In several particulars the accurate information secured by
Soresina corrects or explains statements previously current as to
the affairs of the bank, and particularly with respect to its sus-
pensions of payment The period beginning with 1630, in which
the bank was supposed to have suspended payment perhaps more
than once, now appears to have witnessed a continuous suspension
from 1630 to 1666, when the opening of the cash office put an end
to the forced payment by transfer of bank credits. Ji- was to this
long suspension, then, that Matthew Lewis referred in bis " Large
Model of a Bank" in 1678 as the expenditure of all the cash in
the bank "in the late Turkish wars." The effort in 1630 to take

^ Quarterly Journal of Economics^ January, 1 893.
* Amadeo Soresina, " II Banco Giro di Venezia." Venice, 1889. 8vo, pp. 94.
THE BANK OF VENICE 167

measures a saldare ed estinguere il Banco appears to have con-
templated, not the closing of the bank, but provision for extin-
guishing its debt, which was then overwhelming. Of a suspension
of the bank in 1691, mentioned by McLeod and others, Soresina
gives no notice ; nor was any trace found by Signor Siboni in the
documents at the Frari.^ On the contrary, the cash office ap-
pears to have remained open from 1666 to 1713.
