They Are the Treasure of the Commonwealth: Franciscan Charisma and Merchant Culture in Medieval Barcelona

Abstract

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, it has been a truism that the emergence of Protestantism was the main cause of the development of capitalism. However, a careful analysis of primary sources, especially in Latin countries, shows a quite different reality. Three centuries before the emergence of Protestantism, the Franciscans generated a discourse that made it possible to begin to legitimize the commercial practices that would later enable the emergence of capitalism. Based on these premises, this article aims to explore the discursive and juridical primary sources of medieval Barcelona—especially the testimonies of the Franciscan intellectual Francesc Eiximenis and merchant wills—to provide relevant new data and interpretations of how Franciscan charisma brought about a better understanding and legitimization of mercantile work. I intend to use the concept of charisma to better understand the great paradox of how those who aspired to a life of extreme poverty—the Franciscans—succeeded in legitimizing the work of those who aspired to a comfortable life, namely, the emerging merchant group. The merchants provided the Franciscans with the material capital necessary for their establishment in the city, while the Franciscans granted the merchants symbolic capital that was indispensable for the development of their mercantile work, social recognition, and religious legitimacy.

From the beginning of the thirteenth century, the Franciscans generated a discourse that legitimized commercial practices that that had been prescribed, or at least restricted, for centuries. This article aims to explore the discursive and juridical primary sources of medieval Barcelona—especially the testimonies of the Franciscan intellectuals and merchant wills—to provide new data and interpretations of how Franciscan charisma brought about a better understanding and legitimization of mercantile work. I intend to use the concept of charisma, as articulated from Antiquity and received by medieval theologians (D’Avray 2010; Jaeger 2012; Aurell 2022), to better understand the great paradox of how a religious group whose main charisma consisted in the experience of evangelical poverty—the Franciscans—succeeded in legitimizing the work of the social and economic group whose main activity is to promote wealth through trade: the merchants.

In order to explore and develop these ideas, this article focuses on the case of late medieval Barcelona, within whose walls a substantial social, economic, cultural, and mental transformation took place. Between the thirteenth and fifteenth centuries, two factors converge in the story I propose to analyze: the extraordinary urban, economic, and territorial expansion of Barcelona (Bensch 1995; Ruiz-Domènec 1996; Aurell and Puigarnau 1998), and the emergence of a conventual order whose spiritual density and specific charisma contributed decisively to changing the economic dynamics of the city (Zaldivar 2012; Chubb and Kelley 2013).

The article is divided into three parts. In the first part, after some introductory remarks on the context of late medieval Barcelona, I analyze the writings of the Catalan Franciscan, Francesc Eiximenis, who in his work Regiment de la Cosa Pública (c. 1383) develops some of the moral, social, and economic virtues that a good merchant should possess. In the second, I reproduce and interpret some of the documentary testimonies in the primary sources that shed more light on the change that Barcelona’s transformation effected in the economic mentality of the merchants. In the third, I draw on the inductive part of the article to reflect on the active role that collective Franciscan charisma played in late medieval Barcelona’s mercantile society. These reflections allow me to delve into the concept of charisma as taken up by scholastic theologians from the twelfth century onwards, and its specific influence on the group of medieval merchants. I argue that this concept is key to understanding the intellectual and spiritual dynamics that fueled the complicity between Franciscans and merchants in medieval Barcelona, and was largely responsible for its urban growth, economic consolidation, and both territorial and maritime expansion.

1. Merchants and Franciscans in Medieval Barcelona: A Fruitful Alliance

A series of interrelated factors underlie the emergence of the city of Barcelona as one of the most important commercial emporiums of the medieval Mediterranean. Firstly, Barcelona achieved a good balance between the traditional rural world and the new urban environment, which began to develop rapidly from the twelfth century onwards (Ruiz-Domènec 1996). Secondly, Barcelona benefited from the decision of the king of the Crown of Aragon to settle his court in Barcelona, a center he preferred to other flourishing cities in his territory such as Zaragoza, Valencia, or Mallorca (Bisson 1986). Thirdly, the wealth of the city was based on an effective pact between the merchants as the most dynamic actors in society—the patriciate as the city’s ruling group—and the king himself. They opposed, both socially and economically, the more traditional and static groups represented by the old nobility (Bensch 1995).

More specifically, from very early on, a great complicity arose between the mercantile establishment, which was becoming more and more influential, and the king. The merchants provided the king with the economic means necessary for the incessant Mediterranean expansion of the kingdom, while the king rewarded the merchants in the form of fiscal and jurisdictional autonomy from the city, and even in the development of a specific mercantile law—the Consolat de Mar (‘Consulate of the Sea’) from 1258 (Valls i Taberner 1930).

Around the thirteenth century, contemporaneously with this profound urban transformation, large friaries of Franciscans and Dominicans were established in the city just a few decades after the respective founding of these two religious orders (Duran i Sanpere 1975; Sanahuja 1959; Pladevall 1989, pp. 93–96). These friaries were established within the city walls, unlike the former Catalan Benedictine monasteries such as the old Ripoll or the reformer Cistercian Poblet, strategically located away from the urban bustle, usually in places with extensive agricultural holdings around them. This gave the mendicants a direct presence among the citizens, with great pastoral effectiveness. It took the form of a series of mechanisms of apostolic influence, but also of the conception of commercial work. The mendicant friars represented a continuity of the ideal of detachment from the world (contemptu mundi) experienced for many centuries by the Benedictine monks. However, the social context in which they operated, and the needs of the societies to which their apostolates were directed, were so different that it led to radically different spiritual convictions, models of coexistence, and pastoral practices (Lawrence 1994; Rosenwein and Little 1974).

The mendicants soon realized that their main challenge would be to show how some commercial economic and financial practices—including credit, investment, and speculation—could become exempt from the charge of usury, and could be re-framed and redesigned as responsible ways of making profit within a proper Christian charitable context. This exchange between material and symbolic capital is the paradox that typified the great charismatic movements: the response to the new economic challenges did not come from those who promoted it, such as the merchants themselves, but from those who supposedly tried to avoid it, such as the Franciscans. The followers of Saint Francis, advocating a radical poverty, emerged as the main legitimizing allies of the new urban rich. The charisma of St. Francis of Assisi is well known, but the collective and shared charisma of his spiritual children can also be apprehended through his writings and pastoral influence—and more specifically, through its influence on their contemporaries’ conception of the economy.

Moreover, the presence and influence of the Franciscans did not cease to grow in Barcelona after 1330, the date of the first documentary mention we have (Webster 2000, p. 32). As evidenced by testaments from the mid-fourteenth century, a fruitful complicity was established between the merchants and the Franciscans, whose large friary was established near the city’s most dynamic commercial centers (Duran i Sanpere 1975). As sociologists would describe it, the merchants provided the Franciscans with the material capital necessary for their establishment in the city, while the Franciscans granted the merchants the symbolic capital that was indispensable for the development of their mercantile work, social recognition, and religious legitimacy.

One explanation for the early complicity between Franciscans and merchants is the social origins of its first members, most of whom came from wealthy families. The first friars were not peasants or lower-class workers of any kind, but ministerials, knights, patricians, and merchants. These were usually families with high purchasing power and social prestige, as was particularly visible in medieval Germany and Barcelona (Freed 1977, p. 336), and Zaldivar (2012). The friars recruited from these elite circles, and they engaged in spiritual practices and forms of pastoral care that helped entrench the position of the new urban commercial elites. The impact of Franciscan spirituality among the Franciscans was based on the development of a deep spirituality expanded through effective pastoral care, spiritual direction, direct preaching, and the deployment of new intellectual ideas developed through the universities.

Another of the Fransicans’ missions, as demonstrated by Eiximenis’ testimony provided later in this article, aimed at attenuating the impression of greed on the part of the merchants. They promoted, for instance, charitable donations for the needy and the poor. Merchants were to be useful not only in distributing goods but in creating and re-distributing surplus wealth as well. In Barcelona, the powerful charity Pia Almoina, designed to provide the poor with the means necessary for their sustenance, ended up being an enormous credit enterprise that raised suspicions in its time (López Pizcueta 1998).

The third major front of mercantile legitimization by the Franciscans came from their defense of financial transactions. Usury seemed to be an insoluble problem (Bec 1967; Oberman 1978; Hernando 1982; Rhee 2012; Bazzichi 2003), and in fact, it remained forbidden. The Franciscans did not argue for the disappearance of usury. Rather, they encouraged the merchants to act responsibly as economic actors, so that the Franciscans may legitimate that they were using money according with the Christian tradition. The reluctance of the moralists for legitimizing usury was based on certain biblical quotations against this practice (Exod. 22–25; Lev. 25: 35–38; Deut. 23: 19–21). However, some Franciscan theorists wrote treatises advocating tolerance of some of the merchant’s economic practices. They argued that these practices, responsibly applied, would benefit society as a whole when used in a measured way. Eiximenis himself wrote a long treatise on usury (Eiximenis 1984: Tractat d’usura, c. 1374), specifically dedicated to solving the problems generated by its practice among Catalan merchants. His work applied to the Catalan situation the ideas previously developed by the Domincan Giles of Lessines’ Tractatus de usuris (c. 1280) and the Franciscan Alexander Lombart [Alexander of Alexandria]’s Tractatus de usuris (c. 1307) (Lombart 2021).

All of them adopted the strategy of not confronting the overall question of the morality of usury as a whole. Rather, they focused on justifying certain forms of payment with interest that would ultimately increase the material wealth of society. More specifically, Eiximenis focused on the subject of census, a system common in both private and public debt, which involved an obligation to pay an annual return on a property. A person in need of money sells de census. The purchaser is entitled to receive income from the seller’s property. This transaction was subject to the provisions of the just price but not to the prohibition against usury. Notarial documentation from Barcelona confirms that the practice of using the censals to invest in public revenue was widely used by merchants. The galloping increase in the city of Barcelona’s public debt, brought about by these financial practices, has been well analyzed, and represents an interesting precedent and source of experience for the problematic debt practices of modern welfare states (Roustit 1954; Aurell 1996; Hernando 1982).

Eiximenis joined the task of some mid-thirteenth-century scholastics who had rationally confirmed that there were avenues open to legitimizing mercantile work and its specific monetary methods (Lambert 1998; Todeschini 2009, 2017; Brines i García 2004), enabling the development of a new sense of wealth that was less conditioned by a sense of guilt (Douglas 1992). This greater openness in the sense of wealth was not without great controversy, which even affected the division of the Franciscans (Dossat 1975; Mäkinen 2001). However, there is no doubt that it contributed decisively to changing mentalities regarding the use of money and financial investment and, in the case of Eiximenis, to the increasing wealth of medieval Barcelona.

2. Francesc Eiximenis’ Praise for Merchants

Francesc Eiximenis was born in Girona c.1330, and died in Perpignan in 1409. He entered the Franciscan order at a very young age and became a prolific writer of spiritual and political works. His style is direct and clear, which contributed to the great relevance of his work in his time. He was highly regarded by the great Aragonese kings. Among his readers we can find important personalities of his time, such as the three last kings of the dynasty of the House of Barcelona in the Crown of Aragon: Peter the Ceremonious, John I the Hunter, and Martin I the Humane; as well as Martin’s wife, Queen Maria de Luna, and the Avignon Pope, Benedict XIII. His training began in the schools of the Franciscan order in Catalonia. He then studied in the most important universities in Europe: Oxford and Paris. He was particularly influenced by Oxford, as the Franciscans had an important school there. We can thus consider various English scholars as the authors who most influenced Eiximenis: Robert Grosseteste, Richard Kilvington, Alexander of Hales, Richard de Mediavilla, Thomas Bradwardine, and William of Ockham, among others, including John of Wales and the Scot John Duns Scotus (Hauf i Valls 1990; Guixeras and Martí 2014).

Eiximenis was not strictly original in his task of transforming the moral paradigms of work in medieval Barcelona. The Franciscan Peter John Olivi’s (1248–1298) examination of the concept of value and pricing, born in the context of the economic and commercial development of southern France (Mancinelli 2015, p. 120; Lenoble 2015) and England (Alcover 1989) at the end of the thirteenth century, was reworked by Eiximenis and adapted to his specific area. He was, however, an extraordinarily prolific author in a field that has been rightly defined by one critic as that of ‘social preacher’ (Barraqué 2008, p. 531). As Paolo Evangelisti has argued, “In Eiximenian texts, the communitarian dimension is defined as one that is of necessity based on contract. It is expounded in the long opening section of the Dotzè del Crestià [in which Regiment de la Cosa Pública is included] where Eiximenis outlines the political value of the civitas, as well as setting out the elements that constitute civic life” (Evangelisti 2009, pp. 406–7). Eiximenis’ two key concepts are the profit of civic life and the conservation of the good state of civil life (Evangelisti 2003, pp. 87–91).

Eiximenis presents a model of the citizen that is set in the context of renewed reflection on some key concepts in political thought such as res publica, bonum commune, civitas, iustitia, and lex. He reflects the best of the Ciceronian, Augustinian, and Aristotelian tradition. The recovery of this tradition was particularly intense in the Crown of Aragon, with authors of the stature of Ramon Llull, Arnau de Vilanova, and Francesc Eiximenis himself. Eiximenis wrote several political treatises with a remarkable theoretical component. However, they were actually designed with practical applications in mind for the government and administration of the various political communities that made up the confederation of the Crown of Aragon: Catalonia, Aragon, Valencia, Mallorca, and Sicily (Evangelisti 2013, pp. 1–2; Riera i Sans and Torrent 2011).

In addition, Eiximenis was a recognized authority in the field of mercantile activity and morality. Both spheres—government and mercantile morality—entered fully into the transformations that were taking place in the economy in this period, and therefore, directly influenced the mercantile mentality. The main commercial cities of the Crown of Aragon—Barcelona, Valencia, Mallorca, and Palermo—acted as both receptors of these ideas and enactors of the new transformations of European cities in response to them (Bensch 1995; Ruiz-Domènec 1996; Aurell and Puigarnau 1998). More specifically, Eiximenis’ ideas on money and usury (Hernando 1982; Eiximenis 1984; Evangelisti 2016) are particularly revealing of his influence, since we know that they were applied by the merchants of the Crown of Aragon.

We have a clear imprint of the direct influence of Eiximenis on the merchants through the exhaustive analyses that Jaume Aurell (1996, pp. 185–86) and Jocelyn Hillgarth (1991, p. 62) carried out for Barcelona and Sicily, respectively. These studies show that Eiximenis was the author most widely read by the merchants among the model intellectual authors, surpassing late-antique patristic authorities such as Jerome, Augustine’s De Civitate Dei, Gregory’s Moralia in Job, Isidore’s Etymologies, and other early medieval authors as popular as Boethius. The merchants had on their shelves his Llibre dels àngels, Llibre de les dones, and some sections of Lo Crestiá. This influence is obviously conditioned by the peculiar spirituality of the emerging mendicants, and more particularly by the tendency of the Franciscans to theorize on questions of moral economy. Chiara Mancinelli has argued that the Franciscan concept of voluntary poverty implied a detachment from the economy which, paradoxically, was beneficial in terms of advancing understanding of how the economy functioned and legitimizing its main actors (Mancinelli 2008). In addition, evidence of the reception of Eiximenis by mercantile groups in the Crown of Aragon’s cities not only made itself felt through reading. There is also evidence of direct influence on rulers and administration, both in Barcelona (Webster 1969) and Palermo as well (Evangelisti 2003).

One of Eiximenis’ main works is known as Regiment de la Cosa Pública (c. 1383). With a high political content, it is perhaps his most influential work, touching on a huge variety of topics, from the role of rulers to how women should be treated. It also develops a framework for how most of the professions carried out in a medieval city should be practiced. Two chapters are devoted to mercantile work, with Eiximenis describing merchants as “the life of the land where they are, and are the treasure of the commonwealth [res publica]” (Eiximenis 2021, pp. 290–91). Far from seeing them as a problem or an anomaly for society, he thought that they were particularly cared for by divine Providence, since “the merchants will be favored over all the secular people of the world since they are” (Eiximenis 2021, p. 290).

Eiximenis challenged the traditional idea that merchants were abusing society through the profits they made from their businesses. Rather, he emphasized that “they are the food of the poor, the arm of all good business, of all things perfection” (Eiximenis 2021, p. 291). Modern economists, from Adam Smith to Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson ask, time and again, “why nations fall”, seeking the answers through intricate quantitative methods to which they apply the most sophisticated theories (Acemoglu and Robinson 2012). Eiximenis, for his part, reduced the explanation of the material prosperity of some societies to the existence and activity of merchants, assigning the opposite effect to their scarcity. Without them, societies not only fall into material poverty, but also into political tyranny and moral disease: “without merchants, communities fall, princes become tyrants (Eiximenis 2021, p. 291)”. Eixmenis also assigns to mercantile work a capacity for regeneration of the youngest, since, without them, “the youths are lost, and the poor mourn (Eiximenis 2021, p. 291)”.

The new merchants benefit society not only with economic and material, but also moral improvement. Their generosity is manifested both in the reinvestment of their profits and in their extraordinary ability to support the poor. They contrast with knights, who live on rents and leave these rents sterile: “for knights and citizens who live on rents do not worry about large alms; only the merchants are great alms-givers and great fathers and friars of the public cause, especially when they are good men and with a good conscience” (Eiximenis 2021, p. 291).

This is largely due to the fact that the merchants have special divine assistance, since “God teaches in them great wonders, for as there is nothing that can harm them but God” (Eiximenis 2021, p. 291). This divine support is clearly above that given to other groups in the community, so that they “against all common opposition float high, by the special grace of God, above all the others of the community”, and “Our Lord God shows them special mercy, in death and in life” (Eiximenis 2021, p. 291). For this reason, societies rely heavily on them, and even kings and nobles turn to them for solutions to their major problems: “when the world needs it, so do kings, princes, and great and few, as subjects, and generally everyone takes and steals from them, because they always have more than others and do more good than all others” (Eiximenis 2021, p. 291).

Eiximenis also emphasizes the fact that merchants have to go through many difficulties in order to carry out their activity, always for the good of society. Society owes them thanks for their continuous efforts, which go above and beyond the difficulties of all kinds encountered in the conduct of their business and in the course of their travels: “for the great profit they make to the public cause, and for the great labors they suffered at sea and on land, and for the great losses they often suffered, which pass better than other people because they are already used to it, and for the great longings in which they live all the time” (Eiximenis 2021, p. 291).

The Franciscan also uses an argument that is close to the most entrenched conventions of modern economics. The merchants also help to prevent the generation of a high public debt, which implies a dormancy of productive energies that is very harmful to society:

It should be forbidden to buy rents, either censals or violaris [perpetual or life annuities respectively], from anyone who is in a position to trade. While these practices can be done fairly, they can be detrimental to commerce, which is undoubtedly an activity with far greater benefits for the community. For someone who has his money invested in rent, if he is forbidden to invest it in rent and invest it instead in trade, and work it for profit by sea and by land, then the community would become much richer.

(Eiximenis 2021, pp. 292–93)

Writing around 1380, the Franciscan regretfully considers the golden age of trade has passed, as the merchants are taxed beyond their means. If in the past the “princes and prelates” built ships to defend the merchants from the Muslims and other enemies, nowadays they burden them with taxes that not only harm the community’s economy, but also the very souls of its rulers. These economic policies are generated by “thieving and dissipating” rulers, which today we would call “corrupt”, thus discouraging young people from engaging in trade (Eiximenis 2021, p. 293).

Eiximenis’ prescriptions in favor of merchants and against corrupt governments could not be more topical, reaffirming the remarkable role of Franciscan charisma in the consolidation of mercantile, and later capitalist, societies in Western Europe. Eiximenis concludes that, for all these reasons and arguments, merchants deserve special respect and appreciation, instead of the suspicion they had traditionally aroused in earlier societies, which should also include a solemn public acknowledgement: “every public thing should always make a special prayer for the merchants” (Eiximenis 2021, p. 291).

3. Merchants’ Acknowledgement to Franciscans: The Testaments

The merchants not only benefited from the Franciscans’ disruptive work to legitimize their activity, they also found ways to acknowledge and generously repay it—both symbolically (by seeking their spiritual guidance) and materially. Since wills are the best testimony of this material recognition, the last section of this article is devoted to their analysis.

The testaments are neither a very generous nor expressive source, due to the rigidity of their pre-fixed legal clauses, which often hinder the creativity or spontaneity of the testator. They do, however, have the advantage of having been considered at the time the ‘passport’ to eternal life, in the context of a revival of the belief in purgatory as an intermediate place of remission of punishment before entering paradise (Le Goff 1981). This even led testators to project their quantitative mindset onto the way they designed their wills (Chiffoleau 2011). This was especially evident in the case of merchants, who would take a few centuries to overcome a certain remorse resulting from their commercial and financial practices. For them, the writing of a will was a privileged opportunity to account to God and to society for the stewardship of the material goods they had acquired during their lifetime. Their wills, therefore, showed some manifestations of their religious convictions.

Nevertheless, how the merchants expressed themselves in their wills was conditioned by three factors: the formal inertia of the fixed clauses and the notaries’ manner of speaking; the change in religious customs, of which the emergence of the mendicant orders is an obvious manifestation; and the specific wishes of the testator. The first of these is felt in the rigidity of the clauses’ structures—the different sections of wills—and some of the set phrases that appear systematically in the documents. The second, as I intend to demonstrate in this article, is capable of modifying some sections of the will, particularly the provisions for burial processions and the testator’s donations. The third is demonstrated by the corporate identity of the merchants themselves, whose wills reflect some of their peculiar professional circumstances.

Even considering the difficulty that legal inertia implies for a renewal of forms, the testaments of the merchants of late medieval Barcelona show the profound shift in the city’s work ethic that had taken place since the expansion of the mendicant orders, especially the Franciscans and Dominicans. These new friars created new forms of religious expression and practice, specifically addressed to the urban sector of society, its political rulers, and economic main agents. These forms provided not only an ethical justification for the activities developed in urban societies, as we have seen in the previous section of this article, but also included “new forms of worship, new devotional practices, new structures for lay participation in organized charity, and, above all, an enhanced sense of spiritual worth” (Little 1978, p. 173).

In this sense, the merchants’ wills clearly show that the complicity between Franciscans and merchants was not restricted to an exchange between material and symbolic capital, but also had an effect on the spirituality of the merchants. In the introduction to their wills, the merchants use various formulas, some of them very beautiful, to emphasize the transience of life and the durability of eternal life. Lluís des Cortal uses the metaphor of smoke and steam to describe the expiration and vaporiness of life:

In the name of our Lord God and of the humble virgin holy Mary, his glorious mother, of the glorious Lord Saint Michael the Archangel and of the whole heavenly court, I, Luis des Cortal, merchant citizen of Barcelona, considering that the present life passes as a shadow, and as long as you have seen it long, it is like vapor or smoke that does not last long…

(S1)

This new spirituality is shown especially in the merchants’ interest in emphasizing the duality of life, composed of the material and the spiritual. Both one and the other must be taken care of, otherwise the soul cannot be saved. Guillem de Pere, another merchant of Barcelona, begins his testament by highlighting this paradox of human existence, “since the body of man is composed of elements that always contradict each other and since the body of man has to dissolve by nature”. This leads him to conclude, in a beautiful formula, that no one should be completely detached from his past, his present, or his future, which gives the testamentary endowment great meaning and significance: “each one must think to see the memory of the past, order in the present, and provide for the future”.

Perhaps influenced by their own tendency to calculate time better and to follow the temporal rhythms of their credits, merchants are very fond of introducing into their wills some reflections on the contrast between present time and the eternal time that they will soon have to face. Valentí Sapera, for instance, exhorts us that,

as everything that is composed in nature must be dissolved by nature, and as the body of man is composed of four elements that at the same time contradict each other, so by necessity it is convenient that the body of man be must dissolve by nature, and therefore each rational creature must think of three things, namely: to have memory of the past, order the present and provide for the future, as we all, according to the Apostle, will be before the divine judgment to receive according to what we have done, every faithful Christian must foresee the heavenly works and the health of his soul, since nothing is more certain than death and nothing more uncertain than the hour of that death.

(S2)

The consequence of all this is that everyone will have to submit to divine judgment, and must therefore be prepared, especially since no one knows when their time will come. The reality of judgement is ever-present in mercantile spirituality. As professionals accustomed to making detailed calculations of income and expenditure, they must be prepared for when the divine merchant makes the calculation of their assets and liabilities, in order to enter eternal life. They are aware that they “will all stand before the divine judgement to receive according to what we have done”, so that “it is common to order the things necessary for the health of the soul, as if it were not a purely certain thing that death and nothing more uncertain than its hour” (S3).

As a consequence, the contrast between the opulence of life and the necessary detachment from everything mundane and material at the time of death is an idea very dear to merchants. Antoni Planes highlights the transience of life and the business of eternal life:

I, Antoni Planes, merchant and citizen of Barcelona, attending and seeing how all worldly things are banal and decadent and do not have any firmness, therefore the human creature must put its faith and hope in our Lord God his creator, and which is the work of God, in his business proven by the future and mostly in the works touching the health of his soul, disposing of my goods, I make and order this my testament and last will.

(S4)

Merchants continually play with these paradoxes in their wills, emphasizing the contrasts between material and spiritual life, between mercantile and eternal benefits, between the fugacity of time on earth and the eternity of heaven. Luis de Parets presents these ideas in an almost poetic way:

Attending and knowing by experience, as it is written, that all flesh is grass, and all its glory as the flowers of the field, and knowing that it is appointed for men to die once, blessed Jerome says: ‘Nothing is more certain in death and nothing more uncertain in the hour of death,’ therefore while I enjoy my health through God’s mediation of mind and body I make and order my testament.

(S5)

Another aspect that emerges from the wills of the merchants of late medieval Barcelona is the visibility they want to give to their commitment to poverty. The most effective method is to detail the way in which the mortuary procession should proceed to carry the corpse to the grave. The merchant Francesc Cardona, for instance, asks “the friars to whom the habit was given and that my body must be worn by as many friars as there will be” and “those who will carry the candles are four who have sackcloth and hoods and the body cloth is brown” (S6).

The merchants do not follow the popular proverb “the habit does not make the monk”, since they aspire to be buried in the Franciscan habit, thus visibly confirming the complicity between both groups. When the merchant wished to die and be buried in a Dominican habit, he was keeping with a long tradition. Kitsten Schut explains that there are some connections between clothing, gender, and spirituality in late medieval culture that are fundamental to this devotion, since “Imagining each of these scenarios highlights medieval religious clothing’s deep capacity to communicate, to forge connections, and to transform the people it touched” (Schut 2019, p. 186). It seems that this practice started around the ninth century among the kings and high aristocracy (Gougaud 1927). Yet the emergence and consolidation of the new mendicant orders invigorated it, in conjunction with broader innovations in burial practice such as the promotion of church burials. This custom has multiple readings, most of which are beneficial for the soul of the merchants, since it has different effects:

to emulate the founder of an order or their friars as closely as possible to take special part in all the good works performed by the whole Dominican order; […] to make the friars pray more willingly and fervently on behalf of the lays buried with the habit and aid in their suffrages; […] to serve as a kind of demon repellant, making the attackers hesitate in fear and reverence, and perhaps giving the deceased an opportunity to beat them off with his or her weapons, their virtues; […] and to allow the wearer to embody mendicant ideals of poverty, humility, and physical chastisement, while also participating in a corporate identity.

(Schut 2019, pp. 189–90)

Barcelona merchants proved to be well aware of these benefits, since this practice is abundantly cited in their wills. For instance, Francesc Despuig, who bears the name of the founder of the Franciscans and also has a cousin, Miquel Sa Fabrega, who is a friar of the Franciscan friary, asks

the honorable guards and friars of the said monastery [of the minor friars] that the habit of their order of Monsignor Saint Francis be granted to me, and that my body should be clothed, that my said heart may be buried with that dress; and I want the said habit to belong to the poorest friar who can be found in the said monastery on the day of my death, to which friar a good and sufficient new habit will be bought from my property, which costs one hundred solidos in one hundred and ten solidos; I want, however, that the said friar to whom the said habit will be given be presbyter and that for my soul the thirty-three masses of San Amador be sung within the space of thirty-three days counting from the day of my death.

(S7)

Francesc Balaró asks to be buried in the friary of the Franciscans of Barcelona, “assuming the habit of the blessed Francis the Confessor, asking and supplicating the religious guardian of the said monastery to grant and deliver that habit to me” (S8). Joan de Muntrós adds the nuance that “all the brothers of the said order [of the Franciscans] to grant me the habit of their order and that my body be buried with the said habit” (S9). Finally, Pere de Matarrodona specifies even more the way to proceed, since he not only asks to be buried with the habit of Saint Francis but also for his procession to emulate that of the Franciscan friars themselves:

For I choose to bury my body in the cemetery of the Friars Minor in Barcelona, asking the venerable guardian and the other brothers of the said monastery to grant me the habit of their order at the end of my life, and with the same habit on, my body should be carried to burial and buried in the manner of the brothers of the said order, willing and ordering that four let the poor be led, each one of them, with their sackcloths and hoods of cloth, to carry the candles while my body is carried to the said burial.

(S10)

All these testimonies are expressions of the assimilation of Franciscan spirituality by the merchants, the wealthiest elements in Barcelona society. They reflect the interest that St. Francis had in the conversion of the laity from the beginning of his foundation (Vauchez 1987). However, the notion of a ‘third order’ devoted to the lay people is problematic. Recent research, especially into women, is revising this first impression. In particular, it casts doubt on recognizing St. Francis as the founder of the third order, arguing for a greater contextualization of the phenomenon of lay women with religious connections (More 2018). Some more detailed analyses of the relations between women and the Franciscans provide indications that “the boundaries between lay and religious identities were less clearly demarcated and more permeable than they might appear at first glance” (Schut 2019, p. 186). In the end, these new studies show that the incorporation of the laity into the third order was not so formal as we have tended to think, and they assumed other forms to join the spirituality of Dominicans and Franciscans.

In any case, the laity reciprocated Franciscan zeal not only with their financial donations, but also by seeking to participate in the religious life of the friars, and to benefit from their preaching, be enriched by their confessions, join their lay confraternities, and be buried in their habit. All this also promoted some new manifestations of popular piety, especially processions. During the second half of the thirteenth century, the surroundings of the mendicant friaries, usually located in strategic places near the gates of the city walls, became hotbeds of popular piety.

Merchants would record these tendencies in their own wills, emphasizing the visibility of their interest in getting rid of everything material at the time of death. However, the wills also express the merchants’ attachment to the very virtue of poverty, having perhaps not known how to live during their lives, but now anxious to assimilate to it, confronted with the proximity of death. For this reason, many of them specify to whom they want to donate their money, especially those who have not been graced by life, such as the lame, blind, and sick. The merchant Jaume Boteller, for instance: “I leave to Mathew Padrissa, who is blind, for the love of God, all my clothes which I will wear with care on the day of my death” (S11). Joan Agustí asks that sixteen poor people take his body to the cemetery, and that they be generously paid for this last service (S12).

A final manifestation of this is the merchants’ desire to be buried in the Franciscan friaries, which they must have frequented during their lifetime. Miquel Flaquer wants to be buried “in the cemetery of the church of the Monastery of the Friars Minor of the city of Barcelona, in the tomb or sheepfold which I have there and in which the body of my mentioned mother was buried”, (S13) while Gaufrid Sirvent wants to be buried in his father’s niche:

But the burial of my body, I will and order to be done in the cemetery of the Friars Minor in Barcelona, in the tomb which my said father had in the cloister of the said Monastery, which burial I command to be done well and honorably, asking the venerable guardian and the brothers of the said monastery to grant my body the habit of their religion.

(S14)

4. Conclusions: The Franciscans Economists—A Shared Charisma

Following contemporary cultural and religious paradigms, it is hard to explain how a small group of Franciscan intellectuals contributed decisively to promoting and legitimizing the work of the new social group of merchants during the fourteenth century. In the case of medieval Barcelona, it is possible to trace this influence through the writings of the Franciscan Francesc Eiximenis, and to verify its reception in the behavior of the merchants when writing their last wills.

Considering the disproportion between the material means of the Franciscans and their small numbers on the one hand, and the wealth of the merchants and their progressive numerical growth on the other, it is logical to resort to a concept such as charisma, which escapes the statistics used by social science as the main explanatory factor. That is why I argue that the concept of charisma—not the one created by modern social scientists such as Max Weber, but the one articulated from the emergence of Christianism and assumed by medieval theologians—becomes the best way of understanding the apparent paradox of the close complicity between the Franciscans and the merchants.

Enriched by the theoretical perspectives of scholastic theologians from the thirteenth century (Aurell 2022), the idea of charisma as a gift of God fits with the spirit and context of the preaching and writings of Franciscans such as Eiximenis. They justified the work of the merchants—symbolic capital—and, without theoretically expecting anything in return, ultimately received material capital from the merchants. They were aware that the collective feeling of a shared charisma weighed more heavily in their authorship than the authority that followed from a singular author. Of course, this approach to charisma, in which its center of gravity is placed in the good received rather than on the actor’s personal virtues, contrasts with that provided by modern sociology, especially by Max Weber, who places the key to charisma in the personal gifts of the charismatic character and in the reception of the beneficiaries (Willner 1984, p. 15; Bedos-Rezak and Rust 2017, p. 9):

The term charisma will be applied to a certain quality of an individual personality by virtue of which he is considered extraordinary and treated as endowed with supernatural, superhuman, or at least specifically exceptional powers or qualities. These are such as are not accessible to the ordinary person, but are regarded as of divine origin or as exemplary, and on the basis of them the individual concerned is treated as a ‘leader.’ (…) What is alone important is how the individual is actually regarded by those subjects to charismatic authority, by his “followers” or “disciples”.

(Weber 1978, pp. 241–42)

This explanation perhaps works for the mass societies of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and could be applied to the dynamics of modern state and business corporations. In modern charisma, the figure and work of business and political leaders are highlighted. However, the reality was very different in medieval Barcelona, where the charisma of the Franciscans was perceived by the merchant group as a spiritual quality shared by all members of the community rather than a subjective appreciation by those who benefited from that charisma. The assimilation of all the values that emerge from the annotated testaments, responding to a common Franciscan spirituality, cannot be explained in any other way: the awareness of the transience of life, the need to part with all one’s possessions at the moment of death, the assumption of the Franciscan habit, the funeral processions led by the Franciscans, or the donations to the Franciscan community that allow the continuity of this shared charisma. The evident complicity between merchants and Franciscans, and their continuous exchange of material and symbolic goods, is the key to explaining the effectiveness of this agreement. This historical evidence has led to interesting debates about these ideas in the contemporary world for political purposes (Olives Puig 1996; Marcel Bukala 2007; Evangelisti 2007; Giner 2010), for the conditions of credit and money (Lenoble 2015; Lorenzo Braile 2015; Nicoletti and Evangelisti 2018), and for the configuration of the ideal city (Cervera Vera 1989; Molina Figueras 2008).

The concept of charisma has been commonly applied to individuals and, more recently, to objects (Bedos-Rezak and Rust 2017). Yet I argue that it can also be projected onto groups, especially those sharing a common spirituality, such as the Franciscans. This community of friars inherited from its founder a special charisma for issues connected with poverty, which, perhaps less paradoxically than it may seem at first sight, had a crucial impact on the development of a new urban society of merchants and artisans.

In this article, I have added new data coming from the testaments of the merchants of late medieval Barcelona. This documentation demonstrates the paradox of the complicity between the wealthy merchants and the poor Franciscans. In particular, the testaments and last wills of medieval Barcelona reflect the extent to which the charisma, spirituality, and customs of the Franciscans were effectively and profoundly incorporated into the commercial practices and convictions of the mercantile agents. This new charisma was essential to triggering a profound transformation in morality and work ethic in Barcelona from the thirteenth century onwards.