11. "In the Name of God and of Profit."

Statue of Francesco di Marco Datini, Prato, Italy. Photo by Nigel Haworth

This morning, November 26th, Kim Hill had a fascinating couple of items on her radio programme: a small piece about a 100 euro note, reminiscent of the adventures of the 1770 banknote in my blog 9, and a substantive interview and discussion with Jane Gleeson-White about her book Double Entry: How the Merchants of Venice Shaped the Modern World. Jane Gleeson-White's work focuses on the spread of double-entry book keeping following the 1494 publication of Fra Luca Pacioli's Summa de arithmetica, geometria, proportione et proportionalita, a kind of encyclopaedia of mathematics.

There is an interesting counterpoint in the book keeping practices of an earlier Italian merchant, Francesco di Marco Datini, ‘The Merchant of Prato’. Born around 1335, Datini was the son of a taverner in the Tuscan town of Prato, a few miles north-west of Florence. His father died in 1348, a victim of the Black Death which killed about a third of the population of the area. By the time of his own death in 1410, Francesco, without the advantage of patronage or family connections, had built up a personal fortune of 70,000 gold florins which, along with his substantial house, he bequeathed to the poor of the town. He also bequeathed to posterity a remarkable record of the business, personal and family life of a Renaissance merchant. He saved every letter and business document that he received and instructed his managers, who were spread across Italy, France and Spain, to do the same. This treasure trove of documentation was discovered in Prato in 1870 - ‘some 150,000 letters, over 500 account books and ledgers, 300 deeds of partnership, 400 insurance policies, several thousand bills of lading, letters of advice, bills of exchange and cheques’, plus letters of credit and contracts (Origi, Iris, The Merchant of Prato: Francesco di Marco Datini, London, Jonathan Cape 1957:11).

Datini established trading houses in Prato, Florence, Pisa, Genoa, Avignon, Barcelona, Valencia, Majorca and Ibiza. He traded in ‘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’(Origi:12). He made cloth in Prato, which is still a major centre for textiles and knitwear, and he opened a bank, trading in bills of exchange as well as financing trade in commodities. Although a member of the Wool Merchants’ Guild in Prato, and of the Guild of Silk Merchants in Florence, Datini was, argues Iris Origi, a self-made Renaissance merchant rather than a clannish member of a small, locally focused medieval community of craftsmen and shopkeepers. He is, argues Iris Origi, one of

            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 (Origi:19).

           

Origi’s picture of Datini is of a commercially astute but mistrustful and fretful man immersed in every detail of his business and household affairs. He is acutely aware of the precariousness of his material success and of the threats posed to his business by political upheavals, piracy, plague and famine, and the potential dishonesty of his employees and business associates. As he grows older, he becomes more and more anxious about his spiritual well-being and fearful of his prospects in the after-life. Only two things, suggests Origi, were consistently important in Francesco’s life - trade and religion. Although he was ‘capable, in the pursuit of his business, of a life as industrious and exacting as a monk’s’, and was miserly by nature, he ‘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’(Origi:15). Both his business contracts and his private letters ‘began and ended with a pious formula; the Ten Commandments stood at the head of his ledgers’(Origi:306), where it was also customary for a merchant to write out the dedication: “In the name of God and of the Virgin Mary and of all the Saints of Paradise, that they may give us grace to do right both for body and soul”(Origi:66). "On the first page of Datini’s great ledgers stood the words ‘In the name of God and of profit’, and those 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"(Origi:13; my emphasis).

Unlike a growing number of his merchant contemporaries, Datini did not leverage his financial independence and commercial success into social position or political influence. His social networks were largely defined by his family and his business connections. He was, says Origi, ‘the typical parvenu - boastful and ill at ease’(Origi:155) among his social betters and, on occasions, obsequious in his attentions to those whose favour he wished to cultivate. His interest in local political affairs extended only to their impact on his business ventures and to the taxes that might be imposed upon him. Unlike the great international bankers and trading companies of the period, his scale of operations was such as to leave him largely free from political pressure. They, in contrast, were increasingly liable to be heavily involved in affairs of state, often to their detriment:

            they could not well deny a loan to a foreign prince who could at any moment expel them from his dominions, or refuse to pay the mercenary troops called in by their own city to defend its walls. Thus they were the first to suffer from the repercussions of political or military disasters; one could almost say that the greater or more powerful a company was, the more certainly was it doomed to failure (Origi:102-3).

How the tide has turned.