ABSTRACT
Renaissance Florence was the primary center of financial capital and one of the most important centers of international trade in Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. During the fourteenth century, Florentine cloth manufacturers imported vast quantities of raw wool from England, turned it into fine textiles, sold some of those textiles to Florentine households, and exported a great quantity of the rest to destinations all over Europe – indeed, to such an extent that Florence was also one of the continent's leading manufacturing centers. Friendship commitments as they were expressed in the political patronage world occasionally bled over into commerce and finance. In Italian, the term for credit is closely linked to the verb "credere": to believe, to have faith in. Members of the overlapping elites reciprocally offered commercial credit to each other and to their clients, not as competitors, but as honorable men.
