Alternate currencies, bills of exchange and warfare in Trecento Italy

From Firenze University Press Book: Alternative currencies. Commodities and services as exchange currencies in the monetarized economies of the 13th to 18th centuries

William Caferro, Vanderbilt University, United States

The topic of alternate currencies in the late medieval Europe is often linked to money supply, which has long been the subject of spirited debate. Scholars have devoted a great deal of study over the years to the late fourteenth and fifteenth century «bullion famine, a discourse stimulated in the first instance by the famous «prosperity versus hard times» debate about the effects of pestilence and «crises» of the era. Monetary historians have cited numerous interrelated factors, including mint production, balance of payments, international trade, money hoards, among others, that reduced the supply of specie and hampered financial transactions.1 This essay examines alternate currencies used during the «crises» of the second half of the century in trecento Italy to make payments to soldiers. Scholars generally agree that war tightened markets and created stretezza of money supply. But there remains much that we do not know and variables that have not yet been fully investigated, including the fundamental issue of how soldiers were paid (Caferro 2023, 123–146). The lacuna reflects a compartmentalization of study that has separated war into a self-contained category known as military history, which, since Machiavelli and the nationalist writers of the Risorgimento who established the field (Ricotti 1844, Canestrini 1851), has focused primarily on moral issues related to the reliance in the trecento on mercenary soldiers, often ultramontane, from foreign lands, whose auri sacra fames, greed for gold coin, replaced native martial spirit and contributed to a dramatic rise in the costs of warfare. The more civic-minded (virtuous) communal period is the subject of excellent essays, and recent works have broadened our understanding of the later period (Maire Vigeur 2004; Settia 1993, 2002, 2008; Varanini 2006, 2007, 2015; Grillo 2009, 2018; Ansani 2019, 2021).2 But trecento Italy remains a species of «negative intermezzo,» «una parentesi,» in an evolutionary account of Italian warfare, dubbed the «age of the compagnie di ventura, » characterized by marauding private bands, fueled by the desire for gold, which stood as precursors to the rise of native condottieri/lords of the fifteenth century (Mallett 1974, 25–50; Covini 2000, 21; Varanini, 2018, 258). The lack of communication between scholars on the military side, with their specific studies, and those on monetary side, with their own specific studies, is striking. As the monetary scholar Rory Naismith recently stated the «highly technical studies» of medieval money «sit at a remove from the mainstream of historical and archaeological research» (Naismith 2019, 1–17). Anglophone scholars who have combined the two often highlight the effects of the Hundred Years War, whose very name gives it pride of place in discussions, just as its main protagonists, England and France, have served as focal points of consideration of money supply, from which broader European patterns have often been extrapolated (Mayhew, 1995; Spufford, 1998). Nevertheless, the Hundred Years War, its name notwithstanding, was characterized by long truces and few campaigns in the field. War was far more frequent in trecento Italy, owing to numerous contentious states jostling for space on the geographically small peninsula, which, as Jacob Burckhardt famously noted, was connected to the destabilizing «external» political forces of the papacy and empire that lay at the root of much discord. From an economic and monetary perspective, the two should, I believe, be viewed as inputs and outputs into Italy that deserve closer study, alongside the concomitant involvement in the trecento of the French and Hungarian Angevin royal houses in the civil war in the Kingdom of Naples — the latter (Hungary) a major source of gold in the fourteenth century (Štefánik 20112012, 11–40). The methodology provides an escape from the evolutionary schema that obscures more than it reveals about the true nature of war. The present essay takes a closer, albeit necessarily prospective, look at the realities of payments to soldiers, which included in kind compensation as well as the use of paper instruments, most notably the bill of exchange, whose utility as a «flexible friend», to paraphrase an important recent essay, comes into focus on the battlefield. The combination of the need for large sums of money and speedy turnover of them forced states to employ numerous expedients, perhaps more so for war than for any other activity. It is important to note as well the use of bollette (Milan) and apodisse (Florence, from Greek word, Ἀπόδειξις, meaning proof), notarial documents (slips of paper), in payments to soldiers and communal officials more generally, which functioned as receipts and, internally, as an aid in communal accounting to keep track of money spent. Full consideration of these instruments, which morphed into more than mere receipts in the trecento, lay beyond the scope of this paper, but show at base that for all the discussion of auri sacra fames and warfare, there was a significant contemporary paper trail that remains to be explored and a terminology regarding the instruments that was not yet fixed but polysemic.

DOI: 10.36253/979–12–215–0347–0.23

Read Full Text: https://books.fupress.it/chapter/alternate-currencies-bills-of-exchange-and-warfare-in-trecento-italy/14749