Niccolò Acciaiuoli was one of the most powerful merchant bankers of fourteenth-century Italy. He was also a shrewd politician between the two different, but closely related, cities of Florence and Naples, the latter of which was under Angevin rule when Niccolò was appointed Gran Siniscalco of the kingdom. This explains why his life was balanced between businesses and a coveted noble lifestyle. This book, which follows an international conference held in Florence in 2019, is especially focused on his person and his time, with the result that Boccaccio and the Certosa del Galluzzo become supporting figures.
After the biography of Francesco Paolo Tocco, edited in 2001, we know many things about Acciaiuoli and his family. These essays try to understand this family by fitting it within the political, economic, and religious context of that period. This period was characterized by repeated wars and famines, the bankruptcies of the Bardi, Peruzzi, and Acciaiuoli companies in the middle of the forties and, finally, the Black Plague of 1347–48. Niccolò's life was obviously affected by all these catastrophes, but he was also able to take advantage of them, using the ecclesiastical immunity granted by the project of the Certosa to regain his confiscated properties (through some fiduciaries precisely quoted in Laura De Angelis's essay); installing a feudal regime in the kingdom of Naples and the Peloponnesian area (Morea), that his descendants extended up to Athens. This remains still relatively unknown, as Claudia Tripodi demonstrates and points out in her essay.
William Caferro rightly recalls the wrong perception of some anglophone historiography about the distinction between the Italian bankers and merchants and the feudal lords. Acciaiuoli is a clear example of the overlap among those fields, but he also looked at wars—the classical domain for a nobleman—with his merchant's eyes, as an avenue for business. Like many other sovereigns in Europe, Niccolò founded a Neapolitan chivalry order, the Holy Spirit or the Knot, and commanded mercenary troops and hired warships. He also made use of the ecclesiastical members of his family to strengthen his power in Florence and Greece.
The religious and diocesan situation in Florence during the fourteenth century is covered by Francesco Salvestrini's and Lorenzo Tanzini's essays. They examine the phenomenon of the Osservanze among the Mendicant friars; the renewed tension towards the hermit life; the inurbamento of the traditional monastic orders—Silvestrini, Camaldolesi, Vallombrosani, and Olivetani, for instance—working also as incubators of Christian humanism. In contrast, bishops were mostly men of power, with the two diocesan seats of Florence and Fiesole acting as political patrons of the most prominent Florentine families and their coteries. But the bishop worked also as a keeper of the collective identity and as a mediator in difficult situations, like Angelo Acciaiuoli during the brief Florentine lordship of the Duke of Athens, Gualtieri of Brienne, in 1342–43.
However, the real power of the Florentine families was above all economic. Sergio Tognetti clearly summarizes the origins and the functioning of the local companies and their branches all around Europe, by paying special attention to the changes during and after the 1340s, when a concentration of wealth took place. He analyzes a series of crucial issues like the close relationship with the Papacy, the success of the Guelphism, the fiduciary relationship at the base of the creation of the companies, the importance of the professional training in the Florentine schools (abaco) and abroad, and the invention of many credit instruments, registers, ledgers, and account balances that we continue to use today.
Tognetti invites readers to think about that fascinating domain not with the eyes of the following industrial revolution but by stressing the relevance of the peculiarities of the merchant European, and particularly the Italian, elites. These were characterized by the predominance of the families and their clients, who worked together to form marriage alliances and collaborate in the fields of politics, culture, and religion. The political domain was a crucial element which permitted these families to participate in obtaining power, as Vieri Mazzoni exhaustively demonstrates in his essay, in which he stresses the succession of an oligarchy, a signorile, and a democratic regime during the central decades of the Trecento. Niccolò was surely a merchant banker, but one who desired not only wealth and power: his Certosa is a telling demonstration of his quest for fame and celebrity.
