One of the problems in analyzing the very large medieval Italian merchant-banking organizations that are the subject of this study is that all of them bore the name of a single family that was usually in control. As a result, it is often difficult to distinguish between the activities and motivations of such companies and those of the eponymous families. Historians have compounded the confusion by indiscriminately referring to company and family alike as “the Bardi,” “the Peruzzi,” “the Frescobaldi,” and so forth. This tendency is admittedly difficult to overcome because the affairs of most companies and their family shareholders were indeed very much intermingled. The early companies were in fact largely family associations; the very word compagnia etymologically means a family partnership as well as sharing the same bread. But companies that were comprised of a mixture of family and nonfamily shareholders became increasingly common in the later Middle Ages, and some of them became extraordinarily large. In these big “mixed-type” companies, the relationships between firm and controlling family were necessarily less straightforward.

A further complication in the analysis of the very large mixed companies is that although they were usually dominated by certain members of the controlling family, many of their close kinsmen had little or no involvement in the business. For example, the Bardi Company was able to satisfy the Commune of Florence that none of the sixteen Bardi family members who participated in the failed coup attempt in November 1340 was an active partner in the company.