CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2014
| Author | Arany, Krisztina |
|---|---|
| Title | Florentine Families in Hungary in the First Half of the Fifteenth Century |
| Summary | The study of the activities of Florentine merchants in diverse geographical regions of medieval Europe looks back on a long historiographic tradition. However, for a number of reasons, in this context east Central Europe has mostly been considered a target area of lesser importance by scholars. The present research confirms that, although Hungary did not belong to the main targets of Florentine business interests, studying it, provides a challenging possibility to survey in multiple ways the social and economic strategies of highly skilled Italian merchants and their adaptation to different regional situations. The dissertation proposes the analysis of the economic activity and social strategies of the Florentines investing and working in the Hungarian kingdom in the first half of the fifteenth century on two levels: a quantitative and a “micro” level, the latter in the form of case studies. In the dissertation, rather than study single merchant, I concentrate on families and even multiple generations in fortunate cases, based on the rich set of archival information (from the data of the Florentine Catasto of 1427 up to information drawn from the scattered Hungarian sources) included in the Prosophographic Database (see Appendix 1. of the Dissertation). Florentine businessmen played a notable role in the Hungarian royal financial administration and in the commercial life of the country in the first half of the fifteenth century. The management of royal monopolies however required their prolonged presence in the country and their regular interaction with both the royal court and, in the case of second-level “officers” of the royal monopolies, also with members of the local nobility and citizenship. In the course of the research aimed at investigating these businessmen’s economic and social background back in Florence in order to identify the business circles interested in such long term Hungarian business dealings, their possible motivations and finally, the financial potential needed to embark upon such activity in Hungary. Also trade activity was addressed in the dissertation mainly by focusing on the background, business network and transactions of the three Florentine companies with seat in Buda. Also the types of transactions were analyzed and features of crediting were investigated in the dissertation. This region was also targeted intensively by Upper German tradesmen. Their presence and activity in Hungary has been thoroughly investigated by both Hungarian and German researchers. Nevertheless, the question of their attitude towards Florentine businessmen in Hungary has never been addressed in detail although based on a few bits of information; it has been labeled “competitive”. The research presented in this dissertation, therefore, also addresses the connections between these two major business diasporas, focusing particularly on Buda. In this respect, the question becomes extremely interesting since it deals with the interaction between these two ethnic entities in an environment which remained “foreign” for them both. Thus, Buda must also be considered and reassessed as the only centre in Central Europe where the two most prominent foreign diasporas interested in regional long distance trade established themselves permanently on a long term basis. The analysis of the main factors of integration was carried out in form. For Florentines living in urban environments, all the related details such as the possession of a house, the acquisition of citizenship or any other information about marriage or about their participation in the everyday life of urban society may provide hints to their intention to settle permanently in a town. In the very few cases of ennoblement, the relation of businessmen to the king and the types of services rendered to Sigismund were surveyed. Finally, as the closing chapter (Chapter 6) shows, the presence of Florentines exerted its influence in various ways, but the migration of skilled and unskilled craftsmen towards the Tuscan city, which I shortly introduced in the last chapter, is a surprising element as it is rarely documented, particularly not in such details. From the very isolated information, however, vague evidences of solidarity and co-operation among the Hungarians in Florence can be assumed, although it never matched the extent of solidarity among Germans, with its sophisticated organizational forms around lay confraternities. In fact, in a subsequent period, apparently the German speaking immigrants coming from Hungary tended to join the institutions of Germans in the Tuscan city, and this leads to the conclusion that such German speaking persons from Hungary may be hidden among the householders identified as Germans also in the Florentine Catasto of 1427. This phenomenon also led to another, completely new point, the question of levels of self-identification of members of the multiethnic and multilingual communities of Central Europe. The particular interest in this question, in my understanding, is provided by the foreign environment, in which these Central-European immigrants defined themselves, because this foreign context lacked an important aspect, the point/points of reference which the homeland multiethnic community provided to clearly establish the position of the people in the local context. |
| Supervisor | Nagy, Balázs |
| Department | Medieval Studies PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2014/mphark01.pdf |
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