Papal Banking in Renaissance Rome: Benvenuto Olivieri and Paul III, 1534-1549 (review)

In the Renaissance papal banking was big business. Given tight money supplies, limited credit, and the papacy's constant need for funds, popes had regular recourse to private financiers to advance cash and credit, for which they pledged future ecclesiastical revenues and taxes from the Papal States and Rome to secure and reimburse their loans. By obligating future incomes, popes bound themselves inextricably to their financiers. In the fifteenth century the Medici bank of Florence had made much of its fortune from financial dealings with the papacy. The Florentines, along with bankers from Siena and Genoa, joined together in financing the popes, using their impressive capital reserves and ability to access international financial markets. Banks used bills of exchange, which had an imbedded element of risk, to skirt prohibitions against usury and to float short-term loans. By the sixteenth century the papacy had, in effect, "outsourced" the administration of its finances and tax collections to private banking firms, which bid against but also cooperated with one another in managing the papal fisc. Beginning in 1513 with Leo X, the Medici, now popes and no longer active bankers, relied heavily on other Florentine bankers, notably Filippo Strozzi, to provide capital and management services. By 1529, when Benvenuto Olivieri, the subject of this study, became Strozzi's junior partner and a comanager of the Strozzi bank in Rome, he had already spent nearly fifteen years learning the intricacies of papal banking, starting as a clerk and employee of Bindo Altoviti, another Florentine financier and associate of Strozzi. Olivieri's active career until his death in 1549 thus spanned the waning years of Clement VII's papacy and that of Paul III Farnese.

The value of the present study (translated from the original Italian edition published in 2000) emerges from its detailed rendering of papal finances as viewed from inside the Olivieri company. The author puzzled through an extensive series of account books located in the Galli Tassi collection in the Archivio di Stato, Florence. Part 1 consists of a clear summary of papal banking practices and of Olivieri's rise to junior partner in Strozzi's bank and then as financial front for the capital investments of Strozzi's son Roberto. Finally in 1545, when Strozzi capital was withdrawn, Olivieri became senior partner in his own, much smaller operation. The meat of the book comes in part 2, which takes the reader chapter by chapter through the various types of ecclesiastical revenues, offices, and tax farms Olivieri managed for the Strozzi, including the Depository General and farms of direct and indirect taxes. The appendix of contracts and documents provides helpful illustrations. Unfortunately, the surviving accounts do not include complete balance sheets. Thus the attempt to estimate the returns and level of activity of Olivieri's company in 1543, at its height and before Strozzi capital was removed, remains inconclusive. As business history, the account-book view misses the human drama of contemporary events, the Sack of Rome, the troubled pontificate of Clement VII, and Paul III's nepotism and struggle to reform the Church in the face of a rising tide of Protestantism, all of which seriously affected papal finances. The banking records cannot give us a sense of Olivieri the man, although we know from other sources that he remained a loyal friend to Filippo Strozzi even after the latter's presumed suicide in prison following his failed attempt to unseat Duke Cosimo de' Medici in Florence. The author concludes that Olivieri's rise from modest circumstances to papal banker made him "one of many, and as such an exemplary case" (p. 213).