ABSTRACT
The determining factor in the financial and fiscal history of what became the Burgundian Low Countries is the presence of a dense urban network well connected to international trade and hence receptive to the period’s most advanced financial techniques and steered by its successive economic centers over a period stretching from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries: Arras, Bruges, Antwerp and finally Amsterdam. These were central places and hubs where these financial technique permeated into broader layers of society. In the cities of the Low Countries the cities had developed a performing fiscal system, mainly based on indirect taxes levied on consumption, trade and production. From the late fourteenth century onwards the second most important factor entered the scene: the agency of an ambitious dynasty of the Valois Dukes of Burgundy and their Habsburg successors. They unified the territories (counties and duchies) and endowed them with new centralizing financial institutions, thus reducing transaction costs. However, they never succeeded in imposing a permanent fiscal system on their subjects, whose ruling elites and representatives remained both an inevitable interlocutor and an indispensable financier of their policies. The growing fiscal pressure nevertheless helped to develop a system of public debt which was to play an important if not decisive role in establishing the way a first republican state based on the big cities came into being in the Republic of the United Provinces in the Netherlands.
