For God & Profit

THE MERCHANT or PRATO (422 pp.)--Iris Origo--Knopf ($7.50).

In the square of the city of Prato (pop. 30,586), a few miles outside Florence, stands the statue of a 14th century merchant dressed in flowing robes and holding a sheaf of bills of exchange. The merchant's name is Francesco di Marco Datini, and he is still Prato's favorite son. When he died, Datini left his whole fortune of 70,000 gold florins to the town's poor, along with his spacious house and all his papers. The interest on his capital is still shared out annually (about $1,100) among poor Pratese, but to those who write and love social history it is Datini's papers that constitute the real treasure-trove.

Heaped into sacks and bundled under the stairs of his house, the Datini papers came to light again in 1870, little the worse for damp and mice. They included no fewer than 150,000 letters, more than 500 account books, 400 insurance policies, numerous ledgers--all of them adding up to a unique record of early Renaissance trade and a remarkable story of an early capitalist. British-born Marchesa Iris Origo (Leopardi: A Study in Solitude--TIME, Aug. 2, 1954) has done a brilliant job of sifting the Datini papers and presenting them for the first time as a biographical study. The theme that runs through her book is the unchanging nature of man, the unchanging sense of danger and disaster that surrounds his struggle through life.

Niqhtmares & Taxes. Born about 1335, shortly before Boccaccio wrote the Decameron, Datini never knew the terrors of high explosives and concentration camps, let alone the menace of the atomic bomb. In their place he had the Black Death, tyranny, piracy, the ruthless brutality of mercenary armies. He was the son of a Prato tavern-keeper; by wise trading and prudent investment over a period of 32 years, he became rich enough to build his international business.

In those days a merchant often had to wait years before his expended capital came home with a profit. Because of slow transportation, storms, piracy and outbreaks of plague, trade and profit margins were so precarious as to give ulcers to the steeliest modern businessman. Many a modern businessman will, in fact, find a good deal of himself reflected in Datini. He lived in a state of constant, wretched anxiety--"so vexed with many matters," he groaned, "it is a wonder I am not out of my mind.'' When he slept, nightmares about a crumbling house destroyed his rest.

Often Datini sat up day and night, hardly pausing to eat or sleep, tirelessly writing reprimands to his partners, agents and factors throughout Europe, begging them to act prudently, to "trust no man." Always, just as today, the last straw came in the form of taxation: "I shall see torn from me in my old age all that God has lent me . . . I have reached such a point that methinks, if a man stabbed me, no blood would issue forth!"

Lost Weekends. Datini's marriage was unhappy, partly because his wife, Margherita, bore him no children, partly because he could not tear himself away from his depot in Florence and he neglected Margherita until she grew desperate. But he never wearied of nagging her from a distance. Day after day, he wrote her long letters--remember to lock the front door with all three keys, remember to drain excess water from the maturing vinegar, remember to search again for "the lost pillow-case.'' There were the lost weekends, spent in the office, which drew sarcastic rejoinders from poor Margherita. "Methinks," she wrote, "it is not needful to send me a message every Wednesday, to say you will be here on Sunday, for I trow on every Friday, you repent."

Datini's dearest friend was a simple, kindly notary who never failed to warn the merchant that there was more to life than business: ''To make money is what every man can do; but not every man knows how to work, and then leave go . . "

All such advice was humbly welcomed by Datini--and totally ignored. He grew busier and busier and richer and richer--through cargoes of Cornish tin, Cotswold and Minorcan wool, Milanese armor and iron spurs. Florentine lances, brass, leather, spices, ostrich eggs, feathers and Tartar slaves. Like every well-to-do Tuscan, Datini kept slaves in his own household, and was not above using them as concubines. His only children were bastards; his great marriage bed--four yards wide, with six linen-covered pillows and two of cloth of gold--remained barren and desolate.

New Age. It took a plague scare, plus weary old age, to pry Datini away from the great ledgers with their pious superscription, ''In the name of God and of profit." Wrote his friend the notary: "Of his death I will tell you little, for it would take a whole quire: his sufferings and his sayings, and his passing, which was in my arms. For it seemed to him very strange that he should have to die . . ."

Doubtless Datini was a "grasping, wilful man'' who hoped to save his soul by bequeathing all his possessions to charity. But he was also one of those men whose restless imagination--working through wares rather than art, through bills of sale rather than verse--pushed the horizons of narrow Europe to the far corners and ushered in a new age. The greedy merchant of Prato bequeathed a marvelous and instructive story to the modern world.

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