The Economic Supremacy of Renaissance Italy

Written by Livio Marchetti

(Extracted from the book "The Economic Revival of Italy" by Livio Marchetti.)

Vincenzo Gioberti, the apostle and pure evangelist of the Italian « Risorgiinento », wrote a celebrated work before the revolutions of 1848 with a view to demonstrating the « moral and civil supremacy of the Italians ». Words which, to some among the more temperate interpreters of the patriotic abbé's thought, may have seemed to betray an inordinate national pride: but which, together with other expressions inspired by a desire to incite, served the purpose of spurring on the country to its great struggles.

Historically, Gioberti's phrase does not cover the whole ground. As a matter of fact, the « moral and civil supremacy », which the Italians had derived from the past as the firstborn of the Empire and of the Church of Rome, became, in nearer times, an economic supremacy as well.

In the time when the art of painting was giving its first signs of life in Florence with Cimabue and Giotto; when Dante, like a sun rising without any preliminary twilight on a dark landscape, suddenly illumined Italy and Europe with a new literature; while the researches of learned men in Bologna were being prosecuted with fervour over old Latin law texts, our seafaring Republics of Pisa, Genoa and Venice had already conquered the dominion of the sea for some time past to the extent that the trade of the medioeval world was centred in their hands.

Pair ages when at night
The bell of Saint Mark
Signalled to their cities
The return of their ships:
Prom Egypt, from the Tanas
And from Scandinavian gulfs,
A thousand ships would come
That Adria will see no more.

Thus the Venetian poet, [Giacomo] Zanella, celebrated the past splendours of Venice.

The City of the Lagoons, which flowered at the first dawn of modern civilisation, enjoyed a position similar to that of England today. In possession of a large mercantile fleet, firmly strengthened by a military fleet, she scoured the Mediterranean as absolute mistress, dislodging and defeating pirates of every race. Besides her extensive possessions on land, she had her colonies and her landing-places along all the Levantine shores, and of these she took advantage to promote ever more profitable contacts between East and West. Crusaders would entrust themselves to her at the moment of embarking for the Holy Land; the whole of the new traffic that was seeking an outlet towards the western world from Asia Minor, Syria, Mesopotamia, Persia and China, was headed towards her, as to Genoa and Pisa, as also the inventions and conceptions of the East that were destined to create a new thrill of life as well as deep upheavals in the thought and civilisation of old Europe.

Nor did fortune limit its favours to Venice and her rivals on the Tyrrhanean coast. The period known as the Renaissance — which extended in Italy from the middle of the thirteenth to the middle of the sixteenth centuries — was a period not only of literary and artistic efflorescence, but of economic prosperity. Art itself meant, in Florence, excelling in the arts, that is in the industries of that time; and every artisan considered himself something of an artist.

Lombards and Tuscans carried on their traffic in France and England, giving credit to the powerful potentates of those countries. The traces of Italian origin which have survived in banking and commercial terms are known to all, as are those which are still to be found in the technical dictionary of naval terms. The child once grown to manhood never forgets and continues to use the first words he learned at his mother's knee. In the same way banking, trade and navigation, though called upon by the natural course of events to develop and expand under other skies, will never lose the memory of their true country of origin, which is Italy.

That glad return of the peninsula to prosperity after the darkness and squalor of the Middle Ages, also suggested to several learned Italians the first pleasing conceptions of economic science. Bernardo Davanzati, among others, wrote in the sixteenth century a Notice on Exchanges, in which the phenomena relative to the monetary disturbances between different countries were gone into, with an analytical acumen still worthy of assent and admiration.