Business
A bank gained its standing by handling money for the dominant institution of its day and by lending to kings, not only by serving ordinary trade. Acting as the Church's financial agent and as a creditor to monarchs put it at the center of both politics and commerce.
The largest merchant-banking houses tended to complete their whole arc, from rise to peak to collapse, within about a century. One house hit its high point when its founding leader died, declined under his grandson, and fell under the next heir. Earlier and later houses of the same kind shared this pattern of rapid decline.
A business organized tightly around one family group ties its fortunes to that family's succession. When leadership passes to less able heirs, the firm's decline follows the family's own. The book reads that structure next to similar family companies across three centuries that met the same fate.