Italian Bankers in France and Italian Wars

Abstract

At the last stage of the Italian Wars (1494—1559), the military, political and, most importantly, financial superiority of the Habsburgs over the Valois became quite obvious. The Spanish king could make use of silver which was already coming quite regularly and in large quantities from the mines of the New World. He controlled the old (Augsburg — Ulm) and new (Besançon — Piacenza) centres of banking capital, as well as the commercial and financial heart of the emerging world economic system — Antwerp. But King Henry II of France (1547—1559) launched a series of daring reforms, sometimes far ahead of his time. The king could rely on a more developed bureaucracy than in other countries, on a state system that had reached an advanced level of centralization, and on the economy that was still on the rise, the ‘heart’ of which were the Lyon fairs that acquired international significance. In order to continue an active foreign policy, an unprecedented step was taken — not a royal official, but a Lyon banker of Italian origin, Albizzi Del Bene (Albisse Delbeyne), was appointed to the post of surintendent des finances. Thus, the government was able to use the experience and capability of the banking world for its own purposes. Under the conditions of the war, which was fought at a great distance from the borders of the kingdom, the circulation of money was greatly simplified and became more predictable. The surintendent, closely associated with the most powerful trading and banking house Gadagni (Gadagne) of Lyon, had great weight among Italian bankers who operated not only in Lyon, but also in Venice, Rome, and Tuscany. The reformers’ plans and the progress of reform can be fully appreciated by studying documents from the Lamoignon Collection (Russian State Archive of Ancient Acts, Moscow). Providing fairly clear guarantees based on the income from the Lyon fairs, the king, with the help of his surintendent and people from his entourage who were responsible for financing French policy in Italy (Constable Anne de Montmorency, royal secretary Jean Duthier), managed to attract huge sums (about 12 million Tours livres) which made it possible to resist a powerful enemy. A flexible combination of bills of exchange, clearing and other mechanisms allowed to transfer this amount of money to Italy. The crowning success of Del Bene was the creation of the Grand Parti de Lyon — a consortium of creditors to the French king. Some researchers claimed that its principles were quite comparable to the achievements of the 19th-century banking system. If there had been peace, the Grand Parti de Lyon could well have contributed to the repayment of the principal amount of borrowings and the dissolution of the accumulated interest debt. But politics had once again interfered with the economy. A new war, in which France was drawn against the will of the royal entourage, a chain of military defeats (the capture of Montmorency, the main patron of Del Bene, in 1557) and, finally, the unexpected death of Henry II shortly after the Peace of Cateau-Cambrésis (1559) put an end to bold economic reforms.