Baldassare Peruzzi was a leading Italian architect of the earlier 16th
century.
The Peruzzi were bankers of Florence, among the leading families of the
city in the 14th century, before the rise to prominence of the Medici.
Their modest antecedents stretched back to the mid 11th century, according
to the family's genealogist Luigi Passerini, but a restructuring of the
Peruzzii company in 1300, with an infusion of outside capital, marked the
start of a quarter-century of prosperity that brought the family
consortium to the forefront of Florentine affairs. Semi-public patronage
reaffirmed the Peruzzi status in Florence: in his will in 1299, Donato di
Arnoldo Peruzzi left money for a memorial chapel in a transept of the
Basilica of Santa Croce, Florence. It was probably his grandson Giovanni
di Rinieri Peruzzi who was Giotto's patron in frescoing the walls with
murals honoring John the Evangelist and John the Baptist, which Giotto
executed, starting in 1313.
For economic historians the surviving account books of the Peruzzi cover
the years 1335–1343, and provide an indispensable primary source for the
economic history of the city on the cusp of the late Medieval and Early
Modern period. The contemporary chronicler Giovanni Villani is the other
prime source for the family's affairs.
The company that bore the Peruzzi name was run by a half-dozen family
members, and there were many Peruzzi who were neither active nor silent
partners, pursuing other careers, even amassing independent capital. The
company's courier system acted as an intelligence-gathering system often
embroiled in diplomacy.
Peruzzi capital had been amassed in the textile business that was the main
engine of Florence's prosperity. English wool finished as high-quality
cloth in Bruges was bought by Peruzzi fattori and distributed to the
luxurious courts of Paris, Avignon or Naples, or returned to London.
Peruzzi connections with the Knights Hospitallers gained them important
local leverage in Rhodes, the economic capital of the Aegean and a
transshipping port for silks, drugs, spices and luxuries from the East.
Trade beyond Italy required agents and instruments of credit, extending
the family business beyond its extended membership into an international
network. In Italy was developed the double-entry bookkeeping that made
such complicated financial transactions possible. By the opening of the
14th century, the main activity of the Peruzzi had switched to wholesale
commodities trading on a very large scale, especially in grain exported
from the Angevine Kingdom of Naples to the central Italian cities—for
which they were granted a monopoly— and to banking, the field for which
they are remembered: popes, nobles, bourgeois, towns and abbeys drew loans
from the Peruzzi. But great clients incurred great risks. In 1343 the
Peruzzi consortium collapsed and was bankrupt in 1345, with their partners
in risk-capital, the Bardi.
The traditional explanation, of unsecured loans extended to Edward III of
England, is currently considered simplistic. In fact, several factors
destabilized the network of trade. The war with Castruccio Castracane of
Lucca bled Florentine specie to pay for mercenaries, while France and
England went to war over Aquitaine and the peasants of Flanders rose up in
a revolt that was put down with the aid of mercenaries purchased with
Peruzzi florins.
Not all family fortune were tied in the bankruptcy, and the Peruzzi
continued to figure among the prominent families of Florence, the patrizii
di Firenze. In 1849, in the wake of the disturbances of 1848, the
gonfaloniere of Florence was Ubaldino Peruzzi (giuseppe Conti, Firenze
Vecchia).
The tower of the fortified Villa Peruzzi in the comune of Antella south of
Florence controls the main road into the Chianti district.
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It uses material from the Wikipedia
article "Italian Renaissance".