Francesco Balducci Pegolotti (ca. 1280-1340)

by Andrew Brooke (see Chinese translation)

And don't forget that if you treat the custom-house officers with respect, and make them something of a present in goods or money, as well as their clerks and dragomen, they will behave with great civility, and always be ready to appraise your wares below their real value.

- Henry Yule, Cathay and the Way Thither: Being a Collection of Medieval Notices of China, rev. by Henri Cordier, Hakluyt Society 2nd series 33 (London: Hakluyt Society, 1914), Vol. III, pp. 137-173, esp. p. 169

Francesco Balducci Pegolotti (see alternative names) is believed to have been born in Florence circa 1280, to a mercantile family. Most of his adult life was spent in the service of the Florentine company, Bardi. He first appears in their books in 1310.

From about 1315 until 1317 he was posted to Antwerp, thence to London, where he must have dealt with Edward II, since his firm were financiers of the crown’s expenses.

Found in Cyprus circa 1324-27, and again in 1335, where he negotiated a reduction of tariffs for Florentine merchants, he was also involved in mercantile negotiations with the King of Armenia. After the bankruptcy of the Bardi firm, he was put in charge of its liquidation, circa 1347. Evans, in the introduction to his edition, is able to trace with good precision his movements and dealings based on available records.

Pegolotti's account is entitled Practica della mercatura; it was originally called Libro di divisamenti di paesi. The first modern publication of this work was in a volume of a collection by the Florentine scholar and statesman, Gian Francesco Pagnini, in 1766. Taken from the manuscript at the Riccardiana which announces itself to be a transcription of an original manuscript by Pegolotti. There is no reason, however, to deny that the Mercatura was known and circulated in Pegolotti’s age.

The original is a rather long work and contains to remarkable detail much of the mercantile activity and information necessary for a mediaeval Italian merchant. To this extent it is an invaluable map of the world as known to such a milieu, all the more so for the breadth it demonstrates.

Therefore the book opens with tables of translation, for the terms (such as custom, marketplace, and so forth) useful in trade, in languages such as French, English, Venetian, Greek, Arabic, Persian, Tatar, and any other of relevance to the mercantile man. Information on the primary wool-producing abbeys in England and Scotland is given; as with what and for how much something would sell in Pera and Constantinople. Tables of equivalence in weight, e.g. Tatar measures against Venetian standards, and fees to be expected at each caravanserai on the journey east.

There are tips about the routes into China; how long each will take; the dangers and costs involved in each case of taking a particular river or not; the amount of trade one would expect to do in Peking, and how much it would cost to get there (in detail); what sort of merchandise to sell at each city on the way; what sort of food to pack; to hire a good (if expensive) dragoman; to grow a beard; of the customs, such as the confiscation of all silver and issuance of paper money upon entering China, or the confiscation of a merchant’s belongings if he were to die without a partner or brother present.

In short, the very practical (and thereby illuminating) realities of the otherwise abstract ‘Silk Road’ are laid before one, albeit to be gleaned from a body of work that contains similar information about the rest of the known world. Yule’s chapter has translated a few of such extracts, mainly to pertaining to the Chinese trade.