ABSTRACT
From the late Middle Ages, the more advanced cities of central and northern Italy began to institute the so-called Monti (funded debt), in order to acquire the money necessary to meet their expenses. While these institutions were usually forced loans, there also existed relatively successful voluntary ones, obviously with higher interest rates. The latter, moreover, implicated a redistribution of resources from the poor towards the rich: in order to pay the interests to those who had the means to speculate on the public debt, the taxes, above all the indirect taxes, were applied more rigorously, and the hardest hit were the least well-to-do classes. In the sixteenth century the increasingly powerful European monarchies found that they were able to gather together enormous sums by placing the bonds of the public debt directly on the market, in the large fairs. Their success was at least in part due to the support of consortia of bankers that managed these affairs for them.
