The Castracani Family of Thirteenth-Century Lucca

Abstract

THE partnership controlled by the Castracani family ranked among the foremost international banking organizations of late thirteenth-century Lucca.' Members of the Castracani family first appear in the Lucchese notarial documents of about 1250 as money-changers, campsores. In succeeding generations they became increasingly identified with large-scale, international banking and finance. Thus, apart from the interest attaching to the family that produced Castruccio Castracani, lord of Lucca and would-be master of Tuscany, the history of the Castracani family's enterprises serves to illucidate the conduct, methods and organizations of early banking in Lucca, one of the major industrial and commercial centers of mediaeval Europe. Among the mass of notarial documents housed in the Archivio di Stato and the Archivio capitolare of Lucca, there are numerous contracts relating to the activities of the members of the Castracani family through four generations spanning the last fifty years of the thirteenth century.2 To be sure, the surviving notarial materials represent only a fraction of the original total, and with respect to the Castracani contain a regrettable lacuna for the decade 1274-1284, yet they are sufficient to permit a reconstruction of the main outlines of the family history from about 1250 until the family's expulsion from Lucca in January 1300. The first of the Castracani family about whom we have direct evidence is one Castracane Rugerii whose name first appears in the sources in a document dated 1202.3 On two other occasions, in 1218 and 1221, he again figures in the documents.4 In July 1218 we find him handing over to Giovanni domino et magistri templorum Rome et Tuscie et Sardinie and domino Stefano, rector of the Church of St. Peter de mansionis de Luca, a piece of land with a house in Lucca valued at