The New Yorker:

A slim, compelling book about one of the first orphanages in Europe contains painful echoes of the present.

By Jessica Winter

The Florentine entrepreneur Francesco Datini was the son of a barkeep. Orphaned around age thirteen, by the Black Death, he made his first fortune as an arms dealer in Avignon, during the Hundred Years’ War, then compounded his wealth by manufacturing wool and dyes, trading in spices and gold, and dabbling in usury. By midlife, he had controlling interests in seven trading companies across multiple European cities, plus two factories and a bank. In 1376, he married an aristocrat, albeit one whose father had been beheaded for conspiring to overthrow the Florentine government. Datini’s bride, Margherita, proved to be infertile; with no one to inherit his business empire, and increasingly concerned about the fate of his immortal soul, Datini left much of his estate to causes benefitting the poor. The most famous exhibit of his largesse is Brunelleschi’s Ospedale degli Innocenti, or the Hospital of the Innocents, in Florence, which began operations in 1445; it was one of the first orphanages to be established in Europe.

This outline of Datini’s life and afterlife—an orphan with no children of his own becomes a benefactor of orphaned children—draws a pleasing circle. In actuality, though, Datini was not childless, merely heirless. He impregnated at least two teen-age servants, one of whom, named Lucia, was enslaved. The first of his children died in infancy, in 1387, as did about half of all babies born in Florence during this era. His second child—Lucia’s baby, a girl named Ginevra—was removed from her mother’s care, briefly placed in a foundling hospital, and then packed off to a wet nurse in the countryside. The historian Ann Crabb, in “The Merchant of Prato’s Wife,” writes that Datini sent the infant away because he wanted to keep her existence a secret, and because he was concerned, understandably, that Lucia “would want to see and touch the baby and that there would be no end to it.”

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