Commerce Archive
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Identifying Women Proprietors in Wills from Fifteenth-Century London
Posted on April 21, 2013 | No CommentsMost Londoners lodged their post obit requests with the Husting Court, the county court of London. The testators were primarily wealthy artisans and merchants, since one needed to possess a substantial amount of property in order to register the details of the division of that property. -
Sugar and Spice and All Things Nice: From Oriental Bazar to English Cloister in Anglo-French
Posted on April 1, 2013 | No CommentsUntil recently, such limited interest as late Anglo-French was able to arouse amongst scholars specializing in medieval French has been confined, with only a very few exceptions, to the efforts made in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries to teach what was by now a language unknown to most of the inhabitants of a country moving inexorably towards the unchallenged dominance of English as the national language. -
CRISIS OF CONTRACTS FOR MERCHANTS IN CRISIS: INSTITUTIONS, CORPORATE FINANCE AND GROWTH IN GENOA (11TH -17TH C.)
Posted on January 13, 2013 | No CommentsMy paper focuses these “merchant princes” from Genoa before the “industrial revolution”. The rise and fall of Genoa provides indeed a striking case about the success and failure of what, in the same vein than Bagehot, Joseph Schumpeter called the “creative destruction”, and the role financial markets in that process. -
Adventures far from home: Hanseatic trade with the Faroe Islands
Posted on December 3, 2012 | No Commentshe voyage to Iceland, now a major destina- tion, took about four weeks (gardiner & mehler 2007, 403; Krause 2010, 150). The Faroe Islands are situated more or less in the middle of that distance and provided a fine stop-over. The islands were an additional market for their trade business and in case of storms offered a safe and most welcome shelter. -
“How Could You Recognise a Member of the Merchant Guild in Saint-Omer around 1100?”
Posted on November 5, 2012 | No CommentsThis is another summary of a Haskins conference paper given in the session entitled: SESSION II: Who Do They Think They Are?. It deals with the customs of the guild of Saint-Omer -
Religion, Warfare and Business in Fifteenth Century Rhodes
Posted on October 25, 2012 | No CommentsHow did a military-monastic order manage the resources of an island commercially asimportant as that of Rhodes while overcoming the limitations due to its patrimonial struc-tureto cover their defensive needs? In this essay weattempt to answer this question interms of practice and in the light of relationsthatthe Knights maintained with two distinctgroups of merchants: the Catalan-Aragonese and the Florentines. -
The coinage of Aethelred I (865-71)
Posted on October 22, 2012 | No CommentsThe coinage of England in the third quarter of the ninth century was extensive. Dominated by the Lunettes type struck by a number of authorities (Kings of Wessex, Burgred of Mercia and Archbishop Ceolnoth of Canterbury) it presents a daunting quantity of material. However, the authors believe that focusing on the coinage of iEthelred I and Archbishop Ceolnoth provides the opportunity to concentrate on a key five to six year period in the devel- opment of the Anglo-Saxon coinage and specifically of the Lunettes type. -
A Peripheral Matter? Oceans in the East in Late Medieval Thought, Report and Cartography
Posted on October 21, 2012 | No CommentsFocusing in particular on the southern and eastern parts of the Ocean Sea, this article traces the broad contours of a representational and conceptual shift brought about, I argue, by the interplay between geographical thought and social (navigational, mercantile) practice. -
The fabric of society: The organization of textile manufacturing in the Middle East and Europe, c. 700 – c. 1500
Posted on October 7, 2012 | No CommentsIn recent years several attempts have been made to use institutional theory to explain this divergence between the Middle East and Europe. Most of these attempts focus on the organization of international trade. -
Sailing with the Mu’allim: The Technical Practiceof Red Sea Sailing during the Medieval Period
Posted on September 30, 2012 | No CommentsThe status of the Red Sea as a lane of communication be-tween the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean has beenwidely commented upon...The medieval period was no exception to this. The establishment of Mecca as a centre of pilgrimage and theincreasing importance of Cairo both served to provide further motives for seafaring activity along and across theRed Sea. -
Medieval Fairs: an archaeologist’s approach
Posted on September 30, 2012 | No CommentsThis paper intends to explore some of the possibilities offered by the physical and conceptual structures of fairs towards the interpretation of medieval culture from the viewpoint of an archaeologist working largely in southern Italy. -
The Amber Trail in early medieval Eastern Europe.
Posted on September 30, 2012 | No CommentsThe standard method employed in characterization studies of amber, namely infrared spectrography, can discriminate roughly between Baltic amber and amber from other European sources... -
The Black Road – Trade and State-building in Medieval Sub-Saharan Africa
Posted on August 26, 2012 | No CommentsBy the early fourteenth century, the Mediterranean was approaching maturity as a commercial structure. Various arteries of exchange brought into its scope the full range of European, African and Asian commodities. -
Agricultural wage labour in fifteenth-century England
Posted on August 22, 2012 | No CommentsIn the period when agriculture dominated almost every aspect of daily life, the lords and wealthy peasants relied on paid labourers for farming business, yardlanders hired labourers to work with them, whilst moderate and landless villagers worked for hire. Agrarian wage labour is a window on the economy as well as on agricultural society. -
Labor Markets After the Black Death: Landlord Collusion and the Imposition of Serfdom in Eastern Europe and the Middle East
Posted on August 19, 2012 | No CommentsThe differences in the imposition of serfdom led to different economic and political effects for the peasantry in Europe. In Western Europe, wages rose, grain prices fell, and the consumption of meat, dairy products, and beer increased. More and more peasants moved into a widening “middle class” that could afford to buy manufactured goods. -
‘Images of the Other: Venice’s Perception of the Knights of Malta’
Posted on August 15, 2012 | No CommentsThe hostile perception which Venice generally entertained of the Knights Hospitallers on Rhodes and Malta was not an attitude which the Republic secretly assumed and secretly endeavoured with much effort to disguise. -
Economy of Ragusa, 1300 – 1800: The Tiger of Mediaeval Mediterranean
Posted on July 24, 2012 | No CommentsAn economist is indeed tempted to think of Ragusa as the “Adriatic Tiger “ of yesteryear, an early example of a small open economy with strong fundamentals, and to hypothesize further that, in analogy to the current consensus about what it takes to minimize the impact of external crises, these strengths also allowed Ragusa to mitigate the effects of the many external shocks and financial crises in Medieval Europe. -
From Wine to Beer: Changing Patterns of Alcoholic Consumption, and Living Standards, in Later Medieval Flanders, 1300 – 1550
Posted on July 23, 2012 | No CommentsThe basic problem with the ‘hop’ thesis is that the Flemish evidence for the relative shift from wine to beer consumption comes too late. My primary sources are the annual revenues from sales of excise tax- farms on wine and beer consumption recorded in the treasurers’ accounts of two towns: Bruges and Aalst. -
Pervenimus Edessam: The Origins of a Great Christian Centre Outside the Familiar Mediaeval World
Posted on July 17, 2012 | No CommentsThis is the meeting place of the western and eastern worlds, for near here passed the movements between Palestine and Mesopotamia associated with Abraham, near here the Assyrians made their last stand after their capital fell in 610 B.C., and near here Crassus ill-advised attempt to press eastwards came to an end. -
Long Distance Trade Partnerships and Social dynamic in Medieval Genoa
Posted on July 8, 2012 | No CommentsLikewise, for those specifically addressing the transition from feudalism to capitalism, the participation of the dominant class to the Italian medieval commercial revolution often run contrary to account that pits the nobility against the urban merchants. -
Aspects of the Anglo-Hanseatic conflict in the fifteenth century
Posted on July 8, 2012 | No CommentsThe German Hanse, whose rise and decline spanned almost four centuries, was a rather unique institution in late medieval Europe. -
The acts of the Earls of Dunbar relating to Scotland c.1124-c.1289 : a study of Lordship in Scotland in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries
Posted on July 3, 2012 | No CommentsThe thesis seeks to analyse the nature of the Dunbar lordship, uncovering its particular and essential features, yet placing and assessing it in the context of twelfth and thirteenth-century Scottish aristocratic society. -
Jewish trading in Fes on the eve of the Almohad conquest
Posted on June 24, 2012 | No CommentsThe status of Jewish communities under Almohad rule has been the subject of scholarly interest for different reasons notably in the framework of the disruption of convivencia in al-Andalus among the people of the three abrahamic faiths. -
The Squirrel Fur Trade in 14th Century Novgorod
Posted on June 24, 2012 | No CommentsBulgar-on-the Volga was the first documented trade center which channeled fur from Northern Europe to the rest of the world. -
Captives or prisoners: society and obligation in medieval Iberia
Posted on June 17, 2012 | No CommentsIn medieval Iberia, particularly from the twelfth century onward, warfare took on some religious overtones. As a consequence, the prisoners of war that appear in the sources were for the most part defined by their religious status, as either Muslims or Christians.
