The Cardinal's Hat: Money, Ambition, and Housekeeping in a Renaissance Court

288 Pages·2012·5.1 MB·English

by  Hollingsworth

Copyright
First published in the United States in 2005 by
The Overlook Press, Peter Mayer Publishers, Inc.
New York, NY
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Copyright © 2004 by Mary Hollingsworth All rights reserved. No part of this
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ISBN 978-1-46830-385-8
In Memory of My Father and Rosie
Contents
Copyright
Maps
A Note on Money

Introduction: The Archives in Modena
Chapter 1 A Family Man
Chapter 2 The Palazzo San Francesco
Chapter 3 On the Road
Chapter 4 A Court at War
Chapter 5 Domestic Affairs
Chapter 6 The Business of Pomp
Chapter 7 A Court at Peace
Chapter 8 The New Cardinal
Epilogue

Acknowledgements
Sources and Bibliography
Illustrations
Index
Maps
1 Italy
2 France
3 Ippolito’s journey from Ferrara to Lyon in March 1536
4 Ippolito’s estates

A Note on Money
T
HE RELATIONSHIP BETWEEN the various currencies that appear in Ippolito’s
account books is enormously complex. Most states in sixteenth-century Europe
had their own silver-based coinage. France, which had long been a centralized
monarchy, had a single system based on the livre (1 livre = 20 sous = 240
deniers). In Italy, where the peninsula was fragmented into numerous different
states, each city had its own local currency: Ferrara, for example, used the lira
march-esana (1 lira = 20 soldi = 240 denari), while Rome preferred a decimal
system based on the scudo di moneta (1 scudo di moneta = 10 giulii = 100
baiocchi). There were also internationally recognized gold coins, such as the
Venetian ducat, the Florentine florin and the gold scudo. The latter appears
frequently in Ippolito’s account books and could clearly be used across Europe.
Wealth was assessed in gold, the currency of international trade, while silver
coinage was used for everyday transactions, such as buying food or paying
wages. These currencies, gold and silver, fluctuated against each other in
response to market forces: during the years 1534—40, the period covered by this
book, the gold scudo was worth 45 sous in France, 70 soldi in Ferrara and 105
baiocchi in Rome.
To simplify the bewildering number of currencies that appear as a result of
Ippolito’s extensive travels, I have translated all prices into gold scudi, only
occasionally using the local currency to clarify exchange rates.
What was the gold scudo worth in today’s terms? There is no single answer to
this question. In 1536—40 a scudo would buy 28 chickens or 50 kg of flour and
represented one week’s wages for a master builder. Nowadays a builder can
easily earn £500 a week, but 50 kg of flour costs only £30.
Introduction
The Archives at Modena
I
PPOLITO D’ESTE WAS the second son of Alfonso d’Este and Lucretia Borgia. His
grandparents on his father’s side were Ercole d’Este, the Duke of Ferrara, and
Eleonora of Aragon, daughter of the King of Naples. Lucretia’s parents were
Rodrigo Borgia, better known as Pope Alexander VI, and his beautiful Roman
mistress, Vanozza de’ Cataneis. Ippolito’s lineage was impressive, and so was
his career. One of the leading cardinals of the sixteenth century, and a serious
contender for papal election on several occasions, he was also one of the most
important patrons of the arts in Rome, the builder of the magnificent Villa d’Este
at Tivoli and the benefactor of the musician Palestrina. His artistic achievements
have been thoroughly researched by scholars but his life and career have so far
largely been ignored. This is surprising considering the astonishing quantity of
his papers that have survived. The state archives at Modena contain over 2,000
of his letters, as well as many written to him, and over 200 of his account books.
As one particular friend, Julian Kliemann, pointed out to me, Ippolito would be a
fascinating subject for research.
Even so, I kept putting off my visit to the archives in Modena until I was
finally forced there by accident. One freezing morning in January 1999 I was
negotiating the fog-bound autostrada north of Turin, on my way back to
Florence where I was living at the time, when my landlady rang to say that my
central heating had broken down. The weather was far too cold to consider going
home and the Modena exit was only two hours away. The next day I went to the
archives. They are housed in what had been a very grand palace. There was a car
parked between the columns of the entrance hall, and what had once been an
elegant courtyard was now a kitchen garden.
Once the staff realized that I wanted to look at all Ippolito’s papers, they could
not have been more helpful. The Director sent me down into the stores, the
cavernous reception rooms of the old palace, now musty and cold, and lined with
shelves filled with leather-bound volumes, acres and acres of the Este family’s
past, dating back to the fourteenth century. For a historian, this was heaven. I
found Ippolito’s account books stacked high up in a corner under one of the
ceilings, accessible only by a narrow metal ladder. For the following three
months I sat in the little reading room upstairs and immersed myself in the
minutiae of Ippolito’s life as I read through the volumes of accounts and box
upon box of papers.
Floodwater had damaged many of the letters – some crumbled in my hands,
while others were legible only under the ultra-violet light of the lamp by the
photocopying room. But a surprising quantity were as clear as the day on which
they had been written, 450 years ago. Neither the language nor the handwriting
were as hard to decipher as I had feared. Unlike English, Italian has changed
little since the sixteenth century, though it took some time to get used to the local
dialect, and to the bewildering variety of currencies Ippolito encountered as he
travelled across Italy and France. Some hands were impossibly cramped, but
others wrote in a perfectly formed italic script. Much harder were the coded
letters, several of which I have still not managed to decipher.
As the days progressed I gradually discovered Ippolito himself, his habits, his
tastes and his personality, embodied in the large, open and exuberant signature
which he penned at the bottom of each of his letters. However, it was not just
Ippolito who began to emerge across the centuries, but also the bookkeepers who
meticulously filled in his ledgers, the men who belonged to his household and
were listed year after year in the registers of salaried employees, the shopkeepers
who supplied the velvets, silks and taffetas for his clothes, the painters who
decorated his palaces, the butchers who provided the meat for his kitchens, and
the blacksmiths who supplied his horses with shoes.
What I had stumbled upon was a unique account of life in sixteenth-century
Europe, a detailed record of how a Renaissance prince lived. Here were not only
the gold and silver, the silks and velvets, the fripperies and baubles that we
associate with pomp and prestige, but also the soap, the candles, the shoelaces,
the cooking pots and the drains, the stuff of everyday life. Above all, these
ledgers bore witness to one of the major preoccupations of the period, and
something much loved by Ippolito – money.