ABSTRACT
In the long history of taxation in western Europe, the last three centuries of the Middle Ages, which are an essential stage because they were a period when public taxation – understood as a compulsory and generalised levy for the public good – began to be established. It was not until the thirteenth century that taxation in the strict sense began to reappear when princes and kings had become powerful enough to begin demanding financial support from all their subjects, and cities had grown and become autonomous enough to levy taxes within their boundaries to ensure their defence. In the last centuries of the Middle Ages, western European monarchies, principalities and cities – chiefly the important city-states of central and northern Italy – were gradually implementing a fiscal system, that is to say, “a set of tax procedures and levies which combined in such a way that no source of income or wealth could escape the drain”.
