Yes, but within the contexts of their own experience of economy and wealth. There were not always centralized banks to control the wealth, and it oftentimes came in from exterior sources.

The best example I know is that of Musa I, the Mansa(Emperor) of the Malian Empire in the 14th century(I realize this is just outside your time frame, but only by twenty years!)

Musa was a Muslim ruler, and his Kingdom was one of the richest in the world, if not the richest. As required by Islamic faith, he undertook the hajj, the pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324. When he did so, he took with him some 60,000 people in his retinue, as well as vast amounts of gold. The total amount was just under 10 metric tons. Today that would be worth 380 billion USD.

On his way to Mecca, Musa went via the caravan routes north of the Sahara, making his way through Cairo at the edge of Africa. In every city he came to, he made donations of alms to the poor in the region of 20,000 gold pieces. With 60,000 people accompanying him, he also had to buy food and pay for whatever other small fees might have come up. All of this was done in gold. The effect of the hajj on the gold markets of the eastern Mediterranean was catastrophic. Inflation rendered gold useless in Egypt and Mecca, because Musa had given away so much of it. To rectify the mistake, he borrowed back all the gold available in Cairo at high interest, and for a time, this helped. However, when he repaid the loan upon his return to Mali(in one lump sum), it again ruined the market, as well as the money lenders who had given the loans and now held worthless gold.

So from this, we can see that to some degree, yes, inflation was understood. Musa's attempt to fix the situation by borrowing back all of the gold shows an understanding of the problem, but his experience of wealth was vastly different to that of the Egyptian market. It seems that there are two answers to the second crash. Either he misunderstood the time needed for the market to fix itself before he could repay his loan, or now that he was far from the situation, he just didn't care.

Musa appears in several lists as the richest man in the history of the world. I first read about him several years ago, but the scholarship is vague which is unfortunate. When I first learned about him, there was a hypothesis that he had been the root cause of the Italian Renaissance, due to the huge disruption of the Mediterranean gold market. Like I said though, scholarship is vague so that is just a hypothesis, and I haven't found evidence for it since.