4 ideas
Francesco di Marco Datini (c.1335–1410) lost both parents to the Black Death of 1348. He made his fortune in Avignon trading arms, cloth and luxury goods, then built trading companies across Tuscany, Genoa, Barcelona, Valencia and Majorca.
Datini did not run one firm with branches. Each city's operation was a separate legal partnership with its own local partner and accounts, and Datini was the controlling capital holder in all of them. A loss or lawsuit in one company therefore could not automatically sink the others, while dense letters, bills of exchange and marine insurance tied the network together.
Datini's ledgers were headed "In the name of God and of profit." His letters show that constant fear drove his accumulation more than confident ambition: fear of plague, shipwreck, bad debtors, cheating agents, taxes and damnation. Friends such as the notary Lapo Mazzei urged him to care for his soul, and his final bequest to the poor reads as a settlement between the anxieties of profit and piety.
Read business correspondence and account books as the record of a life rather than as economic data alone. Complaints about late letters, household orders and his wife Margherita's reproaches that he works too much let the historian recover what a person feared, valued and neglected. The official chronicles of the period cannot show this.