Die deutsche Einwanderung nach Florenz im Spätmittelalter (review)

Lorenz Böninger has written a splendid book about German immigration to Florence in the later Middle Ages. This carefully researched study, brimming with otherwise out-of-the-way information and the results of the most recent scholarship, provides a helpful reminder that Florence achieved European prominence in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries because it lay at the center of a great commercial web extending throughout the Continent and beyond. The urban centers of Central Europe developed important ties with Florence, particularly during the late medieval centuries, when they experienced strong economic growth. Böninger shows that travel between German-speaking lands and Florence on account of commerce, pilgrimages, and employment, was relatively common, and that the immigration of German workers to Florence resulted in the creation of a substantial colony whose size and impact on Renaissance Florence have been largely overlooked. Böninger has tried to use all available sources. Chronicles, fiscal records, confraternity registers, legal texts, court cases, and testaments are squeezed for relevant information, often consisting of little more than a name, a trade, or a city of origin. Patient collection and arrangement of these thousands of items results in a magnificent mosaic that tells us as much about Florence as it does about her German inhabitants.

The first chapter reviews the results previous studies of medieval and Renaissance immigration to Northern Italy, discussing the cost of travel, the presence of German knights and soldiers, the organization of German craftsmen in Venice, the creation of German fraternities in other Italian cities, and the presence of Germans at the Papal Court. The second chapter offers an overview of German immigration to Florence in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, showing how the largely Rhenish and Dutch woolworkers (previously studied by Alfred Doren) who had participated in the Ciompi Revolt of the fourteenth century were joined in Florence by numerous shoemakers and tailors from southern Germany in subsequent decades. In the fourteenth century the immigrant's identity was shaped largely by work, but in the fifteenth century fraternities offered German speakers in Florence new forms of solidarities. Chapter 3 looks at some of the elementary questions facing an immigrant. What were his or her means of entrance into Florentine society? How could credit be obtained? What profession was he or she likely to follow? What were the chances of marrying and having a family? (Rather good in the fifteenth century, although a German male was likely to consider marrying women from a wide range of backgrounds and geographic provenances.) The fourth chapter offers a detailed discussion of the three German fraternities in Florence, and their role vis-à-vis the commune, and their social and religious function. Chapter 5 looks closely at the German shoemakers. Chapter 6 discusses German immigrants with skills or professions that gave them an advantage with respect to immigrants: merchants, metalworkers, artists, scribes, and printers. A final chapter skillfully reconstructs the career of Arrigho di Federico Martello, a German mapmaker who also translated the Decameron into German. A Nachwort offers apposite remarks concerning social assimilation. An appendix publishes the fifteenth-century statute of the German cobblers' fraternity in both Latin and Old German versions.

The late Ulrich Middeldorf, director of the Kunsthistorisches Institut in Florence, used to lament that for all of the interest of modern Germans in Florence there was no good study of the Germans in Florence in the Renaissance. Böninger has now done the job. It was a pet theory of Middeldorf's that the sculptor Bertoldo di Giovanni was the illegitimate child of Giovanni de' Medici: he would certainly have been pleased with the discovery, announced in this volume (and published in full in the Institut's Mitteilungen in an article Böninger coauthored with Luca Boschetto), that Bertoldo was instead a German. This is a major work of scholarship for which all historians of Florence will be grateful.