But the real reason for Bernardo Portinari’s trip north was to see if conditions were favorable for opening Medici branches in Bruges and London. Were the local merchants solvent? Were the judges fair to foreigners? What was the level of anti-Italian sentiment in the English wool trade? Considerable. Would the king waive the wool-export monopoly run by the English Merchants of the Staple if the Medici bank lent him ready cash? If lent cash, would the king pay it back? Was the Anglo-French War threatening trade between London and Bruges? How long was the king likely to be king anyway?
Bernardo Portinari’s father died while he was away. He returned to Italy, gave a positive report, then went back to England with a papal bull regarding the appointment of the bishop of Ely and the collection of 2,347 Flanders grossi (about 9,000 florins), much of which was dispatched to Geneva hidden in a bale of cloth. Risky stuff. But profitable. In 1439, a Bruges branch was opened with a secondary office in London. The initial capital was a mere 6,000 florins, all provided by the branch in Rome. In 1446, London became a branch in its own right, with capital of £2,500. At this point, the Medici bank has eight branches of its own and agents in at least eleven other banking centers.
FROM THE GREEN-CLOTH — COVERED table in via Porta Rossa, from the palatial rooms of his great house, now home to the Medici holding, from his private prayer cell in the Monastery of San Marco, Cosimo’s mind reaches out across Europe. He has no phone, no e-mail. The letters arrive regularly, bringing last week’s exchange rates, coded secrets, the latest politics and war news. Replies are dictated, copies made. The director in Rome is complaining about the director in London. I won’t accept second-rate cloth as payment! I want cash. The duke of Burgundy is again defying the French. The coin arriving from Geneva is no longer current and will have to be re-minted. Aren’t my managers spending too much time retrieving money from each other? That boy you sent us, Bruges objects, he can’t even read or write! Why won’t the women of Flanders buy Florentine silks? Our sales rep is so handsome, speaks French so well! You were told not to underwrite insurance on shipping, Cosimo reminds London. The ship was sunk before the premium was paid! Perhaps the theologians are right in complaining how exchange deals in Geneva always run from one fair to the next. It amounts to a loan with interest. But what can a banker do? What can I do to pay less tax? The balance sheet must show only half of the capital invested, Cosimo instructs the director of the Venice branch. And then there was Lubeck. Will the Hanseatic League never let us into Eastern Europe?
Cosimo has Giovanni Benci beside him now as general director of the Medici holding. They work together among the tapestries and sculptures of Cosimo’s house. Benci had made quite extraordinary profits in Geneva. He is astute and gifted and devout. Pondering the accounts together by the light of an open window, do the two men occasionally exchange a snigger over the slave girls, the days in Rome? Are they in agreement with the general Florentine complaint that it’s getting hard to distinguish an honest girl from a prostitute? Do they discuss their contributions to religious institutions, exchange the names of favorite artists — Donatello, Lippi — discuss the latest translations of Cicero, the seductive ideas of the humanists? Why aren’t the Florentine whores happy to wear bells on their heads? Why can’t the Western and Eastern churches agree about the nature of the Trinity? Does the preacher Bernardino di Siena really believe, as he has been claiming in his sermons, that Jews take delight in pissing in consecrated communion cups? Cosimo is now an important figure in the religious confraternity dedicated to the Magi. Contessina fusses over what cloaks he should wear when he rides down the city streets to reenact the three kings’ adoration of the Holy Child.
Together, Giovanni Benci and Cosimo open a Medici branch in Ancona in 1436. This Adriatic port was important for exporting cloth to the East and importing grain from Puglia, farther down the coast. But could that justify the huge capital investment of around 13,000 florins, far larger than the Medici investment in the more important commercial centers of Venice and Bruges? Florence was at war. Once again the Italian scenario was fantastically complicated: a succession dispute down in Naples between the Angevin and Aragon families; the two condottieri, Francesco Sforza and Niccolò Piccinino, at each other’s throats in the Papal States; the pope marooned in Florence, afraid of going back to Rome, worried about developments in Basle, casting about for allies; Duke Filippo Visconti in Milan, with Piccinino in his pay, seeking to capitalize on the turmoil in every area, sending expeditions to Genoa, Bologna, Naples. And now Rinaldo degli Albizzi has left his place of exile and is begging Visconti to attack Florence and restore his family’s faction to power. Undaunted, the incorrigible Florentines are once again launching an assault on Lucca and calling on the Venetians to help them out when it comes to the crunch with Milan. We would, if the Mantuans hadn’t switched sides, the Venetians reply. In the midst of this confusion, Cosimo made a long-term decision to back the great soldier Sforza. The money down in Ancona was not to finance trade at all. Or not exclusively. Ancona was in Sforza’s sphere of operation. It was the Medici bank’s first serious move into funding military operations that were not specifically to do with Florence. Why?
In Milan, the fat, mad, aging Visconti had no legitimate off-spring, just one bastard daughter, Bianca. Sforza wanted her for his wife, together with the Milanese dukedom. He wouldn’t fight against Visconti while that marriage was in the cards. Or not north of the Po, in Visconti’s sphere of influence (he later changed his mind). At the same time, the combination Sforza — Visconti, should the condottiere fight with the duke, was the one feasible alliance capable of inflicting decisive military defeat on Florence. The duke had tied Sforza’s hands with the tease of his daughter, constantly promising that the marriage was about to take place, then inventing reasons for delay. Cosimo responded by tying the condottiere with his cash. Sforza could hardly fight for Visconti and the Albizzi if his army was fed and clothed by the Medici.
The Ancona adventure, though short-lived, marked a turning point in the history of the bank. It fused its destiny with that of the Florentine state. Here was a branch that lent mainly for political purposes, without expecting to recover its capital. Not good news for the small investor. Matters of state go beyond the rationale of any commercial venture. Thirty years later, Sforza would owe the Medici bank something in the region of 190,000 florins, a sum far beyond repayment. This was how the Bardi and Peruzzi banks had gone under years ago. But in 1440, Piccinino, Milan, and the Albizzi faction were decisively beaten by the Florentines at Anghiari, to the south east of the city. Sforza, the most successful military adventurer of the fifteenth century, was up north fighting in the Veneto. He never attacked Florence, despite the fact that the Florentines were his future father-in-law’s bitterest enemies.
IT WAS THE period of the bank’s maximum expansion. In 1442, a branch was set up in the subject coastal town of Pisa, whence the Florentine galleys set out every spring for Bruges and London. State-built and with a monopoly on all sea trade in and out of Pisa and Florence, the galleys were rented to merchants who then sold space to others. The right to rent for each voyage was auctioned off in a contest that lasted an hour, or the time it took for a particular candle to burn out. The smarter merchants waited till the flame began to gutter before beginning to bid. So it was decided that the auction would end with the chiming of the clock on the tower of the Palazzo della Signoria — audible but not visible from the auction room. Without a wristwatch, this was nerve-wracking stuff. The palazzo’s clock-minder was put under armed guard for the duration, lest the hour should shrink or expand. In this etiquette-obsessed world, cheating is the rule. Alertness is all. Nobody is fooled, for example, when the auctioneer plants dummy bids to get things going.