Iris Origo - The Merchant of Prato

Iris Origo

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THE MERCHANT OF PRATO

Daily Life in a Medieval Italian City

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First published by Jonathan Cape 1957

Published in Peregrine Books 1963

Published in Penguin Books 1992

First published in Penguin Classics 2017

Copyright Iris Origo 1957, 1963

ISBN: 978-0-241-30381-8

Iris Origo, the Marchesa Origo (19021988), was an American writer who lived in Southern Tuscany. Her other books include War in the Val dOrcia, Leopardi and The Last Attachment.

Lhistorien ressemble logre de la fable. L o il flaire la chair humaine, il sait que l est son gibier.

BLOCH: Mtier dhistorien

In the square of the busy little city of Prato, beneath the faded brick walls of the Palazzo Comunale in which he sat as a councillor, stands the statue of a merchant. Clothed in the round biretta and sweeping robes of the fourteenth century, he holds in his hand a sheaf of bills of exchange. This is the man to whom Prato owes the foundation of her riches: Francesco di Marco Datini.

The story of the rise of his trading houses in Avignon, Prato, and Florence, in Pisa and Genoa, in Spain and Majorca, is as remarkable as the success-story of a modern millionaire, and quite as fully recorded. His fellow-citizens, to this day, pride themselves on it and dwell above all on the charity which he bequeathed to the poor of Prato, not only his whole fortune of 70,000 gold florins, but the very house in which he lived, and in it, his greatest gift to posterity, his papers. During his lifetime he himself collected every letter and business document he received, telling the managers of all his branches to do the same, and in his will he left instructions for all these papers to be collected and preserved in his own house.

These instructions were carried out somewhat carelessly, for although there is a record in 1560 that Francesco di Marcos ledgers and papers had been carefully put away in cupboards in his own house, they were found 300 years later in sacks in a dusty recess under the stairs. But in the long run this neglect may not prove to have been entirely unfortunate. Bene qui latuit, bene vixit. A few of these pages were nibbled by mice or worms; but at least thieves and fools remained unaware of their existence and when, in 1870, some learned citizens of Prato brought them to light, an astonishing number still remained: some five hundred ledgers and account-books, about three hundred deeds of partnership (some of them belonging to other small companies, connected with his own), insurance policies and bills of lading, bills of exchange and cheques and, above all, some 140 thousand letters, of which eleven thousand belong to his private correspondence, and the rest, in 503 files, to the various aspects of his commercial activity. Thus has been preserved, in the very house of the man whose life-work it represented, an invaluable, and indeed, in its fullness and homogeneity, a unique record of medieval trade.

The picture of commercial activity which these letters present is very remarkable. When Datini returned to Italy from Avignon, in 1382, his branch in that city (entrusted to two Tuscan partners) continued to be as active as before; and he at once opened a central house in Prato, and soon after branches in Florence, Pisa, and Genoa, in Barcelona and Valencia, and finally in Majorca and Ibiza, all managed by his own partners or fattori on the spot, but controlled by his own untiring pen. Between these fondaci sailed the ships which carried his wares: lead and alum and pilgrims robes from Roumania, slaves and spices from the Black Sea, English wool from London and Southampton and African or Spanish wool from Majorca and Spain, salt from Ibiza, silk from Venice, leather from Cordova and Tunis, wheat from Sardinia and Sicily, oranges and dates and bark and wine from Catalonia . Small wonder that Francescos fellow-citizens gaped, as the great bales came pouring in, and whispered that he was the greatest merchant who ever came out of Prato!

Some of the business documents in these archives have already formed the subject of special monographs; others (especially those concerning deeds of partnership, bills of exchange, bills of lading, insurance policies and other contracts) have been fully studied and described in Professor Bensas full-length study of Datini and his trade. And owing to the research and enterprise of Professor Federigo Melis an exhibition opened in May 1955, in the Palazzo Pretorio of Prato, the Mostra dell Archivio Datini, enabled the general public to see, for the first time, not only a selection of these papers, but much additional material: portraits of some of Datinis contemporaries and pictures of the setting in which they lived, maps showing his main trading-routes by land and sea, pictures of the places from which his merchandise came, and in a room given up to the cloth industry of Prato charts and account-books and letters showing the whole complicated organization of a medieval cloth manufacturer, from the first purchase of the imported wool in Majorca, Catalonia, or the Cotswolds, through all the stages of spinning, weaving, dyeing, and finishing, until the cloth was sent abroad again for sale.

These studies, however, have dealt chiefly with Datinis trade. Except for the delightful letters written to him by his friend and notary, Ser Lapo Mazzei, which were published by Cesare Guasti in 1880, his private correspondence has remained almost untouched in particular, the letters he exchanged with his wife, his partners and his fattori. It is from these letters that most of the information in this book is derived although indeed even now these sources are far from being exhausted, or even fully tapped. This book is merely an attempt to draw, from this vast and miscellaneous material, a picture (even if fragmentary and incomplete) of the daily life of the time, and a portrait of the merchant himself, of his wife, his friends, and his underlings.

The flavour of these letters is completely consistent: in the vision of life they represent, only two things have any importance religion and trade. On the first page of Datinis great ledgers stood the words, In the name of God and of profit, and these were the only goals to which these merchants aspired: profit in this world or in the next, as if the whole of life were one vast counting-house and at its end, the final Day of Accounting. Many of the chief events of the time have found their way into these papers but the peep-hole through which they are observed is always the merchants, on the look-out for a good deal. A new Popes election a truce with the Duke of Milan, an approaching famine, a treaty between Christians and Turks, a royal wedding are all merely grist to his unresting mill.