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Political Economy and the Medici

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 April 2020

Sophus A. Reinert  and
Robert Fredona
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Abstract

Using materials from the important collection of Medici manuscripts donated to Harvard Business School by Harry Gordon Selfridge, this paper explores the geopolitics of the transformation of raw wool into finished cloth, and the role played in that process by Medici entrepreneurs, their guild, and their government. It aims to show that the history of political economy cannot truly be understood without business history. Successful business practices used by Medici entrepreneurs were first theorized by Giovanni Botero and others as what would become an “Italian model” in political economy, a model that had a profoundly wide-ranging impact, and that puts the lie to the commonplace in the history of ideas that the Italian Renaissance, so precocious in other fields, was silent on the topic of political economy.

Keywords

MediciwoolFlorencepolitical economySelfridge collectionGiovanni BoteroAntonio SerraGustav von SchmollerRaymond and Florence Edler de Roover
Type
Research Article
Information
Business History Review , Volume 94 , Issue 1: Italy and the Origins of Capitalism , Spring 2020 , pp. 125 - 177
Copyright
Copyright © 2020 The President and Fellows of Harvard College

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Footnotes

The authors would also like to thank Doohwan Ahn, Niall Atkinson, David Armitage, Sven Beckert, Eric Beerbohm, Ann Blair, John Brewer, William Caferro, Hannah Boon Callaway, Elizabeth Cross, Christine Desan, Katrina Forrester, Franco Franceschi, Maria Fusaro, Anja-Silvia Goeing, Richard Goldthwaite, James Hankins, Lauren Jacobi, Steven L. Kaplan, Stephanie Leitzel, James Livesey, Hannah Marcus, Priyanka Menon, Jeff Miner, John M. Najemy, Eric Nelson, Nitin Nohria, Steven Pincus, Erik S. Reinert, Dante Roscini, John Shovlin, Daniel Lord Smail, Jacob Soll, Corey Tazzara, Anoush Terjanian, Francesca Trivellato, Francesca Viano, Andre Wakefield, Carl Wennerlind, and Sophie Wilkowske for comments; and to additionally thank extraordinary audiences at Harvard Business School, Harvard's Early Modern History Workshop, the Harvard Government Political Theory Colloquium, the Huntington Library, the Boston Athenaeum, and the Renaissance Society of America. The data visualizations in this article were designed by Matthew W. Norris, Associate Vice President of Data and Analytics, Art Institute of Chicago. Isabelle Lewis drew the maps. Finally, we would like to thank Cynthia Montgomery and the research directors at HBS for funding the underlying research over several years; Deb Wallace, Laura Linard, Tim Mahoney, and Christine Riggle for making work on the Medici ledgers possible; Anja Goethals, Kate Jenkins, Elizabeth Leh, and Mikayla Schutte for various and vital assistance; and Walter Friedman and Geoffrey Jones for continuing and extraordinary support through HBS's Business History Initiative.

References

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2 Quoting Machiavelli's April 9, 1513, letter to Francesco Vettori, which John Najemy has rightly argued “helped to forge the modern image (or some of the more influential modern images) of Machiavelli.” See Najemy, Between Friends: Discourses of Power and Desire in the Machiavelli-Vettori Letters of 1513–1515 (Princeton, 1993), 4, 107–8; for the original, see Machiavelli, Tutte le opere, ed. Mario Martelli (Florence, 1971), 1131–32. An important vehicle of this particular image is Hirschman, Albert O., The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism before Its Triumph (Princeton, 1977), 41CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

3 Jurdjevic, Mark, “Virtue, Commerce, and the Enduring Florentine Republican Moment: Reintegrating Italy into the Atlantic Republican Tradition,” Journal of the History of Ideas 62, no. 4 (2001): 742CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Jurdjevic has rightly called the incompatibility of wealth and virtue “the dialectical engine” of J. G. A. Pocock's classic The Machiavellian Moment: Florentine Political Thought and the Atlantic Republican Tradition (Princeton, 1975), though he is here addressing more particularly the claims of Pocock's “Civic Humanism and Its Role in Anglo-American Political Thought,” in Politics, Language, and Time: Essays on Political Thought and History (Chicago, 1989), 80–103. Just as Pocock's seductive heuristic uncouples the economic from the political, there is also in him and his intellectual heirs a quasi-permanent displacement from Florence to the Atlantic, which at once marginalizes and masks the local and regional and, thus, the economic. On the economic Machiavelli, see especially the important work of Jérémie Barthas, L'argent n'est pas le nerf de la guerre: Essai sur une prétendue erreur de Machiavel (Rome, 2011) and, more recently, Barthas, “Machiavelli, the Republic, and the Financial Crisis,” in Machiavelli on Liberty and Conflict, ed. David Johnston, Nadia Urbinati, and Camila Vergara (Chicago, 2017), 257–79. Some of the most important new thoughts on Machiavelli, it might be added, deal with the issue of class. See, for example, John M. Najemy, “Society, Class, and State in the Discourses on Livy,” in The Cambridge Companion to Machiavelli, ed. John M. Najemy (Cambridge, U.K., 2010), 96–111; Najemy, “Machiavelli's Florentine Tribunes,” in Renaissance Studies in Honor of Joseph Connors, ed. Machtelt Israëls and Louis A. Waldman (Cambridge, MA, and Milan, 2013), 65–72; and John P. McCormick, Machiavellian Democracy (Cambridge, U.K., 2011). As Lauro Martines long ago concluded, however, “wealth was associated with virtù and honor” in Renaissance Florence, “poverty with dishonor.” Martines, The Social World of Florentine Humanists (Princeton, 1963), 25.

4 Rothschild, Emma, “Faith, Enlightenment, and Economics,” in Natural Law, Economics, and the Common Good: Perspectives from Natural Law, ed. Gregg, Samuel and James, Harold (Exeter, 2012), 2–8Google Scholar. For some additional context, see Berg, Maxine and Eger, Elizabeth, “The Rise and Fall of the Luxury Debates,” in Luxury in the Eighteenth Century: Debates, Desires and Delectable Goods, ed. Berg, Maxine and Eger, Elizabeth (Basingstoke, 2002), 7–27Google Scholar.

5 Hume, Political Essays, 110, 107.

6 We are, needless to say, not the first to argue this. See, for example, Kaplan, Steven L., Bread, Politics and Political Economy in the Reign of Louis XV (1976; London, 2015)Google Scholar; and Sonenscher, Michael, Work and Wages: Natural Law, Politics, and the Eighteenth-Century French Trades (1989; Cambridge, U.K., 2012)Google Scholar.

7 Voltaire, “Bled ou Blé,” in Questions sur l'Encyclopédie, ed. Nicholas Cronk and Christiane Mervaud (Oxford, 2007–2013), 3:412–13. Here we follow the argument of Steven L. Kaplan and Sophus A. Reinert, “The Economic Turn in Enlightenment Europe,” in The Economic Turn: Recasting Political Economy in Eighteenth-Century Europe, ed. Steven L. Kaplan and Sophus A. Reinert (London, 2019), 1–33. On the centrality of grain to French political economy, see Kaplan, Bread, Politics and Political Economy.

8 The literature on physiocracy is vast, but see, for example, the essays in Kaplan and Reinert, The Economic Turn.

9 Giovanni Botero, Delle cause della grandezza delle città libri 3 (Rome, 1588), 39. The chapter “Dell'industria” (II.7), 38–43, was removed from later editions and incorporated into book 8 of Botero's Della ragion di stato (1589), to which the entire work was appended beginning with its second edition. Here we follow a new translation—Botero, On the Causes of the Greatness and Magnificence of Cities, trans. Geoffrey W. Symcox (Toronto, 2012), 43, which is based on the 1598 text edited in Luigi Firpo, ed., Della ragion di Stato di Giovanni Botero: Con tre libri Delle cause della grandezza delle città, due aggiunte e un discorso sulla popolazione di Roma (Turin, 1948)—altering it to more literally reflect Botero's use of the technical language of wool production and adding italics for emphasis.

10 Botero, Delle cause, 40; Botero, On the Causes, 44.

11 Working in the immediate wake of Friedrich Meinecke and Benedetto Croce, Federico Chabod's study “Giovanni Botero,” in Opere di Federico Chabod, vol. 2, Scritti sul Rinascimento (1934; Turin, 1967), 271–458, remains a landmark work. For the broader context of Botero's thought, see, especially, Robert Bireley, The Counter-Reformation Prince: Anti-Machiavellianism or Catholic Statecraft in Early Modern Europe (Chapel Hill, 1990). Apropos of the subject matter of this essay: Michel Senellart, Machiavélisme et raison d’état: XIIe–XVIIIe siècle (Paris, 1989), 71–83, treats Botero as a mercantilist; Romain Descendre, L’état du monde: Giovanni Botero entre raison d’état et géopolitique (Geneva, 2009)—in the finest discussion of the Delle cause (pp. 173–212)—examines Botero's political economy (pp. 186–201).

12 Botero, Delle cause, 41; Botero, On the Causes, 45; Joseph Schumpeter, A History of Economic Analysis (New York, 1954), 195. On Antonio Serra and his Breve trattato delle cause che possono far abbondare li regni d'oro e argento dove non sono miniere, see Sophus A. Reinert, introduction to Antonio Serra, A “Short Treatise” on the Wealth and Poverty of Nations (1613), ed. Sophus A. Reinert, trans. Jonathan Hunt (London and New York, 2011), esp. 37–46, 65 (for an analysis of the relationship between the economic analyses of Botero and Serra); and Rosario Patalano and Sophus A. Reinert, eds., Antonio Serra and the Economics of Good Government (New York, 2016). Immediately following Schumpeter, Arthur Cole, librarian of Harvard Business School's Baker Library, also highlighted Serra's temporal primacy. See Cole, The Historical Development of Economic and Business Literature (Boston, 1957), 16. The polymath Schumpeter similarly declared that “the ‘Malthusian’ Principle of Population sprang fully developed from the brain of Botero in 1589.” Schumpeter, A History, 254, but see also 143–46. The linkages between Botero and Serra are also explored in [Enzo R. Grilli], Antonio Serra visto da Enzo Grilli (Rome, 2006).

13 Serra, “Short Treatise,” 121; [Ferdinando Galiani], Dialogues sur le commerce des bleds (London, 1770), 150; in the edition published by Fausto Nicolini (Milan, 1956), 142. For context, see Reinert, Sophus A., Translating Empire: Emulation and the Origins of Political Economy (Cambridge, MA, 2011), 186–232CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Steven L. Kaplan, “Galiani: Grain and Governance,” in Kaplan and Reinert, The Economic Turn, 221–303.

14 Sophus A. Reinert, “The Italian Tradition of Political Economy: Theories and Policies of Development in the Semi-Periphery of the Enlightenment,” in The Origins of Development Economics: How Schools of Economic Thought Have Addressed Development, ed. Jomo K. Sundaram and Erik S. Reinert (London, 2005), 24–47. See also Sophus A. Reinert, “‘A Sublimely Stupid Idea’: Physiocracy in Italy from the Enlightenment to Fascism,” in Kaplan and Reinert, The Economic Turn, 699–733. For a brief survey of the late medieval Italian economy, see Sophus A. Reinert and Robert Fredona, “Merchants and the Origins of Capitalism,” in The Routledge Companion to Makers of Global Business, ed. Teresa da Silva Lopes, Christina Lubinski, and Heidi J. S. Tworek (London, 2019), 171–188.

15 Gene Brucker, “A Civic Debate on Florentine Higher Education (1460),” Renaissance Quarterly, no. 34 (1981): 531; Robert Black, “Education and the Emergence of a Literate Society,” in Italy in the Age of the Renaissance: 1300–1550, ed. John M. Najemy (Oxford, 2004), 34.

16 Goldthwaite, Richard, The Economy of Renaissance Florence (Baltimore, 2009), esp. 265–340Google Scholar (on Italian cloth production).

17 See, more generally, Sophus A. Reinert, “Rivalry: Greatness in Early Modern Political Economy,” in Mercantilism Reimagined: Political Economy in Early Modern Britain and Its Empire, ed. Philip J. Stern and Carl Wennerlind (Oxford, 2013), 248–70.

18 Roger Aubenais, “Commerce des draps et vie économique à Grasse en 1308–9,” Provence historique 9, no. 37 (1959): 204–6.

19 For a classic case study of a Florentine Calimala firm involved in the over-land cloth trade, see Armando Sapori, Una compagnia di Calimala ai primi del trecento (Florence, 1932).

20 Giovanni Filippi, L'arte dei mercanti di Calimala in Firenze ed il suo piu antico statuto (Turin, 1889), v, xv, 162.

21 Giovanni Villani, Nuova Cronica, 2nd ed., ed. Giuseppe Porta (Parma, 2007), volume 3, book 12, chapter 94, at 197–202. John Najemy has shown, based on Villani's figures, that the labor force of the woolen textile industry represented at least one-sixth of Florence's adult population.

22 On the demographic collapse, see, among others, Day, W. R. Jr., “The Population of Florence before the Black Death: Survey and Synthesis,” Journal of Medieval History 28, no. 2 (2002): 93–129CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

23 Munro, John, “Wool-Price Schedules and the Qualities of English Wools in the Later Middle Ages, c. 1270–1499,” Textile History 9, no. 1 (1978): 118–69CrossRefGoogle Scholar; Munro, “Medieval Woolens: The Struggle for Markets,” in The Cambridge History of Western Textiles, ed. David Jenkins, 2 vols. (Cambridge, U.K., 2003), 1:228–324; Munro, “Spanish Merino Wools and the Nouvelles Draperies: An Industrial Transformation in the Late-Medieval Low Countries,” Economic History Review 58, no. 3 (2005): 431–84; Robert S. Lopez, “The Origin of the Merino Sheep,” in The Joshua Starr Memorial Volume: Studies in History and Philology (New York, 1953), 161–68.

24 Like the Del Bene firm, whose sources are described in Hidetoshi Hoshino, L'arte della lana in Firenze nel basso medioevo: Il commercio della lana e il mercato dei panni fiorentini nei secoli XIII–XV (Florence, 1980), 216, table 26.

25 On the nature of loom technology, widely speaking, see both Marta Hoffmann, The Warp-Weighted Loom: Studies in the History and Technology of an Ancient Implement (Oslo, 1964); and Walter Endrei, L’evolution des techniques du filage et du tissage: Du moyen âge à la revolution industrielle (Paris, 1968).

26 John Munro, “I panni di lana,” in Il Rinascimento italiano e l'Europa, ed. Luca Ramin, vol. 4, Commercio e cultura mercantile, ed. Franco Franceschi, Richard Goldthwaite, and Reinhold C. Mueller (Treviso, 2007), 105–41.

27 Patrick Chorley, “The Cloth Exports of Flanders and Northern France during the Thirteenth Century: A Luxury Trade?,” Economic History Review, 2nd ser., vol. 40 (1987): 349–79.

28 Munro, John, “The ‘Industrial Crisis’ of the English Textile Towns, 1290–1330,” in Thirteenth-Century England VII, ed. Prestwich, Michael, Britnell, Richard, and Frame, Robin (Woodbridge, 1999), 103–41Google Scholar.

29 On the wool guild, see Hoshino, L'arte della lana.

30 Edwin S. Hunt, The Medieval Super-Companies: A Study of the Peruzzi Company of Florence (Cambridge, U.K., 1994).

31 Terence Lloyd, The English Wool Trade in the Middle Ages (Cambridge, U.K., 1977), 60–140; on the letter of exchange generally, see Raymond de Roover, L'evolution de la lettre de change, XIVe–XVIIIe siècles (Paris, 1953).

32 Hidetoshi Hoshino, “The Rise of the Florentine Woolen Industry in the Fourteenth Century,” in Cloth and Clothing in Medieval Europe, ed. Negley B. Harte and Kenneth G. Ponting (London, 1983), 184–204, esp. 187–90.

33 Atwell, Adrienne, “Ritual Trading at the Florentine Wool-Cloth Botteghe,” in Renaissance Florence: A Social History, ed. Crum, Roger and Paoletti, John (New York, 2006), 198Google Scholar.

34 John Munro, “The ‘New Institutional Economics’ and the Changing Fortunes of Fairs in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: The Textile Trades, Warfare, and Transaction Costs,” Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial- und Wirtschaftsgeschichte 88, no. 1 (2001): 1–47.

35 Maureen Mazzaoui, “The Cotton Industry of Northern Italy in the Late Middle Ages, 1150–1450,” Journal of Economic History 32, no. 1 (1972): 262–86.

36 Federigo Melis, “La diffusione nel Mediterranea occidentale dei panni di Wervicq e delle altre citta della Lys attorna al 1400,” in Studi in onore di Amintore Fanfani, vol. 3, Medioevo (Milan, 1962), 229, table 4 (dealing with the period from 1394 to 1410).

37 Lloyd, English Wool Trade, 225–87. On this transition, and the long shadow it cast on the history of Italian political economy, see Reinert, Sophus A., “Blaming the Medici: Footnotes, Falsification, and the Fate of the ‘English Model’ in Eighteenth-Century Italy,” History of European Ideas 32, no. 4 (2006): 430–55CrossRefGoogle Scholar; and Reinert, “Lessons on the Rise and Fall of Great Powers: Conquest, Commerce, and Decline in Enlightenment Italy,” American Historical Review 115, no. 5 (2010): 1395–425.

38 Franco Franceschi, “Lane permesse e lane proibite nella Toscana fiorentina dei secoli XIV–XV: Logiche economiche e scelte ‘politiche,’” in La pastorizia mediterranea: Storia e diritto, ed. Antonello Mattone and Pinuccia F. Simbula (Rome, 2011), 878–89. For other regulations, see Franceschi, “Criminalità e mondo del lavoro: Il tribunale dell'Arte della lana a Firenze nei secoli XIV e XV,” Ricerche storiche 18 (1988): 551–90; on the different sectors, see also Goldthwaite, Economy of Renaissance Florence, 276–78.

39 Franco Franceschi, “Industria, commercio, credito,” in Storia della civiltà Toscana, vol. 2, Il Rinascimento (Florence, 2001), 547–53.

40 Franco Franceschi, “Medici Economic Policy,” in The Medici: Citizens and Masters, ed. Robert Blacke and John E. Law (Florence, 2015), 143. Discussing a series of import bans on foreign fabrics between 1439 and 1458, Franceschi quotes a telling justification: “it will not be believed elsewhere that the textiles of Florence are satisfactory if we ourselves use foreign imports” (p. 147).

41 Hoshino, L'arte della lana, 231–44.

42 Hidetoshi Hoshino, “Il commercio fiorentino nell'Impero Ottomano: Costi e profitti negli anni 1484–1488,” in Aspetti della vita economica medievale: Atti del Convegno di Studi nel X anniversario della morte di Federigo Melis (Florence, 1985), 81–90; Hidetoshi Hoshino and Maureen Mazzaoui, “Ottoman Markets for Florentine Woolen Cloth in the Late Fifteenth Century,” International Journal of Turkish Studies 3, no. 2 (1985–86): 17–31.

43 Patrick Chorley, “Rascie and the Florentine Cloth Industry during the Sixteenth Century,” Journal of European Economic History 32, no. 3 (2003): 489.

44 Lorenzo Tanzini, “Il Magnifico e il Turco: Elementi politici, economici e culturali nelle relazioni tra Firenze e Impero Ottomano al tempo di Lorenzo de’ Medici,” Rivista dell'Istituto di Storia dell'Europa Mediterranea 4 (2010): 271–89.

45 Chorley, “Rascie,” 487–91; Halil İnalcık, “Part I: The Ottoman State: Economy and Society, 1300–1600,” in An Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire, 1300–1914, ed. Halil İnalcık (Cambridge, U.K., 1994), 218–56.

46 Alfred Doren, Studien aus der Florentiner Wirtschaftsgeschichte, vol. 1, Die Florentiner Wollentuchindustrie vom 14. bis zum 16. Jahrhundert: Ein Beitrag zur Geschichte des modernen Kapitalismus (Stuttgart, 1901), 202, 400, 469; and vol. 2, Das Florentiner Zunftwesen vom 14. bis zum 16. Jahrhundert (1908), 505, 560, 721. Early caveats about Doren's methodology were presented by, among others, Edwin F. Gay, soon to be the first dean of Harvard Business School (HBS), in his long review in Political Science Quarterly 19, no. 2 (1904): 310–15: “Doren bases all this on gild documents, which he uses with dexterity and vivacity,” Gay writes, “[b]ut this vivacity has its dangers” (p. 314). On the scale of the Florentine wool industry, see also the important early revisionism of Gertrud Hermes, “Der Kapitalismus in der Florentiner Wollenindustrie,” Zeitschrift für die gesamte Staatswissenschaft 72, no. 3 (1917): 367–400.

47 Werner Sombart, Der moderne Kapitalismus: Historisch-systematische Darstellung des gesamteuropäischen Wirtschaftslebens von seinen Anfängen bis zur Gegenwart, vol. 2, part 2 (Munich, 1919), 767 (translation ours). On Sombart and Max Weber, see Hartmut Lehmann, “The Rise of Capitalism: Weber versus Sombart,” in Weber's Protestant Ethic: Origins, Evidence, Context, ed. Hartmut Lehmann and Günther Roth (Cambridge, U.K., 1993), 195–208.

48 For a study of one production system, see Francesco Ammannati, “Francesco di Marco Datini's Wool Workshops,” in Francesco di Marco Datini: The Man and the Merchant, ed. Giampiero Nigro (Florence, 2010), 489–514. On protoindustrialization more generally, see Sheilagh C. Ogilvie and Markus Cerman, eds., European Proto-Industrialization (Cambridge, U.K., 1996).

49 The literature on woolworker agitation is vast, but see Alessandro Stella, La révolte des Ciompi: Les hommes, les lieux, le travail (Paris, 1993) and Robert Fredona, “Baldus de Ubaldis on Conspiracy and Treason (Crimen laesae maiestatis) in Late Trecento Florence,” in The Politics of Law in Late Medieval and Renaissance Florence: Essays in Honour of Lauro Martines, ed. Lawrin Armstrong and Julius Kirshner (Toronto, 2011), 141–60; and, for a wider context, Samuel Cohn, “Florentine Insurrections, 1342–1385, in Comparative Perspective,” in The English Rising of 1381, ed. Rodney H. Hilton and T. H. Aston (Cambridge, U.K., 1984), 143–64. On the organization of labor in the wool guild, see Franco Franceschi, Oltre il ‘Tumulto’: I lavoratori fiorentini dell'Arte della Lana fra Tre- e Quattrocento (Florence, 1993).

50 Franco Franceschi, “L'imposa mercantile industriale nella Toscana dei secoli XIV–XVI,” Annali di storia dell'impresa 14 (2003): 229–49.

51 Franceschi, Oltre il ‘Tumulto,’ 8.

52 Raymond de Roover, “A Florentine Firm of Cloth Manufacturers: Management and Organization of a Sixteenth-Century Business,” Speculum 16, no. 1 (1941): 3–33, reprinted in Julius Kirshner, ed., Business, Banking, and Economic Thought in Late Medieval and Early Modern Europe: Selected Studies of Raymond de Roover (Chicago, 1974), 85–118. De Roover's original sixty-six-page typescript, with charts, is located in Harvard University's Archives. On the early history of business history at HBS, see Robert Fredona and Sophus A. Reinert, “The Harvard Research Center in Entrepreneurial History and the Daimonic Entrepreneur,” History of Political Economy 49, no. 2 (2017): 267–314.

53 Richard A. Goldthwaite, “Raymond de Roover on Late Medieval and Early Modern Economic History,” in Kirshner, Business, Banking, and Economic Thought, 10–11.

54 David Herlihy, “The Economy of Traditional Europe,” Journal of Economic History 31, no. 1 (1971): 160.

55 “Before I became his [Gras's] student,” de Roover further explained, “I had done some work on the history of accounting and I was familiar with medieval methods of bookkeeping. It was Professor Gras who broadened my horizon and who taught me how to apply this knowledge and how to use accounting as a tool rather than as an end in itself.” Raymond de Roover, The Medici Bank: Its Organization, Management, Operations and Decline (New York, 1948), v, xv.

56 Florence Edler, Glossary of Mediaeval Terms of Business, Italian Series, 1200–1600 (Cambridge, MA, 1934), appendices at 333–426. On Edler (de Roover), see Richard A. Goldthwaite, “Florence Edler de Roover (1900–1987): Nota biografica,” in Edler de Roover, L'arte della seta a Firenze nei secoli XIV e XV, ed. Sergio Tognetti (Florence, 1999), xv–xxiii. We are currently completing a biography of this remarkable yet little-known scholar.

57 Raymond de Roover, “I libri segreti del Banco de’ Medici,” Archivio storico italiano 107 (1949): 236–37; acknowledged in de Roover, The Rise and Decline of the Medici Bank, 1397–1494 (Cambridge, MA, 1963), xii.

58 Raymond de Roover, Il Banco Medici dalle origini al declino (1397–1494), trans. Gino Corti (Florence, 1970), 80, table 11.

59 Ms. 567 (11), ff. 25v–26r, Selfridge collection, Medici Collection, Baker Library Historical Collections, Harvard Business School (hereafter SC). The Brandolini books studied by Richard Goldthwaite were twelve in number; another Strozzi set purchased in 1512 contained nine books. See Goldthwaite, “The Florentine Wool Industry in the Late Sixteenth Century: Case Study,” Journal of European Economic History 32, no. 3 (2003): 487–526; and Goldthwaite, “Performance of the Florentine Economy, 1491–1512: Moneys and Accountancy,” Archivio storico italiano 176, no. 2 (2018): 252.

60 Ms. 567 (11), ff. 44r (Rosso) “istato a ghoverno per marufino a salario per questa ragione”; 30r (Amerigo) “nostro giovane,” 23r (Francesco) “nostro giovane,” and 32v (Antonio) “nostro fattorino,” SC.

61 What exactly a florin was “worth,” particularly in relation to today's parameters, is a perennially vexing question to which there are no definite answers. For a premier approach to the problem, see Goldthwaite, Economy of Renaissance Florence, 362–67, 609–14. More experimentally, one could seek to triangulate the value of the florin by comparing different indices, some of which will be more generally acceptable than others. We know, for example, that the pure gold content of a florin in 1558 was 3.52 grams. At Spring 2019 gold prices of about $41.50 per gram, the operating costs of the Medici firm in question would be valued at $449,451.64 today by a Gold Index. The purchasing power of gold has, however, changed significantly over time. As Goldthwaite shows—in The Building of Renaissance Florence: An Economic and Social History (Baltimore, 1982), 438—1 florin was equal to 140 soldi di piccioli in 1558, or 4.96 days of a skilled laborer's wages averaging 28.2 soldi di piccioli per diem. The operating costs of the present Medici firm therefore amounted to the price of 15,260.68 days of skilled labor. Assuming a skilled worker in the United States today makes about $80,000 a year, or $308 per day if we consider 260 working days in a year, 3,076.75 florins would be equal to about $4,700,289 today by a Skilled Worker Index. However, according to Goldthwaite's calculations, most unskilled workers were paid the equivalent of about 0.20 staia of wheat per day at the time (Economy of Renaissance Florence, 365), and the average price of a staio of wheat in 1558 was 62.6 soldi (of the silver lira). There were 4.5 grams of silver in a 1558 lira. The price of a gram of silver is currently about 54 cents, while wheat was recently trading at $4.43/bushel. At 35.24 liters/bushel, the value is thus 12.6 cents per liter. A staio is 24.7 liters, so 0.20 staia of wheat is 4.94 liters of wheat. As such, the unskilled daily wage was about $1.52 by the current price-of-silver standard. And, the daily unskilled wage was about 62 cents per day by the current price-of-wheat standard. So, if an unskilled laborer today works eight hours per day and makes the Massachusetts minimum wage of $11 per hour, then the current U.S. daily unskilled wage is $88, which is either 142 times (by the Wheat Index) or 58 times (by the Silver Index) larger than the 1558 pay. So, the value of the 3,076.75 florins—owing to the inflation of labor costs relative to commodity prices—might really be as low as $81,040.86, or even $33,116.63. At the other extreme, as Walter Isaacson shows, Leonardo da Vinci was paid 35 florins for his earlier Virgin of the Rocks. Isaacson, Leonardo da Vinci (New York, 2017), 382. Considering this to be the average price of a Leonardo commission, and accepting Goldthwaite's assumptions regarding the reduced real value of the specie florin between 1500 and 1550 (unlike the florin as a unit of account, which remained stable between 1500 and 1600; see Goldthwaite, Economy of Renaissance Florence, 611–12), the firm's operating costs would have covered roughly seventy-three such paintings at the adjusted value (eighty if we consider the florin as a unit of account). Given the recent $450,000,000 sale price for Leonardo's Salvator Mundi, by a 1500 Leonardo Index 3,076.75 1558 florins would be worth almost $33 billion today. As such, depending on which index one picks, one can triangulate the current equivalent of the Medici firm's operating costs to fall roughly in the range between $33,000 and $33 billion. For useful caveats regarding long-term price data and the perils of scientism, see William Caferro, Petrarch's War: Florence and the Black Death in Context (Cambridge, U.K., 2018), 178–99.

62 Ms. 562, ff. 140r–144v; “per rintegrare il nome di Francesco mio avolo e Francesco mio fratello,” SC.

63 Ms. 562, ff. 1r–4v.

64 Ms. 600 (5), f. 1r. The individual tare, found at 568 (9), f. 1r, were 133 lb. per le sache, 26 per uso, 16 per umido, and 122 per sabione.

65 Ms. 567 (7), f. 1r.

66 Ms. 516, ff. 3r–19v; 1r, “lanaiuoli in Porta Roxa”; 2r (Salviati), 4v (Michele de Miranda), 9r (Michele de Silos), and 16v (Fernando e Giovanni de Chastro), SC.

67 Ms. 516, 9r, “ia balla peso lorda lib. 237,” SC.

68 Ms. 563, ff. 2rv, 31v, 32v, 35v, 40v (Luigi di Polancho), 19v, 23r, 32rv (Lopes Ghallo), and 62v–63r (Giannalonso di Malvenda), SC. For an overview of the Spanish merchant colony in Florence in the earlier period, see Bruno Dini, “Mercanti spagnoli a Firenze (1480–1530),” in Dini, Saggi su un economia-mondo: Firenze e l'Italia fra Mediterraneo ed Europa (secc. XIII–XVI) (Pisa, 1995), 289–310.

69 Note that, in the context of the sixteenth-century Florentine wool trade, “barter” (a transaction a baratto) is not a direct exchange of one good for another but a market exchange, because the parties always assigned a monetary value to the items in the transaction.

70 In a striking passage in the original Christie's catalog for the sale of the Medici ledgers (which Selfridge bought and eventually donated to HBS), the auction house noted that “the middle of the sixteenth century saw a sharp decline in the Spanish cloth industry, and it is interesting to find that the Florentine looms had obtained such an ascendancy, that wool was brought from Spain to be manufactured into cloth that at once returned to the country which had produced the raw material.” Catalogue of the Medici Archives . . . which will be sold by Messrs. Christie, Manson and Woods . . . (London, n.d. [1919?]), 185. On the institutionalization of this strategy in the European world, see Reinert, “Rivalry.”

71 Ms. 567 (8), f. 34, and see also ff. 23v–24r, SC. Orchil (oricello) is a lichen-based violet dye.

72 Ms. 567 (11), ff. 5v–6r, SC.

73 For a basic introduction to dyeing in late medieval and Renaissance Florence, see Piero Guarducci, Tintori e tinture nella Firenze medievale (secc. XIII–XV) (Florence, 2005); and, for a fine case study of a Sienese dyer, Guarducci, Un tintore senese del Trecento: Landoccio di Cecco d'Orso (Siena, 1998).

74 John H. Munro, “The Medieval Scarlet and the Economics of Sartorial Splendour,” in Harte and Ponting, Cloth and Clothing, 13–70, esp. 13–21; Munro, “Scarlet,” in Encyclopedia of Dress and Textiles in the British Isles, c. 450–1450, ed. Gale R. Owen-Crocker, Elizabeth Coatsworth, and Maria Hayward (Leiden, 2012), 477–78. On the basis of scientific testing of an extant cloth sample, Dominique Cardon established beyond a doubt the character of the dyestuff employed in scarlets; see Cardon, “Échantillons de draps de laine des Archives Datini (fin XIVe siècle, début XVe siècle): Analyses techniques, importance historique,” Mélanges de l'Ecole française de Rome: Moyen-Age, no. 103 (1991): 359–72. On kermes (from the shield louse Kermes vermilio, formerly Coccus ilicis), see Costanza Perrone da Zara, “Aspetti storici e tecnici della tintura nel Medioevo e nel Rinascimento,” in Gli arazzi della Sala dei Duecento: Studi per il restauro (Modena, 1985), 105–6.

75 Hidetoshi Hoshino, “La tintura di grana nel basso medioevo,” in Industria tessile e commercio internazionale nella Firenze del tardo Medioevo, ed. Franco Franceschi and Sergio Tognetti (Florence, 2001), 24–26. The most common red dye used in the premodern woolens industry was from the long, red roots of the common madder (i.e., Rubia tinctorum, or “dyers’ red”), usually sourced from Lombardy and Flanders.

76 Franco Franceschi, “Il ruolo dell'allume nella manifattura tessile toscana dei secoli XIV–XV,” Mélanges de l’École française de Rome: Moyen Âge 126, no. 1 (2014): 159–70. On the connection between wine and gromma, sometimes also called allume di feccia, see Francesco Balducci Pegolotti, La Pratica della mercatura, ed. Allan Evans (Cambridge, MA, 1936), 380.

77 Enrico Fiume, L'impresa di Lorenzo de’ Medici contro Volterra (1472) (Florence, 1948), 167–71. On Fiume's book, see Lorenzo Fabbri, “L'impresa di Enrico Fiumi contro Lorenzo de’ Medici,” Rassegna volterrana, no. 84 (2007): 33–44. For the firm's main supplies, see Ms. 546, ff. 4v–7r, 42v–43r, 58v–59r, 61v–62r, and 86v–87r, SC. The firm's total alum purchases exceeded 840 florins; for the year of purchases, see Ms. 545, ff. 1r–11r, SC.

78 On the medieval guado and indigo dye (from the flowering plant Isatis tinctoria), see Perrone, “Aspetti storici,” 112. For the range of shades in the mid-Trecento, see Hoshino, “La tintura di grana,” 28. A similar range is found in a fifteenth-century dyers’ manual from the Veneto; see Giovanni Rebora, ed., Un manuale di tintura del Quattrocento (Milan, 1970), chaps. 64–66.

79 For the guild legislation, see Hoshino, L'arte della lana, 235–39. On the importance of rascie in the boom of the 1560s, see Chorley, “Rascie.” For the comparative seventeenth-century (1616–1645) production of perpignani and rascie, see Ruggiero Romano, “À Florence au XVIIe siècle: Industries textiles et conjuncture,” Annales: économies, sociétés, civilisations 7, no. 4 (1952): 508–12. For the penetration of the Lyon cloth market, see, for example, Albert Chamberland, Le commerce d'importation en France au milieu du XVIe siècle, document inédit, publié avec des notes et un tableau synoptique (Paris, 1894), 29–30.

80 Ms. 567 (7), ff. 1r–2r; 567 (11), ff. 0v–1r, 42v, SC.

81 Ms. 567 (7), f. 10r.

82 Ms. 567 (7), f. 10r and 30rv.

83 Ms. 567 (11), ff. 3v–5r, and cash accounts passim. The corresponding accounts in Ms. 567 (7), at cc. 50–60, are missing.

84 Boccaccio's tale of Pasquino and Simona (Decameron 4, 7) concerns the relationship of a lanino and a filatrice; for a brilliant reading of it, see Justin Steinberg, “Mimesis on Trial: Legal and Literary Verisimilitude in Boccaccio's Decameron,” Representations 138, no. 1 (2017): 118–45.

85 Ms. 600 (5), f. 1v, SC.

86 Ms. 567 (8), f. 41r. All information about sold panni here and below is based on Ms. 600 (5), ff. 1r–6r and Ms. 567 (8), ff. 6v–7r and 40v–41r, SC.

87 Ms. 567 (11), ff. 33v–34r for the brokerage fees.

88 Pratica segreta, 9, f. 76 (1573); 16, f. 205r (1603), Archivio di Stato di Firenze, Florence; cited in Francesco Ammannati, “Florentine Woolen Manufacture in the Sixteenth Century: Crisis and New Entrepreneurial Strategies,” Business and Economic History On-Line 7 (2009): 4, 9.

89 Botero, Delle cause, 45; Botero, On the Causes, 45–46, 48.

90 Munro, “Medieval Woolens,” 304–7. On the importance of Edward III's policies for the development of political economy, see Reinert, Translating Empire, 93, 118, 164–66.

91 Botero, The Reason of State, trans. Robert Bireley (Cambridge, U.K., 2017), 47, 146; Bireley's is an excellent new translation of Botero's Della ragion di stato, using texts from 1590 to 1598.

92 Richard A. Goldthwaite, “Artisans and the Economy in Sixteenth-Century Florence,” in The Medici, Michelangelo, and the Art of Late Renaissance Florence (New Haven, 2002), 86; Judith C. Brown, In the Shadow of Florence: Provincial Society in Renaissance Pescia (Oxford, 1982), 281. See also Brown's essential “Concepts of Political Economy: Cosimo I de’ Medici in a Comparative European Context,” in Firenze e la Toscana dei Medici nell'Europa del’500, vol. 1 (Florence, 1983), 279–93; in comparison, Furio Diaz's approach is similar but negatively highlights the statist nature of the economic and political controls under the Grand Dukes: Diaz, Il Granducato di Toscana: I Medici (Turin, 1976), 127–48. On Cosimo I's political economy, and particularly his emphasis on attracting high value-added economic activities to Tuscany, see Reinert, introduction to Serra, “Short Treatise,” 38–46; and, as evidence of a veritable “developmental state,” Reinert, The Academy of Fisticuffs: Political Economy and Commercial Society in Enlightenment Italy (Cambridge, MA, 2018), 400. Cosimo I was, not unexpectedly, celebrated in his own time with an outpouring of encomia. Carmen Menchini, Panegirici e vite di Cosimo I de’ Medici: Tra storia e propaganda (Florence, 2005).

93 Hume, Political Essays, 52.

94 Gustav von Schmoller, The Mercantile System and its Historical Significance (New York, 1897), 48, translated from an extract from Schmoller's twelve-part series “Studien über die wirtschaftliche Politik Friedrichs des Großen und Preußens überhaupt von 1680 bis 1786” (1884–1887); for the original German, see part 2, “Das Merkantilsystem in seiner historischen Bedeutung: städtische, territoriale und staatliche Wirthschaftspolitik,” Jahrbuch für Gesetzgebung, Verwaltung und Volkswirtschaft im Deutschen Reich 8 (1884): 42. On the context from which Schmoller emerged, see Erik Grimmer-Solem, The Rise of Historical Economics and Social Reform in Germany, 1864–1894 (Oxford, 2003). For more on the heuristic value of Schmoller's analysis, see Reinert, Academy of Fisticuffs.

95 Franceschi, Franco, “Intervento del potere centrale e ruolo delle Arti del governo dell'economia piorentina del Trecento e del primo Quattrocento: Linee generali,” Archivio storico italiano 151 (1993): 864Google Scholar, quoted in Goldthwaite, Economy of Renaissance Florence, 591. For a similar statement from a century later, see Giacomo Lanteri, Della economica (Venice, 1560), 98.

96 Aurelio Lippo Brandolini, Republics and Kingdoms Compared, ed. and trans. James Hankins (Cambridge, MA, 2009), 123–25, quoting, as Hankins has shown, Terence, A[n]dria 427: “Omnes sibi malle melius esse quam alteri.” On this theme, see Reinert, introduction to Serra, “Short Treatise,” 32, and Reinert, “Rivalry.”

97 Fernand Braudel, Out of Italy: 1450–1650, trans. Siân Reynolds (Paris, 1991), 226, original published as Le Modèle italien (Paris, 1989), discussed in the context of Serra and the decline of Italy in Reinert, introduction to Serra, “Short Treatise,” 78–82. For further context, see Reinert, “Blaming the Medici”; Reinert, “Lessons”; Gino Luzzatto, “Small and Great Merchants in the Italian Cities of the Renaissance,” in Enterprise and Secular Change: Readings in Economic History, ed. Frederic C. Lane and Jelle C. Riemersma (Homewood, IL, 1953), 52; and Maria Fusaro, Political Economies of Empire in the Early Modern Mediterranean: The Decline of Venice and the Rise of England, 1450–1700 (Cambridge, U.K., 2015). For an earlier Tuscan analysis of this phenomenon, see Giovanni Francesco Pagnini, Della decima e di varie altre gravezze imposte dal commune di Firenze, della moneta, e della mercatura de’ fiorentini fino al secolo XVI, 4 vols. (Lisbon, 1765–1766), 2:146–47.

98 Pocock, Machiavellian Moment; Hont, Jealousy of Trade, 8–9.

99 On this theme, see Reinert, Translating Empire; Reinert, “Rivalry”; and, for an earlier statement about Botero's influence on European political economy, Reinert, “Cameralism and Commercial Rivalry: Nationbuilding through Economic Autarky in Seckendorff's 1665 Additiones,” European Journal of Law and Economics 19, no. 3 (2005): 271–86. On Botero's Greatness of Cities and Reason of State as a publishing phenomena throughout the European world, with at least forty-two editions between them published in numerous languages before 1830, see Reinert, Erik S. and Reinert, Fernanda, “33 Economic Bestsellers Published before 1750,” European Journal of the History of Economic Thought 26, no. 6 (2019): 17–21Google Scholar. On Botero's extraordinary importance in England, in particular, see Jamie Trace, “Giovanni Botero and English Political Thought” (PhD diss., University of Cambridge, 2018).

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