Basically all the Italian campaigns of Frederick Barbarossa against the Lombard League.
Medieval cities were barely proto-caprialist though, their production was based arround a guild system which was more proto-syndicalist than proto-capitalist. The only way one could talk about them being capitalist is the use of money and trade associations. Let's look at the Hanseatic League for example. Was the value form fully fledged out yet? Today, we can attribute an exchange value to any commodity almost globally, which is completely abstract. However, being a trader in the Hansa didn't mean buying commodities from producers and selling it to consumers, but rather buying products from your own companies (which were obliged to give a quota to the city) or the city and selling it to another city where the prices were higher. The most successful traders were those who knew where prices were low and where they were high. Basically you buy a bunch of salt in Riga and then sell it with a profit margin to Lübeck, but was that purely exchange value? It wasn't, as demand was mostly based on use, cities would not stockpile commodities they wouldn't need, and didn't have their own contractors that would try to establish a city-owned trade. So the value form did exist, but it wasn't reduced to exchange value yet, it was a non-capitalist form of commodity production.
In the German part of the Holy Roman Empire that relationship between the Free Imperial Cities and the emperor was positive. Free Imperial Cities were enclaves within principalities but were only dutiful towards the emperor. This caused conflicts with the local princes, especially once they started to legally territorize their realm, with the beginning of the 14th century. In feudalism, you don't rule over land but rather over people and the right of usufruct to cultivate it. Feudalism is not about legal relations in rem (relations to things) like in capitalism, but rather relations to entitlement rights itself, the feudal pyramid is technically just a cession of rights down from the king. With the crisis of the 14th century, this crumbled for a whole bunch of reasons, and dukes and princes started to think territorially, which gave rise to conflicts with the Free Cities (but also the lower class of nobles, like manors of barons). An example would that would be the War of the Cities in 1387, where the Duke of Bavaria crushed a league of Swabian cities that tried to organize themselves.
Brody Russell
You prefer an engrossing lie over a simple truth. Did I nail it?
Grayson Hill
As far as I know, this guy is right. Proto-capitalism started from mercantilism, partly from the trading guilds, but mostly, I would say, from plundering colonies. The latter allowed the European countries to reach much farther and new markets and goods and, most importantly, plunder and rape them without a shred of mercy. In other words, colonialism had an even higher profit margin than guild mercantilism, and was the starter for the capitalist engine.
Logan Kelly
On second thought, colonialism was a later development, being preceded by more normal trade instead of settling new lands.
Colton Sanders
So in essence, every city was an island of capitalism, and none of them ever got out from under the wings of the rural feudal aristocracy because of the material considerations involved in raising medieval armies, until such times as technology etc. started to favour more capital intensive professional and mercenary armies over lifelong trained knights and feudal levies, driving the aristocracy into alliances with banking houses and merchants to fund their suppression of competing aristocrats?
Jackson Martin
The Templars specialized in long-distance currency transactions (one writer called them "The Western Union of their time) and holding property in trust. They did get around the Christian prohibition on usury by charging administrative fees prior or after lending out funds. They usually didn't lend to anyone directly if they were needed to fund a long-distance trade endeavor they would lend it to a thir party or they would lend to governments and the Church since institutions weren't people and could get around the ban on usury.
I don't know much about the peruzzi but I know that the Lombard dynasty specialized in currency exchange. The Medici lent primarily to governments although they did give loans to wealthy individuals at interest. The Medici and other Christian Italian banking dynasties got around this by making massive contributions to charity, patronizing the arts and so on. It was said at the time "Great sinners, great Cathedrals" there needs to be more study of this but Christian philanthropy heavily reflects capitalist modes of investment and reproduction.
The most revolutionary contribution of medieval finance to the rise of capitalism was the Venetian invention of state bonds. They were devised in order to encourage the elite to pay their taxes and to desire to keep the republic solvent, so to enocourage this the Doge made the Venetian oligarchs contribute a part of their wealth to the state through a forced loan that would be returned at interest. In the absence of constant inflation the fact that these bonds paid interest in pepertuity would create problems for the Venetian government which defaulted in 1500. Increasingly governments began turning to this strategy amid bourgeois revolutions and decaying feudal kingdoms on the other during the 17th and 18th centuries.
It was this Christian innovation of government bonds that the Rothschild family so famously internationalized trade-in and dominated: t.Heinrich Heine contemporary and friend of Karl Marx
