Giuseppe De Luca

Conflicts, Financial Innovations, and Economic Trends in the Italian States during the Thirty Years’ War

Under the pressure of war finance by the Spanish empire, the cities of Milan and Genoa responded with financial innovations that made up an early financial revolution in the period 1550–1617. The innovations included the progressive substitution of bond issues for compulsory loans, the rise of a lively demand for state securities due to the earmarking of future tax income for interest payment, their easy transferability and their tax-free status. The Genoese further created an offshore capital market with its own currency of account. More municipal and business organizations participated in the expanded market for credit that arose from the usefulness of sovereign debt as collateral for private financial ventures. New forms of business enterprise emerged to take advantage of the expanded sources of finance.

Not Only Land: Mortgage Credit in Central-Northern Italy in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

The purpose of this chapter is to investigate the role of mortgages in the credit markets of central-northern Italy during the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries. The intense economic change that was affecting Italian states by the middle of the sixteenth century—a change stimulated by the growth of the population and crop prices—received a powerful stimulus from the rural world. A land rush conducted by urban elites and the affluent ruling class produced a dramatic and profound transformation in the structure of ownership and tenure in the countryside. Traditional land loans came under significant pressure mainly in an effort to protect small proprietors and to avert radical shocks to the social equilibrium. These credit instruments backed by land—named census, pensio, and livellum—became frequently used and spread to almost all areas of the Peninsula’s countryside. However, new financial tools were being devised to counteract the troubles and the uncertainty that the stratified credit system represented for rural classes.