Italian Merchants Research Articles

L'efficacia delle campagne di social couponing: uno studio tra i merchant di Groupon

Following the rapid growth of Groupon.com and of the other social couponing web sites, an increasing number of studies have examined the benefits that the customers can derive from this promotional tool. Nonetheless we register a scarcity of studies about the effectiveness of social couponing from the merchants’ perspective, i.e. from the perspective of those companies publishing their offerings on these sites. The purpose of this study is to fill this gap, by investigating the objectives that the merchants intend to achieve through social couponing and their satisfaction with the performance of this tool. Comparisons among merchants belonging to different industries are made, as well. Through a survey on a sample of 157 Italian merchants that have run their coupon campaigns through Groupon, this study shows that social couponing is not perceived as equally effective by all companies.

Money Topples Borders

In the late Middle Ages and in the early modern period, the European continent was characterised by a vast mobility of skilled and unskilled labour: Italian merchants established themselves in Bruges and in other commercial centres, German soldiers and craftsmen intermittently lived in Italy, merchants from many different nations met at trade fairs which regularly took place in Frankfurt am Main and in other cities and countless journeymen went on the road before they established themselves as master craftsmen somewhere. This migration was accompanied by an exchange of commodities, technologies and ideas across all political borders. One may think that these different exchange processes would have led to an economic convergence on the European continent. Why this was not, or was only to a certain extent the case, will be discussed in the second section of this essay.

Other Markets: Complementary Commercial Zones in the Naṣrid World of the Western Mediterranean (Seventh/Thirteenth to Ninth/Fifteenth Centuries)

The Naṣrid kingdom of Granada was integrated into the dynamic space of contacts and exchanges that constituted the southern Mediterranean at this period. The Granadans benefitted from the important presence and commercial activity of the major Italian merchants, and from the systems of navigation by cabotage and micro-exchange that these merchants practised in the region. This facilitated the creation of an active platform of complementary markets that integrated the southern coasts of the Iberian Peninsula, the south of Italy, and the Maghribi coasts. In these markets, key roles were played by groups of local traders who were absent from the usual circuits of overseas commerce, dominated as it was by the great merchant communities. This article presents concrete cases of the relations that connected the Naṣrid world to these others through trade.

Italian Intrigue in the Baltic: Myth, Faith, and Politics in the Age of Baroque

Abstract This article examines the role of myth in Italian cultural politics in the Baltic region during the Baroque era. A special focus for this analysis is the legend about a “kinship” between the Florentine Pazzi family and the Lithuanian noble family of the Pacas (Polish: Pac), known in the sources of the seventeenth century as “the Pazzi in Lithuania.” This legend prevailed particularly in the second half of the Baroque period, having developed under the influence of different political, religious, and social aspects of Baroque culture. It played an important part in the Papacy’s interests in Poland-Lithuania during the Counter-Reformation and in the commercial activity of Italian merchants in the Baltic, which coincided with the expansion of the monastic orders in this region and the cult of St. Mary Magdalene de’ Pazzi, to whom the Pacas family expressed their devotion.

Elizabeth Seton: Transatlantic Cooperation, Spiritual Struggle, and the Early Republican Church

Elizabeth Seton:Transatlantic Cooperation, Spiritual Struggle, and the Early Republican Church Catherine O'Donnell Elizabeth Seton, despite her fame and despite the careful archival and publishing work to make her papers accessible, has received little attention from historians of American women or the early republic. Seton has been the subject of excellent studies such as those by Annabelle Melville, Ellin Kelly, Regina Bechtle, and Judith Metz.1 But historians not explicitly writing about Catholics in the period have largely ignored Seton, and even historians concerned with the institutional creation of the Church in America have tended not to weave her story into their larger narratives. This essay attempts to bring into clearer focus both Seton's stature as an assertive female religious seeker, and her place within the decades-long effort to create a Catholic Church in the new United States. It describes two aspects of her 1804-1805 conversion to Catholicism. One is Seton's role, largely unwitting, in a transatlantic struggle to create a sustainable American Catholicism in the age of the Enlightenment and nation states. The second is her relentless effort to decide her own spiritual fate. During the difficult months of her conversion, many people tried to influence Seton's choice of faith. Her decision mattered not only to her family but also to her Anglican minister, John Henry Hobart. It mattered as well to the Catholic clergy and laity who saw in her a potentially valuable element of a nascent American Church. Seton listened to all counsel but insisted on carefully exploring for herself the doctrines [End Page 1] of both churches. Her journals and correspondence reveal that she found it difficult to assent to the claims of either religion, even though she longed to find a spiritual home. She initially opposed what she believed was a distinctively Catholic argument that salvation was possible only for members of that faith. Coming to believe that Anglicanism made a similar claim for itself, Seton became even more troubled. As Seton turned to evaluating the arguments over transubstantiation and confession, she found herself unable for months fully to accept the doctrines of Anglicanism or Catholicism. Dissent, as she experienced it, was unwanted but necessary: Nothing mattered more to Seton than her faith, so she sought assurance that she had properly aligned her personal devotion with the demands of God. As she sought that assurance, she read widely and critically in apologetical literature and debated points of doctrine with the men who wished to guide her choice. Her goal was humble but confident rest within a church. But during the months of Seton's conversion crisis, struggling to submit meant active and persistent dissent. Seton's spiritual crisis occurred in the context of dramatic political and religious upheaval. In the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the Catholic Church faced innumerable challenges. Both Protestant divines and Enlightenment philosophes assaulted its claims to be the arbiter of the true faith. At the same time, in Catholic nations such as France and Portugal, emerging nationalist sentiment and bureaucracies had begun to resist the reach of Rome. In one sense, the United States might have seemed the least promising territory imaginable: Anglo-American Protestant thought valorized individual will and collective patriotism by defining both against Roman Catholicism.2 But John Carroll, who would become the first American bishop, hoped that the early American republic offered a moment in which the association of Catholicism with tyranny and anti-nationalism could be disrupted. This was so because the American Revolution had provided practical reasons for loosening restrictions on Catholics and because the Revolution had conjured a different association—one between tyranny and Britain herself, thereby potentially discrediting inherited penal laws and even, perhaps, inherited mistrust of Catholics.3 The United States also appeared fertile ground for Catholicism to others who would become central to Elizabeth Seton's life and to the institutional formation of the American Church: the French clergymen William Dubourg and John (Jean) Cheverus, and the Italian merchants, Filippo and Antonio Filicchi. [End Page 2] The French Society of Saint-Sulpice, to which William Dubourg belonged, began contemplating sending some of its priests to America as early as the 1780s and moved...

ISLAMIC FINANCE AS A PROGENITOR OF VENTURE CAPITAL

The antecedents of corporate limited liability are commonly seen to emerge amongst medieval Italian merchant bankers in so‐called commendas, commercial arrangements combining investors and entrepreneurs. Italian merchants trading with the Levant may have adapted the Islamic concept of a risk‐sharing partnership, the qirâd, as a model. Western corporations thus may owe their origins to the influence of Islam's entrepreneurial founder, Mohammed.

14th-Century Galleys in the Black Sea: Ships in the Romance of Alexander the Great

A 14th-century illuminated copy of the Romance of Alexander the Great, now in Venice, offers unique pictorial information about the galleys operating in that period in the Black Sea. The manuscript, commissioned by the emperor of Trebizond and copied in the same region in the mid-14th century, includes images which almost certainly portray contemporary galleys with crews from Italy. The presence of Italian merchants and sailors in the Levant is well documented in historical sources, but this is the first clue for the presence of contracted sailors or mercenaries in the empire of Trebizond. © 2007 The Author

Hopeful Travellers: Italian Explorers, Missionaries, Merchants, and Adventurers from the Middle Ages to Modern Times. An Exhibition in the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto, 30 January - 27 April 2007. Robin HealeyExtra muro / intra muros; A Collaborative Exhibition of Rare Books and Special Collections at the University of Toronto. Marie Korey , Pearce J. Carefoote ,

<i>Hopeful Travellers: Italian Explorers, Missionaries, Merchants, and Adventurers from the Middle Ages to Modern Times. An Exhibition in the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library, University of Toronto, 30 January - 27 April 2007</i>. Robin Healey<i>Extra muro / intra muros; A Collaborative Exhibition of Rare Books and Special Collections at the University of Toronto</i>. Marie Korey , Pearce J. Carefoote ,

Interest rates and efficiency in medieval wool forward contracts

While it is commonly believed that derivative instruments are a recent invention, we document the existence of forward contracts for the sale of wool in medieval England around 700 years ago. The contracts were generally entered into by English monasteries, who frequently sold their wool for up to 20 years in advance to mostly foreign and particularly Italian merchants. Employing a unique source of data collected by hand from the historical records, we determine the interest rates implied in these transactions and we also examine the efficiency of the forward and spot markets. The calculated interest rates average around 20%, in accordance with available information concerning the interest rates used in other types of transactions at that time. Perhaps surprisingly, we also find little evidence of informational inefficiencies in these markets.

Performance and Text in the Italian Carolingian Tradition

Performance and Text in the Italian Carolingian Tradition Antonio Scuderi Truman State University [*eCompanion at www.oraltradition.org 1 ] One of the most fascinating aspects of the chivalric-epic tradition of Italy is the historical dialectic between its manifestations as oral performance and written text. Based primarily on Carolingian lore, the oral and written traditions influenced each other in a symbiotic dialogue across the centuries. John Miles Foley, one of the leading experts on world epic traditions, discusses the interaction of oral and written processes in his book, The Singer of Tales in Performance: "The old model of the Great Divide between orality and literacy has given way in most quarters, pointing toward the accompanying demise of the absolutist dichotomy of performance versus document. . . . Consequently, text can no longer be separated out as something different by species from the oral tradition it records or draws upon; the question becomes not whether but how performance and document speak to one another" (1995:79). The dialectic interaction of oral and written manifestations of Carolingian lore in Italy will be the primary focus of this study. Special attention will be given to 1) the cantari, medieval poems that hail back to the beginnings of the chivalric-epic in Italian literature; and 2) oral performances of epic lore in the Sicilian cunto, which up until the early part of the twentieth century were still part of a living tradition. The epic tradition in Italy, both oral and written, is primarily based on the French chansons de geste, in particular the Chanson de Roland. Foley asserts that the chansons de geste were originally oral-derived texts: "Behind these manuscript-prisoned epics stands a tradition of oral composition and transmission by singers of tales, called jongleurs, although clerical and scribal activity intervened in various ways between oral performance and written record" (2002:177). With specific reference to the [End Page 68] Oxford manuscript of the Chanson de Roland, he explains that it "derives in some fashion from oral tradition and retains structures and textures typical of oral poetry . . . . We know it only as a manuscript dating from about 1100, but it's without doubt an oral poem" (2002:177-78). Foley, with his extensive scholarship and astute methodology on the subject, lends an authoritative and contemporary voice to the issue. But the belief that the chansons were derived from oral performance is certainly not new. 2 The Cantari It is believed that stories and songs from France came into Italy in the twelfth century with merchants traveling to northern and central Italy for commerce and pilgrims on their way to Rome, but especially via minstrels and jongleurs, some of whom may have accompanied the other travelers. 3 These stories and songs would include chansons de geste, which were war songs such as the Chanson de Roland; Arthurian romances; and lyric poetry. Important evidence of the popularity of the French chivalric tradition in Italy during this time is provided by one of the most important historical figures, Saint Francis of Assisi (1182-1226), the son of an Italian merchant. Francis was enamored of the chivalric tradition and sang troubadour songs of chivalric deeds in Provençal. His sermons to popular audiences were often in a chivalric register, using the knight's code of honor as a metaphor for leading the Christian life (Cardini 1989; Frugoni 1995). The French tales began to be written down in Italy, and the form that is of particular interest to this study, the cantare (pl. -i, from the Italian "to sing"), consists of verses in octaves. Cantare refers both to the poem as well as to its internal divisions. The earliest extant manuscripts date from the 1340s. Most likely it was literate cantarini (cantari performers) who wrote down the first cantari, thus most of the standard structural features, discussed below, are performance-derived. French tales, mostly Carolingian [End Page 69] and to some extent Arthurian, were the primary sources of the early cantari. Later, in the fifteenth century, we find...

Advance Contracts for the Sale of Wool in Medieval England: An Undeveloped and Inefficient Market?

While it is commonly believed that derivative instruments are a recent invention, we document the existence of forward contracts for the sale of wool in medieval England around 700 years ago. The contracts were generally entered into by English monasteries, who frequently sold their wool for up to twenty years in advance to mostly foreign and particularly Italian merchants. Employing a unique source of data collected by hand from the historical records, we determine the interest rates implied in these transactions and we also examine the efficiency of the forward and spot markets. The calculated interest rates average around 20%, in accordance with available information concerning the interest rates used in other types of transactions at that time. Perhaps surprisingly, we also find little evidence of informational inefficiencies in these markets.

I mercanti lettori del Petrarca

The article is divided into two parts. The first part analyses how, between the 14th and the 16th century, the Italian merchants read the works of Petrarch, paying attention to material aspects, such as ownership, support, mercantesca hand, language and circulation; the study is based on the available catalogues of manuscripts by Petrarch. The second part studies the circulation of Petrarch's works among a small group of readers who lived in Florence and Prato (late 14th and early 15th century): the merchant and politician Guido del Palagio, the merchant Francesco Datini, the notary Lapo Mazzei and two churchmen, Giovanni dalle Celle and Luigi Marsili. The paper is based on material already published as well as research in archives.

Der Kronstädter Paramentenschatz. Altkirchliche Messgewänder in nachreformatorischer Nutzung

Summary The now known medieval paraments are due to their conservation in parament collections of the Protestants and to their constant liturgical use. The paraments, copes and chasubles of the Kronstadt collection are originating mainly from the Parish Church of the town, and of other surrounding churches (e.g. of Tartlau/Prejmer/Prázsmár). They show a series of reparations during the 17thand 18thcenturies and they were also recut for the protestant liturgical use, which is also proved by written sources, such as liturgical instructions, which correspond in their rather tolerant spirit to the Nuremberg “Ordnung”of 1533. An attempt of the art geographical localization of late medieval embroideries is given by the author. The first group of the early 15thcentury is going back to Bohemia and was perhaps spread over by migrating craftsmen in Central Europe. Another series of embroidered textiles (identified as that “cum cruce veneciana”) can be grouped around Venice and can be dated in the period between cca. 1470–1550. A source of Hermannstadt/Sibiu/Nagyszeben of 1507 shows that this kind of textiles was imported by Italian merchants to Buda. A third group of plastically modelled embroideries has a rather Franconic character and seems to be imported to Central Europe. The character of the Kronstadt collection shows many common treats with other parament treasures from medieval Hungary and it seems to represent a Central European taste, even in its differences to church treasures of Northern Germany. The introductory essay is followed by a catalogue of the Kronstadt treasure, in collaboration of the Author with Jana Knejfl-Fajt.

Les relations internationales et la diffusion de la commune dans le Sud de la France du XIIe au XIIIe siècle

From the twelfth to the thirteenth century in Southern France several towns had an almost completely autonomous administration and own officials, just like the Italian Communes. At the same time economically active citizens established close ties with the Italian merchants. Which was the link between these phenomena? This essay tries to give an overview of the studies about the spread of the Commune in Southern France and to propose some perspectives in research.

Rediscovering the Levant: A Heterogeneous Structure as a Homogeneous Historical Region

The Levant exhibits the geographical, social, cultural, linguistic, religious and political patterns and structures of many civilisations. Highly diverse ways of life produced a broad array of possible social identities. Typical of the cities of the Levant was a mixed population. ‘Levantine’ was an omnibus term used especially to refer to the Armenian, Greek, Italian and Jewish merchants. These cities played an outstanding role in both forms of contact and mutual influence and offer themselves as counter-models to the nation-states that emerged in the nineteenth century. The Levant may serve as a paradigm for potential new historical regions, which do not proceed from current political premises with their attendant virtual maps and the accompanying stereotypes and images of friends and foes. Borderless as it is, it practically cries out for comparative historical analysis. The connecting elements were lively communication, trade and seafaring. Conversions of individuals from one cultural environment to the next and back again were everyday occurrences. A new light is shed on minorities here. Neither marginalised nor treated as objects of tolerance or intolerance, in a social system based on communication and flexibility, they were the system's pillars and driving force.

Desperate Men, Questionable Acts: The Moral Dilemma of Italian Merchants in the Spanish Slave Trade

Modern research into the Italian business community in Renaissance Spain is driven by the desire to strengthen and publicize the Italian genesis of Spain's enterprise of the Americas. Scholarship resulting from this motive understandably focuses on positive facets of the Columbian discovery. The Italians are painted not only as financially more astute but also morally superior to their Spanish associates; their involvement in the enslavement of American Indians is not mentioned. By looking at Christopher Columbus, enslaver of Indians, in the historical context of Spain during the reign of Fernando and Isabel, a moral dilemma becomes clear: Italian merchants in Spain operated in a rapidly changing moral climate that by 1500 criminalized their slaving activities in the Canaries and in the Americas. Columbus and his Italian partners found themselves caught between their need for profits and the new royal prohibition against enslavement of the American Indians.

The Early History of Financial Economics, 1478–1776. By Geoffrey Poitras. Cheltenham and Northampton: Edward Elgar, 2000. Pp. x, 522.

Economic historians usually have to explain to their economist colleagues the difference between economic history, which focuses on facts, and history of economic thought, which focuses on ideas. Our colleagues in finance departments, typically fascinated by episodes in financial history treated by economic historians, are bound to be disappointed in the lack of attention given to the development of ideas in finance by historians of economic thought. Geoffrey Poitras, a professor of finance at Simon Fraser University, makes a valiant effort to remedy these oversights in his collection of vignettes that highlight the sophistication of financial instruments and analysts of financial markets well before the time of Adam Smith. Starting in 1478 with the publication of the Treviso Arithmetic, a typical textbook of commercial arithmetic for Italian merchants, and ending with brief snippets from the Wealth of Nations, Poitras treats the reader to a fascinating potpourri of excerpts from various manuals, brief biographies of pioneers in financial analysis, and historical discursions on foreign-exchange and stock markets.

Cristãos na Índia no século XVI: a presença portuguesa e os viajantes italianos

Os mercadores das cidades italianas, atraídos pela rota do Cabo inaugurada por Vasco da Gama, acabaram por ser os principais divulgadores da ação portuguesa no período dito das descobertas. Embora europeus e cristãos, os viajantes italianos na Ásia ao longo do século XVI utilizavam a rede cristã estabelecida pelos portugueses quando lhes convinha, mas não estavam vinculados a um projeto de conquista ou de dominação mais amplo. Nem descobridores, nem mediadores ou intermediários, esses viajantes, para finalidade deste artigo, oferecem uma visão "de fora" da presença portuguesa na Índia, apontam o apego dos portugueses pelo mar, seu desinteresse ou incapacidade de penetração no território e contribuem para a compreensão do império asiático-português como um império sitiado, constituído por enclaves no litoral, cercado de um lado pelo mar, de onde vinham as riquezas e também os principais inimigos - os holandeses no final do quinhentos - e por outro lado pelos reinos asiáticos.

Une autre hypothèse sur les inscriptions peintes en caractères ibériques de Vieille-Toulouse

A new interpretation is here suggested for the inscriptions in Iberian writing painted on Greco-italic amphorae found at Vieille-Toulouse (Haute- Garonne) in several funerary wells dating to the second quarter of the second century BC. The names mentioned in these inscriptions are likely to be the Latin nomina gentilicia of Italian merchants established on the coast of Languedoc or Catalonia.

Was Florence a perfectly competitive market? Transactional evidence from the Renaissance

To the extent that any location can be considered the birthplace of mercantile capitalism, northern Italy, and especially Florence, is that place. Double-entry bookkeeping, marine insurance, partnerships with branches, holding companies, bills-of-exchange, and international banking in general all of these accoutrements of modern business and finance were invented in northern Italy in the late thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.1 No one today, contra Weber, seriously questions that late-Medieval and early-Renaissance Italian merchants had passionately pursued but rationally disciplined acquisitive motives.2 These facts, with the absence of big business and big government,3 have led many to infer that northern Renaissance Italian economies must have been close to Adam Smith's dream a world of unfettered individualist entrepreneurs, rationally wheeling and dealing in laissez-faire markets.4 But was Florence a perfectly competitive market? Or even a close facsimile?