TY - JOUR
AU - Martoccio, Michael
AB - Abstract Italian communes from 1300–1600 bought and sold numerous towns and castles from Crete (enfeoffed to Venice in 1205) to Arezzo (offered to Florence in 1384) to Tabarka (given as mortgage to a Genoese family in 1540). Despite the popularity of this custom, however, existing scholarship claims Renaissance cities expanded territorially through violent conquests that centralized government finances and promoted militant imperialist discourses. Drawing on case studies of the Florentine purchase of two cities — Lucca (1342) and Pisa (1405) — this article reveals how the buyers of Renaissance cities instead drew upon a vast, little-studied network of private creditors to pay for new lands. The vendibility of space, moreover, helped foster a commercialized ideology of empire. Diarists heralded their city’s superior commerce. Civic leaders tied the good of their communes to keeping its honour and faith with city-sellers. And polemicists stained opponents with accusations of fraud while demoting cities such as Pisa and Lucca to mere merchandise. Buying cities thus allowed Renaissance merchant elites to demonstrate not only their city’s superior material wealth, but also mercantile prowess — their ability to bargain for a good deal (buon mercato). On Sunday 6 September 1405, a Pisan mob stormed the city’s citadel, overpowering the Florentine soldiers stationed within. The attack was an unexpected reversal. Only a week earlier, Florentines had rejoiced at the news that they had purchased Pisa for 206,000 florins from that city’s lords, Gabriele Maria Visconti (1385–1409) and his patron, the French governor of Genoa, Jean II Le Maingre, called Boucicaut (1366–1421).1 1 The bill of sale may be found in Archivio di Stato di Firenze (hereafter ASF), Capitoli, Registri (hereafter CR), R 45, fos. 18r–38r and copies in ASF, Carte Strozziane, ser. 2, filza 91, fos. 13r–17v. Published copies and fragments appear in Ida Masetti Bencini, ‘Nuovi documenti sulla guerra e l’acquisto di Pisa (1404–1406)’, Archivio storico italiano, ser. 5, xviii, no. 204 (1896), 228–39 (doc. v); and Laura De Angelis, Renzo Ninci and Paolo Pirillo (eds.), Le consulte e pratiche della Repubblica fiorentina: 1405–1406 (Rome, 1996), 255–61. The negotiations for Pisa have been published in De Angelis, Ninci and Pirillo (eds.), Le consulte e pratiche della Repubblica fiorentina, xix–xx, 227–30, 232–5, 238–9, 244–5, 248–63, 286–7. See also G. O. Corazzini, L’assedio di Pisa (1405–1406): scritti e documenti inediti (Florence, 1885); Bencini, ‘Nuovi documenti sulla guerra e l’acquisto di Pisa’; Laura De Angelis, ‘“Contra pisas fiat viriliter”: Le vicende della conquista’, in Sergio Tognetti (ed.), Firenze e Pisa dopo il 1406: la creazione di un nuovo spazio regionale; atti del convegno di studi, Firenze, 27–28 settembre 2008 (Florence, 2010), 49–64. Contemporary accounts include Leonardo Bruni, Memoirs [De temporibus suis], ed. and trans. with D. J. W. Bradley, in Leonardo Bruni, History of the Florentine People, ed. and trans. James Hankins, 3 vols. (Cambridge, Mass. and London, 2001–7), iii, 335–9; Neri di Gino Capponi, Commentari di Gino Capponi, che alcuni tengono essere di Neri suo figliuolo, dell’acquisto di Pisa l’anno 1406, in Cronichette antiche di vari scrittori, ed. D. M. Manni (Milan, 1844), 336–8; Cronica volgare di Anonimo Fiorentino dall’anno 1385 al 1409, già attributo a Piero di Giovanni Minerbetti, ed. Elina Bellondi (Rerum Italicarum Scriptores, new ser., xxvii, 2, 2 vols. Città di Castello, 1915), Bonfires lit the night sky. Women danced until dawn. Shouts of ‘we have bought Pisa’ filled the air.2 2 Sercambi, Le croniche di Giovanni Sercambi, Lucchese, ed. Bongi, iii, 99: ‘Pisa abbiamo comperata’. Many believed Pisa’s purchase to be a mark of Florence’s wealth. The city’s ambassadors had made the lords of Pisa ‘as sweet as honey’ by ‘the clink of many florins’, clucked the diarist Giovanni Morelli (1371–1444), adding that the Florentines deserved Pisa because ‘those who have money and wish to spend it always have what they want’.3 3 Morelli, Ricordi, 284: ‘si comminciarono a rendere e addolcire come il mele; e stavano a udire il suono de’ molti fiorini molto volentieri;’ ‘e come che chi ha danari e vuole ispendere ha sempre ciò che vuole’. Crushing then was Pisa’s rebellion. ‘The news was dark and regrettable … for we had presumed God had promised [Pisa] to us … but instead he punished us for our sins’, Morelli lamented.4 4 Ibid., 288: ‘la novella fu iscura e spiacevole quanto puoi comprendere … Allora presumeremo Dio abbia promesso quello … ma ciò si riputa pe’ nostri e pe’ loro peccati’. ‘The citizens [of Florence] were greatly pained and melancholic as much for the shame as for the subsequent expense’, moaned another.5 5 Ser Nofri, Cronaca, 25: ‘cioè e cittadini, ebbono grande dolore e maninconia; sì per la vergognia e sì per la spesa seguiva’. A later chronicler summarized the mood in starker terms: ‘in ten days the Florentines lost 200,000 [sic] florins and honour’.6 6 Giovanni Cambi, Istorie di Giovanni Cambi, in Delizie degli eruditi toscani, ed. Ildefonso di San Luigi, xx, 131: ‘in 10 giorni e’ Fiorentini perderono fior. 200.000 m. e la verghognia’. This article assesses the gains and losses in ‘florins and honour’ — that is to say, monetarily and ideologically — in the market for city-states: the practice of Italian powers’ buying and selling neighbouring cities such as Pisa.7 7 I adopt the term ‘city-state’ throughout this article as an heuristic to distinguish the acquisition of populous, self-governing urban communes from smaller rural lordships. Neither città-stato nor statum civitatis existed in the pre-modern European lexicon nor in English-language scholarship until the mid twentieth century. See, for example, Jacob Burckhardt, The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, trans. S. G. C. Middlemore (London and New York, 1904), 70, 73; Hans Baron, ‘The Historical Background of the Florentine Renaissance’, History, xxii (March 1938), 315. As a general phenomenon, Europeans from 1200–1600 bought and sold innumerable towns, castles and counties from Iceland (offered to Henry VIII in 1518) to Crete (enfeoffed to Venice in 1205).8 8 Björn þorsteinsson, ‘Henry VIII and Iceland’, Saga Book of the Viking Society, xv (1957–61); Monique O’Connell, Men of Empire: Power and Negotiation in Venice’s Maritime State (Baltimore, 2009), 18. Yet none pursued the practice more aggressively than the rich, autonomous cities of Italy. The Florentines bought Pisa, Prato, Lucca and Arezzo, revelling in their purchase of the latter with ‘as joyous a celebration as any other city might have done for a proper victory’.9 9 Niccolò Machiavelli, Florentine Histories by Niccolò Machiavelli, trans. Laura F. Banfield and Harvey C. Mansfield Jr (Princeton, 1990), 136. The Sienese pawned Campagnatico, Castiglione di Val d’Orcia, Marsigliano, Roccalbegna and other castles, before, indebted, ceding their city itself to the lord of Milan on the condition he ‘neither sell, nor in any other way transfer them’.10 10 Cronache senesi, ed. Alessandro Lisini and Fabio Iacometti (Rerum Italicarum Scriptores, new ser., xv/6, 2 vols., Bologna, 1931–7), ii, 760: ‘nè vendare, nè in alcun altro trasferire’; William M. Bowsky, A Medieval Italian Commune: Siena Under the Nine, 1287–1355 (Berkeley, 1981), 190–1, 205; William Caferro, Mercenary Companies and the Decline of Siena (Baltimore, 1998), 123–4. The Venetians spent thousands of ducats on their Aegean empire including Argos, Corfu, Raspo, Scutari, Tenedos and Zara, obtaining the final city only after its residents had rebelled so many times it cost ‘more than one would receive from the selling of the whole of Slavonia’.11 11 Antonio Morosini, The Morosini Codex, 2 vols., ed. and trans. John R. Melville-Jones, Michele Pietro Ghezzo and Andrea Rizzi (Padua, 1999), ii, 21. Genoese consortia (maone) ruled Chios, Phocaea and Cyprus as investments, drawing the ire of a Byzantine satirist, who complained that an adviser to the Genoese podestà of Galata ‘had persuaded his son-in-law to buy the pride of the Roman Empire, the island of Thasos’.12 12 Mazaris, Mazaris’ Journey to Hades: or, Interviews with Dead Men about Certain Officials in the Imperial Court, ed. and trans. J. N. Barry et al. (Buffalo, 1975), 49; Steven A. Epstein, Genoa and the Genoese, 958–1528, 223, 237, 279. The Milanese lord Giovanni Visconti paid 200,000 florins to the ruler of Bologna, Giovanni Pepoli, whose ‘dyspeptic heart’ was unmoved by shouts of ‘don’t sell us, don’t sell us’ from his subjects.13 13 Matteo Villani, Cronica, ed. Giuseppe Porta, 1 vol. (Parma, 1995), bk 1, ch. lxviii: ‘coll’impeto del suo dispettoso cuore’; Cronica gestorum ac factorum memorabilium civitatis Bononie, ed. G. Carducci and V. Fiorini (Rerum Italicarum Scriptores, new ser. xxiii/2, Città di Castello, 1897), 44: ‘Nolumus vendi, nolumus vendi’. And the Lucchese were sold five times from 1329–43, a disgrace one chronicler likened to being ‘a prostitute in a whorehouse’.14 14 Sercambi, Le croniche di Giovanni Sercambi, Lucchese, ed. Bongi, i, 85: ‘come una meretricie in nel luogo lupanario’. Despite the breadth of the market for city-states, little research has been conducted on it, a surprise given the importance of Renaissance territorial expansion for scholarship on Renaissance state formation.15 15 Exceptions include Andrew Gow and Gordon Griffiths, ‘Pope Eugenius IV and Jewish Money-Lending in Florence: The Case of Salomone di Bonaventura during the Chancellorship of Leonardo Bruni’, Renaissance Quarterly, xlvii, 2 (1994), 301–7; Tom Scott, The City-State in Europe, 1000–1600: Hinterland, Territory, Region (Oxford, 2012), esp. 64–192; Monique O’Connell, ‘Voluntary Submission and the Ideology of Venetian Empire’, I Tatti Studies in the Italian Renaissance, xx, 1 (2017). The transformation of north-central Italy from its late medieval patchwork of rural lordships and semi-autonomous urban communes into a handful of centralized, regional powers governing districts (distretti) of subject cities such as Florentine Tuscany (11,000 km2), the Venetian Terraferma (30,000 km2), and the Duchy of Milan (27,000 km2) has for the last century-and-a-half been central to scholarly debates on the Renaissance state — its modes of political thought, diplomatic communication, and public finance.16 16 The literature on the rise of the Italian communes is extensive. For a summary see Daniel Philip Waley, The Italian City-Republics (London, 1969); Giovanni Tabacco, Egemonie sociali e strutture del potere nel Medioevo italiano (Turin, 1979), translated as The Struggle for Power in Medieval Italy: Structures of Political Rule, trans. Rosalind Brown Jensen (Cambridge, 1989); and Philip J. Jones, The Italian City-State: From Commune to Signoria (Oxford, 1997). For a general overview of the Florentine contado before 1300, see Paolo Pirillo, Costruzione di un contado: i fiorentini e il loro territorio nel bassso medioevo (Florence, 2001). Indeed, territorial expansion has served to support all sides of these debates. Beginning in 1958, Federico Chabod could confirm the existence of a modernizing Renaissance state by pointing towards Weberian functionaries administering subject territories.17 17 Federico Chabod, ‘Y a-t-il un état de la Renaissance?’, in Actes du colloque sur la Renaissance (Paris, 1958), 57–74. In English, Federico Chabod, ‘Was There a Renaissance State?’, in The Development of the Modern States, ed. Heinz Lubasz (New York, 1964), 26–42. Marxist historians, conversely, could argue that territorial growth signalled not modernity, but retrogression, a destruction of the equitable medieval commune by absolutist capitalism.18 18 Viktor Ivanovich Rutenburg, Popolo e movimenti popolari nell’Italia del ′300 e ′400 (Bologna, 1971); Samuel K. Cohn Jr, Creating the Florentine State: Peasants and Rebellion, 1348–1434 (Cambridge, 1999). So too did the territorial aggrandizement of Italy’s cities serve as the key backdrop for scholars such as Giorgio Chittolini and Elena Fasano Guarini in the 1970s and 80s to offer a regional approach to Italian state-making unburdened of national grand narratives.19 19 See the essays in Julius Kirshner (ed.), The Origins of the State in Italy, 1300–1600 (Chicago, 1996). The receding of political history in favour of ethnographic and post-structuralist approaches beginning in the early 1980s led scholars to pay no less attention to Renaissance territories; rather, it was on the fringe of these states where subjected peoples self-fashioned most deliberately and in the celebrations of territorial achievements in regional capitals where civic rituals coalesced.20 20 Edward Muir, Civic Ritual in Renaissance Venice (Princeton, 1981); Edward Muir, Mad Blood Stirring: Vendetta in Renaissance Italy (Baltimore and London, 1998); Richard C. Trexler, Public Life in Renaissance Florence (Ithaca, NY and London, 1980). Today, the expansion of Renaissance cities into surrounding lands remains the sine qua non for rich scholarship on political geography, patterns of clientelism, environmental exploitation, political economy and gender politics.21 21 See, in particular, the collected essays in William J. Connell and Andrea Zorzi (eds.), Florentine Tuscany: Structures and Practices of Power (Cambridge, 2000); Andrea Gamberini and Isabella Lazzarini (eds.), The Italian Renaissance State (Cambridge, 2012). But our understanding of the territorial expansion of Renaissance cities from motives (mercantile or agrarian, public or private, geostrategic or symbolic), to strategies (violent or peaceful), to rhetorics (Aristotelian or humanistic, commercial or feudal) remains neglected. Rather, Italian cities have been cast as prima facie violently expansive, as ‘political organizations imbued with an interest in territorial conquest’ for ‘commercial objectives, food supply, or the control of production’ with the objective of the ‘conquest … of other city-states’.22 22 Giorgio Chittolini, ‘Cities, “City-States” and Regional States in North-Central Italy’, Theory and Society, xviii, 5 (1989), 694–6. When scholars have noted that cities adopted non-violent strategies including diplomacy, inheritance, voluntary submission and, indeed, purchase, they have couched such choices in the modern vocabulary of ‘buffer zones’, ‘defensive conquests’, ‘aggressive territoriality’, ‘commercial staging-posts’ and ‘geopolitical reorientations’ rather than consider contemporary vocabularies, rituals, diplomatic codes, moralities and memories.23 23 For a summary of these debates see especially Scott, City-State in Europe. Fortunately, recent studies have better historicized Renaissance territoriality. William Caferro has revealed the ritualized nature of Renaissance war, and how these conflicts frequently preceded territorial expansion ‘by means of purchase, diplomatic manoeuvres, peaceful exploitation … internal discord, or any combination of these tactics’.24 24 William Caferro, ‘Honour and Insult: Military Rituals in Late Medieval Tuscany’, in Samuel Cohn Jr et al. (eds.), Late Medieval and Early Modern Ritual: Studies in Italian Urban Culture (Turnhout, 2013), 183–209; William Caferro, ‘Warfare and Economy in Renaissance Italy, 1350–1450’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History, xxxix, 2 (2008), 175–6. Jane Black has found Milanese jurists writing consilia damning the practice of selling feudal rights.25 25 Jane Black, Absolutism in Renaissance Milan: Plenitude of Power under the Visconti and the Sforza, 1329–1535 (Oxford, 2009). Monique O’Connell has shown how rulers and subjects mythologized the surrender of smaller communities to larger neighbours, with local historians over centuries changing sieges into voluntary submissions.26 26 O’Connell, ‘Voluntary Submission and the Ideology of Venetian Empire’. And a wealth of scholarship on sovereign purchases in later centuries in a trans-Atlantic context has asked useful questions about what ritual acts, cartographic technologies, and legal regimes permitted Europeans to make the lands of non-Europeans vendible; if they did so at a ‘fair’ price; and how those peoples whose lands were sold resisted or adapted to Europeans’ commodification of space.27 27 Patricia Seed, Ceremonies of Possession in Europe’s Conquest of the New World, 1492–1640 (Cambridge, 1995); Jerry Brotton, Trading Territories: Mapping the Early Modern World (Ithaca, NY, 1997); Stuart Banner, How the Indians Lost their Land: Law and Power on the Frontier (Cambridge and London, 2005); Stuart Banner, Possessing the Pacific: Land, Settlers, and Indigenous People from Australia to Alaska (Cambridge, Mass., 2007); Allan Greer, Property and Dispossession: Natives, Empires, and Land in Early Modern North America (Cambridge, 2018). fl. = florins 1. Mangona 1341 | 7,750 fl. 9. Alpe Ubaldini 1372 | 2,250 fl. 2. Vernia 1341 | 4,960 fl. 10. Gattaia 1374 | 15,000 fl. 3. Romena 1357 | 9,600 fl. 11. Caprile 1373 | 2,500 fl. 4. Soci 1359 | 6,000 fl. 12. Oliveto 1385 | 4,000 fl. 5. Cerbaia 1361 | 6,200 fl. 13. Anghiari 1386 | 1,000 fl. 6. Montecollerato 1361 | 6,000 fl. 14. Sillano 1386–8 | 4,950 fl. 7. Staggia 1361 | 12,000 fl. 15. Lajatico 1405 | 1,300 fl. 8. Castagno 1366 | 2,650 fl. 1. Mangona 1341 | 7,750 fl. 9. Alpe Ubaldini 1372 | 2,250 fl. 2. Vernia 1341 | 4,960 fl. 10. Gattaia 1374 | 15,000 fl. 3. Romena 1357 | 9,600 fl. 11. Caprile 1373 | 2,500 fl. 4. Soci 1359 | 6,000 fl. 12. Oliveto 1385 | 4,000 fl. 5. Cerbaia 1361 | 6,200 fl. 13. Anghiari 1386 | 1,000 fl. 6. Montecollerato 1361 | 6,000 fl. 14. Sillano 1386–8 | 4,950 fl. 7. Staggia 1361 | 12,000 fl. 15. Lajatico 1405 | 1,300 fl. 8. Castagno 1366 | 2,650 fl. Open in new tab fl. = florins 1. Mangona 1341 | 7,750 fl. 9. Alpe Ubaldini 1372 | 2,250 fl. 2. Vernia 1341 | 4,960 fl. 10. Gattaia 1374 | 15,000 fl. 3. Romena 1357 | 9,600 fl. 11. Caprile 1373 | 2,500 fl. 4. Soci 1359 | 6,000 fl. 12. Oliveto 1385 | 4,000 fl. 5. Cerbaia 1361 | 6,200 fl. 13. Anghiari 1386 | 1,000 fl. 6. Montecollerato 1361 | 6,000 fl. 14. Sillano 1386–8 | 4,950 fl. 7. Staggia 1361 | 12,000 fl. 15. Lajatico 1405 | 1,300 fl. 8. Castagno 1366 | 2,650 fl. 1. Mangona 1341 | 7,750 fl. 9. Alpe Ubaldini 1372 | 2,250 fl. 2. Vernia 1341 | 4,960 fl. 10. Gattaia 1374 | 15,000 fl. 3. Romena 1357 | 9,600 fl. 11. Caprile 1373 | 2,500 fl. 4. Soci 1359 | 6,000 fl. 12. Oliveto 1385 | 4,000 fl. 5. Cerbaia 1361 | 6,200 fl. 13. Anghiari 1386 | 1,000 fl. 6. Montecollerato 1361 | 6,000 fl. 14. Sillano 1386–8 | 4,950 fl. 7. Staggia 1361 | 12,000 fl. 15. Lajatico 1405 | 1,300 fl. 8. Castagno 1366 | 2,650 fl. Open in new tab Informed by these advances, this article uses the market for city-states to ask how Renaissance Italians thought about value, territory, community, conflict and imperialism. When and why did Italian rulers acquire their neighbours monetarily? How did Italian rulers price city-states and raise funds to pay for them? How did they legitimate the purchase of communities of merchants not unlike their own? And what did it mean for communities with long traditions of self-government to be bought and transformed, as one contemporary grieved, ‘from lords … to servants’?28 28 Ricordi di Anonimo Pisano, in Corazzini, L’Assedio di Pisa, 81: ‘Et quelli che erano signori et padroni doversi riconsocere servi!’ This article proposes the Florentine purchase of two cities — Lucca (1341) and Pisa (1405) — as a means of answering these questions. Florence offers especially fertile ground because numerous scholars have cast the city’s territorial policy as a ‘political–military competition’ that consolidated Florentine public debt and birthed ‘a patriotic ideology celebrating Florence’s domination of Tuscany’.29 29 Andrea Zorzi, ‘The “Material Constitution” of the Florentine Dominion’, in Connell and Zorzi (eds.), Florentine Tuscany, 13; John M. Najemy, A History of Florence, 1200–1575 (Oxford, 2006), 188. See also Marvin B. Becker, Florence in Transition, 2 vols. (1967–8), ii, Studies in the Rise of the Territorial State (Baltimore, 1968); Anthony Molho, Florentine Public Finances in the Early Renaissance, 1400–1433 (Cambridge, 1971); A. K. Isaacs, ‘Tuscany and Veneto from the Thirteenth to the Sixteenth Centuries: the Impact of Cities’, in Peter Blickle (ed.), Resistance, Representation, and Community (The Origins of the Modern State in Europe, Oxford, 1997), 291–304; Charles M. de La Roncière, ‘De la ville à l'État régional: la constitution du territoire (xive–xve siècle)’, in Jean Boutier, Sando Landi, and Olivier Rouchon (eds.), Florence et la Toscane, XIVe–XIXe siècles: les dynamiques d’un état italien (Rennes, 2004), 15–37; Lorenzo Tanzini, ‘Tuscan States: Florence and Siena’, in Gamberini and Lazzarini (eds.), Italian Renaissance State, 90–111. Moreover, the Lucchese and Pisan purchases offer fruitful comparisons. Both cities were rivals of Florence. Both populations fiercely resisted their sale. And both acquisitions intertwined, the fate of one city tying it to the other. One difference, however, separated the two ventures: while the Florentines retained Pisa for nearly a century, they failed to secure Lucca, which stayed autonomous until 1805 despite the Florentines spending many thousands of florins for the city. These monetary payments — their origins, flows, meanings and memories — inform this article. Yet following this money is no easy task; one reason scholars have overlooked the market for city-states is that no city dedicated an independent public office to buying their neighbours, leaving behind instead ad hoc paper trails of private letters, chronicles, council debates, promissory notes and literary or visual artistic productions. What these sources show is that beneath the deceptive simplicity of the map above rests dizzyingly complex exchanges (see Map). The Florentines bought their neighbours to end wars (Cortona, 1411), by pawn (Borgo San Sepolcro, 1441) and as gifts (Prato, 1351). They bought them from Picard mercenaries (Arezzo, 1384), Angevin queens (Prato, 1351) and Milanese mistresses (Pisa, 1405). And they bought them by drawing on a vast network of intermediaries using convoluted credit instruments which necessitated the seizure of Florentine vessels in Genoa and hostage exchanges in Verona. What then seems like a parochial story — one Italian city purchasing another — in fact opens up continent-spanning negotiations as Florentine creditors and diplomats criss-crossed the Mediterranean and Alps helping their city buy its neighbours. As elite Florentines saw their private fortunes made and lost in the market for city-states, they further developed a commercialized ideology of empire. Diarists heralded their city’s superior commerce (mercatantia). Civic leaders tied the good of the Florentine commune to keeping its honour (onore) and faith (fede) with city-sellers. Ambassadors inked bills of sale (carta di vendita). And polemicists stained opponents with accusations of fraud (frode) while demoting cities such as Pisa to mere merchandise. Buying cities thus allowed the Florentines to demonstrate not only their city’s superior material wealth, but also mercantile prowess — their ability to bargain for a good deal (buon mercato). Finally, my attention to monetary exchanges in no way denies the violence that underwrote them; to borrow the words Thomas Jefferson used to discuss similar land sales centuries later, the Florentines acquired their neighbours ‘with the price in one hand and the sword in the other’.30 30 Jefferson deleted this phrase from the final version of his Notes. Thomas Jefferson, Notes on the State of Virginia (London, 1787), ed. William Peden (Chapel Hill, 1954), 281, n. 4. Yet, as we shall see, contemporaries separated the act of buying a city from that of fighting for one, believing the former to be a more appropriate form of acquisition for a community of merchants. Nor does my use of the phrase ‘market’ imply an anachronistic equilibrium of supply and demand. Yes, cities outbid neighbours, reputations mattered, and, to some degree, ‘towns … came to have their market value’.31 However, the sale of cities was not a capitalist market, but a Renaissance mercato, exchanges informed by rituals and norms embedded in contemporary commerce. In this sense, this article adds Renaissance territorial expansion to a growing literature that identifies economic behaviours such as consumerism (Dennis Romano, Evelyn Welch), military labour (William Caferro), debt collection (Daniel Lord Smail), private lending (James Shaw), public debt (Lawrin Armstrong, Jeffrey Miner) and international trade (Corey Tazzara), once thought signs of the modernity of the Renaissance, as in fact expressions of the values and vocabularies of a people struggling to square their wealth with their morals.32 31 John Addington Symonds, Renaissance in Italy: The Age of Despots, vol. 1 (London, 1875), 114. 32 Lawrin Armstrong, Usury and Public Debt in Early Renaissance Florence: Lorenzo Ridolfi on the Monte Commune (Toronto, 2003); Evelyn Welch, Shopping in the Renaissance: Consumer Cultures in Italy, 1400–1600 (New Haven, 2005); Jeffrey Miner, ‘Lest we Break Faith with our Creditors: Public Debt and Civic Culture in Fourteenth-Century Genoa’ (Stanford Univ. Ph.D. thesis, 2011); James E. Shaw, ‘Market Ethics and Credit Practices in Sixteenth-Century Tuscany’, Renaissance Studies, xxvii, 2 (2013), 236–52; Dennis Romano, Markets and Marketplaces in Medieval Italy, c.1100 to c.1440 (New Haven, 2015); Daniel Lord Smail, Legal Plunder: Households and Debt Collection in Late Medieval Europe (Cambridge, Mass., 2016); Corey Tazzara, The Free Port of Livorno and the Transformation of the Mediterranean World, 1574–1790 (Oxford, 2017); William Caferro, Petrarch’s War: Florence and the Black Death in Context (Cambridge, 2018). I COMMODIFYING COMMUNES The account of what one Florentine called ‘the mad purchase of Lucca’ in 1341 began fifteen years earlier: first as treachery, then private enterprise and, later, public fiasco.33 33 Giovanni Villani, Nuova cronica, ed. Giuseppe Porta, 3 vols. (Parma 1990–1), bk xiiii, ch. xxviii: ‘matta compera di Lucca’. Following the death in September 1328 of its lord, Castruccio Castracani, Lucca changed hands for the next decade and a half among a who’s-who of rulers: German mercenaries first sold it for 60,000 florins in 1329 to a Genoese consortium led by Gherardo Spinola (1280–1340s?); Spinola then ceded the city in 1331 to King John of Luxembourg (r.1310–46); Luxembourg delegated it to the Rossi brothers of Parma in return for 35,000 florins, only to renege a year later and give it to King Philip VI of France (r.1328–50) as part of a 900,000 florin dowry; and the Rossi subsequently gave up the city in 1334 to the brothers Mastino (1308–51) and Alberto (1306–52) Della Scala, lords of Verona.34 34 1329: Archivio di Stato di Lucca (hereafter ASL), Capitoli, R 30, fos. 73–100; ASL, Diplomatico-Tarpea, 8/9/1329; Baldassarre Bonaiuti [Marchionne di Coppo Stefani], Cronaca Fiorentina, ed. Niccolò Rodolico (Rerum Italicarum Scriptores, new ser., xxx, Città di Castello, 1903), 163; Sercambi, Le croniche di Giovanni Sercambi, Lucchese, ed. Bongi, i, 84–6, 194–5; Stella and Stella, Annales Genuenses, ed. Petti Balbi, 115; Giovanni Villani, Nuova cronica, ed. Porta, bk xi, ch. cvlii. 1331: ASL, Diplomatico-Tarpea, 8–9/8/1333, published in A. N. Cianelli, Dissertazioni sopra la storia Lucchese, in Memorie e documenti per servire della città e stato di Lucca, ii–iii (Lucca, 1813–16), iii, pt i, 278–84. See also Bonaiuti, Cronaca Fiorentina, ed. Rodolico, 168; Simone Della Tosa, Annali, in Cronichette antiche, ed. Manni, 163; Sercambi, Le croniche di Giovanni Sercambi, Lucchese, ed. Bongi, i, 84–6, 195; Giovanni Villani, Nuova cronica, ed. Porta, bk xi, ch. clxx. 1333: Sercambi, Le croniche di Giovanni Sercambi, Lucchese, ed. Bongi, i, 84–6, 196–7; Giovanni Villani, Nuova cronica, ed. Porta, bk xi, ch. ccxxvi. 1334: G. W. Leibnitz (ed.), Codex juris gentium diplomaticus, in quo tabulae authenticae actorum publicorum, tractatuum … edidit G. G. L., 2 vols. (Hanover, 1693–1700), i, 144 (doc. LXXI); J. C. Lünig (ed.), Codex Italiae diplomaticus: quo non solum multifariae investiturarum literae … ipsos concernentia continentur, 4 vols. (Frankfurt-Leipzig, 1725–1735), iv, col. 2065; L. Mirot, ‘La cession de la ville et du comté de Lucques par Jean de Bohemè à Philippe VI de Valois en 1334’, in [Henri Hauvette], Mélanges d’histoire et de littérature offerts à Henri Hauvette (Paris, 1934), 81–8; Giovanni Villani, Nuova cronica, ed. Porta, bk xi, ch. xv. 1335: Bonaiuti, Cronaca Fiorentina, ed. Rodolico, 178; Sercambi, Le croniche di Giovanni Sercambi, Lucchese, ed. Bongi, i, 84–6, 196–7; Giovanni Villani, Nuova cronica, ed. Porta, bk xxii, ch. xxx–xxxi. For a summary of these exchanges, see Cianelli, Dissertazioni sopra la storia Lucchese, 264–5, 267–70, 278–84, 287, 293–7, 302–6; and Louis Green, Lucca under Many Masters: A Fourteenth-Century Italian Commune in Crisis (1328–1341) (Florence, 1995), 29, 37–9, 54–7, 70–5. Throughout, the Florentines lurked. In 1328 they turned down an offer from the mercenaries occupying Lucca because the Germans wished for ‘a lot of money, and the Florentines were not able to trust them’.35 35 Giovanni Villani, Nuova cronica, ed. Porta, bk xi, ch. cvi: ‘molta moneta, e’ Fiorentini si poteano male fidare di loro’. So too did they fail to buy the city in 1329 from Marco Visconti, the commander of the German forces, in 1333 from John of Bohemia, and from Mastino della Scala two years later.36 36 Ibid., bk xi, chs. cxxvi, cxxviii, cxxxiii, cxli; Bonaiuti, Cronaca Fiorentina, ed. Rodolico, 161–2; Sercambi, Le croniche di Giovanni Sercambi, Lucchese, ed. Bongi, i, 84–6, 193–4. For the negotiations with Marco Visconti, see ASF, Signori, Missive I Cancelleria, R 4, fos. 40r–41v, esp. 41r. For the negotiations with Mastino della Scala, see Giovanni Villani, Nuova cronica, ed. Porta, bk xii, ch. xliv. Florentine persistence, however, met with results when on 27 July 1341, the Della Scala, faced with mounting defeats, ‘sold the commune of Lucca to Florence’ for 250,000 florins.37 37 Archivio di Stato di Pisa (ASP), Comune A, R 214, fo. 96v (Breve Vetus Anthianorum): ‘dictam civitatem Luce comuni Florentie vendidesse’. For the bill of sale and its revisions, see ASF, CR, R 13, fos. 20r–23v, 27r–30r, 32r–44r, 45r–49v, 51r–v, 53r–58r; Cesare Guasti and Alessandro Gherardi, I capitoli del comune di Firenze, 2 vols. (Florence, 1866–93), ii, 280–5, 288–96. See also Bruni, History of the Florentine People, ed. and trans. Hankins, ii, 244–5; Cronache senesi, ed. Lisini and Iacometti, i, 526–7; Cronica di Pisa: dal ms. Roncioni 339 dell’Archivio di Stato di Pisa, ed. Cecilia Iannella (Rome, 2005), 107–10; Della Tosa, Annali, 169; Ranieri Sardo, Cronaca di Pisa, ed. Ottavio Banti (Rome, 1963), 91–2; Sercambi, Le croniche di Giovanni Sercambi, Lucchese, ed. Bongi, i, 87–8; Donato Velluti, La cronica domestica di Messer Donato Velluti, ed. Isidoro del Lungo and Guglielmo Volpi (Florence, 1914), 161; Giovanni Villani, Nuova cronica, ed. Porta, bk xii, chs. cxxx, cxxxiii. But what followed next for Florence was one calamity after another. Led by the condottiere Luchino Visconti (1292–1349), the Pisans and their allies, terrified at the prospect of Florentine encirclement, besieged Lucca and soon after crushed a Florentine relief force on 2 October 1341.38 38 A. Abruzzese, ‘Delle lega dei Pisani con Luchino Visconti nell’impresa di Lucca’, Studi storici, iii (1894), 331–7; Pietro Silva, ‘La Guerra tra Pisa e Firenze per il possesso di Lucca e una fonte delle Istorie pisane di R. Roncioni’, Studi Storici, xx (1911–12), 196–209; Green, Lucca under Many Masters, 128–31. Defeated, Florence’s leaders in May of the following year handed the rulership of Florence to the duke of Athens, Walter of Brienne IV (1304–56), who signed a peace ceding Lucca to the Pisans and prosecuted the previous government for fraud, moves that led the duke to be overthrown himself fourteen months later.39 39 The terms of the treaty with Pisa may be found in ASF, CR, R 25, fos. 33r–37r; ASF, Provissioni Registri (hereafter PR), R 32, fos. 15v–17v; ASL, Capitoli, R 19, fos. 15r–19v, published in Cianelli, Dissertazioni sopra la storia Lucchese, 338–48. See also Bonaiuti, Cronaca Fiorentina, ed. Rodolico, 198; Cronica di Pisa, 126–8; Sardo, Cronaca di Pisa, ed. Banti, 95; Giovanni Villani, Nuova cronica, ed. Porta, bk xiii, ch. viii; Giuseppe Rossi-Sabatini, Pisa al tempo dei Donoratico (1316–1347): studio sulla crisi costituzionale del comune (Florence, 1938), 223–5; Green, Lucca under Many Masters, 184; Christine E. Meek, The Commune of Lucca under Pisan Rule, 1342–1369 (Cambridge, Mass., 1980), 88. On the prosecution of the Twenty, see ASF, Balie, R 2, 143–52; Cesare Paoli, Della signoria di Gualtieri Duca d’Atene in Firenze (Florence, 1862), 103–4 (doc. 213). Given the catastrophe of 1341–5, what motivated the Florentines to pursue this misadventure? Although numerous historians have offered explanations ranging from graft to geopolitics, how did contemporaries describe what happened?40 40 Roberto Barducci, ‘Cum parva difficultate civium predictorum…: Spunti introduttivi per un regesto della legislazione finanziaria fiorentina del Trecento (1345–1358)’, in Andrew Morrogh et al. (eds.), Renaissance Studies in Honour of Hugh Craig Smyth, 2 vols. (Florence, 1985), i, 3; Marvin B. Becker, ‘Economic Change and the Emerging Florentine Territorial State’, Studies in the Renaissance, xiii (1966), 18; Green, Lucca under Many Masters, 126, 131, 188; and Silva, ‘La Guerra tra Pisa e Firenze per il possesso di Lucca’, 198. In the minds of those Florentines who watched their money vanish, their government collapse and their pride dim, who or what was to blame for such folly? No better account captures Florentine public opinion on the Lucchese enterprise than Giovanni Villani’s (1276/80–1348) Nuova cronica (New Chronicle). A typical Florentine merchant, Villani rose to top communal offices only to face bankruptcy in 1338 and civic ineligibility following a stint in debtors’ prison.41 41 Louis Green, Chronicle into History: An Essay on the Interpretation of History in Florentine Fourteenth-Century Chronicles (Cambridge, 1972), 44–85; Charles T. Davis, ‘Villani, Giovanni’, in Christopher Kleinhenz (ed.), Medieval Italy: An Encyclopedia, 2 vols. (New York, 2004), ii, 1143–7; Paula Clarke, ‘The Villani Chronicles’, in Sharon Dale, Alison William Lewin and Duane J. Osheim (eds.), Chronicling History: Chronicles and Historians in Medieval and Renaissance Italy (University Park, Pa., 2007), 124–7. Embittered, Villani wrote his Cronica then as catharsis — a search for the causes of his personal ruin in the follies of the recent past. Following closely the earlier Florentine annalist tradition, Villani begins his account of the Lucchese enterprise by recounting a prophecy of the coming disaster said to be given by the chronicler’s friend, the Parisian philosopher Dionigio del Borgo S. Sepolcro. ‘I see Castruccio [Castracani] dead’, Dionigio augured, ‘and at the end of the war you will receive the lordship of Lucca’. But, he added, Florentine happiness would fade, and Lucca would cause ‘great vexation, expense and shame to your Comune’.42 42 Giovanni Villani, Nuova cronica, ed. Porta, bk xi, ch. lxxxvii: ‘Io veggio Castruccio morto; e alla fine della guerra voi avrete la signoria di Lucca’; ‘con grande affanno, ispendio e vergogna del vostro Comune’. From here, Villani takes his readers through Florence’s financial blunders, blaming them on ‘the envy and avarice’ of his fellow Florentines ‘who ruined every good [thing]’.43 43 Ibid., bk xi, ch. clxx: ‘ma la 'nvidia e avarizia, le quali guastano ogni bene’. Florence could have had Lucca for the pittance of 80,000 florins in 1329, Villani carped, if not for ‘the crooked, disloyal, and always envious citizens of Florence’ who scuttled the deal.44 44 Ibid., bk xi, ch. cxli: ‘ma la guercia e disleale sempre invidia de' cittadini di Firenze’. Villani tells a similar story in 1341–3, when, according to him, Florence’s rulers put private gains ahead of public good. ‘Each of them, through various devices and ways, served his own interests or that of his friends’, corruption that brought about ‘the decline of the commune in the manner of the Romans’.45 45 Ibid., bk xii, ch. cxxx: ‘ma ciascuno alla sua singularità o di suoi amici per diversi studi o modi. E però cominciò ad andare al dichino il nostro Comune al modo di Romani’. ‘Divine justice does not forgive the cleansing of our sins’, Villani thundered, but ‘made our commune penitent with shame for [our] duplicitous and imprudent ways’.46 46 Ibid., bk xi, ch. clxx: ‘la giustizia divina, la quale non perdona alla pulizione degli’innormi peccati … tosto vi mise penitenza con vergogna del nostro Comune per gli modi dupplicati e improvise e non pensati che diremo qui apresso’. But more than the factional or celestial, Villani’s complaints centred on the financial, his fieriest rage spewed at the poor commercial acumen of his fellow merchants. He tells that the Della Scala ‘would have left the negotiations (mercato)’ to sell Lucca if not ‘for the private reasons’, ‘false, hypocritical excuses’, and ‘barratry’ of Florence’s rulers who kept the price high.47 47 Ibid., bk xii, ch. cxxxiii: ‘Che 'nanzi che messere Mastino si fosse partito da mercato l’avrebbe fatto per Cm fiorini d’oro’; ‘o altra privata cagione, e bene si disse per molti cittadini che baratteria s’usò li trattatori del primo mercato’. ‘They opposed [the purchase] under the guise of propriety, that ill-news would fly across the whole world of the Florentines’ cupidity for attaining through money the purchase of Lucca’.48 48 Ibid., bk xi, ch. cxli: ‘dando scusa di falsa ipocresia, dicendo come oppuosono l'altra volta sotto colore d'onestà, che fama correa per l'universo mondo che i Fiorentini per covidigia di guadagno di moneta hanno comperata la città di Lucca’. To this Villani countered that the purchase in fact would raise Florence’s honour. ‘It seems to me … that nothing would be a greater vendetta … nor would greater praise and glorious fame be sent out into the world if one was able to say: the merchants and the citizens of Florence with their money have bought Lucca and its citizens and country-folk’, adding later that the attainment of Lucca through purchase fitted Florence, a community of ‘great, generous, and esteemed merchants, better at mercatantie than war’.49 49 Ibid.: ‘Ma al nostro parere … niuna più alta vendetta si potea fare per gli Fiorentini, né maggiore laude e gloriosa fama potea andare per lo mondo che potersi dire: i mercatanti e' singulari cittadini di Firenze colla loro pecunia hanno comperata Lucca, e gli suoi cittadini e contadini’. Ibid., bk xi, ch. cxxxvii: ‘Ma i Fiorentini come grandi e llarghi e sicuri mercatanti, e migliori d'altre mercatantie che di guerra…’. It is worth standing back from Villani for a moment to consider his appeal here to his fellow Florentines’ sense of mercatantie/mercatantia. Finding a uniform definition for mercatantie/mercatantia can be challenging. On the one hand, merchant handbooks used the term to mean the practice of commerce. Francesco Pegolotti’s (1310–47) guide, Libro di divisamenti di paesi e di misuri di mercatanzie e d’altre cose bisognevoli di sapere a mercatanti (The Book of Descriptions of Countries and of the Measures Employed in Commerce and the Other Things Necessary to Be Known as a Merchant), or Giorgio di Lorenzo Chiarini’s (1400–~58) later El libro di mercatantie et usanze de’ paesi (Book of Commerce and Customs of Countries) come to mind.50 50 Francesco Pegolotti, Libro di divisamenti di paesi e di misuri di mercatanzie e d'altre cose bisognevoli di sapere a mercatanti, published as La Pratica della Mercatura, ed. Allan Evans (Cambridge, 1936); Giorgio Chiarini, El libro di mercatantie et usanze de’ paesi, ed. Franco Borlandi (Turin, 1936). On the other hand, mercatantia evoked ‘the broad cultural framework of a commercial society’ to which Villani belonged, pitting competitive merchants against each other in the controlled setting of the marketplace.51 51 Jill Caskey, Art and Patronage in the Medieval Mediterranean: Merchant Culture in the Region of Amalfi (Cambridge, 2004), 5. In his vernacular encyclopedic treatise, the Convivio (1304–7), Dante for instance defined mercatantia as inherently competitive. ‘A requested thing is, for one of the people involved, not virtue but mercatantia, since the recipient is buying though the giver is not selling’, adding that generosity ‘must be free from every act of mercatantia’.52 52 Dante, Convivio: A Dual-Language Critical Edition, ed. and trans. Andrew Frisardi (Oxford, 2017), 32–3: ‘acciò che ‘l domandato è da una parte non vertù ma mercatantia, però che lo ricevitore compera, tutto che ’l datore non venda … ancora si conviene essere netto d'ogni atto di mercatantia’. Translation is by Frisardi. Other Trecento writers further cast merchant mercatantia in opposition to nobility, as in a tale by Boccaccio, Villani’s contemporary, in Decameron 7.7 in which a fallen Florentine gentleman, Ludovico, attains great wealth through mercatantia yet refuses to let his son follow his trade ‘because the nobility of his father disliked mercatantia’.53 53 Giovanni Boccaccio, Decameron, ed. Ugo Foscolo (Milan, 1849), 7.7: ‘e perché egli alla nobiltà del padre e non alla mercatantia si traesse, non l'aveva il padre voluto mettere a alcun fondaco’. As Boccaccio suggests, mercatantia was not solely an individual trait, but a collective, communal identifier. In Decameron 2.4 he noted how Amalfi was a land with ‘men rich and proficient like no others in the art of mercatantia’.54 54 Ibid., 2.4: ‘d'uomini ricchi e procaccianti in atto di mercatantia sí come alcuni altri’. Other writers saw mercatantia as an essential Florentine quality; Leon Battista Alberti in his 1441 dialogue on the family I quattro libri della famiglia (Four Books on the Family) complimented the wisdom of the ancient Florentines for building a city of merchants rather than men skilled in arms (who threatened violence) or theology (who distained commerce).55 55 Leon Battista Alberti, I libri della famiglia, ed. Ruggiero Romano and Alberto Tenenti (Turin, 1969), 49; Mark Jurdjevic, ‘Virtue, Commerce, and the Enduring Florentine Republic Moment: Reintegrating Italy into the Atlantic Republic Debate’, Journal of the History of Ideas, lxii, 4 (2001), 734. By viewing Villani’s account of the Lucchese debacle anew as an affront to Florentine mercatantia, we can attach a deeper meaning to how contemporaries understood the market for city-states. For Villani, the disaster stemmed not from any military crisis, but a connected set of economic catastrophes that ‘lowered the mercatantia and crafts of the whole Commune’.56 56 Giovanni Villani, Nuova cronica, ed. Porta, bk xii, ch. lxxxviii: ‘e però di tutto il Comune e lla mercatantia e ogni arte n’abassò’. As a consequence, Villani explains, Lucca’s master, Mastino della Scala, tricked the Florentines in 1341 by ‘bargaining with the Pisans and with our commune so that the one would offer him more than the other’ in an effort to ‘raise his mercatantia and to make vendetta upon the Florentines’.57 57 Ibid., bk xii, ch. cxxx: ‘tenea bargagno co' Pisani e col nostro Comune di darla a cchi più glie ne desse’; ch. cxxxiii: ‘E per alzare la sua mercatantia e fare la sua vendetta di Fiorentini’. Villani’s belief that Lucca was a vendible piece of property up for sale and his casting blame upon Mastino della Scala for double-dealing continued to inform Florentine accounts of the imbroglio long after the chronicler’s death. In Nuovo lamento di pietà rimato, a poem based closely on Villani's Cronica read at public events, the Florentine town crier Antonio Pucci (1310–88) remarked much the same.58 58 Antonio Pucci, ‘Lamento di Antonio Pucci, in persona di Firenze, per la perdita di Lucca’, in C. Cipolla and F. Pellegrini, Poesie minori riguardanti gli Scaligeri (Bullettino dell’istituto storico italiano, xxiv, Rome, 1902), 103: ‘E gueregiando comuni e tiranni | Più e più volte ò radopiati i danni. | Nel quarantun, credendo uscir d’ afanni Ove dimore, | Diedi a messer Mastin del mio tesoro | Centottanta miglia’ di fiorin d’oro, | Per aver Lucca col suo tenitoro In mia balia. | Questa mi fu pegior mercatanzia | Ch’ i’ comperasse mai in vita mia’. Speaking in the anthropomorphized voice of the city of Florence, the poet bewailed his failure to gain Lucca: Battling communes and tyrants More and more damage we endured. In 1341, believing we left behind these events, O God. 12 I gave to Messer Mastin [della Scala] from my treasury One-hundred thousand florins of gold, To have Lucca with its territory under my suzerainty,  16 This was the worst merchandise That I ever bought in my life So too did Leonardo Bruni (1370–1444) cast Mastino della Scala as a deceptive merchant in Book VI of his Historiarum Florentini populi libri XII (History of the Florentine People), large parts of which borrowed from Villani. Bruni begins by enumerating the benefits of buying Lucca. ‘Think how much the glory, fame and majesty of the Florentine People will grow if a city which has long been nearly our equal in wealth and power should be made subject to you’, Bruni boasts, thinly couching the public goods such as extended borders, enhanced security and greater glory, which Florence stood to gain from the purchase, in the language of mercantile goods (bona, bonis).59 59 Bruni, History of the Florentine People, ed. and trans. Hankins, ii, 158–9: ‘Quid autem, gloria, et amplitudo nominis maiestasque florentini populi quantum augescet, si civitas, dudum nostrae opibus et potential paene par, nobis subiiciatur?’ For the double meaning of goods (bona, bonis, bonorum) as commerce, see ibid., i: 122, 226, 294, 358, 400; ii: 26, 270, 298, 300, 306; iii: 8, 58, 60, 74. I draw all English quotations for Bruni’s History of the Florentine People from Hankins’s translation. Throwing subtly aside, Bruni then eviscerates Mastino della Scala, whose offer of the town to both Pisa and Florence originated in the lord’s ‘crafty mind’, which ‘sniffed out the desires of the two cities’ and ‘put Lucca up to auction, and so raised the bidding … as though weight had been put on a scale’.60 60 Ibid., ii, 244–5: ‘Sagax vero tyranni mens cum civitatum desideria odorasset, Luca venali hastae subiecta, licitationem augebat’; ‘velut libra ad pondus’. A century later, Niccolò Machiavelli (1469–1527) in his Istorie fiorentine (Florentine Histories) recorded an almost identical commercial contest in which ‘the competitors were the Florentines and the Pisans’, adding how the former ‘being richer … closed their contract with Mastino’ only, in the end, to be ‘driven off with loss of money and acquisition of shame’.61 61 Machiavelli, Florentine Histories, 33. ‘[Mastino della Scala] set off to make a deal (mercato) with either the Florentines or the Pisans … both of which had certain advantages, the Florentines having themselves much money, the Pisans having a great wish to buy it, although they, with notable treachery, would be swindled of their money by the seller’, remembered Scipione Ammirato (1531–1601) in his own Istorie fiorentine.62 62 Scipione Ammirato, Istorie fiorentine de Scipione Ammirato (Florence, 1647), 440–1: ‘prese partìto di farne mercàto co’ Fiorentini, ò co’ Pisani … oltre che l’uno & l’altro parea haverci una certa azione; i Fiorentini haverci tanto speso, i Pisani haverla una volta compra; benche con notabil perfidia de venditori soffero stati ingannáti del danaio’. We should be cautious, however, about reading only Florentine accounts. Rather, the story of the commercial contest for Lucca was itself contested by Pisan, Scaliger and Lucchese writers who cast the Florentines as violating the norms of mercatantia. We are told by an anonymous Pisan chronicler, for instance, that the Pisans first learned of Florence’s purchase of Lucca ‘even before the deal (mercato) was made’, when ‘the haughty Florentines, rebels of the Roman Emperor’ demanded peace terms and threatened to chain up the port of Pisa unless they assented to the sale.63 63 Cronica di Pisa, 107: ‘Ma inanssi che fatto lo mercato’; ‘li superbi fiorentini e ribelli de lo ’nperio di Roma’. ‘The Florentines have bought Lucca, and they say, that Pisa is given to them’, Pisan-Anonymous heard one Pisan shout before an assembly of the city’s grandees. ‘God will help us’ against ‘the pride of the wicked Florentines’ and their ‘vices and disgraces’ the man yelled.64 64 Ibid., 109: ‘lli fiorentini ànno conprato Lucha e dicieno che Pisa li fi’ donata’; ‘Iddie ci aiuterrà’; ‘lla superbia delli malavvagi fiorentini, senpre ci sono iti con visi e con inghanni’. ‘Thankless, haughty and avaricious … born like a fungus on this world’ was how the Della Scala court-poet and Florentine exile Fazio degli Uberti (1305/9–1367) described his former countrymen in a frottola (a comic secular song in poetic form) performed in front of the Florentine ambassador, who was attempting (unsuccessfully) to buy Lucca in 1336: If you look where I am pointing,   30 I say to you, Tuscan, that in your purse you carry poison and false words …          33 But the brave man for no price would sell honour nor esteem.   39 You believed that you were treating and dealing with a man of base values; to have found a Crassus or a true Midas,  42 who would say: ‘give me gold’, and to deceive him because he is running out of time.65 65 The poem is found in two MSS: Biblioteca Medicea Laurenziana, XLII, MS 38; and Biblioteca Apostolica Vaticana, Barberiniano, XLV, MS 130. A complete copy using the former version may be found in Liriche edite ed inedite di Fazio degli Uberti, ed. Rodolfo Renier (Florence, 1883), 163–8, from which this translation is drawn. ‘Populo ingrato, superbo ed avaro, | che tal vi porta Varo | ch’è nato come fungo in questo mondo’; ‘Se guardi ov'io addito, | i' dico a [t]te, Tosco, | che in borsa porti il tosco, | e 'l mele in bocca … Ma [l]l’uomo ch’è prode | per nessun pregio | non vende onor nè pregio. | Tu credevi [di] trattare e fare | con uom di vile affare; | aver trovato un Crasso, o vero un Mida, | che dicessi: ≪oro mi dà≫, | e d’ingannarlo perch’ ha poco tempo’. Even the folios of Tuscan chronicles became arenas in which the meaning of Lucca’s purchase was contested. ‘[Messer Mastino della Scala], seeing that he was not able to defend effectively Lucca … offering it first to the Pisans before anyone else, and, [because] the Pisans did not want it, so the Florentines bought it for 250,000 florins’, the oldest manuscript copy of the Pisan chronicle of Ranieri Sardo (d.1400) recalled, a rather dry remark to which a later copyist embellished that the Pisans had rejected the offer because ‘they believed that Lucca should remain free for everyone’. ‘Still messer Mastino said to the Pisans that he certainly would sell Lucca to Pisa before anyone else, since he now had found other buyers for it’, the copyist inserted later, ad-libbing how the exasperated Pisans did not want the town and Mastino ‘could sell it to whomever he wished’.66 66 Sardo, Cronaca di Pisa, ed. Banti, 91: ‘et propria mente [Mastino], vedsendo che non poteva bene ghuardare Lucha, pensò di lasciarla, et, avendola prima proferta a’ Pisani che a nniuno altro, e’ Pisani no lla vollono, allora i Fiorentini lla chonperorono 250 migliaia di fiorini’. The oldest manuscript may be found in Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale di Firenze, Magliabechiano XXV, MS 491. The later copy is from the Archivio di Stato di Lucca, MS 54, published as ‘Cronaca Pisana di Ranieri Sardo dall’anno 962 sino al 1400’, Archivio storico italiano, vi, 2 (1845), 75–224. The later quotation appears at 111: ‘Pisa rispuose, che non la volea comprare; anzi lo pregavano, e credeano che Lucca rimanesse libera da ogni persona … Ancora messer Mastino disse alli Pisani, che egli venderebbe Luca innansi a Pisa che altrui, imperoché egli ne trovava compratori. A tanto li fu risposto, che egli la vendesse a chi volesse’. Similar commercial allegories and allegations are woven throughout Giovanni Sercambi’s (1348–1424) Le croniche di Luccha (The Lucchese Chronicles), a city chronicle combining text, illuminations, novelle and poems.67 67 Sercambi, Le croniche di Giovanni Sercambi, Lucchese, ed. Bongi, i, 190–202. On Le croniche see Franca Ragone, ‘Le ‘croniche’ di Giovanni Sercambi: composizione e struttura dei prologhi’, Annali dell’Istituto italiano per gli studi storici, ix (1985–6); Duane J. Osheim, ‘Chronicles and Civic Life in Giovanni Sercambi’s Lucca’, in Dale, William Lewin and Osheim (eds.), Chronicling History. According to Sercambi, the purchase of Lucca for 250,000 florins (too little ‘for a place of so great a name’) ‘was not honest’ because the Florentines had pledged the city to the Pisans ‘who had requested it’, only for ‘all the promises of Florence not to be kept’.68 68 Sercambi, Le croniche di Giovanni Sercambi, Lucchese, ed. Bongi, 88: ‘la dicta somma fu assai minore; posto che il nome fusse grande’; ‘non dimeno tal compra non fu honesta, però che il comune di Pisa fu richiesto se tal compra volea fare … e tucte le promissioni di Fiorenza non s’atennero’. Sercambi further presents the Lucchese as victims of Florentine greed by including later in the chronicle O Luchesi pregiati (O esteemed Lucchese), a poem by Antonio Pucci recounting the city's suffering said to have presented to the Lucchese in 1370. ‘Remember how then the Veronese | Messer Mastino put you underneath the ladder (scala)’, the poem warns its readers, ‘And when he had milked it of all its money | He sold it under Florence’s wing’.69 69 Ibid., 197: ‘Ricórdavi che poi il veronese | Messer Mastino vi misse dentro la scala, | E poi che munta l’ebbe colle spese, | Al Fiorentin la vendeo socto l’ala’. As if to dismiss any doubt that Lucca had been tradable, Sercambi provides a vividly commercialized recounting of his city’s subordination in a watercolour illumination attached to the above text (see Plate). In this image, the anonymous illuminator presents a typical commercial scene as two groups of figures on the left make an exchange across a banker’s table with Mastino (standing under a ladder) raising his hand in a gesture of commercial agreement, while, on the opposite side, his Florentine counterparts hand over money and record the transaction in an account book. On the right appears the result of the transaction: Lucca, now a mere commodity, with the Florentine fleur-de-lis raised above its walls. II PAYING FOR PURCHASES Did Florence and Pisa compete for Lucca in the fashion of merchants? Perhaps. Did generations of Florentine, Pisan and Lucchese writers fashion the events of 1341–5 into commercial metaphors of greed, graft and ill-gotten gains comprehensible to their merchant audience? Certainly. But questions remain: did the Florentines in fact demonstrate poor mercatantia when buying Lucca? Why did buying Lucca nearly bankrupt Florence? In other words, in what way did the failed acquisition of Lucca shape Florentine fiscal institutions? This is no small inquiry. Scholars have for a long time tightly knotted Renaissance territorial expansion, warfare and state growth in their accounts of the creation of urban public debts.70 70 For an overview see Luciano Pezzolo, ‘Sovereign Debts, Political Structure and Institutional Commitments in Italy’, in D’Maris Coffman, Adrian Leonard and Larry Neal (eds.), Questioning Credible Commitment: Perspectives on the Rise of Financial Capitalism (Cambridge, 2013), 168–97. For Florence in particular, the fiscal–political crisis of 1336–45 holds pride of place.71 71 Bernardino Barbadoro, Le finanze della Repubblica fiorentina: Imposta diretta e debito pubblico fino all’istituzione del Monte (Florence, 1929), 515–687; Marvin B. Becker, Florence in Transition, 2 vols. (1967–8), i, The Decline of the Commune (Baltimore, 1967), 123–200; Richard C. Trexler, ‘Florence, by Grace of the Lord Pope … ’, Studies in Medieval and Renaissance History, ix (1972); Roberto Barducci, ‘Politica e speculazione finanziaria a Firenze dopo la crisi del primo Trecento (1343–1358)’, Archivio storico italiano, cxxxvii, 2 (1979); Barducci, ‘Cum parva difficultate civium predictorum’, 3–15; Armstrong, Usury and Public Debt in Early Renaissance Florence, 28–52. The basic outline is well known. Following the wars with Verona (1336–8) and Pisa (1341–3), the Florentine public debt ballooned to 600,000–800,000 florins.72 72 Matteo Villani, Cronica, ed. Porta, bk iii, ch. cvi; Becker, Florence in Transition, i, 129. Yet rather than reform, the international bankers (or popolo grosso) who controlled the government ceased all restitution to government creditors and tasked the duke of Athens with an unpopular tax revision. When it became clear, however, that the duke sought a more extensive fiscal adjustment, these same bankers, in coalition with minor artisans, deposed him on 26 July 1343. But both the underlying debts and the popolo grosso and artisanal unwillingness to reform endured, and in September they too were deposed by ‘new men’ (gente nuova), merchants excluded from the existing government, who transformed public finance by amortizing all communal debts in December 1343, creating in February 1345 a communal ‘debt mountain’ (Monte comune), and allowing in August of that year the trade in Monte credits.73 73 ASF, CR, R 18, fos. 133v–136r; ASF, Provvisioni, Duplicati, R 5, fos. 23v–26r. The significance of the Monte comune for Florentine fiscal history cannot be emphasized too strongly. Contemporaries likened the fund to ‘the heart of this body that we call the city’ and the ‘immovable rock’ of Florence, while historians have argued that the Monte grounded a new ‘logic of political economy’ that powered Florence’s territorial expansion in future decades.74 74 ASF, PR, R 161, fo. 168. Cited in L. F. Marks, ‘The Financial Oligarchy in Florence under Lorenzo’, in E. F. Jacob (ed.), Italian Renaissance Studies: A Tribute to the Late Cecilia M. Ady (London, 1960), 127. Julius Kirshner, ‘ “Ubi est ille?” Franco Sacchetti on the Monte Commune of Florence’, Speculum, lix, 3 (1984), 562. See also Becker, Florence in Transition, i, 123–230; Marvin B. Becker, ‘An Essay on the “Novi Cives” and Florentine Politics, 1342–1382’, Mediaeval Studies, xxiv (1962); Marvin B. Becker, ‘Florentine Popular Government (1343–1348)’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, cvi, 4 (1962); and Gene A. Brucker, Florentine Politics and Society, 1343–1378 (Princeton, 1962), 19. Despite the Monte’s importance, however, scholars have never linked the failed purchase of Lucca to the fund’s creation nor included it in the list of fiscal–political disasters that battered the commune in the 1340s.75 75 See, for instance, Richard A. Goldthwaite, The Economy of Renaissance Florence (Baltimore, 2011), 454. Yet by combining records from the commune’s accounting and governing offices (the Camera del comune, Balie, Provvisioni and Capitoli), a clear picture emerges in which debt payments followed lockstep with fiscal innovations. It is best to begin with the 250,000-florin contract to buy Lucca itself. Signed on 27 July 1341, tweaked on 14 August when the Pisans besieged Lucca and modified again on 4 October following the Florentine defeat at Pisan hands, these ‘bills of sale’ (as Florentine ambassadors called them), like all merchant contracts, provided witnesses and enumerated terms of payment, the Florentines promising to deliver 100,000 florins within thirty days of the city’s handover and instalments thereafter of 50,000 florins every ten months.76 76 François-Tommy Perrens, Histoire de Florence depuis ses origines jusqu'à la domination des Médicis, 6 vols. (Paris, 1877–83), iv, 517–19: ‘le carte di vendita di Luccha’. What followed next was four years of rescheduling this original debt as four governments (popolo grosso, duke of Athens, popolo grosso and artisan, and gente nuova) struggled to pay. At first, the Florentine executive council (Signoria) gave this task to a select emergency commission (balìa) of twenty men, commonly called the Twenty, drawn from prominent families, who on 28 August and 6 September issued calls for forced loans (prestanze) — a common, but disliked, form of revenue generation.77 77 The Twenty included prominent members of the Albizzi, Acciaioli, Alberti, Aldobrandini, Bardi, Baroncelli, Peruzzi, Ricci, and Strozzi families. ASF, PR, R 31, fos. 7r–9r; ASF, PR, R 31, fos. 63r–v. This document, dating from Jan. 1342, further references the loans of 4 Oct. and 19 Dec. Following the defeat of the Florentine army in early October, the Twenty called for more loans of 90,000 florins (4 October), 20,000 florins (19 December 1341), 80,000 florins (29 February 1342), and 53,333 florins (June/July 1342).78 78 ASF, PR, R 32, fos. 39v–40v. How much of this money went to pay off the debt on Lucca is unclear. According to the records of the trial of the Twenty prosecuted under the aegis of the duke of Athens two years later, the Florentines charged with administering Lucca had paid 20,000 florins earmarked for Mastino della Scala instead to the captain of Lucca.79 79 ASF, Balie, R 2, fos. 143–52. Communal receipts confirm these payments. ASF, CR, R 13, fos. 35r–36v; Guasti and Gherardi, I capitoli, ii, 288–9. Yet these prosecutions were nothing but political retaliation; a receipt for 35,287 florins from the chancellor of the Twenty to Mastino from April–June 1342, as well as a later renegotiation of Florentine outstanding debts from the next year, show that the Twenty paid approximately 55,000 florins on Lucchese obligations before the duke of Athens ceased all payments in May 1342.80 80 ASF, CR, R 13, fos. 32r–34v; Guasti and Gherardi, I capitoli, ii, 287–8. Following the deposition of the duke in June 1343 and the popolo grosso government three months later, debt repayments improved dramatically under the Signoria of ‘new men’. On 15–16 November 1343, the Signoria renewed the peace with Pisa from the previous October; six weeks later they agreed to pay Mastino 2,000 florins a month for sixteen months, and, two days after that, inventoried all creditors into a single fund, a prerequisite for a public debt.81 81 The Pisan peace treaty may be found in ASF, CR, R 19, fos. 22r–37r; ASL, Capitoli, 19, 22r–37r; ASP, Comune A, R 29, fos. 82v–93r; published in Francesco Baldasseroni, La pace tra Pisa, Firenze, e Lucca nel 1343 (Florence, 1904). See also Bonaiuti, Cronaca Fiorentina, ed. Rodolico, 598; Giovanni Villani, Nuova cronica, ed. Porta bk xiii, ch. xxv; Green, Lucca under Many Masters, 184–5; Meek, The Commune of Lucca under Pisan Rule, 89. On negotiations with Mastino della Scala, see ASF, CR, R 13, fos. 37r–44r; Guasti and Gherardi, I capitoli, ii, 289–92; ASF, PR, R 32, fos. 88r–89v; Barbadoro, Le finanze della Repubblica fiorentina, 636. Some sense of the new regime’s motivation can be found moreover in one of its first official proclamations. On 16 September 1343, the new Signoria formed an eight-man commission to repay Lucchese debts so that ‘our hostages who are now detained in the city of Verona … are cheered up’.82 82 ASF, PR, 32, fos. 60r–v: ‘debita cuidem etiam stadici detinenter in civitas Verone et ut ipsius stadicis relaxant’. As was common late medieval protocol for financial transactions between sovereigns, the Twenty had closed the Lucchese purchase back in 1341 by sending twenty of their own kinsmen to Verona as surety.83 83 The first hostage cohort included Paolo Bocucci, Benedetto Manetti, Corso Corsini, Niccolò Peruzzi, Angelo Cecchi, Simone dei Simonetti, Bordo Bordini, Pietro Aldobrandini, Iacobo Medici, Lippo Valori, Giorgio Ricciardi, Luigi dei Mozzi and Silvestro Baroncelli: ASF, CR, R 13, fos. 23r–v; Guasti and Gherardi, I capitoli, ii, 282–3. On late medieval hostageship generally, see Adam J. Kosto, Hostages in the Middle Ages (Oxford, 2012), esp. 121–9. As a temporary measure to secure Lucca, these hostages at first lived comfortably; a provision for reimbursement shows them receiving stipends of 40 florins for two months of service as they rotated in and out of captivity.84 84 ASF, PR, R 34, fos. 42r–v. But custody, however humane, was deeply unpopular. Giovanni Villani, himself a hostage, blamed his detention on God’s punishment ‘for our arrogance in not being happy with our borders, but wishing to occupy not only Lucca, but other cities and lands nearby’.85 85 Giovanni Villani, Nuova cronica, ed. Porta, bk xii, ch. xxxv: ‘per la nostra prosunzione non istare contenti a’ nostri termini, ma volere occupare non solamente Lucca, ma l’altre città e terre vicine’. Public displeasure only worsened during 1343–4 as temporary confinement turned into permanent limbo and stipends to the hostages ceased due to the new government’s inability to pay its Lucchese debts on time (stopping in June 1343 and January–April 1345) and in full (only amounting in these years to 32,000 florins of the remaining 130,000 florin debt).86 86 ASF, Camerlinghi della camera del comune-Uscita, R 4, fos. 81v–82r, 83v, 88r; R 5, fos. 110r, 111r, 112r, 120r–122r, 127v; R 7, fos. 178v–180r; R 8, fos. 216v, 236v, 237v; R 10, fos. 285r–286r, 289v–290r, 291r-v; R 13, fos. 505r–v. See also ASF, PR, R 32, fos. 118v, 156v–157r; ASF, CR, R 13, fos. 37r–44r; Guasti and Gherardi, I capitoli, ii, 289–92. As a consequence, the hostages’ welfare suffered; in a letter on 13 December 1344 they protested that their stipends had ceased again.87 87 ASF, CR, R 18, fo. 73v. And so to resolve the ongoing crisis once and for all, the Signoria on 1 February 1345 provisioned to send in twenty days a dozen new hostages to replace the existing cohort and repay all the money owed to the Della Scala.88 88 Giuseppe Aiazzi has a copy of this document in Giuseppe Aiazzi (ed.), Ricordi storici di Filippo di Cino Rinuccini dal 1282 al 1460 colla continuazione di Alamanno et Neri suoi figli fino al 1506 … descrizione della Cappella gentilizia in San Croce (Florence, 1840), 111–12. He unfortunately only lists the document as appearing in ASF, Riformagioni with no additional citation. When other schemes to raise money failed, however, the Signoria turned to the only available solution: the formation of the Monte.89 89 ASF, Provvisioni Dupplicate, R 5, fo. 12r. Thus when negotiations with the Della Scala opened again in August 1345, the Florentines, ‘wishing to alleviate … the expenses which daily sustain the Commune’s hostages’, demanded a reduction in their payments, with the two parties reaching an agreement soon afterwards that the remaining debt (115,000 florins) would be halved and delivered to the Della Scala over the next four months upon payment of 5,416 2/3 florins each for the remaining dozen hostages.90 90 ASF, CR, R 18, fo. 89v: ‘volentes alleviare dictum Comune Florentie ab expensis quas cotidie substinet pro obsidibus dicti Comunis’; published in Barducci, ‘Cum parva difficultate civium predictorum’, 9–11. On the repayments see also ASF, CR, R 13, fos. 45r–49v; ASF, Libri Fabarum, R 24, fos. 70v–71v; Giovanni Villani, Nuova cronica, ed. Porta, bk xiii, ch. xlix. The hostages returned were (6 October 1345) Rosso di Giovanni de Gianfigliazzi, Nastagio Cambi de Porcellini; (22 Oct.) Giorgio Dati Guidi, Matteo Totti de Panzano; (19 Nov.) Castellano de Frescobaldi, Niccolò Lapi, Donati Duccio de Adimari, Lapo Arigi de Ricasoli; (14 Dec.) Aldighero ser Gherardi, Uguccione Riccardi de Ricci, Iacobo Dini del Pecora, Lapo Coppi de Mannelli. ASF, CR, R 13, fos. 58r–61v; Guasti and Gherardi, I capitoli, ii, 294–6. In order to raise this ‘great quantity of money … without burdening fellow citizens’, the Signoria further created a scheme whereby lenders to the commune would match their cash loans with an equivalent amount of Monte credits at face value, creating the first secondary market for Monte credits.91 91 ASF, PR, R 33, fos. 59r–60v. To summarize, I in no way want to diminish the financial burdens of Florence’s war for Lucca. War cost. But to say that ‘military expenses, more than any single factor, brought on the formation of [the Monte]’ would be incorrect.92 92 Becker, ‘Economic Change and the Emerging Florentine Territorial State’, 7. Neither the amortization of debt (December 1343), nor the formation of the Monte (February 1345), nor the opening of the market in Monte credits (August 1345) proceeded from any military crisis. Nor was the Monte the only communal public debt meant to ease the pressure of payments owed to other regional powers; both the Genoese and Lucchese consolidated existing debts at least in part to pay off external creditors, the former notably paying down the cost of buying back their autonomy in 1369 from the Holy Roman Emperor Charles IV for 100,000 florins.93 93 Miner, ‘Lest we Break Faith with our Creditors’, 226–36; Christine Meek, Lucca, 1369–1400: Politics and Society in an Early Renaissance City-State (Oxford, 1978), 54–8. In the case of Florence, the debt for Lucca put intense pressure on the September 1343 government. Guaranteed on the captive bodies of Florence’s sons, cousins, brothers and fathers, the purchase terms weighed heavy on a population who imagined the crisis of the 1340s in a distinctly commercial way — as a miscarriage of mercatantia. III VALUING PISA Such mercantile metaphors would return to dominate Florentine political culture sixty-four years later when they again set out to purchase another neighbour, Pisa. Like Castruccio Castracani’s earlier demise, Florentine ambitions in Pisa began with the sudden death of the city’s lord, Giangaleazzo Visconti, duke of Milan, in September 1402. Once a serious rival to Florence, Pisa had gradually declined, hitting bottom when the city’s native signore, Gherardo d’Appiano, ceded it to Giangaleazzo in 1399.94 94 On the sale of 1399, see Cronica volgare di Anonimo Fiorentino, ed. Bellondi, ii, 233–4; Gregorio Dati, Istoria di Firenze, in Firenze contro Milano. Gli intellettuali fiorentini nelle guerre con i Visconti (1390–1440), ed. Antonio Lanza (Rome, 1991), 52–3; Anthony Molho and Franek Sznura (eds.), Alle bocche della piazza: diario di Anonimo Fiorentino (1382–1401) (BNF, Panciatichiano, clviii, Florence, 1986), 215; Morelli, Ricordi, 245; Sardo, Cronaca di Pisa, ed. Banti, 297; Ser Nofri, Cronaca¸4. Following Visconti’s demise, the city passed to his mistress, Agnese Mantegazza, and bastard son, Gabriele Maria, who entered the city in 1403 only after weeks of negotiations with Pisa’s grandees.95 95 Sercambi, Le croniche di Giovanni Sercambi, Lucchese, ed. Bongi, iii. 69. Sensing weakness, Florentine diplomats attempted to recruit one of Giangaleazzo’s associates to sell the town, contacting Caterina Visconti, the lord’s widow; the Visconti commander and lord of Rimini, Carlo Malatesta; and the condottiere Giovanni Colonna, who went so far as to draw up terms of payment to first capture then sell Pisa.96 96 Gene Brucker, The Civic World of Early Renaissance Florence (Princeton, 1977), 192–5. For the negotiations with Caterina, see ASF, Dieci di Balia, Legazioni e commissarie (hereafter DBLC), R 3, fos. 9v–10r. On negotiations with Carlo Malatesta, see ASF, DBLC, R 3, fos. 28v–29r; Rinaldo degli Albizzi, Commissioni di Rinaldo degli Albizzi per il comune di Firenze dal MCCCXCIX al MCCCCXXXIII, ed. Cesare Guasti, 3 vols. (Florence, 1867–73), i, 22, 32–3, 40–1; Cronica volgare di Anonimo Fiorentino, ed. Bellondi, ii, 485–6; Ser Nofri, Cronaca, 5; Anthony Molho, ‘A Note on the Albizzi and the Florentine Conquest of Pisa’, Renaissance Quarterly, xx, 2 (1967). On the negotiations with Colonna see ASF, Consulte e pratiche (hereafter CP), R 37, fo. 41r; ASF, DBLC, R 3, fos. 54r, 57r. These schemes collapsed, however, when on 16 April 1404 Gabriele Maria and Agnese gave the city as fief to the French king, Charles VI (r.1380–1422), and his representative Boucicaut, who soon afterwards compelled the Florentines to sign a four-year peace.97 97 ASF, CR, R 11, fos. 248v–250v; published in Bencini, ‘Nuovi documenti sulla guerra e l’acquisto di Pisa’, 218–24 (doc. i); and Guasti and Gherardi, I capitoli, ii, 142–5. See also Cronica volgare di Anonimo Fiorentino, ed. Bellondi, ii, 302–3; Morelli, Ricordi, 272; Salviati, Cronica, o memorie di Iacopo Salviati, 231; Sercambi, Le croniche di Giovanni Sercambi, Lucchese, ed. Bongi, iii, 76; Stella and Stella, Annales Genuenses, ed. Petti Balbi, 271. For Boucicaut the best source is the anonymous Le Livre des fais du bon messire Jehan Le Maingre, dit Bouciquaut, mareschal de France et gouverneur de Gennes (The Book of Deeds of My Good Lord Jean Le Meingre, Known as Boucicaut), found now in an English translation under the title The Chivalric Biography of Boucicaut, Jean II Le Meingre, trans. Craig Taylor and Jane H. M. Taylor (Woodbridge, 2016), esp. 145–86. Yet the outbreak of war in Lombardy and simmering resentment in Pisa towards the Visconti meant that by the summer of 1405 Boucicaut and Gabriele Maria and Agnese sought to unburden themselves of Pisa, selling the town in late August.98 98 On earlier negotiations, see ASF, CP, R 37, fos. 110r–111r, 112v–113r; De Angelis, Ninci and Pirillo (eds.), Le consulte e pratiche della Repubblica fiorentina, 66–70. On the negotiations that summer, see Capponi, Commentari di Gino Capponi, 337; Cronica volgare di Anonimo Fiorentino, ed. Bellondi, ii, 331–2; Giovanni di Ser Piero, ‘Sei capitoli dell’acquisto di Pisa fatto dai fiorentini’, 250; Morelli, Ricordi, 286; Ser Nofri, Cronaca, 6; Stella and Stella, Annales Genuenses, ed. Petti Balbi, 276–7; Sercambi, Le croniche di Giovanni Sercambi, Lucchese, ed.Bongi, iii, 86–7. For a dramatically different account see Chivalric Biography of Boucicaut, trans. Taylor and Taylor, 152–4. It is at this moment that most scholars stop narrating the purchase of Pisa and begin their account of the war that followed, a vicious campaign that culminated in a Florentine siege ‘even worse than what had happened in Jerusalem at the time of the emperors Titus and Vespasian’, which they only broke by seducing Pisa’s war captain with 50,000 florins to open Pisa’s gates on 9 October 1406.99 99 Dati, Istoria di Firenze, ed. Lanza, 272: ‘miseria più che fatta fusse in Gerusalem al tempo di Tito e di Vespasiano imperadore’. An outline of the war can be found in Corazzini, L’assedio di Pisa; Brucker, Civic World of Early Renaissance Florence, 202–8; and De Angelis, ‘Contra pisas fiat viriliter’. See also Matteo Palmieri, De captivitate Pisarum liber, ed. Gino Scaramella (Rerum Italicarum Scriptores, new ser., xix/2, Città di Castello, 1904); Capponi, Commentari di Gino Capponi, 343–57; Cronichetta di Anonimo Pisano, in Corazzini, L’assedio di Pisa, 61–72; Morelli, Ricordi, 295–8; Salviati, Cronica, o memorie di Iacopo Salviati, 243–62; Sercambi, Le croniche di Giovanni Sercambi, Lucchese, ed. Bongi, iii, 101–12; Ser Nofri, Cronaca¸ 12–57; Stella and Stella, Annales Genuenses, ed. Petti Balbi, 279. On Giovanni Gambacorta’s payment, see Corazzini, L’assedio di Pisa, 139–59 (doc. xv); Capponi, Commentari di Gino Capponi, 357; Cronica volgare di Anonimo Fiorentino, ed. Bellondi, ii, 353–4; Cronichetta di Anonimo Pisano, 72–3; Ricordi di Anonimo Pisano, 79, 92; Morelli, Ricordi, 296–7; Sercambi, Le croniche di Giovanni Sercambi, Lucchese, ed. Bongi, iii, 106–8, 110–12; Stella and Stella, Annales Genuenses, ed. Petti Balbi, 279. ‘Oh change in Fortune! Oh instability of the states of men! There were Pisan gentlemen beyond grief for the pain that penetrated their hearts’, a Pisan lamented at his city’s fall.100 100 Ricordi di Anonimo Pisano, 81: ‘O mutatione di fortuna! O instabilità degli stati umani! Erano li cittadini pisani gentiluomini fuori del sentimento, per il dolore che li penetrava et vestiva tutto il cuore’. But more important than the campaign, scholars have viewed Florence’s victory over Pisa as a turning point as critical for the commune’s territorial rhetoric as the Monte was for its finances. Drawing upon the humanist writings of Poggio Bracciolini (1380–1459), Leonardo Bruni, Niccolò Niccoli (1364–1437), Matteo Palmieri (1406–75), Cino Rinuccini (1350–1417), and Coluccio Salutati (1332–1406), Hans Baron argued in his seminal 1955 essay, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance, that the Pisan war contributed to a newly secularized and republican ‘civic humanism’.101 101 Hans Baron, The Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance: Civic Humanism and Republican Liberty in an Age of Classicism and Tyranny, 2 vols. (Princeton, 1955). And while many historians of Florentine political thought have savaged Baron for ignoring the brutality of Florentine rule, they have continued to privilege the Pisan war as a moment when Florentine political thinkers refined a newly bellicose ‘republican imperialism’ modelled on Roman imperium.102 102 Allison Brown, ‘The Language of Empire’, in Connell and Zorzi (eds.), Florentine Tuscany, 32–47; Mikael Hörnqvist, Machiavelli and Empire (Cambridge, 2004), 38–75; Najemy, A History of Florence, 198. Yet if we listen closely to how diplomats, diarists and chroniclers justified Florence’s acquisition of Pisa, we can hear a parallel strain of political thought, one filled with the tit for tat of mercatantia — with honour (onore), utility (utilità), fraud (frode), faith (fede), vanity (vanità) and avarice (avarizia). We can begin to hear Florentine politicians speaking the language of mercatantia by listening in as they debated a simple question: how much should Pisa cost? The setting for this deliberation was a 14 August 1405 pratica, a closed-door advisory panel of Florentine citizens. While a regular feature of Florentine republican government, pratiche are an exceptional source, providing a ‘behind closed doors’ view of the beliefs of Florence’s rulers.103 103 Nicholas Baker, ‘Discursive Republicanism in Renaissance Florence: Deliberation and Representation in the Early Sixteenth Century’, Past and Present, no. 225 (Nov. 2014), 47–77. It helps as well that the 14 August pratica was particularly large and contentious, bringing together dozens of dignitaries to debate an offer from Boucicaut to sell Pisa for 250,000 florins.104 104 ASF, CP, R 37, fos. 154r–157r. A published record of the pratiche may be found in De Angelis, Ninci and Pirillo (eds.), Le consulte e pratiche della Repubblica fiorentina, 227–40. All transcriptions below come from this edition. Over the course of the day’s debate, three camps formed. Most discussants urged caution, among them Guidaccio Pecori, who wished that ‘the requested price should be diminished for the greater utility for the Commune’, and Marsilio di Vanni Vecchietti, who suggested that ‘in whatever way possible … we should have the city of Pisa, obtaining utility for the Commune’.105 105 Ibid.: ‘Quod petita minuantur cum maiori utilitate Communis’; ‘Quod fiat quicquid fieri potest quod civitas Pisarum habeatur, procurando utilitatem Communis, quantum fieri potest’. Many moderates further demanded that any deal should include Livorno, a port also under Boucicaut’s rule. ‘If Livorno and the citadel are given by Boucicaut then the enterprise should be done, or else not, regardless of the money’s [effect] on the Commune’s welfare’, beseeched Giovanni de Orlandini.106 106 Ibid.: ‘Quod si per Buccicaldum detur Liburnum et cittadella fiat impresa, alias non, nicchilominus cum utilitate Communis circa pecuniam’. Against such moderation, another group wished the project abandoned entirely. ‘Since Livorno was not added to the citadel, a meeting should be held with the Pisans concerning the terms, as not to diminish trust’, Giovanni Soderini noted.107 107 Ibid.: ‘Quod sine Liburno non attendatur ad cittadellam et cum Pisanis teneatur pratica cepta, non diminuendo fidem’. ‘In no way should the business of the city of Pisa be interfered with’, worried Tommaso di Neri Ardinghelli.108 108 Ibid.: ‘nullo modo intromictatur in negociis civitatis Pisarum’. Finally, a third group wished to act immediately. ‘The treaty should proceed, the sooner the better, and that they should occupy the citadel and the other castles’, demanded Buonaccorso Pitti. ‘Money should be raised by voluntary requests or by other ways, and the cost should be reduced to a desirable amount that would provide for the common good’, added Iacopo Salviati.109 109 Ibid.: ‘Quod procedatur quantocius quod cittadella et alia castra capiantur’; ‘Provideatur de pecunia per via accatti vel alterius vie, ut deducatur ad effectum desideratum etiam providendo bene de interesse’. One way to read the 14 August pratica would frame it between competing ideologies of empire, with speakers such as Ardinghelli and Soderini defending medieval ideals of collective reconciliation against the imperialist ambitions of Pitti and others.110 110 Brucker, Civic World of Early Renaissance Florence, 200–4. Another approach could be commercial; the centrality of Livorno hints at the Florentine desire to lift crippling Visconti trade embargoes.111 111 Renato Piattoli, ‘Il problema portuale di Firenze dall’ultima lotta con Giangaleazzo Visconti alle prime trattative per l’acquisto di Pisa (1402–1405)’, Rivista storica degli archive toscani, 2 (1930), 157–90. Perhaps another would envision the price of Pisa as an expression of late medieval frameworks for valuation, whether Aristotelian and Thomist just price, or an emergent ‘appropriation of the quantitative rationality’ of supply and demand.112 112 Germano Maifreda, From Oikonomia to Political Economy: Constructing Economic Knowledge from the Renaissance to the Scientific Revolution (Farnham, 2012), 58; Nicholas J. Theocarakis, ‘ “Nicomachean Ethics” in Political Economy: The Trajectory of the Problem of Value’, History of Economic Ideas, xvi, 1 (2006), 18–22. Certainly, the Florentines linked price to demand. From the death of Giangaleazzo in 1402 to the final purchase of the city in 1405, the price of Pisa fluctuated from 100,000 florins to 400,000 florins as the political circumstances changed. Quality also mattered. After the Pisan war began, a letter from the Dieci di Balia, a special foreign affairs ministry, to the Florentine war captain suggested he buy Pisan fortresses from their defenders by determining the price of each castle ‘according to the quality of the place’ while trying to save ‘the Commune as much money as possible’.113 113 ASF, DBLC, R 3, fos. 90r–v: ‘secondo la qualità del luogo’; ‘possiate promettere danari, ma in piccolo quantità: risparmiando il comune quanto v’è possibile’. But a closer look at the 14 August pratica begs a more complicated reading of the monetary value of Pisa. Consider again Marsilio di Vanni Vecchietti’s comments that purchasing Pisa would obtain ‘utility for the Commune’, or Guidaccio Pecori’s complaint that the price should garner ‘greater utility’ for Florence. What these discussants suggested was that buying Pisa was as much an economic, strategic goal as a rhetorical one: to demonstrate Florentine commercial superiority through the attainment of a culturally mediated ‘honourable’ price. References to an honourable price for Pisa in fact can be heard earlier, such as when the Dieci ordered a commission to Pisa in 1404 to try to buy the city, giving them a blank cheque ‘as long as you promise that the amount of money … would be able to better the honour and utility of the Commune’.114 114 ASF, Signoria, Collegi, Legazioni e commissarie (hereafter SCLC), R 2, fo. 51v: ‘promettiate quella quantità di denari, chon quelli pacti e chonvegne che meglio potrete, ad onore e utilità di Comune’. The diarist Giovanni Morelli mused a similar point after Pisa fell. ‘We did not know and did not want to know what was the most honourable or useful thing for us to do … but in the end we got control of Pisa by spending a great deal of money’.115 115 Morelli, Ricordi, 297: ‘Non sapemmo o non volemmo conoscere quello ci era e d’onore e d’utile: avemmola pure con grande costo di ricompere e di spesa di soldo’. Indeed, the ultimate price for Pisa was imbued with symbolic weight; 200,000 florins was what Pisa had cost Giangaleazzo Visconti less than a decade earlier. And while a fuller discussion of the monetary valuation of individual cities goes beyond the reach of this article, what these sources hint at are the limits of market forces to explain Renaissance notions of valuation, such seemingly rational numbers emerging instead out of ‘a social system that remains to be studied more carefully’.116 116 Caferro, Petrarch’s War, 136. That the Florentines understood Pisa’s monetary value as itself possessing rhetorical value — as evidence of their city being populated with honourable men of commerce — can be heard particularly in the blitz of letters the Florentines sent across Italy from 27 August to 6 September, the critical period between Pisa’s purchase, but before the revolt noted at this article’s start. The diplomatic campaign began on 28 August when the Florentines told the Pisans in a letter how ‘only from God can [Pisa] be freed from the hands of tyranny, under whose yoke you yourselves currently are’, adding that they had ‘acquired the most righteous title of the city, contado, and district (of Pisa)’.117 117 ASF, Signori, Missive I Cancelleria, R 26, fo. 118r: ‘Qua quidem solus Deus de tyrannorum manibus, sub iugum quorum vosmet ipsi, ne volenter dixerimus, patientissime coniecistis, benignitatis sue clementia miraculose defendit’; ‘civitatem comitatum et districtum vestrum iustissimo titulo duximus acquirendam’. Beyond justice, price loomed large in these correspondences such as when on 3 September the Dieci wrote to the Roman Pope Innocent VII ‘about the acquisition of the rights of the title of Pisa and of its contado, lands, and castles, by us for 205,000 florins given in three payments’.118 118 ASF, DBLC, R 3, fos. 80v–81r: ‘farai noto alla Sua Santità l’acquisto delle ragioni del titolo di Pisa e del suo contado terreno castella, per noi comperato per fiorini 205,000 a dare in tre paghe’. Other letters to the Sienese, the Fieschi of Genoa, and King Ladislaus of Naples enumerated the purchase in much the same way, while accurate valuations of the exchange in chronicles from Genoa, Lucca, Siena and Venice suggest that Florence’s message reached a wide audience.119 119 Letter to Siena: ASF, DBLC, R 3, fo. 80v. Letter to the Fieschi: ASF, Signori, Missive I Cancelleria, R 26, fo. 121r. Letter to Ladislaus: ASF, DBLC, R 3, fo. 81v. Cronache senesi, ed. Lisini and Iacometti ii, 762; Morosini, Morosini Codex, ed. Ghezzo, Melville-Jones and Rizzi, iii, 179; Sercambi, Le croniche di Giovanni Sercambi, Lucchese, ed. Bongi, iii, 98–9; Stella and Stella, Annales Genuenses, ed. Petti Balbi, 276–7. Another means to approach the rhetorical value of Pisa’s monetary value is to listen to those who sought to delegitimate Florence’s purchase of the city. This quarrel dated to the opening days of the conflict when, following their recapture of the citadel, the Pisans sent an embassy to Florence to dispute the legality of the Florentine bill of sale.120 120 Capponi, Commentari di Gino Capponi, 343. Four decades later, the humanist Matteo Palmieri made this embassy central to his chronicle of the Pisan war, the De captivitate Pisarum liber (The Conquest of Pisa), blaming the Pisan ambassadors for provoking the conflict. ‘We believe, however, that you Florentine citizens are wise and prudent enough to understand how cruel and against justice it is not only to desire the property of others but, having gained them through fraud, to try to maintain them by arms’, Palmieri recorded the Pisan ambassadors having asserted.121 121 Palmieri, De captivitate Pisarum liber, 12: ‘Credimus tamen, florentini cives, vobis tantum prudentie ac iudicij inesse, ut cognoscatis quam inhumanum et contra iustitiam sit alienum non solum appetere sed, fraude occupatum, vi et armis tenere’. See also Donald Wilcox, ‘Matteo Palmieri and the “De captivitate Pisarum liber”’, in Anthony Molho and John Tedeschi (eds.), Renaissance: Studies in Honor of Hans Baron (DeKalb, Ill., 1971), 267–81; Alessandra Mita Ferraro (ed.), La presa di Pisa (Bologna, 1995), editor’s intro., vii–xxxiii; Mikael Hörnqvist, ‘The Two Myths of Civic Humanism’, in James Hankins (ed.), Renaissance Civic Humanism: Reappraisals and Reflections, 132–40. Regardless of Palmieri’s veracity, any accusation of fraud invoked deep fears among his audience; within the moralized setting of the Renaissance market, fraud threatened the soul of its perpetrators and destroyed the common good, and the Florentines vigilantly disputed such allegations.122 122 Romano, Markets and Marketplaces in Medieval Italy, 160–3, 171. The Dieci, for example, cautioned their ambassadors to Giovanni Gambacorta (Pisa’s war captain who opened its gates in October 1406) to be sure that he gave ‘the city freely to us without fraud’.123 123 ASF, DBLC, fo. 121r: ‘se in effecto vengono a volerci dare liberamente ci sanza frode’. The poet-chronicler Giovanni di Ser Piero argued the same, noting how ‘with Boucicaut was made with complete valour | All the bills [of sale], and the Commune [of Pisa] was taken | August 21 with honour’.124 124 Giovanni di Ser Piero, ‘Sei capitoli dell’acquisto di Pisa fatto dai fiorentini’, 250: ‘Con Buccicaldo fe’ con pien valore | Tutte le carte, e fu pel Comun presa | D’agosto a’ventinove con onore’. Florentine diplomats offered a similar defence after the Pisans ceded their city to John, duke of Burgundy, in mid 1406, who demanded the Florentines lift their siege.125 125 Capponi, Commentari di Gino Capponi, 355; Cronichetta di Anonimo Pisano, 65; Stella and Stella, Annales Genuenses, ed. Petti Balbi, 279; Charles de la Roncière, ‘La domination française à Pise’, Melanges d’archéologie et d’historie, xv (1895). In response, the Signoria argued that their title to Pisa rested on ‘public documents’ that ‘were all approved and confirmed following the proper formalities’.126 126 Published in Abel Desjardins, Négociations diplomatiques de la France avec la Toscane, 6 vols., (Paris, 1859–86), i (Paris, 1859), 37–9: ‘publicis documenti’; ‘uti per litteras regias sigilloque Regis communitas publice demonstrator’. When these words failed to stop the French from imprisoning Florentine merchants in Paris as well as the ambassadors negotiating their release, the Signoria directed Buonaccorso Pitti in January 1407 to carry copies of the bill with him and remind the jailers of the terms of the contract of Pisa’s purchase.127 127 ASF, SCLC, R 4, fos. 1r–6r; published in Desjardins, Négociations diplomatiques de la France avec la Toscane, i, 45. Even more damning, Florence’s opponents inverted the topoi of mercatantia by casting all those affiliated with the Pisan sale as merchants sick with avarice, a sin that ‘challenged pride’s status as the deadliest of the deadly sins’ in Renaissance Italy.128 128 Romano, Markets and Marketplaces in Medieval Italy, 164; Lester K. Little, ‘Pride Goes before Avarice: Social Change and the Vices in Latin Christendom’, American Historical Review, lxxvi, 1 (1971); Carla Casagrande and Silvana Vecchio, I sette vizi capitali: storia dei peccati nel Medioevo (Turin, 2000). The French governor Boucicaut ‘driven by the abyss of insatiable avarice’ had ‘sold your most ancient city at a great price to an enemy’, wrote Pileo de Marini (∼1377–1429), archbishop of Genoa, in a letter circulated to the French court following Boucicaut’s fall from power in autumn 1409.129 129 Published in Dino Puncuh, ‘Il governo Genovese del Boucicaut nella lettera di Pileo de Marini a Carlo VI di Francia (1409)’, Mélanges de l’Ecole française de Rome, Temps modernes, xc, 2 (1978), 675–6: ‘Insatiabili avaritie voragine impulsus, ad vicinam nostris finibus et amicam civitatem Pisanam se convertit ut … civitatem ipsam antiquissimis hostibus venderet grandi pretio’. ‘[Boucicaut], as much because of his great wealth as promises of more, corrupted his reputation and fame most shamefully by having offered that city for sale … Oh honourable merchant who, in order that no one might leave behind new kinds of goods, also became one who sells lives for bribes!’130 130 Ibid., 683: ‘Eum namque multis ac magnis peccuniis sed maioribus pollicitationibus corruptum conscientiam ac famam suam atque nostrarum turpissime venditasse nemo erat qui dubitaret. O egregium mercatorem qui ne quod genus mercium intemptatum relinqueret factus est etiam venditor animarum!’ I thank Matthew Gledhill for assistance with this translation. Giovanni Sercambi, the Lucchese chronicler, in much the same way seethes over the greed of Pisa’s former lords, telling how Boucicaut ‘desirous to acquire money, by every dishonest method he could’ gave the city to Florence.131 131 Sercambi, Le croniche di Giovanni Sercambi, Lucchese, ed. Bongi, iii, 109: ‘desideroso aquistare pecunia, con ogni modo dizonesto quanto poteo dié ordine di fare tutto ciò che da’ Fiorentini fu consigliato’. The chronicler fumes even hotter when chastising the Florentines in a poetic warning comparing the city to a conceited merchant whose squirrel-pelt cloak catches on his riding horse and strangles him: Be excellent, and do not increase what you have. And you who adorn yourself in gold for vain status, riding upon an ass, turn yourself around, for you will be sorrier if you get caught under the saddle, that when you are roused, snagging your vair cloak, you will die for your life lived for money. But who follows virtù, your reputation will live.132 132 Sercambi, Le croniche di Giovanni Sercambi, Lucchese, ed. Bongi, iii, 117–18: ‘Superbo, or non salir, chè tu chadrai. | E tu che d’oro t’adorni | per vano stato, e fusti già somaio, | rivolto vento, a te più ti dorai | se socto ‘l basto torni, | che quando ti domò, lassando ‘l vaio, | e tu morrai che vivi per denaio | Tu che segui virtù, tua fama vive’. Yet Sercambi heaps his greatest scorn on Gabriele Maria, comparing his handover of Pisa to a diabolic pact.133 133 This story also appears in Sercambi’s incomplete Il Novelliere: Giovanni Sercambi, Il Novelliere, ed. Luciano Rossi (Rome, 1974), 357–60. In a novella inserted into the chronicle, Sercambi tells of two Burgundian knights, Count Astolfo da Dierta and Count Danese da Lanzona, whose vengeful feud after many years leaves Count Astolfo destitute.134 134 Sercambi, Le croniche di Giovanni Sercambi, Lucchese, ed. Bongi, iii, 88–90. Defeated, Astolfo, ‘not having hope in God’, announces that he would surrender his soul to the devil for help. Litigious as he is terrifying, the devil appears, demands that the count agree to a contract ceding his soul, and, once Astolfo signs, showers him with florins with which the count buys an army and kills his opponent.135 135 Ibid., 88: ‘non avendo speranza in Dio’. But on the day of his triumph, the devil appears again to collect his compensation, handing the count the bill before defenestrating him right into hell’s open gate. Not one for subtlety, Sercambi’s view of the Pisan purchase is clear. Faced with such polemics, Florentine propagandists legitimated their acquisition of Pisa through mercantile allegories, developing a commercialized imperialism within patriotic speeches and official histories of the Pisan war. At times, this propaganda resembled that produced six decades earlier, with Pisa and its people transformed into vendible property. In a sermon on Mathew 5:44 given in Santa Maria del Fiore to celebrate Florence’s conquest of Pisa, the Dominican friar Giovanni Dominici (1355–1419) exhorted his Florentine parishioners to forgive the Pisan rebellion, likening the new subjects to a mule bought for four florins who throws a horseshoe or an insolent ten-florin slave. ‘If a female or male slave whom you had bought for some ten florins had insulted you, you should not desire their death. Why? In order not to lose that money’.136 136 Biblioteca Riccardiana, Florence, MS Ricc. 1301, fos. 61r–63v. I draw upon Debby’s transcription from Nirit Ben-Aryeh Debby, Renaissance Florence in the Rhetoric of Two Popular Preachers: Giovanni Dominici (1356–1419) and Bernardino da Siena (1380–1444) (Turnhout, 2001), 259: ‘Se una schiava o uno schiavo, che tu avessi chomperato qualche dieci fiorini, ed egli t’oltragiassi, non gli desideresti la morte. Perché? Per non perdere que’ danari’. But others offered a more sophisticated defence: that the Florentines had bought Pisa to save the once-thriving port from the tyrannical avarice of its former rulers. We can hear such claims in a speech by the Florentine Gino Capponi (1351–1421) given on the day the city fell to the Florentines. Capponi’s speech is remarkable because it survives in two versions, one written by an anonymous Pisan diarist and another found in an account of the war begun by Capponi and completed by his son Neri.137 137 Marisa Mariani, ‘Gino Capponi nella vita politica fiorentina del 1393 al 1421’, Archivio storico italiano, cxv, 4 (1957). While elsewhere Neri Capponi and Pisan-Anonymous detail more conciliatory and combative speeches respectively, both begin with the provocation that the Pisans sold themselves to the Visconti. Commentari | Neri di Gino Capponi When you will think of past events, and how many times you have had reason to put our city’s libertà in danger, you should know that you have been a breeding ground for anyone who wanted to come to Tuscany: to the English Company who burned and scorched our countryside, to the Visconti of Milan whom you came to terms with, to those people you gave every help and goodwill in order to damage and submit our city, even to suffer yourself to be sold to Mesr. Giangaleazzo and endure his lordship to offend us.138 138 Capponi, Commentari di Gino Capponi, 364–5: ‘Quando voi penserete delle cose passate, e quante volte voi siete stati cagione di mettere la nostra città in pericolo della sua libertà, conoscerete voi essere stati ricettacolo di qualunque è voluto venire in Toscana, e colla compagnia degl’ Inghilesi fatto ardere e dibruciare i nostri contadi, intesovi coi Visconti di Milano, ed a loro dato ogni aiuto e favore per offendere e sottomettere la nostra città, infino a patire voi d’essere venduti a messer Giovan Galeazzo e sopportare la sua signoria per offendere noi’. Ricordi | Pisan-Anonymous You are those Pisans who have always offered your arms to the Emperors against us … You are those Pisans who, with the Englishmen, damaged us … You have not only favoured our enemies, but held them in your city and submitted yourselves to the duke of Milan so that he could more easily subject us. But this just God who sees all, by his just dispensation, ordered that from your servitude under our enemy you have come into our servitude; and that you and those whom you called to rule over you in order to conquer and ruin us, sold you to the Florentine Republic, and made you perpetually subjects to it.139 139 Ricordi di Anonimo Pisano, 87–8: ‘Voi siate quei pisani che sempre avete, non che portato, offerto il braccio armato alli imperadori contro di noi … Voi siete quelli pisani che, con le genti inglese, venisti a’danni nostri … Avete non solo favorito il nostro nemico, ma tenutulo nella vostra città et sottomessi voi stessi al duca di Milano: a cagione che egli, più agevolmente, sottomettessi noi. Ma quel giusto Dio che vede il tutto, per sua giusta dispensatione, ha ordinato che dalla servitù vostra, sotto il nostro nimico, venghiate alla servitù nostra; et quei che voi chiamasti a signoreggiarvi per sottomettere e rovinare noi, vi abbino venduti alla republica fiorentina, e fattivi perpetui soggetti a quella’. The Florentines bought the city not out of greed, Capponi went on, but to revive its economy. ‘Although your libertà is taken away, you have not lost your health, goods, flesh, nor honour’, Pisan-Anonymous remembered him saying.140 140 Ricordi di Anonimo Pisano, 90: ‘ma benche la libertà vi sia tolta, non vi è tolta la salute, non la roba, non le carni e non l'onore’. ‘We again want your shops and every other business open, and that you attend to your business, trade and commerce securely over us’, Neri Capponi recalled his father saying.141 141 Capponi, Commentari di Gino Capponi, 366: ‘Vogliamo eziandio che le vostre botteghe, e d’ogni altro s’aprano, e ch’ attendiate a fare le vostre faccende, traffichi e mercatanzie sicuramente sopra di noi’. A similar image of Florence as the defender of Tuscan commerce may be found in another account of the Pisan war: Gregorio Dati’s (1362–1435) Istoria di Firenze (History of Florence). Written around 1407–9 in celebration of Florence’s victory, scholars have characterized this patriotic chronicle by a middling merchant as a metaphysical battle between good (Florence) and evil (Milan).142 142 Hans Baron, Crisis of the Early Italian Renaissance: Civic Humanism and Republican Liberty in an Age of Classicism and Tyranny (Princeton, 1966; first pubd 1955), 167–77; Hans Baron, From Petrarch to Leonardo Bruni (Chicago, 1968), 138–50; Green, Chronicle into History, 112–44; Andrew McCormick, ‘Toward a Reinterpretation of Goro Dati’s Storia di Firenze’, Journal of Medieval and Renaissance Studies, xiii (1983), 227–50; Andrew McCormick, ‘Goro Dati and the Roman Origins of Florence’, Bibliothéque d’Humanisme et Renaissance, xlvi, 1 (1984); Hörnqvist, Machiavelli and Empire, 57–61. For these transcriptions I use Antonio Lanza, Firenze contro Milano. Gli intellettuali fiorentini nelle guerre con i Visconti (1390–1440) (Anzio, 1991), 211–300. Yet the Istoria, structured as a dialogue between Interlocutor and Respondent, also offered a defence of Florentine political economy. Dati begins by framing Giangaleazzo Visconti’s territorial conquests before 1402 as similar to that of a merchant, blinded by ‘greed for money’, lusting for profit.143 143 Dati, Istoria di Firenze, ed. Lanza, 236: ‘per cupidigia di guadagno’. Unlike their covetous opponent, however, Dati tells how the Florentines ‘trade, like a honey bee to flowers, and never go to war if not to have peace’.144 144 Ibid, 227: ‘fannone frutto come l’ape del mèle de’ fiorini e mai non presono guerra se non per avere pace’. A love of commerce, not greed, spurred the purchase of Pisa, Dati suggests. ‘How much honour and exaltation would follow to the Florentines if they acquired Pisa; how much opportunity, convenience and utility they would have on the side of commerce; how perpetually secure they would be by never again being able to be besieged’.145 145 Ibid., 257: ‘quanto onore ed esaltazione seguirebbe a’ Fiorentini se acquistasono Pisa e fussono signori, quanto destro e acconcio e utilità n’arebbono nel lato delle mercatantìe, quanta sicurtà sarebbe in perpetuo di non potere essere mai più assediati’. So Boucicaut, ‘with a mind to grasp a big chunk of the money’, and Gabriele Maria, ‘with his father’s … title [to Pisa], which had been correctly and legitimately bought from those who had the power to sell it’, handed over Pisa despite the objections of its inhabitants who ‘would rather have submitted themselves to the Turks or the sultan’.146 146 Ibid., 257–8: ‘con animo di toccare gran parte di que’danari per se, e vennono a mercato’; ‘lo testamento del padre, che l’aveva bene e legittimamente comperata da chi la poteva di ragione ben vender, e i Pisani avevano ratificato, donò e concedette tutte le sue ragioni e azioni che vi aveva su ai Fiorentini’; ‘arebbono innanzi voluto essere del Turco o del Soldano’. Ah, why were the minds of the Pisans so hostile to the Florentines that they would rather be subjected to the Saracens? Would not Pisa be better if she belonged to the Florentines, who would make her commerce flourish than for her to belong to the duke of Milan who made her stagnate and turned her into an army camp?147 147 Ibid., 258: ‘Deh perché era questo animo de’ Pisani tanto nimico a’ Fiorentini, che avessino piuttosto voluto essere de’ Saracini? Non istà meglio Pisa a essere de’Fiorentini, che la faranno fiorire di mercatantìa, che ella non istava a essere del Duca di Melano, che la faceva stalla, e casa de soldati?’ Dati further celebrates Florentine wealth during Pisa’s final conquest, noting how Florentine troops hung banners of Florence around Pisa as marks of triumph: lions (‘given to the Florentines by the Romans’), fleurs-de-lis (‘flags of the Commune’), vermillion crosses (‘the flag of the Popolo’), vermillion and white gonfalons (‘the ancient communal arms’), flags reading LIBERTAS (‘to move the people to support libertà’), and other pennants upon which HERCULES (‘whose virtue and strength dispersed the vicious and wicked’) was written.148 148 Ibid., 273–4: ‘dato a Fiorentini da’ Romani’; ‘pennoni del Comune’; ‘il gonfalone del Popolo’; ‘l’arme del Comune antica’; ‘a muovere i popoli della cittadi e reggersi a stato di libertà’; ‘con la sua virtù e forza disperse i viziosi e malvagi’. Yet the true cause of victory, Dati adds, was a seventh symbol of Florentine power: the florin. ‘I do not know if I must put first or after the others the most worthy sign of excellence, the florin, since it is the most honourable’.149 149 Ibid., 274: ‘Io non so, s’io doveva mettere in principio, per dignità e per eccellenzia, o se dopo tutti, il più onorato, come debbe essere, segno de’ Fiorentini, cioè il sengo del fiorino dell’oro’. Dati concludes with a bookkeeping of Florence’s recent wars, tallying up how ‘in the Pisan War that began in 1405 and lasted a year and a half, with the purchase made from Gabriele Maria, they spent in total 150,000 florins’.150 150 Ibid.: ‘Nella guerra di Pisa, che fu nel 1405 e durò uno anno e mesi … con la compera feciono da Gabriello Maria spesono i Fiorentini quindici centinaia di migliaia fiorini’. And while Dati and Capponi’s promised prosperity in fact never arrived, as the Florentines siphoned off Pisan trade and overtaxed its people, Florence’s historians, poets, orators and ambassadors nevertheless actively appealed to Tuscan commercial sensibilities in their justification of Florence’s actions. IV A MEDITERRANEAN MARKET But did Florence’s commercial imperialism go any further than mere propaganda to change the underlying financing (the payment structure, timing, delivery of the money, et cetera) of Florence’s purchase of Pisa? Did ideology alter economic reality? Here we again can draw parallels with the Lucchese enterprise as the Florentines signed a bill of sale divided between Gabriele Maria (80,000 florins) and Boucicaut (126,000 florins), commissioned an exceptional balià to manage their payments, and began to pay down their debts through forced loans that autumn.151 151 ASF, PR, R 94, fos. 138r–139r. A partial copy of the balià term appears in De Angelis, Ninci and Pirillo (eds.), Le consulte e pratiche della Repubblica fiorentina, 239–40. See also Morelli, Ricordi, 287; Cronica volgare di Anonimo Fiorentino, ed. Bellondi, ii, 333. On the request for prestanze, see ASF, CP, R 37, fos. 159v–161r; De Angelis, Ninci and Pirillo (eds.), Le consulte e pratiche della Repubblica fiorentina, 249–52. For payments to Gabriele Maria and Boucicaut in 1405, see ASF, Camerlinghi della camera del comune-Uscita, R 353, fo. 8r; ASF, CR, R 45, fos. 38v–41v, 41v–44r, 48v–54r, 60v–62r; ASF, Carte Strozziane, ser. 2, filza 91, fos. 19r–22v; ASF, DBLC, R 3, fos. 83v–84r. Yet as six decades earlier, plans soon unravelled, the Signoria sending on 10 September 1405 Tommaso di Domenico Borghini to Genoa to stall Boucicaut with ‘vague words’ and ask him for a six-month extension on the second sum due in January.152 152 ASF, DBLC, R 3, fos. 83v–84r: ‘Della seconda paga non dichiarare il termine, ma sotto generali parole gli dirai’. Such tactics, however, failed to placate the Frenchman, and on 4 October Borghini received further instructions that he should turn to Florentine merchants living in Genoa, who ‘for security on the second payment … promise to deliver it into the hands of Mesr. Boucicaut and not leave Genoa’.153 153 ASF, SCLC, R 3, 67v–68r: ‘per sicurtà della seconda gl’infrascritti nosti cittadini promettano e giurano nelle mani del detto messer Buccicaldo non partirsi di Genova’. Who were these men Borghini hoped to recruit? Where did they find the money to cover their commune’s debts? And, most importantly, what motivated men who felt ‘a deeply ingrained aversion’ to taxation to pay these costs?154 154 Molho, ‘The State and Public Finance’, 104. Here we are fortunate in the survival of a list of proposed lenders included at the end of Borghini’s instructions.155 155 ASF, SCLC, R 3, 67v-68r: ‘Andrea di Lippaccio de’ Bardi, Ardingho di Gucciozo de Ricci, Sandro de Quarata, Agostino di Giovanni Cardinali, Baldassare d’Antonio di Santi, Bartolino Talani, Bonaccorso Alderotti and Iacopo di Giovanni Lippi’. For Florentine–Genoese firms see Maria Giagnacovo, Mercanti toscani a Genova: Traffici, merci e prezzi nel XIV secolo (Naples, 2005); John F. Padgett and Paul D. McLean, ‘Organizational Invention and Elite Transformation: The Birth of Partnership Systems in Renaissance Florence’, American Journal of Sociology, cxi, 5 (2006), esp. Appendix A, 1548–60. Three names in particular stand out. The first, Buonaccorso Alderotti, the son of a Florentine exile living in Genoa, had facilitated the Pisan enterprise from the start, mediating between Boucicaut and Gino Capponi in mid 1405.156 156 Capponi, Commentari di Gino Capponi, 336. On Francesco’s exile see Naddo di Ser Nepo di Ser Gallo da Montecatini, Memorie storiche, in Delizie degli eruditi toscani, ed. Ildefonso di San Luigi, xviii, 94–5. The next important name is Andrea de’ Bardi, another exile who had managed the Genoese branch of the bank of Averardo de Medici since 1402.157 157 Raymond de Roover, The Rise and Decline of the Medici Bank, 1397–1494, 2nd edn (Washington, DC, 1990), 38; and Dale V. Kent, The Rise of the Medici: Faction in Florence, 1426–1434 (Oxford, 1978), 73. The final merchant of note was Ardingo di Corso de’ Ricci, a partner in the firm of the Datini Company who had been exiled following an anti-government plot in 1396, but continued to maintain deep ties to other Florentines named in Borghini’s list including Bartolino Talani, Ardingo’s son-in-law, and Sandro de Quarata, a supporter of the Ricci faction.158 158 Katalin Prajda, ‘Justice in the Florentine Trading Community of Late Medieval Buda’, Mélanges de l’École française de Rome: Moyen Âge, cxxvii, 2 (2015), para. 11, 21; Brucker, Civic World of Early Renaissance Florence, 157–8; Giagnacovo, Mercanti toscani a Genova, 52. For Ricci’s relationship with the Talani and Quarata, see Archivio di Stato di Prato (hereafter ASPr), Datini, Lettere Genoa–Barcelona, Busta 883.21.514931; Brucker, Civic World of Early Renaissance Florence, 397. PURCHASES OF THE COMMUNE OF FLORENCE (1337–1557)* Open in new tabDownload slide * Notes: Numbers on the map correspond to the acquisitions listed below of smaller castles or rural communes. All prices are listed in gold florins (fiorino d’oro) and present the initial cost, omitting additional costs and missed payments. PURCHASES OF THE COMMUNE OF FLORENCE (1337–1557)* Open in new tabDownload slide * Notes: Numbers on the map correspond to the acquisitions listed below of smaller castles or rural communes. All prices are listed in gold florins (fiorino d’oro) and present the initial cost, omitting additional costs and missed payments. Open in new tabDownload slide Lo Co(mun)e di Firenze comp(er)o Luccha da mess. Mastino (The Commune of Florence bought Lucca from Messer Mastino), Lucca, c.1420. ASL, Biblioteca Manoscritti, n. 107 (Croniche di Giovanni Sercambi, Lucchese, CXXV), Archivio di Stato di Lucca, with permission from the Ministro per i beni e le attività culturali e per il turismo. Open in new tabDownload slide Lo Co(mun)e di Firenze comp(er)o Luccha da mess. Mastino (The Commune of Florence bought Lucca from Messer Mastino), Lucca, c.1420. ASL, Biblioteca Manoscritti, n. 107 (Croniche di Giovanni Sercambi, Lucchese, CXXV), Archivio di Stato di Lucca, with permission from the Ministro per i beni e le attività culturali e per il turismo. The Signoria’s request to draw funds from Florentine exiles such as Alderotti, Bardi, and Ricci raises a provocative problem. Because of the density of family and factional networks in Italian cities, jurists favoured banishment over execution for political crimes, creating a ‘contrary commonwealth’ of exiles scattered throughout Italy and beyond. Treated ‘as outlaws as well as common criminals’ by governing authorities, exiles (fuorusciti) plotted coups, served as instruments of opposing cities, and joined mercenary companies to raid their homelands.159 159 Fabrizio Ricciardelli, The Politics of Exclusion in Early Renaissance Florence (Turnhout, 2007), 57. See also Randolph Starn, Contrary Commonwealth: The Theme of Exile in Medieval and Renaissance Italy (Berkeley, 1982); Christine Shaw, The Politics of Exile in Renaissance Italy (Cambridge, 2000). Ricci specifically opposed Florence’s war against the Visconti on the grounds that it would harm the city’s trade.160 160 ASPr, Datini, Lettere Genoa-Valencia, Busta 993.27.604687; Brucker, Civic World of Early Renaissance Florence, 157–8. Yet throughout this period, northern Italian diasporic communities, many of them filled with political exiles, served as vital sources of funding in the market for city-states. Enguerrand de Coucy was promised money in either Bologna, Pisa or Florence when he sold Arezzo to the latter in 1384.161 161 Guasti and Gherardi, I capitoli, i, 375. Gherardo D’Appiano received part of the 200,000 florins promised him for Pisa in 1399 in cash ‘and the other part … in bills in Venice’.162 162 Cronica volgare di Anonimo Fiorentino, ed. Bellondi, ii, 233: ‘e diceasi che parte gliene dava a lui contanti; e l’altra parte si dovea fare le scritte in Vinegia’. Tomasso Navi, castellan of Castrocarro, had 20,000 florins owed him for ceding the town paid by ‘sufficient persons … in Florence or in Genoa or in Venice in convenient terms’.163 163 DBLC, R 3, fo. 4r: ‘E il resto gli faremo promettere a persone sufficienti … in Firenze o in Genoa o in Venegia al termine convonevole’. And the Florentine historian Benedetto Dei (1418–92) remembered how the Florentines had offered to pay for Pisa in 1402/3 ‘in whatever country [the seller] wished … at Rome or at Naples or at Venice or at Avignon or at Lyon or at Paris or at London or at Bruges or in England or in Catalonia or at Barcelona’ where Florentine merchants were ‘ready and willing and pleased to fulfil their wishes’.164 164 Benedetto Dei, La cronica dall’anno 1400 all’anno 1500, ed. Roberto Barducci, intro. Anthony Molho (Florence, 1984), 41: ‘fare i paghamenti in qualunque paese volessino o sapessino adimandare, da Milano in fuora, ma, s’egli voleano, a Roma o a Napoli o a Vinegia o a Vignione o a Lione o a Parigi o a Londra o a Brugia o in Inghilterra o ‘n Catalogna o a Barzalona, ch’egli erono presti e pronti e parati a lor piaceri’. Thus it should come as no surprise that Florentine firms in Genoa covered the commune’s debts to Boucicaut.165 165 I want to thank Richard Goldthwaite for first suggesting I look at the Datini letters. Some of these letters have been partially transcribed in Renato Piattoli, ‘Genova e Firenze al tramonto della libertà di Pisa’, in Giornale storico e letterario della Liguria, vi (1930), 214–32, 311–26; and Renato Piattoli, ‘Lettere di Piero Beinintendi, mercante del Trecento’, Atti della società Ligure di Storia Patria, lx, 1 (Genoa, 1932). As early as 15 September, Tommaso di Giacomino and Bartolomeo di Bonaiuto, members of another Florentine firm in Genoa, discussed making ‘payments for the business of Pisa’, and confirmed on 20 October that ‘today a part of [the payment] has been made to [Boucicaut], and the remainder will be made on the kalends of November’.166 166 ASPr, Datini, Lettere Genoa-Valencia, Busta 993.29.423398: ‘fare paghamento per questi fatti di Pisa;’ 993.39.423401: ‘È per questi paghamenti s’ànno a fare a monsignore, chè ogi se n’è fatto parte, l’avanzo si fa a calendi novenbre’. Communal receipts show that Florentine expatriates paid off the city’s debts, delivering the second payment of 46,729 florins two months late on 6 April 1406 as well as the third payment of 47,000 florins, given in two parts in January and February 1407.167 167 ASF, Camerlinghi della camera del comune-Uscita, R 353, fos. 8v; ASF, CP, R 39, fos. 3v–4v; ASF, CR, R 45, fos. 62v–64r; ASF, Carte Strozziane, ser. 2, filza 91, fos. 23r–v; ASF, Signori, Missive I Cancelleria, R 28, fos. 3v–4r. The timing of these payments, moreover, hints at where Ricci, Bardi and others found the money to pay Boucicaut. The sheer size of the Pisan debt made it difficult to pay off on time. While Florentine firms in Genoa had access to available specie in the autumn of 1405, a factor of the Ricci Company on 6 October worried that ‘we have such a surplus of money from everywhere, but we believe that if another payment for our commune had to be made here, that they would not have better [quality] specie’.168 168 ASPr, Datini, Lettere Genoa-Valencia, Busta 993.27.604684: ‘Ècci larghezza di denari per ogni parte, ma chrediamo ci sarà a fare altro paghamento per lo nostro chomune, chenne varanno di meglio questi denari’. Such fears were realized when the monetary supply contracted during the winter of 1405–6 causing the firms to miss their debt repayment to Boucicaut in January 1406, raising the spectre of economic retaliation. Genoa’s position as a key port for Florentine goods arriving from the North Sea and the Levant meant that its rulers frequently seized goods to pressure the Florentine government. Only two years earlier, for example, Boucicaut had sequestered between 100,000 and 200,000 florins’ worth of Florentine property.169 169 Sources varying from 100,000 florins (Minerbetti) to 150,000 florins (Salviati) to 200,000 florins (Pitti). Cronica volgare di Anonimo Fiorentino, ed. Bellondi, ii, 302–3; Bonaccorso Pitti, Cronica di Buonaccorso Pitti, ed. Alberto Bacchi della Lega (Bologna, 1905), 145–8; Salviati, Cronica, o memorie di Iacopo Salviati, 231–2. See also Morelli, Ricordi, 275. See also ASF, CP, R. 37, fos. 45r, 53r, 55v, 65r–66r, 68r–v; De Angelis, Ninci and Pirillo (eds.), Le consulte e pratiche della Repubblica fiorentina (1404), 137, 178, 236, 239–41, 243–45; ASF, DBLC, R. 3, fos. 60v, 65v–66r, 68r–v; ASF, SCLC, R 2, fos. 58r–59r, 62r. The cyclical rhythms of Mediterranean trade, by which the flow of large eastern galleys slowed with the trade winds in winter and midsummer, made such threats all the more real.170 170 Federigo Melis, ‘Intensità e regolarità nella diffusione dell’informazione economica generale nel Mediterraneo e in Occidente alla fine del medioevo’, in Mélanges en l’honneur de Fernand Braudel, 2 vols., i, Histoire économique du monde méditerranéen, 1450–1650 (Toulouse, 1973), 405–11; Eliyahu Ashtor, Levant Trade in the Middle Ages (Princeton, 1983), 380. Thus we find Florentine merchants delivering the second payment to Boucicaut in April 1406 a mere two days after the arrival of a Genoese ship carrying 2,000 barrels of spices from Alexandria and Rhodes.171 171 ASPr, Datini, Lettere Genoa-Florence, Busta 1091.28. 134888; Ashtor, Levant Trade in the Middle Ages, 539. ‘This money is beginning to better [the supply] and it will provide more available should they pay the governor for the business of Pisa from the receipts from here’, added one correspondent.172 172 ASPr, Datini, Lettere Genoa-Valencia, Busta, 993.27.604704: ‘Questi denari chominc[i]ano a migliorare e farannolo vie più per denari saranno paghati dall’uscita di questo a questo ghovernatore per li fatti di Pixa’. The arrival of another ship the next year provided additional funds, as a letter from the Giacomino–Bonaiuto firm on 22 February 1407 explained. ‘The payment has been made to Monsignore [Boucicaut] of 20,000 florins and now they have made the other one of 27,000 florins and it’s all done’, the letter stated, adding that the firm had loaned the government 8,000 florins through unnamed banks, who would return the debt following the high-summer doldrums. ‘I think from the kalends of July to the kalends of September things will be tight’, its writer worried.173 173 ASPr, Datini, Lettere Genoa-Valencia, Busta 993.29.423409: ‘Il paghamento si fe’ a Monsignore di fior. 20 mila, e ora gli àn fatto l’altro di fior. 27 mila ed è fatto tutto. E noi n’abbiamo paghati fior. VIII mila … Ragiona da chalendi luglio a chalendi sette[m]bre ci sarà streteza’. This circulation of money — from Florentine government debts, through its merchants in Genoa, by threat of the seizure of eastern spices and northern wool — repeated itself again over the next few years with Boucicaut in August 1407 extracting an additional 15,817 florins and halting shipping again the next year in an effort to have the Florentines repay 35,000 florins owed on the account of Gabiele Maria Visconti, whom Boucicaut had executed on trumped-up treason charges.174 174 Salviati, Cronica, o memorie di Iacopo Salviati, 268–73. Gabriele Maria had first received 26,666 1/3 florins from Sept.–Jan. The remaining 18,334 florins do not appear in any records, until the difference of 35,000, held in monte securities, is mentioned in 1408. ASF, Monte Comune, R 131, 67v, 68v; ASF, SCLC, R 4, 100v–101v. See also Lorenzo Tanzini, ‘I forestieri e il debito pubblico di Firenze nel Quattrocento’, Quaderni storici, xlix, 3 (2014), 779. On Gabriele Maria’s imprisonment, see Chivalric Biography of Boucicaut, trans. Taylor and Taylor, 185–6; Sercambi, Le croniche di Giovanni Sercambi, Lucchese, ed. Bongi, iii, 145–6; Stella and Stella, Annales Genuenses, ed. Petti Balbi, 285. But the Florentine merchants of Genoa were motivated by more than just fears of commercial retaliation. Returning to the embassy of Tommaso Borghini in October 1405, along with the list of potential lenders, the Signoria gave Borghini a letter written to their ex-citizens with instructions for him to read it out to them: Dearest citizens. We do not know if, for the second payment we must make to Mesr. Jean Boucicaut governor of Genoa for his majesty the King of France, you will have to take on some debt, which you should make for the patria and our commune. If indeed it is needed, we would repay those of you who would give the payment freely, as good and kind lovers and zealots of your patria. And you should not complain about this since it will assure that our commune keeps its honour and will save us from every embarrassment and damage that it recklessly would do against our faith and the faith of our commune. And because, if any of you were to drag your feet and refused to do it, you could not bring greater shame and injury to our Signoria; you should keep in mind that this would greatly displease as much as possible the Signoria. And just as those who would please us would be numbered always among the kind, good and true citizens, those who refuse us would make such a message that in perpetuity not only would you put a burden upon your shoulders, but serve as a painful and noteworthy example for everyone.175 175 ASF, SCLC, R 3, 67v–68r: ‘Carissimi cittadini. Noi non sappiamo se, per la seconda paga dobbiamo fare a mess. Johanni Buccicaldo governatore di Genova per la maestro reale di Francia bisognerà gravarvi d’alcuna promessione, la quale facciate per la patria e per lo nostro Comune. Se pure bisognasse, noi ci rendiamo certi voi la farete liberamente, come buoni e cari amatori e zelatori della patria. Et che di questo non vi farete pregare, però che renderevi certi lo nostro Comune farà el suo honore et trarravene d’ogni impaccio et danno siche sopra la fede nostra e del nostra Comune fatelo arditamente. E perché, se alcuno di voi facesse pié zoppo e ricusasse di farlo, non si potrebbe fare alla nostra Signoria maggior vergogna et ingiuria; tenete di certo che questo dispiacerebbe tanto alla Signoria quanto dire si potesse; e come chi farà el nostro piacere fia anoverato sempre fra cari e buoni e veri cittadini, cosi quel ricusasse noi gli faremo tale e sì fatto segnale, che in perpetuo non solo leva d’adosso et mai non fia se non doloroso et notato in forma serà essemplo a ciascuno’. Beyond its veiled threats and kind plaudits, we can hear again a clear appeal to these merchants’ sense of commercial faith (fede) — a resource none other than Cosimo de’ Medici once called ‘a merchant’s treasure’.176 176 Quoted in Alison Brown, The Medici in Florence: The Exercise and Language of Power (Florence, 1992), 59. ‘For the whole world to remain happy’, the Signoria wrote Borghini, it was vital that Florence ‘does not break its faith’.177 177 Ibid.: ‘E pensiamo, veduto il primo pagamento et considerate questi cittadini et fede del Comune, che si puote rendere certissimo che questa Signoria non fallirebbe delle fede sua per tutto il mondo esso rimana contento’. And while it is important to point out that we do not possess the sorts of sources to know if Borghini’s audience profited from paying back their erstwhile commune’s debts, what is obvious is that Florence’s rulers hoped an appeal to their former citizens’ sense of commercial honour, of mercatantia, would be enough for these men, hundreds of miles from home, to put their private wealth to use for the public good. * * * On 9 November 1494 the Pisans rebelled again, tearing down the flags of their Florentine masters and expelling their representatives. Looking back upon ninety-two years of subjugation, the Pisan notary Ser Perizolo da Pisa thought it necessary to remind his readers how their great city — founded by ‘the Greeks who came with Penelope to this place’, honoured ‘with many gracious concessions’ by the Romans, masters of ‘Sardinia, Corsica, Majorca and Carthage’, victors over the Saracens — had fallen to the Florentines, ‘men rapacious … ferocious and avaricious’. ‘They were subjugated to the Florentines’, Ser Perizolo remembered, ‘a nation built in a few hours of the world by masons and stoneworkers from Fiesole, having been sold by the Bastard of the duke of Milan’.178 178 Ser Perizolo da Pisa, ‘Ricordi di ser Perizolo da Pisa dall’anno 1422 al 1510’, Archivio storico italiano, vi, 2 (1845), 391: ‘come si legge en Strabone Greco, sanza rammemorare el loro prenzipio dalli Grechi venuti con Pelope a questo loco’; ‘Furono assoggettati da Romani, ma estimate, e de’ maestrati de Roma onorati, e de molte concessioni graziati’; ‘farsi padroni de regni, et en Sardinia, et en Corsica, et en Majolica, et en Cartagina, e tante parte del mondo combattieno, e vincieno e’ Saraceni’; ‘Fiorentini, gente rapace et accosta a Genuesi en crudelità, en ferocia et avarizia’; ‘furono assoggettati a li Fiorentini, nazione venuta en poche de ore al mondo da lavoratori de muri e de sassi de Fiesole, per essere stati venduti dal Bastardo dello Duca di Milano a’Fiorentini’. But such stirring words were not enough; the revolt failed, Pisa capitulated in 1509 and, once again, money changed hands, the Florentines paying 150,000 florins to the Spanish and French to have back the city. Yet even the victors felt cheated. Writing in his 1517 Discorsi sopra la prima Deca di Tito Livio (Discourses on Livy), Niccolò Machiavelli, echoing Villani’s complaints centuries earlier, opined how his city could have had Pisa on the cheap if not for the vainglory of a handful of Florentines who had replaced capable military leaders with their own friends, inferior men ‘who knew neither how to press [the Pisans] nor how to force them’ and thus ‘[the Pisans] were treated so that the city of Florence bought them when it could have had them by force’.179 179 Niccolò Machiavelli, Discourses on Livy, ed. and trans. Harvey C. Mansfield and Nathan Tarcov (Chicago and London, 1996), 256. Ser Perizzolo’s and Machiavelli’s words were, by their lifetimes, commonplace. They bespeak not only of the many thousands of florins Italian cities had spent over the previous two centuries purchasing towns such as Lucca and Pisa, but also of a language of empire filled with the vernacular of the marketplace: a belief in the righteousness of buying neighbours rather than fighting for them, notions of value borne out of commercial honour, and an anxiety about accusations of financial impropriety, avarice foremost among them. The Florentine Monte comune’s origins in the failed purchase of Lucca, the city’s production of a commercialized imperial rhetoric to celebrate its acquisition of Pisa six decades later, and the network of Florentine merchants in Genoa who financed this scheme to some degree from a pious acceptance of such propaganda are only a handful of examples of a forgotten, yet vital, part of Renaissance territoriality from 1200–1600. Nor did the market for city-states slow in the ensuing centuries of French, Spanish and Austrian subjugation. From Finale (bought by the Genoese in 1713) to the Stati dei Presidi (offered for money in 1678 and 1695) to Siena (given in 1557 to Duke Cosimo I in lieu of debts) to Cyprus (sold by Catherine Cornaro to Venice in 1489) to Tabarka (given as mortgage to the Genoese Lomellini family in 1540), northern Italian rulers continued to buy, sell, lease and mortgage spaces and places even as aristocratic modes of thinking subsumed older, republican ones.180 180 Benjamin Arbel, ‘The Reign of Caterina Corner (1473–1489) as a Family Affair’, Studi veneziani 26 (1993); Gene A. Brucker, Florence, the Golden Age, 1138–1737 (Berkeley, 1998), 258; Thomas A. Kirk, Genoa and the Sea: Policy and Power in an Early Modern Maritime Republic (Baltimore and London, 2005), 5, 71; Christopher Storrs, The Resilience of the Spanish Monarchy, 1665–1700 (Oxford, 2006), 3, 128. The sheer number of lands bought and sold across Italy and the Mediterranean in these centuries moreover offers fruitful paths forward in the study of the vendibility of space across time. In particular, these findings suggest that the complex legal geographies that defined Europeans’ purchase of lands in the Atlantic world and beyond, much like notions of colonial administration and human anthropology, possessed a prehistory in the late medieval and Renaissance Mediterranean.181 181 Felipe Fernández Armesto, Before Columbus: Exploration and Colonisation from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic, 1229–1492 (Basingstoke, 1987); David Abulafia, The Discovery of Mankind: Atlantic Encounters in the Age of Columbus (New Haven, 2008); Lauren Benton, A Search for Sovereignty: Law and Geography in European Empires, 1400–1900 (Cambridge, 2009). There is something intuitive about seeing in the creation of early modern Italian territorial states a mirror of the commercial world. Deeply suspect of martial ideals, the merchant-rulers of Italy cast territoriality in the image of commerce through quantification, monetization and contractualization. In this sense, the territorial expansion of Italian cities differed little from the rest of Renaissance public life in which the marketplace provided a moral compass able to celebrate simultaneously the mercatantia of heroes such as Gino Capponi and malign the avarice of villains such as Mastino della Scala, all while demonstrating the complex socio-cultural meanings of the money value of objects, be they consumer goods or entire cities. In this sense, Renaissance elites sought territorial acquisitions not solely for their material or geostrategic benefits, but also their discursive rewards — for their ability to fashion pacific imperial myths for themselves and future generations. As they wove such fictions, contemporaries weighed the costs in florins and honour of buying a city versus fighting for it, coming to portray the former as a more morally appropriate form of territorial expansion for a community of merchants than the latter. Author notes I presented initial versions of this article at Northwestern University, the Renaissance Society of America and the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs (UCCS). I am grateful to Richard Goldthwaite, Regina Grafe, Ed Muir, Monique O’Connell, Keith Rathbone, Peter Sposato and, especially, Brian Maxson, who all read parts of this article in earlier drafts, as well as my colleagues at UCCS who provided additional feedback. Research for this article was made possible by the support the Renaissance Society of America. All translations and transcriptions are my own unless noted. © The Past and Present Society, Oxford, 2021 This article is published and distributed under the terms of the Oxford University Press, Standard Journals Publication Model (https://academic.oup.com/journals/pages/open_access/funder_policies/chorus/standard_publication_model)
TI - The Art of Mercato: Buying City-States in Renaissance Tuscany
JF - Past & Present
DO - 10.1093/pastj/gtaa021
DA - 2021-06-24
UR - https://www.deepdyve.com/lp/oxford-university-press/the-art-of-mercato-buying-city-states-in-renaissance-tuscany-rstUE5DbSp
SP - 1
EP - 1
VL - Advance Article
IS - 
DP - DeepDyve
ER -