Journal of Interdisciplinary History, LII:4 (Spring, 2022), 513–536.

Matteo Pompermaier
Credit and Poverty in Early Modern Venice Credit
is more than a simple exchange of money with a promise of a
future repayment. Muldrew has referred to it as a “currency of rep-
utation,” a means by which trust is communicated to others. It is
an integral part of human relations, so difﬁcult to study that it has
been compared to the dark matter “that makes up some eighty-
ﬁve percent of the universe but cannot be directly observed.”
Credit “irrigated society” well before the advent of banks, linking
people in an endless series of “networks of obligation” based on
trust and sustained through norms of collaboration and solidarity.
Credit is therefore a complicated issue, regulated by a mix of eco-
nomic and social norms. However, for many people it was, and still
is, distinctly pragmatic, an essential resource for survival, to facili-
tate consumption and to make ends meet.1

This article integrates our knowledge of pre-industrial credit
markets by examining an unusual form of lending in European
history. It sheds new light on how early modern societies dealt
with the problem of poverty, focusing on the pawnbroking service
that early modern Venetian inns and bastioni (warehouses where
wine was sold) offered to their customers. Retracing this credit
activity helps us to understand how Venice managed to give both
economic support and low-cost credit to the lower classes of its
population.

Interest in the credit markets of early modern societies has
increased since the global crisis of 2007/8. A wide literature ana-
lyzes the activity of many kinds of borrowers and lenders in several

Matteo Pompermaier is Post-Doctoral Fellow, Dept. of Economic History and International
Relations, Stockholm University. He is the author of L’économie du mouchoir: crédit et microcrédit
à Venise au XVIIIe siècle (Rome, 2022); co-author of, with Teresa Bernardi, “Hospitality and
Registration of Foreigners in Early Modern Venice: The Role of Women within Inns and
Lodging Houses,” Gender & History, XXXI (2019), 624–645.

© 2022 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and The Journal of Interdisciplinary
History, Inc., https://doi.org/10.1162/jinh_a_01765

1 Craig Muldrew, The Economy of Obligation: The Culture of Credit and Social Relations in Early
Modern England (Basingstoke, 1998), 7; Philip T. Hoffman, Gilles Postel-Vinay, and Jean-
Laurent Rosenthal, Dark Matter Credit: The Development of Peer-to-Peer Lending and Banking
in France (Princeton, 2019), 1; Laurence Fontaine, The Moral Economy: Poverty, Credit, and
Trust in Early Modern Europe (New York, 2014), 3–5.

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contexts and periods. Many scholars have studied the consumer
credit activity of the Jewish communities that, for a long time,
were the most important lenders in many cities across Europe.
Many others have concentrated on the Monti di Pietà, institutions
of Christian inspiration, created in ideological opposition to what
was called the “Jewish usury.” These two essentially different
lenders often worked simultaneously in the same market, within
the borders of the same cities. They usually coexisted without
undue competition, since they eventually managed to diversify
their offers to meet the needs of different customers.2

Research about real-estate credit, particularly as associated with
the socioeconomic role of notaries, is also abundant. The pioneering
work of Hoffman et al. proves that between the eighteenth and
nineteenth century, French notaries were at the center of an extensive
private network in which they acted as brokers, matching lenders with
borrowers and certifying borrowers’ creditworthiness. Their research
shows that notaries compensated for the absence of banks, acting as
ﬁnancial intermediaries and fostering economic development.3

We are now much better informed about the non-intermediated
peer-to-peer credit market that involved private individuals in dense
and extensive networks. In pre-industrial Europe, these networks
were at the center of economic life; ﬁnancial exchanges were sustained
through strong norms of collaboration, fairness, and solidarity—in
the context of what has been deﬁned as a “moral economy.”4

Notwithstanding the breadth of this literature, a large part of
the population is often excluded from the analysis. We still know

2 Giacomo Todeschini, La banca e il ghetto: Una storia italiana (secoli XIV–XVI) (Bari, 2016),
33–36; Reinhold C. Mueller, “The Jewish Moneylenders of Late Trecento Venice: A Revi-
sitation,” Mediterranean Historical Review, X (1995), 202–217. For the Monti di Pietà, see
Carmelo Ferlito, Il monte di Pietà di Verona e il contesto economico-sociale della città nel secondo
Settecento ( Venice, 2009); Mauro Carboni, Maria Giuseppina Muzzarelli, and Vera Zamagni
(eds.), Sacri recinti del credito: sedi e storie dei Monti di pietà in Emilia-Romagna ( Venice, 2005);
Carole Bresnahan Menning, Charity and State in Late Renaissance Italy: The Monte di Pietà of
Florence (Ithaca, 1993); Maristella Botticini, “A Tale of ‘Benevolent’ Governments: Private
Credit Markets, Public Finance, and the Role of Jewish Lenders in Medieval and Renaissance
Italy,” Journal of Economic History, LX (2000), 164–189. Maria Giuseppina Muzzarelli, Il denaro e
la salvezza: L’invenzione del Monte di Pietà (Bologna, 2001), 189–245.
3 Hoffman, Postel-Vinay, and Rosenthal, Priceless Markets: The Political Economy of Credit in
Paris, 1660–1870 (Chicago, 2000); idem, Dark Matter Credit. See also Elise Dermineur, “Trust,
Norms of Cooperation, and the Rural Credit Market in Eighteenth-Century France,” Journal
of Interdisciplinary History, XLV (2015), 485–506.
4

See Fontaine, Moral Economy.

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little about the lower strata of the society: Did they have access to
credit, and if so, which kind of credit? Even the Jewish money-
lenders and the Monti di Pietà, which, on the surface, seemed
poised to meet the demands of the lower classes, often chose to
serve only wealthier customers, a clientele whose patronage was
certainly safer and more proﬁtable. Nor was the real-estate credit
market concerned with the lower classes, which usually lack the
required collateral. Even “informal” or peer-to-peer networks were
often inaccessible to them. Therefore, the literature has disregarded
the credit strategy of a sizeable share of the total population, which
was characterized by pressing needs and constraints. Mollat once
wrote that “the poor in history are voiceless individuals … hidden
in the folds of time,” because of the lack of sources—hence, the
importance of new perspectives that might portray the credit market
as more ﬂexible and articulated than heretofore supposed.5

Inns and bastioni were the point of reference for a speciﬁc
demand for credit, in the context of what this article calls the
“handkerchief” economy (handkerchiefs being the most pawned
objects). It was characterized by the typically small amounts
loaned, the high frequency of their requests, and their mixed
nature, halfway between credit and barter. The study of this eco-
nomic context is of crucial importance in retracing the needs and
ﬁnancial strategies of the lower classes. Moreover, the long lists of
objects pawned and stocked in the warehouses of inns and bastioni
provide us with an extraordinary insight into the material culture
and consumer behavior of the eighteenth-century Venetian pop-
ulation. This analysis aims to ﬁll a gap in the current literature
about the early modern period from that point of view.6

5 Vittorino Meneghin, I Monti di Pietà in Italia dal 1462 al 1562 ( Venice, 1986); Massimo
Fornasari, Il ‘thesoro’ della città: il Monte di pietà e l’economia bolognese nei secoli XV e XVI
(Bologna, 1993), 24; Muzzarelli, Il denaro e la salvezza, 198–204; Michel Mollat du Jourdin,
“La notion de pauvreté au Moyen Age: position de problèmes,” Revue d’histoire de l’Église de
France, LII (1966), 5–23.
6 For the material culture of the lower strata of the society, see John Styles, “Lodging at the
Old Bailey: Lodgings and their Furnishing in Eighteenth Century London,” in idem and
Amanda Vickery (eds.), Gender, Taste and Material Culture in Britain and North America,
1700–1830 (New Haven, 2006), 61–80; Patricia Allerston “Reconstructing the Second-Hand
Clothes Trade in Sixteenth- and Seventeenth-Century Venice,” Costume, XXXIII (1999),
46–56; Paula Hohti, “‘Conspicuous’ Consumption and Popular Consumers: Material Culture
and Social Status in Sixteenth-Century Siena,” Renaissance Studies, 24–25 (Nov. 2010),
654–670.

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INNS AND BASTIONI IN THE URBAN CONTEXT The problem of
meeting the demand from the poorer classes for low-cost credit
affected past societies as much as it affects those of the present.
Consider, for instance, the microcredit programs in several under-
developed countries since the 1980s: They often proved to be
unsuccessful in reaching the vulnerable poor, sometimes even
being detrimental to their interests.7

In the early modern period, this dire need for petty credit was
exacerbated by the scarcity of money in circulation. Moreover,
those who had cash usually preferred to invest it in operations of
relatively low risk and high return, rather than becoming entangled
in an endless series of small, scattered operations. The ﬁrst lenders to
respond to the plight of the poor were private individuals who
were in daily contact with them for professional reasons; shop-
keepers, lodging-house keepers, and innkeepers became the ﬁrst
and main providers of petty consumer credit, taking advantage of
what proved to be a proﬁtable investment opportunity.8

Innkeepers were usually prominent and popular individuals
within a community if only because of the importance of their
premises to everyday life. They provided space for clients to store
their goods and acted as brokers for commercial deals and transac-
tions, “using their knowledge of the market to match buyers and
sellers from distant areas who would not have known each other.”
Because of the critical role that they played within the market,
innkeepers were often among the wealthiest men in the commu-
nity, and they usually had ready cash. To make ends meet, many
people went to taverns and inns to ask for money, securing their
loans with everyday objects of limited value.9

In Venice, innkeepers and bastioneri (the managers of the bas-
tioni, or warehouses where take-away wine was sold) assumed this

Sajeda Amin, Ashok Rai, and Giorgio Topa, “Does Microcredit Reach the Poor and Vul-
7
nerable? Evidence from Northern Bangladesh,” Journal of Development Economics, LXX (2003),
59–82; Milford Bateman, Why Doesn’t Microﬁnance Work? The Destructive Rise of Local Neolib-
eralism (New York, 2010).
8 Muldrew, Economy of Obligation, 98–103, 40; Attilio Milano, “I ‘banchi dei poveri’ a
Venezia,” La rassegna mensile di Israel, XVII (1951), 250–265; Richard H. Britnell, “Markets,
Shops, Inns, Taverns and Private Houses in Medieval English Trade,” in Bruno Blondé et al.
(eds.), Buyers and Sellers: Retail Circuits and Practices in Medieval and Early Modern Europe
(Turnhout, 2006), 109–124.
9 Marino Berengo, La società veneta alla ﬁne del Settecento: Ricerche storiche (Florence, 1956),
69–71.

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dual function of primary-goods suppliers and moneylenders for
the lower classes. Yet, the Venetian case proves to be signiﬁcantly
different from others. The Venetian public authorities did not sim-
ply tolerate or perfunctorily regulate this pawnbroking activity;
they ofﬁcially recognized and institutionalized it, placing it under
the strict judicial control of the Provveditori e Sopraprovveditori alla
Giustizia Nuova, charged speciﬁcally with managing the wine mar-
ket and all activities related to it. In doing so, the Republic
allowed this system to grow and develop over time. The Venetian
inns were all located in a few parishes near the Rialto Bridge and
St. Mark’s Square, respectively the commercial and administrative
centers of the city. Here they enjoyed a lawful monopoly in food,
wine, and hospitality. As stated in their mariegola (the statutes of the
guild), inn services targeted a particular clientele, composed specif-
ically of wealthy people and foreigners, excluding apparently the
Venetian population at large. It stated that “the public authorities
ordered the establishment of the inns for the needs of foreigners
and for the comfort of morbinose [happy] and wealthy people.”10
For their part, the bastioni were scattered throughout Venice,
being at the core of the daily life of almost all the seventy-one
Venetian parishes. Whereas inns offered their customers a place
to eat, drink, and sleep, the bastioni could only sell wine to take
away. Yet, although the public authorities promoted domestic
wine consumption for reasons of security and public order, the
population seemed to treat the bastioni as places of sociability,
where people could meet, drink, talk, and, in case of need, ask
for loans.

Beyond the need for credit, wine in the early modern period
was a primary commodity characterized by inelastic demand. It
was a basic part of the daily diet, particularly among the lower
classes. Innkeepers and bastioneri were at the crossroads of three
different but equally important markets, namely, wine, credit,
and second-hand goods. Although it seems unusual, or illogical,

10
I Provveditori alla Giustizia Nuova (the superintendents and chief superintendents of the
Giustizia Nuova) worked with their supervisory body and appeal court, Sette Savi e Sopraprov-
veditori alla Giustizia Nuova (the seven sages and chief superintendents of the Giustizia Nuova).
Compilazione delle leggi, prima serie, b. 299, reg. 1, f.o 104, May 27, 1320, Archivio di Stato
di Venezia (hereinafter, ASVe). Giustizia Nuova (hereinafter, GN), b. 2, reg. 2, f.o 48r,
ASVe. Morbinose literally indicates people who want to laugh and make jokes. Arti, b. 430,
f.o. 95r, ASVe.

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their conjunction is a key factor of this system. It integrated the
daily habits of individuals and their need for credit within a single
market. Every day, a large number of objects were pawned in
the inns and bastioni of the city, while hundreds of items not
redeemed in time by their owners were sold through public auc-
tions. This system allowed the poorer classes to have access also to
a dynamic and efﬁcient second-hand market, one of the most
important prerequisites for the development of an efﬁcient credit
market.11

“The innkeepers and tavern-keepers of
ORIGINS AND FUNCTIONS
this city have the right, and the freedom to take, and ask for a
pawn from those that have eaten and drunk in their taverns, and
they could also take their coats, and other things.” This rule,
written on the ﬁrst page of the statutes of the bastioneri, is prob-
ably the ﬁrst allusion to this credit activity. Unfortunately, it is just
an eighteenth-century copy of an older and non-dated parchment
that is almost certainly lost. It is undoubtedly older than the insti-
tution of the ﬁrst bastione, established by the Republic in 1495. In
fact, none of the documentation produced before this date men-
tions the bastioneri, just innkeepers and generic tavern-keepers
(tavernieri). Nonetheless, the bastioni rapidly became the most
important locations for this unusual credit activity, to such an
extent that during the eighteenth century, 97 percent of total
lending exchanges took place in them.12

The ﬁrst source related to this activity dates back to April 29,
1368. This rule, written by the Giustizieri Nuovi, speciﬁed that
innkeepers had to ask for collateral from those who bought more
than 100 soldi (5 lire) of wine on credit. An explicit reference to a

11 Malvasie and other more precious wines were not considered staples. Hence, their prices
were neither ﬁxed nor subject to market ﬂuctuations. The wine sold in the bastioni, called
terraneo, came from the Venetian mainland, imported for the poorer classes of the society. This
combination of markets was particularly efﬁcient given the high consumption of wine in the
population at the time. For an estimate of the average wine consumption everyday per person
in 1683 (1.6 liters ), see Ugo Tucci, “Commercio e consumo del vino a Venezia in età
moderna,” in Il vino nell’economia e nella società italiana medioevale e moderna (Florence, 1987),
198–199. Tucci’s ﬁgure seems slightly exaggerated: At the beginning of the eighteenth
century, wine consumption was about 0.8 liter a day per person. See Pompermaier, “‘Le
vin et l’argent’: osterie, bastioni et marché du crédit à Venise au XVIIIe siècle,” unpub.
Ph.D. diss. (University of Venice, 2019), 107.
12 Arti, 405ter, f.o 1r, ASVe.

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more articulated lending system, regulating custody of the objects
pawned and imposing restrictions on their auction, dates from
April 2, 1388. This law established that innkeepers had to keep
an inventory of all the pawned objects in their warehouses and
forbade them from selling objects received as collateral without
ﬁrst showing them to the magistrates of the Giustizia Nuova.
Any surplus derived from these sales—any proﬁt that exceeded
the credit offered for them—had to be returned to the borrowers,
since they were the actual owners of the items sold. This law is
noteworthy because, even if it merely regulates a series of details,
it proves that innkeepers were already professional lenders work-
ing in the context of a “formalized” activity, at least since the end
of fourteenth century—just six years after Jewish moneylenders
were allowed in the city (1382) and more than seventy years
before the ﬁrst Monte di Pietà was instituted in Perugia.13

Several factors pushed the Republic to promote this lending
activity and to include it within an institutional framework. The
ﬁrst were its social implications; as stated in the documentation, it
was “ofﬁcially authorized and formalized with the sole charitable
purpose that the poor could provide for their daily needs.” The
public authorities quickly understood that it also promoted wine
consumption, because people would keep going to inns and bas-
tioni to buy wine, even if they did not have the cash to do so.
Moreover, the more wine innkeepers and bastioneri sold, the
more they had to import into the city. Therefore, the Republic
was able to increase its annual revenue from the duty that every-
one had to pay when they brought wine into the capital. The
wine duty was an important entry in the annual budget of
the Republic; it represented, on average, 6 or 7 percent of all
annual revenue and 25 percent of total duties in the eighteenth
century.14

13 The rule was, “No innkeeper or tavern keeper may henceforth sell on credit more than
100 soldi of wine to anyone without asking for collateral” (author’s translation): GN, b. 2 reg. 3,
f.o 143v, ASVe. 1 lira = 20 soldi = 240 denari. GN, b. 2 reg. 3, f.o 140v, ASVe. Meneghin, I Monti di
Pietà in Italia dal 1462–1562, 19. Jews were ofﬁcially expelled from Venice between 1397 and
1509, but they settled in the nearby city of Mestre. See Eliyahu Ashtor, “Gli inizi della Comu-
nità ebraica a Venezia,” La rassegna Mensile di Israel, XLIV (1978), 683–703.
14 GN, b. 2 reg. 4, f.o 329v;,
GN, b. 2 reg. 4, f.o 329v; GN, b. 2 reg. 4, fo. 191r, July 6, 1743,
ASVe. An estimate for the decade between 1718 and 1727 shows a duty of about 386,500
ducats per year for about 65,900 anfore of wine (about 39,600,000 liters).

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As already mentioned, the uniqueness of this credit activity
does not lie speciﬁcally in its most practical feature, a pawnbroking
activity run by wine sellers, but in its special relationship with the
public authorities. Innkeepers and, at the end of the ﬁfteenth cen-
tury, bastioneri had to follow a strict procedure, from the pawning
of an item to its redemption or sale through the auctions, under
the supervision of a speciﬁc magistracy. The public and “ofﬁcial”
nature of this activity strongly affected its development, since
lenders did not need to operate in the shadows, and borrowers
knew that they were protected by law. This offer of credit thus
had the perfect conditions to thrive. Moreover, its “ofﬁcial” nature
is the only reason why today we can rely on a rich and detailed
documentation to illustrate it.15

SMALL AMOUNTS AND BIG EFFECTS As in modern pawnshops, inn-
keepers and bastioneri provided secured loans to their customers,
using personal property as collateral. By helping to reduce infor-
mation asymmetry, this procedure also reduces the risk for lenders.
Each loan corresponded to just a fraction of the estimated value of
the object used as collateral—usually between one-half and
one-third of the whole. Whenever borrowers defaulted in their
debt, lenders were able to recover their investment easily by selling
the collateral.

The analysis of the archival documentation suggests that
borrowers did not have to pay any interest on their loans. Even
though public authorities did not specify or impose any interest
rate, this service was not provided for free. In his book Delle Istitu-
zioni di Beneﬁcienza nella Città e nella Provincia di Venezia (On the
Charitable Institutions in the City and Province of Venice), Count
Pierluigi Bembo—mayor of Venice from 1860 to 1866 and mem-
ber of the Chamber of Deputies of the Kingdom of Italy from 1867
to 1876—provides a detailed description of the lending activity of
inns and bastioni. Intending to celebrate the Monte di Pietà of
Venice, Bembo took great pains to describe what he considered

15 For the (“informal”) credit activity of innkeepers in Siena, see Hohti, “The Innkeeper’s
Goods: The Use and Acquisition of Household Property in Sixteenth-Century Siena,” in
Michelle O’Malley and Evelyn Welch (eds.), The Material Renaissance (New York, 2007),
242–259.

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to be the terrible time when innkeepers and bastioneri were free to
indulge their greedy impulses. He claimed that at least one-third of
each credit operation was supplied in wine, and lenders proﬁted
from the difference between its purchasing and selling price. The
wine was of such poor quality, however, that it generated an extra
loss in relation to the price, which was established monthly by the
public authorities. Bembo argued that the quality of the wine, the
short duration of the loans, and the presence of ﬁxed costs made
this credit circuit particularly disadvantageous for borrowers, esti-
mating an incredible interest rate of 120 percent per year.16

Beyond this likely exaggerated and “romanticized” criticism
(Bembo claimed that the contaminated wine was capable of caus-
ing horrible diseases), his research is an extremely useful exposé of
how this credit activity worked, suggesting a way to estimate
roughly the interest rate charged on each loan. First, we need to
know the price of wine paid both by a lender—say, a bastionere—
and his customers. At that time, when wine was considered a
necessity, the public authority set its retail price each month to
avoid speculation; archival documentation allows us to retrace
an almost complete price series of wine throughout the eighteenth
century. From the ledger of a bastionere, we can also retrace a
series of wine prices on the Venetian mainland, at least in the
second half of the century. Comparison of these two values reveals
that the average proﬁt of a bastionere in 1781 was about 1.42 soldi
per liter, including transport costs and duties.

Considering that one-third of each loan was supplied in wine,
1.42 soldi per liter means that in 1781 the interest rate on a loan was
about 7 percent on a quarterly basis and 28 percent per year. This
rate cannot be treated as a ﬁxed value since it varied according to
the price of wine and its quality. The fact that these loans consisted
at least partly of wine is signiﬁcant. It proves that they were a form
of credit for the poor, being functional for small, daily credit

16 Pierluigi Bembo, Delle istituzioni di beneﬁcienza nella città e provincia di Venezia ( Venice,
1859), 135, 136. Bembo’s information seems reliable, since it is conﬁrmed by Giuseppe Boerio
and Daniele Manin, “Dizionario del dialetto Veneto,” in idem (eds.), Dizionario del dialetto
veneziano di Giuseppe Boerio ( Venice, 1829), under the search term Magazèn. The monthly
wine monitoring was another task of the Giustizia Nuova, in concert with the judiciary of
the Governatori alle Entrate.

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operations linked to consumption and subsistence but disadvanta-
geous in the case of larger amounts.17

Estimating the average value of loans supplied by inns and
bastioni would be a conﬁrmation of this ﬁnding and would allow
us to understand the “quality” of the credit circuit and the nature
of the individuals and objects involved. The accounting docu-
ments produced by the ofﬁcials of the Giustizia Nuova—the
numerous inventories of pawned items held in the warehouses
of bastioni and inns and the reports drawn up during the public
auctions—prove useful for this purpose. An extensive process of
data collecting and processing of more than 30,000 entries distrib-
uted throughout the eighteenth century ﬁnds the average and
median value of a loan as equal to 3.32 lire and 2 lire, respectively
(see Figure 1).

As the signiﬁcant difference between average and median
values suggests, the standard deviation is rather high, because loans
range from a minimum of one soldo (1/20 lire) to more than 200
lire. In any case, 96 percent of the loans were worth less than 10
lire, and in seven cases out of ten, even less than 3 lire. As Figure 2
shows, the majority of the loans—about 16,000 operations, or
52.14—of the total sample—were between 10 soldi (half a lira)
and 2 lire, thus conﬁrming that this credit activity belonged to
the lower classes of society. Moreover, most loans involved much
lower values than the overall average due to the fact that although
transactions above 10 lire represented only 4 percent of cases, they
represented about 25 percent of the total volume of credit.18

But what did it mean to obtain a loan of 3.32 lire? In the mid-
eighteenth century, a person could buy a carpetta, a particular type
of long skirt typical of commoners, a vestina, a jerkin, or even two

17 Bembo, Delle istituzioni, 139; GN, b. 14, reg. 42, ASVe. As mentioned, a bastione could sell
terraneo wine, produced on the Venetian mainland. The most common type of terraneo wine
came from Padua, Vicenza, Mestre, and the Friuli region, each one selling at a different price.
A bastionere’s proﬁt was hardly large given the several ﬁxed costs that he had to meet—for
instance, the 1,500 to 3,000 lire a year in rent for the bastione, depending on its size, and the
200 lire per month for the salaries of four men, at that time the average number of employees.
The wage of a bastionere in 1732 was 130 to 150 ducats a year; other workers earned about 90
to 110 ducats and apprentices about 20 to 30 ducats: Governatori alle entrate, b. 447, reg. “Cost-
ituti dei bastioneri sul numero degli uomini impiegati in ogni bastione, e loro salario,” ASVe.
18 Between 1767 and 1771, the average salary of an unskilled construction worker was
about 40.91 soldi a day, a little over 2 lire; Andrea Zannini, “L’economia veneta nel Seicento:
Oltre il paradigma della ‘crisi generale,’” in La popolazione nel Seicento (Bologna, 1999), 490.

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Fig. 1 Average Value of an Eighteenth-Century Loan

SOURCE Giustizia Nuova, b. 3 regg. 5, 6; b. 6, b. 7, b. 9, b. 16, b. 17, b. 18, b. 22, b. 35 b. 40, b.
41, b. 42, b. 43, Archivio di Stato di Venezia.

pairs of cotton hose from the shop of a second-hand dealer. Wine,
however, provides the most logical and immediate point of com-
parison since at least one-third of each loan was supplied in this
product. During the eighteenth century, a person with about 3 lire
could purchase between 8 and 14 liters of wine. Between 1718
and 1727, Venice imported an average of 40 million liters of wine
every year to meet the demand of a population of about 145,000

Fig. 2 Number of Loans per Range of Value

SOURCE Giustizia Nuova, b. 3 regg. 5, 6; b. 6, b. 7, b. 9, b. 16, b. 17, b. 18, b. 22, b. 35 b. 40, b.
41, b. 42, b. 43, Archivio di Stato di Venezia.

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| MA TTEO P OMPERM AIER

to 150,000 inhabitants. From these data, we can estimate an average
consumption per capita of about 0.78 liters per day for every man,
woman, and child living in the city. Considering that each house-
hold, on average, comprised about ﬁve individuals, daily consump-
tion was about 3.9 liters of wine per day. A loan of 3.32 lire would
have purchased enough for about two or three days.19

But how were people most likely to use these small loans?
The sources suggest that this money primarily ﬁnanced individual
wine consumption and sociability in an inn or a bastione. For
instance, in May 1761, when Antonio Maggini organized a dinner
for friends at the della Luna inn, he left a piece of silver cutlery as a
pledge since he had no cash. A few years later, Paola Lanari com-
plained to the Giustizia Nuova that she had never been able to
redeem her “inbotida di seda latesina bella” (most likely a beautiful
blue silk blanket), pawned a few months earlier at an inn in Rialto,
for which she received “a single bottle of wine.” These episodes,
among others, support what the ofﬁcial documentation states, that
the puropose of this credit circuit was to guarantee the poorest
people access to basic goods (usually glossing over the advantages
for the public coffers).20

Although one-third of each credit was always provided in
wine—every loan contributing, at least theoretically, to on-site
or domestic consumption—some loans also came in cash, which
was evidently not spent in the bastione or inn. As a case in point,
a thirty-ﬁve-year-old goldsmith named Bortolo Bodai went to

19 For a deﬁnition of carpetta, see Boerio and Manin, Dizionario del dialetto veneziano, 791; for
the other objects, GN, b. 42, inventory of the bastione of San Stae, ASVe. Tucci, “Commercio e
consumo del vino a Venezia in età moderna,” 202, 186. The high level of wine consumption
in Venice is evident in an ofﬁcial assessment of 1730, which estimated that a man and a
woman aged between eighteen and ﬁfty drank about 1.34 and 0.69 liters of wine a day,
respectively. Daniele Beltrami, Storia della popolazione di Venezia dalla ﬁne del secolo 16 alla caduta
della Repubblica (Padua, 1954), 186. This information about the pace of wine consumption
coincides with bastionere Pietro Bareggio’s declaration to the magistrates of the Giustizia
Nuova in 1730 that the bastioneri did not have registers of items pawned that indicated the
money they lent to each borrower, because once an object was pawned “in one or two days
they [the borrowers] come and redeem their stuff”: GN, b. 33, unnumbered folios, July 30,
1731, ASVe.
20 GN, b. 28, unnumbered folios, February 23, 1768, ASVe. Lanari referred to a “bozza” of
wine, which probably indicates not only the container but also the volume, roughly 2.5 liters.
GN, b. 2 reg. 4, f.o 329v, GN, b. 28, unnumbered folio, 29 May 1761, ASVe. Antonio Maggini
paid 50 Venetian Lire for the dinner.

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trial in 1762 for pawning in a bastione a series of silver objects that
eventually were found out to be worthless “pure metal.” Over
time, Bortolo had accumulated a debt of more than 160 Venetian
lire for food and wine in the bastione, as well as for 50 lire that he
obtained “on several occasions in actual cash,” about one-third of
the total loan that he had eventually spent elsewhere for other
unspeciﬁed needs.21

Wine was clearly important to social and economic life in
early modern Venice, and the connection between credit and
wine emphasizes the role of bastioni and inns in the urban context.
The average amount of the loans is a further conﬁrmation of the
exceptional nature of this credit, which, thanks to its “mixed”
nature, halfway between credit and barter, was really aimed at
the poorer population of the city and thus often underestimated,
if not completely absent, from other credit circuits.

OBJECTS SOLD, PAWNED, AND REDEEMED According to public ordi-
nance, loans could not run for more than three months. If a bor-
rower did not repay his debt in time, the Giustizia Nuova arranged
to sell the item used as collateral at a public auction. Hence,
lenders could potentially invest their money up to four times a
year, even if the law required unredeemed objects to be sold at
least every six months. The sources, however, clearly show that
the reality was different from the ofﬁcial instructions mainly for
two reasons: First, because participating in auctions was costly,
lenders tried to accumulate as many pawned items as possible
before selling them. Second, the large quantity of unredeemed
objects made auctions extremely long; sometimes a single bastione
needed longer than a month to sell all its items.

Between January 1745 and December 1754, the Giustizia
Nuova organized 930 auctions during which ﬁfty-six bastioni
and sixteen inns sold more than 530,000 objects for a total proﬁt
of more than 1,296,000 Venetian lire. Altogether, auctions in this
period occurred on about 2,500 days (out of 3,652), an astonishing
number considering the 520 Sundays and the 216 days reserved
for the sale of the unredeemed objects pawned to the Jewish

21 GN, b. 35, unnumbered folios, September 20, 1760, ASVe. To compare the amount of
Bortolo’s reimbursement, the monthly wage of a bastionere at that time was about 170 lire
(Governatori alle entrate, b. 447, ASVe).

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Fig. 3 Number of Items Sold through the Public Auctions, 1745–1762

and 1789–1794

NOTE White columns indicate partial data.
SOURCES Giustizia Nuova, b. 3 regg. 5, 6; b. 6, b. 7, b. 9, b. 16, b. 17, b. 18, b. 22, b. 35 b. 40,
b. 41, b. 42, b. 43, Archivio di Stato di Venezia.

moneylenders (three days a month), leaving, on average, only
about forty days per year without any sales. In this period, each
bastione participated in an average of 14.8 auctions, about one
every eight months, and the sixteen inns participated in only
5.8, one every two years. This schedule deﬁnitively proves that
the obligation to sell their items at least every six months was
generally disregarded.22

The data also demonstrate the disproportionate credit activity
of bastioni and inns. In fact, out of the 531,686 items sold in the
period mentioned above, bastioni had pawned 514,123 of them
(96.7 percent) and inns 17,563 (3.3 percent). The reason behind
this difference is more than likely the dissimilar social functions
of these two businesses—inns primarily concerned with foreigners
and wealthy people and the bastioni predominantly with cus-
tomers in the lower classes. Each bastione was, together with
the well and the bakery, central to the parish economy, an impor-
tant part of the daily routine that satisﬁed many of the basic needs
of Venetians. The data relating to public auctions testify to the

22 GN, b. 2, reg. 4, f.o 11r; GN, b. 2, reg. 4, f.o 139v; GN, b. 40, 42, 43; GN, b. 44, reg. “Per il
Magistrato de’ Provveditori alla Giustizia Nova contro il Consorzio Mercanti Bastioneri,”
f.o 160, ASVe.

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| 527

enormous volume of objects, money, and wine exchanged in this
credit circuit. The sources allow us to retrace almost completely
the trend of the auctions in two different periods of the eighteenth
century, between 1745 and 1763 and in the ﬁrst years of the 1790s
(Figure 3). Every year, an extremely large number of objects was
sold, ranging from about 40,000 in 1745 to more than 120,000 in
1794. Figure 3 shows a considerable increase in the number of
objects sold between 1790 and 1795, possibly due to an increase
in the number of items pawned overall or to a drastic reduction
in the loan-repayment rate.23

Public auctions were popular events, well attended both by
private citizens looking for good deals and by professionals looking
for items that they could resell. They began at the ora di terza
(9:00 AM) and ended at noon, in the campo (square) adjacent to
the church of San Giovanni di Rialto the commercial heart of the
city. The few sources available in the archives present a detailed
description of frenetic and chaotic activity there. The comandador
(the auctioneer) stood on a wooden platform, showing and
describing hundreds of objects to a dense crowd who shouted their
bids back at him, while those who had owned the objects a few
months earlier hurled their insults and complaints about inade-
quate prices. Participants, especially the most inexperienced, could
easily be confused and misled. Elisabetta Zechini, for one, who
was in the market for household items, became so overwhelmed
by spirit of competition that she eventually ended up buying
something of “absolutely no value.” Her only recourse was to
ask the Giustizia Nuova for a refund on the grounds that so fraud-
ulent a “method of public sale, [which did not] allow those who
buy to see [the object on sale], [should not] be authorized by
law.”24

Among the ranks of bidders were not only private citizens
with various levels of experience but also strazzaroli, members of
the Venetian guild of second-hand dealers, who ﬁlled their shops
(or carts or bags) with goods for resale. The strazzaroli had their
own reserved area next to the stage of the auctioneer to restrict
their attempts to prevent others from participating in auctions,

23 Ennio Concina, Venezia nell’età moderna: Strutture e funzioni ( Venice, 1989), 168.
24 GN, b. 1, f.o 216v. ASVe. Unfortunately, Zechini’s trial is not dated, but many elements
suggest that it dates back to the second half of the eighteenth century: GN, b. 28, reg. “Sup-
pliche senza data,” ASVe.

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keeping prices low. Not by chance did Giovanni Antonio Bagietti
go to the shop of a strazzarolo on the Calle dei Botteri in San Cas-
siano to retrieve the silver watch that he had pawned months ear-
lier elsewhere; Bagietti declared a loss of 13 lire compared to the
value of the loan.25

Public auctions were key events in the urban economy; they
allowed many low-cost items to be recirculated as pawned collat-
eral. As both supportive of and supported by the diffused need for
credit, the auctions completed the circle of exchanges that nour-
ished the handkerchief economy. Despite the high numbers, the
public auctions sold only those objects not redeemed in time by
their owners. Using these ﬁgures, we can estimate the total vol-
ume of exchanges and the redemption rate.

As in modern pawn shops, a loan’s link to personal items
makes borrowers subject to complex economic and psychological
phenomena. The rate of redemption is consistent with both a
rational decision-making model and a utility-maximization func-
tion in which sentiment plays an important part. For instance, loss
aversion, a concept according to which individuals consider avoid-
ing economic loss to be more important than pursuing a compa-
rable gain, readily applies in this case. Borrowers had the choice to
repay a loan or not. Whenever lenders’ estimates of an item’s value
was higher than their own, they had the option not to redeem it
but to try to buy it back for less at the public auction. By contrast,
when lenders’ estimates were too low, they might be more
inclined to repay the loan and redeem the object, thus avoiding
the risk of losing it at the auction. Given the characteristics of this
credit circuit, mere survival must have been a consideration for
many of the people involved—individuals who, for either physical
reasons (disability, old age, etc.), social ones (vagrants), or profes-
sional ones had neither money nor any hope of getting any in the
future. Hence, to get through difﬁculties, they would have
pawned objects deemed dispensable in the daily, exhausting ﬁght
for survival. In this context, the chance of repaying a loan was
extremely unlikely.26

25 GN, b. 28, reg. “Suppliche senza data”; GN, b. 17, unnumbered folios, 21/05/1787, ASVe.
Susan P. Carter and Mary P. Skiba, “Pawnshops, Behavioral Economics, and Self-
26
Regulation,” Review of Banking and Financial Law, XXXII (2012), 193–220.

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Assessing the rate of redemption throughout the entire period
requires several different strategies: (1) comparing both the value
and the number of the objects stored in speciﬁc bastioni with
the corresponding ﬁgures at the auction in which they were
offered and then (2) comparing the overall stock held in all the
bastioni and inns. Although these estimates inevitably contain
inaccuracies that tend toward an over- or underestimation of the
actual redemption rate, we can safely claim that between 1745 and
1762, about two-thirds of the loans were reimbursed by the bor-
rowers, and just one-third of all objects pawned were sold at auc-
tion. In other words, more than 600 objects were pawned in the
city bastioni every day, and about 400 were redeemed. Each one of
the forty-eight bastioneri lent an average of 41.5 lire—one-third in
wine and a maximum of 27.7 lire in cash—for the approximately
twelve pledges that they received, and they collected 27.6 lire from
the eight objects redeemed by their respective owners.27

Applying the same methodology to the 1790s data, we notice
an increase in the number of items sold through public auctions,
which was probably due to both the general growth in the loans
supplied and the decrease in the redemption rate. Of the 217,000
objects pawned in 1790 and the 248,000 in 1791, the ones sold at
the public auctions numbered 122,000 in 1790 and 116,000 in
1791, about one-half the total in each case. The reasons for this
phenomenon seem to be linked to the overall instability and eco-
nomic decline that plagued the Republic in the last years of its
existence, as well as a general increase in the presence of paupers
and vagrants in the capital.

Applying a redemption rate of two-thirds in the middle of
the eighteenth century and one-half in the 1790s to the data of
the auctions, we obtain an average annual number of 171,551
between 1745 and 1762 and 239,384 for 1790s. These ﬁgures are
noteworthy in absolute terms and in the Venetian context per se.

27 Between 1745 and 1762, the average difference between the value of pawned items in
storage and those sold by each bastione shows that the redemption rate was about 68.07 per-
cent. Otherwise, if we estimate the number of pawned items on the basis of their value (cal-
culated from the average value of 3.32 Venetian lire), the rate falls to 53.03 percent. On May
15, 1761, the Giustizia Nuova ordered a check on the total value of the objects stored at the
bastioni’s warehouses, which turned up a total of 771,800 Venetian lire in pawned items: GN,
b. 39, reg. “Contabilità,” unnumbered folios, 15 May 1761, ASVe (2.000 bigonce are about
300.000 liters).

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| MA TTEO P OMPERM AIER

During the eighteenth century, the city had a population of about
150,000 inhabitants, divided into about 25,000 to 30,000 house-
holds. The average number of objects pawned per capita every
year ranged between 1.1 and 1.5, or between 6.8 and 9.5 loans
per household. Given the volume of exchanges and the number
of objects sold every year through public auctions, how could this
credit offering go almost unnoticed for so long?28

THE WEALTH OF THE POOR The average value of the operations
gives an indication of the quality of the objects that were
exchanged in this credit circuit. Once again, the rich corpus of
sources affords a glimpse into the hitherto hidden contents of
Venetian closets and trunks, or at least those objects that Venetians
were willing to sacriﬁce, permitting analysis of the material culture
of the lower classes in early modern Venice. Although some
objects certainly kept their value better than others, the landscape
of pawned items was not limited to jewelry or precious clothes and
fabrics; on the contrary, these items were in the minority. Hun-
dreds of objects of everyday use, such as handkerchiefs, shirts,
trousers, sheets, and pillows, passed over the counters of the bas-
tioni daily. The few objects banned from pawning were mainly
from the spheres of the sacred (religious ornaments), the public
(objects bearing St. Mark’s stamp, produced by a Venetian magis-
tracy in the performance of its duties), and the military (such as
weapons).29

In 1747, the authorities limited the maximum amount of a
loan for the ﬁrst time. Since they noticed the presence of several
valuable items that were certainly beyond the reach of the poor,
they set a limit on the amount of money transacted in a single
operation. Innkeepers and bastioneri were forbidden to lend more

28 For a typically brief reference to the auctions, see Patricia Allerston, “L’abito come arti-
colo di scambio nella società dell’età moderna: alcune implicazioni,” in Anna Giulia Cavagna
and Grazietta Butazzi (eds.), Le trame della moda (Rome, 1995), 113–115. No one appears to
have understood the scope and special quality of this credit activity.
29 Renata Ago, Il gusto delle cose: una storia degli oggetti nella Roma del Seicento (Donzelli, 2006),
3–22. As the law states, “It is forbidden to any innkeeper or bastionere, to take as collateral any
of the things and furnishing that are used in the sacred temples or serve as decoration in the
same places, and especially those things marked with [religious] signs. In the same way, it is
forbidden to accept as collateral anything with the stamp of Saint Mark, and especially military
tools, weapons or other things belonging to the ‘house’ [lit. casa] of the Arsenale”: GN, b. 2,
reg. 4, f.o 228r, September 28, 1751, ASVe.

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| 531

than 10 ducats (62 Venetian lire) per operation, a much higher
limit than the one imposed on the Jewish moneylenders, set at
3 ducats since 1573. Moreover, considering the data used in this
study, only 0.1 percent of all loans supplied during the eighteenth
century exceeded the limit of 62 Venetian lire, thus conﬁrming
that this credit line was functional for small, daily credit but not
at all for larger amounts.30

When an innkeeper or a bastionere was in debt for unpaid
taxes, the Giustizia Nuova kept a record of all the objects that he
stored in his warehouse for possible seizure and sale in case of
insolvency. To conduct these inventories, the Giustizia Nuova
followed two different methods. The fastest and most frequent
method was to register each item by numbering it and indicating
only its value. Sometimes public ofﬁcers—usually a group of six or
seven assisted by at least one porter—also added information such
as a description of the pawned object and information about the
borrowers. These more accurate inventories enable the construc-
tion of a database of more than 3,400 objects pawned between
1689 and 1798, providing an exceptional opportunity to assess
the material culture of the lower classes from a unique point of
view. The study of consumption usually relies on probate inven-
tories which, as widely discussed in the dedicated literature, tend
to overestimate the richest strata and to underestimate, if not
completely exclude, the poorest ones.31

In this study, the data are divided into two macro-categories,
distinguishing jewelry and metal objects of various types (profes-
sional and household utensils) from clothes, fabrics, and other tex-
tiles such as sheets, blankets, etc. In general, out of the 3,431
objects collected in the database, 2,763 were textiles (84.83 per-
cent) and only 668 non-textiles (15.17 percent). The most numer-
ous objects were handkerchiefs (414), followed by shirts and

30 GN, b. 2, reg. 4, f.o 205r, September 28, 1751; Inquisitori sopra l’Università degli Ebrei, b. 45,
f.o 51v, ASVe.
31 The inventory procedure for items pawned was expensive, between 50 and 60 Venetian
lire: Governatori alle entrate, b. 448, ASVe. For information about the problems related to pro-
bate inventories, see Håkan Lindgren, “The Modernization of Swedish Credit Market, 1840–
1905: Evidence from Probate Records,” Journal of Economic History, LXII (2002), 810–832;
Alice H. Jones, “Estimating Wealth of the Living from a Probate Sample,” Journal of Interdis-
ciplinary History, XIII (1982), 273–300; Sebastian A. J. Keibek, “Correcting the Probate Inven-
tory Record for Wealth Bias,” Working Paper No. 28, Cambridge Group for the History of
Population and Social Structure & Queens’ College (March 2017).

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532

| MA TTEO P OMPERM AIER

blouses (298), hose (220), and doublets (the so-called velade, 210).
Clothing (including accessories like handkerchiefs, hats, shoes,
etc.) is the principal category (2,246 items, 67.46 percent),
followed by textiles for domestic use (574, 16.72 percent). The
clothes classiﬁed as feminine (355) include skirts (carpette, 173),
dresses (99), and shifts (26); on the men’s side (558) are mainly
trousers (160), jerkins (velade, 110), shirts (72), cloaks (70), and
coats (48). The analysis of fabrics and colors has to rely on a smaller
sample because such secondary information was reported on only a
few occasions. The clothes were predominantly woolen (213),
followed by silk (179), and printed calico (126), mostly in white
(66), red (50), black (46), and generic “colors” (26).32

As already mentioned, bastioni and inns were located in dif-
ferent parts of the city, offered different kinds of service (with, at
least theoretically, a different degree of sociability), and probably
targeted toward different customers. Hence, we might expect that
the objects pawned and stored in the warehouses to be different
qualitatively, too. Yet their average value is almost identical. As
Table 1 shows, the most common collateral in both bastioni and
inns were the same—clothing, “domestic textiles” (sheets, blan-
kets, pillows, curtains, etc.), and objects (like shoes, buckets, paint-
ings, dishes, coffee makers, etc). The proportion between these
categories, however, differed considerably; clothing represented
more than 80 percent of the total items stored in the warehouses
of the inns and 65 percent of the items in the warehouses of the
bastioni. Domestic and professional textiles, as well as non-textile
objects, were more likely to show up in the bastioni, probably
because the local population had more access to everyday domestic
and professional objects than did traveling foreigners. The reason
why jewels appear to have been pawned only in the bastioni is
more difﬁcult to explain. This comparison suggests that even if
innkeepers and bastioneri had distinctive roles in the credit market
(as already mentioned, less than 3 percent of total loans came from
innkeepers), they were similar in the “quality” of the credit that
they supplied.

In general, even the humblest, most inexpensive objects rep-
resented real money reserves that people in need could quickly

32 For clothes and fabrics, see D. Davanzo Poli, Abiti antichi e moderni dei Veneziani ( Venice,
2001).

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| 533

Table 1 Categories of Objects Used as Collateral in Inns and Bastioni