The Thammasat University Library has acquired a new book that should be useful for students interested in literature, history, sociology, business, economics, Italy, and related subjects.

The Merchant of Prato: Francesco di Marco Datini, 1335-1410 is by the English biographer Iris Origo.

The TU Library collection includes other books about different aspects of the Italian Renaissance.

The Merchant of Prato recreates the lives of an Italian businessman and his family from the late 1300s.

Prato is a city located in the center of Italy.

Originally published in 1957, it is based on 150,000 surviving documents about aspects of the life of Francesco Datini, a trader.

These include insurance policies, partnership deeds, and shipping statements for cargoes of oranges, cloth, lead, and slaves

Some historians have called these documents the fullest single source of information about the methods of medieval trade.

His involvement with business sometimes damages interactions with his family.

As he is often away on business trips, he writes to his wife, reminding her to do things in his absence:

Wash the mule’s feet with warm water, draw off some of the wine, send the left-over grain back to the mill.

His wife does not appreciate being ordered around and leaves him.

At this point, a friend writes to the merchant to criticize him for his

rough soul and frozen heart.

Francesco Datini realizes that his obsession with making money does not make him content:

Fate has willed that from the day of my birth, I should never know a whole happy day. I fear greatly my end will not be a good one, and I think of little else…What pleased me once, pleases me no longer; and nothing grieves me more than the time I have wasted on such matters.

Ultimately, the businessman in this book is described by another friend as

so busy with building, that he cannot see life itself.

stands outside of time. Not content with ordering the construction of a farmhouse outside Prato, he fills spare hours by rushing there to lay the stones himself (“You are so greedy, he is told, “that you will not allow one groat to be misused.”). In Francesco’s defence, his parsimony may only be an acute form of a much wider social norm. When Margharita loses a sapphire ring, she turns the house upside down, sweeps the street outside, and searches every pawn shop in town (“Since I lost it, I have known no joyful moment by day or night.”).

Francesco Datini is such a difficult person as a manager that even one of his slaves complained that he would

rather eat grass than be spoken to like that.

An introduction to the book by the historian Charles Nicholl, posted online, describes some of the unique features of The Merchant of Prato:

The merchant—her biographical “prey”—is Francesco di Marco Datini, born in Prato, in the lowlands west of Florence, in about 1335. […]

For Origo he is a kind of archetype of modern capitalism: “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.” […]

A born micromanager, he wrote almost all of his business letters with his own hand. “They were written on sheets of paper folded in three, closed by passing a small cord through holes in the edges, and sealing it at each end Each bundle of letters was then wrapped in a waterproof canvas and enclosed in a bag or purse called a scarsella, sealed by the merchant and worn at the messenger’s belt.”

In his will Francesco instructed that his letters be preserved in their entirety. In the 16th century they were seen neatly stacked in cupboards in his house, but sometime after that they were bundled into sacks and dumped in a recess under the stairs, and it was here they were found, in 1870, by a scholarly archdeacon, Don Martino Benelli.

This period of neglect, Origo drily remarks, was not “entirely unfortunate”: a few pages had been “nibbled by mice or worms; but at least thieves and fools remained unaware of their existence.” In this great cache were some five hundred ledgers and account books, another five hundred files of business correspondence, and a further scattering of miscellaneous documents such as deeds of partnership, insurance policies, bills of lading, bills of exchange, and so on. By the time Origo came on the scene in the 1950s this material had been mined by economic historians such as Enrico Bensa and Federigo Melis, but there was also a trove of personal correspondence that the academics had scarcely touched, and these—some eleven thousand letters written over a period of thirty years—are the raw data of The Merchant of Prato.

Most are letters to and from his wife, Margherita di Domenico Bandini. They had married in Avignon in 1376, when she was a “full-blooded” girl in her late teens and he about forty. They were both part of the city’s Florentine community, though she and her family were there as exiles. As Francesco bluntly states, her father “had his head cut off” for “wishing to hand over Florence to our Lord”—the pope. For Origo, the very ordinariness of their letters makes them precious. They are “unliterary, unpolished, unromantic, self-repetitive”; they give us “the small-change of everyday life, the details of domestic intercourse.”

To call them unromantic is something of an understatement. Francesco was almost perpetually away on business, and his letters are often just a long bossy list of reminders. “Remember to wash the mule’s feet with hot water, down to her hoofs,” to “have my hose made and then soled,” to “give some of the millet that is left with you to the nag, and see that it is well mashed,” to “water the orange-trees as we used to do, or they will be burnt up,” to “keep the kitchen windows shut, so that the flour does not get hot”—in short, “remember to do all you have to do, . . . and see to it that I shall not have to scold.” Margherita’s patience was understandably tried by this. Referring to his cosseted mule she says: “Would God you treated me as well as you do her!” She is sometimes tired and ill, “but I would bear it all, if only half of what I do was recognized by you.”

Their friend, the notary Ser Lapo Mazzei, tried to patch up the sometimes frayed relations in the Datini household. He thought Margherita too rebellious and Francesco too overbearing. “I wish she were as meek as she is shrewd,” he writes to Francesco, but can she be blamed when she “has had to listen to your blessed sermons for 18 whole years”? Beneath the superficial frictions of a long marriage lies a deeper resentment: Margherita’s failure to produce any children. Francesco addressed this lack by importing an illegitimate daughter, Ginevra, into the household.

This narrative of marital ups and downs is only one thread in the rich material of the letters. Many readers come to the book not as a biography per se but as a compendium of early Italian social customs. […]

(All images courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)