The Evolution
By the 15th century, the medici had already become quite powerful in banking. When columbus set sail, the first Bank of medici had been operating for a century. The evolution of finance from that “hail mary” voyage to the wealth of the european trading companies of the 16th and 17 centuries required complex calculations of probability. It’s not mere coincidence that the preference or roman numerals faded during the same time period. Distributed commerce required management of probabilities. How many ships that set sail were likely to return with cargo? Would the likely value of the return exceed the cost of the operation? These were questions that weren’t asked when the benefactor was a sovereign who was playing with “other people’s money”. as the complexity of global trade increase, so did the demand for advanced calculations and, again, not as a matter of coincidence, the 17th century saw the rise of mathmaticians such as pascal and fermat to accommodate the new demands.