In his Eulogy of Florence (Laudatio Florentinae Urbis) Leonardo Bruni praised her constitution for giving first place to justice, “without which no city can exist or deserve the name.” Moreover, he said, “Not only citizens, but aliens as well are protected by this commonwealth. It suffers injury to be done to no man, and endeavors to see to it that everyone, citizen or alien, shall receive the justice that is owing to him.” During Bruni’s own tenure as chancellor of Florence, however, we hear of a Jewish banker who was ruined by the heaviest fine in the history of the city after a trial that one modern scholar has described as a monstrous miscarriage of justice.


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The old debate about the vigour of the spirit of capitalism in late medieval Italy wore itself out long ago, not having generated enough really interesting questions to keep it going. It is generally conceded that the Italian merchant was driven by the acquisitive instinct to make more money, that he was prepared often to take great risks to turn a quick profit, that he had carefully worked out the business techniques for proceeding rationally towards this goal, and finally that he was none the less passionately involved in this activity for all the ranting and raving of clerics about his abuse of the usury doctrine and about the moral dangers inherent in the business world. Since the beginning of business history as a distinct discipline within the realm of economic history, all these qualities of the early capitalist have been emphasized by economic historians of the period out to disprove notions that capitalism did not arise until the sixteenth century or later. Doubts linger on in some quarters about the existence in Italy of a positive and articulated those of capitalism, like the socalled work ethic and ascetic spirit associated with Protestantism and there is a general tendency to regard the merchant in this early stage of commercial capitalism more as a speculator, a kind of gambler, than as a planner with long-range goals. Generally speaking, however, discussions of capitalism in Italy have not succeeded in defining the term with sufficient precision to render it a useful tool for historical analysis.


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