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Records, traces left from the past, are available sources for historians who try to explain historical facts. This article attempts to understand the Italian merchants and their commercial world through their records.
One of the most important operations of the Italian merchants was to record their commercial activities. They wrote three to four letters a week, made accounting books, and established price lists of market goods or transcribed correspondence. Although their documents are various in kind, depending on diverse commercial operations such as vending, buying, packing, recording, sending and etc, only a few records have been preserved. The most perfectly preserved are those left by a merchant of Prato, small city of Tuscany, Francesco di Marco Datini: about five hundreds of accounting books, one hundred forty thousands of letters, many hundreds of price lists and etc.
Correspondence, especially that of the Datini Company, shows that commercial contact and communication were more intense and frequent in the Later Middle Ages than the previous centuries. As exchange of merchandises and their volume increased and it became rare for merchants to accompany their goods in the transportation drawing close to the Later Middle Ages, it was more necessary to send an invoice in great details where many pieces of the information for the merchandises were to be written. Commercial records also demonstrate that merchants became rather sedentary than itinerant. This transformation made it more essential to keep an accounting book more accurately and systematically, because a master in the metropole wanted to be fully informed by his agents in foreign lands to control his business. Especially Venice, Genoa and Florence were rapid to make a new method of accounting, that is, double-entry bookkeeping, which would spread later to the rest of Europe. This change from single to double-entry bookkeeping testifies that there was a noticeable transformation in the character of the merchants and their commerce.
In conclusion, many kinds of documents produced by the medieval Italian merchants show that their commercial world was quite dynamic and international, with commercial exchange being active and routine. Such a laborious contact promoted both competition and commercial innovation, for example, double-entry bookkeeping. Those records also testify that the Italian merchants were more capitalistic, more profit-seeking and freer from religious constraints than ordinary medieval populace such as peasants and clergymen. However, these remarks should be accepted with reservations. The medieval Italian merchants and their commercial world represented only a facet of the medieval European society. Moreover, it needs to be noted that the very little preservation of records could limit one’s understanding of the Italian merchants and their commercial world.