The political economy of urban decline in the Renaissance

Two parallel questions in late-medieval Renaissance historiography appear to be the same, but are not: one concerns the decline of towns in England after the Black Death to the sixteenth century; ¹ the other, the so-called ‘economic depression of the Renaissance’. The debate in Italy, first spawned by Armando Sapori ² but enlarged in scope and audience with Robert S. Lopez’s essay, ‘Hard times and investment in culture’ (1953), ³ viewed the decline of the Italian economy as a whole without dividing it into cities and their hinterlands, or claiming that cities and towns declined either absolutely or relative to countryside. ⁴ Perhaps historians of Renaissance Italy have not looked at cities independently of their territories in this debate because of the uniqueness of the peninsula’s political geography: cities were not isolated entities but dominated large hinterlands, at least for most of northern Italy. ⁵