The Great Wave: Price Revolutions and the Rhythm of History

by David Hackett Fischer

Early in the fourteenth century Florentine banks began to fail. The Mozzi went under in 1302, the Franzesi in 1307, the Pulci and Rimbertini in 1309, the Frescobaldi in 1312, and the Scali in 1326. Six houses failed in 1342. Then, in 1343 and 1346, the three great houses of the Peruzzi, Acciaiuoli and Bardi all collapsed with a great crash. Not for many years would banking enterprise recover in Tuscany. Behind these events, many factors were operating at the same time: climatological, demographic, monetary, commercial, fiscal and financial. Together they unsettled social relationships throughout Europe, and caused deep suffering among the poor. Monarchs attempted to impose price regulations with little success. In the fourteenth century, powerful elites condemned price controls as unnatural, ineffectual and immoral, much as other economic moralists would do in the twentieth century. The Canon of Bridlington wrote in 1316, “How contrary to reason is an ordinance on prices, when the fruitfullness or sterility of all living things are in the power of God alone, from which it follows that the fertility of the soil and not the will of man must determine the price.” The arguments of medieval