When the Economy Becomes a Value: The Turning Point of the Italian Renaissance

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At the turn from the Middle Ages to the Renaissance, the northern Italian city-states usher in a decisive shift: the economy is no longer merely a means of subsistence but becomes a value in political and moral terms. Florence and Venice, governed by oligarchies blending nobility and bourgeoisie, stand out for systems of government markedly more open than their neighbouring monarchies. Milan, for its part, remains a princely signoria under the Visconti and then the Sforza, yet its economic and cultural weight makes it a pivotal centre. Across this prosperous urban constellation, credit, commerce, labour and consumption gradually acquire a new dignity, breaking with the traditional suspicion long directed at wealth and usury. The arts and political thought — from patronage to Machiavelli — accompany and reinforce this transformation, yet they are less its source than its mirror. The Italian Renaissance thus marks an axiological turning point: the emergence of a horizon in which the economy tends to assert itself as the organising principle of collective life.

City-States on the Margins of Feudalism and at the Heart of Mediterranean Trade

​Within the monarchical and imperial landscape of medieval Europe, the city-states of northern Italy distinguished themselves by the autonomy they carved out over the course of the twelfth century. The contemporary German chronicler Otto of Freising notes that the lands are divided among great cities whose feudal character has apparently faded. “Desirous of freedom1”, these communes adopted a republican, oligarchic form of government. Most2 would, over the following centuries, tip towards monarchical regimes and, in some cases, outright tyrannies. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, in their republican phase, they were administered by a podestà, generally elected for six months and drawn from another city to avoid conflicts of interest. A salaried officer of the city rather than an independent ruler, he governed with the support of two councils: a general council comprising up to six hundred citizens, and a smaller, more secretive council made up of around forty patricians

The de facto independence won by the northern Italian cities did not reflect the law of the Holy Roman Empire, which regarded them as vassals. The emperors had two good reasons to resist this emancipation: (1) the cities no longer recognised imperial authority, indeed they met the emperor with a certain hostility; and (2) the region was in many respects a “veritable garden of delights,” for the cities of the Lombard plain “surpass all the states of the world in wealth and power3.”

The economic prosperity of the northern Italian cities was made possible by agricultural technical innovations that allowed a shift from direct consumption to indirect consumption (trade, buying and reselling, and so on), thereby enabling urban demographic growth4. Beyond agricultural conditions common to Europe as a whole, this prosperity stemmed chiefly from a geographically privileged position from a commercial point of view5.

As the historian Fernand Braudel has emphasised6, there have always been “world-economies” (économies-mondes): geographically defined economic spaces that are self-sufficient and extend beyond national borders.

Taking long strides through history, we might say that ancient Phoenicia, facing vast empires, was a sketch of a world-economy; likewise Carthage at the height of its splendour; likewise the Hellenistic world; likewise, at a pinch, Rome; likewise Islam after its lightning successes. With the eleventh century, the Norman venture on the fringes of Western Europe sketched a brief and fragile world-economy from which others would inherit. From the eleventh century onward, Europe fashioned what would be its first world-economy, to be followed by others down to the present7.

From the eleventh century, Europe’s economic expansion took shape around two great poles: the North, centred on the Low Countries, the North Sea and the Baltic; and the South, orbiting Italy and the Mediterranean. The junction between these two poles was effected “by the overland north–south routes, of which the gathering of the Champagne fairs in the thirteenth century was the first notable manifestation8.” The North, with Bruges, initially played the leading role from the early thirteenth century. There converged ships of the Hanseatic League (salt, grain, wine, timber, furs, wax), of England and Scotland (wool), of Normandy (wheat) and Bordeaux (wine), and from Portugal and Genoa.

The Italian cities, for their part, owed much of their success to the import of luxury goods from the Near East and their distribution across northern Europe9. The Crusades enabled them to expand their maritime network and extend their dominance at sea10. Venice’s trajectory is emblematic in this respect. Lacking fresh water and agricultural resources yet rich in salt, Venice prompts Braudel to ask whether it was “the city in its pure state, stripped of everything that is not purely urban, condemned, in order to subsist, to ask everything of exchange11.” Its economic activity thus concentrated on trade; on finance — in many respects an extension of trade; and on manufactures that helped balance the trade account, above all textiles (wool, silk, cotton), but also glass, saddlery, soap, metalworking and pottery12… Florence followed a similar strategy, though it could rely rather more on its agricultural hinterland.

With Economic Development, an Ambivalent View of Credit

Since the eleventh century, usury (interest on loans of money) has been harshly condemned by the Church. While it permitted the hiring or leasing of non-fungible goods13, — where ownership can be distinguished from use (usufruct) — to give rise to payment, it nevertheless regarded lending at interest as a sin, whether the borrower was poor or rich, even likening it to a form of prostitution14.

The Fourth Lateran Council (1215), by distinguishing for the first time between usury and moderate interest, appears to have softened the condemnation, but the councils of Lyon (1274) and Vienne (1311) reinforced it by treating usury as a kind of heresy and instituting excommunication both for the usurer and for those who aided him15. Scholastic thought, following Aristotle, held that money does not breed; its sole purpose was to facilitate exchange16. Thomas Aquinas nonetheless lays down different rules depending on the form of the loan:

He who lends money transfers ownership of his money to the borrower; consequently, the borrower holds the sum at his own risk and is bound to repay it in full. The lender should therefore not demand more. But he who lends his money to a merchant or a craftsman with whom he has entered into partnership does not transfer ownership of the sum; he remains its owner throughout, such that it is at his risk that the merchant trades upon his money or the craftsman works. For this reason he may lawfully receive a share of the gain that results therefrom, as the fruit of the thing17.

Thus interest becomes legitimate in contracts where the lender, as a partner, shares risk with the borrower. In thirteenth- and fourteenth-century Italy, financial instruments such as sea loans (foenus nauticum) and maritime partnership contracts (commenda, collegantia) fell within this framework.

Two further principles, discussed by Aquinas, would open the way to a gradual recognition of interest-bearing loans (which in reality would not arrive until the eighteenth century): damnum emergens (“arising loss”) and lucrum cessans (“ceasing gain”). The first — the easier to admit — corresponds to compensation for a loss, for example where a loan is not repaid or is repaid late; such compensation could also cover legal costs. The second, lucrum cessans, was more contentious, and Aquinas did not explicitly recognise it: in his view, a lender cannot sell what he does not yet have (the gain), all the more so since obstacles may prevent the profit in question from materialising18.

Although religious reticence about interest persisted, it spread in step with the rise of international trade, which stimulated the creation of banking houses (the Riccardi of Lucca, the Bardi, Peruzzi and Acciaiuoli of Florence, and so on). These houses also engaged in mercantile activity and facilitated the movement of funds, including loans that they financed by means such as:

This array of resources underscores the entanglement between banks, states and — not least — the papacy. The latter, like the English kings, turned to Italian banks not only to deposit funds but also to borrow the sums needed to pursue military ambitions, in particular its “Italian crusade” against the Holy Roman Empire23 — hence the popes’ favouring of Tuscany (Guelph, pro-papacy) over Genoa (Ghibelline, pro-empire).

Between doctrine and practice, then, a sizeable gap opened on the question of usury. Insofar as interest-bearing loans were granted for entrepreneurial or political purposes, they became increasingly tolerated in practice even while remaining officially illegitimate.

Prosperity, Decline and Humanism

The prosperity of the Italian city-states ran up, in the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, against a series of reversals and calamities24: the Crusades ended definitively with the loss of Acre in 1291; from 1315 to 1317 Europe was struck by torrential rains that brought cruel famines; the conflict between Philip the Fair and the papacy culminated, in 1307, in the latter’s move to Avignon; the Hundred Years’ War began in 1337; the burgeoning banking system entered crisis in the 1340s; and, above all, from 1347 to 1350 the Black Death wiped out around a third of Europe’s population.

To these trials was added a recrudescence of wars between cities. These conflicts affected the whole peninsula in the fourteenth century and were spurred on by the rise to power of authoritarian rulers, the signorie25. Strife also gnawed at urban life itself, not least through the opposition of Guelphs and Ghibellines.

In this historical setting, a sense of decline emerged that Petrarch (1304–1374) — the precursor, indeed the founder26 of humanism — voiced openly in his correspondence27: insecurity was spreading throughout Europe; fortifications and military camps multiplied; ignorance, debauchery and conflict dethroned culture; Christianity yielded ground to Islam, faith to impiety… The deep cause of these ills lay in a kind of moral corruption. Italians, he thought, had forgotten their glorious past; they had corrupted the Latin that bound them to ancient Rome. They were thus passing through a profound moral crisis to which Petrarch glimpsed a remedy: reforming mores by drawing on classical exemplars, above all Cicero.

How to amend behaviour? According to Petrarch, it was regrettably impossible to rely on laws. First, because jurists had exchanged knowledge of the laws and probity for ignorance and fraud. Second, because laws, however good, are always transgressed by wicked men, who outnumber the good28. It was better to educate citizens — above all political leaders, the princes of the age — advising them so that they might become models of virtue29.

Virtue possessed a major political advantage: it legitimised the sovereign who displayed it. And rulers in search of legitimacy were legion in the fourteenth century. For the humanists, virtue became the sole source of “true nobility”30, and this virtue was not inherited like a title, nor won by a single act of valour; it was cultivated, and in principle open to all. As the humanist Bartolomeo Platina wrote:

Assuming that Nature offers to all an equal [physical and mental] constitution, regardless of family, power, or wealth, the sons of private persons and the offspring of princes and kings, as far as the mind is concerned, are born the same way, though the latter be born in purple clothing and palaces, the former in rags and huts.… Seneca … says that Socrates was neither a patrician nor a Roman knight; philosophy did not find him noble but made him noble.31

In The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, Jacob Burckhardt went so far as to claim:

When, after Dante, poetry and literature introduced a new interest into life; when the discovery of antiquity and the study of man inflamed minds; while condottieri rose to the rank of princes and not only lustre but even legitimacy ceased to be a condition for the exercise of sovereign authority […], people might believe that the age of equality had come and that the idea of nobility had vanished for ever. […] The more humanism extended its sway over minds in Italy, the firmer became the conviction that a man’s worth is independent of his birth.32

Equality manifested itself concretely in the rise to power of wealthy families or soldiers, but also in a greater social mixing: unlike the traditional, rural feudal society that revolved around castles, the society of the Italian Renaissance was concentrated in cities where all orders and classes coexisted. This mixing went hand in hand with a behavioural shift among nobles, who invested in private enterprises, some engaging directly in trade, and who married into the new bourgeoisie33.

Plainly, equality concerned those with some financial means. Peasants and workers, without particular resources or intellectual training, could not aspire to virtue, which presupposed a solid education.

Humanist education privileged letters, rhetoric and philosophy. Rhetoric made it possible to go beyond philosophy’s excessively theoretical cast and to put theory into practice34. Mere knowledge of virtue does not suffice to awaken the motivation to practise it; hence the importance of eloquence, which kindles and steels the heart.

Through a reform of mores animated by the virtues, humanism thus sought to restore a kind of political greatness — a nostalgia stoked by the still-visible ruins of Rome. Note that this secular orientation did not contradict religion: the temporal and the spiritual had constituted, at least since Augustine, two separate domains. Moreover, the temporal could serve the spiritual: in 1403 Leonardo Bruni translated Basil of Caesarea’s Address to Young Men on How They Might Profit from Greek Letters. There Basil argued that pagan philosophy could not only assist students in their secular duties, but could also prepare the mind for Christian teaching35.

Civic Legitimation of Wealth

Humanists were passionately concerned with politics from a moral standpoint. In this light, they cared about the economy chiefly in order to regulate the insatiable desire for riches by means of the virtues, not to promote entrepreneurial zeal in the commercial, banking or manufacturing sectors36.

In the fifteenth century, they came to view wealth more positively37: it furnished resources to households and to the state, which in turn aided the cultivation of the virtues. Wealth thus acquired legitimacy insofar as it redounded to the benefit of the family and the civic sphere. When bound up with greed, avarice or other vices, it corrupted38. As Alberti put it, “We should not despise riches but master greed, and amid the plenty and abundance of things we shall live free and happy”39.

In 1420, Leonardo Bruni translated the Economics (Oeconomica), a pseudo-Aristotelian treatise, which he — and later Alberti and Palmieri — drew upon to argue that wealth is a condition for the exercise of virtue in active life40. He writes in the preface41:

As health is the goal of medicine, so riches are the goal of the household. For riches are useful both for ornamenting their owners as well as for helping nature in the struggle for virtue. These riches also benefit our children who are raised more easily by riches to honors and dignities. For ‘when poverty at home stifles virtues, only with difficulty will these virtues appear at all,’ as the sentiment of our poet declares.

The acquisition of some fortune is justified with a view to augmenting the family patrimony, not for the mere sake of hoarding. Higher forms of civic life — those that require the virtue of magnificence — demand greater resources42.

A key term in humanist debates about the positive use of wealth43, magnificence was deployed with reference to classical Greek and Latin authorities, but also by appropriating a medieval notion tied to princely nobility and wealth. Princes sought to display their victories and treasures, to show charity and liberality, not least by putting on festivities. In a sense, magnificence justified a luxury that would otherwise have been deemed sinful.

In Renaissance Italy, the term adapted to a non-feudal society. It became associated with the humanist spirit — which revived ancient authors — and with conspicuous acts on behalf of the community, visible to the public. For example, Alberti develops the idea that possessions, by increasing reputation and renown, strengthen a family’s public image and help to build the social networks of urban life44.

The Valorisation of Commerce and Labour

The civic legitimation of wealth was accompanied by a shift in attitudes towards merchants, long traditionally disparaged. In his handbook of commercial practice (1458), Benedetto Cotrugli holds that merchants possess dignity and a public role. He advances four arguments to justify this claim: (1) the ease and health of republics result to a large extent from commerce; (2) a frugal, temperate, solid and upright merchant increases his fortune, serving his family’s interests; (3) both private and public life benefit from an added measure of virtue and knowledge thanks to merchants’ financial skills; (4) the sobriety, cool dignity, order and unwavering self-reliance that characterise the merchant furnish the state with valuable assets45.

These ideas recur among humanists who, foreshadowing mercantilism, advised governments to encourage commercial activity so as to build a bulwark around the state46. Diomede Carafa, a humanist and minister to the king of Naples, devoted several pages of a treatise to this issue. He writes in particular:

If any citizen wants to work for mercantile profit and excels at it, it will not only be fitting to encourage him and show him favor, but even, if possible, help him with money. Business activity (negotiatio) is fruitful for sustaining states (civitates) and useful for supplying an abundance of the things you need.… Moreover, unless your citizens are brought up in this kind of activity, entrepreneurs (institores) from elsewhere will flock to your towns and will carry off the value they receive to their own countries, like wild pigeons..47

Merchants and humanists moved in the same circles. Alberti himself was the son of a merchant. If it is not easy to gauge the influence of the former on the latter, the influence of the latter on the former can be seen in the ricordanze — registers in which merchants meticulously recorded their private and business affairs48. They sometimes inserted memoirs, slices of history or moral maxims. As for the latter, Paolo da Certaldo’s Book of the Honest Life (1360) inspired many merchant-writers of the Quattrocento49.

That treatise is organised around three notions: profit, prudence and measure. Profit enables the accumulation of wealth that protects against misfortune and adverse turns of fate. It is generated by unceasing labour:

If you have money, do not stop; do not keep it idle at home, for it is better to work in vain than to rest in vain, because even if you gain nothing by working, at least you do not thereby lose the habit of business.50

Like other merchants, Paolo exhorts his readers to toil. Only effort justifies financial accumulation; the hypothetical windfall of inheritances comes, if at all, as a surplus. One of the key words of his book is “industrious,” echoed by “persevering” and “diligent”51. Opulence rewards hard work, yet it should never be considered definitively secured, for dangers are many.

Prudence — indeed wariness — must be cultivated to avoid ruin. One should not go out at night; one should not frequent prostitutes; one should flee heretics, fires, and the like. Discretion is also necessary, since reputation — essential to trust in business — depends upon it. Every fellow-merchant is seen as a competitor and any associate may prove to be a spy in an enemy’s pay. A culture of secrecy and a fear of bankruptcy lead Paolo towards egoism, even cowardice, as he shuns political agitations and quarrels52.

The third and final notion, measure, returns us to classical philosophical concerns: on every occasion, with the aid of reason, one must find the just measure. Thus he writes that anger is a dangerous sin, “for it deprives men and women of their reason and leaves them no awareness of what they do and say. And the man and the woman bereft of reason are like beasts”53.

A Culture of Consumption

As noted above, the trials of the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries fostered among humanists a sense of decline. Yet the economic development of the Italian city-states was not cut short in the fourteenth century by the Black Death54. The demographic fall caused by the epidemic favoured, in the long run, a rise in wages55 and, overall, did not erode the wealth accumulated over the preceding centuries: in Italy, GDP per capita rose from 1350 to the end of the fifteenth century56.

Commercially, greater efficiency in maritime transport led, on the one hand, to more regular and frequent sailings and, on the other, to lower costs and insurance premia57. Financially, banks profited from the funding needs of states. The textile industry, for its part, continued to flourish in the Mediterranean world despite competition from northern Europe58: cheaper wool was imported from Spain; silk spread, as did cotton; technical improvements continued to be made to production59; new markets opened in Naples and Rome, energised by foreign investment60; and in the fifteenth century the Near East too became a source of outlets.

The wealth produced — viewed more positively, as we have noted — contributed, in Richard A. Goldthwaite’s terms61, to the birth of a genuine “culture of consumption,” one that reconciled religion and material concerns. The proof lies in the fact that a large share of this consumption derived either directly from the needs of worship or from the artistic forms associated with it62. From the twelfth century, urbanisation went hand in hand with the construction of cathedrals and monasteries. New orders (Franciscans, Dominicans, Carmelites, Servites, Augustinians) sprang up and grew rapidly, the mendicant orders involving themselves in lay life. The incorporation of women into ecclesiastical structures was one of the major events of early medieval urban life. Moreover, as cities expanded, worship was partly secularised through chapels or dedicated rooms within dwellings.

All these developments continued into the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. They fuelled demand for liturgical goods — objects used in worship, public or private — such as altars, lecterns, bells, chalices, patens, baskets, candles, crucifixes, thuribles, and the vestments of those officiating. We should add practices such as indulgences and the cult of saints, which also contributed to the demand for religious material goods.

Whether for buildings, their decoration, or liturgical objects, demand for them was also conditioned by a powerful psychological factor: competition to possess the finest or the largest specimen. So it was with the European emulation to erect the tallest or the most spacious cathedral. Florence and Milan distinguished themselves in the latter category. Even the mendicant Franciscan order, ostensibly rejecting all forms of possession, yielded to fashion: in 1505 one of its members commissioned a painting from Raphael similar to one Ghirlandaio had produced twenty years earlier, but of “greater perfection, if possible”63. Painting — fostered by a religious culture of the image diametrically opposed to iconoclasm — was arguably the art most representative of the Italian Renaissance.

Social competition, though visible in the religious sphere, played out above all in the secular realm. Architectural ambitions in religious building were financed by the cities — that is, by public funds. Such ambitions were not confined to religious monuments; they extended to public buildings such as, in fourteenth-century Florence, the grain market of Orsanmichele or the Loggia of the Signoria, from which the magistrates addressed the people64. These buildings were linked by broader thoroughfares with uniform façades. In the early fifteenth century, Florentines adorned them with monumental sculptures, some of which conveyed civic ideology. They also raised tombs in honour of their great humanist leaders, of military commanders, and of two artists — Giotto and Brunelleschi — with whom the city’s artistic renown was associated65.

Again in the secular sphere, in the fifteenth century emulation spread into private life with the construction of palaces that underpinned claims to a certain social status and a public identity66. Ancient Rome provided an architectural model, though only in the formal vocabulary of the buildings67. The palace as such, as an urban edifice, was an innovation of the Italian Renaissance. Its purpose was to house a family already firmly rooted in the neighbourhood and projecting itself there for generations to come68.

Within the dwelling, the proliferation of partitioned rooms signalled the burgeoning of private life. The bedchamber was a locked space where the most precious objects were kept (silverware, paintings, tapestries, jewellery, clothing, and so on)69. The study (studiolo), likely of monastic origin, “denoted either a piece of furniture on which one sat to read at a lectern, or a room serving the same function”70. It housed painted wooden panels, professional papers — including account books — juvenilia, love letters, private diaries, coin collections… objects their owner wished to keep from view.

In the fourteenth century the bedchamber was the room that concentrated the household’s furniture. Most other rooms, though they contained beds, also held the furnishings needed for eating, sitting and storage71. In the fifteenth century, interior decoration grew richer in the bedchambers and then, towards the late fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the rest of the house gradually filled with furniture. Over the course of this evolution, furniture design developed and interior spaces became more specialised.

Machiavelli’s Conflictual Ethics

Although an economic culture developed rapidly in Renaissance Italy, it still faced many religious — and political — reservations and limits. Bruni, for instance, valorised the acquisition of wealth only insofar as it contributed to civic life and remained subordinate to the fatherland. Thus, in his view, the knight should seek honour and glory rather than riches72. For Flavio Biondo, in Rome Triumphant (1459), there is “no doubt that the greatness of this Republic began and grew through arms and through the valour of its soldiers73.” Greece, he writes, fell under Roman sway because of “its gymnasia and palaestrae, where the body was exercised; for by this path the spirit of the young came to grow languid74.” Biondo also contrasts the attitude of the Ligurians with that of the Capuans: the latter “are nothing but perpetually proud and arrogant, for the sole reason of the goodness of their lands and the abundance of the things necessary to life75…”

Long before Machiavelli (1469–1527), humanists warned of the lax, militarily enfeebling tendencies that could be induced by excessive wealth. The Florentine secretary — who likewise took ancient Rome as model and who had witnessed the rout of the Italian cities before the French armies from 1494 onwards — not only renewed the warning against the political-military dangers of a luxurious, idle life76; he also questioned the humanist orientation built on the practice of the virtues. Once those virtues reflect a life of a philosophic cast and are reduced to a rhetoric divorced from practice, they become politically dangerous because they weaken the state77. Yet military success inevitably brings in its wake the rise of literary and philosophical leisure:

Usually countries go most of the time, in the changes they make, from order to disorder and then pass again from disorder to order, for worldly things are not allowed by nature to stand still. As soon as they reach their ultimate perfections, having no further to rise, they must descend; and similarly, once they have descended and through their disorders arrived at the ultimate depth, since they cannot descend further, of necessity they must rise.… For virtue gives birth to quiet, quiet to leisure [ozio], leisure to disorder, disorder to ruin; and similarly, from ruin, order is born; from order, virtue; and from virtue, glory and good fortune.78

Unlike the humanists, who bank on virtue and on the power of a good education to forge exemplary conduct, Machiavelli relies first on order — which depends on the constitution and the laws. It is by refounding these that he discerns a path to political salvation. For the force of custom blocks gradual change: a people unaccustomed to liberty will find it exceedingly hard to keep it. The inertia of mores implies that only a thorough overhaul of institutions can change a people. Moreover, whereas humanism promotes a free will by which man can better himself, Machiavelli maintains a pessimistic view of human beings, who “are ungrateful, fickle, simulators and dissimulators, faint-hearted in danger, and greedy for gain,” and self-interested79.

Here conceptions of human nature diverge sharply. To the philosophic virtue associated with measure and limit, Machiavelli opposes an “expansive dynamic of desire80”: with “the desire to have continually outstripping the capacity to acquire81,” men feel dissatisfaction and discontent, which drives them to acquire and to fear loss. Hence one comes “to rupture, then to war, which in turn begets the destruction of one empire to serve the rise of another82.” Conflict is part of ordinary political life — both among states and within the city. A constitution must therefore provide for the “regular venting of resentments83,” notably through a court that would give due weight to grievances; with such a safety valve, civil wars might be averted.

An Axiological Turning Point

While Machiavelli’s philosophy gave marked priority to politics and the military over the economy, his anthropological premises — that human beings were self-interested and guided by the passions — anticipated those of Hobbes, which in turn went on to influence Locke, Hume, Mandeville and Smith84. Thus, by anticipation and despite himself, Machiavelli contributed to the valorisation of the economy as it later developed and gained autonomy from the late eighteenth century onwards. The humanists, for their part, directly endorsed economic development insofar as it reflected positively, in political terms, on the city. They did not, however, give a blank cheque to the accumulation of wealth: it had to remain within the bounds of an ethic still dictated by religion. The Church, for its part, indirectly sanctioned the valorisation of the economy by unofficially tolerating usury.

Beyond philosophical considerations, the economy was also — and perhaps primarily — valorised through the social life of the time: an urban life in which the different orders and classes mingled. In these Italian Renaissance cities, merchants, bankers and manufacturers occupied places of prominence, and some rose to high political office. The many writings they left behind attest to a class consciousness, a sense of esteem that reflects social recognition. They conveyed values proper to their milieu, particularly those of work and effort, and they reveal self-interested attitudes that echo Machiavellian pessimism.

Another manifestation of the valorisation of the economy — evident in the monuments and works of art we can still contemplate — was the culture of consumption that pervaded mores. This culture was directly linked to forms of recognition and social competition, stimulated by urban proximity.

Although the logics of accumulation and systematic reinvestment were not yet in place, and the economy remained framed by politics, the Italian Renaissance was a pivotal moment in the emergence of new values favourable to the economy: since men are naturally equal, each can in principle aspire to virtue; both humanists and Machiavelli place emphasis on politics, which uses the economy as a means to foster civic coexistence; private wealth is legitimised, even encouraged, insofar as it serves political ends; in its wake, private life expands; commerce gains social recognition while work becomes an essential factor of success in business; consumption blossoms against a backdrop of social competition; and, finally, homo oeconomicus — self-interested — steps onto centre stage.

Notes

1 Otto de Freising, Chronica, cité par Quentin Skinner, The Foundations of Modern Political Thought, Vol. 1: The Renaissance, Cambridge University Press, 1978, p. 3.

2 Excepting Venice whose regime is less participative than the one of Florence.

3 Ibid.

4 Fernand Braudel, Civilisation matérielle, économie et capitalisme XVe-XVIIIe siècle. Volume 3 : Le temps du monde, Armand Colin, 1979, p. 105.

5 Richard A. Goldthwaite, Wealth and the Demand for Art in Italy 1300-1600, ​Johns Hopkins University Press, 1995, p. 13.

6 Fernand Braudel, op. cit., p. 15-16.

7 Ibid.

8 Ibid., p. 108.

9 Richard A. Goldthwaite, op. cit.

10Fernand Braudel, op. cit., p. 123.

11 Ibid., p. 120.

12 Richard A. Goldthwaite, op. cit.

13 Typically, land.

14 Adamo, Stefano and Alexander, David J. A. and Fasiello, Roberta, Usury and Credit Practices in Italy in the Middle Ages (January 31, 2017). Accounting and Culture Review, 23 April 2018.

15 Ibid.

16 Marie-Jeanne, C. (2013). L’interdiction du prêt à intérêt : principes et actualité. Revue d’économie financière, 109(1), 265-282. https://doi.org/10.3917/ecofi.109.0265.

17 Thomas d’Aquin (1852, vol. 4, II-II, q. 78, art. 2) in Ibid.

18 Thomas d’Aquin (1852, vol. 4, II-II, q. 78, art. 2) : https://oll.libertyfund.org/pages/aquinas-on-usury

19 John Padgett, “The Emergence of Large, Unitary Merchant Banks in Dugento Tuscany” (2009) Working Papers. Paper 8.

20 Ibid.

21 When a London branch advances cash to a Belgian merchant, it simultaneously draws a bill of exchange on Bruges, where the bank holds deposits. The bill is sold at a discount (the discount being a form of interest) on the London money market, thereby providing fresh liquidity to the English branch.

22 Usher, Abbott Payson. “The Origin of the Bill of Exchange.” Journal of Political Economy, vol. 22, no. 6, 1914, pp. 566–576. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/1820224. Accessed 13 July 2025.

23 John Padgett, ​op. cit. ; Richard A. Goldthwaite, ​op. cit., p. 30.

24 Jean Gimpel, La révolution industrielle du Moyen Âge, Seuil, 2002, p. 189 sq. ; James Hankins, Virtue Politics, Harvard University Press, 2019.

25 Larner, John, Berengo, Marino, Lovett, Clara M., Signoretta, Paola E., Marino, John A., King, Russell L., Palma, Giuseppe Di, Nangeroni, Giuseppe, Palma, Giuseppe Di, Knights, Melanie F., Wickham, Christopher John, Foot, John, Clark, Martin, Powell, James M.. « Italy ». Encyclopedia Britannica, 4 Aug. 2025, https://www.britannica.com/place/Italy. Accessed 5 August 2025 ; Caferro W, Graff DA. Warfare and Italian states, 1300–1500, in Curry A (ed.), The Cambridge History of War, Cambridge University Press, 2020:389-408.

26 James Hankins, op. cit., affirms that, even if Petrarch is not the first humanist, ‘Nevertheless, it is still right to call him the father of Renaissance humanism,’, for he initiated a new intellectual elite whose aim was to reshape social values and behaviour.

27 Ibid., chapter 1.

28 Ibid.

29 Jean-François Mattéi, Platon, PUF, 2011, p. 87 : « In Book IV of the Republic, Socrates says that the good city must be wise, courageous, temperate and just — four of the five virtues in the Protagoras, where “knowledge” corresponds to wisdom and piety is added as the fifth. »

30 James Hankins, op. cit., chapter 2. The humanists here draw on Aristotle and Cicero..

31 Platina, De vera nobilitate, ed. 1529, 172; tr. Rabil, 282 in Ibid.

32 Jacob Burckhardt, La civilisation en Italie au temps de la Renaissance, tome 2, Plon, 1885, p. 94-95.

33 Richard A. Goldthwaite, op. cit., p. 159 et p. 193 sq. The nobility’s adoption of urban mores varies from city to city; it is stronger in Florence, for example, than in Genoa.

34 Quentin Skinner, op. cit., p. 87.

35 James Hankins, op. cit.

36 Ibid., chapter 7.

37 The favourable attitude towards wealth insofar as it contributes to virtue does not originate in the Quattrocento; it goes back to scholasticism. See Quentin Skinner, op. cit., p. 56 ; John F. McGovern. “The Rise of New Economic Attitudes — Economic Humanism, Economic Nationalism — During the Later Middle Ages and the Renaissance, A. D. 1200-1550.” Traditio, vol. 26, 1970, pp. 217–53. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/27830898. Accessed 18 Aug. 2025.

38 James Hankins, op. cit.

39 Alberti quoted by Eugenio Garin, L’humanisme italien, Albin Michel, 2005 (1947), p. 101.

40 Richard A. Goldthwaite, op. cit., p. 206 ; John F. McGovern, op. cit.

41 Quoted by John F. McGovern, op. cit.

42 James Hankins, op. cit.

43 Richard A. Goldthwaite, op. cit., p. 207.

44 Ibid., p. 208.

45 John F. McGovern, op. cit.

46 James Jankins, op. cit.

47 Ibid.

48 Christian Bec, Les marchands écrivains, affaires et humanisme à Florence, Mouton, 1967, p. 50.

49 Ibid., p. 103 sq.

50 Paolo da Certaldo, Le livre de la vie honnête in Ibid.

51 Ibid.

52 Ibid.

53 Ibid.

54 Contrary to the historical interpretation that prevailed until the end of the twentieth century: Richard A. Goldthwaite, op. cit., p. 14 sq.

55 Remi Jedwab, Noel D. Johnson and Mark Koyama, “The Economic Impact of the Black Death”, Institute for International Economic Policy Working Paper Series, 2020, 14. https://www2.gwu.edu/~iiep/assets/docs/papers/2020WP/JedwabIIEP2020-14.pdf

56 Paolo Malanima, “Italy in the Renaissance: A Leading Economy in the European Context, 1350-1550”, The Economic History Review, vol. 71, no. 1, 2018, pp. 3–30. JSTOR, http://www.jstor.org/stable/45183503. Accessed 19 July 2025.

57 Richard A. Goldthwaite, op. cit., p. 16.

58 Ibid.

59 Silk throwing (Bologna): adoption of multi-storey, water-powered filatoio/torcitoio frames capable of twisting dozens of threads at once (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Silk_throwing).
Wool finishing (Florence): hydraulic fulling complexes, such as the Gualchiere di Remole on the Arno (attested in 1425), concentrated pounding, scouring and drying under one roof, using the power of a dammed river. (https://castellitoscani.com/en/gualchiere-of-remole/).

60 Richard A. Goldthwaite, op. cit., p. 17.

61 Ibid., p. 212 sq.

62 Ibid. p. 72 sq.

63 Ibid., p. 137.

64 Ibid., p. 187. Le Palazzo Vechio is built as soon as the end of the thirtennth century.

65 Ibid.

66 Ibid., p. 190 et p. 213.

67 Ibid., p. 214.

68 Ibid., p. 216.

69 Philippe Ariès et Georges Duby (dir.), Histoire de la vie privée. Tome III. De la Renaissance aux Lumières, Seuil, 1999, p. 219 sq. ; Richard A. Goldthwaite, op. cit., p. 228.

70 Ibid., p. 225.

71 Ibid., p. 226 sq.

72 James Hankins, “Civic Knighthood in the Early Renaissance : Leonardo Bruni’s De Milita (CA 1420)”, Noctua, anno I, n. 2, 2014, ISSN 22841180.

73 Flavio Biondo, Roma trionfante, Lucio Fauno’s Italian, Venice, 1544, Livre VI. URL : https://archive.org/details/bub_gb_SOBvQaMo2vIC

74 Ibid., Livre VII.

75 Ibid.

76 Machiavel, Discours, II, X : “Money alone will not defend you; rather, it hastens your being despoiled. Nothing, then, is more false than the common opinion that money is the sinews of war.”; Discours, I, VI : “Even if heaven were so favourable to a republic as to keep the disasters of war from its midst, idleness would arise within it and beget either softness or discord; and these two scourges together — if one alone did not suffice — would be the source of its ruin.”

77 James Hankins, op. cit., chapter 18.

78 Machiavel, Histoires Florentines in Ibid.Je traduis.

79 Machiavel, Le Prince, Librairie Générale Française, 2000, p. 125.

80 Michel Sellenart, « Machiavel (1469-1527) : l’ethos politique de grandeur et de liberté », Alain Caillé, Christian Lazzeri, Michel Senellart (ed.), Histoire raisonnée de la philosophie morale et politique, La Découverte, 2011.

81 Machiavel, Discours, I, XXXVII,

82 Ibid.

83 Machiavel, Discours, I, VII.

84 According to Albert Hirschman, Les passions et les intérêts (PUF, 2020), p. 41, Machiavelli is the ‘common initiator’ of the currents of thought that ‘respectively made possible the principle of compensating passion and the notion of interest’. According to Jürgen Habermas, Une histoire de la philosophie I (Gallimard, 2021), ‘it is a modern economy of vices and virtues that takes shape in Machiavelli.’

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