Contact

mail@gemini-theme.com
+ 001 0231 123 32

Follow

Info

All demo content is for sample purposes only, intended to represent a live site. Please use the RocketLauncher to install an equivalent of the demo, all images will be replaced with sample images.

Fènix is an ambitious project, designed to increase knowledge about European cultural heritage. The team involved in this project leads a rigorous in-depth study in order to analyse, disseminate and put into value an exceptional documentary archive preserved in Catalonia: the files related to the commercial activity of Joan de Torralba, who was a Barcelonese merchant living in the 15th Century. His files –largely unpublished– are a key documentary source of great importance for the knowledge of the European mercantile world and the so called 'merchant culture'. First approaches to this great collection of documents reveal the vast chances of analysis and the exquisite potential of this source to know the processes of Europeanization of the low medieval society. With the development of mercantile activities that will eventually form a first common European market, there is also a great idea of values and ways of life, ways of understanding the world and the European society that will help shape the European mentality of today with all its implications. Understanding the genesis of this idea and scale of values is a key element in understanding our European way of being and in the possibilities of transmitting this rich cultural heritage to future generations.

The exceptional preservation of the accounting books and further documents related to the activities of the most important businessmen, such as Francesco di Marco Datini, the company led by the Salviatti family, or Simón Ruiz, has generated projects carried out and funded around institutes and groups of research and numerous publications that have spread the main results of the studies carried out. The "Istituto Internazionale di Storia Economica Francesco Datini" has assembled during decades the initiatives for the study and dissemination of the Datini files. The ENPrEsa project ('Entreprise, Négoce et Production a Europe (XIV-XVIe siècles)', which is funded by the French "Agence Nationale de la Recherche", leads the analysis of the documentation corresponding to the Salviati family kept in the 'Scuola Normale Superiore' of Pisa. Ruiz’s funds, kept in the Provincial Historical Archive of Valladolid, have the sponsorship of the Simón Ruiz Foundation, Simón Ruiz Chair of the University of Valladolid. All these activities aim at the conservation, research and dissemination of a key information for the knowledge of the earliest networks of the global economy in Europe. Studies about the Torralba society are still lacking or insufficient. Accounting books that have survived in the Catalan-Aragonese archives confer an undeniable importance on this topic. Therefore our study is a challenge to know mercantile activities of one single family starting in the 15th Century.

Torralba was the leader of a commercial company born in mid-15th Century closely linked to the mercantile elites of previous times. Catalan and Aragonese merchants joined their capital in an economic enterprise within a context of trade effervescence. Due to Torralba’s daughter’s marriage to the nobleman Joan de Sabastida, the accounting books of the society were kept in the Sabastida archive and, later, they joined the Requesens’ files, when both families were linked by marriage. Thus, with the transfer of the documentary collection Palau-Requesens to the National Archive of Catalonia in 2011, the collection of accounting books the merchant Joan de Torralba (ANC1-960-T) became public and available to researchers.

This documentation is a chief historic information source for the study of the professional development and strengthening of merchants in the Late Medieval European area. The increase of their economic activity led to the transformation of the Mediterranean landscape in relation to the needs and demands of trade itself. The dissemination, reception and assimilation of new mercantile techniques designed by Italian operators and transmitted through direct and continuous contact in different Mediterranean and Atlantic points entailed a transformation of professional values. A new open and cosmopolitan mentality promoted more cooperative attitudes. Trade became then not only an economic activity but also a social expression.

In this context, cities like Barcelona or Zaragoza, directly linked to the Torralba society, but some others such as Girona, Tarragona or Lleida were at the top of the economic pyramid. These were cities that became a market for markets and eased links between regional and international trade. They became dominant nodes related to an area of territorial influence and of commercial specialization. Diversified and specialized artisans within this area produced goods in order to fulfill the needs of urban spaces, but also the surrounding rural landscapes and the international trade. The origins of the internationalization of Catalan trade must be found here, in the international relations of cities such as Barcelona, Valencia or Zaragoza, which have permanent communities of Italian or German merchants, among others, that carry out its activities and busines.