Bringing the money home: cash, bills of exchange and couriers

Coins in the pack

The simplest way to bring earnings home was to carry them. A stucco-worker returning from Bavaria in November, or a chimney-sweep coming back from Milan in spring, carried his savings in coin, sewn into clothing or hidden in the pack. Travelling in groups gave some protection against robbery, and the fixed calendar of return meant that whole teams crossed the Alps together.¹ Cash had disadvantages, however. It was heavy, it attracted thieves and it had to be exchanged. Masters working in Rome were paid in papal scudi, those in Genoa in Genoese lire, those in Venice in Venetian ducats, those in the Empire in florins and thalers, and those in Russia in roubles. At home the unit of account was the Milanese lira or the local lira of Lugano and Locarno, discussed in Chapter A.I, and all these coins had to be converted at the rates offered by moneychangers in Lugano, Como or Milan.

Exchange margins and the uncertain metal content of foreign coins could consume a noticeable share of the savings. Masters therefore preferred to be paid in widely accepted coins of good silver or gold, such as Spanish or Genoese pieces in Italy and imperial thalers north of the Alps. Some contracts specified the currency of payment. Others left the choice to the client, who would then pay in whatever local coin he had. The coin finds from Ticinese churches show that the territory itself belonged to the north Italian, Lombard currency area, so that foreign pieces brought home in this way had to find their place beside the Milanese money of account.²

The bill of exchange

For larger sums and longer distances, the bill of exchange (lettera di cambio) was the instrument of choice. The instrument had appeared in Italy around the middle of the twelfth century as a notarial act acknowledging a debt, took on its main features in the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries as an order by which a drawer instructed a drawee to pay a stated sum, and was fully mature by the sixteenth century. A master in Rome would pay a sum in scudi to a Roman banker, who would issue a bill drawn on his correspondent in Milan. The master sent the bill home, where a relative presented it in Milan and received the equivalent in Milanese lire.³ The bill thus combined a transfer of funds with an exchange of currencies, and it avoided the physical transport of coin across the Alps.

The network of correspondents on which bills could be drawn was dense between the Italian cities, where Milanese, Genoese and Florentine bankers had long-established connections. It was thinner north of the Alps and thinner still in Russia. A master in St Petersburg in the eighteenth century probably had to buy a bill on Amsterdam, the clearing centre of northern European trade, which could then be negotiated for a bill on Milan or Genoa.⁴ Each step involved a fee and an exchange margin, and each depended on the creditworthiness of the bankers involved. The Genoese exchange fairs, held from the 1580s at Piacenza and known as the fairs of Bisenzone, cleared a large part of the bills circulating between Italy and the rest of Europe, and their mechanisms are discussed in Chapter A.IV in connection with the transit trade.

The bill of exchange required trust at several levels. The emigrant had to trust the banker who issued the bill. The family at home had to trust that the correspondent would pay. Both depended on the reputation of the merchant houses involved, which is why emigrants often used the same bankers over many years and why the Lombard confraternities, whose members included merchants and bankers, may also have helped to arrange transfers.⁵ In economic terms the bill of exchange turned the emigrant's earnings into a claim on a merchant in Milan, and the merchant's reputation became part of the security of the village economy.

Notes

1. Damiani Cabrini, "Maestranze artistiche" (cited above), on seasonal returns of the teams. ↩
2. Andrea Casoli, review of Cantone Ticino: Ritrovamenti monetali da chiese (Inventar der Fundmünzen der Schweiz 12, 2012), Geldgeschichtliche Nachrichten 50 (2014), https://fundmuenzen.ch/wp-content/uploads/2025/06/CASOLI_2014_Rezension_IFS_12_Geldg eschichtliche_Nachrichten_50.pdf (summarizing José Diaz Tabernero: the territory of present-day Ticino belonged to the north Italian, Lombard currency area). ↩
3. "Lettera di cambio", Enciclopedia Treccani, https://www.treccani.it/enciclopedia/lettera-di-cambio/; Wikipedia, "Bill of exchange", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_of_exchange (used as a last resort). The standard study is Raymond de Roover, L'évolution de la lettre de change, XIVe– XVIIIe siècles (Paris 1953). ↩
4. Literature on eighteenth-century Russian foreign exchange. ↩
5. Inference from the membership and functions of the confraternities. ↩

For general information only. This article does not constitute legal or tax advice, does not replace advice on an individual case and creates no lawyer-client relationship. It reflects the legal position as of August 2025.