Medieval Merchants, Careers and Networks

The account-books left by medieval merchants have mostly been studied to analyze their degree of technical development and the activity and volume of the companies that produced them. In order to identify the limit between commercial exchanges and non-commercial exchanges, we have first to understand how the transactions were filtered, decomposed and recomposed as inputs to fit into a system of written recording aimed at tracking flows of wares and capital as well as the shift of debts and credits with numerous partners. In the case of the Datini agency in Avignon around 1386, mostly specialized in armory and ironmongery, the bookkeeping in simple entry is distributed on about ten books. Among these, the memoriale contains most information about customers but partly conceals the transactions by recomposing them in personal accounts which usually sum up debits and credits resulting from several exchanges. This book also gathers about 300 customers, among whom craftsmen and men-at-arms predominate, without excluding a few traders living in town or abroad. All these individuals were not identified unambiguously by the staff of the shop. The tendency to present each person in a homogeneous and abstract form is thwarted by a reading of social links in terms of households and patronage. The memoriali of the agency do not completely exclude exchanges identifiable as gifts, but relegate them to the margins, as an explanation of some of the cash advances required from the company by its staff. Agency accounting can thus be seen as part of a device establishing a boundary between the professional and private spheres. The material layout of the agency distinguishes the shop from the living quarters and signals it to customers as a professional and masculine space. At the same time, account-books invite the staff to distinguish between their personal assets and those of the company by having them open personal accounts similar to those of the customers for their own expenses and earnings, dissociating thus the flows of cash they manage on one side for the company, whether in the shop or during missions, on the other side for their practices of consumption.

This thesis ultimately seeks to understand how and why the London armourers came to be so closely associated with the politics and uprisings of London’s controversial mayor, John Northampton (1381-1383). However, because the armourers were not incorporated as a combined guild until 1453, this thesis must first analyse how the armourers developed as an industry, and how their workshop, household, and socio-industrial networks and organisations developed and helped to inform their political identities. This is the first time that the fourteenth-century London armourers have been rigorously examined as a collective of constituent specialist industries, and this thesis contributes to an understanding of how late medieval small crafts developed outside of guilds.

Through examining armourers’ workshops, households, and socio-industrial networks, this thesis arrives at several important conclusions about the nature of the English industry in the fourteenth century which challenge existing scholarship. It finds evidence to explode scholarly myths that English armour was cheap and poorly made through lack of skill, that women did not participate in the industry, and that regulation of the industry was entirely imposed from outside. Finally, this study shows that the armourers were the most significant participants in the 1384 Mayoralty Riots because their workshop, household, and socio-industrial networks had all contributed to the development of a shared political identity, because Northampton’s opponent Nicholas Brembre attacked that identity, and because the Crown and City’s draconian policies towards the local armour market had grown increasingly severe prior to the riots. This thesis argues that the armourers’ political identity developed as an extension of their workshop, household, and socioindustrial identities and networks, and that each of these contributed to their overall organisational development outside of a guild structure.

The modelling and visualisation of networks is based on the material in: M. Mullett, Theophylact of Ochrid. Reading the Letters of a Byzantine Archbishop. Birmingham 1997.

The first graph is a visualisation of the connections between letters in localities between which these letters were exchanged (" 2mode network").

The second graph is a visualisation of the weighted network of localities on the basis of Theophylact´s correspondence; two localities are connected if letters of Theophylact were exchanged between them. Links are scaled according to the number of letters within Theophylact´s collection documenting exchanges between them.

The third graph visualises these connections between localities on a map. Links are again scaled according to the number of letters within Theophylact´s collection documenting exchanges between them. The size of nodes is scaled according to their number of connections within the network ("degree").

The fourth graph is a "zoom" into these geographical visualisation of the network for the Western Balkans; links are again scaled according to the number of letters within Theophylact´s collection documenting exchanges between them.

For the localisation of sites within the historical region of Macedonia cf. also the upcoming volumes on Macedonia (Southern Part) by Peter Soustal and on Macedonia (Northern Part) by Mihailo Popovic within the series "Tabula Imperii Byzantini" (http://www.oeaw.ac.at/imafo/die-abteilungen/byzanzforschung/communities-landscapes/historische-geographie/)

For any further questions, please contact Johannes.Preiser-Kapeller@oeaw.ac.at.

This article is an attempt to examine contemporary sources to construct a genealogy of the Quarles family during the medieval period, as well as explore its economic activity throughout this time. As merchants, the Quarles family took advantage of the burgeoning wool and fishing industries, continental trade agreements, and the development of ports on the north Norfolk coast, which led to the rise in trade and shipping during the thirteenth to fifteenth centuries. The family's intermarriages with minor gentry, meant it kept a foothold in landed interests, while mercantile activity contributed to its increasing social and geographical mobility to spread within Norfolk, and to London and Northamptonshire by the mid-sixteenth century.

Il-Ḵh̲ānid Tabrīz became not only a nodal point in the spatial imagination of Christian merchants and missionaries, but was promoted even to a significant landmark in the Biblical and apocalyptic topography of 13th and 14th century Christianity. As this processes were very much connected to the rise of the city as centre of Mongol Iran, its prominence on the (mental) maps dwindled with its political and mercantile importance; yet, the case of Tabrīz provides a most interesting example for the imagination and organisation of space respectively the modification and adaption of these phenomena within the Christian communities confronted with the rise and fall of Mongol power in Iran.

"Il contributo segnala la riscoperta del quattrocentesco ms. Laur. Acquisti e doni 401, già noto all’erudizione ottocentesca, ma di cui si erano perdute le tracce e si era addirittura sospettata una falsificazione. Il codice, restituito a Luigi di Ridolfo Peruzzi (1410-1484), un mercante fiorentino esiliato ad Avignone, contiene, tra l’altro, una interessante biografia petrarchesca, la cui edizione è pubblicata in appendice. Essa contiene intriganti
notizie sull’identità storica di Laura, una delle primissime attestazioni del titolo Canzoniere per il libro di rime volgari di Petrarca e appare bipartita in due sezioni, di cui l’ultima dedicata alle origini di Laura: una struttura che influenza la fortunata vita petrarchesca di Vellutello.

This contribution points out the rediscovery of the fifteenth-century ms. Laur. Acquisti e doni 401, already known to nineteenth century antiquaries, but whose traces had been lost, even going so far as to suspect a fake. The manuscript, restored to Luigi di Ridolfo Peruzzi (1410-1484), a Florentine merchant exiled in Avignon, includes, among the rest, an interesting biography of Petrarch, edited in the Appendix. It contains some interesting information on the historical Laura, one of the first attestations of ‘Canzoniere’ as a title for the book of Petrarch’s vernacular poems, and appears divided in two parts, the last being dedicated to the origins of Laura: a structure which will influence Vellutello’s celebrated life of Petrarch."

While scholars may know that the 'sultan of Babylon' sent Frederick II a 'white parrot', few are aware of the existence of four sketches, indicating it was a Sulphur or Yellow-crested Cockatoo. As these were made two and a half centuries before what was thought to be the earliest European image of the Australasian cockatoo - in Andrea Mantegna's 1496 Madonna della Vittoria - the authors consider the events and shared interests that led the sultan to give this bird to Frederick and how it would have arrived on the Apennine Peninsula in the first half of the thirteenth century.
Published with Jukka Salo, Pekka Niemelä and Simo Örmä.

Basandosi sulla documentazione notarile, il saggio analizza il trend della manifattura laniera milanese del secondo '400. Ne emerge un incremento globale della produzione-in particolare per gli articoli di lusso (saie e berretti) confezionati con lana inglese-negli ultimi tre decenni del secolo e all'inizio del successivo, dopo alcuni anni di difficoltà. La ripresa scaturì da diversi fattori concomitanti: la politica sforzesca volta a sostenere le produzioni di lusso; l'incremento della domanda di tessuti di lusso milanesi da parte della corte pontificia; il ruolo strategico della colonia di mercanti inglesi a Milano, importatori di materia prima ed esportatori di berretti a maglia tinti in grana. Tali mercanti erano collegati a uomini d'affari fiorentini e genovesi, e avevano interessi commerciali anche a Firenze.
parole chiave: Manifattura laniera, Ducato di Milano, mercanti inglesi, manifattura tessile, prodotti di lusso

Analyzing the notary documentation, this paper shows the trend of wool industry in Milan in the second half of the 15th century. The result is a global increase in production particularly for luxury items (saies and caps) packaged with English wool in the last three decades of the century and at the beginning of the next, after some years of difficulties. The recovery arose from several concomitant factors: the policy of the Sforza to support luxury production; the increase in papal court demand for Milanese luxury goods; the strategic role of the group of English merchants in Milan, importers of raw material and exporters of knitted caps dyed with cochineal, linked in turn to Florentine and Genoese businessmen, and with business interests in Florence as well. Wool industry, Milan under Visconti and Sforza,

English merchant, textile industry, luxury goods | Previous | Storia economica XXII (2019) 1

Author highlighted three stages of Armenian migration in the northern part of the Black Sea region – in 1250s-1290s, in the first half of fourteenth century, and in 1360s-1390s. There, Armenian merchants used the trade and transportation infrastructure created by Italians, including, first of all, the network of shipments by sea. In turn, Armenians supplied their Italian partners with the merchandise they transported from the remote inland territories of modern Ukraine, Russia, Romania and Moldavia.

ABSTRACT: In the late Middle Ages Udine was a commercial hub for the surrounding area. The handicrafts and food products were sufficient for the town and its countryside: there do not seem to have been large imports of wheat (the export of the local one was prohibited). The scythes for hay, forged in the foothill area, were the only handicrafts distributed in most of Italy.

Nel bassomedioevo Udine è principalmente un centro di scambio e redistribuzione nel territorio circostante. La produzione di manufatti e derrate alimenatari è sufficiente alla cittadina e al suo contado: non paiono esservi grosse importazioni di grano (si vieta l’esportazione di quello locale). La vera eccellenza sono le falci, forgiate nella zona pedemontana e distribuite in buona parte dell’Italia.

This paper focuses on the last part of Luigi Peruzzi's autograph book, presenting twenty-one sonnets of 'various topic' , of which eighteen are original compositions by the author. Peruzzi's sonnets, in particular, are here examined through the lens of 'poetry as politics and memory' (a concept formerly outlined by Lauro Martines for the Renaissance poetry), thus revealing unexpected discoverings.

The medieval Mediterranean was an environment in which mendicant friars were able to thrive, attending to the spiritual needs of the populace and benefitting from the support of the urban classes, especially merchants, with whom they established close relationships. The examples of the convents of Barcelona, Ciutat de Mallorca and Florence presented in this volume clearly elucidate the association between the friars, the merchants and the urban aristocracy. Although the friars did not restrict their activities to the Mediterranean world and quickly expanded into other European kingdoms and remote lands, it was in the dense urban setting of this region where they first conducted their preaching and established their roles as active social agents.

Critical text of, and commentary on the autograph "Libro" made by Luigi Peruzzi, the son of Ridolfo di Bonifazio, one of the prominent leader of the anti-Medicean party, along with Rinaldo degli Albizzi and Palla Strozzi. Exiled from Florence with his father after the return of Cosimo de' Medici, he finally settled in Avignon in 1445, where he stayed until his death in 1484. This "Libro", gathering many vernacular and often original texts of different nature, is conceived as a sort of "memory of Florence and Florentine things"; it includes, indeed, an alphabetical list of proverbs; three moral treaties; the biographies of the two Florentine "corone" Dante and Petrarch; an autobiographical letter of the author; some religious and devotional poems, and a final series of sonnets.

Pisa followed a different evolution from other towns integrated into the Florentine State: after 1406 prominent families resorted mostly to exile instead of settling into the new capital. The study of interactions between Florentine and Pisan traders during the previous generation might contribute to explain this attitude, and private correspondences from the Archivio Datini shed an interesting light on their practices, but also on the context and meaning of binational contacts, which vary from collaboration to competition and from mutual frequentation to avoidance. Whereas examples of binational companies are known between Pisans and Florentines in Avignon, where the complementarity of legal statuses, relational and material assets could profit to both parties, the numerous Florentines settled close to the mouth of the Arno appear to have mostly lived within their community, for their professional activity as well as during their free time. However, the socio-professional and political diversity of this community should also be considered to understand the cases of local assimilation that appear to have occasionally happened.

This is the first description of the as-yet-unpublished texts of the manuscript Florence, Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, Acquisti e doni 401 (1470-'75), with a view to a complete critical edition of them. The manuscript was written by an aged Luigi di Ridolfo Peruzzi, a Florentine merchant, during his exile in Avignon. Its peculiarity lies in the fact that it’s not properly about a common merchant book with utilitarian texts but, instead, a "zibaldone" of more literary-connoted writings, made mostly by Peruzzi himself, and concerning moral, biographical, autobiographical, religious and literary contents. Such writings are inspired by a feeling of nostalgia, which arosed in Peruzzi as well as in those Florentine people forced to exile after the 1434 diaspora. So, Peruzzi tries to build up a personal monument to his own country’s culture in a frank and clear vernacular language, by gathering local proverbs, composing original biographic profiles of the two most popular “Florentine” authors of his time (Dante and Petrarch), and writing moral-based treatises and sonnets with lots of references to Tuscan literature. Through a deep analysis of quotes and textual references, the paper furthermore shows how such monument is essentially set up in the sign of Dante Alighieri, being not only the literary source which the merchant culture is usually filled with, but also a "civil" reference model for every Florentine exiled man, since his love for the city was always conditioned by his high sense of morality.

In his benchmarking article of 1940 on Michel Sittow, historian Paul Johansen not only discussed the identity of the famous painter, but also surveyed his immediate family and kin, including Michel's maternal grandfather Olef Molner, who had probably arrived to Tallinn from Finland. The authors of this article will take a fresh look at Finnish and Tallinn late medieval sources in order to conduct an in-depth study of Olef Molner's life and activities and assess if Johansen's arguments were solid. The article will also shed new light on how close the socioeconomic connections between Finland and Tallinn were in the Middle Ages and how the newcomers became part of various transgenerational networks.

La faticosa conquista catalanoaragonese della Sardegna, con i risvolti finanziari ed economico-sociali connessi all’impresa dell’infante Alfonso d’Aragona, costituisce un tema ormai classico della storiografia sarda. Quali esiti ebbe l’impresa per le istituzioni e l’economia isolana e quali per la Corona stessa e per i mercanti che l’avevano sostenuta?
La Sardegna trecentesca rappresenta un osservatorio ideale per analizzare, attraverso documentazione inedita, due fenomeni tornati all’attenzione degli studiosi: la mobilità sociale e l’impatto della guerra sull’economia.
Mercanti e patroni catalanoaragonesi, insieme ad alcune importanti compagnie fiorentine, sostennero con euforia le prime fasi della conquista allettati dai profitti che potevano venire dall’esportazione di cereali, sale e argento e dal prestigio sociale derivante dall’attribuzione di cariche nell’amministrazione e di rendite feudali, salvo esserne presto delusi. Questo studio traccia la parabola dell’economia sarda trecentesca alla luce della presenza mercantile sull’isola, delineandone il progressivo indebolimento, che coincise con l’abbandono della Sardegna da parte delle maggiori società d’affari dell’epoca.

»Ser Micouillus Petri, draparius, civis Iadre – life as a sign of the times.«

Using the prosopographical approach, the author explores the origin, operation, family relations, kinship, business relations and friendships of Mihovil, son of Petar († 1385), famous draper from Zadar. The paper presents new data based on the lists of documents regarding Mihovil's property inventory and other sources. Building upon the basis his grandfather and father had set before him, Mihovil achieved exceptional business success and became one of the most distinguished and richest merchants and citizens of Zadar in the Anjou era. He evidently belonged to the Anjou party; two letters written by King Louis the Great to his advantage witness to the fact. Mihovil's life is a paragon of the new position of citizen-merchants in Zadar in the second half of the fourteenth century – the Anjou era. In addition to investing in the profitable cloth trade, he also invented in lad property, salt works and real estate in the city. His exceptional wealth was manifested in the quantity of real estate he owned, luxurious home design, as well as the cultural area – Mihovil owned a valuable library confirming his high level of education and the cultural engagement of the social class he belonged to in the life of the city. The paper further brings new data regarding the attribution of Mihovil's books. The list of documents regarding his inventory, which offer data on his business communication and methods, as well as the circle of his business associates, debtors and servants, has also been studied.
The story of Mihovil, son of Petar remains a testimony of the life and work of an exceptional medieval man, whose success relied on merchant's work ethics and knowledge, complemented with Christian and family values.

Review of the volume: https://www.cambridge.org/core/services/aop-cambridge-core/content/view/7DA1240B63A8811807DBF4AA12552E8F/S0034433820002328a.pdf/memorializing_the_middle_classes_in_medieval_and_renaissance_europe_anne_leader_edstudies_in_medieval_and_early_modern_culture_kalamazoo_mi_medieval_institute_publications_2018_xviii_342_pp_10999.pdf

The Republic of Pisa was an international economic power as early as the 11th century. Its prosperity led to the early development of typical communal institutions (consules) as well as to the drafting of the most ancient and exhaustive examples of written ius proprium that have survived until today: the Constitutum Legis (CL) and the Constitutum Usus (CU). The latter included a list of city customs, with particular reference to feudal, commercial and maritime law. At the time of Pisa’s supremacy, i.e. until the second half of the 13th century, merchants from the Republic could be found all across the Mediterranean. Pisa itself too was a melting pot of different ethnicities and cultures, so much so that was described as a new ‘Babel’ by the monk Donizo of Canossa.

This paper aims at analyzing the law and language used for commenda-like contracts by the merchants of Pisa in order to verify possible foreign influences. The very foreword of the CU, in fact, states that Pisa ‘earned’ its own customs (suas consuetudines non scriptas habere meruit) thanks to the ‘dialogue’ with people coming from different parts of the world (propter conversationem diversarum gentium).

À partir de la fin du XIVe siècle, la présence à Marseille de corsaires venus de la Couronne de Castille apparaît de plus en plus importante dans les archives provençales. Ceux que les documents notariés appellent « yspani » profitent des guerres menées par les souverains angevins ainsi que du conflit qui oppose après 1423 la Provence à la Couronne d’Aragon pour venir prêter leurs services aux rois de la seconde maison d’Anjou et au gouvernement urbain de Marseille. En s’appuyant sur un corpus documentaire inédit provenant des archives municipales de Marseille et des archives départementales des Bouches-du-Rhône, cet article s'interroge sur la place et le rôle de ces hommes dans le contexte marseillais des années 1380-1430. À travers quatre trajectoires singulières, il est possible d’identifier deux « modèles » de corsaires : d’une part les grands mercenaires castillans qui s’engagent auprès des souverains et auprès du pape et qui peuvent être considérés comme des experts de la guerre maritime et, de l’autre, des patrons de navires qui exercent également comme marchands et qui profitent après 1423 des opportunités commerciales fournies par une ville en guerre pour venir s’installer à Marseille. Par leurs mobilités et par les liens profonds qu’ils entretiennent avec les cités, ces corsaires peuvent être considérés comme des acteurs de la connectivité méditerranéenne.