Genoa pioneered medieval credit finance and became the world’s leading financial city

Evidence

“Genoa … operated the most sophisticated credit machinery of the Middle Ages. A detailed study has shown that the city was already modern, ahead of its time, in the fifteenth century, daily handling endorsements of bills of exchange and ricorsa agreements, an early form of kite-flying, to use modern barkers’ jargon. Genoa’s early role as intermediary between Seville and the New World, her official alliance with Spain in 1523 did the rest: she became the leading financial city of the world, in the period of rising inflation and prosperity that characterized the second half of the sixteenth century—the century of Genoa, the city where commerce was beginning to appear a rather inferior activity.” — Cedric J. Robinson, Black Marxism_ The Making of the Black…, 1840