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Medici Money
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Medici Money

Banking, Metaphysics, and Art in Fifteenth-Century Florence

Tim Parks
Atlas Books, 2005
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Editorial Rating

9

Recommendation

If your knowledge of the Medici family begins and ends with their patronage of Renaissance artists, sharp-penned writer Tim Parks has some revelations to share. True, the Medicis used the wealth they amassed from their bank to turn Florence, Italy, into the Mecca of fifteenth-century culture. Yet, the Medici clan also perfected the arts of vanquishing foes and allying with the rich and powerful to gain a stranglehold on political power - all in bold-faced defiance of Catholic Church doctrine. The Vatican held that paying or collecting so much as a penny of interest was a mortal sin. Parks’ book shows you what the Medici made of that, and his arch, witty style is a joy to read. Perhaps the only caution is that this history is more a study of the spiritual and social history of Florence than a guide to the Medicis’ business successes and failures. getAbstract.com recommends this history to anyone interested in the intersection of money, politics and religion.

Summary

Usury: Any Interest Is a Sin

The Medici name is synonymous with high finance, extravagant wealth and generous patronage of the groundbreaking art that defined the Renaissance. Indeed, the meteoric rise, iron-fisted reign and fast fall of the Medici banking family came at a particularly fortuitous time in world history. The Medicis rose to prominence in 1397, soon after the plague had wiped out a third of Florence’s population. The family launched an international bank at a time when multinational trade was nascent, and in an age when the Catholic Church declared that charging and collecting interest was a sin punishable by eternal damnation. Even as they defied church doctrine, five generations of Medicis commissioned paintings, sculptures and buildings that remain masterpieces five centuries later.

Today "usury" implies the collection of exorbitant interest rates. But in fifteenth-century Christendom, usury meant the collection of any interest at all. Interest is now a matter of financial routine, but in medieval times, it was an unholy, unnatural threat to the status quo. Interest took money out of the realm of the physical - money no longer was just gold or silver...

About the Author

Tim Parks is the author of 11 novels, including Europa, Destiny and Rapids. Parks also has written three memoirs of his life in northern Italy and is a prolific translator of Italian writers.

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