5 - Business gets bigger: the super-company phenomenon

Summary

A new business phenomenon emerged in western Europe in the latter half of the thirteenth century, reaching its apogee in the first quarter of the fourteenth century. This was the very large international company headquartered in the inland towns of north central Italy, such as Lucca, Siena, Piacenza, Asti, and, above all, Florence. This type of enterprise, often misidentified as a bank, was primarily a large-scale merchanting operation that included international banking activities as an important segment of its business, and thus is better described as a merchant-bank.

It is not surprising that this new type of business organization should appear in Italy, given that territory's strategic location athwart the trade routes of northern Europe and the Mediterranean. Venice and Genoa, not the inland towns, would seem to have been the most likely venues; but although both cities traded with the north by land and by sea, they were preoccupied with the lucrative but furiously contested Mediterranean commerce and with their role as entrepôts. Moreover, their business organizations remained venture-oriented, even when individual enterprises coalesced temporarily or permanently into larger units, such as convoys or overseas colonies. Such cooperative arrangements were usually state-managed collaborations motivated by the need for security and overseen by state officials. In this environment, commerce was conducted mainly by individual entrepreneurs in transitory joint ventures, except in rare cases where the state maintained a substantial permanent organization, such as the arsenal of Venice.