Merchant Marks in Renaissance Italy and the Mediterranean: The Case of the Medici Wool Trade
Today’s brands are intangible assets of enormous value. They convey reputation, differentiate products, and attract consumer loyalty. They are drivers of modern capitalism. The story of these brands usually begins in the period of mass-production and mass-marketing that followed the Industrial Revolution, when the international registration and protection of brands became a pressing issue for nation states. Yet trademarks already played an important role in the often dangerous and highly uncertain global commerce of the premodern Mediterranean. The marks of medieval Italian merchants were also protected, by governments and guilds, and perhaps even understood by civil lawyers as a species of intangible property. They were sold, negotiated over in partnership agreements, and, as an indication of quality and trust, played key roles in reputation building (and “brand” building), in differentiation and the competitiveness of firms, and possibly innovation.
The business- and legal-historical study of trademarks has hitherto chiefly focused on a set of discrete contexts: the nineteenth-century and later, (relatively) liberal political, economic, and legal regimes, especially the Anglo-American common law; large firms relying on economies of scale for competitive advantage, disparate distribution chains. This paper, instead, focuses on marks in the radically different contexts of the premodern Mediterranean: the mid-14th to mid-sixteenth centuries, small-scale family firms, inside proto-mercantilist regimes with powerful craft and merchant guilds, in an entirely different legal tradition of guild rules, local legislation, the rules of merchant courts, and the logics of Roman law.
Were marks in the Renaissance Mediterranean already “intellectual property”? Were they robust tools for competitiveness, and hedges against the uncertainty of long-distance trade? Or did they serve other purposes? This paper will begin to answer these questions by examining the writings of jurists, legislation, and the extraordinary business records of Medici-family manufacturing firms that sold woolen cloth on the Ottoman market in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries.
