16 August 2022 by Eric Nemarich and Daniel Lord Smail

  1. Archivio storico diocesano di Lucca, Tribunale ecclesiastico, Cause civili 7, f. 1r.

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  2. Francesco was still alive as late as 8 March 1348, when he appears selling property located in Segromigno: Archivio di Stato di Lucca (hereafter ASLu), Diplomatico, Archivio di Stato (pergamena), mazzo 430. The plague swept through Lucca later that spring.

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  3. This courtyard survives today as the Corte Portici.

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  4. This is a common motif in fourteenth-century Lucchese silks. Examples can be found in Maria Ludovica Rosati, “De opere lucano: Le produzioni seriche suntuarie a Lucca nel corso del XIV secolo. Origini e modelli, tipologie documentate e testimonianze materiali,” in Lucca, una città di seta: produzione, commercio e diffusione dei tessuti lucchesi nel tardo Medioevo, ed. Ignazio Del Punta and Maria Ludovica Rosati (Lucca, 2017), 68-9, 76-7, 79.

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  5. Francesco's archive can be compared to the "books and writings" of the cloth finishers guild, stashed in three caskets (cassette), that were found in the home of Simone Baroncelli, a Florentine cloth merchant active in the late fourteenth century. Simone's archive included books written or copied by himself and other men of the Baroncelli name, a number on high-quality paper (carta reale), alongside loose sheets. Interestingly, while all of these materials appear to have concerned the guild's business in some capacity, they were left with a relative, hinting at the fuzzy boundary between "public" and "private" archiving practices in late medieval Tuscan cities.

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  6. ASLu, Archivio dei notari, Parte I, 146 and 147, respectively. Nicolao, as identified in Francesco's register (Archivio dei notari, Parte I, 147, f. 1r), was known as "Coluccio," and is presumably identical to the Coluccio Boccansocchi who appears as a silk merchant in the late 1330s; see Louis Green, Lucca under Many Masters: A Fourteenth-Century Commune in Crisis (1328-1342) (Florence, 1995), 281. On Jacopo, whose known career is largely based on the contents of Francesco’s register, see ibid., 281-2.

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  7. Giorgio Tori, ed., Statuto del comune di Lucca dell’anno 1331 (Lucca, 2017), 180 (and note 1270). On the archiving practices of Lucchese notaries in this period, see Arnaldo D’Addario, “La conservazione degli atti notarili negli ordinamenti della repubblica lucchese,” Archivio Storico Italiano 109 (1951): 194-200.

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  8. For portions of Ugolino’s registers from the 1280s and 1290s, see ASLu, Archivio dei notari, Parte I, 16.

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  9. The statutes revised in 1331 and 1342 survive today: ASLu, Statuti 3-4 (1331) and 5 (1342).

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  10. On Tegrimo, see Green, Lucca under Many Masters, 205.

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  11. ASLu, Capitoli, 52.

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  12. Tori, ed., Statuto del comune di Lucca dell’anno 1331, 13.

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  13. This period is the subject of Green, Lucca under Many Masters.

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  14. ASLu, Archivi pubblici, 2.

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  15. ASLu, Potestà di Lucca, 109, ff. 151r-152r, and an unfoliated preceptum (court order) dated 26 January 1341; ibid., 122, ff. 104v-105v. The owner of the property had fled Lucca, hounded by creditors, probably in early 1341. Francesco had been subletting from a tenant for years, even after their sublease had formally expired in 1338, but appears to have stopped paying rent a few months before the landlord’s flight. The tenant petitioned for Francesco’s eviction and was successful in the end, but the case dragged on for sixteen months. For much of this time, Lucca was under siege by Pisan forces, which ironically may have worked in Francesco’s favor.

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  16. On the emergence of public archives in later medieval Italy, with particular reference to Lucca, see Antonio Romiti, “Archival Inventorying in Fourteenth-Century Lucca: Methodologies, Theories, and Practices,” in The “Other” Tuscany: Essays in the History of Lucca, Pisa, and Siena during the 13th, 14th and 15th Centuries, ed. Thomas W. Blomquist (Kalamazoo, 1994), 83-109; So Nakaya, “Organization and Use of Archival Records in Medieval Lucca and Bologna,” Journal of Western Medieval History 38 (2016): 97-119.

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  17. According to Lucca’s statutes of 1331, anyone in possession of “any book or books” (aliquis liber vel libri) pertaining to the city’s administration, including legislation and judicial acts “on paper or parchment” (in cartis bombacinis sive membranis), was to deliver them to the public archive within three days or pay a fine (Tori, ed., Statuto del comune di Lucca dell’anno 1331, 316).

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