This website uses cookies to ensure you get the best experience on our website. Without cookies your experience may not be seamless. Venetians and foreigners active in Venice had three major preoccupations regarding the marketplace.
First, they needed institutions suitable for bringing together persons with excess, lendable capital and those looking for credit. That was essential not only for trade and manufacture but also for persons who were not active in these areas, such as widows and orphans and also princes and feudal lords, who sought opportunities for keeping their money safe and making it work for them at the same time.
A prime customer for credit was the state, which did not trade but which produced protection for those who did. Second, both Venetians and foreigners were concerned lest success in affairs of this world, especially in the money market, preclude their attaining salvation in the next.
This was an area of constant confrontation between theory and practice, as full of risk as the credit market itself. Third, active and passive investors alike looked to the state, perhaps more in Venice than elsewhere, for judicial and regulatory institutions and for a philosophy that would promote a proper balance between regulation and freedom, so as to maintain an environment conducive to investment and making profits.
Local deposit and transfer banks, international merchant banks, floating debts, public deposit banks, and the funded debt were the principal structures that sustained the money market in medieval and Renaissance Venice.
