The ‘Free Port’ and the Emergence of Livorno

It is the quality of the Mediterranean experience, however, quite apart from its economic weight, which makes it a particularly interesting setting for a GA case study.5 Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, The Boundless Sea: Writing Mediterranean History (London: Routledge, 2019), pp. 3–4. In the Mediterranean it would prove impossible for any single state – or even for the states of Christian Europe considered collectively – to achieve anything amounting to political or economic hegemony. The Mediterranean was a contested zone in which no one power held sway.6 Molly Greene, ‘Beyond the northern invasion: the Mediterranean in the seventeenth century’, Past & Present 174 (2002), 42–71, at p. 43. Moreover, it was a zone of intense diversity: religious, linguistic, cultural – and legal. Economic rivalry between states intersected with religious rivalries, sometimes in surprising ways.7 Molly Greene, Catholic Pirates and Greek Merchants: A Maritime History of the Early Modern Mediterranean (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2010). The Mediterranean was the active frontier of a long-standing conflict between Christianity and Islam, but this barrier was permeable and the conflict itself generated interaction and even trade across religious boundaries.8 Wolfgang Kaiser and Guillaume Calafat, ‘The economy of ransoming in the early modern Mediterranean’ in Francesco Trivellato, Leor Halevi, and Catia Antunes (eds), Religion and Trade: Cross-Cultural Exchanges in World History (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2014), 108–30. The entry of the English and the Dutch into Mediterranean shipping in large numbers in the late sixteenth century rendered the Mediterranean even more complex in terms of language, legal traditions, and diplomacy.9 Heywood, ‘The English in the Mediterranean, 1600–1630’; Maria Fusaro, ‘The invasion of northern litigants: English and Dutch seamen in Mediterranean courts of law’, in Maria Fusaro, Bernard Allaire, Richard Blakemore, and Tijl Vanneste (eds), Law, Labour and Empire: Comparative Perspectives on Seafarers, c. 1500–1800 (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), 21–42, at p. 23. For this reason, it has been argued that the Mediterranean provides a kind of ‘laboratory’ for the study of legal, social, and political interaction across boundaries in the early modern period, a place in which a number of global cultures, and global-historical currents, found expression in close physical proximity.10 Wolfgang Kaiser and Guillaume Calafat, ‘Violence, protection and commerce: corsairing and ars piratica in the early modern Mediterranean’, in Stefan Eklöf Amirell and Leos Müller (eds), Persistent Piracy: Maritime Violence and State-Formation in Global Historical Perspective (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 69–92, at p. 69. Few places embodied this diversity to a greater extent than the free port of Livorno.

The presence and importance of foreign operators in Livorno was even more marked than in other Mediterranean port cities. It is traditional when discussing this cosmopolitanism to pay homage to a rare coin, issued by the Grand Duke Ferdinando II.11 Corey Tazzara, The Free Port of Livorno and the Transformation of the Mediterranean World (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017), pp. 1–2; Lucia Frattarelli Fischer, ‘Lo sviluppo di una città portuale: Livorno, 1575–1720’, in Marco Folin (ed.), Sistole/Diastole: episodi di trasformazione urbana nell’Italia delle città (Venice: Istituto veneto di scienze, lettere ed arti, 2006), 271–334, at p. 304. This large gold tollero was minted in 1656 and bears an image of the harbour of Livorno filled with shipping. It was imprinted with the legend ‘diversis gentibus una’ – from diverse peoples, one. For the contemporary reader it evokes a whole number of associations, not least the motto of the United States, e pluribus unum. This parallel with the ‘land of the free’ only intensifies an anachronistic impression that Livorno was a haven for Europe’s persecuted, a cultural melting pot where toleration reigned.12 Andrea Addobbati and Marcella Aglietti, ‘Premessa’, in Andrea Addobbati and Marcella Aglietti (eds), La città delle nazioni: Livorno e i limiti del cosmopolitismo (1566–1834) (Pisa: Pisa University Press, 2016), 11–25, at p. 13. In actual fact, the tolerance extended to different national and religious groups, while remarkable in some respects, was neither uniform nor, in many cases, extensive.13 Francesca Trivellato, ‘Credito e tolleranza: i limiti del cosmopolitismo nella Livorno di età moderna’, in Andrea Addobbati and Marcella Aglietti (eds), La città delle nazioni: Livorno e i limiti del cosmopolitismo (1566–1834) (Pisa: Pisa University Press, 2016), 39–50; Stefano Villani, ‘Religious pluralism and the danger of tolerance: the English nation in Livorno in the seventeenth century’, in Federico Barbierato and Alessandra Veronese (eds), Late Medieval and Early Modern Religious Dissents: Conflicts and Plurality in Renaissance Europe (Pisa: Edizioni il Campano Arnus University Books, 2012), 97–124; Elena Fasano Guarini, ‘Livorno nell’età moderna: mito e realtà’, in Adriano Prosperi (ed.), Livorno 1606–1806: luogo di incontro tra popoli e culture (Turin: Alimandi, 2009), 19–30. Toleration was not a good in itself, and integration was not a hallmark of Livornese society.14 Stefano Villani and Lucia Frattarelli Fischer, ‘“People of every mixture”. Immigration, tollerance, and religious conflicts in early modern Livorno’, in Ann Katherine Isaacs (ed.), Immigration and Emigration in Historical Perspective (Pisa: Edizioni Plus, 2007), 93–107; Stefano Villani, ‘Religione e politica: le comunità protestanti a Livorno nel XVII e XVIIII secolo’, in Daniele Pesciatini (ed.), Livorno dal medievo all’età contemporanea. Ricerche e riflessioni (Pisa–Livorno: Banco di Sardegna, 2003), 36–64. Boundaries between different groups were rigorously policed and possibly even sharpened by the experience of living in the free port.15 Trivellato, The Familiarity of Strangers, p. 275. Another coin, issued at the same time and with the same design, comes closer to the truth of the matter, making the less contentious claim of ‘et patet et favet’ (it/he both stands open and supports). If, as seems likely, it refers not to the port itself but to the Grand Duke imprinted on the other side, then this inscription is even more apt. The minority groups that lived and operated in the port did so thanks to the personal protection of the Grand Duke.16 Addobbati, Commercio, rischio, guerra, pp. 21–2. It was he, not a general spirit of toleration, which reigned in Livorno.17 Ibid.

The coin was correct in one essential respect, however: Livorno was home to a great many different peoples. This was in part the result of conscious policy on the part of the Medici Grand Dukes who pioneered a series of radical institutional innovations that soon became associated with a new idea: the ‘free port’.18 Tazzara, The Free Port of Livorno, pp. 49–55; Michela D’Angelo, ‘Livorno 1421–1606: da villaggio a città-porto mediterranea’, in S. Adorno, G. Cristina, and A. Rotondo (eds), VisibileInvisibile – Economie urbane (Syracuse: Tyche, 2013). It was these innovations, combined with an extraordinary initial outlay on infrastructure, which transformed Livorno from a fortress between a swamp and the sea in the sixteenth century into the Mediterranean boom town of the century in the seventeenth.19 Lucia Frattarelli Fischer, ‘I bandi di Ferdinando I. La costruzione e il popolamento di Livorno dal 1590 al 1603’, in Aleksej Kalc and Elizabetta Navarra (eds), Le populazioni del mare: porti franchi, città, isole e villaggi costieri tra età moderna e contemporanea (Udine: Forum, 2003), 87–98; Lucia Frattarelli Fischer, ‘Livorno città nuova: 1574–1609’, Società e storia 11 (1989), 873–93; Paolo Castignoli, ‘Livorno da terra murata a città’, in Atti del convegno Livorno e il Mediterraneo nell’età medicea (Livorno: Bastogi, 1978), 32–9; Lucia Frattarelli Fischer, ‘Livorno. Dal pentagono di Buontalenti alla città di Ferdinando I’, Nuovi Studi Livornesi 19 (2012), 23–48. Livorno has a strong claim to be the world’s first free port, though since there was, and is, no agreed definition of the term, it is impossible to make any definitive pronouncements in this respect. We might begin by saying that a free port, at least in its perfect platonic form, was a place where goods could be imported, exported, and exchanged without the payment of customs duties and/or where merchants of whatever religion and nationality could trade on an equal footing.20 Tazzara, The Free Port of Livorno, p. 3. In order to reflect this dual conception of the free port, Thomas Kirk helpfully adopts the terms ‘entrepôt’ and ‘emporium’ to distinguish between free movement of goods (entrepôt) and free settlement of people (emporium).21 Thomas Allison Kirk, Genoa and the Sea: Policy and Power in an Early Modern Maritime Republic 1559–1684 (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2013), pp. 189–98. Livorno’s innovative and highly successful example was to have important implications for world trade. By the mid-eighteenth century, several Mediterranean ports had declared themselves free ports, including Marseille and Genoa.22 Kirk, Genoa and the Sea, p. 11; Thomas Allison Kirk, ‘Genoa and Livorno: sixteenth and seventeenth-century commercial rivalry as a stimulus to policy development’, History 86 (2002), 2–17; Junko Takeda, Between Crown and Commerce: Marseille and the Early Modern Mediterranean (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2011), p. 48. The free port model was further developed in the Caribbean and in Asia, finding its modern-day descendant in the ‘export processing zone’, of which examples can be found all over the world.23 Francis Armytage, The Free Port System in the West Indies. A Study in Commercial Policy, 1766–1822 (London: Longmans, Green, & Co, 1953); John McIntyre, Ranjeesh Narula, and Len Trevino, ‘The role of export processing zones for host countries and multinationals: a mutually beneficial relationship?’, International Trade Journal 10 (1996), 435–66.

In the first half of the seventeenth century, the ‘emporium’ facet of the Livornese free port was more in evidence than the ‘entrepôt’ dimension. Fiscal exemptions were employed from the start, chief among them the so-called benefizio libero (free benefit) which allowed goods to be stored in Livorno for a year without the payment of any taxes.24 There were various exceptions to this, however. For example, the goods had to be coming from more than 100 miles away, a distance which thus excluded goods coming from Genoa. See Tazzara, The Free Port of Livorno, p. 123. Though this reduced the burden of customs duties, however, it did so in a somewhat arcane and complicated fashion, with many exceptions remaining. Duties payable on goods were actually increased by the Grand Duke in 1643 in order to meet expenses incurred during the Thirty Years War.25 Tazzara, The Free Port of Livorno, p. 84; Carlo Cipolla, Il burocrate e il marinaio: la ‘sanità’ Toscana e le tribolazioni degli Inglesi a Livorno nel 17. secolo (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2012), pp. 25–6. It was only with the reform of 1676 that Livorno became a free port in the modern understanding of the term, with the complete abolishment of customs duties.26 Lucia Frattarelli Fischer, ‘Livorno 1676. La città e il porto franco’, in Franco Angiolini, Vieri Becagli, and Marcello Verga (eds), La Toscana nell’età di Cosimo III (Florence: EDIFIR, 1993), 45–66. Before this, the emphasis of the free port was more on personal protections and liberties. The emblematic instrument here – though its actual influence is debated – was the livornina, the famous declaration by Ferdinando I inviting ‘all merchants of whatever nation – Easterners, Westerners, Spanish, Portuguese, Greeks, Germans, Italians, Jews, Turks, Moors, Armenians, Persians, and [those] of other states’ to settle in the town, initially made in 1591 and reissued in 1593.27 Frattarelli Fischer, ‘I bandi di Ferdinando I’; Stephanie Nadalo, ‘Populating a “nest of pirates, murtherers etc.”: Tuscan immigration policy and “Ragion di Stato” in the free port of Livorno’, in Timothy Fehler, Greta Kroeker, Charles Parker, and Jonathan Ray (eds), Religious Diasporas in Early Modern Europe: Strategies of Exile (London: Pickering and Chatto, 2014), 31–45; Lucia Frattarelli Fischer, ‘La Livornina. Alle origini della società livornese’, in Adriano Prosperi (ed.), Livorno 1606–1806: luogo di incontro tra popoli e culture (Turin: Alimandi, 2009), 43–62. It encouraged these would-be settlers with promises of safe-conduct from debts contracted elsewhere, freedom from criminal prosecution, and a series of tax breaks.28 Daniele Edigati, ‘Aspetti giuridici delle franchigie di Livorno: l’immunità personale in criminalibus ed il problema dell’estradizione (secoli XVI–XVIII)’, Nuovi Studi Livornesi 17 (2010), 17–41. In the event, however, the initial settling of the town was achieved not so much through expansive rhetorical declarations, or even new taxation rules, but through a much more targeted immigration policy. The Medici government utilised letters of invitation, Grand Ducal hospitality, and an overseas network of agents to encourage the ‘right sort’ of economic migrant, targeting prominent Sephardic Jewish traders in particular.29 Benjamin Ravid, ‘A tale of three cities and their raison d’etat. Ancona, Venice, Livorno and their competition for Jewish merchants in the sixteenth century’, Mediterranean Historical Review 6 (1989), 138–62. There was also a significant process of internal migration from the Tuscan hinterland besides the better-known top-down efforts by the Grand Ducal administration.30 Marco Della Pina, ‘La popolazione di Livorno nel Sei-Settecento: le componenti toscane’ in Adriano Prosperi (ed.), Livorno 1606–1806: luogo di incontro tra popoli e culture (Turin: Alimandi, 2009), 149–57.

Whatever the precise influence of the livornina itself, the vision it represented did indeed come to pass, and the town’s economic success was dependent on the presence of foreign operators.31 Frattarelli Fischer, ‘Livorno città nuova’, pp. 875–6; Filippini, Il porto di Livorno, vol.1, pp. 75–102; Fernand Braudel and Ruggiero Romano, Navires et marchandises à l’entrée du port de Livourne (1547–1611) (Paris: Librairie Armand Colin, 1951), p. 25. Over the seventeenth century, English and Dutch merchants and shipmasters became increasingly important in trade with and within the Mediterranean.32 This was Fernand Braudel’s famous ‘northern invasion’. For recent reflections on this see the first three contributions to Maria Fusaro, Colin Heywood, and Mohamed-Salah Omri (eds), Trade and Cultural Exchange in the Early Modern Mediterranean: Braudel’s Maritime Legacy (London: I.B. Tauris & Company, 2010). They were particularly important to Livorno and helped it to carve out a role as a major port of deposit: thanks to the ‘free benefit’, it became a major centre of redistribution.33 Renato Ghezzi, ‘Il porto di Livorno e il commercio mediterraneo nel Seicento’, in Adriano Prosperi (ed.), Livorno 1606–1806: luogo di incontro tra popoli e culture (Turin: Alimandi, 2009), 324–40. The port was notably engaged in ‘horizontal’ trade with the Levant and Northern Europe, but also enjoyed substantial ‘vertical’ connections with North Africa, as well as fulfilling an important role in trade along the Italian pensinsula: the so-called ‘cabotaggio’.34 Gigliola Pagano De Divitiis, ‘Livorno: porto della Toscana?’, in Adriano Prosperi (ed.), Livorno 1606–1806: luogo di incontro tra popoli e culture (Turin: Alimandi, 2009), 341–9. As was the case in lots of medieval and early modern trading centres, many of the foreigners resident in the port were organised into nationes (nazioni or ‘nations’): Francesca Trivellato defines these nationes as ‘foreign and ethno-religious communities on which sovereign authorities conferred a distinctive collective legal status that came with specific rights and obligations designed to integrate them into the fabric of local society and the economy while setting them apart from the majority of the population’.35 Trivellato, The Familiarity of Strangers, p. 43. See Frédéric Mauro, ‘Merchant communities, 1350–1750’, in James Tracy (ed.), The Rise of Merchant Empires: Long Distance Trade in the Early Modern World, 1350–1750 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 255–86, at pp. 262–6; Roberto Zaugg, ‘On the use of legal resources and the definition of group boundaries. A prosopographic analysis of the French nation and the British factory in eighteenth-century Naples’, in Georg Christ, Stefan Burkhardt, Wolfgang Kaiser, Franz-Julius Morche, and Roberto Zaugg (eds), Union in Separation – Diasporic Groups and Identities in the Eastern Mediterranean (1100–1800) (Rome: Viella, 2015), 699–714. By 1640, Livorno was home to communities of English, French, German, and Dutch traders, as well as Armenians and Greeks, all of which were organised into recognised nationes by the end of the century.36 Frattarelli Fischer, ‘Lo sviluppo di una città portuale’, p. 303. On the Armenians see Renato Ghezzi, ‘Mercanti armeni a Livorno nel XVII secolo’, in Gli Armeni lungo le strade d’Italia: atti del convegno internazionale: Torino, Genova, Livorno, 8–11 marzo 1997: giornata di studi a Livorno (Pisa: Istituti editoriali e poligrafici internazionali, 1998), 43–53. On the German-Dutch natio see Renato Ghezzi, Livorno e l’Atlantico: i commerci Olandesi nel Mediterraneo del Seicento (Bari: Cacucci, 2011); Marie-Christine Engels, Merchants, Interlopers, Seamen and Corsairs: The ‘Flemish’ Community in Livorno and Genoa (1615–1635) (Hilversum: Verloren, 1997); Magnus Ressel, ‘La nazione Olandese-Alemanna di Livorno e il suo ruolo nel sistema mercantile europeo del XVIII secolo’, in Andrea Addobbati and Marcella Aglietti (eds), La città delle nazioni: Livorno e i limiti del cosmopolitismo (1566–1834) (Pisa: Pisa University Press, 2016), 309–35. On the Greek communities of Livorno see Giangiacomo Panessa, Le comunità greche a Livorno. Tra integrazione e chiusura nazionale (Livorno: Belforte, 1991). On the English in Livorno see Michela D’Angelo, Mercanti inglesi a Livorno, 1573–1737: alle origini di una British factory (Messina: Istituto di studi storici G. Salvemini, 2004); Barbara Donati, Tra inquisizione e granducato: storie di Inglesi nella Livorno del primo seicento (Rome: Edizioni di storia e letteratura, 2010); Stefano Villani, ‘Una finistra mediterranea sull’Europea: i “nordici” nella Livorno della prima età moderna’, in Adriano Prosperi (ed.), Livorno 1606–1806: luogo di incontro tra popoli e culture (Turin: Alimandi, 2009), 158–77; Stefano Villani, ‘“Una piccola epitome di Inghilterra”. La comunità inglese di Livorno negli anni di Ferdinandi II: questioni religiose e politiche’, Cromohs 8 (2003), 1–23. The most prominent of the foreign communities was the Jewish natio, chiefly made up of Sephardic Jews who had been expelled from the Iberian peninsula.37 Renzo Toaff, La nazione ebrea a Livorno e Pisa (Florence: Olschki, 1990); Lucia Frattarelli Fischer, Vivere fuori dal ghetto: Ebrei a Pisa e Livorno (secoli XVI–XVIII) (Turin: Silvio Zamorani, 2008); Lucia Frattarelli Fischer, ‘Ebrei a Pisa e Livorno nel sei e settecento tra inquisizione e garanzie granducali’, in Aleksej Kalc and Elisabetta Navarra (eds), Le popolazioni del mare: porti franchi, città, isole e villaggi costieri tra età moderna e contemporanea (Udine: Forum, 2003), 87–98; Giuseppe Marcocci, ‘I portoghesi a Livorno nei secoli dell’età moderna’, in Adriano Prosperi (ed.), Livorno 1606–1806: luogo di incontro tra popoli e culture (Turin: Alimandi, 2009), 405–17; Francesca Trivellato, ‘Stati, diaspore e commerci mediterranei: mercanti ebrei tra Livorno, Marsiglia e Aleppo (1673–1747)’, in Adriano Prosperi (ed.), Livorno 1606–1806: luogo di incontro tra popoli e culture (Turin: Alimandi, 2009), 361–74. Ferdinando I extended even greater autonomy to these Sephardic migrants, resulting in privileges unknown to Jews in any other Catholic state. Sephardic Jews would make up around 10 per cent of Livorno’s population throughout the early modern period.38 Trivellato, The Familiarity of Strangers, p. 5. Muslims from the Ottoman and North African world also made up between 5 and 10 per cent of the population during the seventeenth century, but almost exclusively as slaves rather than the recipients of new freedoms.39 Cesare Santus, Il ‘Turco’ a Livorno: incontri con l’Islam nella Toscana del Seicento (Milan: Officina Libraria, 2019); Tazzara, The Free Port of Livorno, p. 53; Trivellato, The Familiarity of Strangers, p. 70. These were almost all prisoners captured as part of the corso – the ceaseless conflict against the infidel that still simmered in the seventeenth-century Mediterranean, Tuscany’s famous neutrality never extending to the Muslim world.40 See Santus, Il ‘Turco’ a Livorno; Cesare Santus, ‘Crimini, violenza e corruzione nel bagno di Livorno: gli schiavi “turchi” in alcuni processo del XVII secolo’, in Andrea Addobbati and Marcella Aglietti (eds), La città delle nazioni: Livorno e i limiti del cosmopolitismo (1566–1834) (Pisa: Pisa University Press, 2016), 93–108; Cesare Santus and Guillaume Calafat, ‘Les avatars du “Turc”. Esclaves et commerçants musulmans en Toscane (1600–1750)’, in Jocelyne Dakhlia and Bernard Vincent (eds), Les Musulmans dans l’histoire de l’Europe, tome 1. Une intégration invisible (Paris: Albin Michel, 2011), 471–522; Andrea Addobbati, ‘La neutralità del porto di Livorno in età medicea’, in Adriano Prosperi (ed.), Livorno 1606–1806: luogo di incontro tra popoli e culture (Turin: Alimandi, 2009), 91–103.

The significance of the free port setting, however, cannot be captured from the exclusively top-down perspective of Grand Ducal policy making.41 Addobbati, Commercio, rischio, guerra, p. 64. The Grand Dukes did not even explicitly set out to create a ‘free port’ as such. The term had many meanings for contemporaries and in the Livornese case was applied retrospectively to conditions that had already been arrived at in a far more piecemeal and untidy fashion than the single term might suggest. Even in the late eighteenth century, when the two leading Livornese jurists, Francesco Pierallini and Ascanio Baldasseroni, were asked to define the ‘porto franco’, they answered that such a thing would be impossible: the definition of a free port could not be fixed but was rather a matter of what particular laws had been laid down in each port.42 Addobbati, Commercio, rischio, guerra, pp. 65–6. The two lawyers restricted themselves to arguing that the making of the free port had begun with the livornina of 1591 and had been perfected with the customs reform of 1676. Corey Tazzara, meanwhile, has argued that a bottom-up process of negotiation between merchants and local authorities combined with a lack of central oversight was equally if not more important in the creation of the free port.43 Tazzara, The Free Port of Livorno; Corey Tazzara, ‘Managing free trade in early modern Europe: institutions, information and the free port of Livorno’, Journal of Modern History 86 (2014), 493–529. As has been noted, the ‘freedom’ of the port in the first half of the century consisted in a patchwork of piecemeal exemptions, privileges, licences, and special grants, rather than in more general liberties.44 Tazzara, The Free Port of Livorno, pp. 83, 113. Rather than digging into archives to find precedents, officials preferred to deal directly with interested parties to manage disputes and assess requests.45 Tazzara, The Free Port of Livorno, pp. 186, 197. This meant that matters were resolved not through reference to the ‘rules’ as such, but rather with reference to usage, half-remembered grants, ‘common sense’, commercial utility, and officials’ desire for personal enrichment. Petition to the Grand Duke became a potential short cut to definitive resolution, and these petitions became an administrative tool as much as a tool of justice.46 Tazzara, The Free Port of Livorno, pp. 85–98, 127; Guillaume Calafat, ‘La somme des besoins: rescrits, informations et suppliques (Toscane, 1550–1750)’, L’Atelier du Centre de recherches historiques 13 (2015), <https://journals.openedition.org/acrh/6558> [accessed 2 February 2024].

In all these discussions the idea of a ‘free port’ was frequently invoked very loosely. Rather than being used in reference to specific institutions, the ‘free port’ was instead used in a more rhetorical fashion to invoke Livorno’s unwritten constitution or compact. In essence, this constitution established that disputes be regulated in an informal manner by merchants and the local authorities without strict interpretation of the rules.47 Tazzara, The Free Port of Livorno, p. 127. Port authorities were largely congenial to this way of thinking, grounding their decisions in this unwritten constitution even after the wide-ranging reforms of 1676.48 Ibid. Officials often extended privileges which only applied to certain groups to all users of the port. Freedom from existing debts, for example, was technically offered only to those who intended to settle and become citizens. In practice, protection was often offered to ordinary merchants who had no intention of settling.49 Tazzara, The Free Port of Livorno, pp. 78–80; Edigati, ‘Aspetti giuridici delle franchigie di Livorno’, pp. 17–18.

These informal aspects of Livorno – the ‘culture of collaboration’ and the ‘lax rules and careless scrutiny’ – were equally as important to define what it meant to be a free port.50 Tazzara, The Free Port of Livorno, pp. 96, 127. Even after the relative simplification of procedures in 1676, there were other pressures which encouraged a generous interpretation of the rules. Competition between the Mediterranean ports to attract traffic exerted a downwards pressure on port authorities, both precipitating more generous arrangements for merchants and discouraging the enforcement of existing constraints even further, lest merchants decide to move to greener pastures.51 Tazzara, The Free Port of Livorno, p. 8. Marseille and Genoa were Livorno’s particular rivals in this respect, and the threat to decamp, however empty, was leveraged with some success by foreign consuls at various points in the early modern period.52 Cipolla, Il burocrate e il marinaio, pp. 103–6; Kirk, ‘Genoa and Livorno’, p. 17: Fusaro, Political Economies of Empire, p. 95.

The extent to which a ‘culture of collaboration’ was a specifically Livornese phenomenon is debatable: all early modern polities suffered to a certain extent from unenforceable rules, corrupt officials, and ad hoc solutions.53 Clemente and Zaugg, ‘The grand narrative of new institutional economics’, p. 125. Administration-as-justice was likewise not an unusual phenomenon, as we shall see.54 See Luca Mannori and Bernardo Sordi, Storia del diritto amministrativo, new edn (Rome: Laterza, 2013), pp. 52–6. Nevertheless, whatever the singularity of the Livornese modus operandi, we see a similar attitude to the one described by Tazzara prevailing in GA cases presided over by the court of the Consoli. A similar permissiveness can be observed in the way GA cases were handled, despite the fact that the court was located outside of Livorno in nearby Pisa. If anything, the court’s location outside of the port intensified this dynamic. The motivation was similar: a tendency to take the path of least resistance combined with a desire to protect the commercial vitality of the court and a willingness to accept outcomes negotiated by the participants themselves. The chief difference was that the benefit was chiefly felt not by foreign merchants resident in the port but rather the shipmasters.

Fiscal and administrative concerns were not the only part of Livorno’s appeal. The attention given to the administrative architecture of the free port tends to overshadow the concrete naval infrastructure that was created specifically to cater to maritime traffic. Across the sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, Livorno was availed of plenty of space for the unloading and warehousing of merchandise, facilities for ship repair, and piers for the protection of vessels.55 L. Frattarelli-Fischer, ‘Merci e mercanti nella Livorno secentesca’, in Silvana Balbi de Caro (ed.), Merci e monete a Livorno in età granducale (Livorno: Cassa di Risparmio di Livorno, 1997), 65–104, at p. 66. Several lazeretti were built in order to quarantine men and merchandise considered at risk of introducing plague, and these were accompanied by excellent health regulations.56 See Cipolla, Il burocrate e Il marinaio. Modern advocates of the free port as a tool of regional development might do well to consider Livorno not so much a successful example of a free port, but rather as the manifestation of the adage ‘build it and they will come’. This effort to cater to the maritime transport sector on which the commercial economy depended is likewise something that seems to be reflected in the authorities’ attitude towards GA.

Perhaps the most important consideration for our purposes, however, is simply the fact that Livorno was a new city, one that lacked a powerful native mercantile elite with well-entrenched political influence. The dynamic that this created between economic and political power in the port was the single most important influence on the way that maritime-legal cases like GA unfolded and explains the majority of differences we observe with nearby international ports such as Genoa. It is true that many members of the Florentine partriciate continued to participate in commerce right through the Medici period into the eighteenth century, both as passive investors and, sometimes, as active managers of their own commercial capital – we will have occasion to meet some of these figures in the following pages – but, overall, their capital was increasingly invested in Tuscany itself rather than in foreign trade.57 Robert Burr Litchfield, The Emergence of a Bureaucracy: The Florentine Patricians, 1530–1790 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1986), p. 211.

The situation in Livorno was therefore very different to the one that prevailed in other major Italian port centres like Genoa and Venice.58 Fusaro, Political Economies of Empire, pp. 89–109. Livorno was not the capital of the state it was located in. Tuscan businessmen, moreover, were not central to its vitality, and those that were operating there did not have the whip hand in influencing commercial policy. In Genoa, meanwhile, trade remained concentrated in the hands of a mercantile oligarchy, who also constituted the judicial and political elite of the republic. This political economy pushed the form and substance of GA procedures in a different direction, as we will see in the following chapters. Whilst the Grand Dukes naturally wished to promote Tuscan commerce and industry, the private interests of native merchants were not always the regime’s first consideration. Livorno was an important source of prestige and revenue for the Grand Duke, but the great free port experiment worked no corresponding economic miracle in the rest of the region. Indeed, one of the most striking elements in the history of the free port is that, while the rest of the world looked on in envious admiration at apparent Tuscan success, the Tuscans themselves were growing increasingly frustrated at the apparent inability of the free port to stimulate broader development in the Tuscan economy.59 Lisa Lillie, ‘Commercio, cosmopolitismo e modelli della modernità: Livorno nell’immaginario inglese a stampa, 1590–1750’ in Andrea Addobbati and Marcella Aglietti (eds), La città delle nazioni: Livorno e i limiti del cosmopolitismo (1566–1834) (Pisa: Pisa Univerity Press, 2016), 337–57; Tazzara, The Free Port of Livorno, pp. 202–31.