Bank of Saint George

The Bank of Saint George was born from a fiscal emergency. Genoa’s war debts had been parcelled out among hundreds of creditors who held luoghi — tradeable shares in the republic’s earmarked tax revenues, among the earliest government bonds anywhere — and in 1407 these were consolidated under a single institution with its own governance and books, separate from the state. It was something genuinely new: one of the first public banks in the world, and with it one of the first markets in public debt, the shares changing hands and paying interest centuries before the word “bond” carried its modern meaning. Over the next four centuries it banked for Habsburg emperors and Genoese merchants, financed Mediterranean commerce, and governed colonies outright, from Corsica to Caffa, in its Black Sea colonies of Gazaria on the Crimean coast. Columbus kept an account there; David Hume held it up as a model of financial good government.

Its decline tracked Genoa’s own. As Spanish silver dried up and the Atlantic powers eclipsed the Italian city-states, the bank shrank from a colonial sovereign to a municipal creditor. The end was abrupt: when Napoleon’s armies annexed the Ligurian Republic in 1805, there was no longer a Genoese state for the bank to serve, and Napoleonic Europe wanted only one state bank, the Banque de France. Its assets were liquidated into French imperial finance after 398 years. The Palazzo San Giorgio, built in 1260, outlasted the institution it had housed. (A modern Genoese bank that used the name “Banco di San Giorgio” from 1987 to 2012 was a wholly separate company.)