Among the most distinctive aspects of the Italian Renaissance economy was the impressive development of silk manufacturing, nurtured by increasingly strong and extensive demand. This phenomenon, well known to historians, doubtlessly conforms to logics of an economic nature. Thanks to the redistributive mechanism triggered by the plague of 1348 and by subsequent epidemics, the availability of revenue increased, benefiting above all the lay and ecclesiastical elites of the cities that represented Italy’s most dynamic markets. But it has also been considered as part of a transformation of habits and mentalities vis-à-vis consumption and the expression of a new passion for things, especially for objects of cost and beauty.Footnote 1
The prices fetched in silk shops were justified by the high cost of raw materials, difficult to obtain and from far away places; by the complexity of the production cycle, especially evident in the weaving phase; by the fact that the most luxurious cloths were dyed with expensive dyestuffs like grana and kermes and often incorporated silver, gold, and precious stones; by the sense that silk was a socially exclusive fabric; and by silk’s resistance to the ravages of time, such that Renaissance fabrics became a kind of safe haven asset. At the same time, the beauty of silk was inherent in material terms in its lightness, thinness, and elasticity; in the way it reflected light, totally unlike other fibers; in its ability to easily absorb dyes, allowing for a vast array of shades; and in its softness, pleasing both to the wearer and to the tailors who could achieve perfect hemlines and draping effects with it. Not to mention its elegance, refinement, and, importantly, its versatility, since it could provide smooth and monochrome fabrics but could also be enriched with embroidery and designs—the so-called opere—achieved in different pile heights and depicting floral and animal motifs or the human form.Footnote 2 In the former group were smooth and mostly lightweight fabrics like sendals, satins, taffetas, and veils (zendadi and zendadini; rasi; zetani and zetanini; camocati or camuccà; sindoni; taffetà; veli; and poste); in the latter were lampases, brocades, samites, embroideries, damasks, and velvets (lampassi; diaspri; broccatelli; sciàmiti and catasciàmiti; damaschi and damaschini; zetani vellutati and most velluti).
Thanks to their material and symbolic qualities, then, silks—and above all damasks, velvets, and silk-and-gold fabrics—expressed the desire for magnificence, distinction, and ostentation typical of both the long-established elite and the nouveau riche and did so more fully than had even the splendid English woolens that once dominated the luxury sectors of the textile market. As Maria Giuseppina Muzzarelli writes, “silk clothes and embellishes the real world but also animates the world of appearances, which is also real in its own way, fueling fantasies and representing aspirations. . . . It is not only a shiny, precious, and attractive thread, but, precisely because of these characteristics, . . . it is also an instrument of social affirmation.”Footnote 3 This concept is synthesized effectively by Giorgio Vasari and is expressed when he says this of Luca Signorelli: “He lived splendidly and always dressed in silk; and he was venerated by all the great personages.”Footnote 4
In the face of growing demand, before the great boom of the fifteenth century, silk manufacturing had a rather limited number of processing centers in Europe and was therefore protected from the dangers of overproduction, which had become very concrete in the wool sector, the oldest and most consolidated of urban textile activities, but also the most widespread.Footnote 5 Compared with the woolen cloth industry, silk production had peculiar features: a shorter and faster production cycle, a smaller number of employees, and above all a different cost structure. In fact, due to the greater specialization required of silk workers, individual wages paid by setaioli (silk manufacturing entrepreneurs) were often considerably higher than the wages paid by lanaioli (wool manufacturing entrepreneurs); however, they had significantly less impact on overall production expenses, 60 to 70 percent of which were absorbed by the price of the raw materials, dyestuffs, and the precious metals used in processing.Footnote 6 So, while the European wool business, hit by new market trends and by the increase in wages caused by epidemics, had to face a difficult restructuring process, the few existing silk industries, directed especially toward the creation of luxury fabrics for export, saw very promising commercial prospects ahead, not compromised by wage growth, which was absorbed without great repercussions.Footnote 7 Especially in the major Italian cities, there was available capital, entrepreneurial forces, and high-level mercantile organization, in addition to the extraordinary capacity to select and train the workforce needed for making successful products.Footnote 8
If the production of these centers was originally inspired by models found in Islamic Spain, the Byzantine Empire, or the manufactures of the Asian regions conquered by the Mongols, from where the “Tartaric cloths” came, during the fourteenth century Italian shops began to elaborate increasingly autonomous and original articles.Footnote 9 This renewal culminated in the perfecting of textured velvets, fabrics capable of enhancing the “material and three-dimensional effect of the pile,” and ones that contributed significantly to building the international reputation of the producers of the Peninsula.Footnote 10
Lucca and the Other Cities of Silk
Introduced to Lucca in the twelfth century, perhaps by Jewish or Greek workers, silk manufacturing subsequently developed in a few places in central and north Italy; in the thirteenth century, only Genoa, Venice, Bologna, and Lucca could boast of silk production for export as well as for the local market.Footnote 11 Some activity in this sector is also reported at the beginning of the thirteenth century in Milan but seems to have died out in the course of the century, only to reappear in the fifteenth century. As for the typology of this era’s Italian fabrics, cloths of high quality were produced, among them auroseric ones, especially in the two maritime republics; Bologna’s specialty was weaving simpler fabrics, mostly sendals and taffetas; and the Lucchese silk industry, being more versatile, made not only luxury cloths for consumption by the elite classes but also articles of lower quality and price.Footnote 12
Lucca, in effect, presented itself as the long-standing silk center of the Peninsula.Footnote 13 The “silk revolution” had begun there at the end of the twelfth century and had developed in the thirteenth thanks to close ties with the port of Genoa, where increasing quantities of raw silk were arriving from different parts of the Byzantine Empire, particularly Greece and Asia Minor, and from the territories bordering the Caspian Sea.Footnote 14 There are no reliable estimates of total production for this period of expansion, but it has been calculated that in the 1330s, and therefore in a less brilliant phase, the annual exports of the Lucchese silk industry oscillated between 100,000 and 125,000 pounds (or 335 to 418 quintals) of product, theoretically convertible into 12,000 pieces of light cloth or 6,250 rich ones: huge quantities for a single city and for products of such high value.Footnote 15 The early success of Lucca’s silk factories, known all over Europe, made its artisans extremely sought after, such that by 1231 they had already been beckoned to the municipality of Bologna, together with wool workers from Verona and Florence, for the purpose of strengthening the city’s own textile sector.Footnote 16 In the thirteenth century, in fact, the diaspora of entrepreneurs and workers from Lucca in search of new economic opportunities had already begun, but it was only following the conquest of Lucca by the Ghibellines of Uguccione della Faggiola (who became lord of Pisa) and his allies the “White” Guelphs that real migratory currents took shape.Footnote 17 In Italy these flows pointed toward Florence, Bologna, Venice, and Genoa; in each of these cities, local manufacturing received new stimuli and a new impetus.Footnote 18
In the Tuscan metropolis, where only production aimed at the local market existed, carried out on an artisanal basis by independent weavers or managed by small-time silk retailers, the arrival of the Lucchese contributed to the formation of a first nucleus of specialized labor and, over almost a century, to the development of an export industry. In 1411 the Guild of Por Santa Maria, which together with various other trade groups also welcomed silk merchants, issued specific “ordinances of the silk guild,” intended to regulate economic activity and employment relationships in the sector, while after 1420, thanks to the arrival of gold-beaters (battilori) from Genoa and Venice, local production of the gold thread necessary for the weaving of auroseric cloths had its beginnings.Footnote 19
In 1427 at least thirty-three companies in Florence were involved in processing the textiles; this number rose to thirty-nine in 1458 and to about fifty in the early 1460s, only to remain substantially stable in the following decades. In the last four decades of the fifteenth century, the number of workshops of battilori, some of them also silk manufacturers, increased until reaching eighteen to twenty. Data on total production are only available for a little over a fifteen-year period, but they describe a decidedly positive trend: from around 500 pieces per year in 1430, in fact, production jumped to over 2,100 pieces in 1446, while the overall value of the items made, which in 1436–1437 was about 230,000 florins, rose to 270,000 in the years 1451–1453, to 300,000 in 1461–1462, and to 400,000 in 1490.Footnote 20
In Venice and Bologna, where manufacturing was more deeply rooted, the presence of migrants seems to have more rapidly influenced the level of processing techniques and the forms of work organization. Even before the plague of 1348, Bologna was able to export its products to France and Flanders and, in the following decades, the city developed the production of what would become its flagship item, the veil, in rippled or straight versions: a prized accessory present in the repertoire of goods sold by major merchant companies, including those of Francesco Datini.Footnote 21 As for Venice, the fundamental role that Lucchese setaioli and silk workers played in the growth of the silk industry, especially in the period between 1314 and 1430, is well known, thanks to Luca Molà's research, as much in terms of business structures as corporate assets.Footnote 22 Around 1420, silk-and-gold cloths exported to Lombardy alone yielded 250,000 ducats to Venetian producers, and during the fifteenth century, thanks to the possibility of selling fabrics in all the markets reached every year by the republic’s fleets, turnover still continued to grow.Footnote 23 Likewise enriched was the range of fabrics on offer, which, alongside simple satins and taffetas, included lampases, damasks, and velvets in crimson, paonazzo, and polychrome or on a gold background, among which the famous restagno d’oro stood out.Footnote 24
Different still are the events that led to the development of the industry in Genoa, which saw the birth of its own silk guild in 1432 and was characterized by an upward trend until almost the end of the sixteenth century. The setaioli of Genoa could count on the great availability of raw materials imported from regions in both the western and the eastern Mediterranean (that not even Turkish advances interrupted), so much so that at the beginning of the sixteenth century the quantity of raw silk transformed in the city was more than double the amount worked in Florence, if less consistent. The market for cloths was no less extensive—and indeed was “as vast as was the Genoese trade”—but with particularly promising prospects in France, where in 1530 the exported silks, and velvets in particular, accounted for over a million scudi.Footnote 25
In the fifteenth century, and especially in the 1430s and 1440s, the entire Italian silk sector entered a phase of more marked expansion, strengthening where it already existed and gaining new centers. At the end of the century, valuable cloths were being produced in Milan, Mantua, Ferrara, Modena, Siena, Perugia, Naples, Catanzaro, and Messina, while during the sixteenth century the manufacture of silk extended to a whole series of smaller towns in Piedmont and the Trentino, to the major cities of the Po river valley, and to Pisa, Rome, Catania, and Palermo.Footnote 26 The movements of entrepreneurs and specialized workers were doubtlessly decisive in this process of diffusion, but the role played by imitation based on pure observation and the reproduction of the most successful articles should not be underestimated.Footnote 27
According to an estimate relative to the early sixteenth century, 14,000 of the 25,000 silk looms then active throughout Europe were in Italy, with 5,000 of them in Genoa and the Ligurian riviera, 2,500 in Lucca, 2,000 in Venice, 1,500 in Bologna, 1,000 in Florence, 500 in Naples, and a few hundred in Milan.Footnote 28 And valuations relative to all the labor involved in silk manufacturing speak of about 25,000 workers in Genoa in the first half of the sixteenth century, of 12,000 employed in Lucca in the same period, of 25,000 “souls” in Venice in 1529, and of 15,000 people in Milan in 1474.Footnote 29 In Florence, according to an opinion expressed by the consuls of the silk guild in 1461, “a third of this people” drew their livelihood from silk production.Footnote 30 Considering the population data proposed for the Tuscan capital in the fifteenth century, this figure represents not less than 12,000 to 13,000 individuals.Footnote 31
The Markets
Until the fourteenth century the raw material that fed the Italian silk industry came chiefly from areas located outside the Peninsula: from China, Persia, the Caspian Sea, different regions of the Byzantine Empire, including the islands of Chios and Rhodes, and Spain.Footnote 32 With the development of consumption and production recorded since the fifteenth century, however, the share of Italian silk out of the total used rose noticeably. From Sicily and Calabria, where it had, in fact, already been practiced for centuries, mulberry sericulture began to spread north, reaching Tuscany and Le Marche, the Po river valley, and even the hills of the Brianza and around Como, Verona, and Mantua, becoming an increasingly important activity for both landowners and peasant families.Footnote 33
These advances, as we shall see, were the result also of specific cultural choices supported by the governments of many Italian states. It has been estimated that as early as the beginning of the sixteenth century the silk produced in the country, some 400 to 425 tons, was sufficient to cover the needs of the entire Italian silk industry and that three-quarters of the total continued to arrive from the South, particularly from Calabria.Footnote 34 In his Descrittione di tutta Italia, written after 1530, Leandro Alberti estimated that the quantity obtained from this region was approximately equal to what was produced throughout the rest of the Peninsula, but he also does not fail to report the presence of mulberry trees in the Bolognese countryside and even around Vicenza, whose inhabitants, according to Alberti, gained “great profit” from silk.Footnote 35 Naturally, this does not mean that imports of raw silk from abroad had been completely stopped, not least because a share of the silk obtained in Italy was in turn exported, but the dependence of setaioli on the most distant markets had been decidedly reduced.Footnote 36
A different trend, and in many ways an opposite one, characterized the circulation of finished products. A part of the Italian silk textiles, in fact, was sold at retail in the producing cities, and this type of demand should not be underestimated. The need to satisfy the demand for luxury fabrics among the Aragonese of Naples, possibly at lower prices than those of imported silks, was among the reasons that pushed King Ferrante to promote the manufacture of silk in the city, and the same happened later with the Gonzaga family in Mantua.Footnote 37 In Milan, in the second half of the fifteenth century, the level of consumption by the ducal court was very high, so high as to decisively influence the performance of the local manufacturing sector.Footnote 38 But there is no doubt that larger quantities were intended for export and had a very wide diffusion radius. Inside Italy the main consumers of silks were Rome with the papal curia, the cities of the southern kingdom—Naples in the lead—and the seigneurial domains; outside the Peninsula they were the capitals of the national states and the great European and Mediterranean merchant centers.Footnote 39
North of the Alps a fundamental role was played by Geneva, where businessmen, largely from central and Atlantic Europe, converged as buyers. At least until the 1460s, in fact, it was in the city on Lake Léman that the most important of the continental trade fairs were held, providing a real clearing house for debt and credit relationships and, at the same time, an exchange center for gold and silver, in coins or in bars, and for every kind of luxury product.Footnote 40 The Medici bank and other Florentine companies, such as that of the Della Casa-Guadagni, operated there since 1420 and there built the bulk of their fortunes, some of them emanating directly from the silk business.Footnote 41 It is no coincidence that in merchant accounts, news about the supplying of silk to urban shops is sometimes accompanied by a clause stating that payment will be deferred until mules returning from Geneva had time to bring the profits from sold cloths, in the form of cash or letters of exchange, to the hands of the textile entrepreneurs.Footnote 42 Even in Genoa, the days when the caravans that left four times a year for Geneva returned were special: the fairs, as Jacques Heers once observed, gave a rhythm to the activities of the city’s setaioli.Footnote 43
But Italian silks also reached London, Bruges, and Paris, most passing through the Lyon fair, whose fortunes began in 1463 when King Louis XI, determined to develop an alternative economic pole to Geneva on French soil, gave foreign merchants very enticing concessions to induce them to move their business to the city on the Rhone. In Lyon as in Geneva luxury silks dominated the scene, primarily Italian velvets, satins, and damasks, which still in the mid-sixteenth century made up about 50 percent of all the products handled at the fairs.Footnote 44 Of considerable importance was the market represented by the Flemish lands of the Dukes of Burgundy, then in Habsburg hands, in which the traditional prevalence of products marketed by Lucca’s merchant entrepreneurs left an opening, after 1460, for the penetration of Florentine silk cloths.Footnote 45
Two other areas absorbed substantial quantities of silks from Italy. The first was the Iberian Peninsula, where Barcelona, Valencia, and Lisbon imported fabrics mainly from Genoa, Florence, and later from Naples, even if, starting from the second half of the fifteenth century, Italians—in particular, Genoese and Ligurian—themselves gave an essential boost to the development of local silk manufacturing in Valencia, Toledo, Cordoba, Seville, Malaga, and Granada.Footnote 46 The second area was the Levant, traditionally an important outlet for Venetian silks but where, after the Turkish conquest of Constantinople and the affirmation of Ottoman domination, the volume of exports from Florentine setaioli increased.Footnote 47
The Industry: Organization and Investment
As was the case with other textiles, the production of silk fabric was complex and required a strong organizational commitment. Unlike wool, cotton, and linen, which before being woven had to undergo a series of procedures necessary to obtain the woolen yarn, the raw silk arrived in the city in the form of a continuous thread, which greatly shortened the production cycle; nevertheless, the ultimate fabric still resulted from the work of different categories of craftsmen.Footnote 48 The earliest essential phase to be carried out was winding (incannatura)—possibly preceded by doubling (binatura), the coupling of two or more threads—through which the silk was transferred from skeins (matasse) to wooden spools wrapped with thread. Silk throwing (torcitura), a fundamental operation that made the thread more elastic, robust, and regular, followed immediately. From the end of the thirteenth century it was carried out using an innovative and ingenious machine, the mechanical torcitoio or silk-throwing machine, capable of reducing the necessary labor hours by fifty to a hundred times. Returned to the spools, the twisted yarn was delivered to dyers, who first cleansed it of the natural rubber with which it was still impregnated by washing it in warm water (a process called cocitura, or cooking) and then sent it on to the color baths. The manufacturing process ended with warping (orditura), the assembly of longitudinal warp threads on the warp-beam (subbio), an essential part of the loom (telaio), and then weaving (tessitura), destined to finally transform the semifinished product into silk cloth. While the doubling, winding, and warping were carried out by women “who had no clear professional status,” the other, more specialized phases were the reserve of men.Footnote 49
The system adopted to manage all these operations, at least from the second half of the fourteenth century, was what historians have described as “disseminated” or “decentralized” manufacturing.Footnote 50 That is, there were diverse workplaces scattered throughout the space, managed by their particular owners with lesser or greater degrees of autonomy and connected by the initiative and organizational skills of the textile entrepreneurs, the setaioli, who normally worked by forming firms or partnerships (compagnie) with other compagni. The sole owners of the raw silk, the worked product in its various stages, and the final product, the setaioli directed the transformation process at every moment. The heart of this “extended workshop” was the silk workshop (bottega di seta), which brought together the functions of an organizational center, a sorting warehouse for the semifinished product, and a sales point; the other workplaces of the staff involved in the actual productive transformation were connected to it.Footnote 51 This particular workshop configuration, which avoided the convergence of the work phases in a single location and made extensive use of the “putting out” system, was the answer to two very serious problems that the textile entrepreneur had to face: on the one hand, the difficulty of procuring enough capital to simultaneously manage the entire technological cycle; on the other, the risk of investing in an activity that was heavily dependent on foreign markets for the supply of raw materials and the sale of finished fabrics and, as such, subject to sudden fluctuations. In this way, at least, the investments necessary for the production of silk fabrics were divided, to some extent, between different economic actors.
The figures involved in silk manufacturing, however, remained huge and increased over time with the expansion of the market. That silk was big business is evident from the growing interest it aroused among the major mercantile families of the Italian cities; in fact, they entered more and more decisively into the sector, relying on their preexisting networks of economic relationships to obtain the best possible conditions for the supply of raw materials and the sale of their products. Interpenetrating more and more closely with large-scale trade and banking, the production of silks during the fifteenth century registered, in addition to clear quantitative growth, substantive change at the level of entrepreneurship and organization: “what at the beginning of the fourteenth century were only small artisanal workshops, characterized by their modest managerial level and only poorly connected with supra-regional markets, in the fifteenth century became capitalist enterprises with ample financial resources, directed by personnel well versed in the mechanisms of the circuits of international merchants.”Footnote 52 In Venice these men were initially recruited, above all, from among the Lucchese merchant entrepreneurs, owners of companies with capital over and beyond (sometimes by far) 10,000 ducats. Such were the companies of the Balbani, the De’ Cari, the Quarti, the Bernardi, and the Cenami, able to buy oriental or Spanish silks both in the city and in other ports and to open shops in the lagoon, at home, and even in Genoa or Bologna.Footnote 53 But representatives of large Venetian families such as the Contarini, Querini, and Soranzo were also deeply involved in the trafficking of raw materials.Footnote 54 In Florence, by contrast, Lucchese setaioli gave way more quickly to the city’s entrepreneurs, eager to invest their capital in the “new” industry: among these were the Medici, who in 1438 engaged capital of 4,200 florins in a silk workshop destined to remain in operation, with excellent results, until the bankruptcy of the Medici bank in 1494.Footnote 55 Spinelli, Antinori, Pitti, and Martelli also joined the ranks of the Medici and, from the last third of the fifteenth century, the Gondi, Ridolfi, Strozzi, Capponi, and Salviati, owners of large companies, specialized in the production of silk-and-gold cloths.Footnote 56
The evolution was similar in Genoa, where silk became the most important manufacturing sector in the fifteenth century and the one in which investments reached their highest levels. Often structured as partnerships between setaioli, who by virtue of their “art and industry” acted as administrators, and other unspecialized businessmen, who provided the bulk of the financing, individual Genoese silk enterprises came to invest amounts exceeding 10,000 lire.Footnote 57 Also striking, especially after the mid-fifteenth century, is the growing presence among the setaioli of representatives of noble families traditionally engaged in international trade and navigation such as the Spinola, Di Negro, Doria, and Grimaldi.Footnote 58
Entrepreneurs, Artisans, and Guilds
Growing mercantile and entrepreneurial strength often found expression in the creation of guilds (corporazioni) in the silk sector that were dominated by setaioli but made up of all those who cooperated in the production of the fabric, including sometimes the fabricators of silk workers’ tools and the craftsmen engaged in the production of the metal threads necessary for the weaving of auroseric textiles. When this was not possible, and separate guilds for the main categories of producers were formed, the setaioli still managed to secure preeminence over the other trade groups, albeit to varying degrees depending on place and time and not without tensions and conflicts.Footnote 59
A perfect example of the first typology is the guild of the Florentine setaioli, born as a membrum of a composite body, the Arte di Por Santa Maria. It grew in importance until it could gain hegemony over its “host” association, transforming it during the fifteenth century into a real silk guild. Although it is impossible, given the state of surviving legislative materials, to reconstruct the exact position of spinners (filatori), throwers (torcitori), cookers (cocitori), dyers (tintori), and warpers and weavers (orditori and tessitori) before 1335, the impression is that until the mid-fourteenth century they enjoyed some economic autonomy and some corporate status.Footnote 60 But the situation began to change soon after. In fact, with the reform of 1352, and especially with that of 1411, all those who for some reason cooperated in the creation of silk textiles, together with their employees, were forced to swear an oath to the setaioli-led guild and to promise to observe its laws. They were not recognized as members of the guild with full rights and, indeed, were not even required to matriculate; their status was that of simple subordinates (sottoposti) and thus they would always remain.Footnote 61
Less unambiguous, but substantially similar, was the situation in Genoa. Even there, according to the statutes of the Arte della seta of 1432, the various categories of producers were not allowed to form autonomous associations and their condition was characterized by a “complete and almost unconditional submission to the interests of entrepreneurs.”Footnote 62 The only ones to escape this fate were the dyers (probably because they had already been united in their own guild since the thirteenth century), who nonetheless had to defend themselves several times from attempts by the setaioli to incorporate them into their guild and from rules that tended to closely surveil their activities. Such were the provisions, for example, enacted in 1466 that authorized textile entrepreneurs to visit them in their shops to supervise the dyeing of the raw material and obliged the consuls of the silk guild to check very often that these guildsmen did not commit fraud. The story of the spinners is different still: from the early fifteenth century, they had insisted, through repeated “entreaties,” on the recognition of their legal autonomy, which, however, they did not receive until 1598.Footnote 63
We can ascribe to the second guild typology the arrangement of the Lucchese silk industry, characterized by the existence of a guild formed by the mercatores engaged in the production and marketing of textiles, the Ars Sendadorum, which was flanked by separate guilds for the main categories of producers: dyers, goldbeaters, and warpers.Footnote 64 Beginning in at least 1376, however, all details of the artisans’ activity were regulated by the statutes of the Corte dei mercanti, the peculiar civic institution that combined the functions of a commercial court, a merchant association, and an organ of control of the artisans' guilds, of which the half of the consuls and the majority of the councilors were chosen from among the “real merchants” of the silk industry.Footnote 65 The situation did not change in the following decades and, still at the end of the fifteenth century, the subjection of the producer organizations to the Curia mercatorum had to remain strong, as evidenced by the statutes of the Weavers’ Guild of 1482: meetings of the governing bodies of this guild were not valid if one of the Consuls of the merchants did not participate; its deliberations had to be approved in advance by the court; and its sentences could always be appealed to the mercantile curia.Footnote 66
The situation was very similar in Venice, where the presence of Lucchese entrepreneurs and workers was also decisive in this respect. Here, the first to be established, perhaps as early as the twelfth century, were the guilds of the dyers and the samitari, weavers engaged in the creation of a vast range of textiles, among which sciàmiti and auroseric cloths stood out. In 1347 the guild of the veluderi, craftsmen specializing in the weaving of velvets, joined these two associations, for which we possess the thirteenth-century statutes. In 1488 the two guilds of weavers united into one; in the same year, spinners also obtained the right to associate. In the meantime, at least from the mid-fourteenth century on, a guild of setaioli had formed, the Corte della seta, initially reserved for Lucchese setaioli only but later open also to Venetian silk entrepreneurs; from 1360 on, all those who for some reason participated in the production and marketing of textiles, including those already matriculated in their respective guilds, had the obligation to be inscribed as sottoposti. This regulation is already indicative of the relationship existing between the entrepreneurial and the artisanal components of the industry, but what seems to distinguish the Venetian situation from the Lucchese one is the greater autonomy of the producers’ guilds, wider in the case of the oldest of the associations and, in any case, at least partially guaranteed by the fact that all the guilds of the sector, including the Corte della seta, were subject to the supervision of the Consuls of the merchants, a magistracy made up of individuals chosen from among the ranks of the Maggior Consiglio and less dominated by setaioli than was true of the Court of merchants in Lucca.Footnote 67
Silk, Employment, and Wealth
In a 2019 article on the wool industry in the cities of late medieval Italy, Giuliano Pinto again suggests, with a variety of examples, the theme of the awareness that the ruling classes of cities and states had of the economic and social function that this activity performed. A strong and developed wool sector—this the leitmotif of the testimonials presented—generated well-being, wealth, power, honor, and good reputation, while weakness, crisis, or lack in this fundamental sector impoverished a city’s inhabitants and often forced them to look for work in other places, with very negative general consequences.Footnote 68 I cite this study to highlight the fact that in the fifteenth century similar declarations began to appear, only now in reference to the silk industry: a sign of an ever clearer awareness, by public authorities and by entrepreneurs, of silk’s growing importance. In 1439, for example, the potential inherent in the development of this industry was already clear to the rulers of Siena, where the production of silk cloths was just beginning, as is attested to by this municipal deliberation:
In the first place, considering how much silk manufacturing is honored and brings great convenience and utility to the cities where it has developed (this being deduced by experience from how little has so far been done in our own city), it appears an honorable and very useful thing to ensure that the said silk manufacturing grows and increases as much as possible.Footnote 69
The same concepts, but colored with evident pride for results already achieved, reappear a few decades later in Florence, where the consuls of the Por Santa Maria guild stressed “the honor, fame, and great utility that derive to our city from the said guild and especially from the silk member (membro della seta) and how it has expanded and grown, surpassing every other city in the world.”Footnote 70 These ideas were also current elsewhere, for example, in Milan, where in 1490 the city's silk and gold merchants presented a petition to Duke Gian Galeazzo Sforza, which began with these words: “Your Lordship knows how useful and convenient the production of gold, silver, and silk cloths that is done in this city of Milan is for the whole city and especially for Your Lordship and for your income, and thus the merchants of this sector do everything possible to maintain its reputation and to carry it out properly and fairly.”Footnote 71
Returning to Florence, it is worth mentioning a passage that highlights the “social” function of silk manufacturing—that is, that of creating jobs, thus guaranteeing the subsistence of workers. The statutes of the silk guild again observe “how much the silk guild in this city has grown and continues to grow, so much so that by virtue of its manufactures the people receive a great deal of support and help.”Footnote 72 And not so different is what the rectors of the Venetian silk guild wrote in 1529, aware of “how many souls live thanks to this activity.”Footnote 73 From this perspective it is not difficult to understand why in 1448, when rejecting the request put forward by the local setaiolo Giovanni Triadano to move to Milan, the Genoese authorities countered with “the advantages that the city obtains” from his activity and, precisely, with the fact that “it certainly provides work for more than 300 persons.”Footnote 74
It is, in the end, from the Ligurian capital that perhaps the most comprehensive and authoritative comment on the role of the silk industry in economic development comes. In 1514, Doge Ottaviano Fregoso exalted its importance and usefulness for the community, evoking its reverberating advantages for “trade, gabelles, and private individuals both in the city and outside, to the point that it could be said that this activity is the spirit and soul of our republic.”Footnote 75
The Intervention of Public Powers
Fregoso's praise was not only words. In Renaissance Italy, in fact, the silk sector was probably the one in which institutional intervention proved to be the most determined and effective—starting from the action of the states and guilds that set for themselves the objective of introducing manufacturing where it did not really yet exist, or deeply reorganizing its structure, or simply developing particular types of products. Examples are numerous and make up a chronology that affects, over two centuries, cities of different sizes and importance, located in every area of the Peninsula. Even if we limit ourselves to the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries, the list remains very substantial: Siena in 1438; Milan in 1442 and 1457; Catanzaro in 1445; Turin in 1447, 1449, 1453, 1463, and 1515; Perugia in 1437 and 1459; Brescia in 1444 and 1527; Ferrara in 1462 and 1466; Florence in 1463 and 1476; Naples in 1465, 1474, and 1475; Pinerolo in 1481; Messina in 1486 and 1493; Cesena in 1491; Reggio Emilia in 1502; Cuneo in 1506; Udine in 1515; and Mantua in 1523 and 1524.Footnote 76
The cities that saw the best results from their industrial development projects in the fifteenth century—so much so that silk cloth production remained the main manufacturing activity there for centuries—were Milan, Ferrara and Naples. In Milan, where the manufacture of light articles (belts, cords, bonnets, purses, ribbons, and fringes) had existed since the thirteenth century, the production of more complex and precious fabrics like damasks, velvets, and brocades took off only in 1442, when Duke Filippo Maria Visconti signed a contract to start the weaving of silk textiles with Pietro di Bartolo, a Florentine with pro-Visconti sympathies. A group of fifteen to twenty from Florence but also from Venice, among them spinners, weavers, dyers and other craftsmen, arrived in the city and accepted the assignment in exchange for substantial funding and a long series of concessions, including, remarkably, authorization to work in semimonopoly conditions for ten years and tax exemptions for the import of silk, dyestuffs, gold and silver yarn, and the tools of the trade.Footnote 77 This was exactly the right choice, and it was helped along by the evolution of demand, which attracted weavers and other craftsmen from Florence, Genoa, Pavia, Venice, and Bergamo to the city in increasing numbers. In these years, local setaioli had a generally modest profile, although some initiatives stand out: for example, the case of the company led by Leonardo Lanteri, an enterprising setaiolo who included among his financiers the Genoese Filippo Spinola and Enrico Picheti but also the very powerful Milanese Lampugnano family.Footnote 78 The situation, however, changed within a few decades: between 1459 and 1461 the sector was organized in guilds, and by the end of the century it appeared to be characterized by great vitality, especially in the production of silk-and-gold textiles. Though concealed under the label of “silk weavers,” of whom lists exist in 1460, 1481, and 1494, we find in many cases representatives of the main merchant families of the city (Cusani, Dugnano, Carcano, Pusterla, Resta, Marliani, Vimercate, Landriano, Lampugnano, Grassi, and Biglia) coming from different backgrounds—woolens, fustians, construction, and lumber—but having become converts to the silk business.Footnote 79
In Ferrara, the vehicle for the take-off of a high-quality silk industry was the Genoese weaver Urbano Trincherio, well known to authorities in the Ligurian city who had condemned him in 1452 for moving to Catalonia with some companions and then returning to his homeland to supply them with work equipment.Footnote 80 Ten years after this unpleasant adventure, the craftsman was again far from Genoa and, along with three other weavers, he obtained a contract from Duke Borso d’Este for the manufacture of “silk cloths of all sorts and in multiple colors, as well as gold and silver brocades in tutta perfezione.” In this case too the agreements provided for a series of privileges, including the availability of a home for living and a workspace, a loan of 300 florins for the manufacturing plant, and exemption from taxation. In return, the four men had to ensure the activity of twenty looms, which in fact were in operation five years later, by which point, thanks to new agreements and privileges, dyers, battilori, and various other expert craftsmen had arrived in the city.Footnote 81 A significant aspect of the economic policy of the small state in the Po Valley was its “liberal” approach to the spread of silk manufacturing into the territories of dominion. In fact, in contrast to a generalized attitude according to which the monopoly for processing luxury cloth was reserved for the center and not the periphery, Duke Ercole I granted concessions and sureties that facilitated the birth of a silk industry in Modena and subsequently, because of the personal interest of Lucrezia Borgia, in Reggio Emilia, where it would become its main production activity in the modern era.Footnote 82
Of great interest too are the events that transformed Naples into, to use the title of a book by Rosalba Ragosta, a “city of silk.”Footnote 83 Between the mid-1460s and mid-1470s, King Ferrante of Aragon, taking advice from a counselor of the caliber of Diomede Carafa, entered into three contracts with as many craftsmen and businessmen: in 1465 with the Venetian Marino da Cataponte, “master of silk cloths,” hired to produce velvets, satins, and damasks with five looms; in 1475 with the Genoese merchant Pietro de’ Conversi, who undertook to recruit a number of craftsmen capable of starting up the production of light fabrics numbering between five and fifty pieces per year; and in 1474 with the Florentine Francesco di Nerone, who was meant to make brocades and auroseric clothes of any type for ten years.Footnote 84 The economic rewards were numerous and they were accompanied, for Francesco di Nerone and his possible partners, by a grant of Neapolitan citizenship, immunity for offenses committed extra regnum, and a certain degree of civil and criminal jurisdiction over all their dependent workers. The very wealthy Neapolitan entrepreneurs Loise and Francesco Coppola, already engaged in a similar operation aimed at implanting high-level wool manufacturing in the kingdom, also participated in the venture, which had an estimated cost of at least 10,000 ducats.Footnote 85 In 1477 the first nucleus of the guild was formed, made up of everyone who took part in the creation of silk textiles, and the following year detailed rules were promulgated to protect the quality of the products, whose range was already very wide: a distinction that would be maintained and strengthened in the following century.Footnote 86
The three cases on which I have focused, even in their historical specificity, present a scenario in common: the decisive role played by public authorities convinced that manufacturing could create employment and well-being; the use of contracts with individual specialists, usually foreigners; and the exchange between the authorities granting more or less extensive privileges to new arrivals and their commitment to activate a certain number of looms and/or produce a specific quota of textiles. In the silk sector, therefore, a model of integration between public initiative and private competences had emerged that would lead to the birth or take-off of new production activities.
Supplying and Protecting the Industry
Industries, whether nascent or already established, had to be supplied and protected, and this necessity once again inspired, in a number of states, a series of similar measures aimed primarily at reducing the dependence of the industry on silk of distant origin. If we exclude the early initiative of the Commune of Modena, which already in its statutes of 1327 ordered “for public utility” the planting of at least three mulberry trees in every fenced place around the city,then the first measures inspired by the fifteenth-century boom in luxury consumption were taken at Florence in 1441.Footnote 87 At this time, mulberry sericulture had recently arrived in Valdinievole, introduced into the territory of Pescia, together with the white mulberry, by Francesco Buonvicini.Footnote 88 But the Florentine government aimed to acclimatize the silkworm throughout its whole domain and to this end forced landowners to plant five mulberries and five almond trees every year until they reached a minimum of fifty for each type, entrusting the supervision of the application of the law to the Consuls of Por Santa Maria and to the “rectors of the countryside [contado] and district [distretto].”Footnote 89 At the same time, the government concerned itself with attracting, with the promise of a twenty-year tax exemption, personnel able to carry out the silk reeling in Tuscany.Footnote 90 Among those who followed the government's wishes was Giovanni Rucellai, who had three to four thousand mulberry trees planted on his property in Poggio a Caiano.Footnote 91 Already in the mid-fifteenth century, a reliable estimate puts the silk produced in the state at 3.5 tons, an amount that would have grown quite slowly—so much so that still in the early sixteenth century, silk manufacturing in Florence depended on silk imports from southern Italy for 90 percent of its raw material.Footnote 92
The Tuscan example was later followed by Duke Galeazzo Maria Sforza, who in 1470 invited the landowners of Milan, and of the villages and the rural area immediately adjacent to the city (the Corpi Santi), to plant five mulberry trees for every one hundred pertiche of land. Toward the end of the century, his successor, Ludovico il Moro—whose coat of arms bore an image of this plant—made a personal contribution to the development of mulberry sericulture by creating a full nursery in his farmstead La Sforzesca, located a few miles from Vigevano.Footnote 93 Meanwhile, the Dukes of Mantua were also showing interest in sericulture, acquiring three hundred mulberry seedlings in the countryside of Bologna, Vicenza, and Pescia.Footnote 94 In short, new cultivation was beginning to take on a clearly strategic character, to the point that at the end of the fifteenth century in Vicenza and Verona, for example, export bans on tree species that constituted nourishment for silkworms were issued; at the same time a kind of “mulberry diplomacy” developed, as is shown by the attempts (albeit unsuccessful) that Milanese ambassadors made in 1488 to obtain, first from the Consiglio generale of Vicenza and then personally from the Doge of Venice, the coveted plants for transplantation at home.Footnote 95
Another essential tool for guaranteeing the development of silk manufacturing was a customs policy—generally inspired by the protomercantilist principle of prohibiting the introduction of cloths that would potentially compete with those produced locally—of encouraging the import of silk and auxiliary materials (like precious metals, dyestuffs, and equipment) and discouraging their export. In Genoa, for example, during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, no luxury fabrics destined for export ever paid a duty and the same was true of the gold and silver used in weaving the richest cloths; even some of the raw silk, in this specific case from Vicenza and Verona, enjoyed a reduced import tariff.Footnote 96 Conversely, since 1423 there was a ban on introducing silk fabrics made outside the borders of the state, with some exceptions (for example, sendals and taffetas), unless they came from overseas territories subject to the republic's authority.Footnote 97 Likewise, in Florence in 1406, the gabelles on the importation of gold and silver into the city were abolished, while two years later, in order to prevent the reexportation of silk present inside the Tuscan territorial state, entry tariffs on various types of it were standardized and those on its commercial transport elevated. A peculiar system of deterrence for the importation of prohibited fabrics was the decision, reached in 1426, to hit those who used municipal galleys for the transport of “foreign cloths” with the heavy penalties that had been provided for failure to comply with the customs provisions of 1393 relating to woolen cloth.Footnote 98 In Venice, the goal of protecting local production led the republic to formulate a ban on importing silk from abroad already in 1366, though it is certain that the fine fabrics of Florence, Genoa, Milan, and later Naples bypassed these controls without too much difficulty. It is therefore not surprising that antismuggling laws concerning these articles were repeatedly promulgated throughout the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.Footnote 99
Nor were silk and silk fabrics the only goods subject to restrictions. This category also included equipment, in addition to men, naturally, which we discuss below. In Lucca, the statutes of the Corte dei mercanti of 1376—“to ensure that the silk trade does not expand abroad”—prescribed that “no person, of any condition whatsoever, dare to bring or to have brought out of the Lucchese district any tool or device suitable for working sendals or silk cloths or other any thing belonging to the craft of weaving.”Footnote 100 In Florence, too, from the time of the earliest development of silk production, the Guild of Por Santa Maria had prohibited, under penalty of 100 florins, extracting telarium vel telaria, liccios et seu licciaturas, ferros, tabulas, and operas from the city and granting those who had already transferred the tools out one year to destroy them so that no one else could use them. And each month of delay past the scheduled deadline would further result in an additional fine of 100 florins.Footnote 101 In Genoa in 1452 the Doge Pietro Fregoso established—on the occasion of the aforementioned dealings with Urbano Trincherio—that any setaiolo, weaver, dyer, or spinner who left Genoa or who without the permission of the government exported instrumenta et alia necessaria ad exercitium dictarum artium would incur the extremely onerous fine of 400 ducats and that the same penalty would apply to those who provided the offenders with advice, favor, or help.Footnote 102 Exemplary, again in this regard, is the story of the diffusion, starting from Bologna, of the circular silk-throwing machine (torcitoio). Developed in Lucca in a human-powered version, it had long since evolved in Bologna into a silk mill, such that it was specifically claimed as one of Bologna's important civic creations.Footnote 103 Thus the accusation made in 1537 against two artisans for having transferred this “versatile machine that spins around by force of water,” or in any case the techniques needed to reconstruct it elsewhere (as one of the two accused was a carpenter), was exceptionally grave.Footnote 104
Increasing and Protecting Human Capital
When presenting the new statutes of their guild to Galeazzo Maria Sforza in 1481, the silk and gold merchants explained that it was necessary to adapt the corporate legislation to the changes that had occurred in the fifteen years since the approval of their old statutes, noting in particular that they were now much more “educated and expert” in the exercise of their business and therefore “know better what is necessary at the present time,” things they could not have imagined at the time because they were “new” to the trade.Footnote 105 In a highly specialized activity like the manufacturing of luxury silks, the need to have an adequately formed entrepreneurial class was certainly important, but this need was perhaps even stronger in the case of their workers: reliance on an abundant supply of qualified workers meant not only guaranteeing the good health of the sector and the high quality of its products but also stabilizing wages. For these reasons, the goal of guilds and governments alike was to increase the immigration of specialized personnel and, at the same time, avoid any dispersal of productive forces. In the effort to discourage transfers outside the city or the state, though, it was not only demographic matters that were at stake but also the need to prevent the loss or leakage of valuable knowledge, whose dissemination could have triggered or widened the dangerous phenomenon of competition and the related loss of market share for local products.
Following a diaspora in 1314, for example, the Republic of Lucca decreed that emigrants could be killed wherever they were found and incentivized this by offering special criminal bounties.Footnote 106 And just when the boom in the production of silk cloth was beginning, and at the behest of local setaioli, the Florentine government approved a similar law that provided beheading and property confiscation as penalties for those who went to practice silk-related activities outside the city and a fine of 1,000 florins for any who encouraged it.Footnote 107 In the second half of the fifteenth century, Genoa also tried to counter the phenomenon of the emigration of skilled workers by implementing progressively stricter legislation, including a combination of pecuniary penalties, exclusion from the guild, and corporal punishments, until at last, in 1529, the city adopted the Lucchese solution: offering bounties of 50 to 200 ducats to anyone who killed one of these industrial fugitives.Footnote 108
That this was not only a matter of threats is shown by references to the dangers run and the hardships suffered, which can sometimes be retraced in legislation in favor of the artisans who made it to and were heartily welcomed in their new place of work, and occasionally in associated judicial documents.Footnote 109 Such is the case of the 1474 process in Bologna against Cosimo Dini, a Florentine resident of the city for some time, found guilty of having led “certain persons from here to Florence to do work, prohibited outside Bologna's jurisdiction, relating to silk manufacturing.” In fact, from the trial documentation, we learn how at least six workers had left the Bologna area with Dini: three female weavers, two spinners, and a crisper or curler (increspatore). Dini was sentenced in absentia to the Commune's criminal ban, with a bounty of 200 gold ducats, while the craftsmen who had followed him were invited to return to the city within a month’s time; if they did not, they too would fall under the ban. Further, an image of the guilty party, with an indication of the crime he had committed, was then to be painted in public places in the city as a mark of infamy.Footnote 110
The reaction of the Commune of Bologna to the Cosimo Dini affair shows that, beyond the facts in the particular case, the silk entrepreneurs and government alike were very worried about its general implications: if, in fact, all the emigrants were specialists in the production of veils it could be surmised that the exported know-how covered the entire production process for this valuable fabric. This deduction is borne out by Florentine sources, from which it appears that thanks to the teaching of Dini, who ultimately operated not less than thirty looms and taught his skills to local apprentices, the earliest foundations were laid for specialized production destined to develop there in the following century.Footnote 111 The exclusivity, or at least the preeminence, of Bolognese silk manufacturers in the creation of silk veils was thus put concretely in doubt and this sounded a special alarm, because what had left the city was not just a group of skilled workers but the production secrets regarding one of the most lucrative articles for the local silk industry.
But a clenched fist was not the only option: threats and clemency alternated, especially because the real goal, once the departures had taken place, was to bring the emigrants back to their homeland; in fact it was crucial to limit the damage that could result from the dissemination of their skills, not to mention that there were times when the demand for skilled labor definitely exceeded the supply. The flip side of repressive legislation, then, was flexibility or leniency toward those who returned. In Florence, to bring back entrepreneurs and skilled workers who had left the city, in 1429 the Consigli della Repubblica offered them a period of immunity from debts they had contracted and the possibility of extinguishing those debts in a facilitated and deferred way.Footnote 112 Measures of similar tenor were repeated several times during the fifteenth century and sometimes, as in 1468, these were motivated by very precise information about what categories of skill had left the city and their destinations.Footnote 113
Taken as a whole the strategies and interventions put in place failed to stem the tide of moving labor and knowledge, as evidenced by the widespread presence of the phenomenon of cloth imitation and its impact on the development of the whole sector—so much so that city governments and guilds ended up excluding from the prohibitions against emigration a small number of places, which together constituted something like a “a free-trade area for labor.” This included at least Lucca, Venice, Florence, and Genoa in the fifteenth century and extended even farther in the following century.Footnote 114
Conclusion
Thanks to the development from the fifteenth century of a very wide and articulated demand, which affected both Italy and a large part of Europe, albeit in different ways, the Peninsula became the largest European producer of silk textiles and yarns. Taken together, Italy’s various “cities of silk,” while focusing mainly on the most elaborate and expensive fabrics, were able to put on the market a truly varied repertoire of fabrics that responded to the different needs and spending power of consumers. The growth of the silk industry was supported by the significant spread of mulberry trees, which in many Italian areas changed the systems of crop organization and the agricultural landscape itself, generating significant income for farmers and landowners. But it is in the urban centers that the impact of the new activity was most significant, creating employment for a large contingent of workers, to a good extent endowed with a high level of skill and specialization, and strengthening the wider textile sector where the wool industry was undergoing fluctuations. The production of silk cloths attracted a growing volume of capital and interpenetrated with the spheres of banking and finance, finding the most effective distribution channels in the major centers of international trade and in particular in the major fairs of Geneva and Lyon. Moreover, an essential component of success was the intervention of governments, which, increasingly aware of the potential of manufacturing for generating employment and wealth, supported the growth of the silk industry (and sometimes its very birth) with overlapping measures of economic policy. Not all the measures adopted had the same effectiveness—a case in point being attempts to limit the mobility of men and technical knowledge—but less successful policies were modified or abandoned.
Throughout the Renaissance and beyond, silk was a big business for capable entrepreneurs, but it was also a “strategic” activity, to which many states entrusted the essential task of strengthening their economies.
