Genoese Economic Culture: from the Mediterranean Into the Spanish Atlantic
Total Page：16
File Type：pdf, Size：1020Kb
Genoese Economic Culture: from the Mediterranean into the Spanish Atlantic. Thesis submitted in accordance with the requirements of the University of Liverpool for the degree of Doctor in Philosophy by Matteo Salonia January 2015 Table of contents. Abstract………………………………………………………………………………………………..........ii Acknowledgements………………………………………………………………………………….......iii Introduction……………………………………………………………………………………………….iv Part I – Colonial Entrepreneurship and libertà 1. Culture, economy, and everyday life in late medieval Genoese colonies..……………………………………………………………………………………………………1 2. The business network of Giovanni da Pontremoli: diversified trade and movement of capital in the Genoese colonial system……………………………………………………………..42 3. Self-government and self-perception: anti-tyrannical institutions and the Genoese identity………………………………………………………………………………….............................59 Part II – Spain’s “Diabolical” Friends 4. Ferdinand the Catholic’s perception of the Genoese and of their role in his economic policy………………………………………………………………………………………………….…107 5. Rejecting the “Machiavellian” state. Genoa’s regimes from the French fury to the second Hispanic-Genoese alliance………………………………………………………...………………...124 6. Beginnings of a mimetic empire? Tracing the Genoese experience in sixteenth-century Spanish America……………………………………………………………………………..………..167 Conclusion……………………………………………………………………………………………...196 Bibliography…………………………………………………………………………………….……...202 Abstract. This thesis investigates the economic culture that fostered the constitutional history and political cosmology of late medieval and early modern Genoa. Genoese economic actors are here studied through their diversified trades and businesses, as they moved from the shores of the Black Sea into the Atlantic. Genoa’s late medieval economic expansion is described through several case studies and briefly compared to the state-run military expansion of Venice’s empire. Genoese colonial history is found to be both peculiar and relevant, as entrepreneurial techniques, institutions and attitudes later transferred to the Atlantic first originated in the private networks built by Ligurian businessmen in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The adaptability and entrepreneurial skills that allowed Genoese merchants and bankers, captains and businessmen, tax collectors and clergymen to enter the Spanish Atlantic in the sixteenth century are linked to the medieval history of the Genoese commune, to the specific idea of libertà progressively defined and protected by its fluid elite, and to the development of Hispanic-Genoese diplomatic and financial relations. Through the study of diverse documents in Italian, Genoese dialect, Venetian dialect, Spanish, Latin, and English, Genoa’s civic ideology and institutions are revealed to be intertwined with Genoese entrepreneurs’ simultaneity of careers, cosmopolitan self-perception, and mimetic imperialism. The thesis closes with a survey of the Genoese economic activities in Spain’s American kingdoms, whose most significant result is the illustration of Genoa’s multifaceted roles in the building of the Hapsburg Atlantic. This work thus constitutes the first chronologically and thematically broad attempt to explain the prolonged Genoese presence on the stage of intercontinental commerce as well as the existence of a modern Ligurian Atlantic. ii Acknowledgements. This doctoral project would have never materialised without the support and dedication of my supervisory team. Therefore, I would like to express my sincere and profound gratitude to both Dr. Harald E. Braun and Dr. Andrew Redden. As my primary supervisor, Harald Braun has constantly offered invaluable reflections, helping me to fully realise the relevance of my thesis and its historiographical ramifications. He has taught me how to properly contextualise and problematise my work and has made me aware of themes and debates that have progressively become crucial in my dissertation. Similarly, my secondary supervisor, Andrew Redden, has patiently guided me in order to properly express my ideas, effectively approach complex historical documents, and formulate a cohesive argument throughout the six chapters forming this thesis. I wish to express my gratitude to the University of Liverpool, where I have taken advantage of an intellectually lively academic community, particularly at the Department of History. I would like to thank also the British Arts and Humanities Research Council, which has funded my PhD, and the Escuela de Estudios Hispano-americanos, in Seville, where I have not only presented some of my research but also had the opportunity to exchange ideas and benefit from the insight of brilliant scholars such as Manuel Herrero Sánchez and Catia Brilli. Finally, I would like to thank my parents, Gaetano and Veneranda, and my brother, Leonardo, who were lovingly supportive throughout these three intense years of my life. I am also thankful for the friendship and companionship that I have enjoyed from other PhD candidates in the Department of History, especially Teng Li and James Duffy. iii Introduction. Genoese Economic Culture in the Atlantic World. Late medieval and early modern Genoa was a city republic with a modest territorial dominium and an urban centre of narrow streets and crowded neighbourhoods surrounding a bustling port. In this environment (where human action and political ideas were profoundly interwoven), trade and accumulation of capital became socially acceptable, as nobles, merchants and sailors were involved side by side in an array of economic activities. At the same time, underneath its notoriously violent and apparently anarchical political and social life, Genoa preserved for centuries a precise, though relatively unsung civic philosophy. Thus, this thesis presents Genoa’s market expansion, diplomatic moves, and institutional reforms as the results (and causes) of the Genoese people’s entrepreneurial culture, self-perception, and republican ideology. Genoa’s economic, political and intellectual history is here treated within the framework of the Atlantic world, a concept whose historical origins can be traced back to the late medieval Mediterranean city ports – and the Genoese network in particular. In fact, the investigation of Genoa’s ubiquitous merchants, captains and entrepreneurs could well contribute to the redefinition of what we mean by Atlantic world, drawing our attention to the unique role(s) of specific groups in the transfer of colonial techniques and in the exchange of mental capital. Scholars of early modern Atlantic empires have in the last decades stressed their cultural complexity, entangled nature, and overlapping history. Categories like Spanish, Portuguese and British “Atlantics” have been scrutinised and found at times wanting, because they are conceptually rigid, unable to capture the common features of the Atlantic experience and the iv hybrid identity of the people who lived within it.1 John H. Elliott, in turn, who has proposed a comparative method and hence used more unconcernedly the terms Spanish Atlantic and British Atlantic, seems to accept the notion that in the Atlantic world specific groups and cultures were obfuscated, in the sense that they were absorbed by hybrid historical processes. Only, for Elliott, these processes can be studied and compared in a semi-hemispherical (Spanish; British) rather than hemispherical framework.2 Therefore, within this lively, fruitful and sophisticated debate, cosmopolitanism has progressively come to indicate trans-nationality and overlapping identities – which are admittedly essential ideas to grasp the reality of Atlantic empires. As a consequence, the widely known fact that foreign economic actors were part of the fabric of virtually every colonial society 3 has been either employed to disprove and deconstruct any idea of a cohesive national Atlantic (be it British, Spanish or Portuguese) or to carefully investigate the social and economic history of a certain colonial city port or region inasmuch as it fit in broader narratives of a national, semi-hemispherical Atlantic to be perhaps subsequently compared with others. 1 See for example John Thornton, Africa and Africans in the Making of the Atlantic World (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998); Nicholas Canny, “Writing Atlantic History; or, Reconfiguring the History of Colonial British America,” in Journal of American History, 3 (1999), pp. 1093-1114; The Atlantic in global history, 1500- 2000, ed. Jorge Cañizares-Esguerra (Upper Saddle River: Pearson Prentice Hall, 2007); Daviken Studnicki-Gizbert, A nation upon the ocean sea: Portugal's Atlantic diaspora and the crisis of the Spanish Empire, 1492-1640 (New York and Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); Eliga Gould, “Entangled Histories, Entangled Worlds: The English-Speaking Atlantic as a Spanish Periphery,” in American Historical Review, 3 (2007), pp. 764-786; Jim Sidbury and Cañizares-Esguerra, “Mapping Ethnogenesis in the Early Modern Atlantic”, in William and Mary Quarterly, 68 (2011), pp. 181–208; and Theorising the Ibero-American Atlantic, ed. Harald E. Braun and Lisa Vollendorf (Boston: Brill, 2013), where the chapter written by Eliga Gould questions the very existence of categories like a “Spanish Atlantic.” Yet, this historiographical discussion had perhaps already started with Nicholas Canny and Anthony Pagden, Colonial Identity in the Atlantic World, 1500-1800 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989). 2 John H. Elliott, Empires of the Atlantic World: Britain and Spain