Genoa’s merchants wrote the first known insurance contract in 1347 to cover a Mediterranean shipment.
The earliest known insurance contract was written in Genoa in 1347. A merchant paid a premium to transfer the risk of a Mediterranean cargo voyage to an underwriter who agreed to absorb the loss if the ship did not arrive.1 The concept spread rapidly through Italian port cities, where the mathematics of shared risk became a commercial discipline.
By the fifteenth century, marine insurance was standard practice in Barcelona, Venice, and Florence. The Barcelona Ordinances of 1435 are among the earliest known insurance regulations.2 The word "policy" itself comes from the Italian polizza, meaning a written promise or receipt.
Lloyd’s of London began as a coffeehouse in the 1680s where ship owners, captains, and merchants met to arrange marine coverage. Edward Lloyd’s coffeehouse on Tower Street became the meeting point where underwriters signed their names beneath the terms of risk, a practice that gave the industry the word "underwriter."3
Life insurance followed a different path. The Amicable Society for a Perpetual Assurance Office, founded in London in 1706, was among the first life insurance companies.4 The concept that a human life could be assigned a monetary value and that premiums could be calculated against the probability of death required both actuarial mathematics and a particular way of thinking about persons as economic units.