Lest we break faith with our creditors: Public debt and civic culture in fourteenth-century Genoa

"Lest we break faith with our creditors" examines the evolving connection between forms of public finance, particularly long-term debt, and communal life in Genoa between around 1350 and 1407. It draws on a wide range of sources and methodologies, from poetry and sermons to quantitative techniques, to revise Genoa's and Italy's place in long-term debates over finance and state development as well as in discussions of economic and social change in the period after the plague.;This dissertation consists of six chapters, roughly divided between two lines of inquiry. Chapters 1, 2, and 3 examine several ways communal indebtedness changed the relationship between society and the commune. The first chapter shows that communal borrowing worked by stimulating broader networks of credit and obligation in the service of collective military action. As such, the borrowing process privileged traditional forms of engagement with public power, especially the capacity to arm and outfit a galley in communal service. Chapter 2 considers the puzzle of the extreme longevity of the debt, concluding that political norms requiring councils and consultation explain how fourteenth-century regimes that often lasted only a few years could contract loans that continued to exist as late as the nineteenth. The third chapter examines the dynamic interactions between communal borrowing and the construction of a regional state. In contrast to other Italian cities and regions, Genoa's borrowing and debt did not lead to a strengthening of central political control. Instead, the Genoese traded greater autonomy to subject communities in exchange for agreeing to submit to Genoa's taxation regime, which was devoted to financing its debts. This chapter also raises the role of law and precedent as a critical structuring factor in Genoese political life.;The second line of inquiry concerns the public debt in private economic practice, social strategies, and religious belief. Chapter 4 uses sermons and poetry to recover the contours of a broad discourse about debt, credit and salvation. It argues that public debt was not deeply affected by the usury prohibition, not because the Genoese were irreligious or that the commune borrowed in bad faith, but because they were able to justify their borrowing according to a deeply cherished association between religion, right order, and the commune. Chapter 5 draws on records of shareholders in the debt from 1367–8 to illuminate the ways that shares in the commune's debts became a critical part of private economic and social strategies. Although they did not dominate private wealth, shares in the debt provided a critical mediating good that aided in the construction and consolidation of lineages and clans during the later fourteenth century.;The final chapter draws on the themes and conclusions of the previous chapters to reexamine the origins of the Casa di San Giorgio (1407–1805), a financial powerhouse formed out of the mass of the commune's debts. The dominant myth of Genoese public finance is the division between the commune and its debts, a weak state/strong creditor paradigm that owes more to fifteenth-century developments than fourteenth-century reality. This chapter shows such divisions to have been illusory. The experiences of Genoa's political class during the turmoil of the late fourteenth century were critical to their reordering of the debt in 1407, not the strength of a "class" of creditors. From chaos to consolidation, class and group interest are shown not to be meaningful actors apart from the specific institutional structures that gave them form.