“Arme, e danari, e governo”. Genoa and its Bank in Machiavelli’s Florentine Histories

Abstract The article examines Chapter 29, Book VIII of the Florentine Histories, which contains an interesting digression on Genoa and the “Casa di San Giorgio”, a financial institution created in 1407 to manage the Genoese public debt that, over time, acquired control and administration of cities and territories. The Machiavellian digression has attracted the attention of interpreters, who have sometimes considered it surprising or paradoxical. Recently, attention has been drawn to the possibility that Machiavelli was primarily interested in the political consequences of the consolidation of the Genoese debt. An interest that looked, also, at the Florentine reality. In this article, I intend rather to suggest that the chapter should be read as a classic example of Machiavellian realism, focusing-from a comparative point of view-on the analysis of a peculiar case and its relative advantages.