Mobility,Print and Trade in Europe: The Case of the Tesini Pedlars (17th–19th Centuries)

Introduction

In recent decades, the study of communities, societies, and migrations across the Alps in the pre-modern period has occupied a prominent place within historiographical debate. ¹ The case of the pedlars from the Tesino valley, a lateral basin of the Valsugana in the present-day Northern Italian region of Trentino, offers a privileged perspective for analysing three interrelated questions: the dynamics of mobility in Ancien Régime Alpine societies; the spread of ephemeral print in pre-modern Europe; and the economic and credit mechanisms underlying this large-scale trade.

This article focuses on the itinerant print trade that actively involved the Tesini pedlars for more than three centuries and that profoundly influenced the cultural, social, and economic history of their valley, while also having an impact on the places where they traded. In the eighteenth century, thanks above all to the business relations established with the Remondini printers of Bassano, ² one of the most important firms of print publishers of the period, ³ the Tesini pedlars became one of the three major networks of colporteurs in Europe. Historians of popular print culture and itinerant trade have long been interested in the Tesini pedlars, ⁴ within the historiographical contexts of the circulation of ephemeral prints in early modern Europe and the mobility of the lower classes. ⁵ The typology and range of products traded, the geographical range of the commercial network (which extended from the Alps as far as Russia and even the Americas), the detailed organization of the commercial shipments, the number of people involved in this business, and the long duration of the phenomenon make this case study important for illuminating the cultural, social, and economic ramifications of migratory activity on a European scale (and beyond).

The migrations of poor and marginal people often leave few biographical and official documentary traces, forcing historians to turn to other sources. Of particular importance for the historical study of the Tesini pedlars are the approximately 4000 deeds drawn up by local notaries in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries and kept in the State Archives in Trento, which concern the commercial relations established with the companies that supplied them with prints, especially the Remondini publishing firm. Thanks to the analysis of this rich and under-examined documentary evidence and the comparison with other sources, it has been possible not only to map the places the Tesini visited during their expeditions abroad and to reconstruct the effects of mobility on the local economy and society, but also to shed light on the financial and credit mechanisms linked to the land market that fuelled this migratory network. The focus of this article is to examine this complex system of credit and debt, which facilitated the social and economic success of many pedlars, and yet also caused the downfall of others.

Rock, Fire, Paper

Located in the Valsugana, a valley that in the early modern period connected the Republic of Venice to the Holy Roman Empire, at an average altitude of 900 meters above sea level, the Tesino valley is formed by the three villages of Pieve, Castello, and Cinte. In the early modern period, the territory was under the jurisdiction of Castel Ivano, included in the ‘Italian borders’ of the County of Tyrol. ⁶ As in other mountain settlements at similar altitudes, the low productivity of the terrain led to the predominance of pastoral over agricultural activities. While the products of the land were a fundamental element of local subsistence – but limited to self-consumption – the abundance of ovines allowed the Tesini to maintain an exchange economy and created a familiarity with mobility, mainly in the form of transhumance. During the winter months, the shepherds moved to the plains to hibernate their flocks, exchanging the products of their sheep (wool, meat, cheese) for goods that were not available in the Alps (wheat, oil, wine).

In addition, from the middle of the sixteenth century, a further source of supply of grain, cloth, and other goods was provided by the valley's timber trade – the main source of energy at the time and a basic raw material for many industries – which was extracted from the municipal forests and traded by Venetian and Tyrolean merchants in partnership with Venetian patricians. ⁷ Another product allowed many Tesini to engage in itinerant trade in the same period. The soil of the valley was rich in biancone, a white, easily crushed stone containing silica, commonly called pietra focaia (flint). ⁸ Around 1600, the Gallo brothers from Castello Tesino, decided to exploit the abundance of biancone in the area and make flint for use in arquebuses. Cut into small squares to be used in the gunpowder ignition mechanism, the flint was transported and sold in Italy, Germany, Poland, and Hungary by the valley's many unemployed men. Due to their high quality, the products of the Gallo brothers were a great success on the European market. It was not until around 1710, more than a century after its foundation, that the Gallo company was forced to close due to competition from a more technologically advanced French factory. By this time, however, relations with the Remondini printers had been established for at least 25 years, and the Tesini peddlers had transformed themselves from flint sellers into print merchants. ⁹

Leaving: The Organization of Commercial Expeditions

During the eighteenth century, the landscape of commercial infrastructure and transport across the Alps took different forms and involved different actors. ¹⁰ This infrastructure was exploited by the Tesini and by the Bassano printers in their international trade. Around 1711, in order to manage a well-established market more profitably, the Remondini family opened an agency in the Tesino valley, run by representatives whose job was to manage their interests in the area. ¹¹ In 1781, an archpriest of Tesino stated that the local agency from which the pedlars of the three villages of the valley supplied themselves contained ‘a large number of books and prints’. ¹² At the end of the century, the Tesino agency was valued at 407,671 Venetian lire, 170,000 lire more than the prestigious bookshop they owned in Venice (valued at 237,817 lire). ¹³ However, despite the obligation to pay a tax on the transport of goods from the Republic of Venice to the Tyrol and the often-poor conditions of the road through the Valsugana, many pedlars continued to travel to the Remondini shop in Bassano to source books and prints of all kinds. ¹⁴ The purchases and sales formalised in the notarial deeds often ended with the issue of a ticket (‘viglieto’) by an agent of the printers, with which the Tesino buyer would go to the Remondini printing house in Bassano to choose the products to be traded. ¹⁵ One explanation for the repeated choice throughout the century to travel as far as Bassano – and Venice – could be the desire to see and choose for themselves the range of publishing merchandise to be sold. In fact, the pedlars based their choices on their experiences abroad, on the tastes of the places they were planning to visit, and on the constant changes in the sales markets. Attention to the different print markets, to the demand they generated, and thus to the vagaries of taste or fashion, were key decision-making factors that influenced the pedlars’ investments. ¹⁶

As well as Bassano, the Tesini also looked to other towns in the territories of the Venetian Republic to source goods from the Remondini and other printers. The first reference to the purchase of publishing material from other printers in the Venetian Republic dates back to 1698, when the itinerant seller Zilio Zampiccolo contracted a debt for prints and books with the printer and bookseller Giambattista Vidalli of Padua. ¹⁷ Throughout the eighteenth century, other printers, publishers, and booksellers took advantage of the network and distribution channels offered by the Tesini. In 1768, for instance, the engraver Giovanni Volpato had informed the Remondini of the presence of some Tesini stocking up in the Venetian workshops of the printmakers Giuseppe Wagner, Nicolò Cavalli, Teodoro Viero and Marco Pitteri. ¹⁸ In Venice, not just the aforementioned printmakers collaborated with the Tesini pedlars, but many other printers and publishers. The same happened in other Italian northern cities such as Verona, Padua, and Bassano itself. ¹⁹ This tight net of relationships between various printers and the pedlars suggests that the Tesini were not merely transporters, but that they were active agents of dissemination. They played a dynamic cultural role in selecting publications different from those of the Remondini in order to satisfy markets with different tastes.

After travelling to Bassano and the territories of the Serenissima to select books and prints, the pedlars set off in groups of varying sizes – called compagnie – to numerous European destinations. The compagnie were made up entirely of men and were headed by a leader (capo di compagnia) – usually the father of the family or the wealthiest person in the group – who was responsible for choosing the goods to buy, deciding where to sell the prints and teaching the trade to the boys, who from the age of 11 or 12 began to follow the adult pedlars along the roads of Europe. We know of only one case of a woman who decided to take up the life of a pedlar. This was Lucia Buffa, who in 1788 signed a notarial deed stating her wish to accompany and assist her husband, Giuseppe Rio di Pieve, in his trade in Germany. This was not a seasonal migration to take advantage of the lull in agricultural work, but a commercial expedition planned for several consecutive years. ²⁰

Throughout the eighteenth century, the Tesini pedlars’ main trade remained with Central Europe, a market they knew well thanks to the experience they had gained in the flint trade in the previous century and the commercial network they had built up over the years with local merchants. Once they had reached their destination, the pedlars would collect the goods sent by the printers to various urban centres scattered throughout the Alps, and begin their rounds in the streets, squares and nearby places of worship, offering their products to the public. To save on transport costs and for reasons of safety, the products were sent from Bassano or from the warehouse in Pieve to various European cities by convoys that often passed through Augsburg, one of the most important European publishing centres of the time. ²¹ One of the most relevant documents in this regard is a testimony given by Giambattista Remondini in his defence during the so-called ‘Augsburg trial’, a controversy that pitted the Remondini against the Augsburg engravers and printmakers, united in the ‘Imperial Academy of the Liberal Arts’, between 1766 and 1772. The Bavarians accused the Remondini firm of reproducing prints for which the Academy held an exclusive privilege, and had confiscated several crates containing goods sent from Bassano to the German city on behalf of some of the Tesini. ²² Giambattista Remondini stated that for more than 20 years he had been sending boxes full of prints to Augsburg, where a ‘great number of travellers from Tesino’ would come to collect them and then distribute them in various parts of Europe. ²³ Both because of its geographical position and its importance as a publishing centre, Augsburg remained a stable point of reference for the people of Tesino throughout the eighteenth century.

Not only did pedlars use the city as a collection point for the goods of the Remondini and other printers from the Veneto, but they also purchased their supplies directly from local printshops, thus establishing structured relations with the German publishing centre. Thus, although the print trade partnership with the Remondini was their most important throughout the eighteenth century, the Tesini pedlars also carried products from other European publishers and printers. Augsburg printers, for example, contracted with the pedlars themselves or used agents who lived mainly in the city of Verona, some of whom had their own representatives in Tesino. ²⁴ Although the Tesini had most of the goods they bought in the Republic of Venice shipped to the German city and also bought books and prints directly from local booksellers and printers, Augsburg was mainly a transit city, where they only stayed briefly to pick up prints and take them to other northern European states. ²⁵ The road to the German city, together with the one leading to the Hungarian and Polish territories, were the main routes followed by the pedlars. However, the Tesini itinerant sellers beat many paths, leading them from the Alps as far as Russia and even the Americas. ²⁶

Travelling: ‘as far as Siberia, and in Astrakhan’

Although the activity of the pedlars was already well established by the end of the seventeenth century, detailed information about the places where they sold their wares is only available from the following decades. Around 1740, for example, Count Girolamo Ceschi of Santa Croce, a village in present-day Trentino, claimed that the Tesini supplied themselves with ‘printed figures’ and transported them ‘all over Germany and as far as the Low Countries, Lorraine, […] in Hungary, Transylvania, Croatia’. ²⁷ Other evidence comes from legal documents after 1760. In the records of the aforementioned Augsburg case, it is reported that the Tesini, passing through Germany, went to ‘the Netherlands, Poland, Prussia, Saxony, Denmark, Sweden and other states’. ²⁸ The Italian peninsula was, of course, also a destination for the Tesini. Their presence is attested to in the Veneto, ²⁹ in the Marche (Senigallia), ³⁰ in Sicily, ³¹ in Emilia (Guastalla), and in Piedmont (Vercelli). ³² In 1767, the Magistrate of Savi alla Mercanzia of the Republic of Venice ³³ noted that Remondini prints were distributed in large numbers ‘in Piedmont, Marseilles, Provence, in the [cantons] of Switzerland, and even in France, and then in Hungary, Transylvania, in the vast states of Germany, and even in Denmark, where […] the Tesini […] our subjects, who go to their establishment for supplies, distribute them annually in great abundance’. ³⁴ But the places where these itinerant pedlars sold Remondini prints were even further afield than these testimonies suggest. A letter sent by the Podestà of Bassano to the magistrates of the Savi alla Mercanzia states that the various types of paper and prints produced by the Remondini were sent ‘to Spain, America, Portugal, Hungary, Poland, Germany, Constantinople and Smyrna’, where the Tesini sold them. ³⁵

Of particular importance for the Remondini was the trade with Spain and Latin America, which began with the commercial penetration of the Iberian Peninsula in 1730 and became their main outlet for sales during the second half of the eighteenth century. A list of correspondents from 1798 shows the presence of 27 foreign correspondents, 15 of whom were based in Spanish and Portuguese coastal towns with large ports. These merchants acted both as informers on fashions and censorship restrictions and as intermediaries with the market in America: from coastal cities such as Barcelona, Lisbon, Malaga, and Cadiz, Bassano prints were loaded onto ships bound for the New World, the same ships on which Tesini pedlars themselves embarked. ³⁶

The Tesini itinerant sellers had become familiar with the central European market and the opportunities it offered, but commercial success led some of them to offer their wares in other places that they considered particularly attractive. However, only those who had accumulated sufficient capital could risk the expense of travelling and transporting goods to hitherto unexplored frontiers. In 1767, the engraver Giovanni Volpato informed Giambattista Remondini that some Tesini had set out for England for the first time, where their trade was so successful that they would soon be followed by many other compatriots. ³⁷ Russia, too, was a territory only traversed from the second half of the century onward, but where some families were able to achieve an astonishing commercial fortune. ³⁸ In fact, in 1781, the local archpriest, Giambattista Biasioni, testified that most of the Tesini were constantly passing through the towns and villages not only of the European countries already mentioned, but also of ‘the greater part of the Russian Empire as far as Siberia and Astrakhan’, returning home every three or four years, mainly to replenish their supplies. ³⁹

More detailed information on the extent of the commercial network comes from the liber defunctorum (records of the dead) of the Tesino communities. ⁴⁰ Among the various names of Tesini who died abroad, recorded in the registers of the dead by the local clergy, are some of the pedlars who perished in the various areas reached by their expeditions. ⁴¹ Disease and death on trading expeditions were not uncommon occurrences, especially given the extreme living conditions to which the Tesini were exposed during the months or years they spent on the roads beyond the Alps on their ‘long and disastrous journeys’, to use the words of the traders themselves. ⁴²

Apart from towns, itinerant traders were also present in areas not adequately covered by fairs or markets and by communication networks, that is, in areas traditionally excluded from commercial traffic, such as remote mountain and rural villages. It is inconceivable to try to trace the roads and paths followed by hundreds of pedlars over two centuries. However, the registers of the dead allow us to outline and map the most frequented destinations (Figure 1). ⁴³ The first entries in the register of deaths in Pieve Tesino date back to 1689 and concern the deaths of Melchior Tessarius and Pietro Mezzanotte, who died in Germany and Hungary respectively. ⁴⁴ Throughout the eighteenth century, these two geographical areas accounted for the largest number of reports of pedlars who had died outside their homeland (21 in Germany and 6 in Hungary). From the 1770s onwards, Tesino received information about people who had died in the Low Countries (3), in the 1780s in Austria, Bohemia and Galicia (4) and in France (1), and in the 1790s in Belgium (1). From 1785 onwards, the records begin to specify the activity of the deceased Tesini abroad. Thus we find ‘the print seller Sperandio Buffa of Pieve Tesino in the Italian Tyrol’, who died on 1 March 1785 in ‘Lenzen in Prigniz’ [Elbe, district of Prignitz, Germany]; the ‘gestator imaginum Plebis Tesini’ Giovanni Fietta, who died on 22 January 1785 while selling pictures (‘imagines vendendo’) in the town of ‘Messernis’; the ‘imaginum negotiator’ Gasparo Pellizzaro, who died in Berlin on 4 October 1795; the ‘mercator imaginum’ Sebastiano Fietta, who died in Westphalia on 7 February 1797; and the ‘imaginum mercator’ Francesco Tessaro, who died in Vienna on 6 May 1797. To these must be added three other pedlars from Pieve who were not recorded in the death registers, but who are mentioned in notarial documents, and who also died in Germany (2) ⁴⁵ and in Hungary (1). ⁴⁶

OPEN IN VIEWER

Figure 1.

Map of the Tesini who died abroad. Legend: 1. Bamberg (1699, 1700); 2. Mainz (1699, 1771); 3. Koblenz (1717); 4. Orșova (1729); 5. Wierum (1771); 6. Berlin (1772, 1795); 7. Eperies [Prešov] (1774); 8. Prague (1778); 9. Vienna (1780, 1797); 10. Amsterdam (1782); 11. Lviv (1784); 12. Cologne (1785); 13. Elbe (1785); 14. Huls (1785); 15. Paris (1789); 16. Aachen (1794); 17. Ulm (1794); 18. Heidelberg (1795); 19. Hessen (1795); 20. Osnabrück (1795); 21. Westphalia (1797).

This, made possible by the registers of the dead, is a reconstruction by default, since only one stop on the long routes taken by the pedlars is recorded in this way. However, the information contained in the registers confirms much of what is known from other sources about the places where pedlars sold their wares, especially in north-central Europe.

Interesting documents for understanding the commercial development of some pedlars are a few invoices from the 1780s relating to orders for editorial material placed from Brussels and Augsburg by Giovanni Maria de Roman di Pieve. ⁴⁷ The goods purchased amounted to several thousand lire per order, and the commissions were made by correspondence, suggesting that the pedlar must have had an established relationship of trust with the print merchants from whom he obtained his supplies. ⁴⁸ It also reveals the geographical scope of the pedlars’ business, crossing political and religious boundaries. Orders came from Brussels and Augsburg, but also from Paris and London, from the Protestant city of Nuremberg, from Prussia (Königsberg) and Poland (Stettin, Krakow, and Warsaw). The volume of trade and the places where the pedlars placed and collected their orders confirm that by the end of the century some Tesini pedlars had become true merchants who made the print trade their main occupation. It was also during this period that some pedlars decided to take advantage of the opportunities offered by the printing trade and opened shops in various European cities. Before examining the evolution of the Tesino trade, however, it is useful to have a look at the type of editorial materials that were traded.

Selling: ‘Prints of all Kinds’

The type of goods sold by the Tesini consisted of all kinds of printed matter. It is for this reason that the sources often do not give us specific information about the goods but limit themselves to general descriptions. Illustrated prints, often single sheets of different formats, remained the most frequently sold products throughout the eighteenth century, mainly for practical reasons of transport and sale. The archpriest of Tesino stated that they were ‘prints of all kinds’, ⁴⁹ while the Podestà of Bassano believed that they were especially copperplate engravings. ⁵⁰ However, the most common subjects of the engravings purchased from the Remondini and from other printers were mainly saints, Madonnas, Christ on the Cross, and other images linked to popular devotion, with captions written in the different languages spoken in the places where they were sold. ⁵¹

More detailed information on these materials is provided by the aforementioned invoices and by two other orders for books and prints from the Remondini publishing house, the first from Domenico and Antonio dal Negro of Bieno (a village bordering Tesino), dated Bassano 18 June 1771, and the second from Sebastiano Inson of Val Gardena, in the present-day South Tyrol region, dated Bassano 27 November 1771. ⁵² The prints listed in the invoices follow the classification of the Remondini sales catalogues – based on format, type of paper and possible use – and were sold in blocks of one hundred sheets. Thus we find ‘imperiali’ (60 × 80), ‘reali’ (48 × 66), ‘realetti’ (40 × 50), ‘mezzani’ (33 × 48), ‘quarti’ (24 × 33), and ‘longarole’. The list is also subdivided according to the subjects of the prints: ‘francesine’, ‘mode’, ‘chinesi’, ‘realetti prospettive’ (i.e., optical views), ‘carte geografiche fini’, and various types of saints: ‘santi da breviario’, ‘santi sopra breviario’, ‘santi da officio’, ‘santarelli per uso di dottrina cristiana’, and ‘santi in legno’. The price varied according to their sophistication, the painters and engravers who made them, and whether they were black and white or coloured. Invoices from Augsburg and Brussels, on the other hand, show prints of different sizes (large, small, medium), printed in round, oval, horizontal, black, red or coloured. The subjects include mythological figures, historical or literary characters, views, and landscapes. In contrast to the Bassano invoices, however, in this case the number of sacred images is much smaller. ⁵³

The archpriest of Tesino stated in 1781 that the local pedlars were supplied by the Remondini not only with cheap prints but also with books ‘especially for the use of the parish priests, other ecclesiastics and the people’ on an annual basis. ⁵⁴ This is confirmed by the invoice of Domenico and Antonio dal Negro, which lists numerous titles of religious works, but also vocabularies, dictionaries, books on geometry and medicine, and literary texts. These works were of medium or large size, sometimes consisting of several volumes, making them difficult for pedlars to transport, and were aimed at a more educated public. For this reason, they were not intended for itinerant street sale, but rather to supply permanent shops, which contained works that represented a qualitative leap from ephemeral prints. The fact that the invoices refer to goods for display in shops means that in some cases the pedlars’ activity had lost its seasonal character. In fact, the archpriest of Tesino declared that many of his fellow villagers had now settled in the main cities of Spain, Flanders, the Low Countries, Germany, and Italy. ⁵⁵

Information about other shops selling prints and books run by the Tesini family in various cities can also be gleaned from further documents. The famous ‘Causa di Spagna’ of 1772, a trial in which the Remondini family and the Spanish court quarrelled over the distribution of a print depicting the Last Judgement, made at the instigation of the Jesuits and considered offensive to King Charles III, provides us with evidence of the existence of a shop in Rome run by the ‘comrades’ Giovanni dal Negro and Pietro Samonato di Bieno. ⁵⁶ However, information on printshops and bookshops, those opened in Augsburg being the most numerous, comes almost exclusively from the last years of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century. In two lists of foreign agents of the Remondini, the first of 1798 and the second of 1820, many typical surnames of the Tesino Valley appeared, such as Tessari ‘and companions’ and V. Zanna, who settled in Augsburg. ⁵⁷ In the late eighteenth century, Domenico Fietta opened a bookshop in Augsburg – more precisely in Kriegshaber, then outside the city walls, now a district of the same city. ⁵⁸ Initially, Fietta displayed the Remondini prints in his workshop, but by the end of the century he had replaced them with a range of his own, which he marketed by marking each picture with the address of his shop: ‘Chez Fietta & Comp. à Kriegshaber prés d’Augsburg’. ⁵⁹ Another former pedlar from Tesino, Santo Tessari, became fully involved in the economic reality of the Bavarian city in 1798 when he bought the publishing house of Gottfried Beck. ⁶⁰ In 1800, Vincenzo Zanna was listed as a printer in the same Bavarian town, and in 1807 he teamed up with a member of the Klauber publishing family to found ‘Klauber & Zanna’. ⁶¹ In 1808 it became ‘Zanna & Companions’, which continued after the death of the founder, Vincenzo. ⁶² The presence of the Tesini in Augsburg's commercial system and their recognition as reliable businessmen seems to have been definitively established by the end of the eighteenth and the dawn of the nineteenth centuries. In 1820 the list of foreign correspondents of the Remondini shows other European locations where the Tesini opened shops, in particular those of Giuseppe Molinaro in Cádiz, Giacomo della Maria in Barcelona, Giacomo Avanzo in Cologne, and Francesco Buffa in Amsterdam. ⁶³ Invoices found in the private archives of the Dutch royal family in The Hague show that art dealers by the names of Joseppe Buffa ⁶⁴ and J. Battista were active in Amsterdam from at least 1785, while on 27 April the following year Domenico Fietta from Tesino (the same name as his compatriot who had opened a shop in Augsburg) was granted citizenship in Strasbourg, where he founded a printshop. ⁶⁵ By 1791 the same man had opened the company ‘Caramelli & Tessaro’ in Utrecht, specializing in articles related to printing and drawing. ⁶⁶ At that time, Mattio and Antonio Franceschin from Castello Tesino also ran a ‘print shop […] in Olomouc in Moravia’. ⁶⁷ Finally, some Tesini had taken up other professions related to publishing and printing, as in the case of the ‘famous engraver of Heilachenfeld’ Giuseppe Buffa, originally from Pieve Tesino, who died in the German town in 1796. ⁶⁸

The people from Tesino had thus been able to transform their traditional mobility into business skills, which revolved mainly around printing products. The organization and abilities of certain individuals or groups of migrants proved to be decisive factors in gaining a stable foothold in the foreign market. Rootedness and residential and professional stability were the inescapable signs of success for some Tesino families. At a certain point it became more advantageous for these families to build or buy warehouses in various transalpine centres, where they could deliver their goods, store them and entrust them to their compatriots who continued to work as pedlars, thus becoming their new points of reference during commercial expeditions. Of course, this was not just a story of success – the good fortune of some was matched by the bad luck of others.

‘The Saints of the Remondini Ate the Fields of the Tesini’? Credit and Debt

So far, we have seen how the Tesini transported and traded their prints abroad, the extent of the commercial network and the typologies of publishing products sold. However, it is necessary also to understand the financial system through which the Tesini were able to afford the massive purchase of goods and the expenses necessary to travel.

In order to finance their commercial activities, they relied on a system of loans and advances, which meant that the availability of capital and access to credit had to be constantly secured and maintained. ⁶⁹ In the case of the Tesini pedlars, who operated on an international scale, self-financing, support from family members, religious institutions or village elites, and the exploitation of dowries could not sustain the commercial circuit. Just like anyone else in eighteenth-century Europe who needed a large loan, Tesini pedlars had to turn to the private market. In their case, this meant relying on their only source of adequate and stable financial support, those who provided them with work; that is, the printers who supplied them with the goods to sell. In this way, with a single contract, the pedlars were able to obtain the entire capital needed for their enterprise, both the products to be sold (the prints) and the money to finance the journey (costs including the dispatch and collection of the goods, transport duties, food and other travel expenses). ⁷⁰ In addition to prints and money, the Remondini seem to have provided other resources to support the journeys of the Tesini. In 1764, for example, the Remondini agent Allievi provided Tommaso Moranduzzo di Castello with a ‘new pair of shoes’ before his departure. ⁷¹ The Tesini pedlars did not have large amounts of money at their disposal and therefore had to pledge land or property in order to obtain the necessary funds to cover the various costs associated with peddling. Similar methods of financing can be found in other international networks of colporteurs, such as that of Monêtier-les-Bains in the Briançon Alps and that of the inhabitants of Cotentin in Normandy. ⁷² These were supported by a family network of people who stayed in their home villages and gave multiple guarantees to creditors, giving the pedlars greater bargaining power. Like the Tesini, these two other pedlars’ networks adopted a commercial strategy based on a culture of itinerancy, which had to maintain strong links with the place of origin, also for tax purposes, and which could not do without the land market and credit to finance their peddling activities. ⁷³

In the case of the Tesini, the representatives of these local communities state in some of their testimonies that, before setting off, the pedlars would go to the shop of ‘Giuseppe Remondini & Sons’, where they would stock up on prints and borrow money for their journeys. ⁷⁴ However, the most detailed information about the financial system supporting the peddling operations can be found in various notarial deeds drawn up throughout the eighteenth century. The method used by pedlars to obtain credit and significantly increase the capital needed to sustain their commercial activities was, in fact, to use contracts of monetary exchange to formalize the loan. ⁷⁵ Thus, the peddling trade was not regulated by a contract of employment that bound the Tesini to the printers, but by continuous fictitious purchases and sales that disguised forms of credit. By using the notarial instrument, the Tesini were able to mortgage property as security for the capital they received and invested in the peddling business, while at the same time retaining the usufruct in return for an annual fee. These notarial formulas finally allowed the Tesini to redeem the alienated properties within a certain number of months or years, corresponding to the time needed to pay off the debt. ⁷⁶

An analytical approach to the notarial deeds allows us to sketch the scenario concerning the economic and social exchange generated by the long-term business relationships between pedlars and printers. The economic system based on the pledging of goods and rents/interests generated a spiral based on the relationship between credit and debt, in which most pedlars remained trapped. The fact that the Tesini received more credit than they were able to repay is not surprising. When we find repeated relationships between buyers and sellers, we are confronted with a form of credit dependency that was regulated not only by the interest charged on the loan, but also by a series of auxiliary services between creditor and debtor that do not appear in the sources but are subject to these forms of dependency. Once caught in this cycle, it was difficult to escape. Despite the fact that mortgages allowed the Tesini to avoid selling productive resources in the event of contingent needs, and that mortgage loans and interest rates were lower than other forms of credit, there was a high risk that this system simultaneously and reciprocally fuelled both indebtedness and pauperisation. ⁷⁷

Pedlars were at greater risk than other professions of quickly becoming over-indebted. It was customary for them to pay off their debts on their return from their journeys abroad. However, in the event of unfavourable conditions (for example, damage to stock, injury or sickness of the pedlar, or simply failure to sell), they were forced to ask for payment deferrals and then to make other arrangements, and were not always able to get out of this situation. Consequently, when the indebtedness caused by the increased demand for credit and the flow of purchases and sales became excessive, it turned from an economic driving force into a constraint for the pedlars, who were forced to work to repay the debts incurred and not to lose the mortgaged properties. ⁷⁸ Historians have often referred to the popular saying ‘the saints of the Remondini ate the fields of the Tesini’ (‘i santi dei Remondini gà magnà i campi dei tesini’), which is still remembered by the local population, to describe the substantial transfer of land from the hands of the local peasants to those of the Bassano family. However, a sequential reading of the notarial deeds and a comparison with the land registers of the area reveal a different reality from that described in the popular proverb. ⁷⁹ Like other creditor families of the time, the Remondini were not at all interested in taking possession of landed property, from which they would not have been able to derive much financial benefit, but rather in keeping the Tesini constantly in debt. ⁸⁰ In this way they would have been able to profit from an almost perpetual distribution service and enjoy not only the earnings from the trade in publishing products, but also the income from the interest charged on mortgages on land and rural buildings. As other studies tend to confirm, it is the failure of migration that incites a new migration project, while it is success that often determines the migrant's exit from the market. ⁸¹

Conclusion

We possess enough evidence to draw some conclusions about the economic relationship between creditors (the Remondini printers) and debtors (the Tesini pedlars), and about the impact of the printing trade on mobility in this Alpine region. First of all, it is possible to note that the advantages that the printers could derive from their itinerant salesmen were twofold: on the one hand, they benefited from the service of disseminating their publishing products, thus avoiding real expenditure on wages; on the other hand, they increasingly included in their network many ambulant pedlars, who gradually fell into ruin as their debts grew. Consequently, the profit that the printers could make from this relationship was also twofold: the first came from the proceeds of the sale of prints, the second from the collection of rents on mortgaged property (i.e., interest on the capital) and possibly from the sale or rental of such property if the creditors eventually came into possession of it. Within this commercial structure, the Bassano print company was therefore not exposed to any risk. The land guarantee enabled the Remondini to protect themselves against the risk of insolvency on the part of the debtors and to reduce the cost of evaluating their information. If the debt was paid, the pledged property would be returned to the previous owner. On the other hand, should the insolvency become irreversible, or should the debtors refuse to secure the debt with other assets, the printers would be able to assert their rights to the mortgaged land by having it valued and seizing it until the debt was paid. ⁸²

On the other hand, thanks to the printing market, some pedlars gained important economic advantages, thus breaking the cycle that linked migration to seasonal and agricultural rhythms. In these cases, the organization of the commercial expeditions changed: the number of places reached increased, the time spent abroad by the pedlars became longer (with the consequent abandonment of the previous work activities or their entrusting to family members who remained permanently in Tesino) and the journeys became more systematically organized (thanks above all to a network of foreign collaborators who provided a physical location for the dispatch and storage of the goods). Sources reveal the mechanics of the Tesini peddling trade, which did not rely on individual entrepreneurialism and isolated initiatives. On the contrary, many of them arranged themselves into structured migrant networks – formed both by family ties and by commercial and credit relationships within the profession – that moved over vast geographical areas. ⁸³ In the European context, however, it must be emphasized that the pedlars operating in trading networks – which represent the basic structure of the profession – did not constitute the entirety of the itinerant book and print trade that existed on the continent at the time. They were joined by a large number of unorganized traders, who escaped the bonds of solidarity that bound the pedlars together, and who were often linked to the underground book market. ⁸⁴

To return to the cases we have examined, the intermingling of different pedlars led to the formation of real companies made up of several migrants, in which the richest merchants (i.e., those who owned several properties) financed the journey and bought the goods, while the poorest individuals were subordinated to the former and received a salary from them. Clearly, this organization allowed only the wealthiest merchants to become rich, even if they also bore the risk of losing their invested property if the commercial expedition did not go according to plan. At the same time, the risk-free status of the subordinates meant that their earnings kept them in a survival economy with no way out. What really distinguished the pedlars was not the distance travelled, the places visited or the type of goods transported, but the importance of the assets they could offer as security for the loans granted and the products supplied by the printers and publishers. There was a directly proportional relationship between the solidity of assets and the network of family alliances and access to large amounts of credit and goods.

It is therefore possible to deduce the existence of a hierarchical structure among the pedlars, which to a large extent must have reflected the hierarchy within the Tesino villages. In this system, those with the most property to invest were not only those who had the best chance of getting rich and juggling the many pitfalls and opportunities that characterized the pedlars’ trade, but also those who could climb the social ladder and establish themselves in different urban markets. On the other hand, these were also the people who allowed the less well-off to engage in colportage, which, thanks to the game of credit, gave rise to the long history of the Tesini in the world, which lasted through the nineteenth century. During this century, European tastes and fashions in publishing products changed radically, and the old and ‘crude’ printed images of the Remondini were replaced by more refined lithographs and photographs on the international market. The Tesini managed to adapt to the new tastes by establishing and consolidating profitable business relationships with transalpine merchants and becoming successful printers themselves. This opened a new chapter in their history. But that, indeed, is another story.