Merchants might become very wealthy, but their status remained ambivalent. The Church taught that they could not avoid sin. Breach of contract (and therefore of oath), lying, cheating, avarice and adultery seemed inevitable portions of mercantile life, but deathbed penitence and restitution, and good works during life, might help. The aristocracy with wealth based in land and rents tended to look down on merchants, and even in Italian cities there was a recognition of an older nobility, conscious of having its origins in land and rents, and a newer one, based wholly on trade. None the less, mobility occurred: in England the de la Poles, dukes of Suffolk, had quite recent mercantile origins; lesser landed families might send younger sons to make their fortunes in commerce; and all over Europe merchants reached positions of influence in politics and courts. Although imprudent or unlucky merchants could fail, in the fifteenth century, as before, the appellation ‘merchant’ normally called forth an image of comfortable wealth and dignity.
Many merchants had surplus wealth for conspicuous consumption. Some became patrons of the arts and have left us more permanent signs of their passing than records of rich tables and wardrobes. Some focused on church memorials, among which William Canyngs’s chantry in St Mary Redcliffe, Bristol, and the memorials of the Castro and Maluenda families in Burgos still testify to their taste and wealth. As in previous centuries, others contributed to major secular buildings: the wealth of London’s fifteenth-century merchants provided a spacious guildhall, although one not so grand, perhaps, as those of the great towns of the Low Countries. Others poured their money into private palaces. Jacques Coeur’s magnificent house in Bourges, built in the 1450s with an eye to family comfort, was ornate with sculptures inside and out. At about the same time Cosimo de’ Medici, a great book-collector and patron of artists, was building his new palace in Florence. Outwardly austere, the palace must have been spectacular inside, as Cosimo commissioned work for it from Benozzo Gozzoli, Paolo Uccello, Donatello, and Rogier van der Weyden. After his death, the family continued its patronage, and in 1467 commissioned Hans Memling in Bruges to paint a Last Judgement to be sent to Florence. Below this level, merchants’ houses of comfortable size survive in towns all over Europe.