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Medieval Italy1

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 February 2011

Robert L. Reynolds
Robert L. Reynolds
Affiliation:
University of Wisconsin
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Extract

The sort of document which explicitly formulates policy is, in any field of history, rather hard to come by. That is especially true when we search for formulations of business policy and especially for medieval formulations of medieval business policy.

Type
Origins of Modern Business Enterprise
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 12 , Issue 4 , Fall 1952 , pp. 350 - 365
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1952

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References

2 The successive rearrangements of firm interests are analyzed by Sapori in I libri di commercio dei Peruzzi (Milan, 1934)Google Scholar, and in Studi, “Storia intcrna della compagnia mercantile dei Pcruzzi,” and in the appendix to the same (no. II, pp. 243–84).

3 Andrea Barbarigo was sole manager of his own affairs but within the circle of protections given by the Venetian state itself. Even within the circle he was not exactly a lone wolf, co-operating with relatives, enjoying a large banker's patronage, and making use of many correspondents.—Frederic C Lane, Andrea Barbarigo, Merchant of Venice (“Johns Hopkins University Studies in Historical and Political Science,” Series LXII, No. 1 [Baltimore, 1944]). In business in Genoa, in the late I 100's and early 1200's were few if any operators who were entirely [unattached,] as far as I can see. Francesco di Marco Datini da Prato started as an individual, but from his early days on worked to build up around himself a great organization.— Bensa, E., Francesco di Marco da Prato (Milan, 1928)Google Scholar, and the brief general analysis of Francesco's career and records by Brun, Robert, “A Fourteenth Century Merchant of Italy: Francesco Datini of Prato,” Journal of Economic and Business History, II, 3 (May 1930), 451–66Google Scholar.

4 The Medici Bank, just as an example, was housed in the palace in Florence.—de Roover, Raymond, The Medici Bank; Its Organization, Management, Operations, and Decline (New York: New York University Press, 1948), p. 64Google Scholar.

5 Under the enterpriser by whose initiative goods were being processed could be skilled workers directly hired to carry the goods through certain stages of manufacture. Some of the other stages of processing of those very same goods were handled by what we should call subcontractors with their own forces of hired workers, while still other stages of processing were under something like our shop foremen. The best of the pictures of all this is provided by de Roover, R., “A Florentine Firm of Cloth Manufacturers; Management and Organization of a Sixteenth-Century Business,” in Speculum, XVI, i (January 1941), 3–33CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Small-town industrial activity is partially revealed by the materials used by Fanfani, A., Un Mercante del Trecento (Milan, 1935)Google Scholar, chap, iii; perhaps also it is touched by the operations described by Fanfani, pp. 78 ff. and 98 ff.

6 Alfred Doren, Storia economica (Luzzatto translation), treats the general subject of industrial organization, pp. 477 ff., esp. pp. 487 ff. These sections of his general book are based on his fundamental study, Die Florentiner Wollentuchindustrie vom XIV bit zum XVI Jahrhundert, in Studien aus der Florentiner Wirtschaftsgetchichte (Stuttgart, 1901), R. de Roover in his “Florentine Firm” modifies Doren in important respects. The statement here made, “… nearest to employees … multiple-process fabrication … foreign market,” runs into the fact that some personages, in some of the processes, were quite undepressed fellows; it is especially on this issue that De Roover questions Doren (p. 17). The pious “religious co-operatives” of the Humiliati are still another matter.—Doren, Storia economica, 483 ff.