Francesco di Marco Datini was born in Prato, near Florence in Tuscany, around 1335 CE. He grew up in a working family. His father Marco kept a tavern. The Black Death hit in 1348 and killed his parents and two of his siblings. He and one brother were left alone as teenagers and were taken in by a woman from the neighborhood, Piera Boschetti, who basically became his stand-in mother.
This video follows Datini from that point. Plague orphan in Prato. Shop apprentice in Florence. Then bold migrant merchant in Avignon, the city in southern France where the papacy had moved during the 1300s. He went there as a young man in the 1350s because the papal court brought money, elite buyers, and nonstop demand. Avignon sat in the middle of Church finance, French royal politics, and the Hundred Years' War economy. Datini learned fast. He first made money supplying arms in a war market. After that, he sold luxury goods to cardinals and high-ranking clergy. He moved art, fine cloth, jewelry, metalwork, silk, and religious items for the wealthy church world that lived there.
By the 1370s, he was no longer just a middleman. He ran his own company. Sources say he worked obsessively, wrote and dictated letters for up to twenty hours a day, and tried to control every branch from a distance. He did not like partners making choices without him. He expected full reporting on every sale, every shipment, every outgoing coin.
In 1376, he married Margherita Bandini. She was about sixteen. He was in his forties. Her family had been exiled from Florence after her father was executed for conspiracy. She and her mother were living in Avignon, and the match gave her safety and status even though she brought no big dowry. Their marriage was not soft and romantic in the modern sense, but their letters show tension, jokes, anger, care, and daily logistics. Her voice matters because most women's voices from that world did not survive on paper. She later learned to read and write in adulthood so she could manage household operations and handle business when he was away. Her letters talk about money, staff, farming, food, illness, and even marital fights. They also show how a merchant wife in late medieval Italy could act as a manager, not only as "the wife at home."
In 1382, after the papacy left Avignon and went back to Rome, Datini went home to Tuscany. He returned to Prato and Florence, set up textile production and import operations, and kept his old French network alive. He opened and coordinated branches in places like Pisa, Genoa, Barcelona, Valencia, and Majorca, and did business in Flanders and England too. His network reached across the western Mediterranean trade routes of the late 1300s and plugged into northern markets in Bruges and London. He traded in wool and finished cloth, silk, saffron, leather, armor, and artworks. He also handled insurance and currency exchange and even helped underwrite deals that look a lot like early banking.
Datini did not just buy and sell goods. He helped shape how business itself worked. Historians link him to one of the first formal partnership systems around 1383. This kind of structure let investors spread risk across several branches, share profit, and coordinate capital without one single owner doing everything alone. Later Florentine power families, like the Medici, also used branch networks and holding structures. Sources even connect Datini to an early banking company in Florence in 1398 called the Compagnia del Banco, which looks a lot like a stand-alone bank. Some writers also credit him with heavy use of the letter of exchange, which is basically a paper promise to pay in a different city, so merchants could move money without moving coins. That tool is one root of international finance.
We also talk about his paperwork. In the 1800s, workers found a hidden stash inside a sealed staircase in his old house in Prato. Inside were about 500 account books, plus roughly 150,000 letters, contracts, insurance policies, partnership deeds, balance sheets, and private notes from the late 1300s and early 1400s. Historians call this Datini Archive one of the richest business archives from the late Middle Ages. It gives a street-level view of trade, prices, transport, risk, profit, domestic work, marriage drama, and fear of plague in 14th and early-15th-century Italy. It also includes the letters between Francesco and Margherita, which are rare first-person evidence, especially from a woman, about everyday life, labor, and household power.
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