Not Only Land: Mortgage Credit in Central-Northern Italy in the Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries

This paper aims to investigate the role of mortgages in credit markets in northern-central Italy between the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries. This represents a crucial historical phase in the financial market of the Peninsula that affected, along with the urban centres, also the rural areas. The great transformation that was investing the Italian states specifically in the middle of the sixteenth century – a tranformation represented by a growth of the population, increase of the agricultural prices and the consequent phenomenon of land rush –received a powerful push from the rural world. The mortgage loans in the forms of censi, livelli and fitti (perpetual annuities), were widely practiced and spread in almost all the areas of the countryside representing a common trait of early modern Ialian credit market. The dramatic change that took place in the middle of the sixteenth century implied heavy pressures in the old institutional structure. New financial instruments had been created. In particular the elabortation of the old census (that changed from riservativo into consegnativo) with the Pope’s Bull in 1569 represented a turning point in the credit market. Drawing upon archival sources – specifically notarial contracts – and literature this paper shows how such instrument that was created for safeguarding the rural population from the rampant phenomenon of expropriation or foreclosure – constituted also a new and safe financial tool for undertaking new investments in agriculture, manufacture and trade. If real estate was the most common and the most priviledged collateral used in mortages such trend changed giving place to other forms of collateral, less linked to farmland and much more lined to moveable asstes, like public debt …., toll collection, tithes, etc. Such transformation contributed to make credit market more flexible and liquid, allowing the Italian economic system to expand during the lungo Cinquecento but also to overcome the economic crisis of the the seventeenth century.