God and Profit

What actually happened

Francesco Datini ran a multinational before the word existed: branches from Avignon to Barcelona, wool, arms, banking, and the meticulous correspondence that managed it, including hundreds of letters to and from his wife Margherita, who learned to write to argue with him properly.

Dying heirless in 1410, he left his fortune to the poor of Prato and his papers to be preserved. Preservation meant sealed sacks that were eventually walled into a staircase and forgotten until workmen found them in 1870: the most complete medieval business archive ever recovered, and the source for modern knowledge of early insurance, exchange bills, and the invention rate of commercial life.

Iris Origo's The Merchant of Prato built the modern portrait; the motto's exact wording follows her transcription.

The longer arc

Datini's habit of keeping everything traces back to losing everything as a child: the Black Death of 1348 killed both his parents and three siblings in Prato, leaving him to a guardian's household with no inheritance to speak of. At fifteen he apprenticed to a Florentine merchant and by 1358 had joined a caravan of traders bound for Avignon, then the seat of the exiled papacy and a boomtown for anyone selling arms during the Hundred Years' War, which is where he made his first real money.

He spent 32 years building that Avignon trade before returning to Prato in 1382 to open branches that eventually stretched from Barcelona to Genoa, dealing in wool, arms, and eventually banking, and pioneering the modern practice of separately capitalized branch partnerships. He died heirless in 1410, leaving roughly 70,000 gold florins and his house to Prato's poor, along with the archive he had insisted on keeping. Workmen found the sealed sacks of papers behind a false wall in a staircase during 1870 renovations, giving historians the largest surviving cache of medieval business correspondence, later the basis for Iris Origo's 1957 biography.