Seasonal and Market Considerations That Influenced the Communication Strategies of the Datini Company

The massive letter collection of the Datini company and its digitized metadata available from the archive offers a detailed view of medieval communication and travel. Using a combination of GIS and network analysis, I will use the data to look at the influence of seasonality on the speed of communication and how the unreliable speed of ocean travel encouraged an increasing use of land-based communication in the late fourteenth century. While certain major destinations obviously required sea borne communication (such as any information sent to and from Mallorca), multiple routes had the option of both: Barcelona to Valencia or Prato to Genoa. Statistical analyses of monthly communication reveal the increasing overall speed and reliability of land based communication throughout the year. This reliability led to decreased use of ocean going communication, despite the continued use of ships for the transportation of most goods. This preference in turn increasingly separated the sending of information and the sending of material necessitating a new class of dedicated letter carriers.

Additionally, I will focus on communication coming out of Palma de Mallorca and Valencia to assess how certain types of information (reports of political news, market fluctuations, purchase orders, etc.) were given preferential treatment or potentially delivered via multiple means to facilitate more orderly communication. I will also note how the letters themselves (albeit rarely) describe their own communication goals or attempts to overcome impedances throughout the system. Such notes will offer one view of the growing value of and demand for timely news amongst the merchants and elites of the Mediterranean. The facilitation of the effective transmission of news in turn contributed to an accelerating sense of time from mercantile changes measured in days to new concerns measured sometimes in hours.