The Merchant of Prato by Iris Origo

Author:Iris Origo
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780241303818
Publisher: Penguin Books Ltd
Published: 2017-03-15T04:00:00+00:00

Five days later Caterina came back of her own accord, ‘and Stoldo has come out of his melancholy, praise be to God’. The chances of such a flight being successful were, indeed, very slight. Underlying the stringent penalties laid down by the statutes of every city for helping or hiding runaway slaves, lay the old principle of the Justinian code: the runaway slave was also a thief, for he stole himself from his master. A proclamation cried in the city squares gave the name and description of the runaway, and it then became every citizen’s duty to hunt and seize him, and to deliver him to his master. Any unknown coloured man or woman automatically came under suspicion, and so did anyone who was scarred or branded or lacking a limb. Cave a signatis! ran the saying. Any mark or deformity was likely to be the sign of a criminal or a slave.23

Even, however, when the slaves did not run away, they were not easy to live with. They quarrelled with the other free servants and with each other, and were extremely quick with their knives.24 They sometimes corrupted, by their evil ways and coarse manners, the respectable maid-servants, and even the daughters of the house.25 And they had even been known to use magic arts and poison against their masters – for indeed, in an age when poison was a common weapon, who was in a better position to administer it than a slave?26

Moreover – according to the unanimous report of their mistresses – they stole everything they could lay their hands on. To Francesco, with his morbid fear of being defrauded – in Mazzei’s words – ‘even of the shoe-buckle of the wench that serves your slave’, the dread of their thefts became a veritable obsession. ‘Lock the door behind you with three keys’, he adjured his wife when she was going to Florence for the day.

Above all, these vigorous, hot-blooded young savages were completely promiscuous. If Margherita, as we have seen, agreed to bring up the child born to Francesco by his slave Lucia, other Tuscan wives were not so tolerant. One letter, for instance, from a client in Pistoria, revealed a very awkward domestic situation. The writer’s slave had produced, ‘to her misfortune’, a child.

And since the father could not be found, I took it and sent it out to nurse. But my Monna Lucia was seized with jealousy, and said it was mine; and though I told her it was only mine as a calf belongs to a man who also owns the cow, she still will not believe me, whether I vow or coax …. And she has won the battle, and the slave has been turned out, and we now have an old woman who is more like a monkey than a female; and this is the life I lead ….

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