"With Usura,"

wrote Ezra Pound,

"hath no man a house of good stone
Each block cut smooth and well fitting
That design might cover their face."

By usura, Pound meant usury, or the lending out of money at an interest. Not just an exorbitantly high rate of interest, as in the modern usage of the word usury, but any interest at all. He goes on:

"With usura
Hath no man a painted paradise on his church wall….
No picture is made to endure nor to live with
But it is made to sell and sell quickly
With usura, sin against nature."

In the 1920s Pound had come to believe, as many still do, that international banking was a source of great evil. He used the Italian word usura because it was in Italy that the story had begun. During the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries a web of credit was spun out across Europe, northwards to London, east as far as Constantinople, west to Barcelona, south to Naples and Cyprus. At the heart of this dark web of usura lay Florence. But in the same period, and above all in the century that followed, the Tuscan city also produced some of the finest painting and architecture the world has ever seen. Never had stone blocks been cut more smoothly, never were finer paradises painted on church walls. In the Medici family in particular the two phenomena - modern banking, matchless art - were intimately linked and even mutually sustaining. Pound, it seems, got it wrong. With usura we have the Renaissance, no less.
This book is a brief reflection on the Medicis of the 15th century, their bank, their politics, their marriages, slaves and mistresses, the conspiracies they survived, the houses they built and the artists they patronised. The attempt throughout will be to suggest how much their story has to tell us about the way we experience the relationship between high culture and credit cards today, how far it informs our continuing suspicions with regard to international finance and its dealings with religion and politics.

The story is complicated. There are five generations to consider. It's important to get the main names and dates and the overall trajectory of the thing firmly in the head from the start.
The bank is founded in 1397 and collapses in 1494. Alas, there will be no centenary party. Giovanni di Bicci de' Medici starts it. That is: Giovanni, son of Bicci (inexplicable nickname for Averardo), of the Medici family. Born in 1360, Giovanni is responsible for the bank's initial expansion and for establishing a particular Medici style. He keeps his head sensibly down among his flourishing account books before departing this life in 1429. "Stay out of the public eye," he tells his children on his death bed.
Cosimo di Giovanni de' Medici eventually disobeys that order, which is why he will later be reverently known as Cosimo pater patriae, father of his country. His dates are 1389 to 1464 which makes him the longest lived of our five wealthy men. Having survived brief imprisonment and exile, Cosimo takes the Medici bank to its maximum extension and profitability and moves decisively into politics to the point of more or less running the Florentine Republic. He is a friend to philosophers, architects and painters, a patron to the arts and benefactor of major public works. At his death the bank has already entered a decline from which it will never recover.
Piero di Cosimo de' Medici came to be known as Piero the Gouty. Many male members of the Medici family suffered from gout, a hereditary form of arthritis involving painful and ultimately chronic inflammation of the joints. If Piero was the one singled out for the unhappy nickname, it was simply because he didn't outlive his father long enough to be known for much else. To Piero, however, goes the merit, or blame, of establishing a principle of succession there where no succession should have been. Piero was head of the Medici bank by hereditary right, but there was no constitutional reason why he should have taken over from Cosimo as key man in the Florentine state. Frail, bedridden and bad-tempered, he was nevertheless more determined and effective than his republican enemies. Born in 1416, Piero ran the show for just five years before handing over the vast family fortune more or less intact to eldest son Lorenzo in 1469.
Lorenzo was to be known as Il Magnifico. So much for keeping out of the public eye. Just twenty when thrust into the limelight, he puts his eggs in other baskets than finance and commerce, allowing the family bank to slide into now irretrievable decline. Like his father and grandfather Lorenzo survives a major conspiracy and shows great skills of political manipulation. Unlike them, he aspires to the aristocracy, writes poetry (good poetry), and barely seeks to disguise a vocation for dictatorship. In 1492, unable, due to the gout, to visit his portly mistress, Lorenzo finally succumbs to a variety of ailments at the age of 43.
Last of the five, Piero di Lorenzo would all too soon be known as Piero the Fatuous. His father's artistic achievements and pretensions to nobility proved less transferable as assets than the vast monetary wealth left by his great grandfather, now drastically diminished. Born in 1472, his only talent a flair for the game of Florentine football, Piero's two years as head of the family were an unhappy parody of his father's more effective manoeuvrings. He fled Florence, perhaps unnecessarily, as French troops approached the city in 1494. The family wealth was confiscated, the bank collapsed, and ten years later Piero confirmed his incompetence, or perhaps just bad luck, when he drowned crossing the Garigliano, a river north of Naples.
The trajectory, then, is clear enough. One hundred years. Five generations. A vertiginous rise of fortune, first economic, then political, in the hands of two most able administrators. A brief hinge period presided over by a grumpy, middle-aged man in bed. Then two and a half decades of political ascendancy predicated on a wealth that is rapidly disappearing. Followed by sudden and complete collapse. To which we might add that despite their different characters, our five Medici have certain traits in common beyond the gout. They were all ugly, the Magnificent spectacularly so. And they were avid collectors: of sacred relics and ceremonial armour, of manuscripts, of jewels, of cameos. The collecting habit, with its impulse toward control, order and possession, is akin to the spheres of both banking and art.

...and the reviews

Medici Men in suits

The Sunday Telegraph,22nd, May, 2005

When the Florentine mob invaded the Medici Palace in 1494 it destroyed most of the records of the Medici Bank. Those that survive still have burn marks. As the novelist and Italian football fan Tim Parks argues in his witty and penetrating book, Medici Money, it was the family bank and the vast wealth it produced which brought the Medici to power and covertly helped them maintain this power. It also enabled them to patronise the architects and artists, as well as many of the scholars, who played such a leading role in the early Florentine Renaissance.
Despite the gaps in the Medici financial records, it is still possible to piece together from the remaining aptly named libro segreto (secret book) a picture of the Medici financial organisation and its practices. What emerges is a complex mafia-like system, reliant upon inter-family loyalties and trust, which enabled the Medici bank to spread across Europe, with branches and agents from southern Italy to London.
The English wool trade was of importance here: raw wool was shipped south from East Anglia and the Cotswolds to Livorno and then Florence, where it was processed into luxury dyed cloth. Such was the interpenetration of trade that the Italians even had their own name for the Cotswolds, which became Contisgualdo. This piece of gobbledegook, however is nothing compared to the verbal vandalism the English perpetrated in return, where, for instance, lovely Livorno was translated into tin-eared Leghorn.
The wool trade could hardly have existed without banking; but the most important financial business of all was the collection and transmission to Rome of the vast wealth accumulated by papal dues, which were collected in every country throughout Christendom (the Greenland diocese even paid in whalebones). The Medici first gained the papal account by financing the disreputable ex-pirate Baldassarre Cossa, a gamble which paid off when he became Pope Giovanni XXIII.
Transmitting large sums of money from northern Europe to Italy by way of mule trains along Alpine tracks or by galley across the stormy Bay of Biscay was fraught with risk. This risk could be circumvented by the use of promissory notes, as well as simple paper transfers which could be executed with the strike of a pen.
However, banking and the payment of interest faced a more serious difficulty in the later Medieval era. Usury was strictly forbidden by the Bible, and thus officially outlawed by the Church. Fortunately, medieval theologians, skilled in the use of scholastic logic, were soon able to find a way around this. But not everyone was convinced, which meant that all bankers had to remain careful, which in turn led to further levels of complexity and complicity in their business methods.
Tim Parks deftly unravels these complexities, illustrating both their benefits and the pitfalls with illuminating detail. The Medici had strict rules, for example, which the managers of all external branches were expected to obey – no women were allowed to live on the premises (wives remained at home in Florence), cardinals were not to be advanced more than 300 florins, and under no circumstances was money to be loaned to Germans.
This last point was not simply racial prejudice: the German courts refused to enforce foreign debts. Unfortunately, in 1402 the manager of the Venetian bank, Neri Tornaquinci, broke the rules and loaned money to some Germans and Poles (who were considered an even greater risk than the Germans). These northerners subsequently decamped across the Alps, and when Tornaquinci attempted to hide his losses by doctoring the accounts he was found out. In an attempt to regain the money, the Medici sent Tornaquinci north to Cracow. But when he finally did recoup some money, he decided to stay put.
Such pitfalls are not confined to banking in the 15th century and Parks clearly indicates the modern parallels in this saga o financial and political machinations money and power remain perennial partners.
At first, the Medici were not interested in political power. But as their fortune increased, they began to realise that of they were to hang on to their money they needed to take control of Florence itself, where a family could be bankrupted by a swingeing new tax law brought in by their enemies.
Florence was an anomaly in Italy at the time: an island of ramshackle democracy amidst a sea of more or less ramshackle tyrannies. The city had a complex political system, with so many democratic checks and balances as to be unworkable, but more intricate methods by which it could be subverted, to the point where even the supposedly random selection of names for political office, picked from sealed leather bags, became a conjuring trick guaranteed to produce the “right” name.
Tim Parks recounts the Medicis’ story with and infectious enthusiasm. His own conjuring trick is to tell this grand saga, with all its chicanery, in a clear and lucid style.

Banking the Medici way in 15th century Florence

Cathy Winstone - Birmingham Post, 4th, June, 2005

At first glance the subtitle to Tim Parks’ new book, Medici Money , is enough to pot anyone off – banking metaphysics and art in 15th century Florence don’t sound like the lightest of reads.
So it is to Parks’s credit that he turns something which could easily be a turgid and dry account of one of history’s most powerful families into a straightforward, readable, interesting, and most of all witty account of the rise and fall of one of the world’s first banks.
The account traces the family’s fortunes over more than a century, from the founding of the Medici bank in 1397 through their rise to wealth and power, including Cosimo de’Medici and his grandson Lorenzo “Il Magnifico” and finally the collapse of this remarkable financial institution.
The story is also one which illustrates the development of a society, where money becomes more influential than class or birth – yet where aristocratic status is the one thing that wealth hopes to purchase.
With a background of shadowy Florentine intrigues, the Medici family’s manoeuvrings highlight how wealth and politics the inextricably linked.
And it shows how a sin (usurers were consigned by Dante to the third ditch of the seventh circle of hell, along with blasphemers and gays) was not only tolerated by the Church but propped up state religion, enriching the world with some of history’s great works if art in the process as the bankers attempted to atone for this sin.
A fascinating tale of a family renowned in history for their money, their influence – and an ability to do whatever was necessary to retain both these things.

Art affects to be above such things, but has actually always followed the money – and nowhere more triumphantly than in Renaissance Italy. Yet the Medicis emerged in an age when lucre really was considered to be filthy and made their fortunes in a newfangled trade which was seen quite seriously as fundamentally sinful. How – and why – they want on to underwrite one of the greatest cultural efflorescences the world has ever seen is the subject of a book which is as lively as it is learned.

Medici moolah

The Economist, 22nd, April, 2005

Tim Parks is a polymath among authors. He is a prolific novelist. In Italy, where he lives, he is a translator, an essayist, a memoirist and a professor. He also writes authoritatively about football. The subject of his new book extends his range even further, though Cosimo and Lorenzo de Medici would make convincing fictional characters. They are two greatest celebrities in the history of banking, rivalled only by Nathan Rothschild.
Cosimo was the Renaissance man, well-read, with educated taste in painting and sculpture, and immensely skilled at having his cake and eating it. (in an aside, Mr Parks reports that the equivalent Italian expression is to have your wife drunk and your wine keg full). Cosimo’s reward for financing the restoration of the convent of San Marco in Florence was a Papal bull absolving him of his sins – each and every one. Cosimo’s grandson, Lorenzo, known as the Magnificent – though that is how Medici bankers generally referred to the boss – was a great patron in the time of Ghirlandaio, Pollaiuolo, Botticelli and Leonardo, all Florentine painters of genius.
No doubt the Medicis truly appreciated art, but Mr Parks is under no illusions about the ultimate purpose of the family’s patronage. It was designed to make Florentines feel so good about the city that they were willing to suppress their Republican instincts, and surrender political power to the Medici. It was brilliantly done. Niccolò Machiavelli praised Cosimo’s ability to mix power with grace. But one of his first acts on becoming leader in 1434 was to change the rules which had curtailed banking operations. Mr Parks is a quick study, and his explanation of bills of exchange and trade finance in 15th century Europe is a model for all economic historians. Consequently, when he says that one of Cosimo’s first actions was to legalise “dry exchange” – a clever banker’s shortcut to escape the church’s strict laws against usury – we understand that the inspiration is self-interested and the motive is profit. Mr Parks, who is sceptical about bankers, writes about them with pace, wit and some passion.
The Medici dynasty was not long lived. It began with Cosimo’s father in 1397 and ended in 1494 with the flight of Lorenzo’s son, Piero. Mr Parks asserts that the bank’s attraction to power eventually proved fatal. No banker can be a prudent lender when he is buying influence in court and financing armies, and lending to clients who considered repayment somehow undignified.
By the time Lorenzo was in charge, he was not in control. Non-productive loans, such as those to an English king, Edward IV, by the London branch helped bring down the Medici Bank, just as Edward III’s failure to repay huge Italian loans had destroyed the Bardi and Peruzzi banks in the 1340s.
But the collapse of the Medici bank was not the end of the line. Lorenzo had arranged for his younger son, Giovanni, to enter the priesthood at the age of eight, and had been able to promote the boy’s elevation to cardinal when he was only 13. Giovanni went on to become Pope Leo X and nurtured the family’s fortunes in Rome so well that Lorenzo’s great grandson was able to return to Florence in 1537 as Duke Cosimo I. the second Medici dynasty had nothing to do with banking.

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