ABSTRACT
Of all the banking appointments of the Apostolic Chamber the role of depositary general was regarded as the most prestigious; in other words, the man who held this post was considered the first, or most important, papal banker. In general, although there was undoubtedly a financial profit to be made, the benefits were probably indirect rather than direct. The depositary was obliged to advance (and consequently to risk) huge sums of money in the banking transactions in which he was involved:1 tardy repayment on the part of the Chamber (which, as will be seen, was the norm) carried with it more costs than benefits. Clearly, however, no private individual would have assumed such a position purely for the prestige that it bestowed, without there being the opportunity for profit, even though this clearly also implied the risk of loss. There was one benefit in particular that made this post very attractive – the banker acting as depositary general had access to the multiple sources of income which fed into the papal finances. It was for this reason, therefore, that in May 1515 the Florentine Benedetto Buondelmonti sought to convince a hesitant Filippo Strozzi to accept this position, promising to administer it in his name and to share the profits.2 From various sources, Melissa Bullard has estimated that in the 1520s the commission collected by the depositary amounted to 4-5% of the payments he carried out on behalf of the Apostolic Chamber; in the 1540s, however, it dropped, seldom rising above 3%, except in the case of the extraordinary expenditure.3 The
1 On 15 April 1517 Filippo Strozzi wrote to Francesco Del Nero: ‘I will not mention here how much money the Rome company has provided the pope, nor for how much we are his creditors in the Depository of Rome. Both accounts are very substantial, but at the moment I do not know exactly how big they are’ (M.M. Bullard, Filippo Strozzi and the Medici: Favor and Finance in Sixteenth-century Florence and Rome (Cambridge, 1980), pp. 127-128. Source: ASF, Carte Strozziane, serie III, 110, fol. 31r). It is clear that the privileges bestowed on the depositary also included several customs exemptions: in 1543, for example, an order was given to the ‘datiariis, gabellariis, dohanariis et passageriis portuum, passium et pontium’ to allow free passage to goods belonging to Benvenuto Olivieri, depositary general (ASV, Cam. Ap., Div. Cam. 127, fol. 203r). In the text it should be noted that a distinction has been made between depositary, which refers to the person holding the post, and Depositary, which refers to the post itself (the same applies to datary/Datary).
