ages fifteen and
seventy, at 25,000; the population of the city at 90,000, not counting
the monastic communities, nor including the strangers, who are estimated
at about 15,000. The country districts belonging to Florence add 80,000
to this calculation. It is further noticed that the excess of male
births over female was between 300 and 500 yearly in Florence, that from
8,000 to 10,000 boys and girls learned to read; that there were six
schools, in which from 10,000 to 12,000 children learned arithmetic; and
four high schools, in which from 550 to 600 learned grammar and logic.
Then follows a list of the religious houses and churches: among the
charitable institutions are reckoned 30 hospitals capable of receiving
more than 1,000 sick people. Here too it may be mentioned that Villani
reckons the beggars of Florence at 17,000, with the addition of 4,000
paupers and sick persons and religious mendicants.[2] These mendicants
were not all Florentines, but received relief from the city charities.
The big wool factories are numbered at upwards of two hundred; and it is
calculated that from sixty to eighty thousand pieces of cloth were
turned out yearly, to the value in all of about 1,200,000 florins. More
than 30,000 persons lived by this industry. The _calimala_ factories,
where foreign cloths were manufactured into fine materials, numbered
about twenty. These imported some 10,000 pieces of cloth yearly, to the
value of 300,000 florins. The exchange offices are estimated at about
eighty in number. The fortunes made in Florence by trade and by banking
were colossal for those days. Villani tells us that the great houses of
the Bardi and Peruzzi lent to our King Edward III. more than 1,365,000
golden florins.[3] 'And mark this,' he continues, 'that these moneys
were chiefly the property of persons who had given it to them on
deposit.' This debt was to have been recovered out of the wool revenues
and other income of the English; in fact, the Bardi and Peruzzi had
negotiated a national loan, by which they hoped to gain a superb
percentage on their capital. The speculation, however, proved
unfortunate; and the two houses would have failed, but for their
enormous possessions in Tuscany. We hear, for example, of the Bardi
buying the villages of Vernia and Mangona in 1337.[4] As it was, their
credit received a shock from which it never thoroughly recovered; and a
little later on, in 1342, after the ruinous wars with the La Scala
fami