Collection ID: 0002 | Metadata type: TEI | TEI XML | Data

Title

Call number

Alternate identifiers

• bibid: 9944963463503681
• http://www.worldcat.org/oclc/355814024
• http://hdl.library.upenn.edu/1017/d/medren/4496346

Publisher

Language

Origin

Date

1599

Place

Piacenza

Summary

Ledger of accounts of Bartolomeo Corsini, for the "fair" of 1599, that was held in Piacenza, northern Italy. It contains short descriptions of the transactions, which were probably made using bills of exchange, their amounts and, in certain cases, the name of the counterpart involved. A bill of exchange is a written order by one person to his bank to pay the bearer a specific sum on a specific date. Prior to the advent of paper currency, bills of exchange were a common means of exchange. Bartolomeo Corsini appears to be involved in such transactions both as a drawer and as a drawee. A fair, a usually quarterly event in northern Italy, was one of the largest markets for complex bills of exchange. In these fairs there was no physical delivery of the traded asset, but they attracted large volumes of investors nonetheless. In the event of a fair, like the one in Piacenza in 1599 mentioned in the title of the manuscript, businessmen and bankers such as Bartolomeo Corsini traded different currencies or commodities and these transactions usually happened via bills of exchange. Some merchants purchased considerable amounts of bills of exchange from various counterparts (such as Bartolomeo Corsini) to hedge the risk of the transactions, and made money betting on the difference of prices of the same asset which occurred on different markets because the same asset (in this case currencies and commodities such as gold and silver) does not trade at the same price in all markets. Front flyleaf is made of a printed leaf from a liturgical book of readings. The leaf, written in Italian in four columns, also has small woodcut illustrations of the episodes of the Gospels contained in each page.

Notes

• Ms. codex.
   
• Title from title page (f. i recto)
   
• Forms part of: Gondi-Medici Business Records.
   

Watermark

Extent

Foliation

Support

Binding

Layout

Script

Provenance

• Sold by Bernard M. Rosenthal, 1963.
   

Subjects topical

• Accounting--Italy--17th century
• Finance--Italy--Early works to 1800
• Speculation--Early works to 1800

Genres

• Codices
• Accounts
• Ledgers (account books)
• Manuscripts, Italian--16th century
• Manuscripts, Renaissance

Keywords

• Accounts
• 16th century
• Italian
• Paper
• Italy
• Financial records

Licenses

• Text

  These images and the content of Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts Oversize Ms. Codex 1528: Scartafaccio di Bartolomeo Corsini di fiera di Piacenza are free of known copyright restrictions and in the public domain. See the Creative Commons Public Domain Mark page for usage details, http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/mark/1.0/.

  URL

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• Text

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  URL

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