Download PDF | Ingrid-Houssaye Michienzi - Datini, Majorque et le Maghreb (14e-15e siècles). Réseaux, espaces méditerranéens et stratégies marchandes-Brill (2013).
725 Pages
REMERCIEMENTS
En préambule, je souhaite adresser mes remerciements les plus sincéres aux personnes qui m’ont apporté leur aide et leur soutien dans ce parcours aussi bien intellectuel que personnel.
Je remercie tout d’abord chaleureusement mon directeur de thése, Antony Molho, qui a su me laisser la liberté nécessaire a |’accomplissement de mes travaux, tout en gardant un ceil critique et avisé. Je le remercie particuliérement pour sa confiance, son ouverture d’esprit et ses encouragements prodigués tout au long de ces années de recherche.
Il va sans dire que rien n’aurait été possible sans les fructueuses discussions que j’ai eues, notamment avec Antonella Romano, que je remercie sincérement pour son aide précieuse dans |’orientation de mes recherches et pour la sympathie qu'elle m’a témoignée au cours de ces années.
LInstitut Universitaire Européen est un cadre privilégié pour effectuer une these. Les nombreux séminaires permettent d’approfondir une réflexion et de présenter réguli¢érement divers aspects de ses travaux. Merci aux professeurs pour leurs éclairages, et aux participants du Thesis Writting Seminar qui, par leurs conseils, ont permis 4 mes travaux de s’améliorer.
Ces travaux sont l’accomplissement d’enquétes qui débutérent en maitrise lors d’un séjour Erasmus, il y a presque quinze ans. Je souhaite ainsi remercier Philippe Gourdin qui dirigea ma maitrise et me plaga sur les pas de ce marchand et de cette formidable documentation, ainsi que Jacques Paviot, directeur de DEA. Ma gratitude va également a Marco Tangheroni, dont je salue la mémoire, qui m’ouvrit de nouveaux horizons, et 4 Olimpia Vaccari qui m’entraina sans relache a la transcription de documents.
Je voudrais aussi remercier l’ensemble du personnel des archives de Prato. Merci a Elena Cecchi-Aste qui guida mes premiers pas il y a bien longtemps, et 4 Diana Toccafondi qui, lorsqu’elle en fut la directrice, m/autorisa l’accés a distance au fonds Datini numérisé avant sa mise en ligne, me permettant ainsi de poursuivre mes recherches a partir de Paris.
Jadresse également ma gratitude pour leur soutien et leur aide, durant ma thése ou les années qui ont suivi, 4 David Abulafia, Francisco Apellaniz, Mathieu Arnoux, José Bordes Garcia, Gemma Colesanti, Damien Coulon, Jér6me Hayez, Christiane Klapisch-Zuber, Maurice Kriegel, Maria Dolores Lopez Pérez, Judith Olszowy-Schlanger et Dominique Valérian.
Je tiens a remercier mes amis qui m’ont aidée ou supportée au cours de ces années, pour les chaleureux moments passés ensemble, pour leurs relectures et commentaires ou tout simplement pour avoir égayé la solitude de journées passées a jouer les rats de bibliothéques. Un merci particulier a Antonio et Laura pour leur soutien, logistique et affectif, lors de mes nombreux retours en Toscane.
Mes remerciements s’adressent enfin 4 ma famille. Merci a mes parents qui m’ont donné le gotit du savoir, de l’effort et de l’enrichissement intellectuel. Merci 4 ma sceur, Alexandra, pour avoir trouvé le temps de m’aider malgré son emploi du temps trés chargé. Mes derniers mots vont 4 mon époux, Giuseppe, pour sa patience, son soutien et pour avoir géré mes moments de doute ; et 4 mes enfants, Leonardo et Elisa, qui ont grandi en méme temps que mes recherches.
INTRODUCTION
In her widely acclaimed study, The Familiarity of Strangers, Francesca Trivellato wrote “a global history on a small scale” (p. 7). Focusing on a firm of Sephardic merchants in the early eighteenth century, she set out to understand the formation and maintenance of long-term and long-distance trading relations, both within an ethnic group such as the Sephardic-Portuguese “nation” of the early modern period, as well as across cultural boundaries. Thus, methodologically, Trivellato combines microhistory — the study of a long standing business partnership — and a wider interpretive framework, comprising a sharply focused and clearly articulated theoretical context within which she placed her materials and her discussions of them. Indeed, not the least impressive aspect of Trivellato’s account is her documentary foundation, at whose core is a collection of over 13.000 business letters. Thus, this important historical account combines local and global perspectives, while drawing on empirical foundations and theoretical approaches.
In its aims and approach, Ingrid Houssaye’s book very much reminds one of Trivellato’s account. In what one might refer to as its microhistorical dimension Houssaye concentrates on the activities of one business firm — albeit a well known and widely studied one — that of Francesco di Marco Datini, over a relatively short period of time, from ca. 1382 to 1410, in a well focused geographical area, north west Africa, known as the Maghrib. Although generations of scholars have poured over the Datini archive’s papers — well over 150.000 letters and hundreds of account books — so far, little attention had been devoted to this firm’s activities in north Africa. Houssaye now comes to fill this gap, and to offer her analysis of a European firm’s activities in a transcultural commercial environment, as was that of the late medieval Maghrib.
Datini, by virtue of birth and residence in Prato, was a Florentine merchant. His Florentine identity gave him many advantages, perhaps not least importantly Florence’s business culture and traditions. Yet, as a merchant, he was also saddled with a handicap that could not be easily overcome. During his life, Florence was not a major maritime power. Not until 1421, eleven years following his death, when Florence acquired the port of Livorno and decided to launch a major fleet, could Florentine merchants draw on their government's resources to pursue their maritime business interests. During his life, the diplomatic and naval presence of the Florentine government in the Mediterranean was at best meager. The contrast with Venetian, Genoese, and Iberian (especially Catalan) merchants was striking. Datini faced the challenge of pursuing his interests in north Africa without support from his government, and without recourse to commercial agreements between the republic of Florence and the Sultans of Tunis or of Morocco. In light of these circumstances, how could he organize himself and ensure that his initiatives would bear fruit? How could he succeed without having behind him his government’s support? How, finally, could he face the competition of local merchants, or of merchants who had operated in these markets for generations and who were inclined to view this Florentine entrepreneur as an intruder who, at every possible opportunity, should be cut down to size? To put these questions in the language of our own historiographic inquiries: What, if any, role did the absence of the state have in Francesco di Marco’s business activities in the western Mediterranean, most especially in the Maghrib?
To complicate things was the fact that, unlike most successful entrepreneurs of his age, Francesco di Marco Datini did not have a family to support him in his business activities. Datini was not simply (in the expression of his best known biographer) the merchant of Prato, he was the childless merchant of Prato. In an age when the very name of a business firm (think of the Bardi, Peruzzi, Medici companies and of many more) indicated the rallying of many of one family’s components in the operations of its business firm, Datini was alone. No brothers or nephews, no uncles or cousins, not even children to draw on for support. In these circumstances, whom would he trust, on whose good will would he rely in his complex and far flung business ventures?
The merchant Francesco Datini had to come to terms with this double absence: the absence of the state, and the absence of his family. The modern historian wishing to understand Datini’s entrepreneurship faces the challenge of reconstructing his business strategy from the myriad letters and business accounts exchanged between himself and his business agents, at home and abroad. Ingrid Houssaye’s book is a subtly detailed, and highly intelligent response to this challenge. In reading her book we, Houssaye’s readers, come face to face with her patient and perceptive analysis of a complex business strategy that was never spelled out by its creator, but which she is able to perceive, not only in its outlines, but often in precise and detailed reference to products, markets, and people, whose energies and expertise were repeatedly harnessed by Datini and his collaborators. In her search for understanding Datini’s business strategies, Houssaye draws on a range of methodological approaches which have been honed by economic historians in recent decades, and which she applies, with enviable discrimination, to her own evidence.
Key to her analysis is the concept of networks. Through the prism of this concept Houssaye approaches Datini’s involvement in North African commerce and is able to unravel the often long-drawn out processes which, collectively, one can define as Francesco Datini’s north African business strategy. In a few words, what emerges from her analysis is a clear case of a commerce based on an almost infinite number of mediations, itself by product of interactions between varieties of actors and of diverse strategies applied by them.
One example teased out from the pages that follow illustrates the preceding observations. It deals with exchanges between central and western Maghrib and Flanders in northern Europe.
Several letters sent by Florentine merchants in Bruges to the Datini company’s branch in Majorca document the demand for grana barbaresca, a red dye used in the clothing industry, and available in places such as Alcudia, Rabat and Oran. Indeed, Houssaye clearly shows that Majorca was the key strategic location for any European wishing to do commerce with north Africa. The island owed its advantage to its geographic location and to the fact that it was re conquered from its Arab overlords only in the middle of the thirteenth century. However much they may have tried, members of the Datini firm were never able to do business directly in north Africa. Their failure was due to the existence of Majorcan alliances (leghe) that did not permit Italians to place their merchandise in the Majorcans’ ships. Commerce to central and western Maghrib was controlled by these Majorcan alliances, which kept foreigners from loading merchandise in their fleets.
Members of the Datini firm, carefully selected and closely supervised by Francesco di Marco, were occasionally able to get around these leghe, sometimes using fraudulent means, even presenting themselves as citizens of other Communes. On occasion, they were able to place their products sent to the Maghrib on the ships of the leghe, convincing, or corrupting ship captains and simple sailors to violate restrictions on outside merchants.
Yet, Datini’s agents were never able to have direct access to African wares. To obtain the grana barbaresca they relied on middlemen and bought it from them. These intermediaries were local operators, often craftsmen — dyers, druggists, leather workers — who sold small quantities of wares. To them one may add local merchants, whose modest commercial activities extended to the Balearic islands, sometimes as far away as Catalonia, or even Aragon. Above all, it was Jewish merchants who were the most important purchasing intermediaries. There was a long history of contacts between North African Jews and Catalan-Aragonese Jews and New Christians. The pogrom of 1391 and the flight of large numbers of Spanish Jews to North Africa reinforced ties between Jews in North Africa and the Spanish mainland and the Balearic islands. Italian merchants in Majorca benefited from these ties between Jews in the northern and southern littorals of the Mediterranean. Wares from the Maghrib arrived in Majorca thanks to the mediation of these middlemen. Transactions were generally of modest quantities, and Datini’s agents were always on the look out for additional small suppliers, so that they could accumulate sufficiently large quantities of merchandise to export to European markets.
The picture that emerges in Valencia is basically similar to that of Majorca, although there it was the Mudejar population (Muslims who lived under Christian dominance), among whom one finds well to do entrepreneurs, such as the Ripoll or the Xupio. Datini’s agent in Valencia, Luca del Sera, cultivated personal relations with some of them, and was able to enter in contact with the Mudejar networks, thus gaining access to products that, otherwise, it was very difficult for Christian merchants to obtain.
Once the merchandise was safely in Majorca, the problem was to transport it to markets where it was in demand, mostly in North Europe. African products could be sent to Bruges either by a prevalently overland route, first, by Catalan ships to Barcelona, and from there by mule through Perpignan, Montpellier, Paris, and Bruges. Or they could loaded in Majorca onto Genoese or Venetian ships, and shipped to Bruges, with a stop in Southampton.
Similar stories — or strategies — are evident in the procurement and sale of other African products. Leather for example was in demand in Tuscany, and was imported there from the Ifriqiya (the eastern Maghrib), where Datini recruited the collaboration of other Tuscan merchants, especially Pisan ones, such as the Fauglia, who had long resided there. Before 1406, when Florence conquered its maritime neighbor, the leather was shipped either directly to Pisa, or to other nearby ports such as Motrone, Piombino, Talamone, even to Genoa or Venice, from where the wares were transported to Tuscany on mule. An even more fascinating story is offered by the sub African wares traded by Datini and European merchants. This sector was dominated by two groups of traders: Berber Arab caravaniers, who transported dates, Guinean peper, and ostrich feathers (more than 300.000 such feathers were bought by Datini’s Majorca firm from 1396 to 1410!) from Sub Saharan Africa, to trading posts at the edges of the desert (such as Sijilmassa, Noul, Ouargla or Ghadamés), from where, another set of traders, often Jews, carried them northwards, taking advantage of their numerous contacts with other Jewish merchants in various north African trading posts. The Datini agents in Majorca, relied on their own contacts and good relations with Jewish merchants on the island, who, in turn, were aware of the timing of the caravans and could place their orders accordingly.
Two points emerge with great clarity from Houssaye’s account. The first regards Majorca’s role in European trade with Africa during the late Middle Ages. We knew about Majorca’s crucial role in the history of map making. The contribution to cartography of Abraham Cresques, the Catalan Jew who found himself on the island exactly during the years when Datini’s firm was flourishing there, is well known. Now, thanks to Ingrid Houssaye we have an even richer understanding of the mediating role that Majorca played during the late Middle Ages. Majorca was like a double edged funnel. It was there that cartographers and students of the physical universe and its representation gathered during the waning of the fourteenth century; it was there, also, that others — merchants and peddlers, sea captains and simple sailors, scholars and scribblers, of strikingly diverse origins and beliefs also gathered, Christians, Jews, Muslims, with their diverse and theoretically irreconcilable differences, yet with an ability to get on with their work, to trade with each other and to share information; it was in Majorca that wares from the south traveling north were gathered and kept in storage (just think of those 300.000 ostrich feathers making their way from sub Saharan Africa to a number European courts where they were variously used as symbols of luxury) or, following the same routes but in the opposite direction, other wares, such as copper, made their way from Europe to the Maghrib and to points South. It was in Majorca, finally, that information was funneled and often synchronized, information about commerce and map making, and about different ways that such diverse groups of people behaved and acted. There is no better illustration of this almost fantasmagorical reality that Majorca was in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth century than those commercial contracts redacted by Datini’s representatives in Majorca which are signed by Datini’s agents in Latin characters, by Jewish merchants in Hebrew, and Muslim ones in Arabic.
Majorca as a hinge of commercial exchanges between north Africa (at least of the Maghrib) and Europe. This is the first striking image that has emerged from Ingrid Houssaye’s study. Francesco di Marco Datini’s business firm turns out to be as much of a hinge as well. It was a hinge on which turned an almost myriad small and strikingly diverse networks, of small traders, of modest artisans, of Jewish peddlers and merchants, of Mudejar investors, and of course Christians from Tuscany and Catalonia, from Genoa and southern France. If the variety and the number of these networks is striking, equally striking was the ability of one business firm, ultimately based in Florence’s vicinity more than one thousand kilometers away, to coordinate and synchronize all these small and diverse intersecting networks. Years ago, a rather arid scholarly debate (a sort of storm in a small academic cup) agitated students of late medieval European economic history. Was Francesco Datini a merchant in the mould of the great late medieval “capitalists,” as Federigo Melis, an ardent and meticulous scholar of Datini’s account books, had sustained; or was he symbol of that failed capitalism that had allegedly prevailed in Tuscany following the great mid-fourteenth century crisis, as Armando Sapori insisted? Ingrid Houssaye’s book rather suggests that both sides were just as right as they were wrong.
Francesco di Marco Datini emerges from the pages of her book as a very shrewd and able entrepreneur. No doubt, he was a man with an uncanny ability to draw on the resources that the business world of his time offered him, to harness the energies of a multifarious range of networks and of associations of traders and entrepreneurs, to coordinate them and to draw profit from them. No less important was his ability to choose his associates carefully and to supervise them closely. If family could not be counted on for support, one had to be doubly careful about the people who would be called upon to act on behalf of the firm’s interests. It turns out that Datini’s grand strategy, assuming that one can talk about his actions in these terms, entailed the flexibility and malleability of his approach. Where appropriate, he would draw on the resources of local merchants. More generally, he would rely on the coordination and merging of myriad small networks. It is here, perhaps, in the coordination and synchronization of these small strategies, each of which entailed the firm’s relations with one or a small number of local merchants or networks, that one can find Datini’s response to the two absences to which reference was made above: the absence of the family, and especially the absence of the state. If these two weighty institutions could not provide a shield of secu-rity and a universe of trust available to many of his competitors who were supported by strong states (think of the Republics of Venice and Genoa and by the Crown of Aragon, for example, or think of the great Medici bank, founded by Giovanni di Bicci de’Medici during Datini’s own life) Datini’s shield would be the flexibility and creativity of the multifarious and overlapping, often multi cultural commercial networks on which he relied to conduct his business.
If the weight of strong institutions were beyond his reach, then the flexibility of small ones, which were assiduously cultivated by his agents, would do. True, trust among strangers — African traders, Arab caravaniers, Jewish peddlers, Mudejar and Christian sedentary merchants, but also artisans, sailors and modest workers — could not be born by reliance on strong state institutions. Nearly none of these groups could invoke state reprisals against violators of good merchant practice. Yet, trust was usually born among the myriad small operators Datini’s Majorca firm did business with, above all because they understood the wisdom of adhering to good merchant practice, and of honouring their word even in the absence of written contracts. The risks to them served as much of a constraint as the strong institutions of a state. They knew that if they violated their agreements, given that profit for each of them depended on actions that were imbricated in a wider set of exchanges, the very chain of these exchanges would be jeopardized. Of course, it was always possible that something would go wrong, someone would take too much of a risk, a shipment would not fetch the price desired, an intruder would try to get away with an unacceptable action, or someone would die when his services were vital. The years of Datini’s Majorca business operations rather suggest that, in those years, in that place, and in that commercial firm such deviations were both rare and minor. The system worked — even in the absence of the state and of a strong and numerous family to support Francesco di Marco Datini.
Thinking of Houssaye’s Datini one can’t help but think that the wonderfully suggestive title of Francesca Trivellato’s book, The Familiarity of Strangers, rings as much true for the world of Francesco Datini’s Majorcan operations as it did for the world of early eighteenth century Sephardic trade. And just as Trivellato’s Sephardic traders, based in Livorno but moving actively throughout much of the then known world, were able to link Aleppo with Livorno, and these with Lisbon, Antwerp, London and Goa, Houssaye shows us that the best kind of micro history is in the end global in its scope and ambition. When accommodated within the same analytical presentation and supported by intelligent and systematic reading of the available evidence, a sharp focus on a small island in the western Mediterranean, an ambitious entrepreneur in Tuscany, and a large number of local merchants and small trading networks from sub Saharan Africa all the way to Flanders end up by providing a wide scope into an important chapter in the history of Europe’s relations with the non European world.
Antony Molho
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