The Hungarian Historical Review New Series of Acta Historica Academiae Scientiarum Hungaricae Volume 6 No. 1 2017 Medieval Economic History Boglárka Weisz and Tamás Pálosfalvi Special Editors of the Thematic Issue Contents Articles Krisztina Arany Florentine Families in Hungary in the First Half of the Fifteenth Century 5 Katalin Prajda Florentines’ Trade in the Kingdom of Hungary in the Fourteenth and Fifteenth Centuries: Trade Routes, Networks, and Commodities 40 István Draskóczy Austrian Salt in Pozsony in the Mid-Fifteenth Century 63 Maxim Mordovin Bavarian Cloth Seals in Hungary 82 Mária Pakucs-Willcocks Between “Faithful Subjects” and “Pernicious Nation”: Greek Merchants in the Principality of Transylvania in the Seventeenth Century 111 Andrea Fara Production of and Trade in Food Between the Kingdom of Hungary and Europe in the Late Middle Ages and Early Modern Era (Thirteenth to Sixteenth Centuries): The Roles of Markets in Crises and Famines 138 http://www.hunghist.org HHR_2017-1.indb 1 6/20/2017 1:59:39 PM Contents Featured reviews The Habsburg Empire: A New History. 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Among the research questions, the Florentine businessmen’s main fields of interest in the kingdom are of utmost importance, because their interests shaped the patterns of their presence in the kingdom. Also, their financial and economic background in Florence significantly influenced the opportunities they had in Hungary. Thus, the forms of cooperation within the closer local and extended international networks within which they moved prove to be revealing with regards to business as it was run in Hungary. The reconstruction of this network also allows us to identify clusters of Florentine business partners residing in Florence who were investing in Hungary by cooperating with their fellow countrymen actively present in the country. I also offer a detailed analysis of the Florentines’ use of credit in Hungary, focusing on both commercial and money credit transactions and the various forms of transactions used to run business ventures there. Finally, I examine Buda’s role as a royal seat and major trade hub from the point of view of the two major foreign trading diasporas hosted in the town, the Italian/Florentine and southern German ethnic groups. I offer a comparative analysis of their interaction and the different patterns of their social ambitions and economic activity in Buda. Keywords: Florentine merchants, German merchants, Hungary, Buda, King Sigismund of Luxemburg, Florentine Catasto, financial administration, economic relations Introduction Florentine merchants were present all over medieval Europe, trading in a wide range of goods, providing large loans, and holding key offices in financial administrations in several regions, including Central Europe. In this essay, I offer an overview of the patterns of their presence in medieval Hungary. In particular, I seek to explore the economic and social context provided by the Hungarian Kingdom for a relatively large number of Florentine businessmen * This work was made possible with the support of the Croatian Science Foundation under project number 6547 (Sources, Manuals and Studies for Croatian History from the Middle Ages to the End of the Long Nineteenth Century; principal investigator: Damir Karbić). http://www.hunghist.org 5 HHR_2017-1.indb 5 6/20/2017 1:59:39 PM Hungarian Historical Review 6, no. 1 (2017): 5–39 working there, whose activity is documented in both Florentine and Hungarian sources. The study of the activities of Florentine merchants in various geographical regions of medieval Europe looks back on a long historiographic tradition. However, for a number of reasons, in this context, Central Europe has been considered an area of less importance in the international scholarship.1 In Hungary, in contrast, the question of medieval Florentine–Hungarian relations has been a subject of interest in the scholarship from as early as the late nineteenth century. The majority of the works focusing on the topic, however, address predominantly the history of diplomatic relations, leaving out the study of economic affairs partly because of a lack of relevant source material available in Hungary at the time. However, this neglect of the socio-economic aspects of the presence in Hungary of a social cluster characterized by marked international mercantile activity today seems symptomatic of a somewhat misleading approach. Fortunately, this tendency to regard political historical analysis as the priority when addressing the topic has undergone a shift in recent decades, as evidenced by a number of recent economic historical studies.2 These inquiries lay the foundations for more thorough analyses of Florentine–Hungarian economic relations in the Hungarian historical context. Following in the footsteps of these recent publications on the topic and, at the same time, making extensive use of new possibilities provided by the easier access to information (the result of mass digitization, processing, and the online publication of archival sources), I pursued research on the different aspects of the economic activity and social strategies of the Florentine families working in Hungary, drawing on as diverse an array of sources as possible. My research yielded a set of data, which can be regarded as unusually rich in the Central European context, as it includes written evidence from various Florentine, Hungarian, German, etc. archives. Building also on hitherto unused evidence, I 1 Braudel, “L’Italia fuori Italia,” 2109–10; de Roover, The Rise and Decline of the Medici Bank, 201–02, 448, footnote 25; Kellenbenz, “Gli operatori economici italiani,” 333–57; Dini, “L’economia fiorentina,” 632–55; Budak, “I fiorentini nella Slavonia,” 681–95; Raukar, “I