Saints as Intercessors between the Wealthy and the Divine

Art and Hagiography among the Medieval Merchant Classes

Emily Kelley, Cynthia Turner Camp, Emily Kelley, Cynthia Turner Camp

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351171342
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Teologia e religione
• Subtopic: Denominazioni cristiane

Offering snapshots of mercantile devotion to saints in different regions, this volume is the first to ask explicitly how merchants invoked saints, and why. Despite medieval and modern stereotypes of merchants as godless and avaricious, medieval traders were highly devout – and rightly so. Overseas trade was dangerous, and merchants' commercial activities were seen as jeopardizing their souls. Merchants turned to saints for protection and succor, identifying those most likely to preserve their goods, families, reputations, and souls.

The essays in this collection, written from diverse angles, range across later medieval western Europe, from Spain to Italy to England and the Hanseatic League. They offer a multi-disciplinary examination of the ways that medieval merchants, from petty traders to influential overseas wholesalers, deployed the cults of saints. Three primary themes are addressed: danger, community, and the unity of spiritual and cultural capital. Each of these themes allows the international panel of contributors to demonstrate the significant role of saints in mercantile life.

This book is unique in its exploration of saints and commerce, shedding light on the everyday role religion played in medieval life. As such, it will be of keen interest to scholars of religious history, medieval history, art history, and literature.

1 Introduction

Emily Kelley and Cynthia Turner Camp

I am not planning to start any other enterprise and to make any other effort than to dedicate more time to God than I have done in the past. And for this reason I am buying books in the vernacular … they are all Gospels Epistles, sayings and lives of the Saints and other good and honest things.¹

The Florentine merchant–banker Franscesco Datini might not have been the most pious of men, but even he recognized the need to improve his standing with God through education and prayer. Like Datini, merchants across Europe, from the Hanseatic states to the Mediterranean, were deeply concerned with their spiritual and secular welfare, and they frequently looked to holy helpers for aid. This volume pursues the intersection of medieval mercantile culture and the cult of the saints. Examining the religious lives of merchants and artisans, from affluent international wholesalers to modest craftsmen, the chapters in Saints as Intercessors between the Wealthy and the Divine consider not only the specific saints to whom merchants appealed for salvation and earthly protection but also the manner in which those appeals were made. They span the period of mercantile growth in medieval Europe: from the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, when long-distance trade was expanding, to the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, when merchants had long been integral to urban society. To what kinds of holy individuals did merchant communities turn? How did craftsmen and traders voice their spiritual, political, and professional concerns in their veneration of saints? The chapters in this collection address these and similar questions through a range of scholarly approaches, offering detailed profiles of merchant devotion from locales across Europe. Thematically divided, the chapters explore merchants’ religious lives from three angles: the first group considers selected saints to whom merchants were devoted; the second examines the piety of specific merchant individuals; and the third analyzes the religious practices of merchant corporations. Without making any claims to comprehensiveness, this volume uncovers the richness of mercantile spirituality and the broad range of uses that merchants would make of saints.

Although there are thriving scholarly conversations about both saints and merchants, surprisingly little published work draws the two together.² Studies of individual saints who appealed particularly to merchant patrons, such as St. Nicholas of Bari, typically assess his popularity in general terms and only briefly note specific merchant relationships.³ The topic of merchant-saint connections has been most richly explored in relation to artistic patronage since the objects commissioned by merchants often provide primary source material documenting a connection to a particular saint. For example, studies by Dale Kent and Perri Lee Roberts prove the significance of personal protectors in the devotional lives of two prominent Florentine merchants. Kent demonstrates the significance of Sts. Cosimo and Damien to Cosimo de Medici; likewise, Roberts examines Michele Castellani’s manipulation of the lives of Sts. Nicholas, John the Evangelist, John the Baptist, and Anthony for the narrative cycles in his family’s chapel.⁴ While these valuable studies model the type of investigations undertaken in this volume, most scholarship notes the importance of saints to merchants’ religious devotions without focusing on its nuances.⁵ This volume is therefore the first to address the commercial classes’ veneration of saints from diverse temporal, geographic, and disciplinary angles to make a compelling case for saints’ importance in the daily lives of merchants across geographic and temporal boundaries.

Traders had been operating since the early medieval period, but the mercantile classes began to develop in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries when technological advancements encouraged extended maritime travel and the expansion of overseas trade. Larger ships were constructed, often necessitating the creation of new ports to accommodate the bigger vessels, and ports were charted on maps, called portolans, making maritime travel easier.⁶ At the same time, a greater prevalence of coin, the development of trading companies backed by investors, the use of the bill of exchange, and better systems of insuring goods all made long-distance trade safer and easier.⁷ Christiania Whitehead’s Chapter 1 focuses on this period and examines the cult of St. Cuthbert along the trade routes between England, Flanders, and Norway, noting the centrality of saintly intercession from the earliest days of North Sea trade.

As trading practices shifted, merchants became central to growing urban communities. Merchants wielded collective power in most cities through their guilds, commercial associations centered around governing the production and trade of commodities.⁸ Alongside regulating economic activity for certain crafts or wholesaling bodies, trade guilds were also social organizations that could leverage their capital in the political sphere. By the thirteenth century, and increasingly toward the fifteenth century, guilds held great sway with local government, giving merchants some degree of collective power.⁹ In Venice, international traders wielded all the governing authority, but the situation of the London Goldsmiths, who frequently served as aldermen and mayor, is more representative of mercantile political influence.¹⁰ By the end of the fifteenth century, many merchants were taking on increasingly important roles in the administration of their cities and even kingdoms, often but not exclusively through guild service.¹¹ For example, John Shaa, a goldsmith discussed in Gary Gibbs’s Chapter 9, served as mayor of London from 1501–02. Likewise, the Jouvenel des Ursins family, whose artistic patronage is examined in Jennifer Courts’s Chapter 6, held positions in the Parisian Parliament.

At the same time as mercantile communities were gaining prestige and dominance throughout Europe, religious devotion was changing forms, becoming more urbanized and focused on meeting the laity’s spiritual needs. The grassroots religious (often heretical) movements of the twelfth century were transformed, partly through the principles of pastoral care laid down by the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215, into the flowering of lay spiritual fervor of the thirteenth through fifteenth centuries.¹² The mendicants were one important aspect of this growing urban religiosity. Their presence in towns, preaching, and cura animarum responded to civic issues including the morality of mercantile practices.¹³ Mendicants were sympathetic toward the realities of merchants’ lives and livelihoods, and they sought to offer spiritual guidance through both vernacular sermons and written guides such as their Regula mercatorum (Rule for Merchants).¹⁴

Central to the vibrancy of lay and mercantile spirituality were the parishes and confraternities that structured town life across Europe. As the most basic local community, the parish or chapel dominated its members’ lives.¹⁵ Parishes not only provided most individuals with their spiritual home. They also became occasions for parishioners to control church fabric, conspicuously performing their devotion to saints and the Godhead by funding stained glass windows, lights, altarpieces, altar furnishings, and other movables, as many of our contributors discuss.¹⁶ Individuals would often supplement these spatially determined communities by joining parochial or interparochial confraternities. Religious confraternities,¹⁷ typically dedicated to a saint or an aspect of the divine, centered around charity, conviviality, religious display, and the salvation of their members’ souls. As social as well as spiritual organizations, confraternities provided critical networking opportunities and, in some instances, could shape civic government. Individuals often belonged to multiple confraternities for ambitious as well as pious reasons, and these memberships were frequently a mechanism for their charitable acts and patronage of art.¹⁸ The relationship among parishes, trade guilds, and confraternities was highly variable, across Europe and even within a single city. In many instances, confraternities were linked to specific trade guilds, formally or informally, with or without parish affiliations. Merchant communities living overseas often banded together under the auspices of a shared national saint, like Thomas Becket for the London mercers or Nicholas for the Venetians.¹⁹ In each case, devotion to the confraternity’s saint shaped the collective devotion of the fraternity as well as its individual members.²⁰ For example, the fraternity of longbowmen in Bruges, its members drawn from across the social spectrum, suitably chose St. Sebastian as their patron, honoring him at a chapel within the Franciscan friary rather than in a parish church;²¹ the Goldsmiths’ Company in London, discussed by Gibbs, adopted St. Dunstan as their patron saint, leading to his importance in many company members’ devotional lives.

As part of their religious display, confraternities often commissioned works of art, reflecting their political and spiritual concerns, that became part of the community’s religious experience. Overseas tr...