The Rise of Florence

In the Central Middle Ages, starting around 1000 A.D., a number of northern Italian cities, including Venice and Genoa, rode a wave of economic and population growth that saw them become among the most prosperous and powerful cities in Europe. Florence, though a late starter because of its isolation from the sea and the trade opportunities it offered, caught up with and overtook its rivals by engaging in manufacture and commerce, as well as trade. How did it manage to climb to its powerful position by the end of the Middle Ages (ca. 1400 A.D.)?

All the cities of Europe were becoming manufacturing centers, but Florence did it better than most. The industry was textiles, or cloth production. During most of the Middle Ages, textile production tasks such as spinning, weaving, and dyeing were carried out in small workshops that combined together in a complex collective organization. Master craftsmen controlled the manufacturing, while the buying and selling was carried on by merchants. This medieval system was transformed in two ways, and Florence took the decisive lead in both. Firstly, the master craftsmen and merchants were replaced by a new breed of entrepreneur who controlled both the trading and manufacture of textiles. From the thirteenth century Florentine merchant entrepreneurs set up offices in cities all over Europe from Edinburgh to Constantinople- -the archive of the Datini family shows letters from customers and suppliers from 200 different European towns- -while they also bought up workshops in Florence and employed managers to run them.

The second commercial innovation was the development of banking. To support their network of trade, the new merchant entrepreneurs needed a sophisticated method of making money available and moving it around. Florentines got into this role sooner than anyone else, acting as guarantors and providing credit and financial and accounting services to the new merchant entrepreneurs. The banker, someone who did not make or trade in goods and services, but only in money, was a new and powerful commercial phenomenon. At the height of its power Florence was controlled by about a hundred families, all of whom were involved in banking. These commercial innovations may seem mundane, but improvements in organization were to have a revolutionary effect on European commerce. In part these depended on technological advances, many of them made or promoted in Florence. By the thirteenth century paper was being manufactured in Italy, while the use of Arabic numerals was also spreading. Mechanical clocks became widespread in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, giving a new dimension to levels of organization and productivity. Double-entry bookkeeping, an important new accounting technique, was first introduced in Florence, while Florentine bankers organized the exchange of currency (a potential barrier to trade when every city-state was minting its own coinage), advancing credit, overdrafts, deposits, and withdrawals. By 1355 the Peruzzi family had offices in Florence, Palermo, Naples, Avignon, Bruges, and London, with agents running local banks in other major European cities, while the Bardi family had agents in Constantinople, Jerusalem, Cyprus, Majorca, Barcelona, Nice, Marseilles, Paris, Avignon, Lyons, and Bruges. The Florentines were not just bankers to the merchant entrepreneurs of Florence, they were the bankers of Europe- and its richest merchants.

Moreover, the education system of medieval Florence was, despite its lack of a university, highly developed. Around 10,000 young people, out of a total population of 90,000, were enrolled in schools in the mid-fourteenth century, with 1,500 of these in advanced schools of mathematics, Latin, and logic. With further professional training for those entering law or banking, this was a formidable group of people who were educated, literate, and fluent with numbers. Also, despite the wealth of its merchant and banking families, Florence had a strong tradition of republican government and civic participation by guilds (associations of artisans and various other kinds of workers).No one individual or family gained control of Florence until the rise of the merchant Cosimo de’ Medici-an influential merchant who was the first to rule Florence-in the early fifteenth century.

1.In the Central Middle Ages, starting around 1000 A.D., a number of northern Italian cities, including Venice and Genoa, rode a wave of economic and population growth that saw them become among the most prosperous and powerful cities in Europe. Florence, though a late starter because of its isolation from the sea and the trade opportunities it offered, caught up with and overtook its?rivals?by engaging in manufacture and commerce, as well as trade. How did it manage to climb to its powerful position by the end of the Middle Ages (ca. 1400 A.D.)?