What is the history and origination of Merchant Banks?
Merchant banks were in fact the original “banks” of Europe, formed in the middle ages by Italian grain merchants. The Lombardy merchants and bankers grew in stature trading cereal crops. Many of the displaced Jews who had fled persecution from the Spanish Inquisition in the late 1400s entered the trade. They brought to the grain trade from the middle and far east along the Silk Road, ancient practices involving the financing of long distance trade goods. Lombardy (in Italian Lombardia) is a region in northern Italy between the Alps and the Po Valley. The Silk Road was an interconnected series of routes through Southern Asia traversed by caravan and ocean vessel, connecting Changan (today Xian), China, Antioch, Syria, as well as other trading territories. Jewish people could not own land in Italy at that time, so they entered the great trading piazzas and halls of Lombardy alongside the local traders, setting up benches to trade in crops. New Jewish merchants had an advantage over the l
