Medieval period

The more or less developed accounting practices common in the ancient world disappeared because of the almost complete extinction of trade in Europe in the centuries after the fall of the Roman Empire . The accounting had to be developed starting from zero, especially to the time of the commercial boom, that had its first great impulse with the Crusades .

Two great military orders , that of the Templar and that of the Teutonic Knights , developed during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries improved accounting systems, probably influenced by the practices of the Lebanese merchants with whom both orders had contact in their beginnings .

The Teutonic knights transferred their activity to the Baltic regions and there maintained contact with the commercial cities of the Pancreatic League . This League developed prophecy "factor accounting", that is, that of the commission agent who is accountable to his principal . While the Italian merchants presented more attention to an accounting of a patrimonial character, more adapted to the contract of the merchant on its employees.

Italian commercial republics and the Netherlands would be during the last centuries of the Middle Ages European regions where the commercial life would be more intense. As a natural consequence, accounting practice would develop new methods in these countries, and therefore it would be in all these Italian republics that modern accounting would emerge.

From the primitive memorials, in which traders wrote down the various transactions that they had to remember, the evolution of the system gradually evolved towards a simple starting accounting system; As the large number of necessary annotations advised merchants and lenders to dis aggregate from the memorial various accounts, in which they noted groups of operations possessing some common characteristic, such as being referenced to a particular merchandise or to the same person . The method of making the annotations became more and more perfected and led to the progressive development of certain practical rules, until at a moment not determined accurately by the historians appeared, in the zone of Italian economic influence, the method of double entry.