Levelező üzletemberek. Firenzeiek a Zsigmond korban (Men of Letters, Men of Business. Florentines in the Hungarian Kingdom during the Reign of Sigismund of Luxemburg)

During the last decade published studies on agents’ and merchants’ activities have uncovered a neglected history of Florentine businessmen outside the walls of the city-state. Inspite of the discovery of new sources relevant to the history of the Hungarian Kingdom, authors paid little attention to the global dimension of the phenomena. They did not address the questions of why and how these merchants operated abroad, what the context was in which they negotiated business and developed social ties. Their small diaspora provided the scene for a fairly extensive correspondence. This paper’s aim is to reconsider the importance of private letters in the reconstruction of social and economic ties among a diaspora’s members in the light of primary sources housed by the Florentine Archivio di Stato. When taking stock of the history of the Florentine diaspora in the Hungarian Kingdom, the importance of the social network provided by the Scolari brothers cannot be ignored as possibility for placing it in larger contexts of global history. The article concentrates on three family branches’ correspondences, the branch of Matteo di Stefano Scolari, that of Andrea di Filippo Scolari and the branch of the three brothers: Filippo, Lorenzo and Gianbonino di Rinieri Scolari with other Florentine merchants. Their letters give us a picture however fragmentary is on the circulation of goods and that of people between Hungary and Florence during an eighteen years long time span. The intention of this essay is to put into consideration a few issues regarding the life of Florentine merchants operating in the Hungarian Kingdom during the Reign of Sigismund through the Scolari’s case. Therefore the article focuses on eight main themes: delivering massages and goods, banking, instrumental friendship, trading channels, circulation of information, family solidarity and geographical mobility. The first part considers the ways of posting letters by using regular postal service established by merchants or by drawing upon the task on reliable servants and employees (fanti, famigli) who acted as messengers (corrieri) to their behalf. The relationship between banking system and correspondence is well reflected in several letters addressed to Andrea Scolari by Florentine bankers running their local tavolo at the Mercato Vecchio. The analysis of these letters also suggests that developing friendship or maintaining kinship ties across large distances were subject of good postal service which made possible for merchants to change ideas also on issues not strongly connected to business. As the case study of the Scolari’s correspondence illustrates, sketching Florentine trading community from various angles is rich in challenging historical problems, therefore the themes discussed here do not provide us with a more in-depth analysis and do not stress important questions of cultural mediation and that of kinship networks. In this essay the author’s hope is to point out that a closer look at merchants’ correspondences shows the importance of personal networks which did not remain on the level of a single social connection but these channels diffused to economic life as well, establishing overlapping networks of kin and men in business. Nevertheless the scarce preservation of medieval letters from the territory of the Hungarian Kingdom makes these correspondences unique from their private point of view.