III. The Core of the Network: Friends of Blood and Marriage

Abstract

In modern societies, kinship and marriage might be considered weak factors in establishing economic cooperation among individuals. In medieval Florence, though, blood ties as the building blocks of business f irms are well-illustrated by the case of companies founded by potential families (consorterie) like the Alberti and the Peruzzi at the beginning of the fourteenth century.1 Richard A. Goldthwaite claims that the role of kinship relations in the formation of business firms had considerably weakened by the early fifteenth century.2 The sizeable fourteenth-century f irms, which lasted through several generations, were replaced by partnerships that survived only for a couple of years, while their partners invested simultaneously into other companies as well. The phenomenon should have been closely related to the changing practices in inheritance strategies, altering the inpartible properties with the division of patrimony. However, the importance of in-law ties in the formation of smaller business partnerships and networks has never been widely studied. As the example of the Scolaris shows, their in-laws and the in-laws’ in-laws grew into the most signif icant social units of their business network, a pattern which might have characterized trade networks throughout the period. The consorteria, that is, the kinship network as well as the parentado, the network of in-laws, occupied a central role in the Scolaris’ success in the Kingdom of Hungary as well as in their involvement in the Florentine economy. In the city statutes of 1415, the consorteria was described as a unity composed of ‘consortes sint de eadem stirpe per lineam masculinam etiam superios usque in inf initum’, that is, a patrilineal lineage.3 That the Scolari