Usury and Public Debt in Early Renaissance Florence: Lorenzo Ridolfi on the Monte Comune (review)

According to a Florentine official in the early fifteenth century, the monte was "the heart of this body we call city." It tied up an enormous amount of the capital of citizens, forging thereby links between private and public interest. Nevertheless, the fund was the subject of much dispute, particularly among theologians who questioned the right of creditors to receive interest and to speculate in the secondary market in debt shares that soon developed. Lawrin Armstrong examines the influence of one of the participants in the debate, Lorenzo Ridolfi (1362–1443), a lawyer and member of the political elite who strongly supported the monte and equated it with the "public good."

Armstrong's book is essentially a critical edition of thirty-nine of the original hundred and seventy-nine quaestiones and oppositiones of Ridolfi's treatise, Tractatus de usuris (Treatise on Usury) — that is, the section that deals explicitly with the monte. The treatise was composed between 1402–04, during the grave fiscal crisis arising from the Milanese war, when the government relied heavily on loans and credit. But Armstrong offers his readers much more than an edited text; he places Ridolfi's work into its political, economic, and social context. This is done by means of five succinct and well-constructed chapters that examine Ridolfi's political affiliations, the history of the Florentine monte as well as debates arising from it and the larger issue of usury. In the process Armstrong effectively removes Ridolfi from the narrow theological context in which he has previously been studied — through which scholars have viewed him as an innovator — and sets him in his secular context in which he behaved as the quintessential political conservative, an apologist for the Florentine elite of which he was a part.

Armstrong states in the introduction that his perspective is a Marxist one. This is especially clear in the first two chapters in which Armstrong stresses the social and economic inequalities inherent in Florentine society, how the city was highly polarized, and how the monte — indeed the Florentine tax system in general — favored the wealthy over the poor. The third chapter places the Florentine monte in the context of the debate on usury. It is one of the most lucid treatments I have read in English on this complicated subject. In each of the chapters, Armstrong does an excellent job distilling a great deal of information. The footnotes are always comprehensive and up-to-date.

It is in the fourth and fifth chapters that Armstrong gives fully Ridolfi's views and their greater meaning in context. He argues against such scholars as John T. Noonan that Ridolfi drew on the opinions of previous writers, most notably the Franciscan theologian Francesco da Empoli and the Florentine legal expert Lapo da Castiglionchio. Having found theological and legal precedent, Ridolfi then supported the monte and growing market in debt shares (a still more controversial subject) on the grounds of public utility. He equated the moral welfare of the citizenry with the welfare of the state. The state needed the love of its subjects, which could not be obtained by coercion. Interest payments thus became a sort of reward for contributions to the common good (89).

In this manner, Armstrong argues, Ridolfi greatly aided the Florentine elite in establishing a "positive identification" with the monte (102). This was the true meaning of Ridolfi's work — it provided a means by which a small governing elite achieved broader consent from the enfranchised, but non-dominant, elements of society. Armstrong then situates Ridolfi within the tradition of Hans Baron's famous thesis on civic humanism, tracing the affinities between the latter and Ridolfi's emphasis on the common good and classical antiquity. The argument is compelling and intriguing, and one wishes only that the author has fleshed it...