florentine: Florentine Family Marriage and Business Ties Data
In statnet/statnet.data: Network Datasets for the Statnet Suite

Description Usage Format Details Licenses and Citation Source References See Also Examples

These are datasets of marriage and business ties among Renaissance Florentine families. The data is originally from Padgett (1994) via UCINET.

flo – adjacency matrix consisting of weddings among leading Florentine families.

flomarriage – The flo data as a network object

flobusiness – The business ties among Renaissance Florentine families as a network object.

flo

flobusiness

flomarriage

Data flo is a symmetric 16x16 adjacency matrix.

Data flomarriage is identical to flo but as a network object with 16 nodes and 20 edges.

Data flobusiness is a network object with 16 nodes and 20 edges.

Both flomarriage and flobusines include the following vertex attributes:

priorates – number of "priorates" (seats on civic council) held between 1282 - 1344
totalties – total number of business or marriage ties in the total dataset of 116 families
wealth – each family's net wealth in 1427 (in thousands of lira)

Breiger & Pattison (1986), in their discussion of local role analysis, use a subset of data on the social relations among Renaissance Florentine families (person aggregates) collected by John Padgett from historical documents. The two relations are business ties (flobusiness - specifically, recorded financial ties such as loans, credits and joint partnerships) and marriage alliances (flomarriage).

As Breiger & Pattison point out, the original data are symmetrically coded. This is acceptable perhaps for marital ties, but is unfortunate for the financial ties (which are almost certainly directed). To remedy this, the financial ties can be recoded as directed relations using some external measure of power - for instance, a measure of wealth. Both graphs provide vertex information on (1) wealth each family's net wealth in 1427 (in thousands of lira); (2) priorates the number of priorates (seats on the civic council) held between 1282- 1344; and (3) totalties the total number of business or marriage ties in the total dataset of 116 families (see Breiger & Pattison (1986), p 239).

Substantively, the data include families who were locked in a struggle for political control of the city of Florence around 1430. Two factions were dominant in this struggle: one revolved around the infamous Medicis (9), the other around the powerful Strozzis (15).

If the section Source of this page does not specify otherwise, this data set is protected by the Creative Commons License https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/.

When publishing results obtained using this data set, the original authors (see sections Source and/or References) should be cited, along with this R package. To cite this package please use the following:

Handcock M, Hunter D, Butts C, Goodreau S, Krivitsky P, Morris M, Bojanowski M (2021). statnet.data: Network Datasets for the Statnet Suite. R package version 0.1-0, <URL: https://statnet.org>.

Padgett, John F. (1994). Marriage and Elite Structure in Renaissance Florence, 1282-1500. Paper delivered to the Social Science History Association.

Breiger R. and Pattison P. (1986). Cumulated social roles: The duality of persons and their algebras, Social Networks, 8, 215-256.

Wasserman, S. and Faust, K. (1994) Social Network Analysis: Methods and Applications, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Other undirected networks: davis, ecoli, faux.magnolia.high, faux.mesa.high, kapferer, molecule, zach

if(requireNamespace("network", quietly=TRUE)) {
  nflo <- network::network(flo,directed=FALSE)    # Convert to network object form
  all(nflo[,]==flo)                    # Trust, but verify
  # A fancy display:
  plot(nflo, displaylabels=TRUE, boxed.labels=FALSE, label.cex=0.75)
}