L’entreprise florentine et la place de Lyon : l’activité de la banque Salviati au milieu du XVIe siècle
Résumé de thèse, Nadia Matringe
Texte publié le 1er février 2014
According to a long historiographical tradition, which culminating in R. Gascon’s monumental 1971 study on Lyons, Italian businessmen completely dominated Lyons’ economic life in the 16th century. Paradoxically, this perspective holds the field despite a lack of adequate extensive research into the archives of Italian firms: the precise modalities of their intervention in the marketplace remain largely unknown. Certain crucial aspects in particular have been neglected, such as their banking practices — which are difficult to extract from notarial, juridical or fiscal sources. Their analysis through the bankers’ private records require a technical and tedious scrutiny, which can often deter many an academic historian. The adaptation of Italian firms to the pre-existing local economic structures, which was a sine qua non of the durability of their presence in the marketplace, also failed to arouse the attention it deserved. Nevertheless, these issues are essential to understand the functioning of the firms and the marketplace − which is why I have found it necessary to re-examine the role played by Italian firms in Lyons, using the archives of one of the most important of them in the 16th century: the Salviati Bank.
