Islamic banking provides the current focus for investment bankers devising ways to satisfy religious precepts in finance, but in its modern form this dates back only to the 1970s. In Italy and beyond, though, bankers were looking for ways to sidestep religious strictures on charging interest from the early Middle Ages on. That’s just one of the lessons to emerge from Tim Parks’s fascinating new book on the Medicis, in which the author consistently shows that the past is by no means “another country”.
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