In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

79 Chapter 4 Supply and labor Markets Organizational Structure, Management Techniques, and Economic Impacts of Ducal Este Building Yards in the Cinquecento THE polITIcS oF BuIlDInG The importance of the economic and occupational impact of a broadened artistic demand became, I believe, clearly evident in the previous chapter. In the light of those considerations I intend to examine the question by looking at what happened in the architectural field, an artistic area that early modern economic historians of the last thirty years have investigated with increasing interest,1 as one can deduce from the ample historiography so well examined by Alberto Grohmann in his contribution to the conference held at the Datini Institute of prato in 20042 dedicated to the “Building Sector before the Industrial Revolution.” unlike the greater part of these studies, in this chapter I intend to concentrate above all on the construction labor market and the economic and occupational impact of building investments by investigating systems of selection and management of suppliers, the structure and evolutionary dynamic of the client networks, the impact on employment, and the politics of the pricing of goods and services produced and acquired by different Este courts in the course of the sixteenth century.3 To approach the question I have created and processed large prosopographical data bases,4 analyzing almost 60,000 payments to individuals working in 730 sites, mostly in the district of Ferrara:5 : 47,119 were taken from the Memoriali and payment registers (registri dei mandati ) kept by the officials of the ducal office of Munitions and construction (Munizioni e Fabbriche) during the years 1551, 1552, 1554, 1555, 1562, 1565, 1566, and 1576.6 More than 1,200 of these are payments made in 1557 to the men working on the construction of prince Alfonso d’Este, Marquis of Montecchio’s, casino,7 and lastly, 10,988 are pertinent to the workers engaged in the construction of the Mesola complex between 1584 and 1590.8 At the same time, to integrate the quantitative data, I scanned the usual sources for this kind of study: notary acts, contracts, agreements, papers, regulations, registers, various accounting documents, etc. The decision to meld the more traditional methods with those of mass prosopography came out of the desire to examine questions that are otherwise not approachable, such as 80| Chapter 4 the numbers of workers, an estimate of their annual income, the distribution of the projects in time, a calculation of their macroeconomic impact, the longevity of suppliers’ relations, workers’ careers, the politics of hiring and conditions of the labor market, the cycles of cinquecentesque spending and their function in countering economic trends, etc. These are questions that have already been dealt with, but I want to look at them again over a shorter time-span and with more emphasis on the politics of building over the short or middle term rather than single building-yards, in order to test hypotheses and substantiate statements that would otherwise remain vague. Discovery that in a city of 30,000 inhabitants the duke’s constructions involved, in a solar year, 1,377 individuals (1562), or that only 59 of the 3,906 engaged by the office of Munitions and construction between 1551 and 1576 were paid at least once in each of these eight years, compared to the 2,859 (73 percent) paid in a single year, has been made possible by the use of a method that limits the risk of expressing imprecise opinions. I don’t intend to imitate the exact sciences or show useless statistical paraphernalia, but to contribute where I can to the collecting of measurements and numbers that will allow critical analysis of the data and aid in its interpretation. There are in fact cases in which the nature of the sources permits the prosopographic approach to ask fascinating questions that would otherwise be excluded. The choice of years was dictated by specific requirements, starting with the half-decade 1551–1555, which was chosen for its relative normality: the aged and ill duke reigned (Ercole II died in 1558) over a pacified state that was, however, afflicted by a subsistence crisis between 1554 and 1555. The existence of homogeneous sources over a short span of time has permitted examination of a period with no exceptional events, unmarked by special projects and with a stable nucleus of ducal officials. The decision to work on such a short chronological period was born of the desire to study aspects that had been overlooked by...

Share