Economic History Association

Money in Sixteenth-Century Florence. by Carlo M. Cipolla; Le tre Rivoluzioni e altri Saggi diStoria Economica e Sociale. by Carlo M. CipollaReview by: Lauro MartinesThe Journal of Economic History, Vol. 50, No. 4 (Dec., 1990), pp. 950-951Published by: Cambridge University Press on behalf of the Economic History AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/2122467 .

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950 Reviews of Books

gender and textile production in neighboring medieval Islamic societies, a "textile civilization" of great importance in the same period.

KATHLEEN BIDDICK, University of Notre Dame

Money in Sixteenth-Century Florence. By Carlo M. Cipolla. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989. Pp. xi, 169. $29.95.

Le tre rivoluzioni e altri saggi di storia economic e sociale. By Carlo M. Cipolla. Bologna: SocietA editrice il Mulino, 1989. Pp. 428. L 42,000.

The tricky nature of money has long been one of Carlo Cipolla's key interests, and Money in Sixteenth-Century Florence is another episode in this complex tale. Yet he has never been a narrow specialist. His selected essays, Le tre rivoluzioni, range over more than ten centuries and a wealth of topics from medieval castles to plague, the manorial system, economic decline, demographic change, health authorities, poverty, interest rates, wages, prices, technology, autobiography, and California wines. The breadth of his procedures has been no less impressive: some essays are highly focused, technical, with a strong archival basis; others are more discursive "think" pieces.

Money in Sixteenth-Century Florence examines a variety of Florentine coins, their metallic contents, bookkeeping monies (units of account), fluctuations in value (gold versus silver), the Florentine consequences of the flood of silver from the New World, and the city's acute financial crisis of the 1570s and 1580s. The resulting picture is far from simple, not only because of the odd relations between real coins and account monies, but also because of the indeterminable quantities of gold in Florence, the obscure value of wage or workers' money, and the stubborn, if well-intentioned, monetary policies of the grand duke, Francesco de' Medici. Cipolla's findings may be summed up as follows.

Owing to conservative ducal policies and the influx of new silver, Florence lost all initiative in the monetary field. Florentine accountants invented their own bookkeeping monies, but why, exactly, accounts were kept in unreal monies is unclear, unless the practice was imposed by wage money and the double standards of gold and silver. Gold appreciated and silver fell in value, to such an extent that by the late 1580s Florence had all but passed fully over to a silver monometallic system. Ducal efforts to freeze the value of gold made for the flight of gold coins: they were shipped out to seek a higher value in foreign exchange markets. Furthermore in the 1570s and 1580s the financial stranglehold of the Ricci bank-a firm greatly favored by the grand duke-issued in astonishing cash and credit shortages, so that on Saturdays workers often had to go without their pay. In the event, ducal government was forced to lift its restrictions against the circulation of some foreign coins in Florentine Tuscany. We can only puzzle over how the credit noose affected the urban economy and Florentine life at all levels of the population. Luckily for the ruling class, the structure of authoritarian government held fast, all dissent having been extirpated during the middle decades of the century. Eric Cochrane's Florence in the Forgotten Centuries (Chicago, 1976) paints the period in too rosy a color.

Omitting only the question of literacy, most of the 29 essays in Le tre rivoluzioni treat the many themes that have occupied Cipolla during his long career: metal currencies, long-term economic fluctuations, transformations in land tenure, population changes, short-term crises, the introduction and spread of new technologies, and methodological queries. After about 1970 he took up additional subject matter, including the structure of the professions and the history of plague and epidemic controls. But certain themes and emphases recur in his work, and some of these deserve commentary.

He has rightly held that inflation-hence the continuing devaluation of money-has

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Reviews of Books 951

been a secular trend in Europe for about a millennium. In this tongue duree but especially after 1300, states tended chronically to spend beyond their means, thereby helping, in this expansion of credit, to devalue money and fuel long-term inflation. Other factors also contributed to the inflationary process, such as increasing populations, rising productivities, and the debasement of metal currencies. But once we raise the question of the state's fiscal impact on inflation, what about its impact on the vicissitudes of the European economies in the late medieval and early modern periods? Moreover, it would be well to have some idea of what portion of all taxes ended in the pockets of the rich-for at Renaissance Genoa, Florence, Venice, and other Italian city-states, they were the great owners or creditors of the public debt. In an early essay, "Prezzi, salari e teoria dei salari in Lombardia alla fine del cinquecento" (pp. 105-16), Cipolla established that wages in sixteenth-century Lombardy were based on a bare subsistence level. The assumption was that workers should be paid just enough to feed themselves. This view, however, was certainly not confined to the Lombard plain. It was also held by fifteenth-century Florentine humanists and seventeenth-century poor-law administrators in England. Indeed, it was a common view in Europe. Knowing this, we can more easily understand Cipolla's opening sentence in a late essay (1981)-"fluttuazioni economiche, pauperismo e intervento pubblico nell'Italia del Cinque e Seicento" -alleging that 75 to 80 percent of preindustrial Europeans were, arguably, mired in poverty. War, crop failures, epidemics, and deficient technologies doubtless contributed to the cycles of haunting poverty, when 20 to 35 percent of the urban populations might suddenly capsize into beggary and dependence on charity. But three other factors also fostered endemic poverty: (1) the payment of mere subsistence wages, with no surplus for future need; (2) the disadvantageous nature of wage money (copper and mixed silver coins) relative to the money used for calculating profits and productivities (gold and large silver pieces); and (3) the state's preeminent reliance on a variety of sales and indirect taxes, which weighed most heavily on poor folk. Production itself was too inelastic, for with their wages workers could never buy back more than a fraction of what they produced. Finally, when it came to putting more wealth into circulation, it was not enough to build numerous grand palazzi, if most of the laborers who constructed them were paid a pauper's wage.

LAURO MARTINES, University of Califimrnia, Los Angeles

Trasporti e sviliippo economico: Secoli XIII-XVIII. Edited by Anna Vannini Marx. Florence: Felice le Monnier, 1986. Pp. 375.

The 30 articles that make up this large folio volume were presented at the fifth annual Settimana di Studio held in Prato, Italy, in May 1974. This appears to be the fourth volume of Prato papers published to date; as its predecessors have not been reviewed in this JOURNAL, it is worth noting their titles: Vol. I, La lana come materia prima: I frnomeni della sua prodizione e circolazione nei secoli XIII-XVII (Florence, 1974); Vol. II, Produzione, commercio e consumo dei panni di lana nei secoli XII-XVIII (Florence, 1976); Vol. VI, Domandae consumi: Livelli e strutture nei secoli XIII-XVIII (Florence, 1978).

The present collection deals with transportation and economic growth in Europe and its surrounding seas, extending from Great Britain to Russia and from the Baltic to the Mediterranean over six centuries. The papers reflect this chronological and spatial breadth, while the subject allows for a variety of approaches from the various contributors. The result is rather heterogeneous fare, with something for just about everyone. In view of the restrictions of a short review, enumerating the contents of the volume seems preferable to commenting on a few articles that catch my medievalist's eye. The volume reproduces the sequence in which the papers were presented at the

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