Pope Eugenius IV and Jewish Money-Lending in Florence: The Case of Salomone di Bonaventura during the Chancellorship of Leonardo Bruni

Abstract

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 Brum'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.

The Circulation of Interpersonal Credit in Renaissance Florence

“…Much closer in time and place to our case, in a study of tax documents from over 7,500 households in the countryside around Florence in the 1420s, Maristella Botticini (2000) has argued that Jewish moneylenders, linked to each other, were essential for making a market in personal loans, providing access to capital otherwise unavailable to these borrowers. Indeed, the Florentine government allowed Jewish lenders into the city proper in the 1430s to increase liquidity and the supply of credit (Botticini 2000, Goldthwaite 1985 and 2009, Gow and Griffiths 1994)—as Brian Pullan (1987) put it for the case of Venice, accomplishing a public service out of private enterprise.…”