The arti of Florence: a guild could govern a city, and a workshop could raise a genius.
Keep the book, and the book keeps the house.
The household
The casa was a business lineage: brothers, cousins and in-laws bound by a written partnership and a ricordanze — the family book of accounts and memory.
The trade
Wool (Lana), cloth-finishing (Calimala), silk (Por Santa Maria), bankers (Cambio) — seven greater and fourteen lesser guilds who elected the government.
1300s
Florentine and Venetian merchants kept double-entry books; every entry had its balance. Governance began as bookkeeping.
Guild membership was citizenship: to hold office you had to belong to a trade. Craft was the qualification for rule.
1400s
A workshop took boys at twelve and produced masters: grind pigment, prepare panels, then paint. Apprenticeship was a ladder with visible rungs.
Ricordanze — family books mixing dowries, deaths, harvests and contracts — are the surviving proof of how a house thought about itself.
1500s
Medici branches in Rome, Venice, Lyon, Bruges and London ran as separate partnerships with local partners — risk shared, name shared, profit split.
Patronage was strategy: fund the maker, and the city carries your name for five hundred years.
Free books
Workshop life, master by master.
The bookkeeping that built the houses.
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