Jesse James is often credited with the first daylight bank robbery.
The Merchant of Venice portrays the Jewish banker Shylock in medieval times. He didn’t have a store front. For that matter, did storefronts even exist in medieval times? I always think of open air markets with small stalls for each business. Is that where Shylock did his money lending?
No. Shylock would have been a moneylender to major businesses, something akin to a commercial banker today. Nobles and merchants would have come to him personally.
And storefronts were hardly unknown; markets were important because many sellers came to the towns intermittently to sell products, and therefore had no need of a permanent store. It’s like farmer’s market today. But other businesses were permanent and had storefronts, going back as far as we know cities existed.
Actually, that would go back more to medieval gold and silver-smiths. They had strongboxes to hold their valuable metals. Other people, seeing that (a) the guy with the nigh-unbreakable and too-heavy-to-carry strongbox was the man to store their cash, would give him a cut of their savings and he would store it and give them proof of ownership. Some nobles did the same, as I understand it, becaus they also had strongboxes. Then these started issuing letters of credit, so people could travel without carrying lots of cash, restarting (in Northern Europe, as they’d never entirely stopped in the South) a Roman practice and greasing the wheels of the economy. These also merged with the banking practices common in Italy and southern France - which were the big industrial and commercial centers of the Middle Ages - and eventually produced the modern bank.
(The above is a massive oversimplification to a complex, long, and not-well-documented history. Any dopers may feel free to correct me on anything.)
For all the above reasons, trying to decide when we had “modern banks” is more an excercise in defining what you mean by “modern banks”. Instrutions where anyone could come and deposit money are pretty new: most historical banks had very limited clientel: the merchants of particular cities, or who catered to the common people of a small region. People were doing the basic banking services in at least two thousand BC, where it was the domain of certain tempels. They certainly had a fixed location and strongrooms to hold the money. They wouldn’t have had bank tellers, exactly. But they would had people who performed the same service during the busier seasons (busier for mercantile activity).
if you’re actually looking at the form of the bank, with windows of tellers, that’s a more recent development, and one that’s kind of trivial.
I am pretty sure that The Merchant of Venice, like most of Shakespeare’s works, is set during the Renaissance (i.e., roughly his own time), not the Middle Ages.
I would posit that the existence of what we would call banks these days came into existence in Renaissance Florence driven by the work of the Bardi and Peruzzi families. Then, the more famous Medici family eventually became the de-facto rulers of Florence through a combination of excellent accounting and creative chemistry.
In “A Tale of Two Cities” (which begins just prior to the French Revolution), one of the main characters works in a fairly modern-sounding bank with clerks and a vault. Now of course, he was writing decades after the fact, so it’s possible that it’s an anachronism.
Credit the Medici in Florence with the first “modern” banks during the Renaissance. The “restart” smiling bandit mentioned above was the Fugger family getting into the business.
As for storefronts, you can see permanent merchant establishments even in the ruins of Pompeii. There are storefront bakeries with ovens and small hand mills, Places with a “counter” full of holes to hold those amphoras upright… Olive merchants?
The Fuggers were important, but I was aiming at the rebirth of banking in Northern Europe following the Germanic conquests; this occurred in the Dark and Middle Ages. It wasn’t as well documented or as important as the Italian banking renaissance ( ), but it did provide a foundation for later banking that would become very important in time. And in both areas, Jewish bankers were exceptionally important but often invisible in history.
), but it did provide a foundation for later banking that would become very important in time. And in both areas, Jewish bankers were exceptionally important but often invisible in history.