Banking and Money
Early Banking
Since a moneychanger did most of the things associated with banking, it's impossible to say exactly when or where "banking" started. In the thirteenth century, certainly. Along the northern shores of the Mediterranean, certainly, particularly in Italy and Catalonia. When you hear someone say that banking started in Genoa or Barcelona, they're speaking of a formal institution with a name and a charter. But families were doing banking all through the 1300s, and you should really think more about the family than about the bank. That is, family members and employees might have offices in several cities. In each city was the ability to raise money, keep and track money, and disburse money. The principal function was to serve the family business, but this often entailed providing financial services to partners and clients.
We think of a bank as a building with money in it, and there were such places, at least by the 15thc. Mostly, though, were buildings owned by families and somewhere in the building would be a locked room or rooms that held locked strongboxes. If you think about it, even a modern bank is like this. The room with the money is only part of the building's function. There are also offices for negotiating loans, one or more room for storing valuables, perhaps an investment office, and so on. But to make the modern parallel work, it would be more like each major company had its own bank, for there were very few independent banks. The ones that existed were operated by the city, such as the Bank of St George in Genoa.
The other really noticeable difference is that while banks did store currency and valuables, they didn't pay interest on those deposits. They simply provided safe storage and good accounting. As we'll see in a bit, this was a vital function for long-distance trade. Ordinary folk did not put money in banks, and the bank draft (or signature cheque) had not yet been invented.