Gregorio Dati
Gregorio Dati was a Florentine merchant and diarist best known for the authorship of The Diaries of Gregorio Dati, which represents a major source for social and economic historians of Renaissance Florence, alongside the diaries of Buonaccorso Pitti. He kept a detailed diary outlining his business dealings as well as personal information about the births and deaths of his four successive wives and his 26 children.
Life
Career
Gregorio Dati is perhaps best known for exemplifying the late 14th and early 15th century Florentine silk merchant. Dati was a partner in numerous silk-producing firms over his lifetime, entering the industry when it was still young in Florence. The tumultuous financial situations he describes in his Libro Segreto are testament to risk of the industry. Typical of silk merchants, rather than rely on exporters, Dati's firm sold silks directly in Valencia, a burgeoning Mediterranean trading hub. Complicating his commercial life were piracy, bankruptcy and litigation.Dati was politically active in Florence, repeatedly serving as consul of the Silk Guild and, later in life, holding a series of public offices. In government, he served as head of the Florentine Signoria and in two bodies of government advisors. He was also overseer of the prestigious Ospedale degli Innocenti and served in the judicial body Ten on Liberty and among the Five Defenders of the County.
Dati's writings have proven useful to historians and scholars alike due to his unique placement within Florentine society. Dati's diary and Libro Segreto represent a major source of information on the economics and social aspects of Florence during this time. His other works include Istoria Di Firenze dal 1380-1405, a chronicle of the Milanese-Florentine wars set in a cautionary tone rather than traditional chronicle, and La Sfera, a manuscript containing astronomical charts and navigational maps. The complexity and thoroughness of his public works demonstrate that he had access to an informal education that involved Classical writers. Dati's writing has been credited as a self-conscious portrayal of Florentine politics, economy and culture.
Dati survived two bouts of bubonic plague that struck his family, and would go on to outlive three of his wives and 19 of his children. Dati did not keep his diary for the last eight years of his life, and he died in 1435.
Early life
Gregorio Dati, also known as Goro, was born April 15, 1362, to silk merchant Stagio Dati and Monna Ghita in Florence, Italy. Gregorio had 16 siblings, including Fra Leonardo Dati, a Friar and Master General of the Dominican Order At the age of 13, Gregorio quit school to work in the silk shop of Giovanni di Giano, the beginning of his own career as a silk merchant.Personal life
Marriages and children
In his diary, Dati kept an extremely detailed account of the dates surrounding the births and deaths of his four successive wives and his 26 children. With his wives, Dati kept an exact recording of the dowry received and how he invested and spent those florins, handling his personal affairs in the same way he might handle his business affairs. As well as exact dates, Dati kept a record of the godparents of each child and even, in a few cases, what the weather was doing on the day of their births.Dati's first wife was Bandecca, who died in 1390 following a miscarriage in the fifth month of pregnancy. Consequently, there were no children produced from this union.
After the death of his first wife, Dati travelled to Valencia on an extended trip from 1390 to 1391. During his time in Valencia he fathered an illegitimate child with his Tartar slave, Margherita. He called the child Thomas, but refers to him as Maso in his diary.
In June 1393, Dati married Isabetta Villanuzzi after they had been betrothed for several months. According to his diary entry, her dowry of 800 gold florins that came from Betta's first cousins was soon invested in the shop of Buanccorso Berardi, another silk merchant. Dati and Isabetta lived together in Florence, though Dati was often travelling to Catalonia and Valencia on business. Together, they had eight children: Bandecca, Stagio, Veronica, Bernardo, Mari, Stagio II, and Piero Antonio. Isabetta died from complications during childbirth in 1402.
Dati married his third wife Ginevra in 1404 and together they had 11 children before she died from complications during childbirth in 1419. In Gregorio's account of the specifics of each birth, he gives details on only nine. They lived in Florence but moved several times in an attempt to avoid the plague. These children included Manetto, Agnolo, Elisabetta, Antonia, Niccolo, Girolamo, Filipo, Ghita and Lisa.
Dati then went on to marry his fourth wife Caterina, daughter of Dardando di Niccolo Guicciardini and Monna Tita. They were married in March 1421, Dati at the age of 59 and Caterina, age 30. Dati recorded that he received a dowry of 600 florins from Caterina's uncle Niccolo d’Andrea. Caterina gave birth to six children including Ginevra, Antonio, Lionardo, Anna, Fillipa and Bartolomea.
Dati's family would suffer from the bubonic plague twice, once in 1400 and once in 1420. In 1400, two of Dati's children, Stagio and Mari succumbed to the disease. Following that tragedy, the Dati family moved houses several times in an attempt to avoid the plague until they were infected again in 1420, this time losing several servants and three children, Veronica, Bandecca and Antonia, on the same day. According to Cohn and Alfani, one quarter of all plague deaths in Italy occurred within households on the same day, so this phenomenon was not uncommon. In total, Dati fathered 26 children, seven of whom were surviving at the conclusion of his diary. Five children succumbed to plague; several died from other early childhood ailments such as being born prematurely, dysentery and the common cold.
Relationship with brother
Dati's younger brother Fra Leonardo Dati was a Dominican Friar and Master General of the Dominican Order during the Great Schism. They seemed to be close; Leonardo was godfather to several of Dati's children, and Dati made a point of mentioning his brother's achievements in his diary entries. This suggests closeness between the two, as Dati never mentions any of his 15 other siblings in his writings. The two men are both associated with the authorship of the cosmographical poem La Sfera.Death
Dati did not keep a diary for the last eight years of his life, and he died on September 17, 1435, from an unknown cause.Commercial life
Gregorio Dati is best known for his career as a silk merchant, which he documents in his Libro Segreto. His mercantile life is typical of what we know about the Florentine silk trade at the time. His father worked in the wool guild and Dati followed in his footsteps for a stint in his youth, but in the late 14th and early 15th centuries the wool industry in Florence went into a slump, perhaps encouraging Dati to take a different path. He may also have been enticed by the greater potential for profit in the silk industry. Dati apprenticed in a silk producing shop in 1375 at 13 years old, when it was still a fairly new industry in Florence.He was first made partner in 1385 and later formed a number of partnerships throughout his career. Dati's partnerships often lasted less than three years and were usually composed of himself and two-three other investors. He frequently entered into partnerships with Buonaccorso Beradri from 1387–1394 and Michele di Ser Perente from 1395–1403. The exact terms of the contracts, including how long they would last, who was involved, their initial investments and their corresponding share of the profits were decided and recorded in a ledger—Dati records such contracts in his Libro Segreto. Dati was usually a minor partner in these contracts with a smaller stake in the company, but in 1403, at 41 years old, he tells of a partnership in which the company bears his name, indicating he was the major partner.
While the silk industry had greater potential profitability, it was also riskier. At this time, merchants used the putting-out system, which meant that the silk firm owner, like Dati, would buy raw materials and have them processed by workers for a price set by the guild. Since silk took a long time to make and spent more time on the loom, weavers would require an advance. As a result, initial investment in silk firms needed to be quite high to buy the costly raw silk and give the weavers cash advances, and it could be 3–4 months before the first silks were saleable. Thus we see Dati investing all of his money into companies and often struggling to afford the initial investments. He chose his wives based their dowries; borrowed from banks, friends and his brother Leonardo; and used his own money in order to raise the capital necessary to have a substantial stake in the company and its profits.
Overall, Dati was a successful merchant. According to the 1427 catasto, Dati's total wealth—including private investments, e.g. cash and silk; real estate; and public debt investment—at 64 years old was 3,368 florins. This made him within the wealthiest 10% of Florentines on record.
Silks were a far less standardized finished product than wool; rather, they were personalized by the merchant in the production process. Goldthwaite notes that silk merchants would often try to sell their customized fineries to princes and other nobility, which is attested to by Dati's diaries. Dati's brother and business associate, Simone, attempts to sell silk to the King of Castile, and Dati mentions selling John XXIII, the Pisan pope supported by Florence during the Great Schism, some cloths for 150 Bologna florins.
Spanish trade connections
Another implication of the high degree of personalization of silk is that the silk producers had a harder time selling to exporters in Florence, who preferred to deal in standardized woolens. As such, silk merchants often tried to sell their product abroad more directly. This is demonstrated by Dati, who seems to have sold a lot of his product in Valencia, a bustling emporium in southern Spain that was well-populated with Florentine merchants and served as an important trading hub for the Mediterranean rim. Dati's brother, Simone di Stagio Dati, lived there for 28 years and was well-positioned to sell Dati's products on consignment, for which Dati paid him a salary of around 60 fl. Dati also personally travelled to Valencia, sometimes for several years at a time. He would often stop to conduct business along the way in Barcelona—the main route to Western Europe—Catalonia, Majorca, and sometimes he travelled further along the Spanish coast to Murcia.In September 1390, at 28 years old, Dati left for Valencia with his partner Bernardo, arriving on October 26. He laments that this trip would not be expensed by the business and that he did not manage to collect 4000 Barcelona pounds—a considerable sum—from one client, instead returning to Florence in 1392 with a notarized deed.
Shipping goods between Florence and Valencia, while perhaps more profitable, carried with it a certain amount of risk from pirates and inter-state conflict. On September 10, 1393, while returning to Valencia he was robbed by a Neapolitan galley and taken prisoner to Naples. He was released after being ransomed and managed to retrieve some of his goods with difficulty, but the episode was costly—Dati lost 250 fl worth of pearls, merchandise and his own clothes and 300 fl of company property. He made it back to Florence on December 14.
On April 20, 1394, Dati tried for Valencia again and was successful, staying for about 8 months and returning January 24, 1395. However, later in 1395, his brother Simone was captured by the Neapolitan King Louis of Anjou. He was taken to Gaeta, near Naples, and Dati's firm had to ransom him for 200 fl through Doffo Spini of the Compagnacci, a Florentine political group.
Dati left for Spain again on November 11, 1408, and set out for Florence in May 1410. However, a war between the Florentines and the combined forces of the Genoese and Neapolitans under the aggressive expansionist King Ladislaus caused him to delay in Valencia. He finally returned to Florence in March 1411, but the delay, robberies and kidnappings speak to the volatile environment 15th century merchants operated in due to tensions between the northern Italian city-states.