Florentine Woollen Manufacture in the Sixteenth Century: Crisis and New Entrepreneurial Strategies

This paper aims to re-examine the Florentine woollen textile manufacture topic, with a focus on the types and quantities of cloths produced. Where classic historiography pointed to several ups and downs of the quantities and the values of the sector’s output during the XVIth century, a different approach to the archive sources shows a decending though continuous trend. In a time of crisis, the Arte della Lana partnerships attempted to a supply differentiation by introducing new sorts of textiles between the end of the XVth and the XVIth centuries: these were high quality cloths, able to bear the rising costs of raw materials and, above all, of skilled labour. The patnerships also intervened by rationalizing the unskilled labour management, using the services of fattori (labour masters) in charge of supplying labour and the relevant remuneration to a group of unknown and unskilled workers carrying out the first phases of wool processing (ciompi). These changes influenced the partnerships' bookkeeping method: comparing many account books from the XIVth to the XVIth centuries, one can see a sharp downsizing of the accounting system.