Monte di Pietà
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The Monte di Pietà, in Latin Mons Pietatis ("Mount of Piety"), is one of a group of charitable institutions of the Papacy (Montes Pietatis) that lend money at low rates of interest, or without interest at all, upon the security of objects left in pawn, "with a view to protecting persons in want from usurers"[1]
Formerly, in the Papal states there were not only pecuniary montes (numarii) which lent money, but also grain montes (grantatici). The Latin mons signifies a "great quantity", or heap, with reference to money, while in jurisprudence the Latin term for a monetary fund was massa. The public debt that was contracted by the Republic of Venice between 1164 and 1178 was called Mons or Imprestita, and similar montes were created by the Republic of Genoa (1300) and by Florence (1345). Stock companies of the Middle Ages, also, were called montes, such as the mons aluminarius, which operated the alum deposits of Tolfa, which enriched Agostino Chigi. As banks often lent money on the security of objects delivered to them in pawn, the institutions of the Roman Church created for similar purposes added pietatis to express the fact that the establishments in question were beneficent and not speculative.[2]
Assertions that the institution had origins in the twelfth century
Speculation with the funds of the Monte di Pietà was a commonplace perquisite, for which, however Giampietro Campana was arrested and exiled in 1857 and his art collections, which the Monte di Pietà held in pawn, forfeited and sold.
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[edit] External links
The Wikimedia Commons has media related to Monti di Pietà in Italy.
[edit] Notes
- ^ Catholic Encyclopedia, s.v. "Montes Pietatis".
- ^ this description is drawn from the Catholic Encyclopedia
[edit] Further reading
- Porter, Henry John. "On the Mont de Piete System of Pawnbroking in Ireland", Journal of the Statistical Society of London 3,.3 (October 1840: 293-303)
- Pullan, Brian S., "Catholics, Protestants, and the Poor in Early Modern Europe", Journal of Interdisciplinary History 35.3, (Winter 2005:441-456).
- Cross, F. L. and David Livingstone, eds. The Oxford Dictionary of the Christian Church. (New York: OUP) 1974, s.v. "Montes Pietatis" p. 935.
- Myers, Susan E.; J. Stevens. Friars and Jews in the Middle Ages and Renaissance. 2004.
