Francesco Datini: Plague Orphan, Avignon Merchant and 150,000 Letters

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In 1870, workers renovating a mansion in Prato, Italy, knocked down a wall in a sealed stairwell and found roughly 500 account books and about 150,000 letters and documents. They belonged to Francesco di Marco Datini, born around 1335 in Prato, then part of the Republic of Florence, to Marco di Datino and Monna Vermiglia. The Black Death of 1348 killed both his parents and two siblings within months, leaving him orphaned at 13. After an apprenticeship in Florence he joined merchants heading to Avignon in 1358, where the papacy had relocated. He first supplied arms to mercenaries during the Hundred Years War, then moved into silks, luxury goods and art for the cardinals of the papal court, caring about margins and shipping rather than the paintings themselves.

In 1376 he became engaged to Margherita Bandini, whose father Domenico had been executed for an anti-republican plot and whose brothers were banished. The couple returned to Prato in 1382, and from 1386 Datini ran his business from Florence while Margherita managed the Prato estate, a separation of about 27 years recorded letter by letter. In 1383 he organized branches in Avignon, Barcelona, Valencia and Mallorca as separate partnerships in which local partners shared profits and liability, an early holding company model. Francesco and Margherita had no children together, and she raised his illegitimate daughter Ginevra. He died in August 1410 and left most of his fortune to a charitable foundation in Prato that still exists.

• A woman who raised him after the plague signed a surviving letter with a phrase translating roughly to your mother in love.
• The cardinals of Avignon began buying art for private, non-religious use, an early market Datini served as middleman.
• Margherita's letters show her running servants, properties, grain sales and local disputes on her own.
• From the summer of 1400 to the fall of 1401 the family fled Prato to Bologna to escape a return of the plague.
• He was buried in the Church of San Francesco in Prato in a marble tomb by Niccolò di Piero Lamberti and was later painted by Filippo Lippi.