Between Trade and Religion: Three Florentine Merchants in Mamluk Cairo

The “religious side” of Italian trade in Medieval Egypt remains largely unexplored, especially from the viewpoint of the history of mentalities. This paper presents a case study, by comparing three different reports of the same voyage. In 1384, Florentine merchants Lionardo Frescobaldi, Simone Sigoli and Giorgio Gucci sailed from Venice to make the great pilgrimage overseas, beginning from Alexandria and ending at the Holy Sepulcher in Jerusalem. In Egypt, they visited several churches and Christian holy places in Alexandria and Cairo as well as in Mount Sinai area, and also met foreign consuls and local political authorities. After their return to Florence, each of them wrote his own travelogue. This paper focuses on the authors’ attitudes towards Muslims and on their perceptions of the latter’s attitudes towards Christians. The three merchants’ viewpoints are replaced in their travel’s historical context. On the one hand, special attention is given to the religious and legal framework of interactions between Muslim and Latin Christians in Medieval Egypt, on the background of theoretical rules and actual practices governing trade and social intercourse with “Infidels”. On this issue, acomplex attitude of economic need and religious execration towards the “other” emerges on both sides of the Mediterranean. On the other hand, the authors’ attitudes are compared to the new visions of the “other” emerging in Florentine proto-Renaissance culture, in connection with the rise of the bourgeoisie. These new visions are epitomized in a novel of the Decameron by Giovanni Boccaccio showing a quite open-minded towards religious diversity and presenting Jews, Christians and Muslims as somehow all legitimate heirs of the same “father”. In fact, all the three Florentine travelers prove quite far from the tolerant view expressed in Boccaccio’s novel. Though one of them, that is Giorgio Gucci, shows something of the pragmatic and worldly mind that characterizes ideal merchants in Boccaccio’s Decameron, he nevertheless exhibits as a fierce Crusader spirit as his fellows. All of them share a sharp hostility towards Islam and a deep aspiration to religious-spatial re-appropriation of Egypt. In a theoretical framework which remained largely unfavorable, both on Christian and Muslim side, to transcultural cooperation, subduing the “Infidel” would often appear as the only way to solve the inner tensions between economic need and religious execration of the "other".