How do you behave as a good merchant at the end of the Middle Ages ? Based on the biography of two homonymous Provencal merchants, Laure-Hélène Gouffran explores the social and economic practices of trade actors and the values that influence them.
The chances that prepare for the conservation of the documentation produced in the Middle Ages are sometimes happy. This is shown by the work of Laure-Hélène Gouffran, who starts from the discovery, in the departmental archives of the Bouches-du-Rhône, of a corpus of acts relating to two Homonym and contemporary Provencal merchants, having lived at the hinge of XIVe and XVe century. Once the initial perplexity dissipated-was it one and the same character, or two different individuals ? – The author meets Bertrand’s life paths of Rocafort, merchant of Marseille, and Bertrand Rocafort, notary and merchant of the small town of Hyères. By engaging in this way, Laure-Hélène Gouffran has been able to free herself from two trends that have greatly marked historiography since the 1950s: on the one hand, the focus of work on the entrepreneurs of the great international trade, at the head of powerful companies stirring considerable business volumes ; On the other hand, the propensity to essentialize the figure of the merchant by based on some generic features, determined from these same works.
The documents relating to the two Rocafort, on the contrary, shed light on these more ordinary actors in the economy of exchanges, of average scale, whose role in the daily animation of the social and economic fabric of cities and their hinterland has often been highlighted in France in the urban monographs since the founding work that Philippe Wolff devoted in 1954 to Toulouse merchants. From men to various experiences and profiles, who testify to the plurality of the ways of being a merchant at the end of the Middle Ages.
The ways of social ascent
The presentation of these two individuals occupies the first part of the work. We first follow the journey of Bertrand Rocafort, born around 1365-1370 in Hyères. This son of a wood craftsman exerts initially as a notary. Like many of these writing specialists, he quickly developed a parallel commercial activity, which ends up taking precedence over his first profession. The business of the shop he holds in town are relatively well known thanks to the conservation of three account books. He sells a wide range of food and manufactured from a local clientele that he obtains during the pignan and Fréjus fairs, or whether it is important to Marseille and Aix-en-Provence. The confidence inspired by his status as a notary, his mastery of writing and figures and his legal culture soon allow him to access local responsibilities: trustee of the municipality of Hyères during the year 1397-1398, he is notably responsible for the accounts of the city ; He then exercised, between 1405 and 1411, as a collector of the Cometale du Sel gabelle, of which he holds the control registers. Enough to assure him a rating of notable, supported by an ease whose inventory after death of the merchant allows to get an idea. When he died, in 1427, he held five houses in Hyères, as well as many land possessions in neighboring countryside. His close ties with Marseille also allowed him to obtain citizenship of this city in 1423, which perhaps constituted a culmination in the social ascent trajectory of a retailer of a second-plan urban center.
It is a completely different profile presented by Bertrand de Rocafort. Born before 1360, it belongs to a powerful family of the Marseille oligarchy, which has seigneurial rights over several villages in the countryside surrounding the city, and an imposing rural land heritage. The members of this chivalrous lineage, allied with the big names of the municipal elite, have been exercising since at least the middle of XIVe century a strong influence on the political life of Marseille. They do not disdain to mingle with market operations. With this social and economic capital, Bertrand de Rocafort develops lucrative affairs, of which 84 notarial acts allow you to get an idea. He first engages in the coral trade, which he makes fish off the coast of Sardinia then ship towards the Levant, and then devoted himself, from the end of the 1380s, to that of the sheets. For this, he founded a shop with several partners, which soon becomes the main of the city, in which luxury fabrics are offered, more common fabrics from Languedoc, as well as various haberdashery and grocery articles. The prosperity of this establishment, which extends to the disastrous Bag of Marseille by the Aragonese troops (1423), also allows it to invest in the armaments of ships to engage in trade with Beirut and Alexandria. The strong involvement of Bertrand de Rocafort in municipal life, until his death in 1428, bears witness to his eminent status: after a first and early designation as a municipal officer in 1382, he exercised from 1393 to 1423 no less than thirteen charges, including four times that of trustee. He is also sent several times to the embassy to the governor of Provence in order to represent the Marseille municipality there.
The construction of market notability
This presentation of the route of the two homonymous merchants, all in all classic, serves as a prerequisite for a more ambitious investigation, which Laure-Hélène Gouffran develops in the second part of her work. Although the two Rocaforts come from distinct social backgrounds, and that they have developed fairly different activities in their nature as in their scope, their trajectories indeed present common points, which inform about the practices and values shared by the merchants of the end of the Middle Ages. How do you behave in “ good merchant »In the cities of Provence of that time ? Incidentally, part of the fundamental work of Giacomo Todeschini, Laure-Hélène Gouffran places at the heart of her words the challenges of reputation, confidence and social utility which guide the action of those who are enriched by trade. In order to decipher these issues, his investigation is freed from the close framework of biography to expand to the entire Marseille elite environment, whose practices it analyzes in three areas: the field of interpersonal relations ; relation to religion ; the service of the community of inhabitants.
The first of these areas of course occupies a central place in the strategies of affirmation of market notability and in the cohesion of an urban patriciat dominated by the merchants. In this group made up of around twenty families, in which one is not surprised to observe a strong endogamy, the matrimonial links come to double trade and political relations. The girls of merchants are sometimes married to associates, and the important dots which are granted to them are used both to express the financial power of the family and to transfer capital to the future husband. The important economic implications associated with marriage give widows an interest as greater since the period is marked by a strong mortality: more than 70 % of Marseille testators of XIVe century have only or even any child ! Insofar as this demographic slump weakens the family unit, merchants actively invest in other links, through spiritual kinship or brotherhood.
The house is the privileged framework for interpersonal relationships. In Marseille, those of the merchants are concentrated in the lower city, and more particularly in the Draperie and Accounts districts, where the municipal palace is also installed. These residences participate in the expression of market notability. Their vast dimensions, the possible presence of a tower, their decor and their furniture indicate the bad status and the richness of their owner, and therefore its solvency: the precious objects they can contain (clothes, ornaments …), revealed by the inventories after death, are all goods likely to be left in pledge to guarantee a claim.
The usefulness of merchants
These same inventories report on the important place of religion in the daily life of Marseille merchants. They signal the possession of many devotion objects, from the rosaries made up of more or less noble materials to the reliquaries via various books of hours, psalters and missals. The richest of them even have an oratory in their home, in which rare holy images can be found. Prayers and extracts from scriptures scribbled in the books of accounts testify to the strong integration of this religious feeling. Should it be seen as an effect of Franciscan preaching ? As in the city of Avignon of that time, which Clement Lenoble had studied, minors enjoy an excellent reputation with the Marseille elites, which translates into multiple ways: designation of brothers as confessors or testamentary executors, legacy, foundation of obituar masses or election of burial in the church of the Saint-Louis convent … in such a context, we must imagine the influence of doctrines developed by the Franciscans on the proper use by merchants of their wealth, who must benefit the whole of society.
She is expressed in particular at the time of death. The meticulous preparation of funeral and the mortuary convoy in the wills, in a context of “ Development of the funeral pump “(P. 223), made this ritual a time of exaltation of the devotion and the honorability of the deceased, but also of his concern for the poorest, which are associated with the ceremonies. The celebration of his memory is thus closely linked to the staging of his generosity towards the weakest and the Church.
More generally, the “ good merchant “Must contribute to the common good, putting his person and his fortune in the service of the city. It does it first through the Hospital Foundation (seven are attested in Marseille between 1380 and 1420) or the exercise of a rector of one of these establishments, allocated by the municipality. He testifies in doing so doing his concern for the poorest, but also his managerial skills. These same skills find to be exercised in favor of the municipality, through participation in city councils or by ensuring the function of municipal treasurer (the 17 individuals responsible for this responsibility between 1370 and 1407 in Marseille are all from the merchant elite). The important financial availability of merchants also allow them to get involved in the defense of the interests of the community of inhabitants. They consent loans to the city to allow it to face its necessities, activate to facilitate its supply during periods of shortage, arched ships in order to operate as corsairs against its enemies, or participate in companies to buy back captive compatriots. These various initiatives were helping to establish their reputation, while providing them with substantial gains. They were also a powerful instrument of legitimization of the eminent place that the merchants occupied in urban institutions.
There “ double biography Rocafort therefore opens a window on the city of Marseille at the end of the Middle Ages. It reveals the dynamism of its inhabitants which, in a difficult demographic, economic and political context, tried to seize the opportunities offered to them to support their social ascent, or maintain their rank within the elite. If the development of commercial enterprises had a lot of way a privileged way to achieve these objectives, it was never exclusive.
Laure-Hélène’s survey Gouffran shows that this strategy was often going hand in hand with investment in local political life, and that these two dimensions of the merchant’s activity supported each other. They contributed to establishing the expertise of the latter, to establish its good reputation, and to arouse confidence in its initiatives. Thus was built, at the price of constant efforts, the honor of the merchant.