As Europe began to grow rich during the Middle Ages, its wealth materialized in the well-made clothes, linens, and wares of ordinary households. Such items were indicators of one’s station in life in a society accustomed to reading visible signs of rank. In a world without banking, household goods became valuable commodities that often substituted for hard currency. Pawnbrokers and resellers sprang up, helping to push these goods into circulation. Simultaneously, a harshly coercive legal system developed to ensure that debtors paid their due.

Focusing on the Mediterranean cities of Marseille and Lucca, Legal Plunder explores how the newfound wealth embodied in household goods shaped the beginnings of a modern consumer economy in late medieval Europe. The vigorous trade in goods that grew up in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries entangled households in complex relationships of credit and debt, and one of the most common activities of law courts during the period was debt recovery. Sergeants of the law were empowered to march into debtors’ homes and seize belongings equal in value to the debt owed. These officials were agents of a predatory economy, cogs in a political machinery of state-sponsored plunder.

As Daniel Smail shows, the records of medieval European law courts offer some of the most vivid descriptions of material culture in this period, providing insights into the lives of men and women on the cusp of modern capitalism. Then as now, money and value were implicated in questions of power and patterns of violence.

In 1985, Frederic C. Lane and Reinhold C. Mueller published the magisterial Money and Banking in Medieval and Renaissance Venice, Volume 1: Coins and Moneys of Account. Now, after ten years of further research and writing, Reinhold Mueller completes the work that he and the late Frederic Lane began.

The history of money and banking in Venice is crucial to an understanding of European economic history. Because of its strategic location between East and West, Venice rapidly rose to a position of preeminence in Mediterranean trade. To keep trade moving and credit available from London to Constantinople and beyond, Venetian merchants and bankers created specialized financial institutions to serve private entrepreneurs and public administrators: deposit banks, foreign exchange banks, the grain office, and a bureau of the public debt. This new volume clarifies Venice’s pivotal role in Italian and international banking and finance. It also sets banking–and panics–in the context of more generalized and recurrent crises involving territorial wars, competition for markets, and debates over interest rates and the question of usury.

“The single aspect that most characterizes Venetian history and historiography is the dominant role of the state in the life of the city and the symbiosis between public and private sectors of the economy, between public and private interests….A primary concern of civil authorities was to create an atmosphere of competitive opportunity on the Rialto conducive to investment, that is, to the influx of money and goods, their turnover in Venice, and their eventual outflow.”–From The Venetian Money Market