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by Anthony Molho
To understand the Italian Renaissance one must have some knowledge of its economic side. Great merchants and bankers, skilled artisans and day laborers, all helped to lay the basis for the Renaissance. The creative and adventurous spirits of the merchants enabled them to build great fortunes. They used their money to encourage and support the writers and artists who made the Renaissance so brilliant. In Florence and in other cities merchants also influenced or controlled the government. Thus a study of the Renaissance must begin with them. There is no better place to observe them in action than the city of Florence.
For nearly 200 years-from about the 1290's to the 1490's-Florence was the foremost place of business in Europe. It was a leader as, a cloth-making center. It was also the home of Europe's most powerful banking houses. Florentine textiles were sold all over Europe and in North Africa, the Middle East, and even in India. Florentine bankers pioneered business methods still in use today. The wealthiest. of them built up fortunes greater than those enjoyed by kings and, emperors. By 1330 only Paris in the north and three Italian cities, Milan, Venice, and Naples, had larger populations. None -could rival Florence in wealth or in the liveliness of its business activity. Florentine business was highly organized by a system of guilds. Guilds were not new: they had existed in most medieval towns. But in Florence they had a new place not only in business life but also in public affairs and in the arts. A study of business life in Florence naturally begins with the guilds.
THE GUILDS
Originally, a guild was simply an association of people working in one line of business or practicing a single craft. Members joined it from choice. But as time went on, each guild gained full control of all the work and all the workers in its field. Only guild members could practice the craft or profession within the city. For example, if a master tailor from another city came to Florence to live, he must be admitted to the guild of tailors before he could set up a shop. If there were already too many tailors in the city, the guild could refuse to admit him as a member.
There were seven so-called "major guilds." These were made up of professional people and some of the richest and most powerful merchants in Florence. These seven included the judges and notaries; the importers of foreign cloth; the cloth manufacturers (the Wool Guild); the silk retailers and silk merchants; the money changers (that is, bankers); the furriers; and the physicians and ' apothecaries (druggists).
Artisans and other skilled workers were organized into 14 "minor" guilds. These included butchers; shoemakers; blacksmiths; builders; second-hand dealers; wine merchants; innkeepers; sellers of salt, oil, and cheese; tanners; armorers; ironworkers; girdlemakers; woodworkers; and bakers. Members of the minor guilds enjoyed the advantage of careful training as apprentices. In general, they were well enough off to own their tools and shops and to make a comfortable living.
Guild membership conferred rights -and privileges not directly related to the member's work. For example, only guildsmen could vote or be elected to government offices. Most offices were, in fact, reserved for major guildsmen. The richest of the major guilds became important because of their wealth. They owned palaces and real estate greater than what private individuals owned.
Guilds, especially those that were wealthy, played an important role in the growth of Florentine art. For instance they often commissioned artists to decorate churches. From the first, the Wool Guild supervised the construction and decoration of the cathedral. It is to be noted that the Wool Guild was the most powerful and wealthiest in the city.
Guilds also performed a variety of other public services. The guild of Foreign Cloth Importers, for example, had control of the official measure for cloth. Standard iron rods were mounted in three different spots in the city. Once a year every merchant's measuring stick was checked against an official rod. The same guild ran the first postal service in Florence, with carriers and relay stations to serve guild members. The guild also supervised and helped finance several churches and hospitals for the poor. Every other guild, from the prestigious judges and notaries to the more modest butchers and bakers, performed similar public services.
The great power and prestige of the Wool Guild came from a fact of economic life. The making of woolen cloth of uniform high quality and great beauty was the original basis of Florentine wealth. We must begin our study of business in Florence by a look at the many sided wool business.
THE WOOL BUSINESS
The manufacture and sale of wool cloth had an importance in 14th-century Florence that can scarcely be exaggerated. In 1338, when Villani wrote his chronicle, he spoke with enthusiasm about the wool business. The 200 wool shops in the city produced between 70,000 and 80,000 pieces of cloth every year. Total value was more than 1,200,000 gold florins (the florin was the coin of Florence). At current prices of gold, this figure is equal to about $7 million. But gold was much more precious than it is now. Recent scholars calculate the purchasing power of one florin in the mid-14th century as about equal to $100 today. Thus in 1338 the total value of cloth produced in Florence was about $120 million. This sum was some four times the yearly Florentine city budget. It was as if now, in the United States, one industry were responsible for' making goods valued at more than $900 billion a year!
It was wool that made so many of the major guildsmen enormously rich. Wool also made it possible for the guilds to contribute so generously to the various needs of the city and to the city’s artistic life. But wool manufacture had another vital influence on Florentine society. Villani declared that upward of 30,000 people, about one-third of the population, made their living from it. The part each person had in the wool business determined his place in society. At the top were the lanaioli,1 the wealthy merchants who owned the wool shops and directed the whole process of cloth-making. In the middle were the artisans, each skilled in a single step of wool manufacture. They could expect a comfortable living with agreeable work. At the bottom were unskilled men often unemployed except when they were needed by the wool trade to do hard physical labor.
The First Step: Obtaining the Wool
The process of creating a piece of Florentine cloth took many months, or, more likely, several years. It began with the wool on a sheep's back. Since Tuscany never produced enough wool, it had to import large quantities. From an early date the Florentines sent out agents to scout for wool throughout Europe. The finest was to be had in Spain and England. The agents learned to know the best times to buy. English wool, for instance, was often bought in the annual fairs held in midsummer, usually around St. John's Day, June 24. "It is then that the Cotswold [wool region] fairs are held and that those who want good produce should purvey it," a Florentine wrote home to his employer.
{1lanaioli: la-na-yo'1e}
Then came the prolonged process of getting the wool to Florence. In one instance, the Florentine firm of Francesco Datini2 placed an order on November 15, 1394, for wool from the island of Minorca near Spain. In May 1395, the sheep were shorn. An agent was sent to buy 29 sacks of wool. He chartered a Spanish ship, but because of stormy weather it did not reach Minorca until the end of July. Loaded with its cargo, it stopped at the port of Barcelona in Spain. Then on September 2 it set sail for Pisa on the Tuscan coast. It reached Pisa seven weeks later on October 22, 1395. There the wool was repacked in bales, loaded on mule backs, and sent to the Datini plant on the outskirts of Florence. It arrived January 14,1396.
{2 Francesco Datini: fran-ches’ ko da-te'ne}
From this single example it is clear why only rich capitalists -people with money saved up or inherited could afford to own wool shops. Note that from the moment of the original order to the arrival of the wool in Florence, nearly 14 months had passed. Datini had to pay his agent, buy the wool, hire the ship and its crew, and pay the mule train from the coast. And all he had to show for his expenses were the sacks of raw wool. Only a rich capitalist could afford to risk so much money, and then wait, perhaps for some years, before his investment could possibly pay off. It was for this reason that the control of the wool industry in Florence remained in the hands of a small group of wealthy merchants a few dozen, or perhaps a very few hundred men, the lanaioli, all full members of the Wool Guild.
Transforming the Wool Into Cloth
Wool coming into Florence would be delivered to the wool shop of the capitalist who had ordered it. One has only to remember Villani's boast of over 200 wool shops in the city of 90,000 people to understand that each shop was small indeed compared to a modem factory. In fact almost none of the processing of the wool was done there. The shop was the office and storehouse of the lanaioli. Unless he had appointed a business manager to do his work for him, he himself managed the office with the help of a bookkeeper and two or three clerks. He sent out all the orders and paid all the bills. When a shipment of wool arrived, he sent it from one artisan shop to another until it finally became cloth. He bargained with each artisan about costs and made sure that the work was done honestly, on time, and well. The lanaioli not only had to be a wealthy man. He also had to have the eye for business that so competitive an enterprise demanded.
The making of cloth required 26 separate steps. The first processes -washing and cleaning -required husky workers with no special skill. The raw wool was washed in the Arno River, and burrs and sticks were cut out with scissors. Finally, the wool was combed and carded to be ready for spinning. The men hired for these jobs were the poorest in the city. All too often they were unemployed. Only when a shipment of wool came into some wool shop did a few of them have work for a short time. We shall see these miserable people rising up against the government of Florence when we discuss Florentine politics in Chapter 4.
Next, the lanaioli sent the wool to country women who spun it into yarn on their own spinning wheels in their homes. Due to the lack of the organization and supervision that exist in a modern factory, production was less efficient than it could have been. But what these women earned in this way eked out whatever other income they had. The weavers, to whom the yarn was sent, next, had to be highly skilled. The quality of the finished cloth, its texture and durability, depended on the way the yarn was woven. A weaver kept two or three looms in his home. He had apprentices learning the trade, and he also had a few hired hands. Unlike the people who had worked the wool before he received it, he was not simply unskilled, nor was he simply an artisan. He was a merchant as well. He belonged to what was considered the upper level of working people in the city.
The finishing of the woven cloth also required skilled artisans. Master fullers set tip their machines in the river where the current operated hammers to beat and soften the cloth. But in summer the Arno might go dry. Even worse, at other times it might be unusually muddy. That meant disaster, for the wool and cloth could not be washed. In 1333, when this happened, the entire year's supply had to be given up for lost.
Finally, the cloth must be stretched and dried evenly. The Wool Guild built great barn-like structures with racks enough to hang thousands of yards of cloth. There were labyrinths of stairs and terraces sheltered by a huge wooden roof, with a locked gate to keep out thieves. This was the nearest approach in Florence to a modern type factory.
The finishing touch, the glamour of the woolen products, was the work of the dyers. It was the dyers who gave Florentine woolens their spectacular hues. These colors were greatly admired throughout Europe, North Africa, and parts of Asia. In fact, so famous were he deep, rich colors of Florence, especially the reds, that English, French, and Flemish manufacturers sent their unfinished cloth to Florence to be dyed and then re-exported north. The general name of grana was given to these reds. It was a term that in Florentine slang meant, and continues to mean, money, so profitable was trade in the cloth of those red hues.
The Decline of Wool
Throughout the 14th century the Florentine cloth industry was plagued by the rising cost of raw wool. Growing competition from foreign-made cloth was another problem. Thus, the peak of Florentine wool production was reached during Villani's days in the 1330’s. From then on, the industry went into a slow decline lasting two centuries. By the opening years of the 15th century, Florence produced only about half as much woolen cloth as in Villani's time. The primary cause of the decline was a new attitude of the wool-raising countries. The relation of Florence with the European wool-producing lands had been not unlike that between "developed" and "underdeveloped" countries today. The latter often have valuable raw materials -iron, bauxite, oil, and the like. These are sent to Europe and North America to be made into finished goods. The finished goods may then be sent back, at far higher prices, to the very countries from which the raw materials came in the first place. In recent years we have seen the hard and often successful efforts of African, Asian, and South American countries to deal with this problem. They have charged high prices for their raw materials and built their own factories. In the 14th century, governments of wool-producing areas began to impose steep tariffs, or taxes, on unfinished wool leaving the country. They gave large subsidies- money supports -to local businessmen to start their own wool shops. The English export tax on raw wool was about 33 per cent, for example, while the export tax on finished cloth was no more than 2 per cent. As a result, the Florentines were forced to specialize. They concentrated on the manufacture of high-quality luxury cloth, leaving to the north Europeans the markets for low-quality cheaper products.
SILK CLOTH
In the early 1400's, Florentine merchants found a way to make up for the decline of the wool industry. They invested in the manufacture of silk. Raw silk was imported from other Italian provinces where silkworms were raised. Within 20 or 25 years, Florence was able to compete with the already established centers of silk manufacture, Lucca and Venice. Florentine silk brocades, famed for their color and texture, were exported to the major courts of Europe. They went to Naples, to the papal court in Rome, and even to France, Germany, and England. On the whole, the men who had controlled the wool-cloth industry came also to control the manufacture of silk. Thus, to spread and safeguard their investments, wool merchants also became silk manufacturers. The organization of the silk industry was like that of the wool industry. The rich merchants controlled the raw materials. Large numbers of artisans were entrusted with each successive step of the manufacturing process. The finished product was sold by whomever had originally brought the silk into the city.
It is clear that cloth-making was the basis of Florentine greatness in the 14th century. The cloth business created great wealth. It made the wool and silk manufacturers rich. It gave employment and an adequate living to thousands of skilled artisans. It also kept alive the poorer people of Florence. Because raw wool and silk had to be imported, while much of the finished cloth was exported, the cloth industry also promoted commerce all over Europe and beyond.
As the Florentines sent their cloth in such quantities to far places, they came to need new, safer, and more efficient banking practices. In time, banking overshadowed cloth-making as a profitable business in Florence. Bankers amassed wealth previously unknown in Europe. Their story is as worth telling as that of the cloth-makers.
BANKING
Unlike the wool industry, which employed thousands of workers and gave large profits to many people, Florentine banking firms numbered only two or three dozen. But the leading bankers came to enjoy prestige and power matched by few other individuals in all Europe. They made loans to kings and high churchmen and to countless European nobles. Florence dominated the financial and banking worlds of western Europe. Like the wool merchants, the bankers also gave the city many of the beautiful palaces and churches and paid for many projects of city improvement.
The Rise Of Florentine Banking
The story of banking can best begin in the 1280's and the 1290's when the rich merchants were fighting the landholding nobles for control of the city. At that time the pope took the side of the merchants. Soon the Florentine bankers became bankers to the pope. Agents of the banking firms began collecting papal taxes throughout Europe-from Scandinavia and England to Spain and Sicily. The bankers found good profit in advancing loans to cardinals, bishops, or abbots who might be short of cash. The origin of the important place of Florence in the European financial world can be traced to this connection with the papacy.
Florentine bankers soon amassed much greater capital than all previous European banks. The giants of the banking world in the early 14th century–the firms of the Bardi, 3 Peruzzi, 4 and Acciaiuoli 5-were all Florentine. And their fame brought more business. A pope of the early 14th century described them as the fifth element of the universe (along with earth, air, fire, and water): without them there could be no life.
{3 Bardi: bar'de}
{4 Peruzzi: pe-root’ se}
{5 Acciaiuofi: at-cha-yoo-or’ le
But this very success led, in the 1340's, to the first great banking crisis. Though very profitable, loans to, kings were also dangerous. How could a banker defend himself if the ruler of a country refused to pay interest or to repay the loan itself? Against the armies and police forces of kings and princes, bankers had no defense. They were often forced into advancing new loans, under the threat of losing loans previously made. Or the kings and princes might force bankers to accept crowns or jewels as security for a loan, all very hard to sell. How many people could buy an expensive crown if an English monarch decided to forfeit a large loan?
Such a situation arose in the 1340's when Edward III of England forfeited the very large loans he had received from the Bardi and the Peruzzi. He had to take this drastic step in the opening stages of the Hundred Years War against France. The result was the bankruptcy of the Bardi and the Peruzzi, the two largest banks in Europe. The collapse triggered off a series of other bank failures.
To make matters far worse, the failure of the great banks was followed five years later, in 1348, by the single most devastating disaster ever to strike Europe: the Black Death. We shall speak further of this dreadful epidemic in the next chapter. Here, we need only say that it swept away perhaps half the people of Florence. Naturally, business was disrupted and profits fell. But since the rest of Europe suffered almost as severely, Florentine bankers still held the foremost place in Europe. In fact their leadership was actually enhanced in the years after the Black Death. This progress was largely the result of a sound currency and new business methods adopted in Florence and used also in other Italian cities.
The Gold Florin
Florentine merchants had had the great advantage of a sound currency since 1252. Florence, first among European cities, had coined a gold unit of currency, the florin. For the 14th and much of the 15th centuries it was the money most used for international trade. What the American dollar was for many years after World War II, the florin was in the 1300's and 1400's. Merchants throughout Europe, the Middle East, and North Africa preferred to receive payment in gold florins. They knew that each coin contained more gold than any other currency. The Florentine government was careful not to allow any other European currency to become more valuable than the florin. In time, the Venetians coined a gold ducat. It became popular among traders in the Middle East during the late 14th and early 15th centuries. Florence then responded with an even heavier florin that had a larger gold content than the old florin.
A proof of the importance of a strong currency is to be seen in the following incident. Early in the 1420's the Florentines were working out a treaty of commerce with the Sultan of Egypt. They sent an ambassador to prove to him that they should be granted privileges like those he gave the Venetians. The Sultan's chief minister ordered that a set of scales be brought and that 100 Venetian ducats be weighed against 100 Florentine gold florins. "And having weighed them several times," the Florentine recorded proudly, "it became clear that the florins made a good showing."
New Banking Practices
In the late 13th and the 14th centuries, Italian merchants developed a number of devices for making business transactions quicker, simpler, and less risky. In these affairs the Florentines often took the lead. One of the most important of the new devices was the letter of credit. A letter of credit is similar to our modem check. Before it was invented, merchants attending the great European fairs paid for their purchases by the exchange of goods or by counting out silver or gold coins. Obviously, such a system was clumsy and difficult. The use of coins was also risky. Roads were infested with thieves, and traveling merchants were fair game. Once the letter of credit was devised, rich merchants no longer traveled -to the fairs. Instead, they sent their agents to select the merchandise. The purchases could then be paid for by a letter of credit.
The system worked in this way. The buyer would have cash "on deposit" in a central location, a sum at least equal in amount to the letter of credit. The seller could accept the letter of credit and then pick up his money where it had been deposited. The Florentine bank of the Peruzzi, for example, maintained at least twenty branches located from Cyprus, Rhodes, and Tunis to Paris, London, and Bruges. Its agents could pay for goods purchased in the eastern Mediterranean by signing a letter of credit. The seller could then receive his cash in Paris, or he could receive Win any of the other cities where the Peruzzi maintained a branch office.
The letter of credit also let a merchant buy goods on credit. We, of course, buy on credit when we make a purchase at a store and have the bill sent later. By signing the sales ticket, we make a promise that we will, indeed pay. In the 14th century a well-known merchant buying a shipload of wheat in southern Italy could write out a letter of credit. Only after he had sold the wheat would he have to pay the person from whom he had bought it.
The letter of credit involves a loan in the transaction. The seller lends the buyer the price of the sale until that price is paid. The Church forbade the charging of interest on that loan or any other loan of money. It taught that it was uncharitable and unchristian for one Christian to collect interest on money he lent another Christian. But if there was some doubt about the repayment of the loan, then the Church allowed the banker making the loan to charge the borrower something to compensate for the risk involved.
Another invention that helped bankers to resolve this problem of interest was the bill of exchange. It was a letter of credit which involved the exchange of currencies. In almost all cases it was written in the currency of one city and payment was made in another. In the Middle Ages, almost every city and region had a currency of its own. All of them fluctuated in value. Thus, let us say, a merchant of Naples wished to borrow a sum of money to pay a debt he owed in Venice. He might apply for the loan to the branch of the Medici bank in Naples. If his request was approved, he would sign a bill of exchange. The bill would show that he had borrowed X amount of Neapolitan pounds. He was bound to repay it within a certain period of time in Venice and in Venetian ducats. This transaction involved the exchange of currencies, whose values did not remain stable. Because of the risk the Church allowed the bankers to charge interest.
Two other inventions of Florentine bankers improved their business techniques. One was the practice of endorsing a bill of exchange. The bill might be made out to X, to whom money was owed. He might then endorse it by signing his name and giving the name of Y, a third person to whom he wanted to make a payment. We use precisely this method today when we endorse a check over to a third party by signing our name on the back of it.
The second invention was the practice of insuring cargoes of merchandise being shipped overland or by sea. Premiums were high, often amounting to as much as 15 per cent of the value of the goods. But insurance helped safeguard against losses in shipwreck or from pirates or thieves. A policy drawn in 1385 lists the risks against which the insurance company assumed responsibility: "from act of God, of the sea, of jettison, of confiscation, of princes or cities or any other person, of reprisal, mishap or any other impediment." Until the 14th-century invention of insurance, investments in goods that were stolen or destroyed were lost forever.
The second invention was the practice of insuring cargoes of merchandise being shipped overland or by sea. Premiums were high, often amounting to as much as 15 per cent of the value of the goods. But insurance helped safeguard against losses in shipwreck or from pirates or thieves. A policy drawn in 1385 lists the risks against which the insurance company assumed responsibility: "from act of God, of the sea, of jettison, of confiscation, of princes or cities or any other person, of reprisal, mishap or any other impediment." Until the 14th-century invention of insurance, investments in goods that were stolen or destroyed were lost forever.
The Medici Holding Company
The aids to buying and selling discussed above were used when merchants or business firms -had dealings with each other. But one of the most important new business devices of the 14th century had to do with the organization of a single firm. In the hard years after the Black Death, the Medici reorganized their bank as a holding company.
Before 1350 most business concerns had been organized quite simply. A banking family like the Bardi or Peruzzi set up a bank in Florence. Then they opened branches in other cities where conditions were favorable. Legally, the entire business was one unit. Gains and losses of one branch were shared by all. Similarly, in 1397 when Giovanni de' Medici set up his bank in Florence, he took a partner. As his business grew, he opened a number of branches in other parts of Italy and northern Europe. After 1350 each of these branches became in some ways a separate organization. To assure the independence of the branches, Giovanni took on a separate partner for each. During the height of the Medici bank's prosperity, it had branches in eight other European cities. Each was set up as a different partnership, but in each the Medici owned more than 50 per cent of the capital. The Medici used the same principle in the organization of the two wool shops and the silk plant they controlled in Florence.
There was a great advantage in this arrangement. While Giovanni de' Medici kept overall control, losses of one branch did not directly affect the stability of the others. For example, in 1455 a merchant in the Belgian city of Bruges sued the local Medici bank. His complaint was that a shipment sent to Bruges by the Medici branch in London had been faulty. The court ruled in favor of the Bruges branch. The Bruges branch of the Medici bank did not have to repay the customer because that branch was legally separate from the one in London. This same principle is firmly established today. Though the Rockefeller family, for example, owns a controlling interest in all Standard Oil companies, Standard Oil of Ohio cannot be held responsible in court for actions of Standard Oil of Indiana.
We must note one further aspect of Florentine business life that was characteristic of banking as well as of all businesses with connections outside Florence. Perhaps most important of all business practices in the century and a half after the Black Death was the keeping of precise records and accounts.
RECORD AND ACCOUNT KEEPING
The records kept by Florentine merchants were made in almost as refined a way as those of many modern businesses. Although some of these records have been destroyed through the years, many have survived. One collection of 150,000 business letters and dozens of account books has come down to us from the wool business of Francesco Datini. He lived in Prate, one of the smaller cities subject to Florence. A great number of items also remain from the Medici bank.
These mountains of papers show how Florentine merchants kept their books. Every transaction was carefully recorded. Shipments of goods were followed from the moment of purchase to final sale. Expenses and charges were entered in the proper account books, Instructions were sent to agents throughout Europe almost daily, and copies of the letters were filed in the home office. Historians can describe not only the broad outlines of the Datini and Medici organizations. They can also follow individual transactions in full detail.
It was the nightmare of a merchant that his agents in distant cities would neglect their accounts and reports. Francesco Datini, though a prosperous merchant, spent hours each day drafting letters to his agents, reading his accounts, and keeping careful files of his papers. "I would look over each of my papers," he wrote one of his agents, "and set them in order and mark them that I may be clear about each man with whom I, have to do." And to another agent who had neglected to send some vital information, he scornfully wrote:
You have not the mind of a cat! You would lose your way from your nose to your mouth! For even the wisest man in the world must ponder, by day and by night, over what he has to write, lest he forget it. But I see well that you only read my letters once and reply heedlessly, and then sit by the fire dreaming of the great profits you will make.
OTHER BUSINESS VENTURES
We have seen how profitable cloth-making and banking were in Florence. But these were not the only opportunities for profit. Banks in Renaissance Italy did not confine themselves to what we now think of as banking business. Often they were also trading companies, import and export firms, insurance underwriters, and even manufacturers. Big firms like the Medici and Datini companies engaged in every sort of adventure. As long as hope of profits was reasonably bright they were willing to take the risk. We can speak of only a few of these possibilities.
Overseas trade was one opportunity for gain. The Wool Guild was already accustomed to importing raw wool. Banks were experienced in financing such ventures. It was natural that other bulky items such as wheat, always in demand, should be carried in Florentine ships. Wheat was in short supply in a number of European areas. Southern Italy, Sicily, North Africa, Cyprus, Crete, and the Crimea had wheat to export at low prices. But this kind of commerce did not bring large profits. Better gains could be made in scarce luxury items sought after by the rich. Spices, precious stones, delicately finished cloth, paintings and sculpture, and rare wines brought vastly higher prices. Moreover, these commodities took little space in a ship. One shipload of spices and precious stones was worth s much as 260,000 florins, a sum equal to two-thirds of the annual budget of the Florentine government.
In the 1300's and 1400's Florentine and other Italian merchants engaged in the slave trade. Slavery was no longer accepted in the north, but around the Mediterranean, slaves were in great demand. They came from North Africa, Russia, parts of Asia, and the Balkans. The bill of lading of a ship arriving in the port of Genoa in May 1396, listed "37 bales of pilgrims' robes, 191 pieces of lead, and 80 slaves." Not treated as human beings, slaves were like any other piece of merchandise. Two of the slaves escaped shortly after being sold in a Spanish market. Their owner, an agent of the Datini company, wrote to a local noble begging his help in recapturing them.
One of them is named Dmitri, a big man and very handsome. His flesh is good, fresh and rosy.... The other lacks a tooth in front and has rather greenish skin.... I pray you, me lord, have them caught, let them be strongly fettered, and send them back to me.
Because of their many contacts all over Europe, merchants and bankers could secure needed goods at short notice or answer requests for out-of-the-ordinary purchases. When, for example, churchmen or princes wished to order finely made tapestries, they turned to the Florentines. The Medici received such an order. One of their agents knew well the most highly skilled tapestry maker in Europe. He was a Belgian craftsman in Lille. Being well off, he cared more for the quality of his product than for the number of pieces he produced. Florentine agents abroad also kept their ears open. One of -them was in England in the 1390's. Learning that one of the great English noblemen, Henry of Lancaster, had decided to seek a bride, he dashed a letter back home:
Whoever his bride may be, there will be great feastings in England; and silken stuffs and jewels will go up in cost.... Wherefore I would advise and encourage any who have fine jewels to send them here.
HARDSHIPS OF TRADE
It is easy to recount the spectacular successes of Florentine men of business in the early Renaissance. But the risks were great; the stories of failure as many and perhaps as spectacular as those of success. War and the unfriendliness of local governments were always a problem. For two centuries after the Black Death, Europe was almost constantly at war. Foreign governments changed their policies. A Florentine trader in France reported that the king, out of spite for the profits made by the Italians, had them all imprisoned. He only released them after they paid a huge fine. Another trader in what is present-day Yugoslavia wrote to his partner at home that the local people hated the Italian merchants. It was hard to collect loans advanced to them. Many "are lords and counts in these regions and have no superiors, and whoever ventures there does so at great risk, and instead of repayment he may receive blows and be robbed and killed, as has happened to others."
Then there were other hazards. We have heard of bank failures. The dreaded raids of pirates never ceased. The eastern traders on whom the Florentines depended for spices and other costly products were unreliable. Even the weather and the ordinary hardships of travel to far places in those days would have daunted less adventurous people.
As we look back over this account of Florentine business life, what we remember-are the successes. We think of Francesco Datini, who began his career with 800 florins and ended with 100,000. Or of Giovanni de' Medici putting 5,000 florins into his bank in 1397, while in 1451 the Medici holding company had a capital of 75,000 florins. We have noted that Florentine merchants were more imaginative and daring than most others of their time. Since they were better organized, their techniques of management were more successful. They had the advantage of several generations of merchants behind them. Yet they might well claim that success came from taking daring risks and of having many interests. They did not believe in specializing in a single line of work if there was a chance to make a profit from several lines. They would have approved of what Shakespeare's character Antonio in the Merchant of Venice had to say about his business activities:
Believe me or no, I thank my fortune for it, / My ventures are not in one bottom 6 trusted, / Nor to one place: nor is my whole estate / Upon 7 the fortune of this present year: Therefore my merchandise makes me not sad.
{6 bottom: ship}
{7 Upon: based upon}
There is no doubt of the business success of the leading Florentine guildsmen. But business was not their sole concern. Renaissance men prided themselves on having many abilities-of being, many-sided individuals. We can test this boastful claim by observing the merchant outside his office or shop. We shall see him first as a member of Florentine society. Then we shall observe the lives of other Florentines.