So when he claims twelve thousand lire,--roughly, some
two thousand pounds of money at present value,--from the Guelphs of
Arezzo for his service, and the Guelphs, having got no good of it,
owing to this Florentine interference, object to paying him, the
Florentines themselves lend them the money,--and are never paid a
farthing of it back.
127. There is a beautiful "investment of capital" for your modern
merchant to study! No interest thought of, and little hope of ever
getting back the principal. And yet you will find that there were no
mercantile "panics," in Florence in those days, nor failing bankers,
[1] nor "clearings out of this establishment--any reasonable offer
accepted."
[Footnote: Some account of the state of modern British business in this
kind will be given, I hope, in some number of "Fors Clavigera" for this
year, 1874.]
128. But the second story, of a private Florentine citizen, is better
still.
In that campaign against Pisa in which the florins were struck on the
root of pine, the conditions of peace had been ratified by the
surrender to Florence of the Pisan fortress of Mutrona, which commanded
a tract of seaboard below Pisa, of great importance for the Tuscan
trade.
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