Download PDF | The Economy of Renaissance Florence by Richard A. Goldthwaite, The Johns Hopkins University Press 2009.
668 Pages
An economic history of medieval and Re nais sance Florence at once focuses on a single city and opens a perspective on all of Eu rope. At home, the city had a textile industry that was as strong as any in Eu rope yet completely dependent on the importation of raw materials from faraway places and on the exportation of its fi nished products to altogether different faraway places, while the success of its artisan sector was celebrated throughout Italy and Eu rope for all that the city’s very name still conjures up for art lovers today. Abroad, its entrepreneurs built up the most extensive international network of commerce and banking in western Eu rope, in the pro cess establishing their fl orin as a universal monetary standard.
They also moved into the courts of some of Eu rope’s most prominent rulers to serve as government fi nanciers. Much of the early history of capitalism is written around the activities of these men. They effected the transition from the individual merchant- adventurer to the sedentary fi rm, the evolution of the partnership form of business or ga ni zation, and the refi nement of many business practices, such as double- entry accounting, maritime insurance, and all those instruments designed to facilitate monetary transfers and the extension of credit, from the check to the bill of exchange and the certifi cate of deposit. To do all this, Florentines built the protective structure of a judicial system that guaranteed the sanctity of contracts for everyone, be they merchant- bankers or artisans, thereby allowing them all to dispense with the notary for business transactions. And along the way they challenged some of the strongest norms, both social and religious, of Eu ro pe an culture at the time. It is the objective of this book to tell the remarkable story of how all this happened in the course of the economic growth and development of one of the world’s most famous cities. It is surprising that no one has attempted to do this before. Surprising because so much of the fame of Florence is built on entrepreneurial activity.
On the one hand, we have projected on the city’s past the business icons of our own time, calling its bankers the Rothschilds of the Middle Ages and its fl orin the dollar of the Middle Ages; on the other hand, we have appropriated the name of the city’s most prominent family, the Medici, as an icon encapsulating the symbiosis of enlightened patron and entrepreneur that is so central to our own culture. Surprising, too, because the documentation is so rich. Florence enjoys preeminence in the history of early capitalism, more so even than Venice and Genoa, not because capitalism found its earliest manifestations there (it certainly did not) or because it reached a higher stage of development there (this can be argued), but because, quite simply, the story is so much better documented for this city than for any other.
The private account books surviving from the early thirteenth century to 1500 number about 2,500, more than exist for all the other Italian cities put together; and that number increases to close to 10,000 by the time we get to 1600, most of them business accounts of one kind or another. This enormous patrimony establishes a documentary preeminence of Florence in the history of early capitalism that could be extended to all of Eu rope and well beyond the chronological confi nes of this book. Moreover, these documents, in this city as nowhere else, testify to the extraordinarily wide diffusion of the practices and instruments of capitalism throughout the society, far beyond the counting houses of merchants, bankers, and industrialists. Surprising, fi nally, because the historiographical tradition is so rich. This tradition goes back to the very origins of the discipline of economic history—to the German scholars who, beginning in the last quarter of the nineteenth century and culminating in Werner Sombart’s 1902 book, began right off to explore the origins of capitalism, for some of them (including Max Weber) focused on Florence.1
At the very end of the century Robert Davidsohn began his lifelong search in the archives for the mass of material, including anything he could fi nd about the economy, that he eventually incorporated into his classic history of the city down through the time of Dante, published in the 1920s. Historians then went to work on the history of business in the following period—fi rst Armando Sapori (who was the fi rst to explore the vast archive of accounting materials), then Florence Edler de Roover (who matured as a scholar in the ambiance of the Harvard School of Business) and Raymond de Roover (who started out as a businessman), and fi nally Federigo Melis (who started out as an accountant). We, the epigoni, have continued digging around in the documents, throwing light on this and that aspect of the economy and adding to the ever- growing accumulation of par tic u lar studies. At the moment, in fact, the fi eld is prospering as never before, reinvigorated by a crop of some half- dozen younger economic historians dedicated to archival research.
Yet, for all the considerable bravura of many of the scholars who constitute this venerable tradition, no one has yet looked up to see what it is all about.2 Several intellectual barriers block the view of the larger picture. One is chronological. We generally have focused on a narrow period, with the result that we rarely confront change or instead, and perhaps more signifi cantly for economic history, explain its absence. Another barrier is geographic. Parochialism—what the Italians call campanilismo—is a malaise throughout most subdivisions within the discipline of Italian history, no less so for economic history than for any other kind. We all recognize the preeminence of Florence, Venice, Genoa, and Milan in the economic history of medieval and Re nais sance Italy, but notwithstanding the very different economies of these cities, economic historians studying this or that activity in any one of these places rarely put their subject in perspective by looking abroad to see how things were done elsewhere, let alone do a broader comparative study. The failure to compare either over time (change) or across space points to a third barrier in the historiography: the dominance of the descriptive over the analytical mode of doing history. In this sense economics, a discipline of analysis, has had little impact on the study of the economic history of Florence.
The result is an economic history without much sense of what an economy, as distinct from the par tic u lar economic activity being studied, is. Moreover, this intellectual myopia is compounded by disciplinary isolation, yet another barrier to a larger vision of what it is we are doing. Thus we study the businessmen of Florence forgetting that these men spent much of their time and energy deliberating on the innumerable councils that constituted their republican government and contending with others in the often vicious factionalism that so characterized the po liti cal realities behind the façade of that government, or we study artisans ignoring their contribution to the extraordinary fame the city enjoys for the objects they made. Po liti cal history, social history, and art history have not fi gured into our story. And since we have thus not communicated with our colleagues in these other branches of the discipline, who currently dominate the study of Florence, we can hardly blame them for having so little sense of how the economy bears on their subject.
It will therefore be a long time before we get a truly integrated history of this remarkable city, so rich in po liti cal action and thought, so famous for its art and so successful in its economic enterprise. In this book I make no pretense about having crossed any of these barriers. No one could write a history that goes from the beginning to 1600, however, without encountering them—that, in fact, has been the joy of engaging in the enterprise— and on those occasions I have attempted to raise some of the problems that will need to be examined in order to widen our vision beyond the current historiographical confi nes. Although this book is a survey of the entire period directed to orient the reader to the economic history of the city, unlike so many surveys it is not presented as a conclusive summing up of the current state of research without exposing the gaps or problems in the historiography. The holes in the story told here are in fact numerous and are duly noted, for I want to alert the reader to the limitations of our knowledge in the hope not only of stimulating new research but also of thinking differently about the subject so that someday a much more comprehensive and profound history than this one can be written. And so much archival work remains to be done. Indeed, the most important collections of documents for the economic history of the city have hardly been explored.
The catasto rec ords, especially those for 1427, the most thorough economic survey of any Eu ro pe an city before the nineteenth century, have been mined for this and that par tic u lar piece of information, but they have been studied comprehensively only for their demographic content. In addition, an astounding number of volumes—almost fi ve thousand from the years 1314 to 1600— survive recording the proceedings of cases involving debt claims brought before the court of the Mercanzia, but only now is someone, Luca Boschetto, fi nally undertaking a systematic study of this vast material, so essentially economic in its nature. And then there are all those account books. Many have been studied, but even more remain to be studied. The personal memoranda (ricordi) that appear at the end of many of these ledgers have been gone over time and time again by social historians, but too often the accounts themselves have been completely ignored. No Italian city, in fact, has so much unexplored material of a specifi cally economic nature, and that makes the venture undertaken herein particularly precarious. But maybe debate—not polemics, which is as characteristic of the historiography of this city as it is of the spirit of the people who live there today—is what is needed to get things started.
The chronology of this book ranges from the beginning to 1600, but the concentration is on the fourteenth and fi fteenth centuries. These are constraints imposed by the historiography. Not much can be said about the earlier growth of the Florentine economy. For Florence, the notarial record, which tells us so much about Lucca, Genoa, and other cities from as early as the eleventh century, does not begin much before 1300; and by this time Florentines, both entrepreneur and artisan, had abandoned the notary for almost all business transactions. After 1500 the problem is hardly the lack of documentation, given the overpowering immensity of the accounting record as one goes forward in the sixteenth century; it is, instead, the historians’ lack of interest. Indeed, the paucity of studies of the economy in the sixteenth century is symptomatic of the historiographical situation indicated above. No economic historian could venture into this period of relatively rapid change without having to explain the change from what had gone before, or absence of it, for change itself is such a central theme in the economic history of all of Eu rope in that century. My venture into this relative unknown, however, only goes as far as 1600.
I am well aware that in the early de cades of the seventeenth century the economy is thought to have taken a turn for the worse and even undergone a serious crisis. In some respects this turn is explained by what went before; but if I had moved ahead to confront this problem, I would have found myself writing in a teleological mode to explain how it all came out in the end, which would have required a rather different frame of mind and much more research. It is to be expected, of course, that when the history of that crisis is written, we shall have a different perspective on the immediate past as described here. The present book recounts a story that is, therefore, open ended and, in the fi nal analysis, designed to arouse curiosity and even incite criticism, not to present a fi nished picture.3 This book starts with a brief introduction to provide the reader with a general knowledge of the role of the Tuscan towns in the so- called commercial revolution of the eleventh to thirteenth centuries, which marked the fi rst chapter in the growth and development of the Eu ro pe an economy in the Middle Ages. It then places Florence in this context, surveying the development of its economy to about 1300, when the story told in the rest of the book begins. By 1300 Florence, with its strong textile industries, was one of the most industrialized cities in medieval Europe, and the city’s economy grew on this foundation.
This industrial activity, however, was completely dependent on the importation of raw materials and the exportation of fi nished cloth; and it was the city’s merchants, not foreigners, who made this trade abroad possible. Part I, therefore, is dedicated to the history of the international commercial and banking network through which these merchants operated. Chapter 1 offers an overall view of their operations. It traces the changing geography of their business interests abroad and the general course of their success over the entire period of this book and describes the underpinning business structure of their enterprise. The fi nal section of the chapter looks at Florence as the center of this international network. Chapters 2 and 3 break down the business activity of the network into two distinct kinds, commerce and banking, for purpose of analysis. Part II focuses on the local economy. Chapters 4, 5, and 6 survey the main sectors: the textile industries producing for foreign markets, workers in other activities oriented to the local market, and, fi nally, local banking and credit.
Chapter 7 reaches out to wider contexts for all this market activity by examining the role of government in the economy, the ties between the urban and regional economies, and the function of the economy to distribute wealth throughout the society. The conclusion presents some ideas about the economic culture of Florentines and offers an assessment of the per for mance of the economy over the entire period. This last section might serve the reader as an introduction to the book, a general survey of the subject as I see it, before he or she plunges into the details. A fundamental problem in surveying the economic activity of this city over such a long period is the changing value of the gold fl orin. Its price as stated in lire, the money of account used for most local transaction, rose steadily, and the value of the lira changed with respect to its purchase power in the local market. Moreover, several fl orins of account came into use during the period, each with its own price history. In view of the complexity of this situation, a study such as this one would do well to convert all values stated in fl orins into lire, since the lira is the best mea sure of value over the long run for the cost of goods and services— the cost of living—in the local market. The reader would thereby gain a more immediate sense of comparison over time.
To convert fl orins into lire, however, would be to go so much against the force of tradition within the discipline as to be a laughing matter, and I have not had the courage to do this. My ambitions for this book, although directed to arousing debate and stimulating further research, are not so high. Yet we historians would do well to learn to “think” in lire, as did Florentines, because the distortions that arise from the blind attachment to the fl orin are considerable, since the fl orin can mean several moneys, all of which were subject to either defl ation or infl ation with respect to value in the local market, even in the short run. In any event, I can only call the reader’s attention to the problems of comparing values in fl orins over a long period of time. In the attempt to offer some assistance, on occasion in the text I establish one criterion for comparison by translating monetary values into what they meant in terms of the daily wage of an unskilled laborer, presumably a minimum wage. I also use 1427 as a base year for comparisons, since the catasto documents of that year— justifi ably famous for their extraordinary detail—are so familiar to historians of this city. The appendix offers some explanation of the monetary system, and table A.1 provides a basis for comparing values quoted in fl orins that are encountered in the text. In accordance with the standard system for or ga niz ing monetary units throughout medieval Eu rope, both the fl orin and the lira were divided into 20 soldi, each of which, in turn, was divided into 12 denari; these are moneys of account, not coins. In the text they are abbreviated as, respectively, fl ., £, s., and d.; soldi and denari of the lira are identifi ed as di piccioli. The book does not include a comprehensive bibliography on the subject, nor will one fi nd references to all the scholarship on par tic u lar subjects in the notes. Instead, I use the notes to cite the most recent and most relevant literature on the subject at hand, and these references can be used as guides into the further bibliography.
With respect to the many unstudied subjects referred to in the text, however, references to these have been collected as “categories of open problems” under the entry “historiography” in the index, the intention being to point the way for research that will extend our knowledge of the economic history of Florence beyond the parameters of this book. Terms for which there is no exact or concise translation in En glish have been kept in the original Italian. On their fi rst appearance in the text they are defi ned, and entries for them in the index direct the reader to those places. In the Florentine identifi cation of a fi rm, the phrase e compagni is rendered as “& Partners,” the symbol indicating the formality of the or ga ni za tion and the literal translation “partners” being preferred to the cognate “company” to avoid the implication in our use today of this latter term for a different kind of business or ga ni za tion. All passages in Italian quoted in the text have been translated, with the original given in a note only if it does not appear in a cited published source.
For reference to documents cited from the Florentine State Archives I use the standard abbreviation ASF. My thanks to Graziella Coi for the graphics in this book and to Joanne Allen for her careful editing of the text. I am especially grateful to Henry Tom, who for many years now has made it a plea sure to work with the press, and to those colleagues who have commented, helpfully and critically, on parts or all of the text—Luca Boschetto, Alison Brown, Judith Brown, Shannon Brown, Humfrey Butters, Gian Mario Cao, Enrico Faini, Franco Franceschi, Francesco Guidi Bruscoli, F. W. Kent, Marco Spallanzani and Sergio Tognetti.
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