The first company was established at Bruges, under the name of Vitaliano’s teenage son, Filippo, hence its name, Filippo Borromei & co. It opened for business on 1 January 1435 and, according to the contract establishing it, was to last for five years.
The initial capital was £3,000 flemish, entirely provided by Count Vitaliano Borromei with the profits to be divided between Vitaliano (75 per cent), Paolo di Antonio da Castagnolo of Florence and Giovanni di Michele Micheli of Lucca (12.5 per cent each), and it was they who had to go to Bruges.
Towards the end of 1435 Giovanni Bindotti moved from Milan to London and began organizing the imminent opening of a branch there. During the first months of his stay he seems to have kept all the accounts in a small ledger, his ‘quadernetto’, until 8 March 1436 when Giovanni Micheli moved to London from Bruges and took over the management of the bank.
It was clearly a branch of the company at Bruges and again in the name of Filippo Borromei: both ledgers record the transfer of £1,600 flemish (or 16,000 flemish écus), equivalent to £1,431.17.1 sterling at an exchange rate of sterlings 21 5/12 per écu, from Bruges to London. As the money came from Bruges, the initial capital of £3,000 flemish must have been used to establish both banks and cannot be taken as the capital for Bruges only.
From the ledgers it is also clear that at the end of each year all the profits from the London branch had to be transferred to Bruges, where they were then credited to the Profit and Loss account of the main bank. Around 1436-37 a third bank called Filippo Borromei & co. was founded at Barcelona, but as no ledgers, contracts or other material concerning this bank have survived in the Borromei archive, it is not known whether it had complete autonomy from the Bruges-London banks or from the main company at Milan.
Despite initial profits in both Bruges and London, from 1437 the healthy profits of the latter were not sufficient to make up for the losses of the former and in the early 1440s the two branches must have closed, only to reopen in 1444, with different shareholders and a different structure (i.e. the two branches seem to have operated separately), whilst a new company was also opened in Barcelona in 1446.
The ledgers of the Bruges and London companies for 1436-38 are the core of this research project, and their activity has extensively been dealt with in our publications (see the section Publications).