Never ask, never apologise

Abstract This paper details two case-studies in which politeness strategies are conveyed through practices of mitigation in Italian merchant letters during the Renaissance. The first case-study concerns the successful negotiation of trade practices between Italian merchants working in London with the “merchant of Prato”, Francesco di Marco Datini. The second case-study looks at the collaboration between local merchants from Milan and the Datini merchants back in Tuscany. How were practical goals requested and achieved? And what were the linguistic manifestations of such requests? What “work” is language doing when we examine the pragmatics behind (im)politeness in letter writing? This article aims to investigate these questions in a corpus of merchant letters from the late-fourteenth and early-fifteenth centuries. The results show that negotiation occurs through indirect requests, shedding further light on how politeness is expressed in a framework of historical pragmatics.