Part I
1
Carlo Taviani
San Giorgio was created as an office of the Commune of Genoa. The Commune arose in the eleventh and twelfth centuries and by the fifteenth century was the institution with the most extensive territory in Liguria. After political reform in 1528, the term “Commune” was replaced by the term “Repubblica.” When one analyzes the relationship between the Commune and San Giorgio, it is helpful to remember that the studies dealing with the two institutions have different traditions. During the nineteenth century, the concept of “state” was applied to medieval and early modern territorial powers, in a backward projection of a nineteenth-century concept of the state. In recent decades, scholars have abandoned this approach and revised earlier historiography: the history of the Commune of Genoa is part of this revision. Unlike the historiography of the state, however, a revision of financial institutions has yet to be undertaken.1 It now seems appropriate for scholars to apply a similar perspective to the study of public debt, banks, and corporations.
The territorial power of the Commune of Genoa traditionally extended from Capo Corvo, on the east coast close to present-day Tuscany, toward Monaco (the present-day Principality of Monaco) on the west coast. The Commune had various offices: the Officium Antianorum (Office of the Senators); the Officium Monetae (Office of Money); the Officium Mercantiae (Office of Goods); the Officium Gazaria (dominions called Gazaria); the Officium Misericordiae (Charity); the Officium Rupti or Rotti (bankruptcies); and other temporary offices. As we will see, the Compere di San Giorgio was also an office of the Commune. The most important officeholder, the doge, governed the Commune together with the 12 anziani (of the Officium Antianorum); the Officium Monetae drew up the budget and dealt with the Commune’s expenses; the Officium Mercantiae dealt with issues related to merchants and trade; the Officium Gazaria administered the territories in the east; the Officium Rupti dealt with bankruptcies; and the Officium Misericordia administered donations for charity work. The charges of the offices were regulated through a mechanism of elections and lotteries (drawing lots). All the male citizens—nobles and populares (people, merchants, and artisans)—could vote. Election rules changed continually during the fifteenth century. The laws (regulae) of the Commune were updated in 1413 and 1443.2 Among the Commune’s various offices, San Giorgio became the most autonomous, with its power growing so much that some decades after its foundation it was identified— as be shown in Chapter 7—as powerful enough to compete with the Commune.
Before the foundation of San Giorgio, there were various forms of debts of private shareholders of the Commune in Genoa. Some of them were short-term loans, extraordinary contributions that were time limited; others lasted longer. The Compere and the maone lasted longer; they also involved the largest sums. San Giorgio slowly went on to absorb all the maone’s capital, privileges, structures, organization systems, archives, and rules.
1.1. The Comperae and the Sea Ventures
In Genoa, the maritime commercial enterprises were similar to the systems of loans made to the Commune by private individuals and citizens. Merchants needed huge resources to arm new ships, acquire goods, and move them abroad. Since a single merchant could rarely afford these expenses, from the twelfth century onward, a system of investment arose involving multiple capital investors. In exchange for a sum of money, these investors received shares. The shares could be traded during the voyage, and once the ship was back in port, gains were divided among the shareholders.3
Shares were virtual representations of parts of the ship and its cargo and were called loca (places), a term we see later in documents related to the contracting of levies and taxes.4 From the early years of the thirteenth century on, the term locum (pl. loca) was used for the smallest part of a share of the Commune that could be traded in exchange for money. A set of these loca was called a compera. It is still unclear if the term was borrowed from the sea ventures, but it may be that the debt of the Commune was divided into portions following the model of naval capital investment. It is hard to know if the financial system set up for maritime enterprises influenced the terrestrial debt in Genoa, both because sources are scant and because the maritime and terrestrial systems developed simultaneously. In Genoa, private citizens helped the Commune with cash flow from the first half of the eleventh century on via forced loans created for extraordinary situations such as military defense. From them the compere were derived—that is, the acquisition of the Commune’s rights on a gabella, the levy that up to then had pertained to the Commune. Initially this was a temporary process; later it became permanent. The earliest examples were called Compere Capituli (from the name of the Capital of the Cathedral, where the registers of these Compere were preserved);5 then came funding for the Compera Venetorum, the Compera Corsicae, the Compera Magna Pacis, the Compera Finarii, Compera Gazariae, Compera S. Pauli, and so on. A compera was named for the reason it was established—for example, the war against the Venetians, the war in Corsica, and so on.6 Over time, since the compere were numerous, the debts were consolidated. In 1332, for instance, the compere were united into the Gran Compera Pacis (Large Compera of Peace) of 6,668 loca.7
1.2. The Maona
1.2.1. The Puzzle of the Maona
The word maona has hitherto been associated mainly with an institution that was solely Genoese. The research presented here, however, shows that this word is attested to in other cities on the Italian peninsula, including Florence, Messina, Venice, and Lucca—and also on the Iberian Peninsula. Features, tasks, and functions of different maone varied over time, and this research has located several previously unknown and understudied cases that have different characteristics than those found in Genoa.
The more cases that are identified, the wider the definition becomes. Various institutions called maona existed over time and engaged in different activities in different locations. To make it possible to group them together, I will outline scholars’ interpretations of the maona. The maona has usually been defined as a group of investors joined together to form an organization that performed one or more economic activities. The majority of the maone identified by this research often, though not always, replaced the role of the state—that is, of a commune or a republic. Even this wide definition, however, does not account for all institutions called maona. My research has thus developed a model that takes into consideration those maone with different roles or purposes.
The scholarly model of maona has tended to consider only the Genoese cases—primarily those in fourteenth-century Chios. This limited model is problematic, however, and I will examine it more closely so I can open new research avenues.
The first known usage of the term maona is found in Genoese sources in the context of an expedition to defend Ceuta, in the Maghreb, in 1235; other Genoese maone were created later in Chios (1346), Cyprus (1373), and Corsica (1378). In 1235, the Genoese sent a fleet to Ceuta to force the local sultan to compensate the Genoese who had suffered losses at the hands of the Saracens in previous years.8 The Genoese had invested in Ceuta, but in 1234 there had been a serious conflict with the Saracens. After the expedition, the Commune attached taxes (gabelle) to a set of shares of public debt (the compera) in order to reimburse the investors.9 Genoese citizens traded these credits in the following decades and centuries.10 The first time the word maona appears in the sources was to refer to a list of people who had suffered losses in Ceuta and had to be reimbursed.11
German scholars of the Historische Rechtsschule approached the maona as an institution that constituted the model of the very early corporation. Roberto Cessi, who in the early twentieth century worked as an historian of law on the maona in Chios, had a similar approach, which created a crystallized and ahistorical model. He differed from the German scholars, however, on the etymological origin of the term maona. While the Historische Rechtsschule believed that maona derived from the Arabic maʿūnah, which means “mutual help” or “subscription,” Cessi derived it from the Italian word magona, a ship. He focused particularly on the armament of ships and their investors. He was interested in the form of maritime joint ventures and connected the concept of the maona to that of a joint partnership. Cessi did not consider the older case studies of Ceuta and Corsica, maintaining that the term maona did not appear before the fourteenth century, even though he had read sources that showed the word maona appearing in those contexts.12 He focused on Chios as a model, because in that case the word maona could be derived from the term for a ship. Raffele di Tucci’s study, however, showed that the word maona—meaning a group of investors—appears continually in the sources of 1236 and 1237.13 Moreover, Giovanna Petti Balbi has found at least one reference for the maona in Corsica.14
Cessi’s hypothesis was so influential that even Di Tucci, who had found mentions of the word maona for 1235 in Ceuta, tried to justify his finding based on the “traditional doctrine,” that is, Cessi’s.15 The fame of Cessi’s hypothesis was related to the important discovery made by Frederic Lane, who found several previously unknown Venetian maone dedicated to funding ship armaments.16 Lane supported Di Tucci’s argument, maintaining, “[t]he Venetian use confirms Cessi’s demonstration that the maone were not, strictly speaking, associations of bondholders, but associations of the owners or shareholders of a fleet.”17 While the presence of the word maona is demonstrated without any doubt in thirteenth-century Ceuta, before it is seen in Chios, the fact that in both the Venetian and the Genoese sources (at least for Chios) its meaning is connected to the fleet’s armament deserves further analysis, because it could be a clue to a common origin—at least for this particular aspect of the meaning.
Neither Cessi or Lane, however, considered the possibility that the word maona could have appeared in 1235 in Ceuta to define an institution with certain characteristics that could later have changed, hybridized, or been transplanted, producing different outcomes and forms over time. More recent investigations related to the Venetian maone seem to prove this hypothesis. And even in the Venetian context, the maone did not mean only a cluster of shareholders who invested in ship armament: Èric Vallet has demonstrated that between 1483 and 1506, Venetian merchants set up maone in Syria and Egypt to acquire commodities such as cotton, pepper, and spices.18
After the Genoese maona of Ceuta, we find the Genoese maona of Chios and Corsica. The maona of Chios appeared after efforts to set up a maona for an expedition to Monaco (present-day Principality of Monaco) failed. Private Genoese investors had raised a sum of money to help the Commune arm a fleet to punish a Genoese factional group in Monaco. The Commune, as often occurred, attached a compera to this loan to repay the investors in the future. Since the expedition never took place, the maona was used instead to conquer the island of Chios, which was rich in mastic (a resin). Investors in the maona were granted the ownership of the island and its administration. The contract also stated that in the event of the fall of the regime of Genoa—if the city no longer remained “under the rule of the people” (sub statu populi)—the investors would acquire the territorial possession of Chios and the power of plena iurisdictio and ius gladii (“full jurisdiction” and “sword right”), at that time the maximum extent of sovereign power.19
Other maone were set up in Cyprus and Corsica. In 1374 Genoa attacked King Peter II of Cyprus, using the resources of a group of private investors who set up a maona. The maona of Corsica, created in 1378, was different from those formed by the Genoese previously. The Commune granted the island of Corsica to four investors with sovereign powers such as the merum et mixtum imperium (civil and criminal jurisdiction). Unlike the other maone, the investors were considered the equivalent of feudal lords.
The aforementioned Genoese maone are the best-known cases; however, other smaller maone existed there as well. Around 1455–61, Genoese investors formed a maona to exploit the iron mines on the island of Elba, but they did not acquire the privileges and rights of sovereign power, unlike Chios and Corsica.20 Other maone appeared on the Italian peninsula, some of which have not been studied. The most studied example is Venice. Frederic Lane identified maone in existence between the 1480s and 1505.21 These were joint enterprises that armed galleys and insured the cargo. The investors and participants in the enterprise were called patroni (patrons) and parcenevoli (lit. those who contributed to parts). To avoid the formation of a monopoly, the Venetian state supported those who had invested in galleys, and the maone became only temporary enterprises. Comparing the Venetian maone to the Genoese ones shows the difference between two state systems: the Republic of Venice worked cooperatively with private investors, leading to the disappearance of the maone; while the Commune of Genoa permitted investors to take over some of its functions.
Florence and the Florentine merchants also offer an interesting example. Florentines were involved in two kinds of maone. One was dedicated to the financial market. In 1448 Andrea de’ Pazzi and eight others collected 4,000 florins each to form a company to invest in the Monte of Florence—the system of local public debt.22 The second was very similar to the Genoese maona used for mining. In the 1480s and 1490s, some members of the Medici family invested in a maona to mine iron in the town of Pietrasanta and in Pisa. Their account books survive.23
Another little-studied case is that of Messina. It seems that at the end of fifteenth century, Genoese contributed to the diffusion of a maona in Messina on Sicily. It dealt with the scarcity of grain and was apparently brought to the town by the Genoese.24 Carmelo Trasselli—who found the reference to this institution—mentioned it but did not explain its functions. A preliminary study, conducted for the current research, of the limited remaining notarial archive of fifteenth-century Messina has so far not led to any result.
My research has located another unstudied maona—in 1488 Lucca. Here the term maona appeared along with the word societas. The Council of the Republic set up a maona to drain the swamp in Lucca near the river Serchio. The maona in this context was a group of investors who put together their resources to help the Republic. In exchange for the funds, the investors received the land after the draining process. The phrase used in the papers of the Republic was “maona sive societas” (maona or company).25 Later on, in 1618, the private institution became an office of the Republic of Lucca, called Offizio sopra la maona e Foce di Viareggio (Office over the maona and Mouth of the River of Viareggio).26
These cases outside Genoa deserve more study, but for now they can merely suggest a direction for research. Since the meaning of the term maona seems very broad, it may be that one word—maona—gave rise to different institutions.
As mentioned, the scholars of the Historische Rechtsschule thought that the term maona in the Genoese sources had originated from the Arabic word maʿūnah (“subscription” or “mutual help”); they based this on the studies of Reinhart Dozy, who had collected examples of Arabic sources without establishing a direct connection with the Genoese term.27 Scholarship has not yet identified an institution in the Arab-Islamic world that might have given rise to the Genoese institution in Ceuta.
Marco Di Branco, in a recent preliminary and unpublished study prepared with Davide Gambino, has found various definitions of bureaucratic office from the Abbasid period in Iraq, Syria, and Egypt—including the sāḥib al-maʿūna, ʿāmil al-maʿūna, and dār al-maʿūna. An ʿamil al-maʿūna was a kind of officer who superintended the collection of land taxes and had powers similar to those of a sheriff.28 These findings might provide a pathway for future research, though they are much older than the examples from the Italian peninsula noted here. Possibly connected with the Arab-Islamic origin and perhaps specifically with this office is the word maona, which appears at the beginning of the fifteenth century in Catalan sources related to Malaga and Almeria, in the kingdom of Granada.29 This maona was a levy imposed on imports at customs houses. With a similar meaning—that of a tax—the word mangona is attested to in the fourteenth-century work of Francesco Balducci Pegolotti on trade.30 It is not possible to include these last references in the definition used for the Genoese cases: the maona as a partnership for shared investment.
The word maona on the Italian peninsula and the kingdom of Granada between the thirteenth and the very early sixteenth centuries has meanings that refer to various institutions: ship armament, mining, administration of islands, levies on goods and lands. This wide semantic range—if it refers to one word and not just to casual similarities between two or more different words—could be the result of an ancient and still unstudied story of etymological exchanges and hybridization. Instead of rejecting some meanings—as Roberto Cessi did with the maona of Ceuta and Corsica—we should embrace the variability of the word maona and study its history and the various contexts in which it occurs. Acknowledging the temporal gap of two to three centuries between the various examples, the earlier Abbasid occurrences of the Arabic word maʿūnah can remain a conceptual limit in this research—as metaphorically, a kind of gray area—that may or not be connected with a later story, but that in any case deserves to be explored. Possibly this ancient tradition was connected to the fifteenth-century Catalan reference. Instead of defining what exactly a maona was and fixing a model, this research has analyzed the uses of the word maona in different contexts through a process of classification. Before defining a single meaning, one can study the context in which the word appeared and trace its genealogy. In the following two sections, a methodology is suggested and applied.
1.2.2. Applying Institutional Analysis to the Maona
No complete analysis of all sources of the maona has been undertaken. Instead, scholarship traditionally attributed specific functions to different maona. For instance, the maona of Florence performed financial investments, while the maona of Chios administered the island and extracted mastic. Considering their tasks and features has let scholars establish some similarities between the various institutions, but in a way that keeps them from grasping all the similarities. Two or more maone are considered similar based on initial similarities or a shared location. However, as for the history of the business corporation, so also for the commenda and the maona: disentangling the sources is very complex, because they are numerous and the scholarship on these subjects is extensive. Since references to who founded a maona and when and where are insufficient to trace the spread and the history of this institution, my research proposes that we try to establish similarities by looking carefully at the sources, grouping maone together, and proposing various similarities. This analysis will group the actions related to the appearance of the word maona in different contexts, avoiding simplistic definitions.
My research proposes to create clusters of integrated texts such as the sources related to the maona of Ceuta (1235), Chios (1346–1566), and Venice (between 1480 and 1505). The texts have analyzed using the ADICO model mentioned in the introductory chapter, among whose functions the deontic statements (actions undertaken by the actor) seem to be the most complex. They identify the actions related to the word maona. Thirteenth-century Genoese sources (Ceuta, 1235) use deontic statements such as “reccipere debeo in dicta maona” (I have to receive [money] in the abovementioned maona), or “scripta in maona” (enrolled in the maona), referring to an investment of money recorded in a list of investors: a maona. Venetian early sixteenth-century sources use the term “fare maona” (to make a maona), which meant the action of collecting a group of investments to create a maona of one or multiple ships. These and other deontic functions can be grouped according to their specific typology. An integrated analysis of the word maona within the different textual contexts could permit, in the future, the elaboration of a genealogical view or a chart of the diffusion of the institution.
A comparison among different parts of the grammatical analysis could be integrated with nongrammatical analysis. For instance, the research could take into account that the maona for extraction of iron originated in the area between Liguria and Tuscany; that Genoese started this kind of maona and later Florentines ruled it, both on the island of Elba and in the area of Lunigiana (northern Tuscany). Connections beyond what we can prove through the grammatical analysis and genealogy can be considered. The analysis could also consider whether the same actors moved from one place to another and replicated the maona. For instance, a maona emerged in Messina because Genoese were rooted there; sources connect the maona there to the Genoese presence. Here I present the initial part of this research, showing a table of the constitutive texts of the Maona Vecchia and Nuova of Chios (1347 and 1362). To create a model of analysis, it is particularly important to have the foundational texts of the institution (i.e., texts written for the purpose of founding an institution). Table 1.1 shows a summary of sources coded according to the ADICO model: attributes (a); deontic content (d); aim or target (i); conditions of the statement (c); or else, the actor who imposes sanctions (o). The texts cannot be translated in full and pasted into the cells; this is partly owing to the iterations of aims and deontic functions, which are incompletely clarified and fragmented within the texts.
|
Table 1.1 A comparison between the two maone of Chios31 |
||
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1347 |
1362 |
|
|
Attribute |
Commune of Genoa |
Commune of Genoa |
|
Deontic |
The Commune has the fullest extent of juridical power (merum et mixtum imperium) through a podestà (a chief magistrate of criminal law); it can revise the account books of the territorial administration; it progressively acquires the loca of Chios from the participants in the maona. |
The Commune renounces all judicial conflicts against the participants in the Old and New Maona; it can redeem with a fixed term the territories, acquiring all the loca from the participants in the Old Maona; if the redemption fails, the Commune can later try again to acquire the loca at the fixed price of 75 lire for each locum. |
|
Aims |
Reimbursement of the expenses of the participants in the fleet, for arming the fleet (indemnitas), at 203,000 lire. At the end of the process, the participants in the fleet became owners of the territories given by the Commune. |
Ending the conflicts between the Commune and the participants in the Old and New Maona. |
|
Conditions |
The Commune has 20 years to acquire all the loca of the participants in the fleet. If it fails, the participants in the fleet maintains the territorial ownerships; specific rules to elect the podestà. |
The Commune can by February 22, 1366, redeem the territories; if it fails it has to wait four years (until 1370) and can try to redeem them during the following four years, according to the modalities of Deontic. |
|
Or |
1,000 lire fine |
1,000 florins fine |
The comparison between two maone of Chios that existed fairly close in time permits a series of preliminary thoughts. We extracted the information from two different kinds of texts: the first is a resolution of a conflict; the second is the foundational text of the 1361 maona of Chios. As mentioned, the ADICO model has not been applied to the early modern age, and there are challenges in doing so: sometimes we find foundational texts, at other times we find texts written after the institution existed that document its activity or mention its name but were written for a different purpose.
The word maona appears in the first text only as connected to the group of people who received a reimbursement and participated in the fleet (column 1347, cell A, line 2). It seems that maona is here a synonym for a “fleet” patronized by a group of investors. In the second text (1362), a group of shareholders formed a maona. This later maona has lost its warship characteristic (fleet). The reimbursement that is an aim in the first column disappears in the second. Furthermore, it appears that the word maona is a common and general term that was accompanied by other terms. In the 1347 document, maona is accompanied by the term “army,” in maona sive armata (maona or army).32 In the texts of other maona later on, we find expressions such as maona sive societas (maona or company) and maona sive appaltus (maona or contract).33 It is also worth noticing that in the 1347 text, the word maona never appears as a grammatical subject but only in an indirect case like the genitive (of the maona). Maona appears as a grammatical subject only in the 1362 text.34 A comparison between the two texts shows that the organizational form consolidated between 1347 and 1362.
The research model used here has never been applied for historical research and could certainly be improved. It is a first effort to systematically study statements that contain references to economic institutions. Since the historiography on various institutions is becoming quite complex and sources are published together with various commentaries, the strategy presented here offers the possibility of detaching the sources from the commentary and looking at them with a new perspective.
1.3. Origins of San Giorgio
San Giorgio was funded during the French domination over Genoa that began in 1396. Marchal Boucicaut, who became governor in 1401, rose to power during a rebellion of the populares (merchants and artisans) and established a regime with Battista Boccanegra and Battista de Franchi-Luxardo when French troops had entered the city a few years earlier. After 1401, the traditional organizations of the populares, called coporationes (brotherhoods), were disbanded. According to the work of Heinrich Sieveking—which together with the online inventory of San Giorgio by Giuseppe Felloni is by far the most complete work on San Giorgio to date—Boucicaut founded San Giorgio under French rule to finance his enterprises during the eastern crusades. His government consolidated the debt of the Commune to remedy the financial situation. Some of the contractors of the levies had failed to pay their debts, which left some shareholders without the interest on their credits. The administration of the comperae was placed under the government of the Commune, and its magistri rationales (judges) put the debtors on trial, and the Officium Monetae checked their account books.35 The news that all the compere had been consolidated caused a drop in the share prices. The protettori (protectors, sg. protettore; the people who ruled the compera) of the Compera Capituli offered Bucicaut 30,000 lire to avoid the process of consolidation, but it was not enough. They managed to preserve the Compera Capituli and the Compera Pacis et Salis, while the rest of the compere were placed under San Giorgio’s administration. At the beginning of 1405, Pietro Grimaldi proposed naming two nobles and two populares who would attempt to reduce the debt through multiple acquisitions of shares. These people took the title of procuratores S. Georgii, and four other individuals were added. Together with the procuratori, they checked the incomes of contractors and payments for the shareholders. After 1412, eight officers, called procuratores et protectores comperarum S. Georgii, ruled San Giorgio. Some of the compere paid 8% in interest, while others paid 10%. San Giorgio consolidated all of these through a process that took a number of years and created shares paying 7% interest. During the initial phase of its foundation, San Giorgio consolidated some of the compere; later, from 1437 to 1458, others were added.36 In 1437 it acquired the Comperette, which at the time had a low value (1,869,315 lire, 12 soldi, and 6 denari); in 1447 five smaller compere were acquired; and in 1454 it added the Comperae Capituli and the Compera Pacis (covered by a foundation called Vivaldi). In 1458, it consolidated the Compera Vini (compera of wine) and the compera called Sexte Salse. From then on all the compere were administered by San Giorgio, except for one compera of wine called “Soldi 2, Denari 4.” A manuscript preserved in the Vatican Library contains documents related to this compera. In 1437, the protettori of the compera maintained that San Giorgio’s wanted to consolidate this compera, but they believed the price of shares could drop. The mere spread of the news led to a drop of 9 lire, from 65 to 56,37 which prevented further consolidation. A contemporary historiographic tradition that is also seen in modern and contemporary historiography mentions that San Giorgio originated from the compere and the maone.38 This idea originated from the fact that San Giorgio, together with the financial capitals, absorbed the legal and archival structures of the compere. San Giorgio’s palace was the old customs building, used since at least 1260 by the Commune. Later it became the Palazzo del Mare (Palace of the Sea), and had various economic functions. A customs house was attested to at least from 1333, and later the Officium Gazariae—which dealt with the eastern territories in the Black Sea—was located there.
Unlike all other systems of debt utilized in Italian republican cities with extensive territorial holdings (like Florence or Venice) or those of the European monarchies from the medieval and early modern eras, San Giorgio was a corporate body whose powers were separate from the Commune’s. No other system in Europe developed such a degree of autonomy relative to the political power that managed debt as did San Giorgio.39 Consider the city-states of Florence and Venice. Neither of the two Florentine systems of public debt, the Monte and the floating debt, are comparable with San Giorgio. Those who invested in the floating debt in Florence could acquire a great deal of political influence, but they did not create a corporate body.40 The Monte (the institution that managed the debt of the Florentine Commune) remained in the hands of the Commune. In Venice, the Republic managed its own debt, which was sometimes paid off completely and then reactivated in times of war.41 In Genoa, only the wealthiest creditors participated in the management of San Giorgio, while all the citizens voted in the Commune. San Giorgio became powerful because it consolidated all the debts in a single institution and gradually acquired autonomous rights and privileges.
In the years following its foundation, San Giorgio defined its financial tools, characteristics, rights, and powers. It started as a system that dealt with loca and pagae, and progressively acquired the system of gabelle (levies) connected with them. To deal with the debt of the Commune and the interests of shareholders, San Giorgio gradually moved into banking activities and acquired territories. It absorbed specific and minor property rights from the Commune—which Giuseppe Felloni has referred to as “privative.” Some rights, including the administration of salt taxes and the mint, continued for long periods; others, like the arming of galleys in 1481 to reconquer San Giorgio’s territories, lasted only a few months.
Notes
1. With the exception of Jeffrey Miner, who has discussed the difference between present-day public debt and San Giorgio. See Jeffrey Miner, “Genoa, Liguria, and the Regional Development of Medieval Public Debt,” in New Perspectives on the History of Political Economy, ed. Robert Fredona and Sophus A. Reinert (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 1–28. See also Jeffrey Miner, Lest we break faith with our creditors: Public Debt and Civic Culture in Fourtheenth-century Genoa, Ph.D. dissertation, Stanford University, 2011.
2. Rodolfo Savelli, “ ‘Capitula,’ ‘regulae’ e pratiche del diritto a Genova tra XIV e XV secolo,” in Statuti città territori in Italia e Germania tra Medioevo ed Età moderna, ed. Giorgio Chittolini and Dietmar Willoweit (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1991), 447–502.
3. Eugene H. Byrne, Genoese Shipping in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries (Cambridge, MA: Mediaeval Academy of America, 1930), 15–21. Sieveking, “Studio sulle finanze genovesi,” 63.
4. Sieveking, “Studio sulle finanze genovesi,” 63.
5. Giuseppe Felloni, “Stato genovese, finanza pubblica e ricchezza privata: un profilo storico,” in Fra spazio e tempo: Studi in onore di Luigi De Rosa. I Dal Medioevo al Seicento, ed. Ilaria Zilli (Napoli: Edizioni Scientifiche Italiane, 1995), 381–404, 395, now in Giuseppe Felloni, “Scritti di storia economica,” Atti della Società Ligure di Storia Patria 1, 38 (1980): 112, 275–295.
6. Emilio Marengo, Camillo Manfroni and Giuseppe Pessagno, Il Banco di San Giorgio (Genova: Donath, 1911), 25.
7. Marengo, Manfroni, Pessagno, Il Banco di San Giorgio, 25.
8. Raffaele Di Tucci, “Documenti inediti sulla spedizione e sulla Mahona dei genovesi a Ceuta (1234–1237),” Atti della Società Ligure di Storia Patria 64 (1935): 271–340, at 320, 324, passim. The term maona also appears in notarial contracts, accompanying the subscriptions of the contributors. This generally affirms that the signatory has invested some amount in the maona.
9. Sieveking, “Studio sulle finanze genovesi,” 53.
10. Sieveking, “Studio sulle finanze genovesi,” 53.
11. It appeared as maona, and the sentence is this: “de illis bisanciis quos in ipsa maona reccipere debeo et super me sunt scripti in ipsa maona retento mihi quarto proficui.” Di Tucci, “Documenti inediti,” 320.
12. “This name [maona] did not appear earlier and improperly can be applied to the business of the island of Ceuta,” Cessi, “Studi sulle maone medioevali,” 5–69, at 8. See also note 11.
13. Di Tucci, “Documenti inediti,” 320–340.
14. Giovanna Petti Balbi, Genova e Corsica nel Trecento (Roma: Istituto Storico Italiano per il Medio Evo, 1976), 62.
15. Di Tucci, “Documenti inediti,” 318.
16. Frederic C. Lane, “Family Partnerships and Joint Ventures in the Venetian Republic,” The Journal of Economic History 4, 2 (1944): 178–196, 191–194; Frederick C. Lane, Andrea Barbarigo, Merchant of Venice, 1418–1449 (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins Press, 1944), 93–95.
17. Lane, “Family Partnerships,” 190.
18. Èric Vallet, Marchands vénitiens en Syrie à la fin du XVe siècle (Paris: ADHE, 1999), 118–119.
19. Carlo Pagano, Delle imprese e del dominio dei Genovesi nella Grecia (Genova: Tip. dei Fratelli Pagano, 1846), 280.
20. Jacques Heers, Gênes au XVe siècle: Activité èconomique et problèmes sociaux (Paris: S.E.V.P.E.N., 1961), 220.
21. Lane, “Family Partnerships,” 191.
22. Richard A. Goldthwaite, The Economy of Renaissance Florence (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2009), 590.
23. Pietro Ginori Conti, Le magone della vena del ferro di Pisa e di Pietrasanta sotto la gestione di Piero dei Medici e compagni (1489–1492) (Firenze: Olschki, 1939).
24. Carmelo Trasselli, “Messinesi tra Quattro e Cinquecento,” Annali della Facoltà di Economia e Commercio dell’Università di Messina 1 (1972): 311–391, at 380. Trasselli does not explain what the maona was in Messina.
25. ASL, Consiglio 22, Riformagioni pubbliche 1487–1491, 30 giugno 1491, fol. 104v–105r, September 19, 1488.
26. This is the name of the archival fund in the ASL.
27. Reinhart Dozy, Supplement aux dictionnaires arabes (Leiden and Paris: Brill, 1927), 192.
28. Marco Di Branco and Davide Gambino, paper presented at the conference The Genealogy of Corporations Revising Concepts and Tracing Origins of Financial Institutions (12th–18th Centuries), organized by Carlo Taviani at The Royal Netherlands Institute in Rome and the Deutsches Historisches Institut in Rome, June 2016.
29. María Dolores Lopez Pérez, La Corona de Aragon y el Magreb en el siglo XIV (1331–1410) (Barcelona: Institución Milá y Fontanals, 1995), 312.
30. Francesco Balducci Pegolotti, La pratica della mercatura (Cambridge, MA: The Medieval Academy of America, 1936), 274.
31. This table was elaborated by Davide Gambino, who worked with me on the Deutsches Historisches Institut in Rome project on the maona.
32. For “maona seu armate,” see Pagano, Delle imprese e del dominio, 280.
33. For “maona sive societas,” see ASL, Consiglio generale, 22, Decreti, 1487–1491, fol. 104v–105r.; for “maona sive appaltus,” see Pier Filippo della Cornea, Quartum volumen consiliorum preclarissimi iuristorum Principis domini Petriphilippi Cornei de Perusia (Giolito de’ Ferrari: Trino, 1521), 4, consilium 152, fol. 128r–v.
34. “Sed cita mahona vetus vel participes eiusdem.” Pagano, Delle imprese e del dominio, 289.
35. Sieveking, “Studio sulle finanze genovesi,” vol. 2, at 13.
36. Compera regiminis, ₤203878; Compere S. Petri ₤529646 S.3, D.8; Gazarie ₤132859, S.2, D.7; Nove S. Pauli, ₤903966, S.11, D.5; Veteres ₤1021009, S.7; Maona Cipri ₤147102, S.6, D.8. For a total of ₤2938462, S.10, D.4. Sieveking, “Studio sulle finanze genovesi,” vol. 2, 18.
37. BAV, Patetta 1496, fol. 8r, paper of December, 10.
38. Byrne, Genoese Shipping, 21.
39. Anthony Molho, “Le città-stato e i loro debiti pubblici: Quesiti e ipotesi sulla storia di Firenze, Genova e Venezia. Italia 1350–1450,” in Tra crisi, trasformazione, sviluppo (XIII Convegno di studi: Pistoia, 10–13 maggio 1991) (Pistoia: Centro Italiano di studi di Storia e d’Arte, 1993), 185–215, at 210.
40. On the Florentine floating debt, see Anthony Molho, Florentine Public Finances in the Early Renaissance (1400–1433) (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971); Jérémie Barthas, L’argent n’est pas le nerf de la guerre: Essai sur une prétendue erreur de Machiavel (Rome: Ecole Française de Rome, 2011), in particular the appendix. Molho envisaged the possibility of finding a Genoese floating debt, but he noticed that there are few traces of its existence (Molho, Le città-stato e i loro debiti pubblici, 212).
41. Luciano Pezzolo, “The Venetian Government Debt 1350–1650,” in Urban Public Debts in Europe, ed. Paul Janssens and Marc Karel Boone (Leuven: Brepols, 2003), 81–95.