Florentine mothers and children faced dangers that were universal in premodern Europe, above all the high rate of mortality among infants and women in childbirth. It is difficult for us to imagine a world in which women had to go from one pregnancy to another merely to keep the population from declining. Within the wealthy upper classes that could afford large numbers of children, pregnancies were frequent. In what is surely an exceptional example, a Corsini wife gave birth to twenty children in twenty-four years between 1365 and 1389.277 Dati recorded that his third wife Ginevra Brancacci, who entered their marriage in May 1403 with an eight-month-old son from her previous marriage, gave birth in April 1404, March 1405 (born prematurely at seven months), June 1406, June 1407, July 1411, October 1412, May 1415, April 1416, and July 1418, and died in childbirth the following year. In 1427, children between the ages of 0 and 4 represented 15% of the overall population, and those between 0 and 14 fully 39%.278 But huge numbers of them died in infancy or childhood. The ricordanze of Florentine fathers dutifully record the many births but also note with depressing frequency the deaths that were nearly as numerous. In 1422 Dati did some sad counting: of the twenty children born to him and his wives to that point, only five were still living. His fourth wife Caterina gave birth to seven more children, three of whom were still alive at the end of 1431.279 Without knowing the fate of these three, we cannot be sure of how many of the twenty-six children born to Dati’s four wives (plus the illegitimate son Maso born to his Tartar slave in Spain, where Dati was living between his first and second marriages) survived to adulthood. Despite all the pregnancies, and the deaths of several wives from complications of childbirth, the number of Dati’s children who reached an age at which they might have had children of their own may have been no more than half a dozen; they outnumbered their mothers by only one. Between plagues and infant mortality, this was a society that struggled, at huge costs to women and children, simply to maintain its numbers.
Infanticide and abandonment (actual abandonment, not the separation of a mother from her children because of her remarriage) were problems of differing degrees of seriousness. Acts of intentional infanticide were extremely rare and considered heinous crimes meriting capital punishment. In 1407 a woman from the contado of Pistoia, already pregnant by one man, married another, who knew nothing of her condition, and gave birth to a boy whom she killed to hide her guilt. She was burned to death with the body of her dead child tied to her.280 Although infanticide was perhaps marginally more common in rural areas than in cities, a survey of some 8,000 criminal prosecutions covering thirty-six years (1398-1434) in the courts of the Florentine vicars in the outlying districts yields only seven cases of infanticide, mostly linked to situations of adultery or incest.281 More difficult to detect was virtual or presumptive infanticide resulting from neglect or smothering. At the end of the fifteenth century the bishop of Fiesole launched an investigation of suspected or confessed cases of suffocation; he excommunicated a number of married couples (mostly wet nurses and their husbands) for having suffocated babies (presumably unintentionally), and prohibited parents and wet nurses from keeping infants in their own beds. Subsequent absolutions cover a total of some 280 suffocations, equally divided between infant boys and girls, over a period of thirty-five years in the early sixteenth century, an average of eight per year in the entire diocese.282
Abandonment of children was a major problem. Children of destitute parents in the countryside, of the poor, ill, or transient in the city, as well as children born to domestic slaves, were the most likely to be abandoned, and not all were infants. Admissions to the city’s foundling hospital of the Innocenti, which opened its doors in 1445, suggest the dimensions of the phenomenon. In its first decade, 813 children were admitted, 44.5% of them boys and 55.5% girls. Over the next twelve years admissions grew (a total of 1,754, averaging 146 per year, an 80% increase, with a similar sex ratio: 43.2% boys and 56.8% girls), suggesting that the hospital’s very existence may have prompted more frequent abandonment. Economic conditions in the contado may explain why abandonment was more frequent there, but many of the city’s abandoned children were the issue of illicit sexual unions between upper-class men and slave mothers. The Innocenti knew the parents or origins of 41 of the first 100 children admitted: 27 from the contado and 14 from the city, the latter mostly children of upper-class men and domestic slaves.283 Of all the dysfunctions of upper-class Florentine families, the acquisition, importation, and sexual exploitation of domestic slaves were no doubt the most difficult to reconcile with the period’s idyllic images of family life. Domestic servitude was not unknown earlier, but reduced population and scarce labor made it more common after the Black Death. In 1364 the government legalized the purchase and importation of slaves, provided they were not Christian,45 and for the next century modest but significant numbers of slaves, mainly from the regions around the Black Sea where Genoese and Venetians controlled trade in both goods and humans, were brought to Italian cities for sale as domestic servants. A register of slaves sold in the city between 1366 and 1397 records 357 sales (70% of them, however, in only the first few years); 76% were Tartars and 90% women.46 In the second half of the fifteenth century, African slaves begin to appear in the commercial operations (including the sale of a small number in Tuscany) of Florentines doing business in Portugal.47 Among domestic servants in Florence between 1300 and 1530, non-Tuscans have been estimated at 14% and slaves less than 10%. If that is so, there must have been a large population of non-slave domestics, because the 1427 Catasto records 360 women slaves throughout the dominion, 294 of them in Florence, employed by 261 families.48 These are many fewer than Genoa’s slaves (estimated at 2,000), but they are nearly 1% of Florence’s population in 1427. Most slaves spent their lives in their owners’ households, were usually well provided for, and in many cases eventually freed. But girls and younger women were not infrequently sexual targets of owners, their sons, or others, and children born of such liaisons were usually entrusted to one or another of the hospitals that took in children: 22% of children admitted to San Gallo in the 1430s were there because of their mothers’ “servile status.”49 Admission to a foundling hospital automatically freed children from both illegitimacy and slave status, which was not typically inherited.
To make pregnancies more frequent, it was common practice among those who could afford it to send infants to wet nurses. Wet nursing was a major preoccupation of wealthy Florentine parents, and a major occupation of working-class women, especially in the contado. Fathers established agreements with wet nurses who met their requirements of health and character. Usually within days or weeks of birth, infants were sent, sometimes considerable distances, into the countryside to wet nurses for an average of 18 to 20 months or even 2 to 21/2 years. Live-in wet nurses were the most expensive, and city 284 285 286 287 288 wet nurses cost more than their countryside counterparts, and, perhaps for this reason, about two-thirds of families employing wet nurses found them in the contado.289 Although criticized by humanists and religious writers who thought mothers should nurse their own children, wet nursing made it easier for parents to resume sexual relations and increased the frequency of pregnancies. Because of its ubiquity and importance for upper-class families, the commune legislated, and incorporated into the statutes, pay rates for wet nurses. The practice had its problematic aspects, beginning with the class dimension: the upper classes bought the milk of poor women whose own infants had either to have died or were themselves put out to other wet nurses. How many rural mothers may have been tempted to abandon or neglect their own children in order to take in city infants and thus augment the family income can only be speculated, but the whole system was predicated on a supply of women with milk but somehow without their own infants. Still more a matter of speculation is the psychological effect on children of living their first two years with one family and mother and then being returned to what they were told to accept as their real families. Again it is Giovanni Morelli who provides the intriguing clues. His father Paolo used to say that he never knew his own father because he “sent him to a wetnurse in the Mugello and kept him there until [Paolo] was almost a big boy,” in this unusual case apparently until he was ten or twelve. Giovanni supposes that this happened because Paolo’s mother had died and his father wanted neither the responsibility nor the cost of raising his youngest son at home. Paolo developed a hatred for his wet nurse that he carried with him all his life: Paolo “told our mother that this wet nurse of his was the strangest and wildest woman who ever lived and that she hit him so many times that just thinking about her he was filled with such anger that if he had been able to get his hands on her he would have killed her.”290 Paolo’s anger against his wet nurse was no doubt genuine, especially if she beat him, but one wonders how much of it was displaced anger against a father who had abandoned him.
An early instance of government’s expanding role in family matters was the institution of the magistracy that administered state guardianships for orphaned minors, the Magistrato dei Pupilli. From the 1360s to the 1380s, the Signoria and councils occasionally accepted petitions, submitted on behalf of minors whose fathers had died intestate, requesting the appointment of estate guardians until the children achieved their legal majority. Sometimes the government appointed guardians and sometimes assumed the responsibility itself. In 1384 the transfer of minors’ estates to communal administration by testamentary delegation was allowed, because, according to the law, “many citizens deprived of affines and agnates in the nearest degree,” or who, not trusting them, refused to appoint them as guardians, preferred to accept the commune’s help in safeguarding the interests of minors. In other cases guardians designated by testators either refused such duties or performed them badly. Over the next ten years, seventy-one estates came under communal supervision, thirty-one of them by testators’ wishes, and most after 1388, when legislation mandated using the income to reduce the public debt and restoring these sums to the estates with 5% annual interest when minors reached their legal majority. By 1393 the growing number of estates under communal guardianship necessitated the institution of the new magistracy, which managed estates, paid their wards’ living expenses from the proceeds, and promised them 5% annual return on the property; income in excess of this went to the communal treasury for debt reduction. Nearly 100 estates came under Pupilli administration in 1400-9, 150 in 1410-19, and 223 in 1420-9. This did not evolve from a preconceived plan to intervene in the private testamentary and economic affairs of Florentine families: many simply trusted the government over their relatives. For 77% of the estates that came under government supervision, the reasons are known; half of these came via testamentary election. Communal management of minors’ estates was thus largely a matter of citizens’ choice, apparently motivated by frequent lack of trust among relatives, by conflicts of interest between minors and guardians, and by the fragile nature of that much lauded solidarity among kinsmen found in contemporary idealizations of the Florentine family. Intervention by the Pupilli became necessary or desirable when fissures appeared within a patriline or between in-laws who found it difficult to dissolve their affinal bonds amicably.291
Florence’s hospitals contributed substantially to the assistance of children and the poor. According to Giovanni Villani (12.94), in the 1330s the city already had thirty hospitals with a total of 1,000 beds for “the poor and the infirm.” Among older hospitals, the largest were San Gallo, San Paolo, and Santa Maria Nuova, which took in both the ill and the destitute poor. In the second half of the century and continuing into the fifteenth, hospitals became more numerous and specialized in their services. In the 1370s Niccolo di Jacopo Alberti funded the construction of a hospice for poor and widowed women, called the Orbatello, subsequently administered by the Parte Guelfa after the exile of the Alberti. The Orbatello housed some 200 women, mostly
From the artisan and lower classes, and allowed them to bring their children with them.292 Two more hospitals were founded within the next fifteen years: Bonifazio, named after its patron, the military captain Bonifazio Lupi, who asked that it be supervised by the Calimala guild; and San Matteo, built by the merchant Lemmo Balducci, who entrusted its administration to the bankers’
Guild.293
Care of abandoned children was traditionally one among many functions of Florentine hospitals, especially San Gallo and Santa Maria della Scala. In the early fifteenth century, the wealthy merchant Francesco Datini founded a hospital specifically for abandoned children. His motivation no doubt emerged from his having entrusted his only child, Ginevra, born out of wedlock, to the care of Santa Maria Nuova. Although he relinquished responsibility for raising her, Datini provided Ginevra with a 1,000 florin dowry and later bequeathed to her another 1,000 florins of real estate. In 1410, in the final and deathbed version of a will over which he agonized for many years with the prodding of his friend and spiritual adviser, the Florentine notary Lapo Mazzei, Datini decided to use his immense fortune to create a charitable trust under the control of the commune of his native city of Prato. Among other bequests, in addition to the gift to Ginevra, and money, land, a house, and household goods for his “beloved wife, mona Margherita,” Datini left 1,000 florins to Santa Maria Nuova for the construction of a new foundling hospital.294 In 1419 the guild of Por Santa Maria took over the project and petitioned the commune of Prato for the transfer of the bequest to the guild’s consuls to aid in the already initiated construction of the hospital, subsequently known as the Innocenti, in piazza Santissima Annunziata. Among the guild representatives who took possession of the gift was Goro Dati. Soon thereafter, the guild engaged Filippo Brunelleschi to design the new building whose portico, with its mix of classical and Tuscan Romanesque elements, heralded the beginning of a new architectural style. Construction went on for more than twenty years, and in 1445 the Innocenti finally opened its doors. Hospitals became magnets for pious bequests, as charitable confraternities had been a century earlier.295 Many citizens transferred to hospitals ownership of land, houses, or
Other assets, while retaining the right of use until they died. Such bequests before death (inter vivos) were not infrequently attempts to reduce taxable wealth; during fiscal crises pressures mounted to tap the accumulating assets of hospitals and other charitable foundations, and the commune investigated and punished what it considered fraudulent transfers. To protect the material foundation of their charitable activities, hospitals petitioned the commune for tax-exempt status. Such exemptions long remained a source of contention, but by and large hospitals succeeded in protecting their wealth from both the commune and, with the commune’s help, from the church as well.57 In the case of the Innocenti, the legislative councils granted tax-exemption in 1430 on the grounds that “from so laudable an undertaking it can reasonably be hoped that divine mercy wIll be more favorably inclined perpetually to safeguard the liberty of the Florentine people and the benefactors of this hospital.”58 This is a typical expression of the idea that charitable works would generate divine favor and protection for the institutions and persons supporting them.
World History
