Florence’s changing economy had demographic consequences. Its reduced fifteenth-century population was of course in large part the consequence of recurrent epidemics, but another cause of persistent demographic stagnation lies in the contraction of the woolen cloth industry. After the expansion of the 1360s and early 1370s, annual production slipped to 20,000 bolts in 1380, 12,000-14,000 in the 1390s, and under 10,000 in the 1420s. In 1380 the guild had 283 registered firms, but only 132 were reported in the 1427 Catasto. In 1379 a third of household heads with occupations specified in the estimo worked in some phase of woolen manufactures, and 31% still did in 1404; but by 1427 only 18% were so employed. Because total population also declined from 55,000 in 1379 to only 38,000 in 1427, the loss of jobs was even greater than these percentages suggest.1 Among the causes of the decline were increasing competition and the difficulty of securing sufficient supplies of English wool, partly because of interruptions in trade, but also because cloth manufactures were expanding in England and elsewhere. After mid-century the industry recovered, as producers abandoned their former concentration on luxury cloths and converted to lower quality, cheaper cloths from Mediterranean wool, for which they found profitable markets especially in the Ottoman Empire.393 394
Benedetto Dei counted 270 wool shops in 1472.395 Investors continued to come from both the elite (e. g., Albizzi, Altoviti, Capponi, Corbinelli, Velluti, Rucellai) and the popolo, and woolens continued to be exported throughout the Mediterranean, but not in the same quantities as in the 1360s and far fewer than before 1340.
Although woolworkers still outnumbered silkworkers 4:1 in 1427, silk had begun its slow rise. An independent association of producers of silk cloth had existed in the thirteenth century before joining the cloth retailers of Por Santa Maria, but they were mainly artisans, not merchant entrepreneurs, and remained a small and weak minority in the guild until the early fifteenth century. In 1427, 33 firms were producing silk cloth for export, 50 in 1461, and 44 in 1480; total value of production went from 230,000 florins in the 1430s to 300,000 in the early 1460s and 400,000 in 1490.396 Even with the tripling of raw silk produced in the Florentine dominions between 1440 and the mid-sixteenth century,397 silk had to be imported to meet the needs of manufacturers, who were now increasingly merchant-entrepreneurs producing for export to foreign markets. Among the earliest were merchants from the popolo: Francesco Della Luna, Benedetto Ghini, Parente di Michele Parenti (Marco’s father), and Andrea Banchi, who sold his silks all over Italy and beyond, in Geneva and Constantinople.398 By mid-century elite families and merchant-bankers began investing in silk production and using their international connections to good advantage to market their products. In the 1430s the Medici formed a partnership in a silk company, and by the 1460s several Pitti and an Antinori also did so. But the industry remained mostly in the hands of new families, some of which, like the Serristori and Cambini, accumulated big fortunes in a combination of banking, trade, and silk exports. As with woolens, silk cloth was manufactured in a series of decentralized stages by artisans working in their homes or shops. But because the steps were fewer than for wool, and especially because initial cleaning and combing were not needed as with raw wool, manufacturing silk cloth did not require a large force of unskilled workers. Thus the rise of this new textile industry could not replenish the population loss caused by the decline of wool production. Because silk cloth required fewer workers (and despite the fact that many were highly skilled and well paid artisans), the proportion in production costs of labor to materials was the inverse of that in woolen cloth production: in woolens, labor represented 60-65% of costs and raw wool and other materials 35-40%, whereas in the silk industry, despite higher remuneration per worker, labor accounted for 30-35% and the expensive raw silk and other materials 65-70%.399 Silk was a luxury product in which success depended on quality, and in turn on the refined skills of dyers, loom warpers, weavers, and the goldbeaters who produced the gold thread woven into brocades.
With the relative decline of the labor-intensive wool industry and the rise of silk and other forms of skilled artisan labor, Florence’s economy underwent a major shift. Unlike the fourteenth century, in which a huge amount of wealth was paid out in wages to a large working class, in the fifteenth century, although skilled artisans were in great demand and enjoyed rising incomes, the declining demand for unskilled labor meant stagnating wages for what was still the bulk of the working population. Despite the demographic contraction (which ought to have raised wages in a structurally unchanged economy, and initially did so after 1348), wages and piece-rates held steady or even declined in both the building and woolen cloth industries in the fifteenth century.400 Fortunately for workers, long-term price trends also remained remarkably steady until the end of the century. But short-term price fluctuations or periods of unemployment could throw households into chronic indebtedness, which further depressed real wages. For unskilled workers to afford basic necessities they needed steady and low prices, modest indirect taxes, and a favorable ratio of household size to incomes. An unskilled worker employed full time earned enough to support himself and one other person, but families of three or four with a single income could not make ends meet even with stable prices. Living costs in families of four or more also exceeded the incomes of skilled workers with higher earnings. Of 909 household heads identified in the 1427 Catasto as workers in the wool industry, 53% were deemed miserabiles, too poor to pay any tax, and they included 57% of wage-earners, 64% of unskilled Ciompi, and 43% of artisans (but fully 78% of weavers and spinners who worked at home).401 Stagnant wages in the building and woolen cloth industries almost certainly depressed other workers’ incomes as well, and when prices began their slow steady rise toward the end of the century the erosion of real wages created endemic poverty within the working class.
Serious impoverishment prevailed in the subject territories. Heavy direct taxation of the dominion was gradually transferring wealth from the contado and district communities to feed the city’s public debt (whose interest-bearing shares were owned almost entirely by Florentine citizens). Except for a few cities like Prato, which continued to be a major center of woolen cloth manufactures, and Pescia, where the silk industry flourished, protectionist measures were destroying the ability of producers in the territories to compete with Florentine industries. Most of the smaller cities lost wealth and population in the fifteenth century, as the spread of sharecropping (or mezzadria) slowed demand and economic growth in rural areas. Wealthy Florentines bought land from former freeholders, whose incomes had shrunk because of low prices and high taxes, and entered into sharecropping arrangements that gave half of each farm’s annual production to the owner and half to the sharecropper, leaving the latter little incentive to specialize and produce surpluses for sale. Weakened productivity kept sharecroppers in depressed economic conditions, when, here too, lower population ought to have had the reverse effect. All these factors reduced incomes and demand in rural areas.402 403
Weak consumer demand in the bulk of the city and dominion population also drove the development of luxury industries. With handsome profits more likely in luxury goods than in labor-intensive industries that produced for the lower classes, investors naturally turned toward the former. Growing investment in luxury products also shaped elite tastes and increased demand for these products. Here was the paradox of Florence’s fifteenth-century economy: on the one hand, ever greater displays of opulence and conspicuous consumption among the wealthy; on the other, working and rural classes unable to spend much beyond subsistence. Renaissance Florence’s brilliant material culture did not have deep economic foundations: it did not spread wealth significantly beyond the skilled artisans who produced for the elite and the merchant-bankers who sold these products throughout Europe and the Mediterranean. Hence the severely unbalanced distribution of wealth: the wealthiest 100 Florentine households, each with at least 8,600 florins of net taxable wealth (1% of the city’s 9,946 households and less than two-tenths of 1% of all households in the city and dominion), controlled 26.5% of the city’s wealth and 17% of that of city and dominion combined. The 202 households with 5,000 or more florins owned 36% of the city’s wealth, and the 339 households with 3,000 or more florins controlled 45%. More than half the city’s wealth was in the hands of about 6% of households.11 Because large elite lineages often had several among the richest households, wealth was concentrated in a considerably smaller number of lineages than households. In the Catasto of 1458 the highest assessment of tax owed, that of Cosimo de’ Medici (and his nephew Pierfrancesco), was in a league of its own at 576 florins. Two other assessments exceeded 100 florins: 132 for the heirs of Giovanni de’ Benci, the Medici bank’s former general manager, and Giovanni Rucellai’s 102. Eight more households were assessed between 50 and 98 florins (including Jacopo Pazzi and Gino Capponi). Of the remaining 7,625 households that owed any tax (excluding the miserabiles), 49% owed less than 5 soldi (when 1 florin was worth 108 soldi) and 64% owed 10 soldi or less. If an estimated 3,000 households of miserabiles are added to the total, 63% of city households owed from zero to 5 soldi and 74% from zero to 10.12
Despite its uneven distribution, this was still an economy that offered opportunities for new wealth. Some large new fortunes were made in the fifteenth century, mainly by merchant families who enjoyed Medici favor. Niccolo Cambini, son of a minor guildsman and linen-cloth dealer, began working in the Naples branch of the Medici bank and his brother Andrea apprenticed with Florentine merchants in Lisbon. In 1420 they formed a merchantbanking partnership with Adovardo Giachinotti and members of the elite Guadagni, who were allies of the Albizzi. Fortunately for the Cambini brothers, the Guadagni partnership ended some years later, and they astutely joined the ranks of the Medici party under whose protection their business flourished. They were also neighbors of the Medici, and in the early 1440s Niccolo acquired a family chapel in San Lorenzo, a sign both of his success and of Medici favor. Like other merchant-banks, the Cambini accepted deposits (on which they returned 7-8% interest) and used the capital to export Florentine woolen and silk cloths to Rome and elsewhere in Italy and throughout the western Mediterranean, in particular the Iberian peninsula where Lisbon became the center of their operations. They also imported raw materials, including silk, wool, dyes, leather, and furs for the Florentine textile and clothing industries. By 1458, after Niccolo’s death, his sons jointly declared gross assets of almost 9,000 florins, thus ranking them among the 62 wealthiest households, and purchased a family palazzo for 3,600 florins. Cambini fortunes increased in the 1460s, as they expanded their silk business, extended trading operations to the eastern Mediterranean, accepted still more deposits, and began making profitable but risky loans. In 1467 Francesco di Niccolo Cambini was appointed one of eight Officials of the Bank and thus became a trusted creditor of the commune together with Giovanni Rucellai and Francesco Sassetti, general manager of the Medici banking empire. It was the pinnacle of Cambini success. But the risks finally caught up with them: bankruptcy struck De Roover, Medici Bank, pp. 29-31.
In 1482, and, after lengthy legal proceedings, they sold off property, including the palace acquired thirty years earlier, to satisfy creditors.404 The Della Casa similarly rose from humble origins to wealth and status with a banking operation under Medici protection. Two sons of the notary Lodovico della Casa, Antonio and Ruggieri, also began with the Medici, the former as an employee, partner, and then director of the Rome branch in 1435-8, the latter as director of the Geneva branch for many years until 1447. In 1439 Antonio founded his own company with Jacopo Donati and entered the profitable business of papal banking. He soon created two more companies, including one in Geneva where he sold Florentine silks.405 Another brother, Giovanni, now famous as the lover of Lusanna,406 directed the family’s Rome company after Antonio’s death in 1454 and married the daughter of an elite Medici ally, Marietta di Piero Rucellai. In the 1458 Catasto he and a fourth brother, Jacopo, declared gross assets of almost 8,700 florins.407 Although the Spinelli had been on the outer edges of the elite since the 1320s under the Alberti umbrella, in the fifteenth century Tommaso Spinelli took his branch of the family to new economic heights in papal banking and silks.408 And the Riccardi rose from obscurity to make, lose, and regain notable wealth.409
Perhaps the greatest success story among fifteenth-century “new” families is that of the Serristori, who not only made a huge fortune but also used it and Medici connections to enter the city’s social elite. They descended, as their name implies, from a notary, ser Ristoro di ser Jacopo, who emigrated to Florence in the mid-fourteenth century from Figline in the upper Valdarno. While practicing the notarial profession, ser Ristoro bought property (much of it in Figline), invested in a wool shop in which he set up two of his sons, and left a considerable fortune to a third son, Giovanni, whom he sent to law school in Bologna and who alone among the brothers survived the plague of 1400. Messer Giovanni went into the merchant-banking business, and when he died in 1414, without male heirs, his nephews divided the estate whose business investments alone were worth 37,000 florins. Relations with the Medici must already have been well established, because one of two mediators they appointed to arbitrate the settlement was Cosimo’s cousin Averardo, whose daughter Costanza was already the wife of one of the nephews, Antonio di Salvestro di ser Ristoro (the patronymic had still not been definitively converted to a surname). Under Antonio the family business prospered. In 1427 he declared gross assets of almost 35,000 florins and net taxable wealth of over 28,000 (second highest in Santa Croce and fourteenth overall). Almost half his fortune was in Monte shares, a quarter in a merchant-banking operation, and a quarter in real estate, mostly in Figline. In 1430-2 Antonio served three times among the Officials of the Bank and made loans to the commune totaling over 26,000 florins. In 1433 Cosimo, anticipating the political storm that was about to break, deposited the assets of the local branch of his bank into Antonio’s company for protection during the exile. Having gained Cosimo’s trust, Antonio went on to serve on many balie and as an accoppiatore. Although he declared significantly reduced taxable assets in 1431 and 1433, the company accumulated ever larger working capital from deposits with which it exported textiles and imported wool, dyes, silver, and everything from soap to sugar to alum. Antonio’s sons married into the elite Capponi, Pazzi, and Strozzi families. In the 1450s they divided his estate but went into the silk business together and built a huge company whose capital investments rose from 6,400 florins in 1470 to 24,000 fiorini larghi (the new florin that was worth 20% more than the old, hence 29,000 old florins). Between 1471 and 1492 the Serristori manufactured and sold 40,000 kilos of silk cloth with sales of 355,000 fiorini larghi and total net profits over twenty-one years of 57,688 florins. They went on to be one of the pillars of the nobility under the principate.410
Despite these examples of new wealth, the old elite still controlled the lion’s share. Of twenty-eight households with 20,000 or more florins of taxable wealth in 1427, half came from very old elite families (including the Alberti, Barbadori, Bardi, Medici, Panciatichi, Pazzi, Peruzzi, Strozzi, and Tornabuoni), and only six from really new families (including the Serristori).411 In 1458 the old elite was even more prominently represented among the very wealthy, with seventeen of the twenty-four households declaring 10,000 or more florins of assets (e. g., Alessandri, Baroncelli, Canigiani, Capponi, Medici, Pazzi, Pitti, Rucellai, and Salviati), and two others that had joined the elite on Medici coattails (Benci and Dietisalvi-Neroni).412 The indefatigable list-maker Benedetto Dei begins his roster of richest Florentines in 1472 with three Medici, two Rucellai, three Pitti, four Pazzi, and nine Capponi before including six members of the “new” Martelli. Besides the many new families, the rest of the list includes (in this order) one or more Canigiani, Tornabuoni, Soderini, Gianfigliazzi, Nerli, Guicciardini, Salviati, Portinari, Ridolfi, Antinori, Velluti, Frescobaldi, Albizzi, Vettori, Adimari, Cavalcanti, Corsini, Corbinelli, Peruzzi, Castellani, and Alessandri.413 Giovanni Rucellai famously advised his sons to continue his merchant-banking business only if they attended to it personally, to keep up the appearance of “merchants” while in fact conducting themselves as “shopkeepers,” and to avoid the risks of deposit banking and investing other people’s money.414 While this no doubt reflected his cautious awareness of the precariousness of wealth after setbacks toward the end of his life, he had nonetheless accumulated one of the city’s great fortunes with the usual combination of economic ventures (and without any help from the Medici). As he reminisced in 1473, “In the trading and banking business I have been very fortunate, through God’s grace, and careful and diligent. I began in this profession as a boy, indeed as an infant, and I have acquired great credit and trust. I founded several banking companies with various partners and had operations in many places outside Florence, including Venice, Genoa, Naples, and Pisa. I was a partner in seven woolshops in Florence at different times and with different partners. And in these businesses I made a lot of money.”415 Even political disaster did not dampen the entrepreneurial spirit of elite families. The Alberti commercial and banking empire prospered in exile. And Filippo Strozzi (1428-91) began the process of converting his father Matteo’s modest estate into the greatest fortune of the age while he was still an exile in Naples. Introduced by relatives to international commerce and banking, and financed in part by his mother Alessandra’s dowry and the sale of family property, he began businesses in Palermo and Naples. After he returned to Florence, the Strozzi bank, still based in Naples, made fabulous profits that increased Filippo’s fortune from 32,000 fiorini larghi in 1471 to 112,000 in 1483 and 116,000 by his death in 1491 (and this does not include Monte holdings): 86 percent of his income of 90,000 florins between 1471 and 1483 came from the Naples company. So vast was Strozzi’s wealth that, even with the huge expenditures on the palazzo he began building in 1489, he hardly knew what to do with it all: after his death, over 52,000 florins in cash was found in sacks stored in his house!
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