ABSTRACT

These lines do not result from systematic or prolonged study; they aim rather to offer a few considerations and a valid starting-point for a general discussion of certain economic and social phenomena common to several European countries in the late Middle Ages and at the beginning of the modern era. I refer to those great movements of expansion which from the fifteenth century onwards preceded the long crisis, marked by widespread economic and social depression that set in, for certain regions of the continent, in the mid-sixteenth century. The period in question is not simply one of stagnation, for it saw important social and economic changes. I have for example endeavoured to show that a ‘democratization’ (if I may coin the phrase) of large-scale international commerce took place in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, particularly in the cloth trade, when textiles of average and even mediocre quality appeared on the international market in large quantities, especially in trade between the Low Countries and central, eastern and south-west Europe. From the fifteenth century onwards we observe a growth in the volume of trade in cereals and timber between the Baltic and the west. Spanish wool consolidated its position on the markets of Italy and the Low Countries and even reached England, which was itself an important producer of various qualities of wool. All these goods had increased in importance in international commerce despite the high cost of transport and the general decline in population.