Filthy lucre.

Medici Money: Banking, Metaphysics, and Art in Fifteenth-Century Florence, by Tim Parks (Norton, 224 pp., $22.95)

THIS is a most unusual book, perhaps because it's part of a thoughtful new series that aims to present "the business book as literature." The volume is not detailed enough to serve as a true biography of the dynasty--like Christopher Hibbert's The House of Medici: Its Rise and Fall or, more recently, Paul Strathern's breathless The Medici: Godfathers of the Renaissance--or as a history of the period. Renaissance specialists will learn nothing from Tim Parks that hasn't been said before--which is not meant as a swipe at Parks, who acknowledges that he must rely on the works of others because he finds the crabbed paleography of the documents too difficult to decipher.

But the general reader will learn from this book a great deal about the era, and those who bestrode it, without getting bogged down in excessive scholarly detail. Even so, they may find, as I confess I did, that one's eyes glaze over about halfway through, when Parks begins to narrate the dizzying intricacies of inter-Italian diplomacy. This section is not badly written--Parks's style is chatty rather than desiccated--but it is confusing and over-compressed. Though the author's descriptions of Florentine ballot-rigging are entertaining, one pangs for a juicy Medici murder to liven things up.

Parks excels when he sticks to what he promises on the cover: a book about the Medicis' money, and the interplay of banking, metaphysics, and art. The title is not entirely accurate: There's relatively little discussion of art, Lord-Clark-of- Civilization-style, with Parks instead ruminating, in best "business book as literature" fashion, on the interaction of cash and religion. These two ostensibly competing elements worked to justify one another--the rich man piously thanking the Lord for showering him with shekels, in return for which blessing he endows the Church--and reached compromises to preserve social order. Rome, for instance, banned usury as against nature on the grounds that when money copulated it produced a monstrous offspring, "interest." In the course of a normal business day, therefore, a banker would violate not only moral law but also several Biblical precepts (see Luke, for example: "Give, without hoping for return"), yet still credit was extended and money lent--to the Church, not infrequently. The two poles of God and Gold were somehow reconciled, but only when both parties did a lot of blind-eye-turning, some nose-holding, and a bit of mutual hand-washing.

This certainly worked out for the Medicis. The Pope needed the Medici bank's expertise to stay liquid, and in return their filthy lucre was laundered by papal blessings. Consider the time when Cosimo de' Medici paid to restore the Monastery of San Marco and received a papal bull absolving him of all his sins, which were as considerable as one might expect: sweet deal. Parks writes that Cosimo was aware of "those blind spots that allow for some useful exchange between metaphysics and money," just as "the Church would pretend that all this beauty was exclusively for the glory of God" and had nothing to do with Cosimo's megalomania. But, a clear-eyed Parks continues, "without such dishonesty, the world would be a duller place." True enough, and it's nice to see some of the Medicis' purchased pieties not taken as seriously as the family would have liked.

Money and religion sought accommodation because they persisted in a state of dynamic tension. Again, take the Church's ban on usury, the raison d'etre of banking: This decision obliged merchants to invent impressively imaginative ways of circumventing it. Consequently, while the facts of banking remained conservative--assessing risk for a living, after all, predisposes a man towards skepticism and temperance--the ban turned the practice into a subversive, creative outlet that threatened to break the Church's power even as it buttressed it.

I don't, however, agree with the argument--advanced by several conservative commentators--that, apart from the usury brouhaha, a forward-looking Church helped foment capitalism by overseeing a continental single market that smashed the "anachronistic" feudalistic system, thus enabling Europe's economic take-off and rise to mastery. But then neither do I assume, as Parks does, that the Church was an inherently reactionary force, the implication being that the Medicis' Renaissance unleashed socioeconomic forces that extinguished a theocratic, medieval world "lit only by fire" (as the title of William Manchester's dreadful book put it).

So, was the Church slitting its own throat by getting into bed with its bankers? Parks thinks so, for he says that usury creates motion in society, and allows the talented and the thrifty to rise above their divinely allotted station. The author makes a strong case in this respect, but I think the argument works only if one exaggerates the stodginess of the Middle Ages. There was, in fact, plenty of social dynamism in medieval society--almost as much as in our own, as Chaucer's Canterbury Tales amply demonstrate. Upward mobility, too: Between 1295 and 1300, 136 English barons were summoned to Edward I's parliament; by 1500, fully 120 of these noble lines had become extinct through disease, ineptitude, misfortune, or impotence. They were replaced by obscure families captained by "men raised from the dust," as one complaint ran against Henry II, who liked promoting the meritorious to keep his barons and clerics on their toes.

Their elevation to power--owing mostly to a facility for commerce and royal lending--rarely had much to do with the Church, or religion at all. One gets the impression that successful merchants were, like the poetically revolutionary Chaucer himself, conventionally pious fellows (fish on Fridays, snooze through a sermon on Sundays, etc.) who didn't worry too much about either finding a moral "accommodation" with Rome or existing in dynamic tension with it. They just sort of muddled through and hoped the king didn't default.

Parks does have an excellent section on banking practice, and explains very lucidly many financial concepts alien to modern readers, though I found it at times a little light on context. There's little or no analysis of the 12th-century renaissance, which is when the apparatus of banking--for example, double-entry bookkeeping--was invented; the 15th-century Medicis restricted themselves to tweaking the older practices. Also, there's virtually nothing on the role the Italian banks played in royal financing, the flow of cash and credit allowing kings to recruit armies and build navies larger than feudalism--with its emphasis on bonds of kinship and local affinities--had ever conceived. Arguably, the interest rate was more important than the Psalter in propelling Europe to world domination.

Enough about my caveats; perhaps Parks was right to leave that stuff out to concentrate on his Medicis. Indeed, what he has set out to do he has succeeded admirably in doing, and Medici Money makes a very fine entry in a promising series.