The movements of mining : German miners in renaissance Italy (1450s-1560s)

Abstract

‘The Movements of Mining’ explores the historical relationship between mining and mobility. Few historical actors offer a more illuminating perspective on this connection than German-speaking miners who developed substantial technical expertise in highly productive mines located in the territories of the Holy Roman Empire. The movement of experts across Europe was paramount to the development of local mining activities. In Renaissance Italy, territorial rulers in the Republic of Venice and the Duchy of Florence envisioned great economic and fiscal opportunities from the discovery of new metallic deposits in their territories. Lacking the necessary skills to set up large-scale mining enterprises, rulers fostered the migration of technical expertise through the recruitment of miners from Saxony and Habsburg Tyrol. With the present study I contribute to a better understanding of the relationship between mining and migration and broaden accounts of scientific expertise and mobility in at least three ways. First, I show that the mobility of German-speaking miners was the result of shared customary practices of law and labour. This challenges conventional conceptions of state-driven craftsmen’s migrations in the preindustrial economy. Second, I question the expectation that mobility triggered technological transfer by demonstrating that claims to expertise hindered rather than facilitated the exchange of knowledge in early modern mines. Third, I provide new research trajectories to the continuities and similarities that mining activities shared across space, and propose a complex, open-ended, and actor-based account of how the circulation of expertise unfolded in the early modern period. Although political authorities played a pivotal role in this process of migration, the relationship between mobility and mining developed as a result of a more complex framework for male and female miners to move across juridical, political, and geographical territories. Based on a large body of manuscript, visual, and printed sources from the late fifteenth to the mid-sixteenth century collected in German, Italian, and Austrian archives and libraries, I examine a relatively unknown process of migration. More specifically, I explore heterogeneous historiographical accounts of mining and migration to unearth the multifaceted historical layers that narratives of economic growth and technological transfer have long concealed. To achieve this objective, I engage with five different cases in detail: 1) the cross-fertilization of mining laws from the German-speaking land to Renaissance Italy, and the different solutions it offered to territorial rulers; 2) the attitudes of male and female miners towards mobility in light of the fragmented framework of laws, customs, and regulations; 3) the labour regime implemented by German experts to translate mobility into sustenance; 4) the role of gender relations in the mines, and the impact of women’s work in the mining district; 5) the (failed) transfer of mining technologies, and the intertwining of sources of knowledge in early modern mines.