Whatever God Gives: Arabic and Judeo-Arabic Rizq and Latin Resicum in Commercial Vocabulary, 1154–1164 CE

The Latin term resicum is first documented in a contract from 1156 redacted by the Genoese notary Giovanni Scriba. After 1156, resicum had a steeply ascending if slow career, appearing in various commercial contracts across the western Mediterranean and ultimately taken to signify the intangible commodity we call “risk” in insurance contracts from c. 1400 on. Previous scholars have suggested that the word resicum likely derives from the Arabic “to provide/he provided.” Among other meanings, rizq refers to livelihood (‏رزق‎ /root rzq) and sustenance granted by God. This paper is the first to combine Judeo-Arabic evidence from the Cairo Geniza and Latin documents to analyze how resicum entered Latin commercial language. Long before 1156, in Judeo-Arabic business correspondence, investors instructed agents to buy or sell merchandise bimā razaqa allāh [for whatever God provides]. Contemporaneously, notaries, including Giovanni Scriba, wrote the formula quod deus dederit [whatever God will give]. However, from 1156 on, Scriba sometimes replaced this clause with ad tuum resicum [at your resicum]. This article shows that in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, notaries borrowed a convenient term, resicum, for an idea—whatever God provides—that they were already expressing. In its early appearance, resicum has little to do with “risk” in insurance contracts. Instead, its significance for economic and legal history is proof of cross-cultural economic interaction as well as an integration of the Mediterranean economy that extended to legal institutions.