The first western bank had been created in Venice in the twelfth century. But by the early fourteenth century the most successful houses were the Florentine-based Bardi, Peruzzi, and Frescobaldi. (The most famous banking dynasty the Middle Ages produced was the Medici—who in the fifteenth century rose from Florentine financiers to a dynasty of oligarchs, popes, and queens.*) These family-run “super-companies” bought and sold stocks, offered deposit banking to clients large and small, and provided a whole raft of secondary financial services including loans and investment in business ventures,
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