The Compagnia dei Frescobaldi rose in Florence and, around 1300, became the principal bankers to the English crown, stepping into the role the collapsed Riccardi of Lucca had held. Over eight years they advanced Edward I and his son roughly £150,000 and took, as collateral, command of England’s royal mint and customs — for a decade a Florentine private firm effectively managed the king’s finances.
The danger this time came not from a defaulting monarch but from the monarch’s enemies. The Lords Ordainers, a baronial council trying to cripple Edward II’s spending, drew up ordinances in 1310–11 banning foreign control of the customs and ordering the arrest of foreign merchants. The Frescobaldi fled to Avignon and then home to Florence, their loans never repaid, and the bank never rebuilt its international standing. The family endured — they had begun making wine in Tuscany in 1308, and the Marchesi Frescobaldi still do, thirty generations on — but as growers, not bankers. The wine outlived the bank by seven hundred years.
Worth remembering
- Between 1302 and 1310 the bank loaned Edward I and II roughly £150,000 and took control of the royal mint, customs and wool revenues as security — a Florentine firm running the operational core of the English exchequer.
- It stepped into the gap left by the ruined Riccardi of Lucca, a direct succession of one Italian house by another that the English crown treated as interchangeable suppliers of credit.
Sources
- The Frescobaldi loaned about £150,000 to Edward I and II between 1302 and 1310 and received control of England's mint, customs and wool revenues; they were expelled in 1311 by the Lords Ordainers' ordinances Encyclopaedia Britannica
- The Frescobaldi were expelled from England — suffering default — by Edward II in 1311, having succeeded the Riccardi as English royal bankers BullionVault / Gold News
A graveyard tradition: leave a stone to show you came, and remembered.