Download PDF | Florence's Embassy to the Sultan of Egypt_ An English Translation of Felice Brancacci's Diary-Springer International Publishing,Palgrave Pivot (2018).
110 Pages
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I thank my colleagues and students at NYU’s Global Liberal Studies, and in particular the Freshman program in La Pietra, Florence where I undertook this translation of Felice Brancacci’s Diario. The purpose of the translation was pedagogic: to contribute to Liberal Studies’ collective work of globalizing the teaching of the Humanities. It was through the translation of Felice’s descriptions of his experience in Egypt that I arrived at a new reading of Masaccio’s Tribute Money, a fresco among the Petrine cycle he commissioned for his family Chapel in San Frediano neighborhood of Florence.
I would also like to thank Paul Taylor for his gracious invitation to present the introductory essay, “Faith and Finance” at the Warburg Institute in London in February 2013. Paul Barolsky, John Nejamy, Anthony Molho, Michael Rocke, and Neda Hadjikhani read early versions of the essay when I as a historian of nineteenth-century Italy was venturing into a new archive. I thank them for those early encouragements and helpful comments. I thank Marella Feltrin Morris for reading the translation and for her superb suggestions for improvements. I dedicate this short book to the memory of Richard Trexler, renowned historian of Renaissance Florence and my graduate advisor.
CHAPTER 1
Faith and Finance: Felice Brancacci’s Visit to the Sultan and Masaccio’s Tribute Money The Sea Consuls, like true Sinbads, had been saddled with a task that was beyond their limited resources. Michael Mallet, Florentine Galleys.
Abstract This introductory and historiographical essay contextualizes Felice Brancacci’s mission to Egypt in fifteenth-century Mediterranean commerce and finance. Felice’s mission not only served to inaugurate the Florentine galley’s presence in the Mediterranean, but also played a role in the transformation of mercantile culture in Renaissance Florence. The essay relates Felice’s Egyptian mission to his patronage of one of the most celebrated and enigmatic frescoes of Renaissance Florence— Masaccio’s Tribute Money—in the Brancacci Chapel of the Carmine Church in Florence.
Keywords Florin + Masaccio’s Tribute Money + Diplomatic protocol Commercial culture
The city of Florence has, until recently, enjoyed little attention as an object of historical study within a Mediterranean framework. Perhaps this is because the major drivers of trade in the eastern Mediterranean from the twelfth century onward had been Venice, Pisa, and Genoa. With the purchase of Port of Pisa in 1421, however, and the building of a galley system, Florence would go on to assume a more active role in Levant trade.!
On June 30, 1422, Felice di Michele Brancacci, a prominent Florentine silk merchant, and his companion Carlo Federighi, a noted jurist and doctor of canon law, boarded the first of the Florentine galleys sailing to Egypt from the port of Pisa. The pair carried letters of instruction from the City of Florence intended for the newly enthroned Sultan Al-Ashraf Sayf-ad-Din Barsbay (1422-1438) in Cairo. This coupling of a merchant and a jurist was particularly well suited to the Florentine mission to Mamluk Egypt.? After acquiring a license to trade with the Muslim nation from the Pope, Florence proposed treaty would allow them to finally challenge Venice’s trade monopoly in the Levant. The mission served to inaugurate the Florentine galley’s presence in the Mediterranean; furthermore, it would have ramifications for Sultan Barsbay’s infamous protectionist economic policies in Mamluk Egypt, the transformation of mercantile culture in Renaissance Florence, and, finally, the patronage of one of the most celebrated and enigmatic frescoes of Renaissance Florence—Masaccio’s Tribute Money—in the Brancacci Chapel of the Carmine Church in Florence.’
Timelines for the commission and completion of the Brancacci Chapel frescoes typically conceptualize Felice’s time in Egypt in terms of the patron’s “long absence” from Florence—a “lacuna,” in other words.* Felice wrote in surprising and often fascinating detail about the tribulations experienced during his “absence” from Florence and during his sea voyage to and from Egypt to meet with Sultan Barsbay and his officials. As he does so, he offers his observations on Mamluk customs and religious practices, alongside Christian holy sites, exotic animals, and other natural phenomena. What comes across most clearly in this experience is his deep feeling of estrangement and disaffection, a response that Brancacci related almost singularly to the monetary payments he made in this unfamiliar— and at times hostile—territory in the absence of established and standard diplomatic protocol. Part official communiqué, part travelogue and confessional, Brancacci’s marvelously rich testimony offers insights into not only transcultural relations in the Mediterranean but also the significant historical shift in the mercantile culture of Renaissance Florence that would unexpectedly reveal itself in Masaccio’s Tribute Money.°
Florence was a relative latecomer to maritime trade with Egypt among the Italian city-states. The market had been dominated by Venice since the fourteenth century, when the galley line between Venice and Alexandria opened as a result of the city having procured a long-term trading license from the Holy See in 1345 and having abolished their embargo on the Muslim Mamluk rulers of Cairo.” Trade with Cairo and Damascus had grown increasingly important, particularly as other commercial routes to India—including caravan routes in lower Russia and the maritime routes of the Persian Gulf—became less viable. While Florence began her active pursuit of maritime commercial interests in the Levant only after the conquest of Pisa in 1406, the acquisition of the Pisan port in 1420, and the construction of a communal fleet they modeled on the Venetian galley system, Florentine merchants had conducted trade in Egypt and Syria previously.’ At that time, they had been dependent on Pisan ships and, by and large, posed as Pisans abroad.?
On the inaugural journey of the Florentine fleet, Brancacci and Federighi sailed, then, as the rightful successor to the Pisans.!° They were commissioned to procure for Florence three concessions from the Sultan: equality with or advantage over Venetians regarding customs allowances and right of safe conduct!!; a permanent consul in Alexandria; and, most importantly, the right to replace the Venetian ducat with the florin as the currency of the Mamluk territories.!* The city’s instructions to the ambassadors stressed that this final objective was the most pivotal.
Additionally, that our gold and silver currency be used and accepted as any other, and especially that our florin be regarded as equal to the Venetian ducat.... This task of yours is of the utmost importance—giving them tangible proof of this. Show them that our florin has never been of lesser quality than the ducat, and that in many places it is regarded as having the same value as the ducat and more.... If they won’t make a deal on the currency, do as much as you can. And if you cannot have everything, obtain as much as you can, leaving the fundamental parts unchanged.!*
FLORENTINE MERCHANT BANKERS IN FIFTEENTH-CENTURY MEDITERRANEAN
The question of currency was pivotal to this early-fifteenth-century sea-faring mission. Felice was neither a crusading mercenary nor a missionary like St. Francis, who had made a much-celebrated visit to a Sultan of Cairo in the thirteenth century.!* Rather, he visited Egypt as a merchant, representing a city that prided itself on being the first mercantile state to issue a gold coin—the florin—in the mid-1200s. With the creation of its own galley system in the 1420s, Florence hoped to challenge not only Venetian trade dominance but also the ducat’s virtual monopoly in the Mamluk territories.!> The purchase of the port of Pisa and the creation of the Florentine fleet in the early 1420s were in fact systematically coupled to an effort on the part of Florence to strengthen the value of the florin.!° At the time, Florence perceived the conditions in Egypt to be particularly propitious for the enterprise.!7 Because of the interruption of the trade with Persia that had occurred in the second half of the fourteenth century, the Holy See had lifted its embargo with Egypt and began issuing trading licenses to European nations.!® At the same time, economic conditions and the imperial strategy being enacted on the part of the Mamluk Sultanate—and, specifically, by Sultan Barsbay—favored the European trade.!°
Much of Florence’s wealth rested on the reputation, value, and stability of the florin as the standard bearer for international currency.?° However, despite the florin’s spectacular success, and the fact that Florentine merchants had served as the Pope’s bankers since the beginning of the fifteenth century, the ducat had still maintained a dominant presence in the Levant. Since 1399, the Venetian ducat had become the sole international currency in the region, replacing even the native Dinar as the local Mamluk coin.?! Prices in Cairo and Damascus were listed in ducats rather than Dinars, generating an enviable source of revenue for the Venetians.2? The Mamluk Sultans had themselves tried, unsuccessfully, to break the ducat’s monopoly—banning it and issuing a local Muslim coin.?* But time and again, the Muslim coin failed to hold its value relative to the ducat. It was during this time that the Florentines came to the Sultan a new solution to the ducat: replace the ducat not with a Muslim coin but with an alternative Christian one. Just before the departure of the ambassadors, Florence minted a new coin, the largo fiorino or fiorino galleo, which, while thinner and wider than the original, still resembled the ducat.?* This ducat-like florin was the weapon by which the ambassadors hoped to seduce the Sultan and, at the same time, corner a significant portion of the Levantine market.
Felice’s Diario reveals that the ambassadors endured a great deal of tribulation lobbying for the florin in Egypt.?° Not only did they suffer physical assault, they also were constantly compelled to offer gifts and other forced payments, which Felice categorizes as bribes, or mangerie.
Even then, the success of the mission—persuading of the Sultan to adopt the florin—despite, as we shall see, the ambassador’s claim to the contrary, was equivocal. The Sultan did accept the florin as a currency on par with the ducat. But only two years later, he went on to declare a new ban on Christian coins and successfully replaced both with a new Muslim currency, the Ashrafi. There is reason to believe that the Sultan’s reception of the florin and its Florentine representatives was only part of his own strategy to create competition for the Venetian ducat.?” The first of Felice’s objectives—breaking the monopoly of the Venetian ducat— may have ironically contributed to the rise of the Ashrafi, the currency that would go on to be adopted by subsequent Mamluk Sultans.?® Regardless of success or failure, however, the negotiations concerning the currency and the lessons learned in Egypt shaped Felice’s views on exchange with those outside Christendom and contributed to his advocacy of a mercantile policy upon his return.
MEASURING TRIBUTE IN EGYPT
The first person we saw in the middle of the two gates was the Customs Officer?°
Felice’s Diario discloses an excessive preoccupation with monies paid to Mamluks, whether as tribute, bribe, gift, tax, charity, gratuity, or duty. Page after page, Felice expresses shock and disdain at the Egyptians’ unfailing requests for the payments that he considers extortion or forced bribes (mangerie), regardless of from whom the services were requested: message carriers, middlemen, interpreters, and even Mamluk officials. Felice’s derision is noteworthy given that such payment was customary for ambassadors and merchants trading abroad—the cost of doing business.°° Felice had been advised by the Genoese Consul, for example, to bribe even the highest officials in order to gain an audience with the Sultan.*! In fact, the Venetian Consul in Alexandria had an official budget especially allocated to cover the cost of bribing these officials.*? This was partly due to the fact that Mamluk Sultans practiced a policy that forced the purchase of public offices. Such posts were financial investments that the officers hoped to eventually make profitable.** But Felice’s moral or affective reaction to the demands of payment, which he considered extortion, was not unique. There are other instances, such as one that concerns a Cretan Merchant who, after having obtained from the Sultan the privilege of importing wine tax free, was still asked to pay customs; he complained that he was forced to bribe officials against his own conscience.*4
That Felice’s outrage comes to be a dominant theme in_ his “chronicle” is, nonetheless, striking. One can only speculate that this was due to his character, as Ugo Tucci does, exacerbated by his lack of experience and expertise in the Eastern Mediterranean.*° Yet, there are other historical factors that likely contributed to his experience. The Florentines, like the Venetians who arrived one month before, were probably not aware of the enthronement of a new Sultan, especially one who would be subsequently known by the Europeans as the “cruel and avaricious.” They expected to meet a different Sultan altogether.*° Secondly, the Florentines arrived at a moment of intense anti-Christian hostility in the port of Alexandria, with a Catalan ship having just opened fire on the Mamluks.*7 The event made Sultan Barsbay furious; he threatened to expel all Christian merchants from Alexandria at the very moment the Florentines disembarked from their ships.** Finally, and most crucially, the ambassadors had been adamantly instructed by the city to spend as little money as possible, never more than others and certainly, if possible, less than the Venetians, “lest it result in our loss.”°?
The fact remains that Felice’s first impression of Alexandria is filled with a fury that only increases over his time there. On the day of his arrival in Alexandria, he expresses open contempt for “a thousand moors and solicitors approaching us, requesting and offering this and that thing.” After he and his companions were taken to a residence assigned for ambassadors, one that he condemns as “hardly equipped with doors,”*! he stated:
Only after parting with a lot of money, we got rid of most of them. For example, an individual would come to say “the admiral sends you his regards” and he would then ask for a ducat. And around three in the afternoon, the admiral sent us a gift of five castrated lambs, fifty chickens, a basket of bread, and we had to pay the carriers three ducats, and still they were not satisfied.*?
Felice experiences these relatively mundane exchanges, and reports on them, as if they were on par with issues of great political and diplomatic weight, ones such as the dispatch of Genoese and Venetian Consuls by the Sultan or the Catalan offensive. In terms of the emotional drain and his resulting preoccupation with them, the demands of solicitors appear to eclipse even his official duties.
Indeed, Felice’s complaints grow so bitter they come to occupy the central thrust of the Diario. In his second entry while in Alexandria, Felice objects to all “requests and solicitors,” including the request of the Admiral himself, who had offered gifts to welcome the new arrivals the previous day. On this second day, he reported that:
On the 21‘ we also received a large number of requests and solicitors, and even the admiral wanted his own gift, which we believed we were not obliged to give until we had offered gifts to the Sultan. Even the one who had come to ask for a gift on the Admiral’s behalf wanted payment. The situation reached such a level of greed and dishonesty that we refused to give these gifts, which seemed a waste to us. Considering the news in the country, and seeing that in attempting to carry out our ambassadorship we would be risking our lives, we were told that we should not be offered access to any provisions. We took time that day in order to ponder the situation, and quickly sent a message to the Cadi ...asked him for advice. He said he regretted the events and usefully advised us to go ahead and do it.48
Felice remarks that the Florentines believed, as a matter of principle, that “they were not obliged” to present any gift to the Admiral, however customary it may have been. That they did so, he intimated, was only because they were advised that their initial refusal had created a dangerous situation. They were faced with a conflict, one between the authority bestowed upon them by the Florentine Commune and the circumstances that they encountered in Alexandria. The portrait of events on his third and fourth day suggests that Felice was utterly unprepared for these circumstances. One entry both starts and ends with further discussion of the disputes that had resulted over this same gift to the Admiral. While negotiations over the Admiral’s gift continued, none of the Florentine merchants that had arrived on the galley were allowed to move freely throughout Alexandria. To settle matters, the ambassadors finally resolved to offer gifts of cloth to the Admiral. Only begrudgingly did Felice and his companions plan the visit to submit this tribute to the Admiralty. But when the gifts were reviewed, they were deemed unworthy. The Florentines were unceremoniously turned away once more.** In these early days in Alexandria—even before the presentation of the florin—Felice remarked that “we would have gladly left and returned to Rhodes.” As a Christian outpost, it would have offered relief and salvation from this Mamluk injustice.
Felice expressed his experience of estrangement in terms of payments, considering abandoning his mission because he believed that remunerating the Mamluks was a “waste.” Increasingly desperate to leave by only his fourth day in Alexandria, he noted: We were so displeased and astonished by these matters that we were tempted to take our leave in secret and sail back to Rhodes. It was only because our orders were quite strict that we endured those events and prepared to remain pawns to Cairo and to their enormous greed (mangeric).*°
Rather than abandoning their mission, or acquiescing to exploitative payments, the ambassadors adapted as best as they could. That same day, for example, when two of the Florentine sailors were arrested for trespassing in areas prohibited to Christians, Felice was asked to make a payment of twenty-five ducats to secure their release. Instead, Felice resolved not to offer the requested fee, besieged by what he believed were corrupt financial improprieties:
And because we had already grown familiar with their techniques, we said that they could take the sailor away instead, and if indeed he had done something wrong, they should hang him. Fortunately, in the end we got him back for less than one ducat, but not before he had been beaten badly with sticks.47
Boasting of his shrewdness, Felice claimed that he could identify the Mamluk tactics of extortion. Suggestively, the Florentine’s response to compensation for the various Mamluk officials was different from that of the Genoese and Venetians. For example, when the Genoese Consul advised the Florentines to extend gifts equivalent to 400 ducats a piece to each of three crucial Mamluk officials, the Dindar, the Chatibisser, and the Natarchass, to avoid paying “much more in bribes (mangerie) later,” the Florentines “were quite taken aback by this advice, as we did not feel that we should make the offer, nor had we been instructed to spend so much.”48 He even characterizes this advice as trickery.*? It seems that the Florentine ambassador’s code of parsimony did not equip him to distinguish between benign or even benevolent and beneficial gestures and those he thought represented pure avarice. He was not yet convinced of the power of cortesia, a form of “voluntary” but expected payment, a credit without interest, which transformed relationships, resolved conflicts, and crucially often proved profitable.5° In his account, Felice categorized mangerie and cortesia as equally illegitimate and wasteful.>!
The remainder of Felice’s time in Alexandria and Cairo is largely colored by this attitude. Page after page, a deeper pathos emerges. When leaving Alexandria for Cairo, Felice described being “approached by a thousand solicitors whom we got rid of as cheaply as possible, shielding our faces with our hands.”5? According to Ugo Tucci, Felice’s attitude reflected the inexperience of a Florentine ignorant of customs different from his own, particularly of the value of “gift giving” in commercial and diplomatic exchange. He could only interpret this custom and economy as a corrupt one.>?
The pathos toward the monies spent in Egypt takes on rather rigorous quantitative features in Felice’s report of expenses after his return to Florence. The list of expenses, which appeared at the end of the sixteenth-century copy of the Diario transcribed by Strozzi and also reproduced in Dante Catellacci’s nineteenth-century publications, divided the monies spent in Egypt into two categories: (1) complimentary giving (Fig. 1.1) and (2) forced extortion (Fig. 1.2).°+ His “list of gifts delivered and expenses incurred” begins:
Here I will list all the gifts we gave to the Sultan and to the other lords in Cairo and in Alexandria, as well as to many other officials, in the form of fabrics and drapes.
Subsequently, I will list all the amounts of money we gave as bribes (mangerie), although it would be more fitting to call it the money that was stolen from us and that we were forced to give.>>
Given Felice’s misunderstanding of the protocols of gift giving, even with the Sultan, it is perhaps not surprising that his accounting of the “forced” and “stolen” category, the mangerie, is ten times longer than the other. Clearly, this prodigious, and visually impressive, accounting reveals not merely the conspicuous economic dimensions of tribute but something else altogether (Fig. 1.2).
The ferocity of Felice’s accounting also begins to reveal the ethical and legal dimensions of the monies that his party is “forced” to dispense. For example, the tax and customs fees that the group paid as foreigners entering the port of Alessandria were entered in the illicit, forced list, as if the injustice needed to be shared with the Florentine merchants and their city. Occasionally, Felice ends an entry with vaglono—worth the payment—or toccati al comune—indicating the city’s share. By doing so, he acknowledges that, even if forced, these monies were not a waste. They procured some service of value. Significantly, all monies paid on the day that he arrived in Alexandria, twenty-five entries alone, are considered “forced.” The Florentines clearly had expected to enter Alexandria’s gates without payment. This moral and legal judgment will be the central message of Masaccio’s commission for his family chapel: Tribute Money.
"TRANSLATING TRIBUTE
In Felice’s Chronicle, images of the troubling experience of making these forced payments in ducats are balanced by another set of images related to money, in fact, to the central purpose of the ambassadors’ mission: the presentation of the new florin to the Mamluk Sultan. In Cairo, Felice and his companions eventually gained three opportunities, each portrayed as a dramatic event, to present their currency to the proper officials.
On the first day of their residency in Cairo, the party left on horseback to carry the florin to the Sultan’s officials. Felice reported that he and his companions were then violently attacked by a man they identified as a religious figure, describing his shouts to the gathering crowd that “our prophet demands that we should kill these Western dogs. Look what has become of the Muslim faith: Westerners travel on horse and we on foot.”°° Felice noted that the throng grew so large that his party only managed to escape with difficulty—and in horror at having undergone this “great danger.” Rather than abandon the task of the day given the stress they had endured, Felice overcame his anxiety to proceed to the Mamluk representatives and “lobby for our florin.”57
The Diario reveals that what Felice refers to as “the business of the florin” (tenemmo alcuna practica del nostro fiorino) grew associated in his mind with the experience of being attacked as a Christian in a Muslim land. Each meeting with the Mamluk officials commences with a conversation about the prior incident, followed by the Mamluks’ expression of regret. Felice then proceeds with the presentation of the florin.5* The menacing events of the first day even mark the eve of Felice’s scheduled meeting with the Sultan, leaving his party in a state of disquiet in which “none of us could feel at ease, due even more so to our doubts about the future than about what had happened.”5?
At his long-anticipated meeting with Sultan Barsbay, Felice passed through what appeared to him to be a new and unnerving world, one filled with strange spectacles, sounds, and rituals. The sights seemed unreal, more “painting” than reality:
Between the novelty for the eyes and those for the ears and the fact that they made us kiss the ground at every step, I doubt that I can coherently describe the scene. Furthermore, they were two of them for each of us, and they held us by our shoulders so tightly as they led us that we were overwhelmed. And when they wanted us to kiss the ground, they would shout at us in their language, so loudly that we grew dizzy. And so they made us kiss the ground about 6 or 8 times. And when we came within 45 feet of the Sultan we stopped.°°
What transpired between the Florentine diplomat-merchant and the Sultan, what allowed Felice to process the overwhelming as a communicable experience, was his recollection of St. Francis of Assisi’s celebrated meeting with the Sultan of Egypt two centuries before. Felice was most likely familiar with the fresco immortalizing the episode in the Bardi Chapel of Santa Croce (Fig. 1.3). Legend held that, upon Francis’s arrival to the Sultan’s court, the Saint’s faith was tested by a challenge. He was asked to walk through fire. St. Francis miraculously passed the test, proving to the Sultan and his Muslim audience both the strength of Francis’s faith and the truth of his religion.®! Felice presented his meeting with the Sultan in a similar fashion. This time, however, it was the florin that would have to undergo the trial. Felice writes:
And immediately, [the Sultan] asked us whether we had the florins with us to which we said yes. Our Chancellor gave his men nine florins, which the Sultan then asked to see for himself. And he said from his very own mouth, that if he found any of them weighing less, he would have it cut, and we would lose it. We accepted the deal.
Within the context of the new mercantile culture that accompanied this increased and intense commercial activity in the Levant, the florin emerged as the article of faith in the showdown. When pleading that the gold florin was as acceptable as, and should be accepted as, the Venetian ducat, the Florentine Signoria instructed the ambassadors specifically to put the florin to the test of fire, “mettere a fuoco e fondere.”®* The florin’s stability, value, and legitimacy evoked the qualities of Francis’s own faith. In this deal qua ordeal, we encounter the central metaphor of Felice’s journey. The very language of the Commune’s instructions to the ambassadors discloses the equivalent replacement. But unlike his humble and self-possessed predecessor St. Francis, Felice perceives, judges, and presents his inquisitor, Sultan Barsbay, as not only greedy but irrational. He even characterizes the Sultan—who had severely and corporally punished a man who had carried in the Florentine ambassadors’ gifts— and his violent comportment on the occasion of the judgment upon their favors as “crazy,” saying, “These events sat very badly with us, and we thought of it as a great shame, as we feared that this craziness might make him send for us to do another investigation of the presents. With them you can not reason.”°*
The test of the florin lasted longer than St. Francis’s did. The dramatic ordeal continued the next day during a meeting with the Sultan’s secretary, an individual whose purpose was to settle the language of the treaty:
We then brought up the matter of the gold, and they insisted on weighing a florin and a ducat, and it seemed to them that the ducat was heavier, and as we maintained the contrary they asked for one hundred new florins and one hundred ducats. As we did not have those, we sent for them, albeit with great concern. After they came and were weighed many times it seemed to them that the florin compared well. That is why they agreed to this and that thing.
At this moment, the transformative power of the florin was demonstrated. Again and again in the Diario, the florin emerges as a miracle currency, one capable of communicating to those with whom “you can not reason.” It is likely that Felice had expected greater hospitality from the Mamluks.®° Clearly disappointed, he likens the experience of suffering Mamluk greed to “knives to the heart.”°” His resentment is expressed again when he says that “with great displeasure we saw from big to small everyone tried to exploit and take advantage of us, and there was not a single one of us who would not have given away half of what he had just to go back home.” Here, a constellation of the central images of Felice’s experience emerges: unjust payment of money, violent dispute, and the transformative power of the florin.
On occasion, Felice and his companions used their position as visitors and outsiders as part of a strategy of resistance, a strategy that was not available to those foreign merchants that were stationed in Egypt, such as the Cretan Merchant who thought that the Sultan had not honored his agreement. Felice, facing the same situation—even though the florin had passed the Sultan’s test, the inquisitor’s position remained arbitrary and poised for blackmail—pretended not to understand the language demanding payment. Felice reported that the Mamluk officials expressed extreme irritation at this Florentine tactic. They resorted to verbal insults directed at the Florentines, who fell mute. For the Florentines, these payments appear as an obligation that exceeds the financial register, becoming instead a sign and performance of submission.°? The Sultan’s insistence that foreign nations should “humble themselves” is made plain, and the demand of the Sultan, from Felice’s perspective, is for this humility. During the Muslim religious celebration of Ramadan, a group of Italian pilgrims arrived in Cairo to ask the Sultan to reopen the doors of the Church of the Holy Sepulcher, which had been shut by the Sultan as retribution against the Catalans. With great pathos, Felice insisted that these were only poor pilgrims. They lacked the requisite funds to pay for access to the Sultan. Brimming with righteous indignation, and characterizing this demand for payment as a great “injustice,” Felice reported that he dared to take this matter up with the Sultan on behalf of the Christian pilgrims. But his cause was quickly countered, with the Sultan’s insistence that foreign nations should rightly “humble themselves.””°
One typical mode in which an embassy is humiliated is by keeping them waiting while officials attend to other, supposedly more important, matters. After the meeting with the Sultan, and after receiving a verbal agreement, the Florentines were kept waiting in Cairo for their contracts and official dismissal for more than two weeks. Felice remarked that “we thought we were being pulled along for too long, and we didn’t know to what end, but we suspected it was to extort more money from us.”7!
It is during this wait that we find the clearest externalization of Felice’s inner experience of estrangement in Egypt. In what is not only the most memorable image but also the longest passage in Felice’s Diario, Felice describes his encounter with an elephant during Ramadan.”* He devotes more than 900 words in his otherwise sparsely worded account to this alien creature, eclipsing even the detail in his description of his visit to the Sultan’s court. While waiting for their dismissal, Felice and his companions are barred by Ramadan custom from speaking to Muslims. In this context, it seems that the elephant, in its uncanny strangeness, mirrors Felice’s own feelings. It is a rare occasion for which Felice does not mention having had to pay for access.
The events of the negotiation for a fondaco took place toward the end of Felice’s mission in Alexandria and further amplify the pathos attached to the cross-cultural exchange. A good fondaco, rather than the shabby ones being offered to the non-paying Florentines, would have symbolized respect: the power and legitimacy of the other.7* It would promise immunity from further humiliation, the kind of immunity already enjoyed by the Venetians.” The deal now hung on yet another payment, this time to the Cadi or judge, in Alexandria, which Felice refused to extend both for lack of funds and on principle. It was a decision that would further delay the return home.
During the final stages of the mission, having been delayed in Alexandria for over a month—with many sick people in his company awaiting to return home—Felice himself grew extremely ill.7> On November 11, while bedridden, he was carried out of Alexandria on a stretcher.”° Heading home a few days later, “with God’s help” according to Felice, they arrived to Christian land on Rhodes. Though the tribulations of the journey were not yet over, Felice expressed relief at leaving Egypt behind. Eventually, on February 11 of the next year, 1423, he reentered the port of Pisa.
The human and, arguably, the long-term commercial cost of remaining faithful to the commission was considerable. In his final remarks before departing Egypt, Felice had intimated that, despite making all the extra payments, the mission had not been properly financed by the Commune. He wished he had enjoyed more funds so as to accomplish his mission more successfully: “We knew very well that if we had had more money available to bribe the Cadi, he would have met our request. And we were not in a position to do so, we did not want to spend any more money.
MANGERIE AND CORTESIA
Measuring the success of his mission back in Florence, Felice had to conduct complex moral, political, and monetary calculations. The official report to the Commune is brief, if not silent, on the question of mistreatment. With a positive spin, the account stated that “we obtained much more than we were commissioned to obtain” and that “we did not obligate the Commune of Florence to the Sultan in nothing.”’ Exaggerating the success of an embassy was a common practice in fifteenth-century Florence, since the reception of embassies abroad touched the very civic identity of Florentines. It was of utter importance that embassies, as representatives of the foreign city, did not shame them.”? Every action abroad on the part of the ambassadors was subject to close scrutiny. Insults and humiliations of various degrees were often damaging enough, and Felice Brancacci’s and Carlo Federighi’s response to conceal the disgrace publicly was the typical course of action.®°
The reality of Felice’s success in accomplishing the mission’s three objectives was more ambiguous. Barsbay’s treaty did recognize Florence as a trading nation, did grant Florence a fondaco, and did accept the florin on par with the ducat.®! But it did so with strict qualifications.*? While the Florentines had hoped to pay less than the Venetians, the city was not granted the privileged customs rate paid by the Venetians. The Florentines also failed to successfully negotiate a “dignified” fondaco. Finally, on the issue of currency, the florin might have passed its trial by fire vis-a-vis the ducat, but the winner seems to have been the Ashrafi— for a time at least.
By all accounts, judging from his career after his return from Egypt, Felice managed to portray his mission as a heroic success, one that established him as a key figure in the public and political life of the city.8* Over the next decade, Felice was elected to important posts; he served as a major figure in the political life of Florence and as the treasurer of the city fund. In fact, the commission of Tvibute Money for his family chapel, a decidedly rare subject for monumental art in Renaissance Italy, can be understood in this context: as an afterimage of his Egyptian ambassadorship, as a means to commemorate the treaty he procured from the Sultan, and finally, as justification for advocating public subsidy of the galleys—all of which would correct the debilitating parsimony of Felice’s commercial and diplomatic mission, signaling a transformation of commercial culture in Florence.
The commemoration of an unsuccessful mission to the Sultanate as an image of victory inside a family chapel in Florence had a celebrated precedence in Giotto’s Trial by Fire for the Bardi Chapel in the Church of Santa Croce (Fig. 1.3). The Bardi fresco, based on one work in the cycle of twenty frescoes of the life of St. Francis of Assisi, was the first “document” to present Francis’s confrontation before the Sultan in Egypt as a glorious victory between the Saint and the Muslim clerics. John Tolan observes that Giotto “transformed this failure into a singular victory, worthy of figuring among the Saint’s miracles.”8+ The image of the Saracens as irrational and stubborn in the presentation at the Bardi Chapel inaugurates a pattern of representation of the Saracens that would span the next two hundred years, Felice’s commission included.*® The formula allows for St. Francis’s victory in the miracle trial despite his very real failure to convert either the Sultan or indeed any other Muslim.
Yet, there is another image. It is one commissioned for another prominent Florentine family chapel, one that Felice could not have avoided when he returned from Egypt in 1423 to find the city in the grip of a “magi-mania.”°° Obsessed with the story of the journey, the gifting, and prostration of the magi, “Florence responds to the galleys’ return from Egypt as if the new maritime power had accessed two of the lands from which the fabled wealth of the magi had come.”8”? One 1423 chronicler reported: “Among other valuables, incense and myrrh had arrived on galleys from Alexandria.”®* Palla Strozzi, the most illustrious man in Florence at the time and, significantly, Felice’s future father-in-law, had commissioned the celebrated artist, Gentile de Fabriano, to paint the story for an altarpiece in his family chapel. This altarpiece, which da Fabriano had been working on exclusively since his arrival in Florence in 1420, was celebrated at an extraordinary mass in 1423. Felice returned, from Egypt, to a city captured by an image. It was an image with which he was forced to negotiate.®?
The idea of the Magi functioning as diplomats paying tax or tribute enjoys a long history that goes back to Roman times and the spread of early Christianity.?° In Felice’s time, the Magi were cast as Eastern kings journeying to bring gifts and pay homage to Christ as a Western, Christian, King.?! In Palla Strozzi’s 1423 “Adoration of Magi,” the confrontation between the East and West becomes further qualified in terms of a Muslim and Christian split: the three kings are identified as the three crusader Christians kings.?? In the audience, a youth wearing a banner with pseudo-Arabic text and Mamluk rosettes bears witness to the event.
Felice’s recent voyage to Egypt, which entailed gifting and prostrating himself before the Sultan, uncannily mirrored the painting that the ambassador celebrated upon his return, presumably with his own offering of incense and myrrh. The image of paying tribute in Egypt comes into relief when situated against the backdrop of the idealized image of the Florentine elite it presented. These people are cast as magnificent and gracious in giving and in receiving.?* Indeed, there is textual evidence that the story of the Magi was already on Felice’s mind when he was in Cairo. While anxiously awaiting the Sultan’s response, Felice made an unplanned excursion to the village of Matariya; there, he visited the site where the holy family took refuge while fleeing from Jerusalem.?4 An image on the predella of the da Fabriano altar would have immediately transported Felice to that holy site: the image of flight to Egypt.
Felice had to account for the money spent, as gift or tribute, whether freely or “forced.” A group within the Sea Council known for its “undue parsimony” were likely critical of the excessive unauthorized payments on behalf of Florence. In this context, the fresco he commissioned for his family chapel, T7ibute Money, might be seen as justifying the payments. Revising the very real story of having been “constrained” and forced into payment, into a magnanimous gesture that, post factum, transforms mangerie into strategic offerings which financially benefited Florence.
TRADE Po icy, TRUST, AND TRIBUTE MONEY
The main plot of Felice’s Diario—payments made to enter a foreign city—along with three of its central themes—unjust tribute, the fear of violence, and the miraculous power of the florin—appear as central components of Tribute Money.°> The image of the fresco depicts events recounted in the Gospel of Matthew: Peter is approached by a customs collector soliciting payment from Jesus. The choice of this story for a family chapel, a minor episode from the life of St. Peter that was rarely referred to or depicted, and Masaccio’s alterations of the original portrait supply clues about the meaning of the painting.
I begin with Matthew’s text, both because it is the origin of the story and because “Tribute Money” enjoyed no visual precedence. I provide here the Diatessaron in Volgare:
24. And when they come to Capernaum, they that received tribute money came to Peter, and said, “Does your master pay tribute?” 25. He saidth, “Yes.” And when he came into the house, Jesus prevented him, saying, “what do you think, Simon? Of whom do the kings of the earth take tribute, or in fact, custom (Ovvero Dazio)? Of their own children or of strangers?” 26. Peter said to him, “of strangers.” Jesus said to him, “then, the children are free. 27. Notwithstanding, lest we should offend them (scandalo) go to the sea, and cast a hook, and take up the fish that first comes up, and when you have opened the mouth, you will find a piece of money; take it and give it to them for me and you.”
This is a highly complex story. How is Masaccio to represent this narrative? Jules Lubbok has identified thirteen subsidiary episodes or speeches in the short passage.”° I will summarize for the sake of coherence, adding my own emphasis.
1. Arrival: Jesus and companions arrive and try to enter the city without paying tax.
2. Dialogue between customs official and Peter: The customs official asks Peter: Should Jesus pay? Peter says yes.
3. Dialogue between Peter and Jesus: Jesus asks Peter preemptively, offering an example by way of legal clarification of the nature of the tribute as dazio and adjudicates. They do not have to pay.
4. Dialogue between Jesus and Peter: But they will pay for extralegal diplomatic reasons.
5. We will pay for it with a miracle: Go the sea and collect the coins from the fish.
6. Make the payment.
How did Masaccio translate this story into an image? Portraying the parts of the story that are actions—the arrival, fetching of the coins, and the payments—is not difficult; the activities are depicted in the three parts of the painting. But how is the central message of this story, legal adjudication—interpretation of law, the discussion between the tax collector and Peter, and Peter and Jesus—represented?
The scene of a dispute about the payment of customs and a judgment form the central portion of the tripartite image of Masaccio’s painting Fig. 1.4. In this case, Jesus stands in as judge in the case between Peter and the customs collector. Masaccio’s Peter stands on the right of Jesus, on the seaside, as the new arrival; the customs collector stands on the left side toward the town. In what is a curious revision of the original text, Jesus occupies a middle position, arbitrating the opposing claims. In Matthew’s text, Peter responds “Yes,” that Jesus is liable to pay customs. And it is Jesus who pronounces his objection. Peter shows no qualms about paying. In Masaccio’s picture, conversely, it is Peter who exhibits outrage concerning the payment. Jesus, in the place of judge, is the peacemaker, resolving the conflict, condoning the payment that Peter seems unwilling to make and transforming tribute to instrumental cortesia.
What is the source for Masaccio’s revision of the biblical narrative? To whose outrage is Masaccio giving voice? Given the conspicuous alteration of the original text, and the element noted consistently by viewers as early as Vasari—Peter’s pathos and emotional state—any explanation of the image must address these queries. In fact, the meaning of this image remains an enigma. In a volume published immediately after the restoration of the Brancacci Chapel in 1990, Tribute Money is read as an affirmation of the oft-quoted Christian political and ecclesiastical imperative—to give to Caesar what is Caesar’s and to God what is God’s—the Augustinian breach between the kingdom of God and the broken world.?” But why should Peter be so passionately contemptuous if this is, in fact, the sentiment?
The iconography of the chapel frescos has also been studied in a volume edited by Nicholas Eckstein on the proceedings of a symposium on the Brancacci Chapel held at I Tatti.?® As a collection, these studies question a long-standing interpretation of “Tribute Money,” which Tony Molho, in his influential 1970 essay, tied to the introduction of the Catasto tax system in Florence and the establishment of Papal Primacy. This edited volume instead reveals the significance of the frescoes in the immediate and local context of the Brancacci Chapel, the neighborhood life of San Frediano, and the Carmelite Order associated with it.?? More specifically, the theme of monetary exchange is linked to: (1) the attitude toward poverty and charity; (2) the value of money as juxtaposed with the power of God!°!; and (3) Felice’s “civic fashioning” and embezzlement of 2900 florins from the communal fund.! Yet, none of these explanations can account for Peter’s pathos, his discernment of the tribulation, or the miracle attendant to tribute payment. Even in one of the earliest descriptions of the frescoes, Giorgio Vasari observed!9?:
Saint Peter’s face flushes with the effort he makes in bending down to retrieve the money from the belly of the fish; and more so when he pays the tribute to the tax collector, where his emotion can be seen as he counts out the money, as well as the greed of the man who is receiving it, who looks at the money in his hand with great pleasure.
The profundity of Peter’s encounter—the specific alteration made by Masaccio that makes his experience with tribute a suitable subject for the Chapel commission—can only be revealed against the backdrop of Florentine galley’s maiden voyage and the “business of florin” in Egypt.
Let us now return to Masaccio’s image. The central part of the tripartite narrative depicts the arrival of Jesus from the sea. The tax collector is clearly asking if Jesus will pay the customs tax to enter the city: pointing to the city with his right hand, gesturing to Jesus with his left. Note that what is specifically being alluded to here is the customs or entry tax that is collected from foreigners upon entry to the city, by the Cadi della Dogana—the first person Felice and Carlo saw upon arrival in Alexandria. Florence insisted that it pay only as much as the Venetians, not more, and the entry tax Felice would consider forced and illicit in his account book was submitted to the City. The tax was as commonplace in the biblical narrative as it was in Felice’s time. This is not just any tax; it is not the kind of payment the church would pay the state. Masaccio is emphasizing the kind of payment, a payment required of foreigners upon entering a city, which is the example offered by Christ.
In Masaccio’s rendition, Peter is outraged, and the tax collector is agitated. The sky is stormy, it is late afternoon, and the shadows are long. In fact, it looks as if a fight might break out between the tax collector and Peter, but Jesus strides into defuse the tension. The suspense of this scene of arrival and payment bring to mind the dangerous atmosphere in Alexandria when Felice and Carlo arrived on the galleys. We recall that because the Catalans had attacked one of the Sultan’s ships, the Sultan was about to expel all Christian merchants from the lands. Indeed, once on land the situation was so tense, the payments required so unexpected, that Felice had considered going back secretly with the galleys. Could Felice, as the patron, have provided the text of his Diario to Masaccio? Could he have shared the story of his dramatic adventure paying entry tax in Alexandria with the painter he hired?
In Masaccio’s depiction, we see that Jesus steps between the two adversaries to adjudicate the matter and render his judgment: that they do not have to pay legally but will pay for diplomatic reasons. And, they will pay with their miracle coins. The discussion between Jesus and Peter as to the matter of law, whether or not they are obliged to pay, not only recalls Felice’s daily reflections and the negotiations with various Mamluk officials and customs collectors. One can also presume that they were the substance of Felice’s discussion and consultations with the other member of this embassy, including his fellow traveler, Carlo Federighi, a doctor of law specifically selected for his legal expertise.
Jesus says that, as the son of God, he is not liable to pay tax, just as the Florentine party believed that they should not be liable to pay. Yet, Jesus adds an extra-legal, diplomatic qualification, insisting that they ought to pay for deeper reasons. Framed in this way, the Prince of Peace demonstrates that it is only by making such a payment that they can avoid violence and scandal and ensure the peace. And that is how, in the end, an embassy that saw itself as “pawns to Cairo’s enormous greed” justified payment, resolving “to get rid of them as best as we could.”
Coming back to the scene, whose pathos is Peter voicing? One certainly thinks of Felice in Egypt, as he expressed his outrage day after day for having to pay “these people.” Yet, back in Florence, Felice also had to justify those payments to the Commune.!°° The Sea Council not only had to approve the payments already made but also future ones agreed upon, including the very treaty Felice has signed with the Sultan. According to Mallet, the entire enterprise of the Florentine galleys was burdened by lack of money, “a Sinbad,” as the Commune believed, that the galleys should pay for themselves:
The real defect in the system of financing the galleys was a common one in Florentine institutions; undue parsimony in the early stages, when expenditure of considerable sums of money to get things going might have paid dividends later on. But Florentines hoped that the galleys would practically pay for themselves from the start and, by the time they realized they would not, the sporadic attempts to subsidize them were insufficient.... The Sea Consuls, like true Sinbads, had been saddled with a task that was beyond their limited resources.1©
We recall that during his final days in Alexandria, Felice mentioned that his mission was inadequately funded. Tribute Money could be interpreted as advocating a policy of state subsidy of the Florentine galleys, just as it justifies according to a new code, the moneys he spent in Egypt.
It seems that back in Florence, now in the position of having to justify the payments made in Egypt, Felice not only transcends his own outrage but also finds that his experience in Egypt has made him an advocate of mercantile policy based on his new understanding of the power and profitability of cortesia. In the painting he commissioned from Masaccio, Peter is depicted expressing the very outrage that Felice felt in Egypt and that Sea Councils were expressing in Florence. But the painting tells us that Jesus justifies the payments on the grounds of diplomacy. While we can characterize this as a politically triumphant spin on a mission that was not an unequivocal success in the manner of Giotto’s St. Francis’s Trial of Fire, we can also view it as a change on Felice’s part. The politician and merchant advocating for a trade policy based on that maiden journey of the galleys: that for a successful commercial enterprise, Florence should learn to risk by extending credit as an art of cortesia. Parsimony might not be the most economically advantageous path in seeking an active commercial presence in the Levant.
But the condition of a trade policy is that it should be profitable, not only expedient. After all, the central image of the fresco depicts the scene where Jesus directs Peter to pay the tribute he said they ought not to pay. It is a payment not only made from the elevated position of his diplomatic rational and Christian righteousness but also one further redeemed by the episode on the left side of the painting, where Peter’s gold coins accompany a miracle—their emergence from the mouth of a fish.
Let us now come to the intervention that diffuses the violence: the miracle coins. We have seen that the florin emerges in Felice’s account as the one successful offering he can make in Egypt. In Felice’s experience, the florin is the miraculous currency that ushers in reason to the unreasonable, sanity to the insane, and redemption for the humiliated. The strength of the florin, if not its messenger, Felice, was comparable to that of Francis’s faith. Again and again, in Felice’s Diario, the appearance and presentation of the florin saved and transformed a violently tense situation. The trade policy will be advantageous, because the tribute and customs payments will be covered by the profit that Florence will make from trade in the miracle currency: the florin, the cause of which Felice had championed in Egypt.
Yet, the scene of the payment of the tribute is, in itself, interesting. Masaccio has placed the figures on either side of the post. Peter is framed by the city gate, and the customs collector is on the side toward town. The scene has brought to the minds of art historians the representational convention of a contract, or of a marriage—the two representatives agree to the exchange and shake hands. This is a payment and a handshake, even if animosity has not subsided.!°” What other contract could this be? Could it be any other than the one Felice had waited for in anxious anticipation in Cairo, making a pilgrimage to the site of flight after the Magi’s visit, the contract whose terms he painstakingly negotiated, the contract he brought with him to Florence in 1423, just before he commissioned this picture?
Tribute Money can be viewed as an image commemorating the commercial treaty Felice had successfully signed with the Sultan. As with all commemorations, it legitimized and justified actions taken just as it advocated for future policy. Yet, Tribute Money goes beyond political spin and trade policy. Felice’s journey and Masaccio’s Tribute Money stand at a crucial moment in the mercantile culture of Florentine Renaissance, one that had begun to recognize that trust and risk, rather than excessive parsimony, may be profitable. Connecting the language of faith and finance not only commemorates the Florentine galleys voyage and the treaty with the Sultan, it also inaugurates a shift in paradigm, a mercantile culture wherein credit, trust, and risk are inexorably linked to profit and speculation. Tyibute Money stands as a moral allegory in the mercantile culture of the fifteenth century. Cortesia was a financial risk, a credit extended—but it not only resolved conflict, it was the very condition of future profit.
With the Port of Livorno replacing Pisa as the Tuscan port during the following century, trust and credit came to play a major role in the working of the mercantile firms that had established agents in various ports and cities. This new culture operated according to a correspondingly new understanding of risk, fate, and futurity, one exemplified in Machiavelli’s Fortuna: chance as a force that can be controlled by human skill.°8
Massacio’s Tribute Money might be viewed as an allegory inaugurating this shift in paradigm, one related to the personal experiences Felice recorded in detail in his Diario. In this context, the commission of Tribute Money justifies, even glorifies, his payments. This is the after image that Felice renders iconic in his family chapel in Florence, the representation of a prior experience so overwhelming that he was unable to put it into coherent words. The image fixed onto the walls of the Florentine family chapel transforms the strange sights and sounds, the formless fluidity of the overseas, into a recognizable image of the self, reconstituted. Likewise, it translates the meaning of tribute, from extortion to speculation.
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