Leggete
questo documento in inglese. Vi servirà a conoscere e capire il periodo ed il
contesto storico del brano che leggeremo tratto da “I libri della famiglia” di
Leon Battista Alberti. Poi rispondete alle domande che seguono.
Merchant Writers
of the
Italian Renaissance
edited by
Vittore Branca
translated from the Italian
by
Murtha Baca
MARSILIO
PUBLI SHERS
NEW YORK
Introduction
In the Decameron, Boccaccio recounted the epic
of the Italian merchants of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries in Europe,
and even on the African and Asian shores of the Mediterranean.1
In the thriving civilization of the late Middle Ages
in Italy, Florence was one of the main centers of the new power that was
infringing on the power of the military and the power of the Church, and was a
prime mover of the “economic revolution” (as Robert S. Lopez defined it) that
characterized the age straddling the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.2
Economic power conditioned both the political and military power of
kings and lords and the religious power of popes and bishops. Merchants and
bankers could “make and break” kings, as one of them, Nicola Acciaiuoli (who
had done so with the King of Naples), said. They could start and stop wars at
the drop of a bar (as Bardi and Peruzzi did with Prance and England); they
could get popes elected, have prelates and lords excommunicated (as Acciaiuoli
and Frescobaldi did). Merchants had become the “fifth element” of the universe,
along with air, water, earth, and fire. They were the “pillars of Christianity”
— that is, of civilization — as the famous historian of the time, Giovanni
Villani, characterized them. Florence was the great center of banking and
commerce in continental Europe and, through the Angevins in Naples, the
Byzantine world as well; it dominated the new, the first true
economic-commercial organization, based on the invention of double-entry
accounting, on the letter of exchange that made it possible to move millions beyond
any frontier, and on the stability and internationality of money (during the
late Middle Ages, the Florentine florin played the same role that the dollar
does today).
Boccaccio himself had gone back and forth between
France and Italy, Greece and Asia Minor between about 1330 and 1340, when he
was working for the powerful Bardi trading company of Angevin Naples. Tints he
had been in a position to appreciate the “totally material” writing of
annotations, diaries, and first-hand accounts by those busy men of action who
worked for the banking-commercial-industrial “companies.” Boccaccio made these
often exceptional people the protagonists -- be they heroes or victims — of
several tales in his masterwork, the Decameron. He captured the
uninhibited, bold, adventurous character of these men who travelled throughout
Europe and from one side of the Mediterranean to the other. He portrayed their
commitment, their culture, and their pioneering spirit, indirectly giving his
seal of approval to their writings, in which those talents and that adventurous,
exciting life were reflected.3
It was no accident that the earliest merchants to
take up the pen were two men who worked in the circle of the Boccaccio family;
in fact, one of them, Paolo da Certaldo, was from Boccaccio’s home town. And it
is no coincidence that in the wake of certain pages by Boccaccio, the
first-hand accounts of Italian merchants in later years took the form of a
fascinating, original literature that characterized the most advanced
civilization of the city-states of the late Middle Ages and High Renaissance,
from Boccaccio to
Machiavelli, Guicciardini, and Cellini all the way to the diarists of the
sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. This was a genre of writing that
flourished in hundreds of examples and different experiences, a genre that is
now studied side by side with the Petrarchan genre of lyric poetry, the
narrative genre established by Boccaccio, and the romantic—chivalric genre, as
one of the most typical of Italian society and culture between the fourteenth
and seventeenth centuries (and as the richest source of private diaries before
the French diarists of the late Renaissance onward).
This was a genre that might proudly proclaim the
fourteenth-century motto: “No enterprise, no matter how small, can begin or end
without these three things: power, knowledge, and love.”[1] And the revival of interest in it seems in some way
natural in our own times — an interest in writers not of words but of facts and
concrete realities, in writings that are not literary, but rather colloquial,
personal accounts of the everyday realities and problems of ordinary men
concerned with goods and money, home and family, private and public affairs;
men with the urge to possess and dominate and the awareness of how fleeting it
all is, man’s pride and his inadequacies, his aggressive materialism and his
insuppressible need for God. The middle-class merchants of the late Middle Ages
and early Renaissance felt and lived and took for granted these eternal realities
of man and existence—. not in an intellectual or literary way, but in the most
ordinary way, in their own everyday activities. They recorded their memoirs in
the direct, concrete tone of entrepreneurs who left room for emotions,
imagination, and fantasy alongside accounts and calculations. They wrote about
things and events and people involved in production; they were writers like
Edison, Ford, Krupp, Gualino, Pirelli, Mattioli, and Rusca from the recent
past, or Iacocca, Agnelli, Floriani, Travaglia, Renault, and Pompidou today.
They were experiencing those realities at a time — like ours — when the ideals
and powers and institutions (Church and Empire) that had ruled society for
centuries were in a state of crisis, and the ones that would dominate
society in the centuries to come (supra-national economic institutions, large
nations and their national agendas) were coming into being. Most of these
merchants were writing in the tempestuous atmosphere of the decline of the
Florentine city-state and its guilds: the time between the brief, naive,
populistic Ciompi rebellion in 1378 and the signory of the by then ruling
Florentine family, the Medici, who had already been cunningly working behind
the scenes in the person of Salvestro de’ Medici at the time of the Ciompi
uprising. This was also the time of Florence’s most intense, dogged, aggressive
campaign for supremacy not only in Tuscany, but in all of Italy.
Corresponding to the turbulently evolving political
situation, on the economic level there was the first ascendancy of Florence
during the thirteenth century (the florin was first coined in 1253) and the
beginning of the fourteenth century, and then the economic depression during
the mid-fourteenth century, with the dramatic failures of the houses of Bardi
and Peruzzi and the devaluation of the florin, followed finally by the economic
recovery of the late fourteenth century, which continued throughout the fifteenth.
This was an economic-mercantile revolution, or rather an evolution less
turbulent than the political upheaval, but no less profound and decisive — and
it had already been perspicaciously envisioned and foretold by Boccaccio in the
mercantile epic of the Decameron.
A transformation of Florentine economic and social
life took place starting at the time of the greatest European and Mediterranean
expansion under the regime of the guilds and “companies” (there were about zoo
guilds in Florence in the early fourteenth century), at the time of the most
cautious albeit fortunate capitalistic organization, after the depression
mentioned above, under the oligarchic domination of the wealthy and according
to the directives, no longer of the guilds, but of the banks and “holding
companies, which had their ultimate example in the Medici. The pioneering
spirit of the adventurous merchants who had set out to conquer the Occident
arid the Orient, the discovery of new lands (Boccaccio himself recounted the
discovery of the Canary Islands) out of a thirst for wealth and power but with
a spirit of adventure and of human generosity as well, came to be supplanted by
a systematic, cautious exploitation of those conquests through the
accumulation of wealth. The powerful, explosive, expansive age of the Wool
Guild, the Exchange, and the “companies” — the age of the Mozzi, the
Frescobaldi, the Bardi, the Peruzzi, and the Acciaiuoli dynasties —was
succeeded by the age of the highly calculating, almost inordinate cautiousness
of the Datini, Albizzi, Strozzi, Ricasoli, Capponi, Pitti, Niccolini, Alberti,
and Medici families. These families were also concerned about controlling the
political situation in order to profit from the monti (public funds), to
be able to obtain reductions on taxes and forced loans, to establish
international relationships of privilege, or even to set up monopolies via
official missions and with the backing of popes and kings.
The audacious, mad dash
for wealth, the building of capital via the most open, ruthless economic cycle
(from usury to exploitative production to dumping), the conquest of the
European and Mediterranean markets even at the cost of violence, gave way to a
cautious, deliberate quest for solid property investments, farming, or easy
shortcuts to wealth (gambling, diplomatic posts as a source of "insider
trading,” manipulation of currency values). The motto of these new merchants
seems to have been the one we find in Morelli: “Don’t do too much; it’s better
to play it safe.” Little by little, the various “companies” that had operated
as far away as the distant lands of the Orient were replaced by banks that
concentrated their operations on money — often public monies — in Florence,
Italy, and Western Europe. In spite of a pathetic effort to create a “broad
florin” in 1422, the Florentine florin, the true “dollar” of the late Middle
Ages, was losing to the Venetian ducat its position as the prevailing currency
of Europe and the Mediterranean.
The finest books of memoirs, the richest in humanity and narrative spirit from those of
Velluti, Morcili, and Pitti to those of Bernardo Machiavelli, reflect this
tempestuous political and social background, rhetorically dominated by the
values and myths (justice, peace, civic unity) of the libertas of the
Florentine city-state. But later these myths came to be disturbed by blinding
flashes of light and sinister shadows, great nostalgia and anguished shudders,
by intractable hatreds and ambitions run wild, by appalling greed and
headstrong enthusiasm, leading up to Lorenzo de’ Medici’s humanistic myths of a
Florentine primacy in Italy and Europe and the prophetic illusions and
upheavals of Savonarola.5
These writings by merchants and traders had already
begun to appear in Florence during the thirteenth century, in the mar-gins of
ledgers and account books, where they recorded the acquisition of lands or the
leasing of farmland to sharecroppers (as in the diaries of the Guicciardini
family). These notations were also family histories and ricordanze (that
is, “things to be remembered”).’ The awareness of tile natural convergence of
economic prosperity, powers and the growing fortunes of the family was always
the inspiration for these books, which were often written by several members of
successive generations of a family: as with the Medici, from Foligno di Conte
in 1360 to Lorenzo tile Magnificent in 1472. They were usually called ricordi
or ricordanze or “book of.. .“ with the name of the writer or of the
family.
Of course Florence also produced the kind of
technical or geographic-statistical documentation or pratiche that were
prevalent in other commercial centers and especially in Venice (the greatest
example of which is Marco Polo’s book); suffice it to recall the famous pratica
of the mid-fourteenth century by Francesco Balducci Pegolotti.7 But
these seemingly “marginal” annotations in account books and ledgers almost
always had the character of histories of family life (births, marriages,
deaths, above all in their economic implications such as wills and divisions of
property, dowries, contracts of sale, construction of houses, etc.); or even
insights of a psychological nature about people with whom the merchants had
business dealings, or with whom they corresponded, reflections on family,
social, or political situations or on moral and religious implications, always
noted in a strictly familiar tone, only for the eyes of other family members.
In the early fourteenth century, as we shall see, Domenico Lenzi interspersed
the monotonous columns of prices of cattle fodder at the Orsanmichele market
with apocalyptic notes about famine and plague, which affected the oscillation
of prices. These distant roots in personal account books reappear in the more
elaborate writings of the fifteenth century, in the form of accounting abbreviations
and in certain syntagmas or stylistic features, and even in the writers’ habit
of “making an accounting” of the most diverse operations or events.
While they were keeping track of their activities
(loans, sales, purchases, letters of exchange, organization of craftsmen and
workers), these “sons of Mercury” were also acquiring the habit of evaluating
and characterizing times, things, and people. As Le Goff has shown, they
replaced “the eternally renewed, perpetually unpredictable time of the natural
world with a new, measurable time, focused and foreseeable.”8
And they established a literary tradition that traced its origins to the Roman paterfamilias
but that also fused life and economic substance with life and family
substance, like body and soul, like tile circulation of the blood and spiritual
activity. For these mercatores, the family was also the basic,
fundamental cell of civic and political life, as in Morelli, and as
theorized by the greatest humanists of those years, from Bruni (“nor can
anything be perfect where the family does not exist,” Life of Dante) to
Ficino (“by leading your family you educate yourselves, you become experts,
honored in the earthly republic and worthy of the heavenly,” Letter to
Pelotto). Ragion di mercatura (merchant interests) and ragion di
famiglia (family interests) — the two dominant themes of the diaries of
three centuries (albeit with notable variants, as we shall see) — clearly
indicate this from the earliest examples of the genre.
The
merchant writer was fully aware of the decisive value of his writings for both
his economic activity and for the life of his family, which were inextricably
linked. It was no coincidence that when a merchant wanted to have his portrait
made, he usually had himself depicted in the act of writing, it was not by
chance that Dino Compagni, in his survey of the various professions in the Libro
del pregio (Book of Merit), characterized the pregio (merit) of the
merchant as “fine writing.”
For financial and political reasons, these
annotations and accounts, both mercantile and domestic, became even more necessary
at the beginning of the fifteenth century. The merchant’s activity had always
been closely interwoven with his domestic life. But the growing impact of the
public sphere on the private (and vice versa) during the early fifteenth
century heightened the need for
annotations
that served both commercial and family interests. The establishment of the
Florentine catasto or tax assessment 9 in 1427, the creation of
the Monte delle doti10
in 1425, and the increasing number of prestanze11 due to
continual wars, made it necessary to keep precise accounts of both financial
and family matters. For that matter, at this same time the increasingly
oligarchic structure of the Florentine government and the strengthening of the
increasingly conservative Guelph party (1413) led men to reconstruct the
stories of their families and to gather evidence and facts about their own past
and present and those of their families.
For both economic activity and for
family and public life, it was necessary to have all the elements and all the
documents relating to a family’s estate, past and present, clear and ready to
hand. This was the only way to defend one’s estate from the often aggressive
intervention of the state and whoever dominated it at the
moment.
This also enabled men to aspire to become part of the oligarchy of the
government, which was selected for primarily economic and commercial motives.
These conditions are
reflected and even recommended in the insistent teaching, more practical than
humanistic, that often led the diarists into long digressions, from the past of
their parents to the future they hoped to build for their children and
grandchildren.
Luca Pitti, who had been given his start on the
commercial scene in 1423 by his father Bonaccorso, and who through luck,
brains, and vigilance became the proverbial progenitor of the economic and
political greatness of his family, decided in 1459 to lay the foundations of
his splendid palazzo right in the area of Florence where his forefathers
had lived — a palazzo that would perpetuate the Pitti name for centuries
(Vasari wrote that “so much grandeur and magnificence have never been seen”).
Luca went from playing a leading role in the oligarchy of the wealthy middle
class under the Medici regime to having his praises sung by poets like Ugolino
Verino and Benedetto Dei, to being considered one of the four most powerful
citizens of Florence at the time of Cosimo de’ Medici’s death in 1464. He can
be considered an emblematic figure in the sociopolitical situation reflected in
the most characteristic writings of the merchants of tile fourteenth and
fifteenth centuries.
In the writings of the Florentine merchants, the
preponderant convergence of commercial interests and family interests, over
which the more ruthless state interests began to cast a shadow during the
mid-fifteenth century, is depicted in various situations and in continual
evolution, enlivened by the most diverse human temperaments. Underlying the
most systematic and successful of these
writings
are usually moral reflection and debate; attention to and preoccupation with
spiritual and domestic matters; and political and familial commitments and
aspirations that also had a public, civic side to them. During the fifteenth
century, family and political considerations came to be overshadowed by the
personality of the individual writer; thus sometimes these writings
constituted, at least in part, a kind of autobiography (for example in
Bonaccorso Pitti’s writings or in private diaries
I.
Esercizio di verifica. Indicate se queste affermazioni
sono vere (V) o false (F).
1.
Firenze era uno dei centri principali per la rivoluzione
economica del Duecento (1200-1300) e del Trecento (1300-1400).
2.
I mercanti italiani avevano poco potere nel 1300.
3.
Mentre i primi mercanti del Duecento erano esploratori
avventurosi in cerca di nuovo capitale, i mercanti del Trecento e del
Quatrrocento (1400-1500) come la famiglia Alberti erano più cauti e
conservatori.
4.
I temi più importanti per gli scrittori erano la
ragion di mercatura e la ragion di stato.
5.
I mercanti separavano la vita domestica, privata dalla
vita commerciale, pubblica.