Treatise on Commerce and Exchange

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Original title: Tractatus de commerciis et cambio A Latin folio treatise of legal and moral jurisprudence on trade and exchange, written by a jurist who had served as a judge of the civil Rota of Genoa and as a magistrate at Rome. It sets out to determine when a bill of exchange constitutes a genuine transfer of money between distant places (cambium reale) and when it conceals a loan at interest, and treats a wide range of commercial instruments: insurance, wager, census and loca montium, the triple contract, partnership in venal office, regular and irregular deposit, mutuum and usury, delay (mora) and interesse, extrinsic titles such as damnum emergens and lucrum cessans, cession, delegation, payment, prescription, compensation, insolvency, and procedure in exchange causes. Beginning from definitions of commercium, negotiatio and mercatura, it argues that commerce belongs de genere permissorum — licit unless expressly prohibited — assigns the decision of usury questions principally to the doctors of canon law and to operative papal legislation (especially the constitutions of Pius V), and distinguishes the external tribunal from the forum of conscience while testing each contract against commutative equality and the latitude of the just price. It analyses the fictive money of account reckoned at the Piacenza (Bisenzone) fairs, the scutus marcharum, alongside carats, assays and the prince's obligations in coinage. The work includes a Roman licensing dossier, an appendix rendering Italian and sometimes Spanish mercantile documents into Latin 'in merchant style,' the texts of papal constitutions confirming the mercantile chapters of Bologna, two discourses on fair exchange, and a copious alphabetical index. 👉 Read our introductory primer, full report, and finding guide here 📜 View the original source file This text was transcribed and translated as part of the ExLatinis project—an effort by Leo to make English translations of every published text in Latin in early modern Europe (between 1450 and 1750) available to the public for free online.

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