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Warlord Bankers
October 29, 2024 | By SOTN
The first "modern" bank was established in Venice with a guarantee from the State in 1157 AD and operated until 1797 acting in the interest of the Crusaders of Pope Urban the Second. This activity developed into the Bank of Venice, with an initial capital of 5,000,000 ducats. This bank was the first national bank to have been established within the boundaries of Europe.
In the middle of the 13th Century, when certain rich Italian families saw the profits that the Venetian banking families were making, groups of Italian Christians, particularly the Cahorsins and Lombards, invented "legal fictions" to get around the ban on Christian usury. One method of Christians effecting a loan with interest without calling it usury was to offer money without interest, but also require that the loan is insured against possible loss or injury, and/or delays in repayment. The Christians effecting these legal fictions became known as the Pope's Usurers and reduced the importance of the Venetian and Italian Jews to European monarchs.
The most powerful Italian warlord banking families came from Florence, including the Acciaiuoli, Mozzi, Bardi, and Peruzzi families, which established branches throughout Europe. Probably the most famous Italian bank was the Medici bank, set up by Giovanni di Bicci de' Medici in 1397 and continuing until 1494.
The spread of Italian bankers into Europe was dramatic. By 1327, Avignon, France, had 43 branches of Italian banking houses. The accompanying growth of Italian banking in France was the start of the Lombard moneychangers in Europe, who moved from city to city along the busy pilgrim routes important for trade. By the later Middle Ages, Christian merchants who lent money with interest were without opposition, and the Jews lost their privileged position as moneylenders.
After 1400, political forces turned against the methods of the Italian free enterprise bankers and in 1401, King Martin I of Aragon had some of these bankers expelled. In 1403, Henry IV of England prohibited them from taking profits in any way in his kingdom. In 1409, Flanders imprisoned and then expelled Genoese bankers. In 1410, all Italian merchants were expelled from Paris.
Later, when modern banking practices became widespread, the Italian banking families became prominent again, especially between 1527 and 1572 when Italy produced a number of important banking family groups: the Grimaldi, Spinola, Pallavicino, Doria, Pinelli and Lomellini.
The Bardi, Peruzzi, and Acciaiuouli family banks, along with other large banks in Florence and Siena in particular, were all founded in the years around 1250. In the 1290s they grew dramatically in size and rapaciousness, and were reorganized, by the influx of new partners. These were "Black Guelph" noble families, of the factions of northern Italian landed aristocracy, were always bitterly hostile to the government of the Holy Roman Empire. Charlemagne, 500 years earlier, had already recognized Venice as a threat equal to the Vikings, and had organized a boycott to try to bring Venice to terms with his Empire. Venice in 1300 was the center of the Black Guelph faction which drove Dante and his co-thinkers from Florence. Machiavelli describes how by 1308, the Black Guelph ruled everywhere in northern Italy except in Milan, which remained allied with the Holy Roman Empire, and was the most economically developed and powerful city-state in fourteenth century Italy.
The charter of the Parte Guelfa openly claimed that it was the party of the papacy, and with Venice, the Black Guelph openly pushed for the Popes to change usury from a mortal sin to a venial sin. The Venetians seemed to enjoy an effective exemption from the Catholic Popes injunctions against usury, and also from their ban on trading with the infidel — the Seljuk and Mamluk regimes of Egypt and Syria.
A century earlier, in the 1180s, Doge (Duke) Ziani of Venice had Emperor Frederick agree to withdraw his standard silver coinage from Italy and allow the Italian cities to mint their own coins. Over the century from the 1183 Peace of Constance to the 1290s, Venice established the extraordinary, near-total dominance of trading in gold and silver coin and bullion throughout Europe and Asia.
The Black Guelph bankers of Florence did not simply loan money to monarchs and then expect repayment with interest, because interest was often "officially" not charged on the loans, since usury was considered a sin and a crime among Christians. The primary conditionality was the pledging of royal revenues directly to the bankers — the clearest sign that the monarchs lacked national sovereignty against the Black Guelph "privateers." Since in fourteenth century Europe important commodities like food, wool, clothing, salt, iron, etc. were produced only under royal license and taxation, bank control of royal revenue led to, first, private monopolization of production of these commodities, and second, the banks' "privatization" and control of the functions of royal government itself.
By 1325, the Peruzzi bank owned all of the revenues of the Kingdom of Naples (the entire southern half of Italy, the most productive grain belt of the entire Mediterranean area); they recruited and ran King Robert of Naples' army, collected his duties and taxes, appointed the officials of his government, and above everything sold all the grain from his kingdom. They egged Robert on to continual wars to conquer Sicily, because through Spain, Sicily was allied with the Holy Roman Empire. Thus, Sicily's grain production, which the Peruzzi did not control, was reduced by war.
King Robert’s Anjou relatives, the Kings of Hungary, had their realm similarly "privatized" by the Florentine banks in the same period. In France, the Peruzzi were the cooperating bank of the bankers to King Philip IV. The Bardi and Peruzzi banks, "privatized" the revenues of Edward II and Edward III of England, paid the King's budget, and monopolized the sales of English wool.
When King Edward tried forbidding Italian merchants and bankers from expatriating their profits from England, they converted their profits into wool and stored huge amounts of wool at the monasteries of the Order of Knights Hospitalers, who were their debtors, political allies, and partners in the monopolization of the wool trade. It was the Bardi's representatives who proposed to Edward III the wool boycott which destroyed the textile industry of Flanders.
Large revenue flows came to the Vatican in the collection of its church contributions and tithes. Under John XXII, the Black Guelph Pope from 1316-1336, papal tithes sky-rocketed reaching the apparent value of 250,000 gold florins per year. All were collected by agents of the Venetian banks (for France, the largest source of papal revenue) and the Bardi Bank (for everywhere else in Europe except Germany). They charged the Vatican sizable "exchange fees" to transfer the collections.
Only the Venice-allied bankers had the reserves of cash to finance papal operations. They transferred collections from Europe and loaned them to the Popes in advance. Thus, Venice controlled the papal credit and the continuing hostilities between the papacy and the Holy Roman Emperors.
In the Italian city-states themselves, the early years of the fourteenth century saw the assignment of more and more of the revenues of the primary taxes to the bankers and other Guelph Party bondholders. From about 1315, the Guelph abolished the income taxes in the city, but increased them on the surrounding rural areas into which they expanded their authority. The bankers, merchants, and wealthy Guelph aristocrats did not pay taxes, but instead, they made loans to the city and governments.
Some of the famous banks of Tuscany had failed already in the 1320s: the Asti of Siena, the Franzezi, the Scali company of Florence. In the 1330s, the biggest banks, with the exception of the Bardi, the Peruzzi, Acciaiuoli and Buonacorsi, were losing money and plunging toward bankruptcy with the fall in production of the vital commodities which they had monopolized. The Acciaiuoli and the Buonacorsi, who had been bankers of the Vatican before it left Rome, went bankrupt in 1342 with the default of the city of Florence and the first defaults of Edward III. The Peruzzi and Bardi, the world's two largest banks, went under in 1345, leaving the entire financial market of Europe and the Mediterranean shattered with the exception of the much smaller Hanseatic League bankers of Germany, who had never allowed the Italian banks and merchant companies to enter their cities.
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What is going on here with the US government having access to all the fairy dust magic money they need? The rocket developed by SpaceX can land on its butt hole and it has 33 engines to make that happen. That's it? Ancient rocket technology used to get to Mars with rocket engines? Who else wants to call bullshit on that idea? All these people including Musk are pretending. They live by an entirely different set of rules and morality we can barely comprehend. It is astonishing how many people think this is real when the amount of money that it took for Musk's rocket to land on its ass is the exact amount of money Musk said he needed to get to Mars.
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