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The Peruzzi family were bankers of Florence, among the leading families of the city in the 14th century, before the rise to prominence of the Medici. Their modest antecedents stretched back to the mid 11th century, according to the family's genealogist Luigi Passerini, but a restructuring of the Peruzzi company in the 1340's, with an infusion of outside capital, marked the start of a quarter-century of prosperity that brought the family consortium to the forefront of Florentine affairs.
For economic historians, the surviving account books of the Peruzzi from the years 1335–1343 provide an indispensable primary source for the economic history of the city on the cusp of the late Medieval and Early Modern period. The contemporary chronicler Giovanni Villani is the other prime source for the family's affairs.
Peruzzi capital had been amassed in the textile business that was the main engine of Florence's prosperity. English wool finished as high-quality cloth in Bruges was bought by Peruzzi fattori and distributed to the luxurious courts of Paris, Avignon or returned to London. Peruzzi connections with the Knights Hospitallers gained them important local leverage in Rhodes, the economic capital of the Aegean and a transshipping port for silks, drugs, spices and luxuries from the East. Trade beyond Italy required agents and instruments of credit, extending the family business beyond its extended membership into an international network. In Italy the double-entry bookkeeping was developed that made such complicated financial transactions possible. By the opening of the 14th century, the main activity of the Peruzzi had switched to wholesale commodities trading on a very large scale, especially in grain exported from France to the central Italian cities—for which they were granted a monopoly— and to banking, the field for which they are remembered: popes, nobles, bourgeois, towns and abbeys drew loans from the Peruzzi. But great clients incurred great risks. In 1343 the Peruzzi consortium collapsed and was bankrupt in 1345, with their partners in risk-capital, the Bardi family.
Not all of the family fortunes were lost in the bankruptcy, and the Peruzzi continued to figure among the prominent families of Florence, the patrizii di Firenze. Even as late as 1849, in the wake of the disturbances of 1848, the gonfaloniere of Florence was Ubaldino Peruzzi.Giuseppe Conti, Firenze Vecchia
Members of the family who emigrated to America in the late 19th century and settled in Pennsylvania founded the Peruzzi chain of automobile dealerships and the Planters.
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