Tuscany’s ‘Northern’ Policy
We are now in a position to say something about how GA and Livorno’s political economy intersected. The idea that GA was used to entice masters to Livorno, as Finch had maintained, made little sense. However much masters might have wished to declare in Livorno, their wishes were irrelevant unless Livorno was already a scheduled stop. Long-term traffic flows were determined by the merchants who chartered the ships, which in turn were informed by commercial incentives. Masters decided where to declare GA only within very limited bounds. Since the actual adjustment of the GA should take place in a port in which there were some receivers, the choice was still effectively limited to the ‘menu’ of options provided by the master’s freight contract. Furthermore, the number of GA declarations resolved formally – an average of 12.5 per year across our samples, roughly one a month – does not suggest that generous GA provisions would have had a huge impact on overall port activity. Here the work of Jean-Pierre Filippini, reconstructing data on port traffic for the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, can lend some sense of proportion. In the period 1683–1700, the port was visited by between 100 and 300
navi annually (large, square-rigged vessels built for medium- and long-distance trade); the number of small vessels would have been far greater.
1 Filippini, Il porto di Livorno, vol. 1, pp. 39, 44. As noted in Chapter 3, the court of the
Consoli was more likely to be involved in GAs for these larger ships employed in longer voyages which had multiple stops involved, whilst smaller ventures were more likely to have been resolved privately, and thus be hidden from view. Even so, the GA numbers, while not insignificant, cannot be deemed decisive from the point of view of Tuscan commercial and maritime ambitions.
The only possible circumstances in which Tuscan authorities might have used GA procedures to actively attract traffic to the port (with no bearing on the case of the
Alice and Francis) was in the case of grain ships. As already noted, there are several instances in the documentary evidence where grain ships destined for Genoa were allowed to declare unseaworthiness and carry out a GA in Livorno: the end result was that the grain was sold on the Livorno market.
2 ASP, CM, AC, 319-25 (18 April 1670); ASP, CM, AC, 320-2 (9 May 1670); ASP, CM, AC, 321-25 (25 August 1670). The idea that this was a conscious policy has a certain plausibility within the broader contours of both Tuscan and Genoese political economy. Grain was a politically sensitive commodity, and both Livorno and Genoa competed as important regional distribution centres.
3 Fusaro, Political Economies of Empire, pp. 93–108. Indeed, the ‘free port’ institutions in Genoa were largely oriented around the need to encourage imports of grain.
4 Kirk, Genoa and the Sea, pp. 151–85. In Livorno, meanwhile, grain imports formed an important part of the Grand Duke’s income.
5 See Anna Mangiarotti, ‘La politica economica di Ferdinando I de Medici’, in Silvana Balbi de Caro (ed.), Merci e monete a Livorno in età granducale (Livorno: Cassa di Risparmio di Livorno, 1997), 17–36. The authorities were thus surely happy to allow masters of vessels carrying grain to Genoa to carry out this deception, though it must be said that there is not positive evidence that the strategy was deliberate, and it may have simply been a function of the court’s willingness to give shipmasters the benefit of the doubt.
In the
Alice and Francis, however,
the passivity of the Pisan court was not a way of attracting shipping per se but a way of privileging certain groups of merchants and masters who were already using the free port and played a critical role in maintaining its vitality. It is clear that the
Consoli were more than happy to allow the English merchants and Stephen Dring to arrange the GA between themselves. They facilitated the process by tolerating procedural irregularities and even providing the guise of due process, appointing a
curatore who made no substantial effort to oppose the master’s request. Nor, crucially, was the
Alice and Francis singular in this respect. By the second half of the seventeenth century, the
Consoli seem to be treating ‘Northern’ masters – English, Dutch, and German – differently from the rest. Of the 18 GA cases administered in Pisa in the year 1670, five involved an English, Dutch, or German master; on each occasion – and on no others – the
Consoli mandated a ‘reduction’ in their judgement.
6 ASP, CM, AC, 318-26 (22 January 1669). Speranza Incoronata. Master and all three witnesses from Hamburg. List of damages submitted in Dutch and translated by the ‘consule Amburghese’ in Livorno. The Dutch and Germans shared a consul in Livorno. See Ressel, ‘La nazione Olandese-Alemanna’. ASP, CM, AC, 319-13 (28 February 1669). San Giovanne. Master and all three witnesses from the Netherlands. ASP, CM, AC, 319-28 (28 April 1670). Mercante Fiorentino. Master and all three witnesses from England. Final destination was London. ASP, CM, AC, 320-7 (28 May 1670). Principe Enrico Casimiro. Ship bears a Dutch name. List of damages submitted in Dutch. Master from the Netherlands, two witnesses from the Netherlands, two from Hamburg. Final destination was Amsterdam. ASP, CM, AC, 321-30 (30 August 1670). Alice and Francis. Master and all witnesses from England. Voyage began in London. Finch’s letter attests the involvement of English merchants. These varied in size: deductions of 5%, 20%, 31%, 38%, and 57% on the original amounts requested in the masters’ declarations. Whereas Italian masters continued to receive a visit from experts to assess damage, these masters were also all allowed to submit their own damage assessments. In two of the cases, the claim was not even notarised.
7 Notarised self-assessment: ASP, CM, AC, 319-13 (28 February 1669); ASP, CM, AC, 320-7 (28 May 1670). Unnotarised self-assessment: ASP, CM, AC, 319-28 (28 April 1670); ASP, CM, AC, 321-30 (30 August 1670). The decision to reduce the requested sum was clearly not a function of accident type, since these were various in nature: corsair encounters, masts being cut in a storm, ropes being cut, and the ship being beached during strong winds. This was a conscious policy of allowing Northerners to use different procedural forms.
8 Dyble, ‘Divide and rule’, pp. 378–84. At first glance, the ‘reduction’ suggests that the
Consoli were rigorously safeguarding merchant interests. In fact, this reflects an agreement made between the parties themselves.
There thus clearly emerges a strategy designed to appease those Northern merchants and masters who were so important to the port’s vitality.
9 Ghezzi, ‘Il porto di Livorno’, p. 96. Rather than being a stratagem to actively attract ships to the port, the Tuscan approach to GA was rather a way of privileging powerful foreign merchants whilst maintaining their own judges’ role as ultimate arbiters. The Tuscans
were allowing the Northerners the greatest possible latitude in resolving their own cases in actual practice while being careful never to concede the principle of their own jurisdiction. In this sense, the Tuscan approach to GA was in line with the political economy of the free port more broadly. Livorno’s success was founded on the activities of powerful, foreign merchant communities who were enticed to the port with the promise of an extraordinary level of freedom and latitude as far their commercial activities were concerned.
10 Tazzara, The Free Port of Livorno, pp. 48–77; Frattarelli Fischer, ‘Lo sviluppo di una città portuale’. With the Northerners in the ascendency in the Mediterranean in general, and in Livorno in particular, it was politic to keep English merchants and masters onside.
11 Maria Fusaro, Political Economies of Empire, pp. 64–88; Ghezzi, ‘Il porto di Livorno’, pp. 324–8. On the Tuscan efforts to maintain the principle of their jurisdiction see Addobbati, ‘Until the very last nail’, pp. 49–51. See also Danilo Pedemonte, ‘Deserters, mutineers and criminals: British sailors and problems of port jurisdiction in Genoa and Livorno during the eighteenth century’, 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), 256–71. This may seem somewhat self-negating, like the King in Antoine de Saint-Exupéry’s novella
The Little Prince, who believes all things to be subject to him but only commands them to do what they were about to do anyway in order to avoid exposing the emptiness of his own pretensions.
12 Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, Le petit prince (New York: Reynal & Hitchcock, 1943). In reality, it was a sound strategy in the circumstances: the Tuscan authorities kept the merchants onside while formally retaining their jurisdiction and the power to intervene if it was really necessary.
A close analysis of this case thus casts Finch’s remark in a different light. The Tuscans were not neglecting the interests of merchants
inside their own jurisdiction; the losers in this situation were those merchants in other centres who had no say in the negotiation of the GA figure, particularly those in Messina, and the principal merchants in London. The important difference between a GA adjusted in Livorno and one carried out in London was that the receivers who had negotiated the GA in Livorno typically represented just a fraction of the overall venture.
13 Addobbati and Dyble, ‘One hundred barrels’, pp. 844–5. Livorno’s importance for long-distance trade, it should be remembered, lay largely in its role as a Mediterranean redistribution centre.
14 Trivellato, The Familiarity of Strangers, p. 106; Tazzara, The Free Port of Livorno, pp. 48–77; Filippini, Il porto di Livorno, vol. 1, pp. 87, 90–1. Many of the resident foreign merchants were middlemen who made their money by receiving, storing, and re-exporting goods which belonged to merchants based in London, Amsterdam, and other major ‘final destinations’.
15 Addobbati, Commercio, rischio, guerra, pp. 52–6; Filippini, Il porto di Livorno, vol. 1, p. 45. When a GA was adjusted in London or another major terminus, most or all of the interested merchants could be present in order to be party to the agreement. In a waypoint like Livorno, this was not the case. This aspect should not be exaggerated, of course: Livorno was the starting point for numerous intra-Mediterranean voyages.
16 Heywood, ‘The English in the Mediterranean, 1600–1630’, p. 36; Greene, ‘Beyond the northern invasion’, p. 47. Yet it is undeniable that many of the ships that stopped at Livorno were often midway through a longer voyage, sometimes a voyage with many additional stops. Though agents bore full legal responsibility for the cargo of their principals, they may have been able to pass on these costs to their associates, directly or indirectly.
17 Trivellato, The Familiarity of Strangers, p. 153. Even if they had to bear the cost personally, there was nothing to stop them striking a good deal for themselves, and damaging the interests of their associates, as happened in the case of the
Alice and Francis. Nor did this approach adversely affect their all-important personal reputations. When their associates asked why the costs were so large, the Livorno agents could place the blame on the Pisan
Consoli who had issued the judgement: their hands were tied. The English factors in the port most likely disassociated themselves from the entire process, presenting the imposition as an arbitrary and unavoidable injustice on the part of the court. This undermined faith in the Tuscan authorities abroad.