"Trade and Production Effects of the Plague: The Saminiati and Guasconi Bank of Florence (1626-1634)"

The research project aims to analyse the effects on production and trade of the plague which struck Europe in the late 1620s and early 1630s. To do so, we used unpublished financial documentation preserved in the historical archive of Bocconi university (Saminiati-Pazzi Archive), specifically, we digitized all the letters (more than 6000) sent by the merchant bank 'Saminiati e Guasconi' between the end of 1626 (date of foundation of the bank) and the beginning of 1634.
We decided to perform a text analysis over such documents, developing first an artificial intelligence tool on the platform “Transkribus” in order to transcribe the digital version of the original letters into a practical .txt file. Then we wrote an R code that classified the letters according to their destination (65 cities across Europe) and to addressee merchant (more than 400 different companies), and counted for the mention of 21 different goods and raw materials in the letters (gold, silver, silk, wool, cotton, pepper, sugar, ..).
In this way we built a dataset to quantify how trade patterns between cities and merchants during the pandemic period changed with the infection. We could also appreciate the variation in the mention of textiles manufactured in Tuscany, which follows a U shape according to the arrival and then passing of the contagion.
At the end of the project, we’re able to measure the degree of pandemic recession brought by the contagion and how this event affected trade between Florence and 65 European cities. And we could appreciate how different merchant companies entered and exited the market because of the infection.