Giovanni Villani

Giovanni Villani was an Italian banker, official, diplomat and one of the most prominent medieval historians who wrote the famous Nuova Cronica (New Chronicles) on the history of Florence. He lived during the Florence's golden age of commerce when the city served as a Europe's banker and one of its main trade centers.

Villani was born into a wealthy merchant family in Florence and according to family tradition, he applied himself to commerce. After he acquired basic education, he likely became an apprentice in the merchant firm, perhaps at famous Peruzzi Company from Florence. He served as an agent and business partner in this great merchant banking house in Flanders from 1300 to 1307. As a representative of Peruzzi he travelled to Rome (1300-1301) where he had an audience with the Pope, and to France, Switzerland and Flanders (1302-1307).

Since in medieval business, international trade and banking were intertwined, Villani also became a member of the guild of bankers. After 1308 he was no longer a formal partner in the Peruzzi firm, although he continued to act as their representative. Business cooperation with Peruzzi's Villani finally terminated in 1322, when he became a member of the rival merchant company of the Buonaccorsi and one of their principal partners. The Buonaccorsi firm was very successful and influential in handling banking and commodity trade activities throughout Italy, France, Flanders, England and several places in Mediterranean, and in 1324 Villani appeared as co-director of the firm.

Villani's accumulated business knowledge and personal experience, to him public services in his native town. Thus he actively participated in the Florentine Republic from 1316 to 1341 by performing numerous minor offices like responsibility for coining money and for the city walls. In 1328 during the famine in Tuscany he was a commune-appointed magistrate of provisioning for two years, charged to protect Florence from the famine's worst effects. In the same time he was also a member of various diplomatic missions in the service of Florentine republic.

The greatest personal accomplishment Villani achieved by holding the position of prior on several occasions (in 1316, 1321-1322, and 1328), the most prestigious and powerful in the government of Florentine Republic. Exercising prestigious public services and a marriage to a member of the Pazzi, one of the wealthiest Florentine families, were the best evidence of Villani's social and financial prestige in fourteen century Florence.

The 1340s were fatal for Villani and entire merchant community of Florentine Republic. In that period Bardi, Peruzzi and Buonaccorsi companies suffered a bankruptcy, and Villani, because of his debts, was imprisoned in the Stinche, infamous Florentine prison. He claimed that Bardi and Peruzzi banks suffered bankruptcy because they advanced loans excessively to King Edward III of England (r. 1327-1377) to help him finance the opening phases of the Hundred Years’ War. He claimed that the English king owed the Peruzzi Company the colossal sum of 600,000 Florentine florins when it went bankrupt in 1343 and to Bardi an even larger sum of 900,000 florins when it failed in 1346.

Anyway, that unfortunate event marked his future, and he never succeeded to recover his wealth and social prestige. He died in 1348 from the plague while describing in his history the devastating power of that terrible disease which eliminated one third of the European population.

His Cronica or Storia fiorentina is a vast and ambitious universal history in 12 books. Villani planned it as a history of events from the fall of the Tower of Babel to his own time, with emphasis on Florence. Cronica is very valuable for its inclusion of detailed information on the administration and finance of the Florence of his own time, and it is regarded as the first introduction of statistics as a positive element in history.