Download PDF | Quentin van Van Doosselaere - Commercial agreement medieval genoa-Cambridge University Press (2009).

Download PDF | Quentin van Van Doosselaere - Commercial agreement medieval genoa-Cambridge University Press (2009).

280 Pages 

Commercial Agreements and Social Dynamics in Medieval Genoa 

Commercial Agreements and Social Dynamics in Medieval Genoa is an empirical study of medieval long-distance trade agreements and the surrounding social dynamics that transformed the feudal organization of men-of-arms into the world of Renaissance merchants. Making use of 20,000 notarial records, the book traces the commercial partnerships of thousands of people in Genoa from 1150 to 1435 and reports social activity, on a scale that is unprecedented for such an early period of history anywhere.

 In combining a detailed historical reading with network modeling to analyze the change in the long-distance trade relationships, Quentin Van Doosselaere challenges the prevailing Western-centric view of development by demonstrating that the history of the three main medieval economic frameworks that brought about European capitalism – equity, credit, and insurance – was not driven by strategic merchants’ economic optimizations but rather by a change in partners’ selections that reflected the dynamic of the social structure as a whole. 

Dr. Quentin Van Doosselaere is a Research Fellow at Nuffield College. He combines training in sociology and business administration to focus on the emergence of capitalism at the end of the medieval period. Adding formal network analysis tools to detailed archival research, Dr. Van Doosselaere has studied the social foundations underpinning the economic changes that initiated the Western dominance in global economic exchange. The multidisciplinary nature of his research has resulted in invitations to present his work to Business, Economics, History, and Sociology Departments in both Europe and the United States.

From Sword into Capital

 At the turn of the first millennium, as is true today, the Mediterranean straddled distinct and very different communities. However, while contemporary economic power lies in the West, the reverse was true prior to the revival of medieval long-distance trade. From the time of antique trading, commerce in the West had slowed down nearly to a halt; the European economy had shrunk, and the decrease in population levels had sharply reduced the size of urban centers. Even the largest Italian ports were nothing more than villages when compared to bustling and sophisticated eastern cities such as Constantinople, Baghdad, and Cairo. In the overall context of the subsistence economy of the early medieval West, urban centers had in some ways offered fewer economic opportunities than the countryside. Whatever degree of importance the medieval cities had managed to maintain was often not because of their role as commercial meeting points but, rather, because of the military protection they could provide against the regular marauding of pirates and other invaders. As the millennium approached, the balance of power changed and European communities, which had been in decline for hundreds of years, were able once again to challenge the military supremacy of the East and eventually gain economic dominance. It is from that period until the mid fifteenth century that Italian cities, Venice and Genoa in particular, controlled the Mediterranean Sea and served as anchors for the economic expansion that subsequently led to Western domination of the rest of the world. 

Historians have examined the commerce that underpinned the Western ascendancy. Italian Renaissance cities are the object of classic social historiography, and a few studies have described the emergence of innovative commercial methods that were to shape the modern economy. However, none have systematically focused on how the mercantile social organization came into being. In this book, therefore, I analyze the rise of the three main forms of medieval long-distance trade agreements – equity, credit, and insurance – while also tracing the underlying long-term social changes that in many parts of Europe, including Genoa, transformed, the preexisting social structure, organized around men-ofarms, into the new world of men-of-capital initiated by Renaissance merchants. To do this, I coded thousands of medieval Genoese notarial records and consulted a variety of other primary sources to build a unique data set. Starting more than 900 years ago, the data set records more than 20,000 commercial relationships between individuals who, by joining their resources, gave rise to what is commonly called the medieval commercial revolution. Modeling their ventures over a 300-year period, I followed the transformation of the structure of social ties by analyzing the link between commercial agreements and social process. I was thus able to consider commercial innovations as social patterns. 

The critical influence of these patterns not only conditioned economic growth but also molded the rules that governed the transformation of social ties during the period, resulting in the emergence of a mercantile oligarchy within the feudal world of medieval Italy. As such, a broad objective of this book is to demonstrate the social foundation of the economic development that brought about the rise of the modern capitalist economy by studying the interplay between institutions and social interactions. Genoa’s history is a perfect arena for this type of study for several reasons. First, while history will never offer perfect laboratory conditions in which to test theories about social dynamics, for our purposes Genoa is a solid empirical site because of its shift from feudal organization to a mercantile republic, a shift that was as pronounced there as anywhere in Europe. Indeed, from a small, fortified town dominated by warriors who went to kill and plunder throughout the seas, one that lagged behind its counterparts in the early long-distance trade growth, Genoa became an economic archetype among the city-states of the Renaissance. Second, many key medieval innovations in financial technology – the bill of exchange, double-entry bookkeeping, third-party insurance, and public finance – either originated in, or were widely disseminated from, Genoa. Third, Genoa’s records are unique in Europe in terms of their precocity, continuity, and quantity. This meant that I was able to make unprecedented use of extensive data showing relationships between individuals and groups in order to reconstruct a long-term medieval social dynamic. As such, the quantitative method presented in this book contrasts with the approaches used by previous researchers, who have had to use a thin body of evidence that is more likely to be subjectively handpicked. 

Fourth, in the absence of a large routinized mercantile class, a large proportion of Genoese directly participated in the expansion of trade that occurred in the twelfth- and thirteenth-centuries. As a result, medieval commercial records include a wide variety of men and women: princes, servants, oarsmen, dozens of different kinds of artisans, bishops, lower clergymen, doctors, and schoolteachers. Because of this they provide us with remarkably deep insight into the nature of early social activity, on a scale that is simply unattainable for other European cities. Using the resources just described, I study the institutional framework of early European long-distance trade and document the rise of occupational categories associated with it. In doing so, I identify and measure the social mechanisms that gave rise to the concentration of capital in the maritime state’s dominant class and to the emergence of the Renaissance oligarchy. By tracing the feudal1 origin of the Genoese Commune around the time of the First Crusade (1097–99), I show that, at first, the commenda contracts (temporary equity partnerships that organized most early trading ventures) fostered heterogeneous ties with respect to status and wealth. Eventually, the expansion of trade – in a pre-market society – and the cumulative nature of its profits decoupled the feudal domination from the economy, and a quantitative change became qualitative, so much so that commoners were eventually able to compete effectively for formal control of the city. Over time, the Genoese elite increasingly switched to commerce and credit, a framework for routinized traders, when defining their relational ties. By the middle of the fifteenth century, along with many of the noble clans a few commoner families completed the oligarchy, and insurance ties became one of the tools used to manage its control operations. 

The urban patriciate had transformed its traditional resources into commercial activities tailored to a small number of clans and was completing its mutation from a medieval feudal authority to a mercantile ruling class of the Renaissance. Conversely, the feudal transitive social order characterized by its division of centralized and hierarchical local clusters was reshaped into intense social activity inside a single homogenous and cohesive elite network that was increasingly segregated from the rest of the population. The remainder of this chapter is divided into three parts. I start by placing this book in the context of the body of scholarship that formed the background of my research and make clear where this book contrasts with it and how it contributes. I then explain some elements of the data collection and indicate the scope condition used to interpret the coded information. Finally, I describe the organization of the book and explain the chronological signification of each chapter.

medieval social and economic development 

This book draws upon a wide range of social science disciplines. First, I consider the literature on the transition from feudalism to capitalism and examine, through analysis of my data set, how it confirms my findings on the false dichotomy between markets and feudalism. Indeed, contrary to the classic Marxist theory exemplified by Dobb (1947) and Holton (1985), the Genoese dominant class did not use all its power to maintain the particular mode of production that underpinned its authority. Instead, it shows that the feudal elite used new commercial institutions to control the polity and actively participated in the sustained accumulation of capital (which is Marx’s precondition to capitalism). Similarly, the same empirical evidence completes more recent transition theory, such as Lachmann’s elite conflict theory (2000). Lachmann, studying a slightly later period, rightly points out that the conflicts among the existing elite left sufficient room for a commercial class to grow. 

However, as this book shows, the elite’s participation in the dynamic of commercial innovation, coupled with the multivalence of their activity, indicates the existence of shifting alliances and more flexibility of economic interest than Lachmann’s elegant model can accommodate. My work also confirms that the Italian case does not fit easily into a Weberian conception of history. In Genoa, the routinization of commerce and the pursuit of repetitive gains preceded the emergence of a bureaucratic legal framework and did not necessarily coincide with the Weberian cultural transition from a traditional to a mean rational attitude. Indeed, twelfth- and thirteenth-century medieval trade was not strategic but opportunistic in nature, and the pursuit of financial wealth was often initiated as a by-product of military undertakings. Over time, it is the cumulative nature of profits – which contrasted with the more discrete and often dichotomic social stratification characteristics of feudal Europe – that engendered the competition for control of the polity and locked in the never-ending capitalist process of accumulation. 

Social Foundation of Economic Development 

By demonstrating, over a long period, the social foundation of commercial arrangements, this book reaffirms the importance of social relationships in economic exchange. For example, the analysis of empirical evidence shows that the institutions that define the price-regulated market follow the rise of the merchant oligarchy so characteristic of the Italian Renaissance. Here, economic institutions provide the boundaries between social networks: They are a formalization of existing practices. Thus, this finding challenges directly the theories of economists such as Douglas North (1973, 1990) and Avner Greif (1998, 2006), who rely on rational choice and human motives to explain the emergence of the mercantile domination. For North, institutional dynamics are driven by economic efficiencies. In particular, he feels that the motor of European medieval economic development is the institution of private property, which ultimately guarantees the healthy functioning of (modern) markets. According to his modernization theory, rising medieval merchants decided on clever arrangements enforced by assertive state policy on the basis of their superior economic efficiency. Others have already noted North’s anachronistic assessment of the ability of political institutions to enforce market contracts.2

 In addition, the analysis of scalable long-distance trade network parameters presented in this book demonstrates that the organization of trade evolved in ways that had to do with more than just strict economic dynamics. Underlying North’s conception of history, as well as that of other economic institutionalists, is the idea that economic dynamics are powered by the rational choice of single actors under certain constraints. Numerous criticisms of the application of this outlook to historical behavior have been formulated. To summarize this debate once more is probably not necessary. Therefore, in the context of this study on partnerships and social dynamics, I will limit myself to recapitulating the most topical objections. First, individuals do not act in a social vacuum. Instead, as Harrison White notes, they intrinsically “come out of relations, out of skills in relations” (2008, p. 135). Second, individual goals, and therefore preference ordering, are dependent on social context and the social values that are constructed with others – often in asymmetric relations. In particular, to assign an economic utility function to encapsulate the role of a medieval actor is out of historical order. Even more than today, with an economic sphere unsegregated for the larger net of sociability, goals were multifarious and defied single-track strategies. Economists relying on game theory are particularly vulnerable to this criticism, since the equilibrium of the models they use to support their views of institutions requires a form of a priori knowledge of optimal economic arrangement, without which their explanations would present the usual circularity of functionalism. It is, indeed, ahistorical to work back from an identifiable institutional role in order to define a “usefulness” that eliminates “failed” historical alternatives. Greif (1998, 2006) is one of those scholars who apply modern economic models when analyzing history. Studying the institutional conditions under which merchants could trust distant agents, he directly addresses the fact that commercial relationships between medieval longdistance operators were changing. In contrast to many of his colleagues, Greif is very attentive to the historical setting, and his work effectively bridges history, sociology, and political science. He recognizes that norms, culture, belief, and, to some extent, social stratification are key elements to understanding economic dynamics. In Institutions and the Path to the Modern Economy: 

Lessons from Medieval Trade (2006), Greif endeavors to establish a general theory of institutions by linking a small sample of case studies drawn from medieval history. However, while this major undertaking provides an interesting and comprehensive framework in which to study the history of institutions, Greif faces important obstacles. First, his institutions remain the incentive structures of a system in which transaction costs have to be minimized. This is a problem especially for medieval history because those costs are hard to measure and are not uniform with respect to social settings. As a result, “transaction costs” constitutes a shaky notion on which to build falsifiable theories that are portable in time and space. Second, Greif relies on game theory models that might be well designed to demonstrate how equilibrium is achieved but are inadequate for uncovering the sources of a changing context over the longue dure´e, as each iteration can only be a static answer to the continuous process of development. Greif’s solution to these two problems is to consider the particular historical setting of each case study in order to include as many features as possible of the specific social dilemmas to be resolved. While a sensible idea in concept, it compromises the precision and parsimony of the econometric models that sustain the analytical legitimacy of his project. This is not only because of the recrudescence of unmeasurable – and often interacting – variables that must be considered, but also because of the numerous potential solutions to his query. Readers familiar with Greif’s work may see parallels in our research endeavors, especially considering that one of his case studies involves medieval Genoa. However, for the most part our enterprises proceed differently. 

The first difference is in scope and focus. While Greif focuses on enforcement mechanisms and coordination,3 my interest in the rise of commercial institutions is wider and deals with the specifics of equity partnerships, credit, and insurance agreements. Why, how, when, and which Genoese made certain arrangements are key questions that this book strives to answer. The second difference is methodological. Whereas Greif proceeds with analytical narratives that interpret historical details as evidence of a set of rational choice equilibriums, this book provides systematic quantitative data drawn from primary sources. In addition, my analysis is not based on any individual mean-ends approach and does not privilege commercial goals in the motives and behaviors of actors. As a result, the reader will learn that, in contrast to Greif’s – and North’s – assumption, it was not economic optimization that drove the key medieval commercial innovation “life cycle.” Rather, it was a change in partner selection, which reflected the dynamic of the Genoese social structure as a whole. Indeed, the network analysis clearly shows that the change in the type of agreements by which merchants were linked follows the demands of social survival and the lure of the opportunities for wealth that resulted from political change. 

In addition, my study also brings to light the relative chronological dissociation between the emergence of modern market instruments and the medieval economic expansion. The network analysis presented in this book demonstrates that the period of highest growth in Genoa’s medieval commerce was supported by custom-based commercial agreements (commendae) forming the nodes of a trade network that was the least hierarchical and least connected of the period covered in the study (Chapter 3). It was, thus, not formalization and organization that prevailed but instead multivalent social positions. This allows one to reflect on the paradoxical emergence of the market as an instrument for the consolidation of social hierarchies, rather than as an arena of economic and social opportunity. It also makes clear the dynamic relationship between microsocial interactions and the technological advancement of European commercial interactions. Thus, the analysis also departs from the classic view of certain scholars such as de Roover (1952) and Weber (1978), who assert that technological innovation in Western Europe4 led to its commercial world supremacy and the concentration of capital that facilitated the modern industrial revolution. 

Opportunistic Merchant. The study presented in this book is relevant to the tradition of social and economic history including scholarship that considers the “Commercial Revolution” and, more generally, the rise of a mercantile society. The intensity of this scholarship has decreased since the work of Sombart (1902), Pirenne (1914, 1987), Lopez (1938), and Lombard (1972); the skillful descriptions of the early Renaissance merchants provided by Sapori (1952), Lane (1944), and Renouard (1950); and the substantial synthesis of Braudel (1949, 1967). In this context, my goal is to revive and freshen up some of the classic questions of the field by applying up-to-date technologies, both in network analysis and in the management of large data sets. As a result, my analysis sometimes supplements but more often contrasts with recent publications, such as those by Dahl (1998) and Spufford (2002), as these have maintained the stereotype of the medieval merchant as a “modern” decision maker in a “traditional” medieval world. Indeed, my work shows that the strength of the Genoese long-distance commercial growth in the twelfth- and thirteenth-centuries stems from opportunistic and heterogeneous social ties, and not from the fixed structures that are associated with routinized mercantile networks. This finding dampens the importance of individual agency as business skills do not play the central role in the commercial success of the emergent Western merchant class. This outlook would not have surprised Braudel, who acknowledges commercial innovation but who argues that the success of medieval long-distance traders was essentially the result of the merchants’ predatory instincts and their relentless pursuit of profits. For him, it is precisely the emergence of a world market – that is, the real possibility of exchanging goods for currency in disconnected geographical areas that often fall under different political jurisdictions – combined with the lack of fair competition that explains how long-distance trade ignited the only potential medieval accumulation of capital (1979, p. 228). In showing that Italian merchants’ commercial trajectories were driven by their social and historical settings, my book also complements the studies of Kedar (1976) and Goldthwaite (1993), who added analysis of cultural and behavioral empirical patterns to the economic motives that had dominated the classic mercantile historiography. Kedar points to the rise in faith to explain a change in business practices among fourteenthcentury Renaissance merchants. According to him, merchants became more risk-adverse, which resulted in slowing social mobility. Goldthwaite also notices a more stagnant social structure in Renaissance Florence, but attributes this historical change to a shift in capital allocation. Studying consumption patterns, he notes the diversion of financial resources away from investment capital and toward expensive acquisition of art and real estate to explain the Renaissance slowdown. 

Genoa Long-Distance Trade. Meticulous studies of the supply and demand for goods have allowed economic historians to describe the mechanisms that created the financial surplus seen in late medieval Europe. Micro studies of price, quantity, and geographical flows of goods and financial assets show how price differences in space and time had fortified the position of a merchant class. Portions of the notarial records have been used by historians to produce a series of studies about medieval Genoa5 on specific topics, and particularly relevant in this context are those on the city’s commercial activities.6 These studies have focused on what, where, and how transactions took place, and they even sometimes function to portray some members of the emerging mercantile elite. In that context, commercial innovation helped merchants to increase their business opportunities and maximize return on investment. Several books have also built on the same model to describe the whole mercantile society of the medieval and early Renaissance periods in Genoa. In depicting various periods and aspects of the Genoese rise to economic prominence, Heers (1961), Balard (1978), and Jehel (1993) have written substantial volumes that provide much valuable quantitative information about Genoese commercial practice. As with other research in the tradition of the Annales School, their use of statistics is not analytical, but their careful accounts describe with precision as many elements of the social life as it is possible to deduce from the primary records. In so doing, their focus is naturally more on quantification of history than on abstraction and theory.7 In a more recent book, S. A. Epstein (1996) also makes use of the wealth of Genoese historical sources to present a well-documented narrative history that covers a period of 500 years. While his book includes references to trade and the economy, Epstein focuses on political and cultural history to create a picture of the mercantile atmosphere that permeated medieval Genoa. However, he does not consider the change in the relations of trade in order to make sense of the Genoese trajectory. As a result, despite interesting discussions on charity and slavery, he is left with the themes of individualism and endemic factionalism as the main thread of the city’s history. In adopting the classic topics that had been developed before him by specialists of medieval Genoa such as Vitale (1956), Airaldi (1986), and Petti Baldi (1976, 1991), S. A. Epstein leaves the reader wondering how his account fits with the city’s mercantile success and its ability to develop ingenious commercial arrangements. By sometimes using the same historical sources as the Genoese specialists, my analysis often runs parallel to their studies, but at the same time differs in focus. To date no work has considered the social structure8 of commercial partnerships, despite the fact that these partnerships usually lasted several months and were crucial for early capitalist activity in medieval Europe. Indeed, although every aforementioned study recognizes the importance of commerce in the city history, none focuses on the city trade dynamics – that is, on the ongoing change in the set of social ties that dealt with the production, transportation, and distribution of goods. This is an unsatisfying approach because the record shows that despite the reputation of the Genoese people for individualism, medieval longdistance ventures usually involved multiple parties. For this book’s analysis, I did not resort to any cultural assumptions or any actor role theories. The Genoese might or might not have been more individualistic than their contemporaries, but they definitely worked and invested together. Moreover, and without contesting the reality of continual infighting (which also occurred in most other Italian city-states), the record shows a series of close associations demonstrating that when it came to long-distance trade, boundaries between factions were a lot less sharp than what the historiography portrays. Direct and indirect ties between members of opposite factions are not rare in the data set. Furthermore, when their common interests were threatened, the Genoese deployed the military might of the entire community, which, as I explain at the end of Chapter 2, was key to their economic ascension. These facts attest to a social life that accommodated many more compromises than the city historiography often represents. We forget that, between the historical events that we compress into single time lines for heuristic reasons, there is real social time giving people many opportunities to find common ground. In medieval Genoa, the appeal of military bounty and, later, of profit from long-distance trade was surely facilitating the erosion of individual antagonistic memories. In building my analysis on the change in the trade network, it is certainly my aim to capture the continuous character of history with its protagonists involved in ongoing human interaction.

Dynamic of Social Ties. This book’s focus on social ties in the emergence of the mercantile organization in medieval Europe contributes to the body of literature that, following Polanyi (1957), has shown the social nature of economic exchange. In particular, my research aims to put in historical motion the findings of sociologists such as Granovetter and H. C. White, who have statically demonstrated the social construction of markets. It does this by showing that the history of economic institutional frameworks was as much a condition for economic growth as it was the carrier of the rules that organized the transformation of ties that gave rise to a merchant class. In showing that markets were not merely price-mechanism institutions, Polanyi has opened a line of research demonstrating that various forms of markets can operate simultaneously and not necessarily in chronological sequence. For example, Zelizer’s (1985) cultural study on the development of life insurance in the United States points out the importance of social norms in economic exchange. For their part, the economic historians Hoffmann, Postel-Vinay, and Rosenthal’s (2000) analysis of the central role of notaries in seventeenth- to nineteenthcentury Parisian credit transactions shows that markets can strive even under conditions of asymmetric and compartmentalized information. Similarly, in medieval Genoa, the feudal social order with its traditions of birth order and mutual obligations coexisted with the commercial sphere, and its emerging calculative business competence. This book is historical in that I unfold details of medieval social ties. Similarly, my account of the intricacies of commercial agreements improves our understanding of how such formal contracts took hold in medieval Europe. However, my objective is not simply descriptive. Instead, in this book social ties form the empirical trials that are used to construct theories about human interactions and how they congeal into relationship dynamics. The aim is not simply to understand the structure of social relations. Crucially, I also intend to show how those structures evolved through time. Thus, this book directly engages the field of historical sociology, an area of study that, following Tilly’s The Vende´e (1964), has produced a body of research that is rich in theory and methodological advances. Although this work is not tied to any single  methodological approach, graph theoretic network methods are a key facet of the analytical techniques I use. While the works of network structural theorists9 have guided some of my methodological choices, the monographs of Bearman (1991, 1993), Gould (1991, 1995), Barkey and van Rossen (1997), Padgett (2001), and Erikson and Bearman (2006), among others, have provided me with examples of the systematic examination of historical relational data. This said, despite my commitment to algebraic methods, the fact remains that, whenever possible, I made sure to test my results by using other analytical resources to make sense of historical events. The longue dure´e is another key element of the analysis presented here, and it addresses a major quandary of social history: how to capture the intrinsic continuity of social life. A common strategy is to read a crystallized form of social structure into the institutional history, where the constantly renegotiated rules of social encounters are expressed. However, unless the duration of a study is long enough to include an institutional dynamic, it is often impossible to dissociate the rules of the institutions from the social dynamic itself. For example, to infer the early Renaissance Florentine elite organization from accounting ledgers presents a crucial problem: the data production and organization already contains the rules of the mercantile domination and cannot account for the genesis of the Renaissance social structure. In other words, studies often use information that already expresses the social structure they aim to analyze. In particular, understanding the origin of the mercantile domination through the repertoire10 of the mercantile classes has a tautological feel to it. In this book, commercial institutions are not taken for granted. Instead, the analysis relies on an extensive collection of data to focus on the long-run historical dynamic that brought about the emergence of credit, temporary equity, and insurance relationships in medieval Europe.

medieval data The historical evidence available for medieval societies is a lot sparser than that available for the modern period, and this is especially true of quantitative information. In this light, this book is original in that it uses what is, comparatively, a very large data set to study medieval social dynamics. The bulk of the data was obtained by compiling more than 11,000 commercial agreements harvested from the 20,000 notarial records I examined. In addition to contracts drawn up by more than 135 different notaries, I have also used a variety of other primary sources to collect supplementary information about the parties, building a data set containing more than 18,500 ties covering a period of 280 years. It includes roughly 9,700 individuals from 4,000 different families. I coded not only details about the transactions at hand, but also, when available, a variety of information about the parties as well. This included information such as occupation, gender, formal status, geographic origins, and kinship ties. During my research, I have identified ten types of commercial agreements,11 each having very regular features. The largest number of entries in the data base (almost 9,000) refers to temporary equity partnerships, which are concentrated in the early phase of the commercial expansion (1150–1250). Credit agreements (more than 7,300 ties organized by 6 different legal types) display the most stable temporal distribution in the data set, whereas the insurance relationships recorded (about 2,600) cover the shortest period (1350–1440). 

Notarial Records Notarii publici (notaries)12 were a typical element of urban life in medieval Italy. They were vested with the public authority of the emperor13 and are, thus, one of the links between the feudal tradition and the written contractual system that emerged as a way of organizing new social relationships (Clanchy 1979). They are omnipresent in Genoa’s daily life. We can find them writing wills at deathbeds, drawing up marriage agreements in the houses of patrician families, and authenticating commercial documents in town squares and churches.14 Each Italian city collected its notaries’ documents and preserved them in the public archives. In Genoa, more complete and earlier cartularies – the large books in which the notary recorded legal documents – have been saved than anywhere else in Europe. Reading the notaries’ cartularies presents enormous paleographic difficulties for anyone who has not specialized in medieval writing. Luckily, over the last 130 years, several scholars15 have published transcriptions, in the original Latin, of almost 15,000 of the surviving records. I have coded all these transcripts but still could not build a continuous time series past the mid thirteenth century.16 By good fortune, however, I was able to consult the private collections of two leading historians on medieval Genoa, Georges Jehel and Michel Balard, each of whom has independently, and very graciously, allowed me the use of his private collection of transcripts, documents that account for years of research on the Genoese archives. Their combined 4,800þ records fill the temporal gap in the published sources at least until the first quarter of the fourteenth century. In addition, the geographical focus of their respective researches (western Mediterranean trade in Jehel’s case and eastern Mediterranean trade in Balard’s), added to the extensive published sources regarding the northern trade,17 provide a diverse and reliable sample. Access to private transcripts has also increased to 135 names the pool of individual notaries I coded from, and has thus further reduced the risk of sample bias resulting from any specialization in the notaries’ clientele. Indeed, published transcripts account for at least 90 individual notaries,18 while the contracts I analyzed in Balard and Jehel’s private notes were gathered from 86 notaries, about half of whom do not appear in any published records. For the unpublished names, both scholars catalogued their research according to the Genoese archival recording system, which attributes a single notary’s name to cartularies that may contain the work of several. In that light, the number 135 is a conservative estimate. In any case, I can safely assert that I coded contracts from at least fourteen individual notaries for the period 1154–1210, forty-one for the period 1211–50, forty-nine for 1251–1300, thirty-eight for 1301–50, twentynine for 1351–1400, and nineteen for 1401–40. 19 Among the notarial records, I selected for coding all commercial contracts that pertained directly or indirectly to long-distance trade and that had a duration attached to them (which eliminated a small set of cash transactions). I ended up with more than 11,000 contracts for which I recorded the following information: 1) the year, month, and day of the agreement; 2) the names and roles of the participants – usually a pair, but sometimes up to five for equity partnerships and up to sixteen for insurance agreements; 3) the size of the transaction – ranging from a partnership in 1203 between a priest and an occasional traveler for a venture to Acre (in today’s Israel)20 involving a single pound to a £6,500 investment to Sicily among three members of the powerful Spinola and Cibo clans in 1377; 21 and 4) the legal type of the commercial agreement (a loan, insurance, exchange contract, commenda, etc.). In addition, different types of agreements contained specific details that enriched my analysis. For example, the exchange contracts indicate a currency rate, while the promissory loans specify payment schedules, and the insurance agreements name the captain of the ship.22 In addition to the documents involving commercial ties, I have also consulted, in the same cartularies, civil records such as wills and dowries. These I used to tackle the difficult problem of sorting out and identifying kinship and people’s professions. This was particularly crucial because aside from the members of a small number of families, first names are often followed by filiations only, usually the father, and/or a topographic qualification. In certain cases, people are also identified by a profession or a word suggesting a professional activity, such as Wilielmus peliparius (William “the pelter”).23 A first comment is that, in the thousands of documents that I analyzed dating from before 1250, I almost never encountered a word that evoked a strictly commercial activity, other than a few mentions of bancherius (banker). The quantity of these records, unique in medieval Europe, should not hide the fact that any surviving medieval documents are rare jewels for us. It is, therefore, very difficult to establish a measure of the selectivity bias on our samples, and the precision of very sophisticated statistical measures should not be mistaken for veracity. First, despite the large number of notaries represented in the data set, the surviving documents are the work of a portion of the pool of notaries at work at the time. Second, the records do not constitute a continuous or uniform time series, and my temporal comparison should be viewed with caution. Third, the practice of using notaries declined toward the beginning of the fourteenth century – because of the development of literacy and the increased use of bilateral agreements. As a result, private contracts became progressively more common, eventually gaining legal power. These caveats aside, the data set is large and diverse enough to allow us to be reasonably confident that it is representative of the nature of early commercial activity. It is just that we do not have, as we do with random samples, enough information to quantify the degree of reliability. Other Primary Sources. The remaining primary sources that complete the empirical foundation of my research fall into four categories. First, the Annales Januences (the Genoese chronicle) presents the official version of the Commune’s history from 1099 onward. Despite the bias inherent in any official account of that period, the text offers a detailed background that can be used, with confidence, to assess other official documents. Second, a collection of administrative documents as well as ecclesiastic registers provides an insight into Genoese medieval politics. In particular, the Liber Jurium, a thirteenth-century compilation of a large number of official documents, provides a few lists of citizens who participated in various official functions or who voted on important communal issues. Third, financial records, such as fragments of public bank records and the partial fiscal lists for 1414 and 1440, 24 provide supplementary information about the financial dealings of specific clans. Finally, the oldest surviving Genoese customs records, the earliest extant Italian registers, supply precise information about importers for the years 1376 and 1377. 

Such records, meticulously transcribed by John Day (1963), provide the custom dues of all Genoese importers, and thus exhaustive quantitative information on the mercantile activities of hundreds of individuals. Scope, Periodicity, Monetary Scale, and Profits. Before I conclude this first chapter with a succinct description of the way in which this book has been organized, I need to make four brief notes about scope, periodicity, monetary scale, and long-distance trade profits. First, regarding scope: political and cultural histories provide crucial insights into the emergence of new modes of social organization during the Renaissance. Without denying the validity of such studies, the present research focuses on the interplay of commercial institutions and social dynamics. In the interest of maintaining a credible scope of study, I borrow only sporadically from other sources for the purposes of my analytical inquiries. This being said, I do rely on a wide range of evidence (such as records of feudal vassalage ties, political appointments, and tax records) to best define the dynamics of the elite families, as well as to specify elements of social mobility. By the same token, geographical comparison is not a central element of this research, as no chronologically corresponding records in Europe survived. 

Because the strength of this study rests on linking micro social processes with larger classical sociological questions, the absence of comparable data for other cases limits the usefulness of extensive comparison. However, when relevant and possible, I position the Genoese social processes in the broader context of medieval Europe. Second, regarding periodicity: picking the starting point for a continuous social process is clearly impossible. As Woloch (1994) and before him Tocqueville (1952) have demonstrated, even such a monumental historical event as the French Revolution cannot always be thought of as bounded within a specific historical period. With this in mind, the period covered by the formal analysis was dictated by the oldest surviving notarial cartulary, which was minuted in 1154 by Giovanni Scriba, and by a wish to include enough data pertaining to fifteenth-century social relationships to capture both the whole transition that brought about the early modern social organization and the changes in the formal agreements that organized commercial encounters. This said, it was not my purpose to restrict my study to even this long a period, as I bring forth evidence from the tenth and eleventh centuries to confirm the feudal origin of the Genoese Commune, and as I refer to the clans’ political positions in the early sixteenth-century to assess the relationship between commercial dynamics and the formal status of the elite. 

Social dynamics – that is, the study of changes in social organizations over time – is a central concept of this book. My objective is to describe not only the trajectories but also the mechanisms that explain the relationship between the changes in the structure of social ties and the “life cycle” of commercial institutions. In this light, the emphasis on continuity inherent in my research defies the concept of thresholds between periods, and the reader should not attach too much meaning to the words medieval and Renaissance, as I use them more as linguistic conveniences than as expressions of epochal difference. 

Still, I do object to the use of the term “medieval Italian trade” by historians who produce evidence dating almost exclusively from the second half of the fourteenth to the end of the fifteenth century. It is with this in mind, and notwithstanding the usual controversy, that I assume that, chronologically speaking, the Italian urban Renaissance began sometime between 1325 and 1375. There is nothing original in picking these dates. For most scholars, the markers of the epochal change are cultural. For example, the medieval Dante and Giotto died in 1321 and 1337, respectively, whereas the Renaissance Boccaccio wrote the Decameron in 1353, and Donatello’s David dates from 1408. 25 My signposts regard social interactions. Thus, as the reader will learn, the dates 1325 to 1375 roughly designate a period during which social mobility declined and the distinctions among occupational categories became clearer, all bound by more rigid social ties among the elite. Third, regarding monetary scale: this study covers three centuries of commercial ties, and I provide historical evidence that is expressed in monetary units. Examples include income and wealth measures, taxes and public debt levels, trade volumes, real estate prices, and payments for the transfer of feudal rights. Throughout the book, unless specified otherwise, I consistently use Genoese pounds (£) as the currency of reference. This means that I have converted records expressed in a foreign currency into pounds, using an exchange rate computed from exchange contracts or, when available, from those published in the secondary literature. However, consistent use of a currency of reference does not solve two thorny issues when dealing with money over a long period of time: the depreciation of money and the variation in purchasing power across time. The value of currencies changes over time, and a comparison between epochs is hard. The usual solution is to pick a baseline date and then use inflation indices to discount the monetary value back to that time. 

This is  impossible in the context of this book, however, as no reliable or representative inflation indices are available for the medieval period in Genoa. Another key problem is that inflation indices only relate to average prices. They therefore do not reflect price structure dynamics and are not helpful when one is working to understand various social group consumption patterns. Thus, even if a reliable Genoese medieval price index were available, the wide disparity in marginal income would exacerbate the problems associated with using a “constant” currency level. I thus elected to use then-current prices throughout. By and large, this should not pose a big problem because changes in relative values such as capital allocation, wealth distribution, and transaction amount standard deviation are more topical to this work than are straight comparisons of monetary value over time. 

With little knowledge of medieval price structure, another problem about monetary units becomes obvious: it is almost impossible for the reader to understand or even “feel” what a galley oarsman could purchase in the 1150s with the £4 he earned annually. Historians sometimes specify the price of precious commodities in order to establish a baseline, but knowing that £6 could purchase 10 grams of pepper or 7 grams of gold offers limited help to the unspecialized reader. It is probably more indicative to know that during that period, a slave could be bought for between £5 and £10; a servant earned £2 to £3 a year; a storefront could be rented for £3 to £4 per year; the price of a mule was £5 to £8; and sufficient food to feed an adult could cost about £3 a year. Although this kind of information does not solve the problem associated with assessing relative purchasing power in medieval Genoa, at least it provides the minimum information to figure out roughly the value of the Genoese pound at the time. 

This is why the reader will, when relevant, find in the text prices of goods and services. In addition, the reader can consult Appendix A, which lists a few prices – drawn from primary and secondary sources – that refer to a variety of goods and services available in medieval Genoa. Fourth, regarding long-distance trade investment return: economic historians agree that medieval long-distance trade was very profitable. If goods arrived at their destination, a hefty profit could be expected. Unfortunately, we have very little data with which to systematically quantify the return on investments. In particular, the notarial records rarely contain figures showing the outcome of a given venture. A further problem is the lack of information about speed of capital turnover. For example, it is generally presumed that commendae to Sicily or to the North African coast were less profitable than those to the eastern Mediterranean. However, this is debatable because voyages to the former destinations were much shorter, and the capital turnover could therefore be twice as fast. 

At the same time, this logical line of thought exemplifies the danger of applying modern economic measures when thinking about medieval profits. Indeed, ships did not necessarily sail direct routes (see Chapter 3); travelers were not always in a hurry to come back home; and the risks of travel varied according to political and military settings. In addition, upon returning to Genoa, long-distance participants might not be able – or willing – to reinvest their venture’s proceeds as quickly as modern strategic investors would. Fortunately, even though the change in capital structure is one of the elements needed to explain the Genoese social organization dynamic, precise information about return on investment is not necessary to support the analysis presented in this book. Still, the scant information about proceeds provides some sense of the magnitude of profits. For instance, a documented series of three ventures for the years 1156–58 shows return of 36%, 96%, and 59%,26 while a small sample of thirteenth-century commendae shows between 20% and 110% profit. Keeping in mind the anecdotal character of these numbers, the range of profits does not seem to be connected to the identity of the parties or to the nature – other than destination – of the transaction at hand. Another way to assess profitability is by examining long-distance credit rates. Obviously, the medieval borrower must have been fairly confident that his return would exceed the 40% to 100% rate applied to sea loans (which included coverage of the transportation risk; see Chapter 4) to the Levant, or the 25% to 45% rate applied to the less distant western Mediterranean ventures. Similarly, an analysis of the exchange contracts at the Champagne Fairs, which were usually payable within less than three months, indicates an implicit interest rate that varied between 12% and 20% (thus an annual compound rate between 57% and 107%).

organization of the book The rest of this book is divided into four chapters and a conclusion. The second chapter establishes an early twelfth-century baseline from which to study the development of medieval Genoa throughout the next three centuries, when social encounters were being increasingly defined by commercial agreements. In the first section of that chapter, I begin by placing the development of Genoa in the context of early medieval Mediterranean history and by tracing the formal origins of the Genoese Commune to the feudal base of its social organization. I then review the importance of the Crusades in the context of Genoa’s development and show how the warrior class actively participated in the long-distance trade expansion. In the second section, I review early medieval commerce both in continental Europe and in the more advanced eastern community. This is done to familiarize the reader with the trading practices that existed before Genoa rose to commercial prominence from the mid thirteenth century on. 

I show that Genoa benefited from the multivalence of its commercial operators, who, unlike members of preexisting trade networks, could draw on the financial capital and the military support of the whole city to take over the growing long-distance trade. In many ways, it is precisely because the Italians were not specialized merchants that their commerce flourished during the early phase of the commercial expansion. Each of the three chapters that follow addresses one of three main types of commercial ties: temporary equity partnerships, credit, and insurance. While the subjects of these three chapters are not considered in a chronological manner per se, the chapters nevertheless overlap to provide complete coverage of the period 1150 to 1450, highlighting the “life cycle” of each of the three institutional frameworks. As such, the three chapters bring to light the close association between social dynamics and economic history, by showing what kinds of social structure was historically associated with what kinds of formal economic arrangements. These chapters are each divided into three sections preceded by a brief historical introduction to the period being considered. Each includes 1) a detailed account of the legal and economic background of the commercial framework that is the focus of the chapter, 2) a description of the social characteristics of the network’s main protagonists, and 3) an analysis of the network dynamic as well as an explanation of the partner selection pattern. Chapter 3 deals with the commenda and societas maris, the two welldefined medieval forms of equity association contracts that organized most social pairings during the emergence of Genoa’s long-distance trade. I show that these two institutions, which originated in the eastern Mediterranean, were perfectly adapted to the opportunistic nature of trade and the heterogeneity of commercial ties that characterized the growth period of the Genoese long-distance trade. As a result, the analysis of the database provides insight into various social categories, including those into which women, artisans, and professionals fall. 

Building a series of networks that cover the period from 1154 to 1315, I show that, over time, status and occupational categories became salient features of partner selection, and that this in turn precipitated the decline of the temporary partnership paradigm. Thus the data offer a full institutional “life cycle” because even though both societas and commenda partnerships were still sporadically in use in the fifteenth century, they had lost their significance toward the beginning of the fourteenth century. Chapter 4 takes up credit-based instruments. This type of agreement spans the whole period under study, and an analysis of the data set shows that its form and social usage mutated several times. The first section of the chapter describes the functioning of medieval credit. After this, I demonstrate that, unlike temporary partnerships, credit was a commercial framework of routinized traders. Thus, the credit network is a good locus for studying the rise of merchants. The surviving records show that, in the early part of the period covered by my analysis, credit instruments – especially promissory notes – were overwhelmingly contracted by foreign itinerant merchants, often when trading with the northern fairs. From the mid thirteenth century on, however, the Genoese elite increasingly used credit when defining their relational ties. 

When the Genoese opened the maritime road to the North Sea around 1280, the records show that they intensified the use of credit and currency-related instruments to supplant the traditional itinerant merchant of the northern fair. Unlike commendae and societas maris, credit-based contracts were important not because they were a revolutionary social institution, but because their use consolidated commercial identities during the period. For example, the typical credit innovation of the medieval period, the exchange contract (which is the ancestor of the letter of credit coupled with a currency transaction) was never an instrument of social heterogeneity. However, it became a prevalent institution, and as such it provided a social arena that stabilized social ties and promoted symmetric relationships, which in turn induced homogeneity. 

Chapter 5 examines the early use of the insurance contract from its inception, around 1350, to the middle of the fifteenth century. Although Genoa’s decline is amplified by the historiography, this period does nevertheless mark the end of the city’s rapid territorial and economic growth. It was also during this period that the city’s public finances were reorganized to consolidate the control of the dominant families – a process that culminated with the establishment of the Bank of San Giorgio in  1407 – and my data analysis confirms the slowdown of the relative social mobility of the thirteenth century. In this fifth chapter, I sample more than 2,400 insurance ties to identify the core oligarchic families of the period. I then formulate a probabilistic model of commercial partner selection. The nature of these relationships is very different from that of the ties of the commercial network of the commenda period. Here, the names of almost all of the elite families appear continuously. These point to domination by a group, whose members also control the city’s public finances and occupy various political positions. My calculations show that the network of Genoa’s elite is dense and highly cohesive, and that it cannot be partitioned.

 No important clan (or alberghi, as they were known in Genoa) is excluded, and my model indicates that each family had a propensity to spread its business between peer families. Thus, the insurance contract helped to consolidate and to define the social boundaries of the elite. In the conclusion of the book, I consider the ways in which the data I gathered allows us to improve our understanding of the complex processes by which social relations suitable for the expansion and ultimate domination of modern capitalism arose. Specifically, while expansion in trade volumes, increased monetization, and capital accumulation are certainly markers of the transition to capitalism, historical continuity is to be found in the ongoing development of complex social relationships and of the institutions that contain the constantly renegotiated rules of their interactions.

 

Link 

Press Here