The Economy of Renaissance Florence

2. The Shifting Geography of Commerce

c h a p t e r t w o The Shifting Geography of Commerce Northwestern Europe. Naples and Southern Italy. The Western Mediterranean: A Transport Revolution, The Iberian Peninsula, Southern France, The Later Sixteenth Century. Central Italy and Rome. Venice, the Adriatic, and the Levant. Central Europe. Northwestern Europe The dynamic that drove the commercial revolution was trade between Europe and the Levant, and in Europe the principal pole of this trade was in the northwest . By the third quarter of the twelfth century much of the trade in this area had converged on the great fairs of Champagne, in northeastern France. Then, toward the end of the next century, this northern node shifted northwestward toward the Channel and to the Flemish towns. The documentation does not tell us much about Florentine participation in the early growth of this northern trading system. Florentine merchants are documented in 1178 as being involved in the trade going through Monferrato on the way to France and in 1211 as active in exchange operations at the Champagne fairs. In the last quarter of the thirteenth century the Cerchi operated at Liège, the Bardi at Ghent and Brussels, the Mozzi at St. Omer, the Pulci at Cambrai, Douai, and St. Quentin, all of these at Ypres, and some, along with yet others, at Antwerp, Caen, and above all Bruges and Paris. By the early fourteenth century Florentines are well documented as having a major role in the commerce of the Low Countries alongside the Venetians and the Genoese. Besides the general traffic in Flemish cloth headed to Mediterranean markets, the Florentine merchants of the Calimala guild had a particular inter- The Shifting Geography of Commerce 127 est, at least down to the mid-fourteenth century, in buying semifinished cloth for refinishing in their home industry and then reexport. Bruges was the central emporium out of which they conducted their business. The chronicler Giovanni Villani was a factor in the Peruzzi bank there from 1306 to 1308. The city was also a major center for international monetary exchange, perhaps the largest outside of Italy before the rise of Lyons in the second half of the fifteenth century. Rates were posted daily in Bruges for Venice, Genoa, Barcelona, Paris, and London, and Florentines enjoyed preeminence in this traffic, thanks to their more extensive business network. The ledger of Bartolomeo di Caroccio degli Alberti & Partners, open from 1352 to 1358, documents frequent transfers made by the Bruges branch to its branch at the papal court at Avignon for the archbishop of Riga, for the Teutonic Knights, and for merchants from Lübeck, and Bruges remained a major center for the transfer of ecclesiastical revenues from northern Europe to Rome Italy, the western Mediterranean, and Europe Italy, the western Mediterranean, and Europe 128 International Merchant Banking through the fifteenth century.1 Most of the large Florentine firms, from the Bardi, the Peruzzi, the Acciaiuoli, and the Alberti in the fourteenth century to the Medici and the Pazzi in the fifteenth, had agents in Bruges and its vicinity. The Florentines were not the largest group of Italian merchants in Bruges, being outnumbered by the Genoese, the Venetians, the Milanese, and perhaps at times even the Lucchesi. Nor do they appear at the very top of the list of the foreign communities who paid taxes and made loans to the local government, although they made major loans to the city in 1379–80 and again in 1422. Evidence for their corporate organization in a nazione there dates only from 1427.2 The nazione had a lodge, the grandest the Florentines built anywhere, on the Bourse, the city’s principal market square for foreign merchants; the building figures prominently in early urban views. And in Bruges, as in no other city where Florentines were located, their commercial interests extended also to the traffic in local artwork.3 To get to the Champagne fairs, Italians originally used overland routes going north through eastern France, but after about 1250, when Louis IX developed the port of Aigues-Mortes as his kingdom’s outlet to the Mediterranean, the Genoese and the Tuscans used this port and then traveled overland through the valleys of the Loire and the Seine. This brought them to Paris, and the city grew in commercial importance when their trade shifted to Bruges and the other Flemish cities . Although Paris did not emerge...