Wolves in Sheep's Clothing
From humble weavers to the Merchant-bankers of Europe.
It is my conjecture that religion and commerce have been bound together in union from their inceptions.
In 2008, in an interview with London’s Sunday Times newspaper, Lloyd Blankfein, the chief executive of Goldman Sachs, made the remark that he was just a banker “doing God’s work”.1 At the time, his remark attracted widespread media attention and condemnation, but perhaps he was revealing an hermetic secret?
We are told that the origins of modern banking can be traced to the medieval and early Italian Renaissance, to the rich cities in the north like Florence, Lucca, Siena, Venice, and Genoa.2
“In later times trade and banking became quite separate. But in the period we are discussing, the line between the merchant and the money-lender was an indistinct one. The fortune of the merchant-banker was founded on trade, but it grew great by lending money to kings, nobles, clerics and to any others who needed immediate funds and could give some promise of repayment. It was this function, rather than their activity as merchants, that has preserved to us their names and their actions.”3
It was these early trade and merchant guilds that gave birth to not only modern banking, but the “corporation” as we have come to understand it.
“Throughout Western Europe till the close of the 18th century the control of trade and industry was largely, in some countries mainly, in the hands of the guilds.”4
According to some researchers, the guild, in its various forms and in its subsequent developments, has been one of the main instruments of what we call progress, and modern Western civilisation could not have been possible without them.
