and other medicines, amber, indigo, pearls, and diamonds from India and Central Asia. From Persia there came silks, carpets, skins, and manufactured articles used by the great for clothing or for the comfort of their homes. Tartary and Russia furnished hemp, canvas, ship-timber, tar, wax, caviare, raw-hides, and peltries. From the ports of Syria and Asia Minor, and particularly from Smyrna, were shipped to Italy hare-skins, leather, camel’s hair, valonia, cotton stuffs, damasks, dried fruits, beeswax, drugs and electuaries, arms, armor, and cutlery; and many articles of Asiatic luxury and magnificence found their way thence through Italian merchants to the courts and castles of England, Scotland, France, Germany, and other northern nations. Greece sent fine wines, raisins, currants, filbert-nuts, silk, and alum. A large quantity of grain was brought into Italy from Egypt and the Barbary States; but the supply to the colonies in the Levant came mostly from the Black Sea. Wool, wax, sheep-skins, and morocco came from the Moorish provinces of Africa. These were the principal imports, and were exchanged for the products and manufactures of Italy and the countries to the north, for which the Italians acted as agents. The Genoese exported immense quantities of woven fabrics from the looms of Lombardy and Florence, fine linens from Bologna, and cloths of a coarser make from France, for which a ready market was found in the East and among the Italians settled in the Archipelago and Levant. The oils of Provence and the Riviera of Genoa, soaps, saffron, and coral, were also largely exported. Quicksilver was a valuable article in the hands of the Venetians, who got it
from Istria and sold it in Spain and the Levant; they also extracted a great amount of salt from Istria and Dalmatia, which was sold at a good profit in Lombardy and other parts of Italy. Sardinia, Sicily, and Naples also did a large foreign business; the last city importing cargoes of delicate Greek and Oriental wines, such as the famous Cyprian, Malmsey, and Muscatel, much of which was sent to different parts of Italy, and into England and the Netherlands. Spain, Portugal, and Flanders were supplied with the products of the Indies and Levant principally by Genoese and Venetian merchants. The latter especially had many privileges and fiscal exemptions in Flanders, and in returning from the North loaded their ships in Portugal with tin, silver bars, wines, and raisins; while the former had the greater part of the trade with the Moors of Africa and southern Spain, from whom, in return for spiceries and other Eastern products, they got gold, cordovans, and merino wool, which were sold to advantage in France and Italy.
The Italians were the best cloth-weavers in Europe in the fourteenth century, although the Flemings were not contemptible rivals. The manufacture of cloth was industriously carried on in many of their cities; in those of Tuscany particularly, the finest kind of work being done in Lucca. When this city was taken by Uguccione della Faggiuola, in 1314, the factories and goods were destroyed, and many citizens emigrated to other parts of Italy, and even into France, Germany, and England. Yet long before this Italian operatives had introduced, or at least improved, the art in the northern countries. Crapes, taffetas, velvets, silks, camelots, and
serges were extensively made in Italy, the richest quality being sold at Florence, where the home industries seemed to centre, and only the most skilled artisans were employed. The art of weaving wool was practised by thousands of citizens, and, nominally at least, by some of the noblest families of the city and contado (commune), since there was a law that no one could aspire to public office unless he were a member of one of the trades-corporations of the republic. The citizens of Florence were classed from 1266 into twelve companies of trades or professions, seven of which were called arti maggiori, viz., 1. lawyers and attorneys; 2. dealers in foreign stuffs; 3. bankers and money-changers; 4. woollen manufacturers and drapers; 5. physicians and apothecaries; 6. silk manufacturers and mercers; 7. furriers. The lower trades were called arti minori. The records of these corporations are now preserved in a part of the Uffizi palace devoted to the public archives of Florence. They range from A.D. 1300 to the end of the eighteenth century. Around the hall, which was fitted up a few years ago to receive them, are the portraits of some of the distinguished men who belonged to these guilds: Dante, Cosimo de’ Medici, Francesco Guicciardini, and others. Balmes gives an interesting account, after Capmany, in his European Civilization, p. 476, of “the trades-unions and other associations which, established under the influence of the Catholic religion, commonly placed themselves under the patronage of some saint, and had pious foundations for the celebration of their feasts, and for assisting each other in their necessities.” Although his long note refers principally to the industrial organization
of the city of Barcelona, it is acknowledged that Catalonia borrowed many of its customs and usages in this matter from the towns of Italy.
Before the middle of the fourteenth century there were over two hundred drapers’ shops in Florence, in which from seventy to eighty thousand pieces of cloth were made every year, to the value of 1,200,000 gold florins, and employing more than thirty thousand people. The historian John Villani says that the trade had been still more flourishing, when there were three hundred shops open and one hundred thousand pieces were made yearly, but that they were of a coarser quality and consequently did not bring as much money into the city, although more people got work. The art of dyeing cloths and other stuffs was cultivated by the Italians during the middle ages with considerable success. Alum, which is much used for this purpose, was eagerly sought after, and the Genoese obtained from Michael Palæologus, on payment of an annual sum, the exclusive right of extracting it from a certain mine in the Morea that had previously been worked by Arabs, Catalans, and others. The lessees began operations with a force of fifty men, and soon built a castle to protect themselves, and finally a town, which was destroyed by the Turks in 1455. The Florentines were so expert in dyeing wool that the material was sent to them for the purpose from other parts of Italy, and even from Germany and the Netherlands. It was only in 1858 that an immense wooden building for stretching and drying cloth in the sun, called Il tiratoio della lana, which had been used for over five hundred years, was torn down as too liable to catch fire.
The cloths of France and other northern countries found a sale in Florence, not so much for home use as for exportation through the Genoese and Venetians. An exception, however, must be made for a rich article called say, manufactured in Ireland, and esteemed so beautiful as to be worn by the ladies of that refined city.[33] John Villani, already mentioned, says that there was a quarter of Florence called Calimala, containing twenty stores of the coarser cloths of the North, of which thirty thousand pieces, of the value of three hundred thousand gold florins, were yearly imported.
Florence in the middle ages had a territory extending only a few miles round its walls; but the industry and speculative spirit of its citizens wonderfully enriched them, and, since “all things obey money” (Ecclesiastes x. 19), they soon became the predominant power, and finally the masters in Tuscany. They were money-changers, moneylenders, jewellers, and goldsmiths for the whole of Europe and no little part of the East. The elements of a business education were given to its youth in numerous schools, attended by some twelve hundred boys, who were taught arithmetic and book-keeping. A great deal of money circulated within the city itself, and a large amount was necessary, particularly before the introduction of bills of exchange, to accommodate merchants in their visits to other countries. The public mint coined annually during the fourteenth century from three hundred and fifty thousand to four hundred thousand gold florins, and about twenty thousand pounds weight of coppers, called danari da quattro, or half-farthings; and eighty private
banks assisted the circulation. The beautiful golden florins were first coined in the year 1252, bearing on one side the impression of St. John Baptist, the patron, and on the other that of a lily, the device of the city. This was considered the finest coin in the world, and so much admired that many princes and governments began to imitate it while preserving its original name, and consequently perpetuating the monetary renown of Florence. It was current in Europe, Asia, and Africa. The workmanship of the Florentines was so superior that they were often called upon to conduct or superintend the coinage in foreign countries. During the reign of King David II., in the first half of the thirteenth century, he appointed a Florentine one of the two keepers of the exchange for all Scotland, and masters of the mint; and under King Robert III. (1390-1424) gold was minted for that kingdom by Bonaccio of Florence.[34] In 1278 the Exchange at London was under the direction of some Lucca merchants; and it seems to be directly from the Italian that we get our English word cash, derived from cassa, the chest in which Italian merchants kept their money. We may have some idea of what a money-centre Florence was in that age from the fact that the notorious French adventurer, the Duke of Athens, who was elected Lord of Florence in 1342, contrived in the course of only ten months to draw four hundred thousand golden florins out of the city. The Florentines, who had the reputation of being the smartest people in Italy, were extremely fond of banking in all its branches. While the middle and lower orders of society were mostly engaged in mechanical occupations,
the higher classes handled the money, and would appear to have taken lessons of the Jews. The great feudal nobles of the north, with more land than gold, would often ask their chaplains to reprove them with some holy text of Scripture—Ecclesiasticus x. 10 being a favorite one—when interest was demanded or mortgages were forfeited. They were not by any means the only Italians who publicly courted the queen Regina Pecunia; the ancient name in England for a banker, which was Lombard, and the street in London called Lombard Street, preserving the memory of the Milanese and others out of Lombardy who took up their first residence there before the year 1274, and were great moneychangers and usurers. The stupendous fortunes of the Chigi, who gave Pope Alexander VII. to the church and are now Roman princes, and before them of the Medici family, which became royal, were amassed chiefly in the banking business; but it is a popular error that the well-known sign of the pawnbrokers’ three gilt balls is derived from the armorial bearings of the latter, which their agents in England and other countries placed over the doors of their loan-shops. The arms of the Medici were or, six torteaux gules except the one in chief, which was azure charged with three fleurs-de-lis or. Whether these roundlets had any allusion, as has been suggested, to doctors’ pills and the professional origin whence the family name is supposed to be derived, we cannot determine; but the gold pieces called bezants because coined at Constantinople—Byzantium—and so common at an early period in Italy that the saying Aver buoni Bisanzi was a proverbial expression of one