CHAPTER SEVEN
Niche Players
Close to 24,000 people lived in and around the city of Prato, Italy, at the end of the fourteenth century. The bulk of the population worked as textile craftsmen and merchants, mostly organized in tiny independent operations. These typically included a handful of people and focused on highly specialized “niche” crafts such as weaving, carding, spinning, fulling, and dyeing.
This mass of niche players formed a business ecosystem much like the ones discussed in the previous chapters and was coordinated by two tiers of intermediaries. The first tier was made up of the lanivendoli (wool sellers), who bought in small lots from the craftsmen and sold the materials in larger amounts to the powerful lanaiuoli (wool merchants). ...
