The Ribbon Files: The Medici Project to Chart the Measurements of the Entire World

Abstract

THIS ARTICLE IS ABOUT A LITTLE DISCOVERY . In Florence’s Archivio di Stato, folded between lists of publications and postage prices, are some one hundred documents belonging to a forgotten Medici project for recording all the measurements of the world. A week before the end of July 1683, the chancellery of Grand Duke Cosimo III (r. 1670–1723) sent letters to some of his agents across Europe, asking them to provide the dimensions of standards in use in their areas of operation. It also solicited up-to-date information on currencies, even if the replies indicate that this second request only inquired about the names of units of accounts and their divisions. Those responses got stacked together, bound to the drafts (minute) of Cosimo’s letters, and inserted in a towering miscellanea of receipts and wish lists. The result—what I call the “ribbon files”—is as curious as was the decision to keep all the letters together. Florentine archivists usually place each missive in the folder of the respective sender. They sometimes even divide them into different years. The current arrangement instead points to a different objective: to keep those documents together even after the endeavor was eventually abandoned.