THE PROSOPOGRAPHY OF SENIOR PERSONNELIN THE MINTOF FLORENCE
The early period, to 1316
This preliminary study on the prosopography of Florentine mint personnel focuses on the senior officials in the mint of Florence who are attested during the several decades before November 1316. The chronological scope of the investigation corresponds to the period embraced by the retrospective entries in a master register of the mint, coveringthe period until the first semester of 1316, which ended on 31 October.[1] During the second semester of 1316, which ran until 30 April 1317, mint-masters GherardoGentili and Giovanni Villani, both shareholders in the Peruzzi merchant-banking firm, ordered their mint scribe Salvo Dini to gather together all the available records of the mint. The motivation for their orderprobably derived from the need to improve accountability within the mint after the bargellino affair of the preceding semester, during which the mint began to produce what was supposed to have been a six-penny coin that turned out to contain only enough silver to warrant a value of four pence or less; the mint withdrew the coin in 1317.[2]
The information that Salvo Dini assembled formed the basis of the master register of the mint to which I have already alluded. It included information on senior mint personnel, output in terms of the denominations produced (but not volumes of production) and the privy marks used on the coins to identify the masters responsible for their production; contemporaries called the register the Fiorinaiothough it is now generally referred to as the LibrodellaZecca, or ‘book of the mint’.[3] Dini was able to assemble a nearly complete record going back only as far as the second semester of 1303.Most earlier mint records were presumably lost in the great fire that swept through the heart of Florence in June 1304; the records of 1303 escaped the flames probably because they contained active accounts that were not yet archived.The few earlier fragments of data uncovered by Dini, his successors and/or modern historians derived from either the oral tradition or the notarial record. In terms of personnel, Dini identified the masters of the mint (Lat. domini, Ital. signori),[4]the assayers for gold (Lat. sententiatores, Ital. sentenziatori)and silver (Lat. approbatores, Ital. approvatori),[5] and the notaries who worked as mint scribes.Over time, mint scribes also began to record the die-sinkers and other personnel involved in coin production and quality control. This study for the most part limits the scope of the investigation to the masters and assayers, leaving aside the scribes and other personnel.
Not surprisingly, there was a clear distinction between the masters of the Florentine mint, who were generally merchant-bankers, and the assayers, who were goldsmiths. The masters were almost invariably of merchant-banking extraction, selected from among the senior members of two of the city’s six major guilds (l’Artimaggiori), that of the importers of foreign textiles and unfinished wool (l’ArtedellaCalimala, named after the Florentine street where its fondaco or warehouse was located) and that of the money-changers (l’Arte di Cambio). Representatives of the two guilds alternated each semester between the direction of the city’s gold mint and its silver mint; money-changers also alternated between those of the MercatoVecchio, in the modern Piazza dellaRepubblica, and those of the MercatoNuovo, which still stands and continues to function as a market.
The men who served as masters of the mint were more likely to belong to the ruling elite. Most of themservedat one time or another as members of government (Signoria) as priors of the major guilds (priori delleArtimaggiori) and/or standard-bearers of justice (gonfalonieri di giustizia). They were also more likely to serve on one of two advisory councils,the ‘good men’ (buoniuomini) and the standard-bearers of company(gonfalonieri di compagnia). They were active in the governance of the guilds and were generally shareholders or factors in one of the city’s larger merchant-banking firms. Masters were also more deeply engaged in the kinds of economic activities that, in the later thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, were frequently subjects of notarial instruments, particularly short-term credit operations, sometimes for considerable sums, as both borrowers and lenders. The object of these transactions, which often involved other members of the merchant-banking community, were no doubt mostly to enable borrowers to overcome short-term liquidity problems, whether to meet other payment obligations or to take advantage of investment opportunities in commercial ventures.[6]
The merchant-bankers who administered the Florentine mint were well-suited for the responsibilities that the work entailed. They could read and write well enough to deal with commercial correspondence; they were experts in commercial arithmetic, bookkeeping and accounting; and they had experience working in large companies with strict division of labour, tight controls and complex organisational structure. Members of the money-changers guild also knew how to work and refine precious metals, but that was not an essential skill for the office of mint-master; merchants of the Calimala who always ran one of the mints were not necessarily experts in metallurgy. The requisite expertise of the successful mint-master lay more in the realm of business administration. It is therefore useful to consider the training and professional development of the merchant-banker.
At the age of ten or eleven years old, after having learnt how to read and write in an elementary grammar school, a young male destined for a career in business began to study commercial arithmetic in an abacus school (scuolad’abbaco). After about three years, he graduated and entered the world of work, often in the family business, sometimes abroad in one of the firm’s branch offices. Initially, young junior employees, who were generally called garzoni or fanciulli (boy or child), managed the cash box and maintained the relevant accounts, recording receipts and expenditures in a master ledger, thus learning the basic techniques of accounting. If all went well, the junior merchant was soon entrusted with the key to the cash box. Another fundamental responsibility of a young new employee was to write and copy commercial correspondence. Eventually, again if all went well, he was entrusted with the key to the chest of documents. The object of the young merchant’s early education and professional preparation was therefore to become a good abbachisto, a good bookkeeper or accountant, and a good reader and writer of commercial correspondence.
The next phase in the career of a young merchant-banker in one of the larger Florentine companies involved working in one or more of the firm’s branch offices abroad. This was considered a fundamental part of a merchant’s professional development, to travel and participate in the world of business on other important marketplaces of Europe and the Mediterranean, to see with his own eyes the wide range of goods available and the various customs of distant lands, to deal with different systems of currency and different systems of weights and measures. Soon after completing his studies in one of his city’s abacus schools, the young Florentine merchant Guido di Filippo dell’Antella, born in 1254, left Florence to work in the branch office of the family business in Genoa for eighteen months. He then travelled across Northern Italy to work there in Venice for two years, then proceeded down the Adriatic coast to work in Ravenna for ten months before crossing the Apennines back to Florence, where he worked for five years with his uncle, Lambertodell’Antella, who had already distinguished himself as the first master of the Florentine mint for the new gold florin in 1252. When Guido was only twenty-four years old, in 1278, he left the family business to become a shareholder (compagno) in the larger Scali Company, working with them for ten years both in Florence and abroad in Provence, Pisa, Rome, Naples and even Acre in the Middle East. He then worked for three years with the Franzesi Company in France before returning to Florence, where he formed a banking partnership with two other Florentine merchants, working from a table or kiosk (banco) that they had acquired in the city’s MercatoVecchio. In 1298, Guido joined the Cerchi Company and worked with them asthe dominant political party in the city, the pro-papal Guelf party, was torn asunder by factionalism. The Cerchiwere leading members of the White Guelfs, which made up the bourgeois faction of the party, while another family, the Donati, dominated the Black Guelfs, which made up the older aristocratic element in the party. The crisis reached a climax in 1301 when Pope Boniface VIII threw his support behind the Blacks, which led to the expulsion of the Whites from Florence, including not only the Cerchi but also the poet Dante Alighieri, a prominent White Guelf who was forced to live the rest of his life in exile.
Guido’s career trajectory in the second half of the thirteenth century was fairly typical. He worked in the family business and then became a shareholder in a larger enterprise, often working abroad. He eventually formed his own firm with two partners; the partnership was evidently short-lived. Guido subsequently became involved with the Cerchi Company, but his affiliation with the firm was then cut short when the Cerchifamily became entangled in the rupture of the Guelf political party in Florence.The careers of two other well-known Florentine merchants of the early fourteenth century, the copyist Francesco di BalduccioPegolotti and the chronicler Giovanni Villani, were similar in these respects. As far as the evidence suggests, Guido never became master of the Florentine mint, though his uncle Lambertowas master of the gold mint in 1252, as already noted, and his relatives Giovanni and Donato dell’Antella managed the gold and silver mints at various times in the early fourteenth century. Francesco di BalduccioPegolotti, like Guido, never appears to have managed a mint, neither as master of the mint in Florence nor as contractor of a mint in any other city, principality or kingdom;his famous fourteenth-century merchants’ manual, La praticadellamercatura,nevertheless included not only a list of coins in circulation mainly around 1290 but also detailed instructions on refining and alloying precious metals, andhis relatives were administering the important mint in Meran for Counts Otto (1295-1310) and Heinrich II of Tyrol (1310-1335) in the early fourteenth century. Giovanni Villani, on the other hand, served two terms as master of the mint in Florence, becoming master for silver in 1316and then master for gold in 1326, while his nephew Andrea and brother Matteo obtained contracts to run the mint in Naples for King Robert the Wise of Anjou (1309-1343) in the 1330s and early 1340s.
It is difficult to generalise, but the Florentine merchant-bankers who undertook the charge of managing the municipal mint were senior members of the local merchant communitywho had been active in trade and finance for many years, often on distant marketplaces. By the time that they had become mint-master, however, they had largely ceased their peregrinations in the name of commerce to settle, once and for all, in their native city on the river Arno. Themajority, twenty-nine out of the forty-seven attested as mint-master until 1316, served a single tenure as master. For them, the office of mint-masterwas either a respite from business or more commonly one in a series of government offices that merchants routinely filled in the latter part of their careers in business. Of the forty-seven masters covered in this study, at least twenty-seven of them occupied high government offices. Seventeen of them,by contrast, are not otherwise attested as having held any government office; these are generally the least well documented of the masters covered in this study. Eighteen of the mint-mastersattested until 1316 served multiple tenures, but half of these served only two, includingGiovanni Villani, who alsoserved in offices that oversaw ongoing construction of the city’s new circuit of walls (1321), the urban food supply (1328-1330), and Andrea Pisano’s continuing work on the bronze east doors of the octagonal Baptistery of St John (1331).[7] Among the masters who served more than one tenure, most worked in both the gold and silver mints, indeed like Villani. Only four of the masters attested until 1316 are known to have served three terms, only three served four, and only two served anything more than that; both Donato dell’Antella and TanoBaroncelli served five terms, with one of Donato’s and three of Tano’s coming after 1316.
The committee that oversaw the food supply, the Sei del biado, was a particularly important government agency in a city of some 100,000 or more inhabitants in which an unusually large proportion was employed in non-agrarian labour and actually produced relatively little food, if any at all. According to Villani, some thirty per cent of the urban population was in some way earning a livelihood from the woollen textiles industryalone in the late 1330s, and possibly an even higher proportion during the first decades of the century, before the industry had shifted its focus from mass market textiles to luxury fabrics. Surplus agricultural production in the contadoof Florence, thehinterland under direct Florentine control, was nevertheless insufficient to feed the city throughout year; the contado itself was essentially self-sufficient, but surplus output met the city’s needs for only five months in any given year. The rest, which amounted to nearly seventeen per cent of net food consumption in the territory, had to be imported, and it was the committee’s responsibility to manage food imports and ensure that the shortfall in domestic production was always covered. At least two other Florentine merchants who occupied the office of mint-master at one time or another before 1317 also served as one of the Sei del biado. Banco Ra[g]ugi, a money-changer who became master of the mint for gold in 1305, served on the six-man committee in 1296, while Alberto di Jacopo del Giudice, a merchant of the Calimala who becamemaster of the mint for gold in 1310, served on the committee in 1302. Others who obtained the office of mint-master served on committees that oversaw the systems of direct and indirect taxes, respectively called the estimi and gabelle, and still others served as electors of the podestà, as communal treasurers or as other important government officials.
Assayers were qualified goldsmiths, not more than sixty years old, though most were considerably younger when they first began to work in the mint. As goldsmiths, the assayers were inscribed in the guild of Por Santa Maria, which had been called the Baldrigai in the early thirteenth century. It was made up of various groups of merchants and artisans who shared their headquarters in a building or palazzo in the via Por Santa Maria, one of the main streets in the old city on the right bank of the Arno leading to the Ponte Vecchio. In the fourteenth century, the merchants and manufacturers of silk fabrics began to dominate the guild; in the early fifteenth century, the guild formally adopted the new title of the silk guild (l’Artedella Seta).
Like the mint-masters, most assayers in the Florentine mint occupied the office for one or two terms. Twenty-nine assayers are attested until 1316,tenof which served a single term and eight served two terms; only four served three terms and only one served four terms,[8]but seven others are attested as having served seven terms or more, and some of these appear to have made something of a career out of the position.Three assayers in particular stand out.Morello di Tommasino served four terms as assayer in the mint for gold coinage during the period from 1303 to 1316 and a further eleven terms to 1330. MarchinoCiuti served six terms as assayer in the mint for silver coinage during the period from 1303 to 1316 and a further nineteen terms to 1340, twice for five consecutive semesters.Fredino di Bono Gottifredi served eight terms as assayer in the mint for silver coinage during the period from 1303 to 1316, continuously from May 1310 to October 1312, and a further twenty-seven terms mainly in the silver mint to 1340, including a stretch of eighteen consecutive semesters from May 1326 to April 1335. Of the assayers who served for multiple terms, Fredinowas one of only two whoworked in the mints for both silver and gold coinage, often working in the gold mint from 1333 onwards. Other assayers worked exclusively in either silver or gold.
Assayers were far less likely than the masters to be engaged in the kinds of economic activities recorded in notarial transactions; when they appeared in the notarial evidence, it was more likely as an apprentice or employer of an apprentice, as witness to a notarial act or perhaps as a party to a conveyance of immovable property but generally not as borrowers or lenders in credit contracts. When assayers served in government offices, moreover, it was generally as minor officials, but some eventually acceded to higher offices. Geri dellaMaestra, who served several terms as assayer in the mint for gold coinage from 1300 to 1306, becamecommunal treasurer in 1310.Piero di Rinuccio Machiavelli, who was assayer in the mint for silver coinage in 1308, became standard-bearer of company in 1332, one of the good men in 1337 and prior in 1340. Dino di ChiaroCornacchini, who was assayer in the mint for silver coinage in 1305 and 1306, was councillor in the Merchants’ tribunal (the Mercanzia) in 1311 and councillor of the money-changers’ guild in 1313 before becoming prior in 1315. Dino’s career subsequently took an interesting turn afterhe formed a partnership with two brothers, Filippo and Cornacchinodi ChiaroCornacchini, and became active in trade at the Champagne fairs. The partnership collapsed by 1319, when officials of the Mercanzia in Florence notified custodians at Champagne and Brie that the tribunalwasunable to satisfy the custodians’ request to turn the Cornacchiniover to them since the partners were all tonsured clerics in clerical habit. The brothers were therefore under the jurisdiction of the bishop of Florence, who ordered their arrest and detention in le Stinche, the communal prison, under charges of heresy. Exactly how this episode played out is unclear, but Dino evidently went on to become master of the mint at Aquileia for Patriarch Bertrando de Genesio in 1336. This constitutes a highly unusual example of a former employee of the Florentine mint subsequently working in a foreign mint; as a general rule, former employees of the Florentine mintdid not subsequently undertake work of any sort in any foreign mints, presumably as a matter of mint and monetary policy.