Notes on Venetian monetary history between the late Middle Ages and the early modern age

The sales catalogues of Venetian booksellers in the early modern age listed a price for each title, conventionally expressed in lire, but one might come across other currencies, such as ducati and grossi, or even a combination of several monetary species. What did this mean in concrete terms? What relationship existed between the figures noted in these catalogues, in the account books of the merchants, and the coins that materially circulated in the Venetian marketplace? The following remarks certainly do not aspire to summarizing a centuries-long debate on the nature of money, its extrinsic and intrinsic features, and its function in an economic system, all the more so in an era such as the ancien régime: precisely the changes that occurred in these aspects are some of the indicators marking significant differences with contemporary times. This paper is meant to fix a few definitions and possibly eliminate some ambiguities that often accompany the study of monetary aspects in the history of economic phenomena.