Arte di Calimala

The Arte di Calimala, the guild of the cloth finishers and merchants in foreign cloth, was one of the greater guilds of Florence, the Arti Maggiori, who arrogated to themselves the civic power of the Republic of Florence during the Late Middle Ages. The ascendancy of the Calimala ran from the organization of Florentine guilds, each with its gonfaloniere in the thirteenth century, until the rise of the Medici usurped all other communal powers in the fifteenth century. Their presence is commemorated in the via di Calimala, leading away from the city's Roman forum (now Piazza della Republica) through the Mercato Nuovo to the former city gate, the Por Santa Maria, as the Roman cardo; the main street, as old as Florence itself, was a prime location for trade, even though, unpaved, crowded, and much narrower than its present state, it was truly a callis malis, an "ill passage-way". The name Calimala is of great antiquity and obscure etymology. Though the original earliest archives of the Arte di Calimala were lost in an 18th-century fire, abundant copies, preserved at the Archivio di Stato, Florence, document the guild's statutes and its activities.

The merchants of the arte di Calimala imported woollen cloth from northern France, from Flanders and Brabant, which was dyed, stretched, fulled, calendared and finished in Florence. Weaving was strictly the province of the Arte della Lana, who imported raw wool from England, but who, for their part, might dye but not otherwise finish any already-woven cloth.

The woollen cloth trade was the engine that drove the city's economy. With the profits from the cloth trade, closely monitored by the Arte di Calimala itself, and usually constrained within the limitations on usury laid down by the Church, true capitalism emerged in Florence by the thirteenth century. A small, not particularly outstanding 14th-century consortium or compagnia, that of Francesco del Bene and company, whose archives happen to have survived, was studied by Armando Sapori Francesco had two inactive partners, a bookkeeper and eight or ten factors, and handled about a bolt of cloth a day. On a larger scale, the compagnia of the merchant-bankers of the Scali family has also been examined, by Silvano Borsari. Scali interests extending to England, the source of the wool, led by degrees to their bankruptcy in 1326 in a liquidity crisis. The permissible profit over the primo costo, the asking price for cloth in the North, to which the added costs of God's penny, the maltolts owed the king of France, transportation to Paris, the center of the dyeing industry, warehousing, and gifts, tips and bribes along the way, resulted in the vero costo, the "real cost", both of which are alluded to in the Calimala statutes. a profit of 10 to 12 per cent was allowed, representing the "just price" that exercised the Church.

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