Borrowing and Lending Money in Alpine Areas During the Eighteenth Century: Trento and Rovereto Compared

In 1740 the imperial nobleman Mattia Giuseppe Cresseri de Breitenstein of Trento borrowed 25,000 florins (125,000 Venetian lire) in a single transaction (Archivio di Stato di Trento, hereafter Astn, Archivio notarile, hereafter An, A. Ceschini folder, hereafter f., XVIII, 4388, 21 March 1740. 1 florin was worth 5 lire (or troni). 1 lira was equal to 20 soldi or to 240 denari). That sum nearly equaled the revenues of the tolls of Rovereto in the same year, 24,769 florins (Bonoldi, La fiera e il dazio. Economia e politica commerciale nel Tirolo del secondo Settecento. Società di studi trentini di scienze storiche, Trento, p. 67, 1999). The nobleman Leonardo Piomarta de Langenfeld, in one year (1760), lent more than 45,000 florins (225,000 lire) spread across a score of transactions, most to finance the surrounding rural communities and some as individual loans. These figures represent only a small portion of the sizable amount of capital mobilized by the informal credit market pivoted on notaries, at a time when banks did not yet exist. For years, a vast literature claimed that a country’s economic development became possible only once banks, in the form of joint-stock companies, had been created (Cameron, Financing industrialization. Elgar, Aldershot, 1972). According to this view, which became common wisdom, only specialized formal credit institutions were able—acting as financial intermediaries—to mobilize considerable financial resources at low cost. As a consequence, preindustrial economies had been for long considered limited, characterized by a weak demand and by money exchanges that occurred within restricted personal relationships. On the whole, credit supply had been considered aimed at meeting only military expenses or at financing the growing bureaucratic apparatus of modern State [Debunking this traditional view, recent studies have proved the positive interplay between public debt and real economy in pre-industrial Italy where, in some cases, state bonds nurtured a lively financial market (De Luca, Government debt and financial markets: exploring pro-cycle effects in Northern Italy during the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries. In: Piola Caselli F (ed) Government debts and financial markets in Europe. Pickering & Chatto, London, pp 45–66, 2008; Pezzolo, Government debts and credit markets in Renaissance Italy. In: Piola Caselli F (ed) Government debts and financial markets in Europe, Pickering & Chatto, London, pp 17–31, 2008)].