The most serious problem was that Florentine families were not producing enough children, especially because so many did not survive to adulthood. Fifteenth-century Florence was remarkably smaller than the pre-plague city. Its partial recovery from the catastrophe of 1348 raised the population to 55,000 in 1380, still half its pre-1348 numbers. Another wave of plagues struck, in 1400 (with an estimated 12,000 deaths) and again in 1417, 1422-4, and 1430, when 10 percent of the population died. Even before the last of these, the 1427 Catasto indicates a population just over 37,000, a third less than in the late fourteenth century. The ecclesiastical jurisdiction that included the immediately surrounding rural parishes within a radius of three miles had a population of 44,000, and the contado counted 125,000 inhabitants (but only 104,000 within the 1338 borders). Nor was there much recovery for most of the fifteenth century, as the city’s population struggled to exceed 40,000. Except in upper-class families, small households were characteristic of the entire population: the Catasto’s 9,780 households averaged 3.8 persons. Recurrences of the plague, which rarely wiped away entire families, were no doubt one reason for this. But even in the second half of the century, when the plague subsided, the average Florentine household numbered fewer than five persons. In the sixteenth century, when the population began to grow again, it did so by first increasing average household size.
One-fifth of city households in 1427 consisted of only one person, the result of two aspects of Florentine marriage and inheritance practices: the many men who either married late or not at all, and the many widows who did not remarry. Among all classes, men in the city married in smaller numbers and later in life than did men in the countryside. And while there was less variation in the ages at which women married, the city had many more widows than the contado. In all cities of Florentine Tuscany surveyed by the Catasto, the average age of marriage for women was just under 19, and for men just under 28. In the Florentine contado it was over 19 for women and just under 24 for men. But in Florence the average age of women marrying for the first time was between 17 and 18, and the vast majority of women who married did so by their early twenties; those who did not mostly entered convents. For men in the city, the average age at first marriage was around 30, but 12% of all men never married. The large age difference between husbands and wives (averaging 12 years, and in many cases much more) accounts for the startling number of urban widows: 25% of women over the age of 12 were widows in 1427. Many were widowed in their twenties, and few ever remarried. This combination of factors - the relatively small proportion of the population that married and the brief duration of marriages - kept the number of births low, even as some upper-class married couples had many children. Whatever plagues and other diseases were doing to limit the population, Florentine marriage patterns contributed significantly to the demographic crisis.257
Particularly crucial was the reluctance of men, especially from the upper classes, to marry early. Their motivation was in part economic: it took resources and capital to confront the prospect of marriage and children, and many preferred to wait until they accumulated sufficient wealth. In merchant and banking families young men were typically sent to learn, and then to oversee branches of, family businesses throughout Italy and Europe, and invariably they waited to marry until they returned home. Buonaccorso Pitti, born in 1354, postponed marriage until he returned from years of travel in northern Europe in 1391, when he was thirty-seven. Even men who did not leave the city, including those without financial reasons to delay marriage, generally married no earlier than thirty. This had clearly become a cultural preference, one linked perhaps to assumptions about the stages in life at which men were prepared to assume domestic as well as political responsibilities. Alberti tells us that contemporaries were acutely aware of men’s reluctance to marry early. In book one of the Famiglia, Adovardo counts twenty-two Alberti men between the ages of sixteen and thirty-six living alone and without a wife, and says: “it grieves me to see so many of you younger Alberti without an heir, not having done what you could to increase the family and make it numerous.” In book two, Lionardo, a humanist and himself unmarried, sings the praises of marriage as having been instituted by nature and laments the hesitation of so many young men to take wives, which he attributes both to the attendant financial burdens and to an unwillingness to leave behind the “freedom” of bachelorhood: “Subjecting themselves to the yoke of marriage, perhaps, seems to them a loss of liberty and of the freedom to live as they wish.” Therefore, “we must use every reason, method of persuasion, and reward, and every argument and all our planning and skill to induce our young men to take wives.” He even suggests that fathers threaten to disinherit sons who refuse to marry by a certain age. Upper-class marriage was, it seems, so encumbered by social expectations and paternal pressures that many men tried to avoid it for as long as possible. One wonders if these marriage-shy young (and not so young) men were avoiding the inevitable re-subjection to their own fathers that marriage, children, and a role in their lineages’ matrimonial strategies entailed.
While avoidance of marriage allowed some young men greater freedom to travel and pursue their own pleasures, many unmarried adult sons nonetheless remained in their fathers’ households. Sons were subject to the legal authority of their fathers’ patria potestas, which restricted the freedom to sign contracts or write wills. This generated a certain level of tension which occasionally erupted into conflict between fathers imbued with the culture’s high sense of paternal dignity and power and sons who were enjoying, and from their fathers’ point of view perhaps wasting, the years of freedom. In 1405, Lanfredino Lanfredini settled an old quarrel outside the family without consulting his wife or adult sons, thereby provoking the ire especially of his son Remigio, who was so incensed at his father’s unilateral action that he severed all ties with the paternal household and left the city. Remigio assumed that, as an adult, he had a right to be consulted and to participate in the decision his father made, whereas the father’s self-defense relied in turn on one of the central pieties of Florentine family culture: when accused of being a “traitor” against his son and the rest of the family, Lanfredino pleaded, “Remigio, you are my son and you should be content with my decisions; I did it for the best.”258
Beneath idealizations of paternal authority and love (and in part because of inflated expectations surrounding the power of fathers), generational conflict was always latent, although it rarely exploded into the open as in this case.
For Florentine women, the major consequences of prevailing marriage patterns were pressure to marry early, expanding dowries and growing numbers of women unable to marry because of inflated dowries (and who thus entered religious life), and, among those who did marry, the dilemmas they faced, when their husbands died, over dowries, children, and pressures for and against remarriage. Pressure to marry early was motivated by urgency over marrying daughters before their virtue and purity were in any way compromised, even simply by loose talk, and by the many men who opted out of the marriage market or delayed marriage, thereby creating a situation in which marriageable young women outnumbered prospective husbands. Marriages in the upper class were negotiated in detail and at length, often through professional marriage brokers, because each marital union was also an alliance between two lineages entailing reciprocal obligations and long-lasting ties and the crucial matter of the dowry: its size, components, and schedule of payment.259 Florentines from both elite and popolo described these negotiations in letters and ricordanze. When Buonaccorso Pitti decided to marry, he picked, not a bride, but the interrelated group of families into which he wished to marry. He let it be known that he was willing to leave the choice of a wife up to Guido di messer Tommaso del Palagio, “the most respected and influential man in the city,” “provided he picked her among his own relatives.” Pitti’s motives were openly political: “I sent the marriage broker to him to tell him of my intentions, and I did so in order to acquire his good will and a marriage alliance with him, so that he would be obligated to work on my behalf for a reconciliation with the Corbizi,” a family with which Buonaccorso had feuded in 1380. The broker came back a first time to say that Guido del Palagio would be pleased to have Buonaccorso “as his parente,” and a few days later reported that Guido was able to offer in marriage Francesca, daughter of his cousin Dianora del Palagio and of Luca di Piero degli Albizzi. Pitti accepted immediately: marrying an Albizzi gave him an alliance with the family then emerging as the most influential within the ruling group.260 In this case (or at least in Pitti’s recollection of it) the dowry seems not to have played a major role. It was the tie to the Albizzi that sealed the deal, and which Buonaccorso may have been after all along.
But for most Florentines dowries and their steady inflation were a central concern. Fourteenth-century upper-class dowries were normally between 400 and 1,000 florins. Even among the wealthy Alberti, 16 of 33 known dowries given to their women in the mid - to late fourteenth century were 800 florins or less; by the early fifteenth century (and despite their exile), 11 of 12 known Alberti dowries were 1,000 florins or larger.261 By the late fourteenth century, some elite dowries reached between 1,000 and 1,500 florins.262 In 1370 Michele di Vanni Castellani bequeathed a dowry of 1,000 florins to his daughter Antonia, having previously given the same amount to each of her two sisters. In 1381, after apparently difficult negotiations, Giovanni Del Bene agreed to pay a dowry of 900 florins for the marriage of his daughter Caterina to Andrea Quaratesi. He commented: “I could not reduce that sum, although I tried hard to persuade [the marriage broker] to adhere to the terms of our previous discussions. But [he] insisted upon it, alleging many reasons. So, to avoid the rupture of the negotiations, I surrendered on this point.”263 Average upper-class dowries moved steadily from about 1,000 florins in the second quarter of the fifteenth century, to 1,200 in the third quarter, over 1,400 in the last quarter, and 1,850 in the first quarter of the sixteenth century.264 In one branch of the Strozzi, only 3 of 13 dowries up to 1445 exceeded 1,000 florins; between 1445 and 1486 only 2 of 13 were less than that; and from 1487 to 1510, 9 of 13 were over 2,000 florins and none less than 1,260.265 These increases occurred in a period (until the sixteenth century at least) otherwise free of inflation, and in many cases represented real financial dilemmas for fathers, many of whom were faced with the unpleasant reality of not being able to provide adequate dowries for all their daughters. Dowries may have grown because of the imbalance between the supply of marriageable young women and the smaller pool of men willing to marry: girls’ families were literally competing for husbands by offering larger dowries. Those who lost in this competition either married down the social hierarchy or sent daughters to convents. Whatever the cause of dowry inflation, contemporaries noticed and frequently decried the phenomenon.
To help families with this problem, in 1425 the government instituted an investment fund for dowries, the Monte delle doti.266 Fathers could deposit a sum of money at the birth of a daughter and be guaranteed a much larger sum for her dowry: after 71/2 years 100 florins would mature to 250 florins, or after 15 years to 500 (with annual compounded interest rates of, respectively, 13 and 11%). The Dowry Fund was not an immediate success, and over the next few years the government introduced modifications (a third eleven-year option, the possibility of waiting until a girl had survived the earliest and most dangerous years of life before opening an account, lower initial deposits and thus higher interest rates) all designed to make it more attractive to invest, wait many years, and hope that their daughters survived to marry. Even so, in the first eight years of the fund, only fifty-six girls were enrolled. The chief flaw in the original plan was that, if a daughter died before marrying, both the deposit and its accrued earnings were forfeited, a defect finally corrected in 1433 when the government agreed to return deposits to fathers or brothers of girls who died without marrying. This is what families had apparently been waiting for, because over the next two months the fund attracted 879 deposits worth over 67,000 florins. By 1442, accounts amounted to almost 350,000 florins, and by the 1450s nearly three million.
Once it caught on, the Dowry Fund became central to the matrimonial strategies of Florentine families. In the fund’s 150-year lifetime, accounts were opened for some 30,000 girls, slightly less than a fifth from the contado and district towns, the rest from city families. In 1480, just under a fifth of all city households (1,649 of 8,414) had girls with Dowry Fund accounts. Wealthy households, which were generally those of elite lineages, were more likely to invest in the fund than poorer ones. Whereas only 266 (9%) of the poorest third of Florentine households (with taxable wealth under 100 florins), and 14% of unmarried girls in those households, had accounts, 220 (46%) of the wealthiest 477 households (the 5.7% of households with taxable wealth in excess of 1,500 florins), and the same percentage of girls in these households, had accounts. In the middle, the 60% of households with taxable assets between 100 and 1,500 florins (which included much of the popolo and artisan community) were also prominently represented, but not in the same proportion to overall numbers as the wealthier elite: 1,163 of 5,090 households in this middle category (23%) had accounts in the names of 28% of their unmarried girls. Overall 27% of Florence’s nubile women (2,684 of 9,964) had Dowry Fund accounts in 1480.26
Upper-class families took advantage of the fund in large numbers. Over its lifetime, accounts were opened for 113 Strozzi women, 104 Medici women, and 94 Rucellai women. These and other elite families not only had the resources to invest; they were also more in need of the service because of the steady inflation of dowries within their class and their generally larger Ibid., chap. 3, table 3.1, p. 87.
Numbers of children. Such families were more likely to open an account soon after the birth of a daughter and perhaps supplement it with a second deposit once the girl had survived the early years of life. A well known case is that of Caterina Strozzi, daughter of the exiled and (by the time of her marriage) deceased Matteo Strozzi and of Alessandra Macinghi (whose mother was an Alberti). In 1447 Alessandra, whose letters are a rich source of Florentine social history, wrote to her son Filippo, still in exile in Naples, to inform him that she had agreed to marry Caterina to Marco Parenti, son of a silk-manufacturer and grandson of a minor guildsman, and to provide her with a dowry of 1,000 florins. Daughters of Strozzi men and granddaughters of Alberti women did not normally marry men only two generations removed from the minor guilds, even ones that had become wealthy. But Strozzi political misfortunes and Alessandra’s inability to provide a truly grand dowry made a marriage down the social hierarchy necessary. Caterina had two Dowry Fund accounts, both for 500 florins: a fifteen-year account that would mature in 1448, and an eleven-year account that would mature only in 1450. But Alessandra wanted to marry Caterina at the end of 1447, and, as she wrote to her son, since “whoever takes a wife wants money,” she “could find no one willing to have part of the dowry in 1448 and the rest in 1450” and was forced to provide the second half as a “combination of cash and presents” which she would recover when the second account matured three years later. By the end of 1449, Caterina was pregnant and expecting her child in February of 1450. Alessandra was now worried that, if “God has other plans for Caterina before April” (which is to say, if she died in childbirth), the 500 florins from the eleven-year account, which had been opened on March 26, 1439, and would mature on that date in 1450, would be lost (except for the initial deposit). So she decided to purchase three months’ worth of insurance on Caterina’s life for the substantial sum of twelve florins. She did so against her son-in-law’s opinion, who thought it money wasted in view of Caterina’s good health. But Alessandra thought it the prudent thing to do and asked her son Filippo not to inform Marco of her decision so that he “wouldn’t take it badly, and because it’s our business.” Such were the considerations forced on Florentine families by the dangers of childbirth and the rules of the Dowry Fund. As it happened, Marco’s optimism was vindicated: Caterina gave birth to a son, Piero, and subsequently to seven daughters, for five of whom Marco opened fifteen-year accounts in the fund.267
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