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Datini had made his money as a merchant whose trade extended from England in the West to the Caspian Sea in the east.³⁰² He also left his house to the city, Palazzo Datini, today an archive and museum.

Workers restoring Datini’s house in 1870 discovered a hidden storeroom under the stairs containing more than 150,000 letters, 500 account books and ledgers, 300 deeds of partnership, 400 insurance policies, as well as countless other documents including bills of exchange and checks.³⁰³ These have proved a rich trove for historians analyzing the origins of merchant capitalism in late medieval Europe.

Datini represents a turning point in the long history of the market. He was a great textual innovator, applying new forms of meaning to realize fundamentally new relations of sociable interest, new meanings of exchange and in the market. Datini may not always have been the first to use each of these textual forms, but he was certainly the first to use them in such a systematic way to create a widely dispersed commercial empire.

Historians characterize this time of transition as the moment of emergence of the “sedentary merchant.”³⁰⁴ Before Datini’s time, medieval merchants had traveled to the fair, selling their wares in person, in an immediately present configuration of object, body, and speech. Datini, however, created an expansive trading system transposing the textual and object forms at a distance. Meaning across space and time, this was a new play of the virtual and the real, using text as a transpositional mediator for the extension of the virtual and the real into each other. In so doing, he also extended the transpositional function of alienation, creating another step where the abstractions of exchange were further detached from the immediate, useable physicality of objects and the embodied personages of their owners.

The objects with which Datini dealt were wool, silk, dye, spices, dinnerware. He also traded in bodies in the form of slaves, as well as essentially ideational items such as maps and religious pictures.³⁰⁵ These various products were created and then traded just for the rich, the privileged few who could at that time participate in the market. These were people who, in feudal society, could extract rents from agricultural serfs whose lands they owned, and so had money to spend. Meanwhile, the mass of society lived largely outside of the market, subject to the hierarchical compulsions of feudalism, the direct rule of the lord over his “domain.”³⁰⁶

In order to maintain a virtual exchange relation over space-time, a new textual artifact was used, the bill of exchange. Here is one, from the Datini Archive:

In the name of God, 5th February 1410.

Pay by this first letter … to Guircardo Catani, four hundred and eighty three lire, twelve soldi, five denari … equivalent to 617 francs … Make good a payment and pay into the account of Barolino de Nicolao Bartolini of Paris …

Antonio di Neve di Montpelier, greetings.

This particular bill is of enormous historical significance because it is the first to include an endorsement on the back: “I, Gherado Cattani, agreed that the aforementioned money is to be paid to Iacopo Aceptanti.”³⁰⁷ The exchange value, in other words, was passed on to a third party in another trade. In this way, the distance of the exchange abstraction had been further attenuated.

It was another small step to issue checks and to become a bank, which Datini also established beside his trading enterprise. The Medicis of Florence went on to do this on a much larger scale over the course of the fifteenth century.³⁰⁸ In the monetization of trade debts in the later part of the fourteenth century, concludes Gardiner, lie the origins of the modern market economy.³⁰⁹

In order to map people and objects across time and space into new configurations of interest, the “sedentary merchant” required new textual architectures. The bill of exchange was just one. Another was the partnership agreement, establishing parameters of trust for the managers of the holding companies that Datini established, and the branch offices in Genoa, Catalonia, Majorca, and Valencia.³¹⁰ Still another was the ledger, a record of accounts taking its most rigorous analytical form in double-entry bookkeeping.³¹¹

These elaborate textual forms were designed to maintain a balance of solidary and antagonistic interests. In one moment of their meaning, they expressed solidary interests of a kind that are a minimal basis for sociality, a level of trust between partners and traders in the complementary mesh of their differential interests.

But the system of differential interest worked in apprehensive expectation of mistrust and antagonism, and anticipating assault from every direction. We learn a lot about the emotional economy of the trader from Datini’s prodigious letter writing. He was a man who was always “scolding his employees.”³¹² He was perpetually “intolerant, discontented, dissatisfied.” His letters were full of orders, disappointments, “accusations of incompetence” and “angry tirades.”³¹³ He was ever worried about risk: theft, piracy, highway robbery, fraud. He was plagued by “constant anxieties and guilt.”³¹⁴ Such tensions are intrinsic to the conflicted sociability that is the exchange relationship. Datini was discovering them for the first time, becoming in the process a new kind of person, the commercial man.

Datini’s guilt came with good reason, because he was always treading a fine line when it came to the sin of usury, charging “interest” on credit, making money out of money itself. “Interest” is a symptomatic word. The way in which bills of exchange avoided such a sin was through a fiction for the faithful – differential exchange rates, profit hidden in the pretense of equivalence.

“In the name of God and profit,” the accounts writer was required to head each new page in the ledger, as if to reassure the parties of their compatibility.³¹⁵ The final extirpation of Datini’s possible sins, should they prove on judgment day to have been ill-gotten, was to bequest his gains to the poor of Prato.

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³⁰² Giampiero Nigro, 2010a, “Francesco and the Datini Company of Florence in the Trading System,” pp. 229–48 in Francesco Di Marco Datini: The Man and the Merchant, edited by G. Nigro, Florence: Firenze University Press, p. 241.

³⁰³ Iris Origo, 1957, The Merchant of Prato: Francesco Di Marco Datini, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, p. xii.

³⁰⁴ N.S.B. Gras, 1939, Business and Capitalism: An Introduction to Business History, New York: F.S. Crofts and Company, pp. 67–92; Robert S. Lopez, 1976, The Commercial Revolution of the Middle Ages, 950–1350, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, pp. 106–11; Sophus A. Reinert and Robert Fredona, 2017, “Merchants and the Origins of Capitalism,” Working Paper 18–021, Cambridge, MA: Harvard Business School.

³⁰⁵ Michele Cassandro, 2010, “Aspects of the Life and Character of Francesco Di Marco Datini,” pp. 3–52 in Francesco Di Marco Datini: The Man and the Merchant, edited by G. Nigro, Florence: Firenze University Press, pp. 12, 15; Iris Origo, 1957, The Merchant of Prato: Francesco Di Marco Datini, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, pp. 53–57, 87–91.

³⁰⁶ Marc Bloch, 1939 [1962], Feudal Society, London: Routledge and Kegan Paul; Perry Anderson, 1974a, Passages from Antiquity to Feudalism, London: New Left Books; Perry Anderson, 1974b, Lineages of the Absolutist State, London: New Left Books.

³⁰⁷ Giampiero Nigro, 2010b, “The Banking Company,” pp. 515–28 in Francesco Di Marco Datini: The Man and the Merchant, edited by G. Nigro, Florence: Firenze University Press, p. 520.

³⁰⁸ Raymone de Roover, 1963, The Rise and Decline of the Medici Bank: 1397–1494, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

³⁰⁹ Geoffrey W. Gardiner, 2004, “The Primacy of Trade Debts in the Development of Money,” pp. 128–72 in Credit and State Theories of Money: The Contributions of A. Mitchell Innes, edited by L.R. Wray, Cheltenham: Edward Elgar, pp. 140–41.

³¹⁰ Giampiero Nigro, 2010a, “Francesco and the Datini Company of Florence in the Trading System,” pp. 229–48 in Francesco Di Marco Datini: The Man and the Merchant, edited by G. Nigro, Florence: Firenze University Press, pp. 231, 238–39.

³¹¹ N.S.B. Gras, 1939, Business and Capitalism: An Introduction to Business History, New York: F.S. Crofts and Company, pp. 114–19; Giampiero Nigro, 2010b, “The Banking Company,” pp. 515–28 in Francesco Di Marco Datini: The Man and the Merchant, edited by G. Nigro, Florence: Firenze University Press. p. 523.

³¹² Giampiero Nigro, 2010a, “Francesco and the Datini Company of Florence in the Trading System,” pp. 229–48 in Francesco Di Marco Datini: The Man and the Merchant, edited by G. Nigro, Florence: Firenze University Press, p. 426.

³¹³ Michele Cassandro, 2010, “Aspects of the Life and Character of Francesco Di Marco Datini,” pp. 3–52 in ibid., pp. 12–13.

³¹⁴ Iris Origo, 1957, The Merchant of Prato: Francesco Di Marco Datini, New York: Alfred A. Knopf, p. xvii.

³¹⁵ Ibid., p. 52.

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Kalantzis, Mary, and Bill Cope. 2020. Adding Sense: Context and Interest in a Grammar of Multimodal Meaning. Cambridge UK: Cambridge University Press. pp. 284–287. https://doi.org/10.1017/9781108862059

Francesco Datini’s Bills of Exchange §AS2.4.1a