Collegio della Mercanzia

On Perugia's main street, behind a plain doorway, lies the boardroom of medieval capitalism: the wood-panelled hall where the city's merchants heard commercial cases under the ius mercatorum, administered justice from a carved pulpit, and stored their charters in an iron safe that still stands at the end of the room.

Why it matters

The merchants' corporation of Perugia is documented as early as 1218 and ranked first in precedence among the city's guilds, organising the mercatores of the free commune. Under the municipal statutes of 1279 it nominated the first two of the ten priors who governed the city, and its registers and statutes, surviving from 1323, 1356 and 1599, record the ius mercatorum in detail: admission of members, trading rules, unfair competition, weights and measures, bankruptcy and commercial jurisdiction. The Nobile Collegio della Mercanzia that owns the hall today is the direct continuation of that body, transformed over the centuries from a bourgeois corporation into an institution of the Perugian nobility before its governing role ended in the Napoleonic era.

What to notice

The Sala dell'Udienza is the reason to come. In 1390 the commune transferred these ground-floor rooms to the guild as repayment of a loan of 1,400 florins raised from the merchants for wars and famines, and the wood-cladding work began soon after. The panelling, in precious walnut, fir and poplar, dates in its main substance to the first half of the fifteenth century, partly carved and partly inlaid, with square tiles carrying interlaced geometric and oriental motifs that nod to the trade routes running from Flanders to the East. On the left wall stands the pulpit from which judgment was pronounced among merchants: a carved polygonal parapet topped by coloured reliefs of the four cardinal virtues, with griffins of the city and the guild. The guild calls it a rare surviving testimony of a medieval mercantile judge's bench. A wrought-iron safe remains at the hall's end; the fifteenth-century Annunciation by Mariano d'Antonio, now in Paris, documents how the cladding once looked.

Context and history

The guild's story tracks the city's. Exiled with the other corporations after a political convulsion, it was allowed to re-form in 1223 under Pope Honorius III on condition it stuck to commerce; from 1260 it shared responsibility for minting with the Collegio del Cambio, and when the priors replaced the consuls in 1303 it kept two permanent seats. From the fifteenth century, and decisively in the statutory reform of 1670, the college closed into a body of nobles requiring proofs of nobility. The second room, the archive hall, preserves the decorated membership registers, including one illuminated in 1377 by the Perugian miniaturist Matteo di Ser Cambio. Little of this institutional texture survives elsewhere in Umbria in such intact domestic form.