The Three Florentine Brothers Squander Their Fortune and Go Bankrupt

The three brothers’ collapse is a story of wealth regained and squandered twice: inheritance first enables extravagant living, and a successful lending business briefly restores their fortune, only for renewed excess and war in England to bring bankruptcy. In Pampinea’s account, their downfall is not a single reversal but a chain of decisions in which apparent prosperity repeatedly conceals how little security remains.

Family and Inheritance

The tale begins with uncertainty about the family’s identity. Some people, Pampinea says, associated the brothers with the Lamberti family; others assigned them to the Agolanti, reasoning from the kind of business their sons later pursued. She leaves the disputed lineage unresolved and turns instead to what can be established: their father was a very rich gentleman, and when he died, his three sons inherited all his movable and immovable possessions as legitimate heirs.

The eldest, Lamberto, was not yet eighteen at the time of the inheritance. The other two were his younger brothers. Their youth matters to the shape of the story: they suddenly possess lands and money on a scale their previous experience had not prepared them to manage. Their inheritance gives them the means to live magnificently, but not, as events show, the restraint needed to preserve it.

Inherited Wealth Spent Away

The brothers spend without limit or governance, following their own pleasure. They maintain a large household and many fine horses, dogs, and hawks; they keep open house, give generously, and stage tilts and tournaments. Their display encompasses both the expected pursuits of men of their station and whatever else their youthful appetites lead them to want. The narration makes the breadth of their spending concrete: it is not one extravagant purchase but a whole mode of life sustained by their father’s estate.

The fortune does not last. Their inherited treasure melts away, while their revenues alone cannot meet their current expenses. They begin selling and mortgaging their estates, disposing of one holding after another until they are nearly reduced to nothing. Only then, Pampinea observes, does poverty open their eyes to the condition that wealth had kept hidden from them.

Lamberto calls his brothers together. He recalls their father’s former magnificence and their own, contrasts it with the poverty their unrestrained spending has produced, and urges them to sell what little remains and leave before their distress becomes more visible. The brothers accept his counsel. They depart without farewell or ceremony, choosing flight and a change of livelihood over remaining in their home city with their dwindling resources.

A Fortune Rebuilt in London

The brothers travel to London, rent a small house, live frugally, and apply themselves diligently to lending money at interest. Fortune favors this new enterprise: within a few years they accumulate a great sum. Returning home one by one, they buy back much of their former property and acquire more besides. They also marry. Their recovery appears to reverse the first collapse: the men who left nearly impoverished regain property, money, and family standing through a disciplined business abroad.

Yet the discipline does not endure. The brothers continue lending in England, entrusting the supervision of their affairs there to their young nephew Alessandro, while all three remain at home. Though now fathers of families, they forget the ruin their earlier excess had caused and begin spending more extravagantly than before. Merchants extend them credit for sums of any size, and the money Alessandro sends helps sustain their spending for several years.

Alessandro’s English business is profitable in part because he lends to barons against their castles and other possessions. That arrangement makes the brothers’ renewed prosperity dependent not only on the loans themselves but on the political stability that allows the pledged property to remain a source of repayment. The distinction between apparent wealth and secure wealth, central to the first collapse, returns in a new form: the brothers spend freely at home while their financial support rests on assets and income managed far away.

War, Arrest, and Bankruptcy

The support fails when war breaks out in England between the king and his son, dividing the island into opposing parties. The barons’ castles are taken from Alessandro, and he has no other source of revenue that answers his needs. He hopes that peace will soon be made and that both principal and interest will be restored, so he remains in England. In Florence, the brothers neither reduce their expenses nor stop borrowing; instead, they continue to incur debts, relying on the expectation that English payments will eventually resume.

Several years pass without the anticipated settlement. The brothers lose their credit, and their creditors demand payment. Their possessions are not sufficient to meet what they owe. They are arrested and remain in prison for the balance. The reversal is especially stark because the brothers had previously converted their recovered earnings into estates and renewed commercial credit: neither those possessions nor the confidence of their lenders can protect them once the expected English income disappears.

Their families suffer the consequences beyond the brothers’ imprisonment. Their wives and young children scatter, some into the countryside and others elsewhere, in a condition of acute uncertainty and distress. Pampinea’s account thus ends not with the brothers’ financial calculations but with the dispersal of the households their renewed prosperity had seemed to secure.

The Pattern of the Reversal

The episode sets two different causes of ruin beside one another. The first is self-made: unchecked expenditure consumes the inheritance until the brothers are nearly destitute. Their recovery follows the opposite habits—living cheaply and working diligently at lending—but success does not produce lasting prudence. Once wealth and merchant credit return, they again spend without restraint.

The second collapse is brought about by circumstances beyond their control: war in England removes the collateral and revenue supporting Alessandro’s business. Yet the political shock becomes catastrophic for the brothers because they have continued borrowing and spending as though repayment were certain. The story’s repeated rise and fall therefore turns on the gap between a fortune that appears available and the resources that can actually sustain it. Its ending restores poverty and dependence in a harsher form than before: the brothers are imprisoned, while their wives and children are left dispersed and without a clear prospect of what will follow.