ABSTRACT
In the late Middle Ages, England was an economic and political backwater, distant from Europe’s largest concentrations of wealth and power. These lay far to the south, in the Mediterranean, where the Italian city-states had grown rich as intermediaries in the luxury trades between the east and northern Europe, and to the north, in the German towns, where the Hanseatic League controlled the richest flows of commerce in the products of northern seas, mines, forests and farms. During the sixteenth century, however, Europe’s economic centre of gravity shifted away from these traditional foundations. After 1500, medieval patterns of trade were increasingly supplemented by new maritime routes for commerce, opened by voyages of discovery made from Portugal and Spain during the late fifteenth century. Reaching into the Atlantic Ocean from Lisbon and Seville, these routes reached towards Africa, Asia and the Americas, bringing into Europe resources that were to transform its economy in the centuries that followed.
