To the west was Arezzo, and farther was Florence. To the north across the back ridge of Appenine mountains lay the route to Rimini and Ravenna which were very often held thru medieval times as papal holdings. The fifteenth century was no different. Behind that lay Venice in its lagoon. To the south lay Perugia and past that Rome herself.
Five years before Pacioli was born, in 1442, armed papal forces of Eugenius IV, in the battle of Anghieri, beat those of Milan. Thereupon this pope sold Sansepolcro to Florence. Ten years before (1427), a previous pope had purchased the town by legitimising a couple illegitimate sons of the Malatesta family. Just thirty years before that still another pope had sold the place to an earlier Malatesta generation who were then the rulers in Rimini. Thus, years later, by selling Florence the town, a favor was seen as being granted in the additional security this gave to Florence, and to its Medici rulers, by this pope.
It must be hard to remember that math didn't really arrive in Europe outside a few elite purveyors, until the fifteenth century. That widespread dispersal came with the printing press. Merchants used such systems, tax-collectors too, and certainly the good bankers. But it was a specialist's game, fixed in abstract terms like 'figures' and 'sums' - things that may have well been foreign commodities. Scarce and widely prized, yet misunderstood. Luca Pacioli is remembered these days as one of the earliest to make a book for humanists in the vernacular about maths. He did that in Venice as his time dictated and, appropriately as well, he gave us the first real tract on financial accounting.
There were earlier examples as Jane Gleeson-White tells us in her monograph Double-Entry (published in 2011 by WW Norton & Co. for the English language). For example, she spends a few paragraphs on the nature of typical (but, and also, crucially well-documented) examples of actual accounting records as these were used and kept in Venice by one Jacomo Badoer. He used Hindu-Arabic numerals, as well as the ledger style of rows of lists of goods and prices, investments and returns.
"Badoer was a nobleman who for over three years ran a commercial venture in Constantinople, the meeting place of the trade routes of Europe and Asia, trading for himself and as an agent for Venetian merchants.... The dangers of sea travel ... led to the development of maritime insurance, an industry new in Badoer's day and one into which he ventured. Charging a premium of 3 to 19 percent (depending on the risk factor), Badoer suffered only one insurance loss over three years, a testament to the protection provided by the Venetian navy to its merchants."Badoer's record was written from 1436 - 1439 but gives example of the various kinds of goods, capital and credit, and their accounting. Pacioli would improve on these and publish it in a book on math for a wider audience.
All we know of Luca Pacioli's earliest beginnings is that the young Luca was taken in probably around 1460 by a local merchant in Sansepolcro who was named Folco de' Belfolci. A new math had been promoted in Italy from the thirteenth century, with the adaptation and teaching of Fibonacci's Arab-Hindu math lettering and systems. Merchants picked up these methods, and a hundred years before Pacioli there were six schools of this math in Florence alone. But lucky (and unlucky) for him, when Luca Pacioli came of age, the leading name about town was none other than Piero della Francesco, known for his painting, but also his understanding of math and other things like optics. By 1464 the young Pacioli left Sansepolcro to teach abbaco math in the big city of Venice, the nearest world entrepot. Here he went to school and taught and studied finance and accounting.
Quickly, Pacioli devoloped a system for accounting that was modeled on these years of study and practice in Venice. This system, also lucky for him, became the European model of accountancy, and specifically, double-entry book-keeping, upon which all others since have been built. But unluckily, he wouldn't gain credit for all this til rather recently. This was because Piero della Francesco far outshone messer Pacioli in mere repute over the subsequent generations. More on that later. It must have been in these years that Pacioli had found a copy of Fibonacci's Liber Abaci and at some point translated big chunks of it into Italian for his students.
Yet it was this same Pacioli who set in motion here in Venice his 'editions' of tutorials for mathematics. By 1470 he was acting as an agent and teacher in math to the sons of Antonio Rompiasi. That was the year he also went with Leon Battista Alberti to Rome. When this great humanist and teacher died two years later, Pacioli went on to Naples. After another stay here, he caught a job in Perugia teaching math again. In the meantime he had become a travelling monk with the Franciscans and in 1475 took vows as a Conventual, with some of their rules relaxed for itinerant friars.
In Perugia he began not only teaching but writing books and textbooks for his students. When the city gave him a position as a teacher they hoped to enhance their own prestige and that of their sons. Classes for him could be as many as 150 students at a time. In a way, Pacioli could feel like he had made it, yet his ambition grew. In 1478 he produced another book on math and in 1481 went to Zara, the Venetian capital of their Dalmatian province in Croatia. But he also spent time looking at the huge collections of manuscripts made publicly available by the Medici in Florence. By 1482 the Elements of Euclid - the first math text of any kind - had been published in Venice and for Pacioli, he could see the future. The following year, Pacioli's printer would open a shop. Pacioli's own text of Fibonacci, then Euclid, then a great Summation of these, plus a section on accounting, had been growing.
In 1486 he returned to Perugia to teach there again. He could put the final touches on his masterwork surrounded by familiar mountains. In the search for something more permanent in a rapidly changing world, he sought a way to set down the summation of what he had learned for a wider audience. And this was to show a more accountable method of record-keeping that cold hold even business and markets accountable.
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