Power and Profit
The Merchant in Medieval Europe
Peter Spufford
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| 'Splendid … a story pre-eminently worth reading' | | – The London Review of Books |
| ‘One of a handful of scholars who knows how to make economic history interesting … He tells it with verve and great narrative skill’ | | – The Evening Standard |
| ‘Achieves that increasingly rare combination of scholarly rigour and fascinating, always accessible, information and narrative’ | | – The Tablet |
The earliest surviving cheque was drawn in 1365 by two Florentines to pay a draper for black cloth for a family funeral. . . In 1360 a banker in Barcelona was beheaded in front of his bank for failing to honour his clients’ accounts. . . In 1477 a confidence-trickster persuaded a citizen of Cologne to buy shares in a non-existent silver mine. . .
From a thousand tiny facts like these, the fruit of nearly thirty years’ research in the municipal archives, commercial records, account books and letters of a dozen countries, Peter Spufford builds up a picture of the medieval business world that will be a revelation to the historian and a fascinating human story to the layman.
Virtually every aspect of medieval society is illuminated by this wide-ranging and immensely detailed study. The illustrations have been chosen largely from unpublished material, and there are over a dozen specially drawn maps. Power and Profit is that rare phenomenon – an academic classic that can be read purely for pleasure.
See the complete contents
Also of interest:
Medieval Panorama
The Christian World
The Cathedral Buiders of the Middle Ages
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|  |  | | | | ISBN 0500285942 | | ISBN-13 978-0500285947 | | | | 25.4 x 17.8 cm | | Paperback | | 432pp | | 265 illustrations, 29 in colour | | First published 2006 | | | | £15.95 | | | |  | | | | 
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