ABSTRACT
In 1586, Filippo di Giovanbattista Sassetti wrote a lengthy letter to a friend in Florence from Kochi on the south-west coast of India, describing the society and people of the city. In particular, Sassetti discussed the practices of Indian merchants and commerce at length. Sassetti initially pursued a mercantile career at the behest of his father, but he tempered this with literary ambitions and humanistic studies. He studied at Pisa from the late 1560s and became a member of the Accademia degli Alterati in 1575. In Sassetti’s lifetime, Francesco I de’ Medici actively pursued commercial opportunities for himself and Tuscan merchants, sending Antonio Vecchietti to Lisbon in an attempt to negotiate the contract for the re-exportation of pepper from Portugal across Europe. Sassetti’s recognition that “tutto il mondo e paese” testified to the intensification of connections and the wider horizons of Florentine commerce after 1500: a quantitative change but not qualitative one.
