In the fifteenth century, a new moral allegory connected to the figure of fortuna began to develop. In contrast to the Boethian one, discussed in Chapter 5, the moral force of this allegory aimed at not missing the opportunities for profit and success offered by fortuna. This chapter argues that this new allegory, which underlay the development of the new concept of the future as unknown time-yet-to-come, emerged first in mercantile culture. It traces its development in the writings and visual world of three Florentine merchants whose careers spanned the late fourteenth to the late fifteenth centuries. While never breaking with the providential future of Christianity, these merchants began to articulate ideas about the rewards of financial speculation and the promise and potential of taking risks on unknown future outcomes.

After gamblers, merchants in Renaissance Italy had the deepest professional familiarity with experiencing the unknown future, in all its risks and potential. This chapter examines how the well-established notion that trust was crucial to the functioning of the premodern economy connected to ideas about temporality and the future. It argues that the experience of trusting strangers and distant agents or business partners was fundamentally a temporal one. The chapter traces the institutions and mechanisms used by sixteenth-century merchants to manage the temporal problems of trust. It also demonstrates the continuing persistence of a providential understanding of the future, based on Christian faith, in mercantile culture, revealing the complex multiplicity of Italian attitudes toward the future.

Like the authors on games examined in Chapter 1, sixteenth-century merchants also constructed an identity based on expertise in futurity. This chapter examines how they did so through the deployment of rich, varied, and precise vocabulary for discussing the opportunities and risk of speculating on future profits. It traces the fine-grained way that merchants discussed the passing of time, demonstrating the ways in which they thought about time and risk as commodities that could be weighed and priced. It develops on Chapter 3, however, by showing these same merchants continued to think about the future and nature of the world in profoundly religious ways, complicating notions of straightforward linear progression for medieval to modern notions of temporality.