Premodern European Capitalism, Christianity, and Florence

William Caferro Premodern European Capitalism, Christianity, and Florence The essay examines the role of Christianity in premodern Euro- pean capitalism, with regard to the city of Florence. It traces the formation of the historical construct and the influence of Werner Sombart’s Der moderne Kapitalismus, a work much neglected nowadays in the Anglophone academy. The article seeks to historicize and contextualize faith and economy, to stress their fundamentally intertwined nature and more specif- ically how notions of “negotiation” and diriturra (moral Chris- tian rectitude) connect the seemingly antagonistic sides, and connect also Florentine finance and business history, which are too often studied independently. It argues that Christian rectitude and service to the church (a noncynical quid pro quo) were conjoined with a calculated, reasoned profit motive–evident especially among papal bankers, a key sector of the Florentine economy. Keywords: Florence, Italy, early capitalism distinguishing feature of the vast literature on premodern Euro- Apean capitalism is its disparate nature. Scholarly debates have focused on a wide variety of issues, from accounting techniques to “tran- sitions,” and the establishment of proto-industries, the role of capital cities, and world systems, to name a few.1 The discourse has been I wish to thank the organizers of the conference, Sophus Reinert and Bob Fredona, and the participants, John Brewer, Maria Fusaro, Lauren Jacobi, Elizabeth Mellyn, Jeff Miner, Dan Smail, Corey Tazzara, and Francesca Trivellato, for their comments and critique. I am grateful to Steven Epstein and Julius Kirshner for their critical readings of the essay. The faults are decidedly my own. 1 For a basic outline of the various debates for Europe in the period, see William Caferro, Contesting the Renaissance (Cambridge, U.K., 2011), 126–55. Maurice Dobb, Paul Sweezy, and others debated the nature of “transition” from feudalism to capitalism, with emphasis on the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. See Rodney Hilton, ed., The Transition from Feu- dalism to Capitalism (London, 1976). Franklin Mendels and others have investigated the role Business History Review 94 (Spring 2020): 39–72. doi:10.1017/S0007680520000045 © 2020 The President and Fellows of Harvard College. ISSN 0007-6805; 2044-768X (Web). Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 99.54.142.239, on 01 May 2020 at 15:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007680520000045 William Caferro / 40 characterized not only by the force of argumentation of the participants but by an often startling lack of awareness of the alternative lines of inquiry. The state of affairs is perhaps inevitable for a subject that has engaged scholars from across fields, including sociologists, economists, historians, and political scientists. A singularly enduring approach to premodern capitalism has been that which has focused on its developmental/evolutionary nature, expressed in stages, linked to a metaphysical “spirit.” The scholarship draws implicitly and explicitly on Voltaire and the Enlightenment (Whig) tradition of “history as progress” and on Hegelian notions of a purposeful unfolding of events guided by a Geist. The durability of the construct owes both to its amorphous quality and its inherent utility. The study of premodern economic history holds little value if it is not sit- uated in terms of the present. And as the renowned scholar John Hale has argued, the urge to divide history into stages may well be rooted in a basic human psychology that inclines us to align the contours of our lives—youth, maturity, and old age—with the historical past.2 In any case, few economic historians of the early period have shown interest in Kuhnian “paradigmatic shifts” or a Foucauldian “episteme” that would disconnect prior events from those that follow and render the premodern era, in Gregory Clark’s recent formulation, one of prolonged and relentless stagnation.3 Focus on capitalism provides a means of cutting through the layers of the past, functioning, to paraphrase William Bever- idge in another context, like the headlights of a car, illuminating a narrow strip that obscures the periphery while offering an escape from antiquar- ianism and irrelevance.4 of proto-industry in the countryside. See Mendels, “Proto-Industrialization: The First Phase of the Industrialization Process,” Journal of Economic History 32 (1972). For capital cities, see Fernand Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, trans. by Sian Reynolds (New York, 1981– 84), 396, 400, 621; and “world systems” in Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World- System, 3 vols. (New York and London, 1974–1989). The work on double entry includes, among others, Basil S. Yamey, “Scientific Bookkeeping and the Rise of Capitalism,” in T. A. Lee, Ashton C. Bishop, and R. H. Parker, eds., Accounting History from the Renais- sance to the Present: A Remembrance of Luca Pacioli (New York and London, 1996); Chris- topher Nobles, ed., The Development of Double Entry: Selected Essays (New York and London, 1984). 2 J. R. Hale, “The Renaissance Label,” in Background to the English Renaissance, ed. J. B. Trapp (London, 1974), 30–42. 3 Gregory Clark, A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World (Princeton, 2007), 1–2. See also Karl Gunnar Persson, Pre-industrial Economic Growth, Social Organiza- tion and Technological Progress in Europe (Oxford, 1988). A recent exception to the developmental/evolutionary model (using the methodology of Foucault) is Germano Maifreda, From Oikonomia to Political Economy: Constructing Economic Knowledge from the Renaissance to the Scientific Revolution (Burlington, VT, 2012). 4 William H. Beveridge, “Wages in the Winchester Manors,” Economic History Review (1936): 22; see William Caferro, Petrarch’s War: Florence and the Black Death in Context (Cambridge, U.K., 2018), 147–48. Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 99.54.142.239, on 01 May 2020 at 15:03:12, subject to the Cambridge Core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/10.1017/S0007680520000045 Premodern European Capitalism, Christianity, and Florence / 41 The discourse on premodern capitalism is compartmentalized and characterized by often stark oppositions and casual assump- tions. A basic term like “feudalism” functions for economists, especially those of a Marxist turn, as a synonym for medieval “unfree” labor that is antithetical to capitalism.5 At the same time, medievalists question whether feudalism existed at all and, if so, what its essential features were and where to place treatises like Walter of Henley’s On Husbandry that provide evidence of rational economic calculation in the countryside.6 Most problematic of all has been the role of the church. Teleological notions of evolution of capitalist practice along with a metaphysical spirit have posed particular problems with regard to religion. They encourage the portrait of a monolithic medieval church that is a synonym for “traditionalism,” which enforced the feudal landed structure of social stratification and unfree labor that were the opposite of capitalism. For Max Weber and R. H. Tawney it was the “spirit” of reform religion—Calvin- ism and Puritanism, respectively—that overturned traditionalism and facilitated the advent of capitalism.7 The aim of this essay is to look more closely at the role of Christianity in premodern capitalism, with particular attention to Florence, an “epicenter” of capitalist activity, famously associated with modernity. Florence has a privileged place in discussions as a locus of modernity and capitalistic practice with regard to not only trade and merchant activity (commercial capitalism) but also accounting technique (double-entry bookkeeping), business organization, and public finance (funded debt, or monte)—the latter associated with “financial capitalism.” Raymond de Roover declared in his classic study in 1966 that “modern capitalism” had “its roots” in Florence, and a recent comprehensive study of the Flor- entine economy affirms that the enduring “romance” of the city is “that of 5 The so-called transition debate sought to locate the point at which merchant capitalism transformed into industrial capitalism, focusing on free labor and commercialization of the countryside. Rodney Hilton, ed., The Transition from Feudalism to Capitalism (London, 1976). 6 Jacques Heers calls feudalism “a real custard pie of a term,” one that is weighed down with “every implication of evil” and is “difficult to define and varied from place to place.” Heers, “The ‘Feudal’ Economy and Capitalism: Words, Ideas and Reality,” Journal of Euro- pean Economic History 3, no. 3 (1974): 625. For the classic critique of the term, see Susan Rey- nolds, Fiefs and Vassals: The Medieval Evidence Reinterpreted (Oxford, 1994). 7 Max Weber, The Protestant Work Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, trans. Talcott Parsons (New York, 1958); R. H. Tawney, Religion and the Rise of Capitalism (London, 1922). An interesting, provocative teleological take on the medieval church is in Robert B. Ekelund, Robert F. Hebert, Robert D. Tollison, Gary M. Anderson, and Aubrey B. Davidson, eds., Sacred Trust: The Medieval Church as an Economic Firm (Oxford, 1996). The volume’s contributors treat the church in modern corporate terms as a “multidivi- sional firm.” Downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. IP address: 99.54.142.239, on 01 May 2020

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