Money in Sixteenth-Century Florence

Drawing on the extraordinary wealth of the Florentine archives, Carlo Cipolla reconstructs the monetary system and its development in sixteenth-century Florence under the impact of the massive inflow of silver from Mexico and Peru via Spain and Genoa. His study allows us at last to chart the movements of this American silver after it reached Spain and to assess its impact on the economy and the monetary structure of a European state.Cipolla also reveals the role of the Ricci family of Florence—a great banking family hitherto virtually ignored by historians—in first fueling a credit boom and then provoking a credit crisis in the Florentine economy of the 1570s and 1580s. Cipolla relates this situation to the economic downturn that characterized the economies of southern Europe in the last three decades of the sixteenth century.Money in Sixteenth-Century Florence is a major contribution to early modern monetary history.