available, from London to Constantinople and beyond, Venetian merchants and bankers created specialized financial institutions at the service of private entrepreneurs and public administrators: deposit banks, foreign exchange banks, the grain office and a bureau of the public debt. This new volume clarifies Venice's pivotal role in Italian and international banking and finance. It also sets banking - and panics - in the context of more generalized and recurrent crises involving territorial wars, competition for markets and debates over interest rates and the question of usury.