Fiscality, Debt, and Moral Economy: The View from Florentine Civic Chronicles

This article explores how civic chroniclers in the Florentine Republic represented institutional developments in the city’s funded debt, the Monte Comune. It explores how late medieval and early modern history writers represented communal fiscal policy and citizen-creditor behaviour within broader moral and political concerns. The market for Monte credits was a contentious area of economic activity that provoked an intense debate over its legitimacy amongst theologians and lawyers. This chapter shows how the usury controversy impacted Florentine historiography. Civic chronicles provide evidence for the lay reception and understanding of the debate. The first part of this contribution focuses on Matteo Villani and his model for representing the consolidation of the Florentine public debt and the creation of a market for government credits. In the second part of the article, the chroniclers Villani and Baldassare Bonaiuti’s concerns over price, yield, investor behaviour, and political policy in the market for credits are compared with that of the humanist historians Leonardo Bruni and Benedetto Varchi. The final part of the chapter shows how writers both described the ways in which the debts attracted both popular resentment as well as relatively wide levels of citizen investment, as creditors looked for stable investments connected to the marriage market and charitable provision. Moral economy offers a prism through which to understand how late medieval and early modern historiography framed ethical concerns on the social impact of public credit, connecting taxation and markets to religion, moral philosophy, and social values.