ABSTRACT
Beginning with the first decades of the sixteenth century, the principal states of Northern Italy faced the problem of long-term public financing by introducing innovations that notably increased collection of monies and tied financial capital to the state organization. In the second half of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the governments were enabled to collect money at interest rates raging from 2.3 to 12 per cent, whereas many other European countries had to borrow at higher price. The trade of bonds and interest claims initiated sophisticated forms of speculation and were the springboard for financial innovation all over the continent. It would be unwise, however, in a financial market strongly affected by extra economic elements, by interest rates which responded more to reasons of urgency and reciprocity than to availability of capital, to limit the analysis of public debt to a search for features of presumed economic and administrative rationality and elements of modern efficiency.
