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Introduction

L’historien ressemble à l’ogre de la fable. Là où il flaire la chair humaine, il sait que là est son gibier.

BLOCH: Métier d’historien

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 Marco’s 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 Francesco’s 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 Bensa’s 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 Datini’s 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 Datini’s 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 Datini’s 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 merchant’s, on the look-out for a good deal. A new Pope’s 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.

It is, however, with the private papers in this collection that this study is chiefly concerned: Datini’s personal account-books and notebooks, and the forty folders containing his voluminous correspondence. Here, if any were still needed, is a refutation of the belief that the merchant of the trecento was not ready with his pen. ‘I am not feeling very well today,’ wrote Francesco at the age of over sixty, ‘on account of all the writing I have done in these two days, without sleeping either by night or by day, and in these two days eating but one loaf.’ When his business letters to his fondaci were finished, he would take up his pen again and write his long personal letters: to Ser Lapo Mazzei about the wine he was bottling and the partridges they would eat together next week, and Fra Giovanni Dominici’s sermon in Santa Liberata; to his partner in Florence about the picture he needed for his bedroom and a new scarlet biretta, ‘dyed in England’; to his agent in Genoa about buying a strong little slave-girl; to the one in Venice about sending him a piece of brocade for his wife’s gown, and a couple of peacocks (but how were they fed? and how many hens were needed for each cock?) – and above all, at least twice a week, to his rebellious and singularly outspoken young wife.

The most remarkable thing about this domestic correspondence (for over a hundred of Margherita’s letters are here, too) is not that it should have been preserved, but that it should have been written at all. Public and official documents of this period, as well as records of business transactions, are abundant, but private letters, containing the small-change of everyday life, the details of domestic intercourse, are rare. In particular, we possess remarkably few letters between husbands and wives, for they were seldom parted. Sometimes, indeed, a husband was abroad for long years at the Crusades, or trading in foreign ports, but in such cases letters home were necessarily few, and often very slow to reach their destination. But in this correspondence we have a wife who lived in Prato, looking after her husband’s house, and a husband who lived (during the years of this exchange) no further off than Florence or Pisa; and their letters, together with the washing, which was done in Prato, and the fowls, eggs, and vegetables, which were sent from the farm to Florence or Pisa, went up and down on mule-back once or even twice a week. Thus this correspondence possesses an immediacy and contains a fullness of detail which we associate rather with letters of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Francesco sends his wife minute instructions as to every detail of the household management; and Margherita, in reply, accounts for all she has done, or offers much sound advice. Moreover, a great many things which, if the couple had lived together, would no doubt merely have been said in moments of exasperation, were thus put down on paper.

These papers thus provide a singularly genuine picture of married life in the fourteenth century. They hold a double interest: as a record of facts and as a study of character. The information they provide about the everyday life of a Tuscan merchant and his family is so detailed that we almost feel as if we had been to stay in the solid square brick house which Francesco built to show off his riches on his return from Avignon, and which he guarded so jealously that in his absence he would not even allow the front door to be opened, until his wife was up and about. We learn what clothes Francesco and Margherita wore, and how much they paid for them, what they ate and drank, what servants and slaves they kept, and how unsatisfactory they were, what Francesco spent respectively on his illegitimate daughter’s dowry, on buying a horse, on marrying off a pregnant maid-servant, and on foods, gifts, and alms; how he went on a pilgrimage to Signa; how he dosed himself in sickness; how he fled with his whole family to Bologna, to escape the plague. But, above all, we learn a great deal about Francesco and Monna Margherita themselves. What emerges from these unliterary, unpolished, unromantic, self-repetitive letters is the portrait of a man and a woman, so clearly outlined that we could hardly fail to recognize them if we met them in the streets of Prato today.

It is interesting to compare the picture of married life that emerges from these letters with the one shown in the ‘Advice to his young wife’ of a French husband of almost precisely the same period and of similar standing, the Ménagier de Paris. The Ménagier was more gentle in tone than Francesco; but we must remember that his letters were intended for publication, and Francesco’s were not. Moreover, Monna Margherita’s replies – although she was nearly twenty-five years younger than her husband, who was over forty when he married her – are not always patient or submissive. She could disagree with Francesco’s decisions and criticize his behaviour with a shrewdness and plainness of speech which he took with surprising meekness. ‘What you say’, he wrote to her on one occasion, ‘is as true as the Lord’s Prayer.’

Francesco’s own character is very sharply etched. It is impossible to imagine a more completely Tuscan figure. Intensely individualistic, he owed his success entirely to his own personal enterprise, to an audacity always tempered, at just the right moment, by shrewdness and mistrust of his neighbour. A hard businessman, he gathered his golden florins wherever he could find them: he traded in armour, wool, metals, and wheat; he made cloth and bought slaves; he opened (though this laid him open to the accusation of being a usurer) a bank. But he also never failed to conform to the conventions of pious practice: he neglected no fast-days, assigned a due proportion of his profits to alms and charity, built chapels and adorned churches. Self-indulgent during his prosperous years in Avignon – ‘keeping a woman and living on nothing but partridges’, and begetting several little bastards – he was also capable, in the pursuit of his business, of a life as industrious and exacting as a monk’s.

His life was not a serene one. ‘Destiny has ordained’, he wrote to his wife at the age of over sixty, ‘that from the day of my birth I should never know a whole happy day.’ The canker which ate all joy away, both in youth and old age, and which is revealed by almost every line of this correspondence, was anxiety. It is this, perhaps, that makes Datini seem so akin to us, so much the precursor of businessmen of our own time. He was an astute and successful merchant; but he was, above all, an uneasy man. Each of his fondaci was a constant source of anxiety: he mistrusted his partners, his managers, and the captains whose ships carried his merchandise; and he went in constant fear, too, of all the misfortunes that might overtake these ships – shipwreck, piracy, over-loading, or an outbreak of plague among the crew. And when his great fortune was made at last, fresh anxieties sprang up; he worried about his investments, his taxes, and his fines. He trusted his bailiffs and servants at home no better than those abroad. He lived in daily apprehension, according to Mazzei, of being defrauded, ‘even of the shoe-buckle of the wench who serves your slave’.

And with old age came the last and worst anxiety: overwhelming fear of what would happen to him in a future life. Pilgrimages and periods of fasting, gifts of pictures to churches and of lands to convents, and, finally, the bestowal of all his great fortune to charitable works – none of these sufficed to dispel the haunting sense of guilt that darkened his last years – a gnawing anguish, a perpetual maninconia.fn1

Other figures, too, emerge as we go on reading. There are the rapacious poor relations, Margherita’s family, perpetually hoping for crumbs from the rich man’s table, perpetually dissatisfied when they fall, ‘for Francesco is able to do more than this’. ‘You have demeaned yourself in such a fashion,’ wrote Margherita to her brother after one of his begging letters, ‘that you have sealed my mouth for ever in Francesco’s presence.’ Yet so strong was the convention of the family tie that when this same brother (the family black sheep) died, Francesco felt obliged to spend no less than 259 gold florins on mourning cloaks for the whole family. There are Francesco’s partners and friends, among them the cheerful shrewd Florentine, Domenico di Cambio, whose chief quarrel with Francesco was that his riches did not make him happy. ‘I vow I get more pleasure in a day from my handful of soldi, than you in a whole year.’ And there is the wise, kindly family friend, Ser Lapo Mazzei – the personification of the Tuscan virtues of piety and moderation – quietly counselling prudence and charity; proud of his friend’s riches, but with no desire to share them, glad to enjoy with him a fat partridge or a glass of red Carmignano, but accepting no richer gifts – and gently striving, as the years passed, to loosen his friend’s hold from the things he must soon leave behind him. His relationship with Francesco is the most pleasing note in the whole correspondence: it provides the spectacle of a disinterested friendship.

Ser Lapo’s letters are a real contribution to literature – lively, gentle, wise, and written in the purest Tuscan of the trecento – but only a few more have now been added to those already published. Francesco’s and Margherita’s have much less literary value. They are chiefly marred by a fault common to many medieval letters: the cumbersome repetitiveness of writers who cannot quite believe that a written instruction is really as effective as a spoken one. We must remember, too, that during the early part of her marriage Margherita herself could neither read nor write; she dictated even her letters to her husband, and his were read aloud to her. Both of them seem to have felt that if a thing was worth saying once, it was worth repeating; and, in addition, we know that Francesco requested his instructions to be read aloud to his wife, not once but over and over again, to make sure that she had fully mastered them! It is for this reason that whole letters have very seldom been quoted here; the second paragraph is often only a repetition of the first.

On the other hand, the letters also have the merits of the spoken word: directness, raciness, and a complete lack of affectation. The language is the Tuscan of Boccaccio and Sacchetti – but broader, more colloquial, less polished.

A great deal of the liveliness of the letters is derived from their colloquialisms, their proverbs, and their popular aphorisms. ‘Non son villana perch’in contado stia, ma gl’è villano chi fa la villania’,fn2 Margherita quoted to her city relations. ‘Chi si leva a tempo,’ writes Niccolò dell’ Ammannato, ‘fa buona giornata e si può riposare all’ albergo.’ fn3 And ‘Non vorrei che isteste chostà tanto,’ writes Domenico di Cambio, when the plague is raging, ‘per richogliere i chiovi [chiodi] che voi vi lasciate i ferri’.fn4 ‘Ha più corta la fede, che la lepre la coda!’fn5 he exclaims about a mutual friend. And Lapo Mazzei, of a man he does not expect to see again: ‘arrivederci, come le volpi, in pellicceria!’fn6

Sometimes these aphorisms have a strongly moralistic turn. ‘Chi ogni ingiuria vorrà vendicare, o d’ alto stato cade, o non vi sale.’fn7 And sometimes, too – and this also is very Tuscan – the writers use a device imitated from the sermons of such expert preachers as San Bernardino or Fra Giovanni Dominici: they interrupt whatever they are saying to make use of a story or an assempro (parable). ‘You are like the countryman who went to an apothecary …’ or ‘You put me in mind of the tale of….’

‘You seem to me’, wrote Francesco to a greedy factor, ‘like a priest who says, “If only I had a poor little church of my own, where I could find a living, and every morning say my Mass, I would ask nothing more of God, and would be the happiest man in the world”; and then when he has got the church, he cannot rest until he has become Pope, and then the spiritual power will not suffice without the temporal ….’

Sometimes, too, a completely prosaic business letter ends with a story – which suggests that, when books were scarce, it was not unusual for friends to copy out for each other any tale that had taken their fancy. ‘I will tell you the story of the man who set out to seek the wrath of God ….’

Above all, we are made aware in these letters of how frequently – in a period in which men read few books, but read them often – the maxims in these works became part of common speech. Seneca, the Letters of St Jerome, Boethius, Dante, Jacopone da Todi, the Fioretti – these were Francesco’s reading – and he was also familiar with many quotations from the Bible, heard over and over again (for he was a great sermon-goer) from the lips of popular preachers. These tags Francesco repeated in his letters without quotation-mark or comment, perhaps even – so accustomed was he to hearing them – without being aware that they were not his own. He uses, in speaking of his old age, Dante’s phrase ‘calar le vele e raccoglier le sarte’ (or was it a phrase already then in common use, which Dante had absorbed? For Francesco adds, ‘e morir in porto’).fn8 He speaks of ‘rendering unto Caesar the things that are Caesar’s’. And after having heard a Lenten sermon, he sits down in the evening and writes to his wife: ‘I have founded my house upon sand, and my wall is falling. I have placed greater hopes in the men of this world than in God, and the world has repaid me.’ Here, plainly, is both the content and the phrasing of the sermon he has just heard.

The chief value of these letters – apart from their contribution to the history of trade – is as an echo and a mirror. The society which they reflect is the world of Boccaccio and Sacchetti: a small, busy, earthy society. It is a world neither sophisticated nor subtle: its members like jokes that are broad and simple, food that is heavy and heavily spiced, gowns of rich velvet and fur covering coarse, scanty linen. It is, in spite of violence, greed, and social injustice, a curiously innocent world – in the sense that, like the cruel practical jokes of children or a peasant’s violence, it is lacking in guile. It is an urban society which has not yet lost the tang of country air, in which orchards and gardens hold almost as much place as houses within the city walls, and a great preacher does not hesitate to hold the crowd’s attention by imitating the croaking of a frog or the crowing of a cock. A world in which men have put on city clothing, but still retain in their minds a countryman’s shrewdness, suspiciousness, and stark realism.

But this is not the whole picture. For this is also a society in transition, in which the corporative organization of the guilds has given place to the control of a few great entrepreneurs, and the rule of the Commune has been taken over by a handful of rich merchants and bankers. In this world of contrasting trends, in which a Franciscan cult of poverty is to be found side by side with a rapacious struggle for wealth, we may see, on the one hand, a small enclosed society of craftsmen and shopkeepers, still wholly preoccupied with local interests, and on the other, a handful of men whose marketplace is the whole of Europe, and whose ambition and enterprise are as wide as their field of action. Here most men are still ordering their lives according to the precepts of the Church and the statutes of the Guilds, but a few are already merely using these rules as a screen behind which to form their own audacious schemes. The unquestioning orthodoxy of the Middle Ages is giving place to the sceptical, inquiring mind of the Renaissance, and among the pioneers of the new order are the men who perforce have had to depend upon their own enterprise, adaptability, and shrewdness, to achieve their ends: the merchants.

Francesco Datini belonged to one of these trends; his friend, Lapo Mazzei, to the other. It is not possible – or necessary – to claim that either of them was a great man. Ser Lapo was a shrewd notary, a true Christian, and a charming writer; Francesco, a self-made, ambitious man – a taverner’s son who, without help or backing, became a rich and influential merchant. But it is precisely because no greater claim than this can be made for them that the record of their daily lives has a peculiar value. Great men – leaders, geniuses, saints – are poor mirrors, because they rise too far above the common level. It is the smaller men, who belong most completely to the climate of their times, who can tell us most.

Between them, Datini and Mazzei reflect very faithfully the two dominant trends of their time. Ser Lapo was held by the older tradition: his life was shaped by local custom, rooted in piety and moderation. Francesco – though he did not fully possess the wide vision or fine taste of some of the merchants of the Renaissance – stood upon the threshold of the new age. In his moral values he still belonged to Ser Lapo’s world – unquestioningly accepting not only the rulings of the Church (even when he disobeyed them) but the iron law of custom. Even the ‘change of heart’ of his later years, with its final act of contrition, was as much within a familiar convention as the grasping ruthlessness of his prime – seeming, both to himself and his friends, as natural in old age as the hardening of a man’s arteries. In youth a man was ruled by his senses; in his prime by Mammon; in old age he turned to God. But in his business dealings Francesco was already a man of the new world: he belonged to it by his spirit of enterprise, his commercial methods, his international connexions – and his own intense individualism.

To some extent this last trait may have been due not only to Datini’s own temperament, but to an accident of circumstance. ‘The medieval man’, as Professor Rodolico has said, ‘was esteemed in so far as he formed part of an aristocratic clan, a guild, or a party; in the Renaissance, he was assessed by what he had made of himself.’ The power of all the great merchant-companies had been built up by the united efforts of a compact clan: the very structure of their companies rested upon this basis. But Datini had no family with whom to share his labours or his profits. His father, a humble taverner, had been carried off by the Black Death while he was still a child; his wife bore him no sons; he had no influential kinsmen. No patron helped him to establish himself in Avignon, nor to remain there when the Pope’s interdiction fell upon all Florentine merchants. And when at last, after thirty-five years abroad, he came home, he was regarded almost as a foreigner. When a forced loan was levied by the Commune, he was among those most heavily taxed; when he required some backing in a foreign venture, he knew better than to ask for it. Except for Ser Lapo Mazzei, he had no friend whom he could trust, and even when he formed his companies abroad, his partners had neither the wit nor the character to become anything more than subordinates. All that he achieved, he achieved alone.

Thus by circumstance, as well as by temperament and the stirrings of the Zeitgeist, Datini belongs to the merchants of the Renaissance, and the story of his achievements is something more significant than the mere record of the enrichment of an ambitious man. In the extent and variety of his ventures, in his powers of organization, in his international outlook, in his swift adaptability to the changes of a society in turmoil, as in his own ambition, shrewdness, tenacity, anxiety, and greed, he is a forerunner of the businessman of today.

Preface to the Italian Edition

Marchesa Origo’s own introduction to this book is so complete, clear, and attractive as to render any other preface unnecessary. I must therefore give the reasons why I agreed to introduce this book to Italian readers. The first is that the book bears witness to the author’s feeling for the documents in the Archivio Datini. The great Italian archives contain treasures which are far from being fully explored as yet and which arouse respect and awe in all who have worked there; but I myself have always longed for an opportunity to study in a small archive, where one can hope to see, even if not to use, all the documents, and to find the earliest extant document relating to one’s subject.

In addition, however, to her work in the Archivio Datini, Marchesa Origo has furnished me with another reason for writing this preface: it is the nature of her historical writing. Within the limits of the time at my disposal, I like reading history books; not all of them, for disappointments have made me diffident, even though this diffidence does not save me from subsequent regret for the time I have wasted by reading, as is my habit, every book I have begun from cover to cover. Perhaps mistakenly, I am apt to eliminate the books which I call surprise-boxes, but which seldom hold a surprise. They are those whose form has become familiar: thesis and antithesis, with a dialectical synthesis and an interpretation of the events as they occurred and were inevitably bound to occur; books in which the protagonists are not kings and princes, generals and adventures, peasants and monks, but ‘principles’, ‘institutions’, ‘evolutions’, ‘historical phases or periods’, ‘the court’, ‘the army’, ‘the navy’.

The greatest plagues of all, in this kind, are the economic histories describing the birth, evolution, and death of ‘economic feudalism’, of ‘the bourgeoisie’, of ‘capitalism’ in its dawn, its progress, and its maturity – that is, the time at which it is ready to be destroyed by other economic entities called ‘proletariat’, ‘socialism’, ‘communism’, ‘working classes’, and similar abstractions. Economic histories of this kind are mostly written by men of whom it is evident, from the first page, that they are not familiar with the practical workings of economics in either the present or the past. When we read about the Stock Exchange as if it were a robbers’ cave, when wheat hoarders are referred to as abominable speculators, and infringers of the law of the ‘maximum’ are accused of being responsible for a rise in prices, the book should at once be closed as the work of a conceited simpleton. Only one does not close it, because after all the French Revolution, for instance, however it may be treated, is a permanent problem, which is alive both today and tomorrow, both in France and anywhere else, and one goes on hoping that the writer may have discovered something that others have not perceived. Perhaps, in the midst of the tedious pseudo-economic jargon, one may yet find something original, based on an original source, and thus, in spite of the superfluous interpretation, truly and solidly illuminating.

Reading pure economic history, one cannot obtain the illusion of understanding the great events of history: the illusion which – to speak only of modern authors – I have felt in reading Gibbon’s epic on the Roman Empire, or De Tocqueville’s great book on the French Revolution, or Croce’s works on the history of Italy and the Kingdom of Naples. In spite of the pretensions of the pseudo-economists that they alone can explain the deepest causes of events, serious economic history has a more modest function: it merely narrates and explains economic vicissitudes, which deserve to be told and explained quite as much as political, religious, or military events. But just as political history, told by men who have never had any familiarity with political events, passions, and strife, inevitably produces a sense of unreality; just as one realizes – even without wishing to – the difference that lies between a description of war and of battles by land or sea given by Admiral Mahan or General Jomini and a reconstruction, however learned, by an armchair historian; just as histories of religion require to be told by either those who hold a faith or those who deny it, and who, in writing about Gregory VII or Luther, are conscious of the religious issue and do not dilute it with tales of the strife of princes and territories, of peasants’ revolts or of the depredations of nobles seeking to seize the lands of the Church – so an economist’s histories should simply and purely describe the economic events of the past. When Gino Luzzatto’s or Armando Sapori’s essays describe to me the events in a Florentine merchant’s shop, or the misfortunes of a Venetian trader who has armed his ships and risked his merchandise, I know that I have really learned something about what happened in the Italian merchant cities during a great period. I have not acquired any theories about ‘pre-capitalism’ or ‘post-feudalism’, and I do not care; for these abstract marionettes will go out of fashion and be destroyed tomorrow by a new historical mode and a new jargon, invented by men who compete for University chairs. But the picture or the shop or the ship remains in the mind’s eye, and sometimes I think I see one of them in the small offices beneath the porticoes along the harbour of Genoa, where millions of lire change hands, or in some ship launched at Camogli.

Marchesa Origo’s book is not a professional study of the Catholic origins of capitalism, as opposed to the familiar thesis about its Protestant origins. It is not a book about methods of accountancy or trade or correspondence, about the founding of foreign branches or their administration in Tuscany, Genoa, Avignon, or the Balearic islands. All this has been brought to light and described by others, and will continue to have further light thrown upon it, for the harvest is a rich one, and many scholars may yet take part in this research. No, Marchesa Origo has told us about the life and deeds of the man Datini, the merchant Francesco di Marco Datini, to whom Prato, in gratitude, has erected a fine monument in her chief square. This is the man as he appears in his note-books and correspondence: avid for gain, determined to become rich, never satisfied with what he has acquired (a fortune which would seem substantial even in our time), suspicious of his factors, his employees, his servants, his peasants, a dogged worker both by day and by night; not above love affairs with light women and with his own servant-maids, and acquiring, in place of the children his wife could not give him, several bastards, one of whom he provided with a generous dowry. A man of few friends, but among them the wise counsellor and admonisher Ser Lapo Mazzei, whose letters to Datini and his wife have become one of the classics of Italian literature.

Datini lived for a long time with his wife, scolding her constantly and affectionately, but the greater part of their life was spent apart – she in Prato, attending to household matters, and he in Florence and Pisa, caring for his trade. Thence the correspondence between them, on which a large part of Marchesa Origo’s book is based. Moreover, from the merchant’s rough notes, his bills and his letters, the author has described the house which Datini built for himself, and the farms, food, books, slaves, factors, and employees of this indefatigable man, who never left anyone in peace and never found peace himself. Always irascible and imperious, he was also perpetually anxious, ever dreading that some misfortune might fall upon him: any of his ships that was delayed might have been sunk or become the prey of the Saracens. His friend Ser Lapo and his wife Margherita alternately admonished and encouraged him, but his whole life was given up to the anxiety and preoccupation which were then called ‘melancholy’. One phrase had always headed his ledgers: ‘In the name of God and of profit’, but after the age of sixty and for many years more (for he lived until over seventy-five) it was the name of God that predominated. His fortune was now made and solidly founded: it was time to turn his thoughts to the future life. Lacking an heir, he was tormented about the best way to leave his riches, both for the public good and for that of his own soul. The fear of the plague obsessed him and caused him to fly, with his wife and children, to Bologna, but his deepest melancholy was caused by his fear of what the future might have in store for him. Still profoundly suspicious, he destroyed his first will (in favour of the Church and of religious foundations), since his experience did not convince him that a testator’s intentions were always carried out, and he ended by putting his trust in four ‘buoni uomini’ (probi vires) of Prato, chosen by himself, who were to be replaced at their death by others appointed by the Commune of Prato. Thus he formed the foundation of ‘il Ceppo’, which still exists, and which has preserved for us, throughout five hundred years, the papers of its founder.

Few books of true, serious, unromanticized history deserve to be compared with this one, in its capacity to teach us about its characters and their times, and to compel us to read it to the end, like a great novel. It is because of my love for old papers and well-constructed books that I have the honour to present it to a new circle of readers.

LUIGI EINAUDI

Iris Origo

THE MERCHANT OF PRATO

Daily Life in a Medieval Italian City

PENGUIN CLASSICS

Contents

PENGUIN MODERN CLASSICS

THE MERCHANT OF PRATO

THE BEGINNING

Introduction

Preface to the Italian Edition

Note on Tuscan Money, Weights, and Measures

MONEY OF ACCOUNT IN DATINI’S BOOKS

SILVER COINS IN USE IN DATINI’S TIME

CLOTH MEASURES

WINE MEASURES

OIL MEASURES

DRY MEASURES

LAND MEASURES

WEIGHTS

Part One

THE MERCHANT