The purpose of any currency, you would have thought, is to offer a unit of wealth that, when multiplied or divided, will buy anything for sale within a given geographical area. This is at once the wonder and danger of money, that in different amounts it can be made equivalent to almost anything. Hence we have copper coins that can be added up to make silver coins, silver that can be added up to make gold, or, in our day, the banknote, one dollar, five, ten, twenty, a hundred.
Not so in fifteenth-century Florence. Your silver coin, the picciolo, could not be added up to make a golden florin. They were separate currencies. The logic of this was that since the two coins were actually made of precious metals — indeed their worth depended on the intrinsic value of each mineral — the relationship between them could no more be fixed than the relationship between apples and oranges. Piccioli could only be changed into florins by the bank at the going rate for changing silver into gold.
Thus the reasoning. The reality was that into the very element that potentially frees us from class — the element that allows the hateful parvenu to pile up wealth and act as if his peasant family were as noble as mine — a radical divide was established. The picciolo was the currency of the poor, the salary of the worker, the price of a piece of bread. Luxury goods, wholesaling, international trade, these were the exclusive realm of the golden florin. By law. It was a situation not unlike that in the communist bloc some years ago where the rich and powerful used the dollar and the masses the zloty or rouble. A man who dealt in piccioli had a long way to go.
Across the banker’s green table you could make the move from one world to another, from silver to gold, modesty to riches. At the price of a small commission. Needless to say, the poor man’s money tended to be worth less and less. In 1252, when the florin was first minted, it could be bought with a lira of piccioli, which is to say 20 piccioli. Around 1500, you needed 7 lire of piccioli—i.e., 140. This was partly because the merchant who belonged to the Arte di Calimala (the Merchants’ Guild), the silk manufacturer who belonged to the Arte di Por San Maria (the Clothmakers’ Guild) earned in florins but paid salaries in piccioli. When profits were down, they encouraged the mint, which was controlled by the government, which in turn was formed mainly of men from these powerful guilds, to reduce the silver content in the picciolo. That way it would take fewer florins to pay the same salaries in piccioli to the unsuspecting poor. Archbishop Antonino condemned this practice. The archbishop was well loved for his constant work to improve the lot of the poor. He even went around personally to put bread in the hands of dying plague victims. But nobody was ever excommunicated for fiddling the currency, as they were when a debt to the pope wasn’t paid. Nor was anyone publicly whipped, or put in the stocks, as when a silk-worker stole some of the material she was weaving.
So separate currencies guaranteed that despite all the social turmoil, some salutary hierarchical distinctions were maintained. Assessed for tax in 1457, 82 percent of Florentines paid less than a florin and 30 percent nothing at all, because destitute. This monetary apartheid, however, came at the price of some serious accounting problems. Dealing only in florins, Giovanni di Bicci’s bank could use the double-entry system, with debits and credits on opposite pages, Venetian style. But when the family opened a wool-manufacturing business, more primitive methods had to be adopted. Who was to say what the exact relationship between purchases, earnings, and salaries was, when one side of the company dealt in florins, the other in piccioli? In any event, when business was bad and neither gold nor silver was to be had, the workers were obliged to accept payment in woolen cloth, which they hated, and which messed up the books even further, though it did benefit the pawnbrokers, who had a habit of turning cloth into cash at rates that suited them. However potentially evil money may be, the mind does long for the clarity and convenience of the transferable unit of value.
HOW MUCH WAS the florin worth? A slave girl, or a mule, could be bought for 50 florins. To purchase the piccioli that would pay a maid’s wages for a year might cost 10 florins. Thirty-five florins would pay a year’s rent for a small townhouse with garden, or for the Medici’s banking premises on the corner of via Porta Rossa and via dell’Arte della Lana. Twenty florins would fresco the courtyard of a palazzo costing 1,000 to build, or pay an apprentice boy at the bank for a year, while a barrel of wine would come in at just a lira de piccioli and a visit to the astrologer half that. “Don’t trade in wine,” Cosimo would tell his branch managers, “it’s not worth it.” But he regularly consulted astrologers. Money and magic go together. A leek cost one picciolo and an arm’s length of cheap cloth 9 piccioli, while the same length of gorgeous white damask would set you back 2½ florins, about twenty-five times the price, depending on the exchange rate. In general, luxury goods were expensive — the rich needed their florins — while the staples were cheap, so that, assuming they had been paid, the laborers could get by on their piccioli. But the city’s many wool- and silkworkers were on piece rates and demand was not steady. In hard times, you might be better off as a slave at a rich man’s table.
All the same, despite low wages and separate currencies, the scandal of moneymaking continued, for money will not stay still and the poor are rarely happy with their lot. So if you did manage to lay in a little store of cash, there were laws to prevent you from upsetting others by showing it off. No meal with more than two courses for the common classes. No more than a certain number of guests at any given meal. No clothes with more than one color, unless you are a knight or his lady. Or a magistrate, perhaps. Or a doctor. No fine materials for children. No soft leather soles on your white linen socks. No fur collars. No buttons on women’s clothes except between wrist and elbow, and for maids, none at all. For maids, in fact, no fancy headdress and no high heels, just kerchief and clogs.
The plebs were thus prevented from spending themselves into poverty. A sensible thing surely. Such legislation keeps the natural order natural. Money can’t cause trouble if people aren’t allowed to use it. Was the inspiration behind the laws just a touch misogynist? No doubt the threat of being birched naked through the streets guaranteed a certain frisson when a girl broke the rules and sewed a silver button at her breast.
Sporadically enforced, because in the end bad for business (this was a town that specialized in the production of luxury clothing), the so-called sumptuary laws kept everyone hyperconscious of status. Spying on your neighbors is exciting. Fashions were constantly changing to beat the letter of the law. If such and such a material was banned, then a new one was invented. As in the area of finance, repression proved a great stimulus for creativity, to the detriment of plain speech. This sleeve may look like samite, signora, says the dressmaker, but technically speaking it’s something else. A French invention. Not covered by the legislation. This may look like a row of buttons, but as you see there are no buttonholes, so strictly speaking they are studs.
The legislators worked hard to keep ahead of the game. “Clarification about pearls,” announces one new law. “Clarification about buttons.” “Clarification about the wearing of chains.” But, as for the theologians pondering new financial instruments, the task was endless. “How can we ever curb the disgraceful bestiality of our women?” asks one despairing member of the government. Fashion police were appointed to roam the streets and finger ladies’ clothes. The Officers of the Night, they were called. “Oh, but the collar is suckling, sir, not ermine!” “And what’s suckling?” “An animal, sir.” Meanwhile, Giovanni di Bicci and his two sons wore sober cloaks. They hadn’t yet tackled the problem of how to make their wealth manifest. For the moment, envy was a weed best left unwatered. One of Cosimo’s favorite sayings.