Detail from Masaccio’s The Tribute Money in the Brancacci Chapel
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The arrival of a diplomatic mission in Mamluk Cairo was no small thing.
From Africa, Asia, and Europe they came, bringing peace, bringing threats, bringing tributes, demands, or requests. They came, and they brought slaves, furs, hunting birds, and fabrics. And they received things in return.
They received generous gifts. They received housing and provisions. Perhaps most importantly they received a spectacle, as they sat as audience to their hosts projection of wealth and power. Horns and drums provided the soundtrack for astonishing pyrotechnical displays using bitumen and gunpowder; guards of honour and military parades asserted Mamluk might.
In 1440, a delegation arrived on behalf of the Timurid ruler Shah Rukh, and the 15th century historian Ibn Taghri Birdi was there to describe the city’s wonderful decorations, the way it was all lit up by candles, and how its people thronged in the street to watch the visitors arrive, how the Timurids inspected a ceremonial guard at the palace gate before meeting with the sultan and presenting him with gems and silks, cloths and furs, musk, and thirty Bactrian camels.
When a 1453 Ottoman embassy arrived, fresh from the conquest of Constantinople, the city was gloriously decorated with images and oil lamps, and its streets lined with lance-bearing soldiers. And in 1495, Ibn al-Himsi described something similar.
Quote:
An ambassador of the sultan of the East arrived at the court of our Sultan al-Malik al-Ashraf Qaytbay in Cairo. The sultan’s mamluks lined up along the way from al-Rumayla to Bab al-Hawsh, in the citadel. Companies of officers and chanters were staged at every gate. The ambassador ascended in a magnificent procession. I viewed it at the citadel. It was a splendid day. The ambassador brought gifts and presents. He sent a message to the sultan declaring: I am the servant of the guardian of the holy cities. … After several days he was received in an official banquet at the hippodrome. The sultan’s mamluks were there too. Mounted on their horses, they demonstrated their skills: standing on the saddle they shot arrows and gamboled with lances. This astonished the ambassador.
All the ingredients were there in that 15th century display of grandeur and force, and when the ambassador met with the sultan, he brought gifts: boxes of silver orbs, furs of lynx and sable, 50 enslaved, and more. He in turn was given a rich wool robe lined with sable, similar to the one the sultan himself wore, and together the two took in the entertainments, notably wrestling. But not all visiting embassies were so well received.
Today, we’re looking at how it went for our two friends from Florence, for Felice Brancacci and Carlo di Francesco Federighi.
Hello, and welcome. My name is Devon, and this is Human Circus: Journeys in the Medieval World, the podcast that explores medieval history through the stories of its travellers. At this time in the episode, I’d like to point out that if you are enjoying the podcast and able to do so, you can help keep this journey on the right track at patreon.com/humancircus, and I’d also like to send out my thanks this time to Craig, to S.J., to Marek, and to Tom. Thank you all very much!
And now, let’s get back to the story.
Today, we’re finishing up with Brancacci, Federighi, and their diplomatic adventures in Mamluk Egypt. Last time, we left them in Cairo, having at last succeeded in extricating themselves from the Alexandrian admiral, and on the cusp of getting down to business and actually representing their city to the sultan. That’s where we left them, and that’s where we’ll pick them up, as they prepared for that meeting. They’d been sent to Egypt seeking trading rights, everything the Pisans had enjoyed and more - everything the Venetians had. They’d been sent to lobby the sultan in regards to their city’s currency, the florin. They had come this far, past the sea, of course, and Alexandria with its own set of difficulties, but that was no guarantee of success. All sorts of things could still go wrong and indeed to varying degrees would for other embassies.
One 1460s Ottoman ambassador failed to bow and kiss the ground before the sultan on his first audience and had to apologize profusely, which he was at least allowed to do at a second meeting.
Another ambassador, in Cairo on behalf of Uzun Hasan, ruler of the Aq Qoyunlu or White Sheep Turkomans, was sent away without even communicating his message or being seen at all.
And a Timurid delegation caused initial annoyance at being so large that their hosts “had to supply them with [200kg] of barley … 27 sheep and 40 chickens to feed them.” Still, their visit seemed to go very well, at least until after they’d left the sultan’s presence. As they returned to their quarters, they were followed by a hostile mob whose aggression escalated from angry jeering to stone-throwing, beatings, and plundering. The mob was, quote, so “unrestrained in their robbery that they took even the delegation’s horses, … turquoise stones, pieces of silk and velvet, musk, all kinds of furs, and other articles,” and an angry sultan, who seems genuinely not to have intended for any of it to happen, punished several who’d been involved in the attack and replaced the embassy’s stolen items with richer gifts.
So I suppose it all worked out for those Timurids as a group, not so sure how the individuals in it fared, what with the beatings, but it shows that the sultan’s approval wasn’t all you needed for a smooth and successful diplomatic mission. You could make all the right bows and bring just the rights gifts for all the right obstructionist officers, but then public violence could get you. There were just so many ways that things could go wrong for a visiting embassy, but I should point out that Florence was positioned to avoid at least some of them.
Unlike the Ottomans, the White Sheep Turkomans, and the Timurids mentioned above, Florence was not, in any sense, a powerful rival. They were just another potential partner among many, trading on the Mediterranean. So they might fumble through ignorance or unwillingness to play the game properly and spread the money around, but they weren’t exactly going to threaten their much more powerful hosts.
On the 5th of May, they left their Cairo residence and got to work.
The spent the morning in calling upon someone they refer to as the “Dindar of the Sultan,” a religious official, and all went well for them there. They presented their letters, asked for support, and were treated, Brancacci says, with “good manners and exquisite regard.” But out on the street, the regard was less exquisite.
They were riding along a bustling road on their way to another appointment, this time with the officer they identified as chancellor, when they caught the attention of a holy man. The first they knew of it, he was striding towards them, stick in hand, and then striking Federighi repeatedly with it. He turned to Brancacci and lashed out at him too, the ambassador managing to duck and dodge away after the first blow. And all the while, the man was speaking, shouting possibly, and as they later learned from their interpreters, he was saying something like this: “Look at what has become of us and our faith. These Christians travel on horse, but we are on foot!” And his message struck a chord. It riled up the surrounding crowds who chased after the ambassadors and their people, pulling some of their party down from their horses.
“I do not mean to be long-winded,” Brancacci would later write, really unnecessarily under the circumstances, “but even our interpreters struggled to get home together with our young men and our servants.” There’d been the immediate risks of offended mob violence, and then there had been the danger when one of their interpreters seized the religious man who had instigated the whole thing, beaten him, and had him tied up to be collected by the authorities.
Though he was later freed by the crowd, they had, Brancacci was later given to understand, been in serious jeopardy to treat a religious figure like that, and all things considered, they were lucky to have escaped the situation without coming to too much harm.
I’m sure that’s not how it felt though. They were surely shaken by the incident, but there was no time for retreating to their residence and settling their nerves over some refreshing sweet water. They had work to do. It was off to see the chancellor first, and then another officer.
Both officials greeted them warmly, expressed their sadness at what had happened in the street, and showed every interest in their cause where the florin was concerned. That was clearly their first priority, for that was the issue they pressed first, preparing the way here by offering it up to be weighed and tested. The early indications were good, but Brancacci writes that “none of [them] could feel at ease, due more to [their] doubts about the future than about what had happened,” though I’m sure that hadn’t helped.
That night received from one interpreter “a large castrated lamb and a cage of chickens,” and from that second official they’d been to see “twenty geese, fifty hens, two blocks of sugar, and four boxes of … [candied fruit and other] sweets,” and the next day, they prepared for their audience with the sultan. They had written requests to finalize and the old Pisan letters of privilege that they arranged to be read. Then, they rested, and they waited for the morning of the 7th.
Their interpreters arrived before daybreak with horses, bringing with them the Receiver of the Ambassadors and other officials. All together, they rode to the sultan’s castle on its hilltop perch, two miles from their residence, reaching it as the sun came up and waiting, waiting as officers passed them and entered the castle, “a never-ending and incredible multitude, all dressed in their own style, with full-length white tunics, some with sashes of very fine material and some heavier, with light blue embroideries on the arms.” At last, the embassy was allowed to proceed, up a wide stone stairway, their horses struggling to reach the top and there, reaching another gate and courtyard where they stopped to sit before going on.
Now, they passed under many arches and between pairs of soldiers, each facing one another with spears in hand. They went through another courtyard and still more soldiers, more spears, so that Brancacci said they were “completely surrounded by weapons.” Even if the Florentine mission was unlikely to intimidate the Mamluks in the slightest, that didn’t mean the Mamluks were going to refrain from intimidating them, and matters weren’t getting any more soothing as they made their way deeper into the sultan’s castle, all the way in to the sultan’s residence.
They climbed eight steps, again between spears, but this time the “spears” had three or four sword-like blades which were rubbed together above the ambassadors as they walked. So you can hold that metal-on-metal sound in your head, imagine them clashing and scraping against one another over their heads as they entered the hall of the sultan.
The men from Florence felt as though they had stepped into a church, what with its stone columns and three naves. They walked forward over marble inlaid floors and carpets, approaching what Brancacci termed a “pulpit,” and in the centre of that “pulpit,” sitting on the ground, and somewhat obscured from view by the lack of stairs at the front, was the sultan. Brancacci records his first impressions.
“He was dressed in a tunic similar to the others we had seen, a man thirty-eight or forty years old, with a brown beard. Behind him were many of his barons, among whom some with a sheathed sword in hand; others still a baton as long as an arm … and made of gold. They held it very high and straight above the shoulders. … And all along the two staircases and down below was an infinite number of barons. I would almost say that this assemblage looked like a religious painting. On certain steps at the foot of every column and everywhere else were men playing violas, lutes, drums, [and] cymbals, and there were also singers, everyone playing together making a lot of noise and a partially-harmonious sound. Between the novelty for the eyes and for the ears, and the fact that they made us kiss the ground at every step, I doubt that I can coherently describe the scene.”
Each of the Florentines was seized tightly by the shoulders and at the appropriate moments shouted at with words they couldn’t understand, the commands so loud they grew dizzy. Their minders were pressing them down, making them kiss the ground before the sultan, 6 or 8 times, and then, as they closed to within about 45 feet away from the sultan, they stopped, and so did the music. They were told they could speak, so Brancacci, or perhaps Federighi, did.
He presented his city’s position and desires there beneath those shining blades, and then after about 12 words, he was cut off. “Enough, enough,” he heard through their interpreter. They were all pressed toward the ground for another kiss and then shown the exit, one backwards step at a time.
They were bustled out, and it’s not clear if they thought that was it, if they wondered whether it wasn’t all over, and if the sultan hadn’t taken a look at them and maybe thought to himself, “well, these people aren’t interesting.” But hopefully someone had better prepared them than that because it wasn’t over yet.
They waited outside, while crowds rushed through and about half an hour passed. Then they were shown into another hall, where they found the sultan among a small group of mamluks. Again they kissed the ground, again held tightly by the men at their sides. Now, they were only 18 feet away from the man they had come to see, and they were able to present their petition, “almost one word at a time,” Brancacci writes, maybe reflecting the way their words were being translated.
First, they brought forward their letters of recommendation, and then their three requests: freedom to conduct commerce in the sultan’s territories as the Pisans had, a consul complete with a fondaco and all the usual privileges, and the Florentine florin accepted as the ducat was. They left their coins behind to be tested, for the florin to show its metal, almost framed as a test of faith one might say, and they left, again kissing the ground on the way out.
They left the castle, and on the way, they stopped in with a friendly official. How had they done, they asked, and what could they expect? Very well, he told them. They had done very well. Indeed, he said, “never before had a western ambassador received such a welcome.” So that sounded good. Great, even. They were off to a fantastic start.
They must have headed back to their residence feeling absolutely ecstatic, or even better, relieved. But then, as they made their way, they had to drive off one person after another asking for money. Even worse, Brancacci writes, “our interpreter told us that [the] main lords went around saying that they had done great things for us, and that we had received great honour…, and that it would be necessary for us to present them with gifts. And these words were like knives to the heart, because we felt deceived.”
The Florentines’ audience with the sultan was hardly their last. They’d neither given gifts nor gotten robes. They’d not nearly lobbied for their goals as they needed to. They’d met with the Mamluk ruler on September 7th, and they were going to be staying through to November. There was much work still to be done.
On the 8th, they were back at the castle, now finding the sultan on a platform Brancacci compared to the “beautifully-decorated ones that you would find in a chapel over a choir.” And this time, they presented their gifts: “a pair of trunks, rich and beautiful, a piece of red two-pile velvet with gold trimmings, and one similar but blue, one of plain red velvet, and one green and black,” each piece about 72 feet long.
Brancacci was very aware that their offerings were but modest in that place, but he reported that the sultan received it all very graciously, that he responded positively to their requests, and was only perturbed that the gifts had arrived covered up. It was actually something that their interpreters had advised so that nothing would be stolen on the way, but for their pains, there would be beatings in store for those interpreters, for having done so and also for the suspicion that they might have skimmed from the gifts for their own benefit. Nobody trusted the interpreters, and soon enough Brancacci and his colleagues wouldn’t either.
For now, they continued their rounds of gift-giving, to the lords and officials on whom their diplomatic mission depended for success, bringing velvet that they’d bought from their merchants after hearing, quite forcefully, that the wool they’d planned on giving was not at all appropriate, bringing smaller gifts of cloth or coin to those officials’ underlings.
On the 10th, there were meetings concerning the proposals they’d written up and had translated, and the details started to be hammered out. Yes, the sultan had nodded agreeably to all the ambassadors’ requests, but now those requests had to get past his officials, the bureaucrats as one might think of them, and they weren’t going to be nodding agreeably.
Judges had apparently been consulted, and it would be quite out of the question for Florence to simply carry on under the agreements with Pisa. Some progress was made on the issue of the fondaco, with a promise being made to request one on the Florentine’s behalf, and there was movement too on the florin front; they wanted 100 of the coin and 100 ducats to compare, and after close examination on the scales, they seemed pleased. However, Brancacci writes, “regarding our major contracts and agreements, they left without giving us any real answer.”
There was also more financial stress. The officials didn’t just want 100 florins to test. They wanted another hundred to distribute as samples. And this may have been entirely legitimate, didn’t necessarily mean they were just out to make a little more for themselves at the Florentines’ expense, but whatever the money was for, our envoys didn’t really have it. The coins they had provided for testing had been borrowed from their city’s merchants, and they had not remotely been directed to spend such quantities. So even though their interpreters urged them to reconsider, said they should not refuse these men upon whom their entire enterprise was dependent, they did refuse, they hoped for the best, and they grumbled about their interpreters.
“Everyone exploited us,” Brancacci would write, “our own interpreter worst of all. We did not want to give into him, nor could we deny him what he requested, lest he got offended, since he was in a position to ruin us. Finally, we returned home to take refreshments…. We were greatly displeased, since we saw that from big to small, everyone tried to take advantage of us, and there was not a single one of us who would not have given away half of what he had just to go home.” For that, they were going to need to be patient.
More “requests” for gifts poured in and were fulfilled to somewhat grudging acceptance, with one recipient describing the cloth he’d been given as “neither beautiful nor of good quality,” and the Florentine mission continued their work under something of a time-constraint. There were galleys due to arrive, and if agreements had not been made, then they wouldn’t be able to unload their wares when they did so.
Brancacci and co. pleaded their case on the 11th, 12th, and 13th, but other, larger matters had apparently occupied the sultan’s attention, other deals that had complicated their own. This Florence business was a big deal to them, but much less so to him. The 14th was supposed to see them ceremonially robed by the sultan, but who knew now when that might happen. When word came that nothing could be done until the 16th at the earliest, they wondered why, but they suspected “it was to extort more money.”
While they waited out this new delay, they weren’t entirely housebound, and they weren’t spending every last waking hour reading trade agreements or worrying about currency. On the 15th, for example, they managed to get out of the office for a bit.
They visited a site we’ve been to just recently on this podcast, travelling six miles from Cairo to the village of Matariya. There, they stopped at the fresh water spring where Mary, Joseph, and Jesus were said to have rested in their flight from Jerusalem, the spring appearing miraculously at the infant’s feet; they saw the sycamore tree where the holy family had sought refuge from Herod; and they came to the balsam plants we paused at in our own, Mandevillian visit to Egypt, taking cuttings from what Brancacci said was “in the entire world … the only place where this plant gr[ew].” The party would round out their day with visits to the local churches before returning home.
The next day, they were back to work with the sultan’s interpreter, but they also received another diversion, as visitors to their residence gave Brancacci what was quite clearly his first look at an elephant, an animal that he wrote was “so marvellous and of such strange appearance that I am barely able to speak about it.” It’s skin he likened to a buffalo’s, its ears to the wings of a bat but the size of medium wheels, its legs like columns, its eyes like a pig’s.
As the astonished Florentines looked on, the animal’s trainer spoke to it in words they didn’t understand, and the elephant sucked up water in its trunk and sprayed it all about, soaking its audience. The trainer stood on its raised foot and had it lift him up. He sat on a carpet on its back and did a kind of call and response, him speaking and the elephant trumpeting after. He held a stick in his hand and had the elephant strike it with the one that he held with his trunk. The elephant hurled loaded bags high up in the air, one after the other, and lay on the ground, as gracefully as a puppy. Brancacci was clearly struck by the experience but commented that the creature was “very dirty and stank all around.” He wrote that “overall, it seemed more like a piece of meat that wiggles about than a four-legged animal.”
The whole episode makes for an odd passage in the text, sits very strangely alongside his fairly straightforward report of diplomatic business and its difficulties, but he must have thought the creature would be of interest to those back home, and he devoted more words to it than any other single encounter, including his audience with the sultan.
Over the next few days, there was little for the envoys to do. They waited while their hosts were busy with a religious holiday, and they saw yet more consequences of last episode’s Catalan actions, this time manifesting as a group of pilgrims arriving in Cairo. The pilgrims had been bound for Jerusalem, but the sultan wasn’t allowing any Christians in the holy city until trade with the Catalans was normalized and obviously saw control of Jerusalem as a pretty powerful lever with which to get that done. These pilgrims pleaded with the Florentine ambassadors to intercede on their behalf, but would Brancacci and his colleagues be able to do any such thing? They had still been waiting for an audience with the sultan on their own business. At last, on the 21st, they were invited in for that audience.
At the palace, they thanked Sultan Barsbay for all that he had done, “with whatever kind words [they] knew.” They commended their merchants to him, received the traditional robes for four of their party, and they asked if they might come and see him again if they needed to. His response was not exactly encouraging. “What for?” he asked. “You are already dismissed.”
Clearly, they would not be seeing him again.
So they began to take their leave, kissing the ground many times in retreat. The sultan spoke in his closing words of his wish that they be allies, since they had arrived at the right time. He pressed them to speak with the Catalans in order to fix matters between his realm and theirs, and seeing the opening, the Florentines started to ask him about Jerusalem, but he quickly cut them off, saying that “he desired only that other nations would humble themselves into making the Catalans come to terms with him.” And with that, they were pulled off without a chance to respond. This phase of their embassy was definitely over, but their work, as you may have guessed, was not, and neither was their day.
Getting the nod of approval from the sultan, the official robes, and the general agreement that their business was welcome, was a far cry from actually concluding any agreements as to the details. There were more officials to be seen that same day and further insistence that one hundred florins be supplied to be sent round as samples, along with building frustration at the ambassadors’ failure to do so. Brancacci and his colleagues protested that the 100 florins they’d brought in to be tested were not even theirs but rather their merchants’, but eventually it all just grew to be too much for the one Mamluk official they were speaking with.
I imagine him turning eyes and perhaps even hands to the sky as he swore that “these ambassadors are so ignorant, they do not realize what we intend to do with these hundred florins.” The words, as you might expect, sounded very harsh to the Florentines, but in Brancacci‘s words, they “could not contradict them.” They could only agree to send along their chancellor and interpreter the next day and make their way to their residence, pushing past some 500 singers, jugglers, and officers of the sultan who finally left and let them be “amidst great commotion, screams and threats.” That same day, they saw “twelve camels arrive, loaded with snow,” a pretty striking dispatch from the unrefrigerated world.
Much of Brancacci’s embassy seems to have been consumed with arranging documents and with waiting. This was to be translated and that was to be excised. Passages that had been discussed were found to be missing, were requested, and had to be translated and examined when they arrived. Papers promised at noon were sent for again at sundown. And always they waited. They waited hours when calling upon officials. They waited days, or even weeks, for documents, their waiting a very open indication of their unimportance or their unwillingness to spend money.
Interpreters were depended upon for everything, but they couldn’t be trusted. They were in for richer deals than this little embassy had a budget for, or at least that was the ambassadors’, likely correct, assessment, and there were problems beyond the interpreters. The official who was to disperse their daily stipend hadn’t done so for nine days. Even worse, he was now making accusations that they’d sold off some of the gifts their city had intended for the sultan and other lords. Maybe this official was just finding an excuse to hold on to that stipend himself and would always have done so, or maybe their mission’s lack of generosity had placed it beyond the pale and was starting to cost more than it had saved.
Either way, none of it was going to matter if the sickness finished them off first. Something had taken hold in the party, and three of their four youthful servants were sick already. The time had definitely come to leave. But there were certain documents that they needed first, documents which they’d sent for but could not obtain. Meanwhile, the sultan sent them “a vial of balsam, and a stick of perfume,” and an official asked them for sixteen and a half feet of blue cloth, which they promptly supplied.
On the 26th of September, they again sent for their documents, and they decided they could wait no longer. Having already dispatched their belongings, their servants and sick to Bulaq, by the river, they now departed themselves. It was, Brancacci makes clear, a bit of risk to leave without those papers, but they did leave behind three of their men to collect them. “All matters were settled, and everything was paid for,” everything except the interpreters that is.
On the 27th, the three men arrived with documents and interpreters, but there was fresh trouble. The interpreters were not pleased with the agreed price, and after many arguments it was decided that a portion would be paid now and a further portion given to the one interpreter who would go with them, once they got to Alexandria, but that brought fresh, fresh trouble. The letters they were carrying mentioned two interpreters and they were given to understand that the second one’s name would need to be removed. This was not just a simple matter of crossing out the name. This required that the letter be taken back to Cairo to be handled properly, and that meant more waiting. Until late evening the next day, they waited for the interpreter to return with the new letter, and all the while one of their young people was very ill, so that they “did not expect to take him alive to Alexandria.”
Once they finally got moving, the river trip north was hard going, Brancacci writes, with much abuse from the “wicked men” who refused to pull the oars unless given money and wine, which sounds pretty reasonable on the part of the “wicked men,” I think. And when you read immediately after that on October 1st, after disembarking, they purchased three horses, five camels, and eighteen donkeys, it starts to look like for all their protestations about not having a hundred florins here or enough money for expensive gifts there, they probably could have paid the guys who took them up the river.
They reached Alexandria on the 2nd, one of their number too sick to ride. They presented their letters to the admiral and the qadi, witnessed the announcement that their florin was to be accepted at equal value to the ducat, and were questioned by the qadi as to what exactly was in it for him to arrange that they received a nice fondaco. They had the order of the sultan that they should have one, but there was more work, more pleading, more gift-giving in their future. They worked to secure that fondaco, that combined merchants’ centre, residence, and trading warehouse, and all the while, the threat of sickness grew. They found it had affected “the consul, his priest, as well as another young boy and two of [their] own youngsters who [they] had left with him.” A man named Piero del Papa was dead and one of his servants too.
By the 6th, most of the merchants and youngsters were sick in bed. The 7th saw the consul receive his last rites, and on the 8th, he died. The ambassadors pleaded for that fondaco, but they received only positive responses, no actual action. They were sure a bribe would have closed the deal but were unwilling still to do it, maybe unable. Meanwhile their “entire house was crowded with sick people, and those who were particularly sick needed attention … that took up a [great deal of] time and filled [them] with concern.”
On the 11th, Brancacci writes that he himself “contracted a fever, and stayed in bed,” and the next day that he “got the chills, and after that … developed a high fever that lasted throughout the night.” Of the 13th and 14th there are brief notes as to their lobbying efforts and of requesting a boat to bring them to Rhodes, and then we get the one real gap, the one jump in time, in Brancacci’s record, though you can understand why when we read in the next passage that, quote, “until November 9th, I remained sick with two tertian fevers and an ongoing one; thank God, on that day I recovered from them all, but I was very weak and I could not stand on my feet.”
Two days later, Brancacci and Federighi boarded a ship, Brancacci needing to be carried aboard on a stretcher. They were not ideal circumstances in which to be leaving, but I’m sure he was glad to finally be doing so, very glad on the 15th, when their ship left port, heading home.
Their return journey was not without incident. They experienced storms, threat of Catalan attack, near-sinkings, and a stop at a volcano where Brancacci described hiking up to the top and then looking down at the “smoke, fire, and flames,” hearing the noise, likened to “a couple of bellows in a forge” but too loud to tolerate. With one thing and another, it would not be until the 15th of January that they’d arrive in Florence, but arrive safely they did. Their travels were over, Brancacci I’m sure delighted, but had they been successful?
In a sense, they’d been set up for failure. True, they arrived in an unexpected situation, what with the recent Catalan disturbance and the new sultan, but we should read Brancacci’s outrage over the need to distribute gifts against the context that the Venitian consul in Alexandria had a whole budget for bribery. Why didn’t Florence? By comparison, they seem to have left Brancacci and Federighi inadequately prepared. As it was, Brancacci scrupulously recorded long lists of money that they were forced to give, money he said might as well have been stolen for all the choice they had in the matter, and still he seems to have been constrained from spending the money that could have smoothed the way to success.
Despite these difficulties, he would have put the best possible face on it upon returning home, as one would. He would have pointed to the recognition of his city as a trading nation, to a fondaco in Alexandria - which had eventually been arranged, and to the sultan’s acceptance of the florin as equal to the ducat, that last one being the most important.
On the other side of the balance one might point out to him that these successes were not all that they seemed, that the diplomatic mission had managed to secure neither the same favourable rates that the Venetians enjoyed nor a truly superlative fondaco, and then there was the issue of the florin.
The party had gone to great efforts to unseat the Venetian ducat as the regional currency of choice, and bolster their city’s already strong financial position, its already powerful bankers. There had been other attempts at dislodging the ducat, with sultans putting forward local coins that failed to retain value in competition with the Venetian one, but now Florence, and
Brancacci, seemed to have done it. Or had they?
When they’d presented their newly minted florino galleo to the sultan, they’d offered up their currency as a balance to the Venetian one, a benefit to both parties involved, and he’d taken it. But just two years later, he made another currency move and introduced his own in the Ashrafi along with a ban on the Christian coins of Florence and Venice. Brancacci’s success had been temporary, a passing convenience by which Sultan Barsbay had been able to break the ducat’s monopoly before bringing out his own competitor, and the florin’s time atop Mamluk trade would prove short.
However short it was, Brancacci does seem to have come home and done well for himself. His report stated that the embassy “obtained much more than [they] were commissioned to obtain,” and that they “did not obligate the Commune of Florence to the sultan in [anything].” He’d go on to play a public role in the life of his city, several roles in fact, and he’d take on one important post after another, some of them, again, as ambassador, in the early 1430s as ambassador to the pope. He’d also commission those frescoes I opened last episode with, among them The Tribute Money, that visual telling of Matthew 17, and of the encounter between Peter and the tax collector. Let’s close with that.
In that Brancacci Chapel painting that Brancacci commissioned on his return from Egypt, you see Peter three times: on the far left, he’s in the shallows, retrieving money from the fish’s mouth; in the centre, seemingly in dispute with the tax collector, Jesus standing between them as if in judgement; and on the right, paying the tax collector his tribute. It's unusual subject matter for such a painting, and Mahnaz Yousefzadeh, whose translation of Brancacci I’ve been using here, sees a message in it.
In Yousefzadeh’s view, that image in the family chapel is a celebration and justification of the ambassador’s recent trip to Egypt, of arriving in an unfamiliar city, prostrating himself before the sultan and parting with all that money.
Brancacci may have done his best in conserving his city’s resources, certainly didn’t spend as freely as he might have, and made every effort to aim for the minimum where gifts were concerned, but there were still certain parsimonious men waiting for him when he came home who would have challenged him on the extent of his spending, either freely given or otherwise. In Yousefzadeh’s reading Tribute Money was part of how he met that challenge.
The outraged Peter expresses Brancacci’s own reaction to the money that was pried from him and perhaps also the critical voices back in Florence, but Peter’s anger in the meeting is met with Jesus’s judgement that the payment, Peter’s and perhaps also Brancacci’s, though it seems unjust, should be made. Finally, the whole episode is redeemed in that miraculous coin in the fish’s mouth.
Yousefzadeh’s reading carries this forward, seeing the Tribute Money as, quote, “a moral allegory in the mercantile culture of the fifteenth century. [The mandatory gift] was a financial risk, a credit extended - but it not only resolved conflict, it was the very condition of future profit.” The paying of tribute is translated “from extortion to speculation.” What had been forced from Brancacci was not only unavoidable; it was necessary for the advancement of his city.
However he’d personally viewed the commissioned fresco, whether he saw it in terms like Yousefzadeh’s, Felice Brancacci was not able to savour the art for long. He was going to tie his fortunes by marriage to the powerful Strozzi family. They were going to play a large part in temporarily ousting Cosimo de Medici, and when an extremely hostile Medici returned from his Venetian exile to reestablish himself in 1434, the Brancacci were in with the Strozzi among the many families that were declared enemies and banished to Siena, our Felice among them.
That’s where we’ll leave the Brancacci story. I hope you’ve enjoyed it. If you’re listening on the Patreon friar feed, then keep listening for a further exploration of Mamluk gift-giving.
Sources:
Florence's Embassy to the Sultan of Egypt, translated by Mahnaz Yousefzadeh. Palgrave Macmillan, 2018.
Ashtor, Eliyahu. Levant Trade in the Middle Ages. Princeton University Press, 2014.
Behrens-Abouseif, Doris. Practising Diplomacy in the Mamluk Sultanate: Gifts and Material Culture in the Medieval Islamic World. Bloomsbury Publishing, 2014
Goldthwaite, Richard A. The Economy of Renaissance Florence. JHU Press, 2009.
Najemy, John M. A History of Florence, 1200-1575. John Wiley & Sons, 2008.
Shulman, Ken. Anatomy of a Restoration: the Brancacci Chapel. Walker, 1991.