Datini Letter Collection Metadata and Description of the Datini Letter Materials

Abstract: The Datini company stands out from other large Italian mercantile companies. Notably, the Datini archive is one of the largest pre-modern collections of private correspondence in the world, containing around 150,000 individual letters. The Datini company reached its apex under the management of Francesco di Marco Datini (1335–1410), with the majority of the letter collection coming from his tenure as the head of the company. The earliest letters conserved are from the 1360s, with the numbers increasing significantly in the 1390s when the company expanded to new locations around the Mediterranean (Barcelona, Valencia, and Palma de Mallorca, most notably.) The letters stop after Francesco's death in 1410, with only a handful of letters from the subsequent few years appearing in the collection. The letters record much of the inner workings of the company and its diverse businesses, which included purchases of spices from the Eastern Mediterranean and bulk imports of Spanish and English wool for use in the textile workshops in Tuscany, alongside numerous exchanges and transport of local goods. In the archive, the letters are organized by the satellite office (called the fondaci ) where they were received, meaning there are many more letters sent from small towns to large towns than the reverse. Large central offices would also conserve the letters of nearby towns, where they often had representatives, but would only rarely conserve the letters sent out to other people in the field (for instance, letters sent to Lucca and Bologna are generally conserved in the Pisa fondaco ). The letters vary widely in length and content, running from only a couple lines of instructions to buy or sell to several pages of text containing personal anecdotes and requests. Presented here is an organized set of the key metadata for all of the Datini company's remaining letters currently housed at the Archivio di Stato di Prato . The archive also includes hundreds of account books and numerous other contracts, testaments, and other individual documents. As a dataset, the letter metadata makes possible both digital analyses of the communication network of the Datini company, as well as provides a way to better sort and focus in on particular areas of interest for research within the overall collection. We offer here an introduction to the Datini company, a description of the data itself, and few introductory thoughts on possible uses of the dataset.