Agorà - Between the 13th and 15th centuries, economics became a topic of theological debate and reached a wide audience: Luca Ughetti's essay Predicare l'economia (Preaching Economics), Carocci, 2025.
by Luigino Bruni
published in Agorà by Avvenire on November 8, 2025
Merchants have always known that the market was a form of reciprocity and civil friendship. Exchanging goods was no more or less civil than administering a municipality or a confraternity. Those who knew much less about this were theologians, bishops, and popes, who, based on the principle that the idea of reality was superior to reality, described and regulated markets, trade, contracts, and finance, demonstrating little knowledge of real markets and transactions, too little for the entire Middle Ages and even more so the modern Catholic era to know a true alliance for the common good between lay people and clergy, between the official documents of the Church and the accounting records of merchants and bankers. The moral treatises of theologians and pastors of the Church condemned interest-bearing loans and merchants' profits, as if there were anyone in real cities who lent money for free or transported cloth from Florence to Paris without making any profit.
But while theologians and doctors wrote manuals on coins, merchants had to work. Everyone knew, including the authors of moral treatises, that economic and financial operators did not work for free, that using their services cost money, and that the price to pay for obtaining goods and money was called interest, which was accepted by all operators, especially if it was not excessive. Between the 14th and 15th centuries, Venice had more than a hundred banks, Christian and Jewish, Florence seventy, Naples forty, and Palermo fourteen. The Church was an expert in ambivalence, including economic ambivalence. It knew the names of the great bankers in the city, sat with them on government councils, and, above all, made use of their services. Everyone knew this, especially the citizens, but little was said about it, partly because those who write history, generally intellectuals, overestimate the importance of books and ideas and forget, or underestimate, that reality imposes itself with its needs and desires. From the height of their pulpits and their Latin, theologians imposed prohibitions and restrictions that made life very difficult for merchants and the people, including honest merchants, and especially those poor people whom they wanted to protect in good faith.
Ughetti's Predicare economia (Preaching Economics) is part of a line of studies, reopened by masters such as Amleto Spicciani and Giocomo Todeschini, which focuses on the mendicant orders between the 13th and second half of the 15th centuries in central Italy (especially Tuscany, Umbria, and Marche) in order to understand the birth of the market economy. The book is a collection of essays (and therefore, by its very nature, repetitions are almost inevitable), and offers much inspiration to those who want to learn more about the roots of the Italian and European economy, in particular the spirit of southern capitalism prior to the Reformation, and thus a narrative that differs from Max Weber's analysis of Protestant ethics.
The first protagonists of the book are two Dominican preachers in Florence between the 13th and 14th centuries, Remigio de' Girolami and Taddeo Dini. This is followed by an extensive analysis of some lesser-known works by Bernardino da Siena and some of his disciples of the Franciscan Observance, Giovanni da Capestrano and Giacomo della Marca (teacher of Marco di Montegallo, whom we have mentioned several times in these pages as the founder of the Monti di Pietà and Monti frumentari).
The Dominicans, as we know, were less open than the Franciscans (Olivi, Scoto) to the novelty of merchants and markets. Their criticism of profits and even more so of usury emerges strongly from the volume: “Every usurer sins, and every sinner is a usurer” (Remigio, p. 42). It is interesting to discover the wide range of animals and bestiaries used to describe the sins of merchants and usurers: eagles, whales, snakes, donkeys, dogs. Since Jerome, dogs had been the preferred name for Jews, who became the perfect image of the usurer - a strong and tenacious anti-Semitism accompanied the foundation of the market economy, an aspect that the book mentions but develops little.
The pages on Bernardino are important, as he is characterized by ambivalence, which is the same as that of his temple. In certain texts, the great Sienese preacher shows significant openness towards the market and merchants, provided that their activities satisfy the six conditions indicated by medieval theology and law: person, cause, time, place, consortium, and manner. Bernardino adds a seventh moral note to these six, referring (with a certain creativity) to Scotus: common harm, which is his negative version of the common good. In those sermons, we always find words of condemnation without exception for usury, but some good words about trade, such as when Bernardino even uses economic metaphors to speak of Salvation (“God the merchant”) and of “mercantia amoris” (p. 92). But too often Bernardino overlooked a fact that he and other preachers knew very well: that the great merchants and the great usurers were often the same families who were tolerated as bankers because of their philanthropy as merchants. Consider, on this point, one of the messages of Shakespeare's ‘The Merchant of Venice’: Antonio, a merchant, who played the part of the victim and boasted of lending money for free, while Shylock, a usurer, played the part of the executioner - a thesis that Shakespeare questions.
Ughetti devotes many pages to the analysis of this seventh condition of Bernardino, from which emerges the root of the substantial distrust of medieval preachers towards merchants. It is found in the theoretical hypothesis, implicit but clear and strong (even if Ughetti does not tell us so), that trade takes place in a constant condition of what we would today call ‘information asymmetry’, where the merchant is the most informed party and abuses his knowledge to defraud the simple people. This emerges clearly from the Bernardine Giacomo della Marca when, in the years 1440-1450, in a questio from his Quaresimale, he lists the fraudulent tricks of a merchant (Mastro Bartolomeo): “First is counting, of the one who counts and deceives; who, in counting so quickly, ends up astonishing the one who receives the money: because his counting is hurried (”to' to' to' to' one, two, three, five, seven, eight, ten, thirteen, fourteen, seventeen, nineteen, twenty“) and the woman, who is not very intelligent, believes that it is what you say and receives it as you give it, and goes home and begins to count penny by penny and finds that she has been cheated out of three coins!” (p. 218). This hypothesis, which certainly occurs sometimes and often in certain markets, was extended by those friars to a general rule of transactions. Hence their conclusion that the junk dealer's work was not lawful because it was not useful to the common good (i.e., the good of the community, i.e., the city), because it was based on those deceptions.
Merchants were well aware that mutual advantage was often asymmetrical (+4, +1) due to the many power and information relationships, but even yesterday, those who accepted an exchange rarely did so by intentionally losing wealth and utility; this was also because exchanges were repeated, people returned, and there were important reputational effects. But when the contract ended up generating a minus sign somewhere in the contract (+1;-1, +4;-1...), the operators knew very well that they were leaving the economy and entering into theft, leaving physiology behind and entering into market pathology. And for these wrongful actions, they confessed, asked for forgiveness, and occasionally returned the ill-gotten gains, perhaps during jubilees or on their deathbeds, as Armando Sapori told us almost a century ago. In the financial sphere, asymmetry is very great, and for this reason it was followed by the laws with great attention, but even here there was a wide range of mutual advantage, which everyone knew very well – and protests by the people were not uncommon when the civil and religious authorities expelled Jews and their banks from medieval and modern cities. In some of Bernardino's writings, mutual benefit in the markets emerges, but in many others it is denied, fueling the idea of merchants (especially small ones) as thieves and swindlers to be viewed with suspicion.
And on the basis of this partial theory of value, Giacomo della Marca constructs a whole casuistry that would make today's stock exchanges pale in comparison, where the ‘manner’ of the contract must not be ‘Malignus, Falsus, Infedelis, Iniustus, Crudelis’ (p. 214), and then twenty types of these five kinds (from ‘inviluppare’ to ‘falso cambiare’) . Also in Quaresimale, we find another hypothetical dialogue with a merchant who claimed that his work was lawful because he ‘fed the city’, to which he replied: ‘The first reason is clearly false, for I have never seen anyone die of hunger except those who are in prison for debt or those who are stripped of their possessions, since God gives nourishment to men’ (p. 221).
Reading this book and others like it, we realize that the market economy in Italy and Europe managed to develop despite the actions of the preachers. Merchants and bankers did not listen to the preachers' case studies, but tried to continue working, partly because many other Franciscans, while their colleagues who were professors of theology wrote treatises in Latin, were friends with merchants, their confessors, met them in the Third Order, and encouraged them beyond the prohibitions and condemnations of the treatise writers and preachers. Above all, however, merchants and economic operators in Catholic countries developed a double standard that is still at the root of many Latin anomalies, from tax amnesties to widespread tax evasion. We have not been able to generate a true culture of trust between the market, religion, and the city, and it is also for these reasons that we do not find the words entrepreneur, market, or bank in our beautiful Republican Constitution.
