‘News from the South’: price lists and currents from the Spanish and Italian exchange fairs between the 15th and 17th centuries. The European exchange fairs: a long journey

In Early Modern Europe, the bills of exchange were the most important international means of payment, and for more than two centuries creditors and debtors met at prearranged towns at set times of the year, to settle their positions. The Italian exchange fairs of Piacenza (1580), and later of Novi (1621), became the main operating markets where an increasing number of international operators gathered and where the volume of transactions multiplied. Which was the monetary geography of Europe (16th-17th centuries)? We must remember that European markets depended on a very complex international payment system in which many currencies from different countries were ‘legally’ accepted even abroad. So, the ‘price lists’ (the exchange rates currents) were an extremely important work-tool for carrying out the business of the Renaissance merchant-bankers. At a time when information was a very precious ‘commodity’, receiving the ‘listini’ from a trusted correspondent was an operation of utmost importance. I am extremely interested in better understanding the multilateral relations among the most important European financial centres and I intend to study the unpublished collection of 'listini' that the Archivo Simón Ruiz (Medina del Campo - Spain) stores in its archive.