The gold florin

The story

Coins of silver and copper

In the Middle Ages, for centuries, western Europe used almost only silver coins, the pennies (denarii), of small value, and coins of copper or alloy. Gold coins were hardly minted any more: the gold in circulation came from the East, above all from the Byzantine Empire and the Arab world, and there was little of it: for important business a gold coin would have been extremely convenient. A merchant who had to pay a large sum found himself with a sack of silver coins that were heavy and hard to count.

Coins, moreover, were a practical disaster. Every lord, bishop or town minted its own, of different weights and qualities, and sometimes rulers secretly reduced the amount of silver to get more coins from the same quantity of metal. To know what a coin was worth you had to weigh and check it, and there were money-changers everywhere.

The florin of Florence

In 1252 the commune of Florence decided to mint a coin of pure gold, that is, 24 carat: the gold florin. It weighed about 3.5 grams. On one side it had the lily, the symbol of the city (the “flower” from which it took its name), and on the back Saint John the Baptist, the patron saint of the Florentines. The design stayed the same for centuries, so that everyone would recognise it at a glance.

Genoa too had minted its own gold genovino in the same year. But it was the florin that became the reference coin of Europe. Its secret was stability: for more than two hundred years Florence kept the weight and purity of the florin unchanged. Whoever received one knew it was worth what it had always been worth, and this gave confidence. Traders of every country accepted it; many states and towns imitated it. In 1284 Venice minted its ducat, also of almost pure gold.

Around the coin ran an inscription in Latin: on one side the name of the city, “Florentia”, on the other that of the saint. Every florin was checked by the mint officials, who had to guarantee the quality of the gold. Anyone who forged coins risked very severe punishments.

A bankers' economy

Florence had grown rich above all through wool and finance. Its wool cloth was finished in the city and sold all over Europe. The banking families, such as the Bardi and the Peruzzi in the 1300s, and the Medici in the 1400s, opened branches in London, Bruges, Paris, Avignon and many other cities. They lent money to kings, popes and merchants, accepted deposits, and made payments at a distance with bills of exchange, that is, documents that allowed payment to be made in one place without having to carry the coins.

To keep these affairs in order a new way of keeping accounts was also developed, double-entry bookkeeping, in which every transaction is recorded twice, once as an entry and once as an outgoing, to catch mistakes. Not all the bankers were lucky: the Bardi and the Peruzzi failed between 1343 and 1346, above all because King Edward III of England did not repay the loans they had made him.

A “cursed” flower

Not everyone looked on money with favour. Dante, in the Paradiso, writes that the “cursed flower”, that is, the florin, had led sheep and lambs astray, meaning that it had corrupted both the faithful and the shepherds of the Church. For the Christian morality of the time, making a profit from money, and above all interest, was viewed with suspicion, and the Church condemned usury. The bankers found ways round the ban, for example through exchange dealings, but many, at the end of their lives, left money to charity, to feel more at ease.