the world of private banking

PROtEStANt bANKING 235
loan of 10,000 écus at Lyons to the representatives of King Henry of Navarre, they
stipulated Frankfurt as the place for all payments of interest and reimbursement.
In 1590–2 the sums of money recently collected in England were transferred by
letter of exchange directly or via Hamburg from London to Frankfurt and then
mostly by Genevan merchants home to their Republic. Now it was a Mr Castel
who arranged this business in London. Then the money was managed at Frankfurt
by the Calvinist pastor Canon. Over the year, Genevan merchants and publishers
came to all the four fairs at Frankfurt, which were very important international
book markets. There we several times meet Louis Maupon, Jean Lepreux, Jean
Dupan, Jacques Delacort, Pierre Patru, Jean and Julien Péaget. Finally, the sums
collected in the Protestant Low Countries were sent in 1594 by letter of change
from Amsterdam to Frankfurt and taken over from there by the above mentioned
Genevan trustees.
At the beginning of the seventeenth century King Henry IV transferred from
Paris via Lyons the considerable sums he designated as support for the financially
weak Republic of Geneva. All this royal money and other sums from private
intermediaries came to Geneva mainly via letters of exchange on Lyons. Some of
the letters also came directly from Paris. Another sum collected by Jean Anjorrant
in England did not travel via Frankfurt to get to Geneva but through Lyons. In
1603–5 about 42,000 écus arrived by letter of exchange in these two ways from
London and Paris at Geneva.
All these facts known about Protestant financial activities during the sixteenth
century bring us to a first or intermediate conclusion. The foundation of Protestant
banking was first the result of ordinary economic activities of merchants and
merchant bankers passing from the Catholic to the Protestant confession. Protestant
solidarity began in Switzerland among the towns of the Reformation and Calvin’s
Geneva and continued between European Protestants and the Calvinist party
in France, especially with King Henry of Navarre. Protestant banking became
internationally visible in history through all kinds of financial and political activities
during the French civil and religious wars. It appears that together with England,
the Elector Palatine and the Duke of Württemberg, Swiss Protestants became the
main foreign financial supporters of the French Protestant party. Capital transfers
were brought about in different ways: by real monetary transports, by letters of
exchange, by cédules obligatoires. It was possible to use the last two techniques
mentioned because of the existence of a new international payment network
especially among Protestant merchants and merchant bankers existing beside
the traditional one concentrated on Antwerp. Of course, the existing traditional
network for international payments at 1575–80 had a rather different geographical
According to empirical data found in the accounts of the Republic of Geneva of
the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. See Körner, Solidarités, pp. 368–76. This mainly
Protestant payment network was also used during the seventeenth century by Swiss Catholic
merchants and military entrepreneurs in France. See H. Steffen, Die Kompanien Kaspar Jodok
Stockalpers: Beispiel eines Soldunternehmers im 17. Jahrhundert (Brig, 1975), pp. 219–21.