Martina Saltamacchia
University of Nebraska at Omaha
In 1391, the Milanese merchant Marco Carelli donated his vast patrimony to jump-start
the building of the city’s new cathedral. Through wills, merchandise inventories,
confraternity statutes, accounting books, sale contracts, and trial minutes dug out of the
archives of Bruges, Lille, Milan, and Venice, I reconstruct a life in many ways typical of
late-medieval Italian merchant-bankers.
Known for centuries as the “prince of medieval Milanese mercatura,” Carelli witnessed
major changes to Europe’s social and economic patterns in a life that spanned seven
decades of plague and warfare. His life reflects the paradoxes of an epoch when religion,
economics and ethics were inextricably intertwined. A brilliant businessman, Carelli
fruitfully invested his wealth in financial operations and land acquisition. Surely Carelli
did not obtain his immense fortune entirely without compromising himself, sometimes
with reproachable decisions. He served pro bono as an officer for the Cathedral of Milan
precisely at the time when he faced charges of usury. During the very months when he
was sealing delicate diplomatic treaties for the dukes of Milan, Carelli might be found
evicting insolvent debtors from their houses, without any apparent thought about their
impelling needs. And at the same time that Carelli founded a confraternity together with
300 influential merchants from Milan and Monza to aid the poor people of Venice, the
merchant trafficked Tartar slaves at the Rialto Bridge market.
The profile that emerges from this analysis forcefully contradicts the historiographical
narrative of the rapacious merchant who bestows lavish gifts to buy his way into
heaven, challenging the divide with which often scholars artificially separate the
economic and religious sphere in medieval mentality.