The age of Antwerp had been the 'age of the Fuggers'. The following century would be the 'age of the Genoese' - not quite a hundred years but seventy, from 1557 to 1627.  For three-quarters of a century, 'the Genoese experience' enabled the merchant- bankers of Genoa, through their handling of capital and credit, to call the tune of European payments and transactions. This is worth studying in itself, for it must surely have been the most extraordinary example of convergence and concentration the European world-economy had yet witnessed, as it re- oriented itself around an almost invisible focus. For the focal point of the whole system was not even the city of Genoa itself, but a handful of banker-financiers (today we would call them a multinational consortium). And this is only one of the paradoxes surrounding the strange city of Genoa which, though apparently so cursed by fate, tended both before and after its 'age of glory' to gravitate towards the summit of world business.

Genoa, even counting her two rivieras, east and west, was contained in a very small space. In the words of a French diplomatic report, the Genoese had 'about thirty leagues along the coast from Monaco to Massa, and seven or eight leagues of plain towards the Milanese. The rest is a screen of barren mountains. The city survived by practicing banking and finance as the circumstances allowed.  This was its weakness and Genoa had lost control of the finances of Europe by the 1620s and the centre of the world economy shifted to Amserdam.