Florence, November 1252. The Florentine army had just returned home from the successful war against Pistoia, as recounted by the fourteenth-century chronicler Giovanni Villani (1276–1348).¹ Emboldened by the victory, so the story goes, the city government acted on the request of the Florentine merchants to strike a new gold coin to honour the commune and its achievements: they called it the florenus aureus – the gold florin, as we know it today.

During the second half of the thirteenth century, the Florentine florin achieved such popularity that it became one of the most important and widely accepted gold currencies for the subsequent three centuries.² Thanks to its reputation, historians have traditionally referred to it as ‘the dollar of the Middle Ages’, emphasising its broad circulation in long-distance trade networks.³ Yet, other sources, written closer to the events in question, tell a different but complementary story of the early life of the florin as money for diplomacy, funding for war, and part of the financial operations of the clergy. Three significant pieces of evidence stand out.

In a legal document from Parma, dated 23 March 1258, Guglielmo Beroardi, delegate of the Florentine government, compensated Matteo and his brother Guido, sons of the late Gherardo dei Denti da Correggio, with a sum of money. Although he was appointed Podestà of Florence between 1236 and 1251, for some unknown reason, Gherardo never took office.⁴ The Florentine commune compensated his sons with 1,200 libre of floreni parvi, the Florentine money of account: £800 of this was paid in gold florins worth one libra of floreni parvi each.⁵ Later, in a notarial act at Lucca dated 21 April 1258, two senior clergymen needed money for an obscure affair. The Lucchese moneychanger Gerardino Tacchi lent them £10, paid in ten gold coins of the types of Lucca and Florence, i.e., grossi d’oro and gold florins, respectively.⁶ Lastly, in a fragmentary ledger of the Treasury of the commune of Florence, dated 27 July 1259, Benintendi di Guglielmo, an envoy of the local Council of Elders, consigned to Manente Uguccione da Jesi, ambassador of Manfred, King of Sicily and ‘special friend of the Florentine commune and people’, the sum of 50 gold florins in a large, pretty, red silk pouch, probably both as a diplomatic gift and as financial aid for his fight against the rival city of Pisa.⁷

These three documentary sources for the early history of the florin introduce the major themes of this book. Villani’s fourteenth-century narrative firmly placed the context of the florin in the mercantile sphere and the rising power of Florence, and his assessment set the stage for decades of historiography on the florin. However, these three sources, which date back to 1258–59 and represent the earliest written evidence of the actual use of gold florins, point us in a different direction: toward the Florentine florin as a vehicle for the transfer of assets and thus power in other, namely ecclesiastical, political, and diplomatic, spheres.

Drawing on the research traditions and approaches of economic, political, social, and cultural history, as well as numismatics, and combining data from a large variety of sources, including archaeological material, such as coin hoards, and largely unpublished written documentation (e.g., detailed tax receipts, tithe registers, notarial documents, and so on) from seven different archives (Florence, Lucca, Pisa, Vatican City, Venice, Genoa, and Naples), this book provides a new perspective on the early life of the florin, significantly broadening the existing consensus around this coinage. Crucially, it offers an original approach that produces, for the first time, a comprehensive account and explanation of the patterns of the diffusion of the florin in commercial and non-commercial contexts and of its use by the agents of the time. Without denying Villani’s merchants their due credit for the actual fabrication of the coin and the promotion of its success, this book will approach the early history of the florin from a more holistic perspective. It will demonstrate that it was not exclusively grand commerce that enabled its success but rather the simultaneous adoption of the florin and its permeation into networks of power within the political, diplomatic, military, and ecclesiastical spheres. Therefore, the early history of the gold florin will be reconsidered in the context of the intersections between Florence and its merchants, the Angevin Crown in the Kingdom of Sicily, and the papacy. Within this framework, the florin will be presented as both an economic tool and a political instrument. While the distinction between these spheres might seem anachronistic for this time, the florin, as a creation of an economic power with a strong political dimension, both reflected such distinction and transcended it, serving as a lynchpin between the two spheres. The financial power it represented greatly enhanced the political potential of an apparently lesser polity, the merchant city of Florence, while offering improved financial power to other more established, if less economically developed, polities that included the Angevin Kingdom in southern Italy and the Roman Church.

Reassessing the florin

The early history of the florin and its diffusion in the decades immediately following its introduction have traditionally been subsumed within the wider historical narrative of the resumption of gold coins in western Europe and thus somewhat neglected. In 1933, Marc Bloch was among the first to provide an early account of this return to gold in his seminal study ‘Le problème de l’or au moyen age’.⁸ Through a now famous metaphor that sees monetary phenomena as ‘the most sensitive [of] barometers’ able to unveil ‘the deeper movement of an economy’, Bloch considered the thirteenth-century revival of gold coinage mainly as a result of the progressive growth in the volume of commercial exchanges. According to him, the minting of the gold genovino of Genoa and the Florentine florin in 1252 was possible because of a growing quantity of gold from North Africa and the Arabic East reaching Italy in exchange for weapons, wood, grain, and cloth – a consequence of the increasingly favourable ‘trade balance’ of western Europe with those regions. The new gold coins provided long-distance trade with a more effective means of payment, given the severe debasement of both the silver denarii and the foreign gold coins in circulation, which were ‘a decidedly inadequate instrument for purposes of trade’.⁹

In the 1950s, Bloch’s theory found fertile soil in the work of Roberto Sabatino Lopez. In his now famous article entitled ‘Settecento anni fa: il ritorno all’oro nell’Occidente duecentesco’, which first appeared in 1953, and later in a revised but much shortened English version with the title ‘Back to Gold, 1252’, Lopez concurred that gold was primarily minted to cater to the needs of grand commerce for a more stable ‘supra-national tender’, which would put an end to the ‘chronic inadequacy’ of the gold and silver coins then in circulation.¹⁰ Lopez further refined Bloch’s view by introducing the notion of a ‘Commercial Revolution’, which he regarded as the most significant economic movement of the period. His interpretation subsequently achieved a broad consensus among scholars.¹¹

Carlo M. Cipolla, Andrew M. Watson, and Thomas Walker improved Lopez’s thesis by providing a better understanding of particular aspects of or trends in the return to gold. Cipolla, for example, investigated the processes of currency depreciation or ‘debasement’, showing how progressive deterioration in the fineness and weight of the silver denarii in circulation generated an increase in the demand for money that could only be met either by the development of new forms of credit or else ‘by resorting to new forms of money’.¹² Watson described the severe silver famine that affected the Muslim world and the Byzantine Empire in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, which corresponded to an intense gold famine in western Europe. It was in this context, he argued, that a redistribution of the supplies of gold and silver in the Mediterranean basin took place.¹³ According to Walker, similar shifts in supply and demand for precious metals represented the ‘basic cause’ for the subsequent change from silver to gold coinage in the West and from gold to silver in the East.¹⁴ More recently, Peter Spufford, Richard A. Goldthwaite, Enrico Faini, Sergio Tognetti, and William R. Day Jr. have tackled the subject, all reiterating the dominant narrative of the florin as a product of the contemporary intensification of long-distance trade.¹⁵ Yet, the ‘back-to-gold’ theory alone cannot fully explain the early life of the florin and its subsequent affirmation.

To date, too much emphasis has been put on the year 1252 as a key moment in the return to gold in western Europe. Scholars have tended to see it as the culmination, or better yet, the endpoint of the so-called ‘Italian gold revolution’. This approach has generated a twofold effect. On the one hand, all this emphasis has created a misleading myth around that historical event, which still appears to be popular within modern historiography. In the recent volume Storia Mondiale dell’Italia, which offers a world history of Italy from 3200 BC to 2015, a whole chapter has been devoted to the year 1252, and this is symptomatic of the importance that this date still holds.¹⁶ On the other hand, the consequences of the introduction of gold coins in the historical context of the time have been largely ignored in scholarly literature.¹⁷ With the exception of a few cases highlighted below, most scholars have focused primarily on the preconditions for the minting of gold, thus providing only a truncated explanation of the return to gold itself and one that does not thoroughly illustrate ‘what happened next’ or, in other words, the aftermath of these events.

Moreover, the majority of studies have investigated the early history of the florin from a purely macroeconomic perspective. Their focus on large structural economic features and processes, such as the ‘Commercial Revolution’, taking place over a long period of time and/or a large geographical range has hitherto prohibited historians from analysing the political, cultural, and social conditions that fostered the spread of the florin, together with the ‘meso’ and ‘micro’ history of this currency, understood here as its supra-regional and local – albeit limited – circulation. Lopez was probably the first to stress the necessity of looking more closely at the evidence from this period since those macro patterns, although familiar to the majority of modern economic and monetary historians, ‘were hidden’ to the very people who wanted the gold genovino, the Florentine florin, and the grosso d’oro of Lucca, as will be further illustrated.¹⁸ Also, the severe lack of reliable data within the written sources at our disposal does not permit a conclusive assessment of any of those features.¹⁹ This is not to say that the economic explanations mentioned above are wrong, but they do not take into consideration the particular historical and political contexts of the cities of Genoa, Florence, and Lucca, and of Italy and western Europe more generally, when the minting of gold was resumed, and the new gold coins entered the monetary circulation of the time. Lopez sought to tackle these issues, but his attention was primarily devoted to understanding the origins of the gold genovino, given its alleged ‘primogeniture’ over the florin.²⁰ The Florentine gold coin was relegated instead to the rank of mere imitation of the Genoese currency, albeit one with a strong political dimension, namely, as a statement of superiority by the city of Florence over other Tuscan centres.²¹ Lopez also paid very little attention to the diffusion of the two currencies: in his attempt to explain why gold eventually conquered all of Europe, he referred once again to the long-term commercial development that had sustained the demand for new means of payment.²² In other words, Lopez ascribed this conquest to the same ‘macro’ causes that had fostered the return to gold without really engaging with the actual context in which the new gold coins circulated. In this respect, not even the work of Mario Bernocchi, which is considered the standard numismatic reference for the Florentine coinage today, appears to be of much help.

Between 1974 and 1985, Bernocchi published five volumes on the Florentine mint and its coinage based on the analysis of the mint register or Libro della zecca – now kept at the State Archive of Florence – and on the examination of more than 800 Florentine gold and silver coins dating between 1252 and 1533.²³ Thanks to his extremely valuable study, we are currently in possession of a considerable amount of detail on, for example, the many types of coins issued in Florence and their respective chronology, the organisation of the Florentine mint, its technology, and the processes of minting. The coin series and their dating have recently been revised and updated by Alessio Montagano and Massimo De Benetti.²⁴ Although all of these works provide useful data on Florentine coinage, they do not fully integrate the numismatic evidence within the historical context of the period or engage with broader historiographical debates on Florence, Italy, and Europe more generally.²⁵ Moreover, the mint’s records, as published by Bernocchi, do not assist the purposes of this study since the surviving Libro only begins in 1303, more than fifty years after the introduction of the florin, when the currency had already achieved its international reputation. Similarly, in 1982, Cipolla published Il fiorino e il quattrino, a seminal study on the monetary system and policies of fourteenth-century Florence. He adeptly redirected scholarly attention from the world of long-distance trade to the local dynamics of the florin, addressing significant issues beyond its origins, such as the banking crisis of Florence in the 1340s and the subsequent depreciation of gold and silver coinage. Yet, in this case, too, the chronological scope of his study precluded an analysis of the florin’s role and impact in the preceding century.²⁶ Hence, none of these authors helps us understand the particular circumstances of the origins of the florin and its wide diffusion in the second half of the thirteenth century.²⁷

The first important discussions on these earlier aspects appeared in Peter Spufford’s seminal contributions. Following the geographical pattern suggested by the early exchange rates between the Florentine florin and other Italian and European currencies, Spufford showed that, although designed as a libra to fit in perfectly with the accounting and financial system of Florence, gold florins were being exchanged as early as 1263–64 along the commercial axis that ran from Florence to the Champagne Fairs, the major commercial centre of the time, and thence to Paris.²⁸ The early diffusion of the florin therefore mirrored the development of the commercial network of Florence and its merchant bankers into northern Europe.

It was along those lines that the history of the florin was also presented at a conference held in Florence in 2002 to celebrate the 750th anniversary of the coin’s birth.²⁹ There, for the first time, the florin became the subject of an interdisciplinary discussion carried out by medieval numismatists and economic and monetary historians, such as Lucia Travaini, Philip Grierson, and Spufford himself. In his ‘The First Century of the Florentine Florin’, the latter provided the first account of the life of the florin, illustrating how by the 1270s, after a slow take-off following its minting, it was being used regularly throughout Italy, at the main fairs beyond the Alps, and along the Mediterranean littoral, and from the 1290s onward, the florin circulated widely in the East.³⁰

In the following years, Spufford’s theory found broad agreement among scholars: in his book, The Economy of Renaissance Florence, Richard A. Goldthwaite endorsed Spufford’s argument by describing the florin as ‘an international money’, whose prestige ‘followed on the success of the city’s merchant bankers abroad’.³¹ Indeed, one of the great merits of Spufford’s work lies in his ability to provide important chronological and geographical details on the early diffusion of the florin. Even so, his research reinforced the established emphasis on the close relationship between the grand commerce and the Florentine coin. Spufford acknowledged that in the late Middle Ages, religious and political pressures, such as the needs of the papacy, pilgrimages, wars, or war preparations, would have had a more immediate effect on the movement of bullion than trade balances in the short term.³² This book will investigate the extent to which these elements also assisted the diffusion of the florin.

However, in addition to the limitations outlined above, most of the studies discussed so far suffer from a major conceptual drawback that hindered their ability to provide a comprehensive understanding of what the florin actually was and represented. Crucially, they display a propensity towards studying the Florentine currency and medieval money more broadly, primarily as a medium of exchange, a mere instrument of the market that had no other efficacy than to facilitate commercial transactions between sellers and buyers. In the case of the florin, these would be merchants engaged in long-distance trade in need of a stable, high-quality gold currency, as noted. Such a conception of money resonates deeply with the so-called ‘metallist’ theory, as defined by Georg Friedrich Knapp in his now famous book The State Theory of Money, first published in German in 1905.³³

According to this view, money arose ‘naturally’ from economic exchanges between individuals to minimise transaction costs and facilitate what could be done without it in a barter economy. Defined exclusively by its function as a ‘lubricator’ of exchange, money operates independently of the specific context of transactions and is governed by market principles. Treated as an exchangeable commodity, it derives its value solely from the material used to produce it, i.e., gold for the florin, although in the Middle Ages, any precious metal or commodity (e.g., silver, pepper) that maintained an exchange rate with other goods could perform that function.³⁴ From this utilitarian perspective, money appears as a decontextualised, ahistorical, and impersonal device, often compared to a ‘veil’ that conceals the mechanisms of the ‘real’ economy. No reference to politics is necessary to understand its nature within this framework: the state only has to produce coins and put a stamp on them to certify the good quality and the correct quantity of their metal content – any other public intervention is bound to fail.

Knapp opposed this interpretation by advocating what he called a ‘chartalist’ theory.³⁵ In contrast to the metallist approach, he emphasised the fundamental role played by political authorities in the origin and evolution of money. In particular, he regarded money as a creation of the law, a ‘token’ (charta in Latin) whose value has no connection to an underlying commodity. Whether it is gold, silver, billon, or anything else does not matter. Money is, first and foremost, a political instrument, an abstract unit of account chosen by the state, which also determines its nominal value, its characteristics as a means of payment, and the demand for it within society. In this framework, money does not arise from the market but precedes it, becoming a precondition for its development.

Both theories have been – and still are – at the centre of a lively debate on the nature and purposes of money. The metallist approach has been perpetuated by generations of thinkers, including mercantilists and neoclassical economists, and still constitutes the prevailing answer to the question ‘what is money?’ in the mainstream or orthodox tradition of modern economics. Conversely, chartalist arguments influenced the writings of Max Weber and John Maynard Keynes, to name a few, and have been gaining popularity among modern heterodox economists, sociologists, anthropologists, and those experts whose interest in money transcends the mere financial sphere.³⁶ Yet, by arguing in favour of one or the other, scholars have created and reinforced a clear-cut division between those two theories, thus establishing an unhelpful, artificial, and rather simplistic dichotomy that fails to fully grasp the complexity of money. In other words, despite the obvious classificatory benefits, ‘much is also lost in this process of bifurcation’.³⁷

In contrast, recent scholarship on the history of money and monetary thought, notably by Stefan Eich, Andrew Sartori, and Luca Fantacci, as well as Keith Hart’s earlier but influential contributions, clearly demonstrate that the two theories were neither competitive nor mutually exclusive in their historical manifestation.³⁸ Aspects of both coexisted, and there is evidence of their interaction and influence both in the monetary policy of kings, governments, and money operators, as also illustrated by Constantina Katsari, Jotham Parsons, and Sebastian Felten in their studies on the monetary systems of the Roman Empire, sixteenth-century France, and the Dutch Republic, respectively, and in the thinking of many historical authors who otherwise ‘fail to fit neatly in one of the two categories’.³⁹

The Middle Ages were no different. In her study of the function of money in medieval England, Christine Desan has shown how, at the basis of commodity money, there was a monetary nominalism that tied denominations to the state authority. In order to make coins circulate, governments had to constantly regulate their metal content and bring it into congruence with their legal or nominal value.⁴⁰ Monetary alterations in the form of debasements, recoinages, and ‘crying up’ or ‘crying down’ decrees were common to many – if not all – medieval European monetary systems. Such interventions were often contested and became the subject of heated ideological disputes among medieval thinkers.⁴¹

Taken together, these studies suggest that if we overcome that bifurcated and compartmentalised view of money, the effective combination of metallist and chartalist theories and the constructive dialogue that can be established between them can offer a more capacious and nuanced understanding of its nature, purposes, and functioning throughout history, right up to the present day. Yet, earlier studies on the gold florin remain unaware of the potential of combining metallist and chartalist approaches as analytical tools in the study of medieval money. This book intends to fill this gap. Crucially, I will not discuss the metallist approach in detail, nor will I attempt to prove that the chartalist one is more consistent with the events narrated. In fact, rather than taking a side in favour of one or the other, I will demonstrate that by merging these two antithetical yet complementary theories to recount the early life of the florin, we can fully appreciate what that coin represented in its own historical context.

In the process of undertaking this study, I will also address a final drawback of the ‘back-to-gold’ narrative discussed so far. In 1933, Marc Bloch concluded his famous article by stating that the ‘human history’ of medieval coinage had not yet been written, although the time was already ripe for a ‘frontal attack’ on this issue. Specifically, he asserted:

With these few words, Bloch paved the way for future investigations of not only medieval money but any means of payment throughout history. He underlined the paramount importance of linking such studies to the analysis of the people who adopted a given means of payment and their attitudes towards it, arguing that mere statistical or quantitative data on its use are worthless without considering the social dimension and its inherent values and norms. Bloch’s insights found fertile ground in the significant scholarship of the so-called economic sociology of money. This field began to emerge in the 1980s and expanded considerably in the 1990s, largely due to pioneering and pivotal studies by Viviana A. Zelizer, Nigel Dodd, and Jane I. Guyer, among others, and continues to produce original contributions on money, such as those collected in the 2017 volume Money Talks: Explaining How Money Really Works edited by Nina Bandelj, Frederick F. Wherry, and Zelizer.⁴³ Underlying all these works is the idea that modern money is a social construct with its values and meanings defined by the very people who engage with it daily within their networks of social ties. Rather than merely exchanging it, individuals ‘identify, classify, organize, use, manufacture, design, store, and even decorate money’, transforming its most direct manifestation, i.e., coinage, into amuletic, symbolic, and ritual objects imbued with moral and emotional significance.⁴⁴

However, ambivalent attitudes towards money existed in the past as much as they do in contemporary society. Besides being a means of payment at trade fairs, medieval coins were also placed in the foundations of new buildings or in tombs, worn as amulets, offered at holy shrines, or venerated as relics.⁴⁵ The transactional value of money was thus subjective and multifaceted: economics was but one element, political propaganda and symbolism another, and rituals linked to religious beliefs yet another.⁴⁶ In Rory Naismith’s words, medieval money was not only ‘deeply embedded in existing social relations’, shaping itself around them, but also played a key role in articulating all kinds of human interactions.⁴⁷ Likewise, and vice versa, human agency was integral to every aspect of medieval money, from the accumulation of precious metals for minting to its production, diffusion, and iconography. The combination of images and inscriptions on coins was a deliberate ‘human choice’, making money a means of political and cultural communication and propaganda for the issuing authority. Hence, money in the Middle Ages was a ‘connecting agent’ between people, offering significant insights into the social, economic, and cultural dynamics of a society when analysed from this ‘human’ perspective.⁴⁸

Although original, Bloch’s voice has remained largely unheard among the many scholars studying the gold florin of Florence in its early life. Lopez described the gold florin as one of ‘the dollars of the Middle Ages’, together with the Byzantine gold bezant, the Muslim gold dinar, and the gold ducat of Venice, as noted.⁴⁹ All those currencies would, at different times, enjoy international supremacy over other coins of their period. Such success was identified as the effect of three specific characteristics common to all of them: to be a ‘dollar’, a currency had to have a high unit value, intrinsic stability over time, and be supported by a strong economy very active in long-distance trade.

Despite the implicit connection to medieval mercantile society, Lopez did not touch upon the potential contribution of other agents and institutions that used those international coins, especially in ‘non-commercial’ contexts, such as diplomacy, war financing, or papal finances. In Spufford’s account, too, the success of the florin was closely intertwined with the mercantile class alone. Very little consideration was devoted to other and external agents (i.e., not Florentine) that adopted and relied on that currency for their own needs. However, if we go back to the premise of this introduction, the episodes recorded at Parma, Lucca, and Florence in 1258–59 signal a variety of potential actors and interactions that expand the florin’s range considerably beyond long-distance trade. Yet, the ways in which these people and institutions animated the early life of the florin, motivated by their own needs, remain obscure. The existing influential narrative that explains the resumption of gold coinage in western Europe and its success does little to help in this regard. Thus, a comprehensive and contextualised analysis of the various uses of the florin by the many agents of the age and in different milieus, along with a full understanding of their contribution to the success of this currency, has – to my mind – yet to be achieved.

A set of relevant questions stands at the heart of my analysis: Who used the gold florin? Where and when did it circulate most? Which purposes of payment did it serve? Were there specific markets for its circulation? What were the benefits arising from its use for the money operators of the time? And what light does this use shed on the florin’s own history?

By addressing these questions, this book undertakes an extensive study of the early life of the florin, one that brings the hitherto neglected interplay of human agents and political institutions more prominently into the history of this currency. I will show that the minting of the Florentine florin did not mark any ‘revolutionary’ return to gold per se. Other European cities before Florence – and indeed before Genoa and Lucca – either attempted to mint new gold coins or were counterfeiting foreign gold currencies to trade in the Mediterranean. This calls into question the primacy of the Italian cities and downplays the role of 1252 as a crucial date. Despite its common acceptance, the poor level of Florentine documentation for that year does not allow any certainty about this chronology.⁵⁰ By adopting a comprehensive approach that focuses on a longer period, i.e., covering the diffusion of the florin up to the early fourteenth century, it will be possible to better understand what the return to gold really meant in practical terms. This will eventually provide the first focused explanation of why it was the gold florin of Florence and not any of the other gold coins in circulation that won the day.

This book will therefore tell a new but complementary story of the gold florin, the narrative of which moves beyond the scope of the economic take-off of the city of Florence or the monetary necessities of long-distance trade. If we shift our attention away from the major themes of northern European and grand commerce to adopt an original perspective that takes account of the diffusion of the florin mainly in the Mediterranean region, unexpected outcomes that enrich our knowledge of the early life of this coin come to light. The present book shows that the simultaneous adoption of the florin in three different yet interrelated and entangled environments fostered the early spread of the Florentine gold coin and its success in the second half of the thirteenth century: the world of the merchant bankers of Florence, with their commercial and political affairs, the Angevin monarchy in the Kingdom of Sicily, with its high military spending, and the papacy and its fiscal system.

Historians of thirteenth-century Florence have been well aware of the instrumental role that the alliance with the Angevin monarchy and the papacy played in the economy and the development of Florence in the second half of the thirteenth century.⁵¹ Yet, the questions of how these relationships, which were contemporary to the early diffusion of the florin, contributed to this and how the florin strengthened the creation of those political ties have not been explored.

Sources for what remains of the florin

The starting point for this analysis must be the surviving archaeological material, generally consisting of single or stray coin finds and coin hoards. The former are normally individual coins lost accidentally by the owner and discovered many centuries later. These are completely random samples of the coinage at a certain period and can potentially provide very useful details about the use, volume, and duration of single issues when a good range of specimens is available. Yet, they are normally dominated by coins of lesser value, i.e., petty coins, and thus mainly reflect the local circulation of a given area. This may explain why no gold florins are documented as single finds for the period in question. Further, single coin finds have not been systematically recorded in all countries, and, even when available, information may be either unreliable due to the lack of detail related to the discovery or hard to obtain, as it is usually disseminated in a wide range of publications – including local newspapers – if a publicly accessible online database is not available.⁵²

Gold coins are more usually found in coin hoards – groups of coins concealed together and discovered as aggregates. To date, only six hoards with gold florins dating back to the second half of the thirteenth century have been discovered and published. The earliest hoard is the one found at the Logge dei Banchi in Pisa, presumably buried around 1269 and consisting of ninety-one Florentine florins out of 229 gold coins.⁵³ This is followed by the treasure recovered by the officials of Charles of Anjou, King of Sicily (1266–85), on the coasts of Trapani in November 1270, known today only through the reports from that time.⁵⁴ These are the only thirteenth-century coin hoards that can be connected to the circulation of the Florentine florin in the first decades after its minting. The hoards from Alberese (before 1290), Aleppo (1290–91), Acre (1290–91), and Pavia (1290–95) are too distant in time to provide any detail about the early life of the florin.⁵⁵

Overall, however, this archaeological material is not adequate to assess the spatial and chronological distribution of the florin for the period in question. From a quantitative perspective, the hoards are too few to offer enough data on the florin’s diffusion or a clear and comprehensive picture of it, although they do suggest an initial link between the Florentine coin to the monetary circulation of the Mediterranean region, which will be unfolded throughout this study. Also, caution must be exercised in interpreting such scant findings since coin hoards as historical sources are problematic in and of themselves. The quality of information they provide is normally affected by several factors, including their reliability as samples of what was really circulating, their association with other objects, and the context in which they were found.⁵⁶ This is especially true when assessing the role of any high-value currency, for which the number of finds available is commonly far more meagre than for any other level of coinage.⁵⁷ Moreover, on their own, these coin hoards remain silent on a number of important issues, such as their original owner(s), the economic or non-economic reasons for their accumulation and concealment, or the motives behind the function of the florins concealed and how general this practice was. Drawing conclusions from any of these aspects by relying solely on the archaeological evidence without analysing the archival documentation of the time creates problems. Due to similar limitations, the several thirteenth-century gold florins in museum collections are not considered in this book. These are necessary sources for a study on the florin’s style and iconography; for example, they may help us solve certain issues related to the classification of the earliest specimens; yet, this kind of study is beyond the scope of the present work.⁵⁸ The analysis of the early life of the florin will therefore be addressed with a fresh approach, combining archaeological evidence from the few hoards available with the written sources of the period. I will refer to the few coin hoards presented above mainly when they offer details that would not otherwise be available from the surviving documentation.

Before introducing the array of sources this book will rest upon, it is important to point out the problems facing the interpretation of any reference to money in medieval documents. The general rule is that there is no exact correspondence between the currencies recorded in written sources and the actual coins used in payment. These do not necessarily, or even usually, coincide with each other. Such a discrepancy exists because, in the Middle Ages, there was no ‘one concept’ of money.⁵⁹ Medieval people distinguished between the coins actually paid in transactions and the so-called ‘monies of account’.⁶⁰ The latter were denominations adopted in medieval documents to reduce the huge number of different types of coins in circulation to a common denominator, thus facilitating accounting. As such, monies of account were not visible or tangible coins but ‘ghost monies’, as Cipolla called them.⁶¹ This implies that sums in the sources did not always consist of simple quantities of the specified currency.

For the gold florin, this scenario is even more complex, especially considering that, within the sources, the expression florenos auri or ‘gold florins’ could refer either to the actual coins or to money of account based on the Florentine currency. In the latter case, however, it could also be that other gold or silver coins were employed in the payment, while gold florins were being used purely to express the amount paid. To avoid any sort of ambiguity, I have decided to consider any reference to gold florins where the effective use of actual money is not clearly specified by further expressions within the text as ‘money of account’ and thus set these references aside. This is not to say that the use of the florin as money of account cannot reveal interesting details about its circulation. For instance, the adoption of a foreign coin, one not minted locally, as a money of account in a given monetary area usually occurred when that coin had been in circulation for some time, and local people had become familiar with it. Hence, the appearance of florins as money of account in contexts other than Florence, its district, and its people can potentially shed light on their actual use. Yet, in a study that aims at describing the diffusion of the florin ‘in practice’, i.e., how the gold coin physically entered the monetary circulation of the time, the volume of its spread, its demand and supply, as well as the actual use made by the agents of the time, references to money of account are of little help. This issue will be considered on a case-by-case basis while going through the sources.

However, on the whole, it is possible to distinguish between ‘actual florins’ and ‘florins of account’ when at least one of the following conditions applies. The first is a clear itemisation of the several monetary species used in payments. The second is the double recording of the sum both in actual money and money of account: the first reference normally expresses the amount in the local system of account, while the second one refers to the effective number of coins paid, usually linked together by Latin expressions such as ‘videlicet’, literally ‘namely’ or ‘that is’. The third is when there is a more detailed description of the florins in the source: thus, not just as ‘florenos auri’, but with a clear reference to the quality of their gold, their fineness and weight, or to the dies adopted to mint the coins.⁶² Also, the use of expressions such as ‘manualiter’, ‘ex mani’, ‘in una manu’, and ‘de propria manu’ indicates that the payment occurred literally ‘by hand’ and leaves little doubt about the actual involvement of Florentine coins.

This book is therefore based on written sources referring primarily to transactions in which Florentine florins were actually used alongside other coins. It draws mainly on fiscal records, such as detailed receipts, tax registers, and registers of deposits that offer a fragmentary but clear picture of the circulation of gold florins in the finances of the Angevin Crown and the papacy. More precisely, the collection and expenditure of gold florins by Charles of Anjou have been investigated through the records published in the twenty-seven volumes of the series of the Registri della Cancelleria Angioina.⁶³ They contain complete or partial transcriptions of administrative orders, letters, instructions, and fiscal accounts related to the economic and political business of the Crown. Due to their composite nature, they also provide interesting details of Charles’s monetary and financial policy, which is crucial to understanding the motives behind the spread of the florin in the Angevin dominions.⁶⁴ The study of the florin in papal finances meanwhile draws on five unpublished registers devoted to the collection of the papal tithe in the Kingdom of Sicily for the years 1274–80, today kept at the Archivio Apostolico Vaticano.⁶⁵ This documentation has been supplemented by the published registers of papal letters, which also inform us of political relations between the popes, the Florentines, and the Angevins.⁶⁶

The choice to turn to external archives to study the political life of the florin has also been dictated by the current status of the records at the State Archives of Florence. Public records such as statutes, acts, laws, edicts, and monetary ordinances, which could do much to recreate the different stages of the florin’s issues and the monetary policy of Florence, are virtually absent for most of the period under investigation.⁶⁷ Information of this kind appears, for example, in the Provvisioni collection, consisting of the legal acts of the Florentine commune, but the majority of these sources date from the early 1280s. As can be seen, even the documentation produced by the local mint is of little help. Furthermore, the earliest books of account of the Florentine mercantile companies, which begin to appear with more frequency in the second half of the thirteenth century, are generally unhelpful due to their ambiguity: even if there are payments made in floreni as early as the year 1262, they do not always specify the kind of florins recorded in their transactions – whether they are gold, silver, actual coins, or money of account.⁶⁸

Despite these limitations, this study still draws on a large number of notarial documents held mainly in the Diplomatico collection of the State Archives of Florence, as well as records from the Archivio Storico Diocesano of Lucca and published material from the State Archives of Pisa, Venice, and Genoa. The nature and the complexity of these collections as assemblages of documents related to the private business of medieval people make them a useful source through which to analyse the business of Florentine merchant bankers and their contribution to the minting of the florin, although they refer only incidentally to it. The picture is completed by references in narrative sources such as sermons or chronicles, although the latter must be approached cautiously.⁶⁹

The book adopts an interdisciplinary methodology in order to deal with such a broad and original range of source material. Specifically, when applying modern frameworks, there is always the risk of distorting and manipulating historical facts to fit the theory. This could result in a stereotypical view of the past, disregarding the specificity and the distinctiveness of historical phenomena. Instead, this book draws from many research areas such as numismatics and monetary, economic, political, cultural, and social history to reach an in-depth and contextualised understanding of the early life of the florin in its own time. The analysis concentrates primarily on the years 1258–84 – thus on the period between the first appearance of gold florins in contemporary reliable written sources (i.e., not narrative ones, like Villani’s chronicle) and the year of the introduction of the gold ducat, the Venetian response to the Florentine gold coin. Yet, to show the florin’s full reach and influence, the chronological limits will be extended to the second half of the twelfth century in Chapters 1 and 2 and pushed to the first decade of the fourteenth century in Chapter 4. As for the agents, they have been chosen for more than just their central role in the politics and economics of Florence. When taken together, they also provide a comprehensive picture of the main political powers of the time, and each of them corresponds to a specific sector of the multifaceted market of the florin in the second half of the thirteenth century.

This book is split into four main chapters. Chapter 1 sets the stage by drawing attention to the period leading up to the ‘back-to-gold’ event, i.e., from the late twelfth century to the early 1250s. It discusses the key factors of this phenomenon, starting from a macro perspective that takes into account the economic revival of Europe and then looking at the monetary needs of the period. Other attempts to coin gold in Italy and Europe are discussed, and a comparison between the return to gold in Florence, Genoa, and Lucca is offered in light of the most recent historiographical debates. Against the backdrop of the economic and political context of the city of Florence in the years preceding the birth of the florin, the chapter offers a qualitative analysis of the conditions under which the gold florin was first conceived and eventually minted. It shows that the coin was the product of the city’s economic development and commercial expansion and of the political upheaval following the death of Emperor Frederick II Hohenstaufen in 1250, which engendered the complete autonomy of the city and its government.

Each of the remaining chapters is dedicated to a specific agent or institution that contributed to the origins and affirmation of the Florentine coin. Chapter 2 concentrates on the contribution of the merchant bankers of Florence to the making of the florin and its early diffusion – an aspect that, although alluded to in current historiography, has not yet been systematically explored. The chapter challenges the traditional belief that the florin was simply the result of a request made by the mercantile class of the Florentine society, as narrated by Giovanni Villani in his fourteenth-century chronicle. Instead, it argues that the contribution of the mercantile elite was more complex, instrumental, and multifaceted: while merchants were responsible for the supply of gold, they also provided the necessary know-how and capacity, thereby making the florin a concrete manifestation of their economic and political power at the time of the so-called Primo Popolo.⁷⁰

Chapters 3 and 4 examine the contribution of the Angevin Crown and the papacy to the florin’s early spread. They point towards the importance of the financial requests and the military spending of medieval rulers, including the popes, to explain the enormous success of this currency. The two chapters share a similar structure: they move from the study of the relations of each political actor with Florence and its merchant bankers to the description of the role played by the florin in their respective finances, with a focus on the collection and expenditure of the gold coin. A final section in each chapter attempts to clarify the contribution of each agent to the diffusion of the florin and the benefits arising from its use. In both cases, the florin is presented as an economic tool and a political instrument, crucial for the deployment of the political power of these agents.

Through the analysis of the surviving registers of the Angevin chancery for the reign of King Charles I of Anjou, Chapter 3 shows that by the end of the 1270s, the Florentine florin was already deeply rooted in the monetary system of the kingdom, in the service of the administrative needs of the Crown, which included taxation, payments to military personnel, and various local affairs involving the royal treasury. This is an extremely important and hitherto unacknowledged facet of the early life of the florin, which was performing as a domestic gold currency in the Kingdom of Sicily on the same level as the gold denominations minted there, despite its ‘foreign’ nature. The important role of Florentine currency in Angevin finances, the origins of which may even date back to Charles of Anjou’s military venture in southern Italy (early 1260s), was also the result of the contemporary demand for florins coming from mercenary troops.

Chapter 4 analyses the diffusion of the florin within the financial system of the papal curia. It begins with an overview of the relations between the popes and Florentine merchant bankers, which became increasingly important in the second half of the thirteenth century. Then, the analysis of a remarkable set of hitherto neglected tithe registers from southern Italy during Pope Gregory X’s sexennial tithe in the years 1274–80 reveals that gold florins were the prevailing currency collected by papal officials in the region at that time. The circulation of the florin in papal finances ultimately contributed to fostering its market.

Overall, this book offers new evidence for the early life of the Florentine coin that will complement and challenge accepted historiographical accounts of its origin and diffusion, thus advancing a hitherto unacknowledged understanding of the currency’s significance in promoting certain aspects of social and political life. It refines the current interpretation of the ‘Commercial Revolution’ and of the ‘back-to-gold’ phenomena by presenting them as historical processes – not just single events – with a social and political dimension and consequences that have thus far been disregarded. Most significantly, it will emphasise the role of human agents in the study of medieval coins while elucidating the role of gold coins as a lynchpin between economy and politics. From a methodological perspective, this book shows ways in which monetary history can be incorporated into the study of the Middle Ages more broadly, thus overcoming the existing boundaries between this subject, numismatics, and political, cultural, social, and economic history. Its findings will also show the inadequacy of the artificial separation between the economic and political dimensions to explain both the origins and early life of the florin and, more generally, of money in the Middle Ages. Finally, this book will speak to the now fashionable histories of materiality, which in the past have focused on different objects but not coinage, although coins probably represent the most obvious starting point for writing such histories, given their millennial tradition.⁷¹ Thus, this book will provide a new perspective on the florin and establish a framework that reconceptualises the relationship between material culture and economic practice – a framework that further studies can follow.