Thank you Professor Habers for this very kind introduction and I would like to thank you also

for the invitation to give a lecture at this colleague with this fascinating topic. My lecture

today will be something like an experiment because reading my paper in the train to Erlangen I

decided not to read the entire manuscript but to give a mixed presentation. I will read parts of

it, parts that need to be read because I otherwise might lose something that I don't want to lose and

parts that I will just comment what you will find on the slides. The reason for this there

will be some numbers in my presentation and as you know numbers that I read and too many

numbers is not maybe is not the perfect way to present them but I want to start with a novella

and to be precise the fourth novella of the second day of Giovanni Boccaccio's De Quamerone,

the story of Landoffo Ruffolo and the power of fortune. Landoffo is a wealthy merchant from

Ravello on the Amalfi coast in southern Italy. Striving to double his fortune he buys a ship,

loads it with all kinds of merchandise and embarks on a voyage to Cyprus. Yet arriving there Landoffo

is unpleasantly surprised. Many other merchants have gathered there offering the very same goods

he brought with him. He thus not only has to sell his merchandise at less than its original price

but for almost nothing. Whereupon I quote, breathing exceedingly at so great a loss not

knowing what to do and seeing that from very abundant wealth he was likely to fall into as

low poverty, resolved to die or to recompense his losses upon others because he would not return

home poor having departed thence so rich. Consequently he sells his ship and buys a

smaller one with the whale to hit the seas as a pirate. In this venture fortune shows

herself far more gracious towards him than in his former business as a merchant and within a year

he does not only make up for his losses but actually doubles his original capital. One day

however seeking shelter from the winds in a bay he himself gets robbed and captured by Genoese

pirates who are anchoring there too. And to make matters even worse when one of the Genoese carries

him away on his ship it gets into a storm and wrecks. But now finally Landorfer's fortunes

change for the better. Clinging to a chest which is floating on the waters he's driven to the shore

of the island of Corfu where by good fortune Perventura, a poor woman I quote again, was

scouring dishes with salt water and sand to make them housewife like, neat and clean. This is what

you see on the menu too. She takes him and his chest to her home, nurses him back to health and

nurses him back to health. When she returns the chest to him which saved his life he opens it and

finds innumerable precious stones therein, some costly and curiously set in gold and others not

fixed in any metal. Now the vicissitudes of Landorfer's life come to a happy ending. He hides

the treasure in a bag, embarks for Puglia and from there with the help of other merchants from Amalfi

he makes his way back to his hometown of Ravel. There he sells the jewels and sends a good part

of the money he got for them to the people who helped him. The rest he kept for himself and lived

in honor and worship to the end of his days without seeking to trade anymore. The second day of

Pocacos de Camerona is about, I quote, men or women as in diverse accidents have been much molested

by fortune and yet afterwards contrary to their hope and expectations have had a happy and successful

deliverance. It is thus a collection of novels that in one way or another deal with the subject

of Fortuna whose ways are determining the cause of human events. In the case of the novel about

Landorfer Ruffalo this is achieved by covering a subject that must have seemed particularly

suitable for this to the contemporaries. Maritime trade had always been a business practice whose

outcome was uncertain in a very peculiar way. In addition to the imponderabilities of supply

and demand in distant countries which had made Lordalfo's trade in Cyprus such a failure it is

also changed by the dangers of the sea. First and foremost these were exactly the dangers

Landorfer fell victim to piracy or privateering and shipwreck. In the diverse records of maritime

trade ever since the 13th century these dangers appear under the expression Fortuna mares.

My lecture here today will be about the strategies the merchants of late medieval or Renaissance

Italy pursued to cope with the dangers of the sea. In doing so I want to approach the strategies

themselves, their effectiveness, their specific logic and the interrelations between them. My

primary objective is to place them in the history of man's dealings with contingency. The dangers