Inside Medieval Paris: A City of Wealth, Merchants, and Artisans

In the Middle Ages, Paris stood at the heart of Europe’s luxury trade. Behind its grand churches and royal palaces was a bustling network of merchants, artisans, and aristocrats whose wealth shaped the city’s rise to prominence.

By Sharon Farmer

By 1300 Paris had a population of about 200,000 inhabitants, which made it the largest city in Western Europe. It grew to that size because of its importance as a royal, administrative, and intellectual hub. Elite residents, who fueled Paris’ luxury economy, included the French royal family, a large number of French aristocrats, Francophone aristocrats from outside the kingdom of France, wealthy members of the royal administration, and a significant number of archbishops, bishops, and abbots.

By 1400, over 120 of these elites had built luxury residences in Paris. One of those residences—the mansion of Charles I, King of Sicily (d. 1285)—is still memorialized by the name of the “Rue du Roi de Sicile” on the Right Bank in Paris; Charles was the younger brother of King Louis IX of France. Another such residence belonged, in the late thirteenth century, to the count of Artois and then, by the late fourteenth century, to the Duke of Burgundy. Its early fifteenth-century tower—“The Tower of John the Fearless” (d. 1419)—is the tallest surviving medieval tower in Paris.

The Tower of John the Fearless – photo by Guillaume Speurt / Wikimedia Commons

Like the royal family, French-speaking aristocrats, royal administrators, church administrators, and elite merchants brought wealth and extravagant consuming habits to the French capital. Their hunger for luxury goods was fed by Italian, German, Iberian, French, English, and Flemish merchants, who imported goods not only from all parts of Western Europe, but also from Siberia, sub-Saharan Africa, Central Asia, China, and the Indonesian archipelago. But Paris was also a prestigious center of luxury production; the reputation of its artists and artisans was such that in the thirteenth century the royal houses of England and Sicily sent agents to Paris to purchase jewelry, gold and silver plate, furs, fine linens, carpets, and embroidered saddles.

Foreign Merchants

Italian merchants in Paris were the principal importers of goods from Italy, the eastern Mediterranean, sub-Saharan Africa, the Mongol Empire, and points farther east. The goods that they brought to Paris included spices from the Indonesian archipelago; gemstones, cotton textiles, and buckram textiles from the Indian subcontinent; silk and gold brocades from the Mongol Empire; elephant ivory from sub-Saharan Africa; brocaded silk from Lucca; velvet from Venice; and warhorses from Lombardy. These merchants also played a role in bringing prestigious Northern French and Flemish woolen textiles to Paris, and they imported a number of raw materials that were important for Paris’ own textile industries, including silk fiber from the Caspian Sea region, alum from the Turkish coast, and kermes—an extremely expensive red dye that was made from the dried bodies of insects that grew on Mediterranean live oak trees.

By the end of the thirteenth century, some 180 Italian merchant-banking companies had branch offices in Paris. The wealth of the Italian merchants who were partners in these companies could be enormous, as was the case with Girart of Soleret, an Italian spice dealer who was one of the ten wealthiest taxpayers residing in Paris in 1300. But the Italians working for these merchant-banking firms also included salaried employees, some of whom ended up in dire straits. Such was the case with a young man from Siena named Mermetus, who imported wool textiles into Paris for the Gallerani Banking Company of Siena. In 1300 Mermetus fell mortally ill while staying in Paris, lacking cash and indebted to the Gallerani Company. He implored a fellow worker to cover the cost of his burial at Paris’ Franciscan convent.

Women spinning at a loom – British Library MS Royal 16 G. V, fol. 56

German merchants in Paris were the main importers of luxury furs. Their imports included beaver pelts from the southern coast of the Baltic Sea and ermine from Scandinavia. But the most important fur, known as miniver, was made from the stomach pelts of northern squirrels. Those pelts had traveled with Russian traders from the Arctic zone of western Siberia to the Russian town of Novgorod, where German merchants then bought them and transported them across the Baltic and North Seas to France and England.

Some Spanish merchants brought expensive Iberian warhorses to Paris; others brought goatskins, which were used to make cordovan leather goods. English merchants brought English beer and valuable raw English wool.

Local Merchants

A number of Paris’ most prominent local merchants, many of them holding positions as aldermen, became major furnishers for Paris’ royal and aristocratic households, furnishing them with prestigious wool textiles, leather gloves, warhorses, and wine, among other things. These prominent merchants were usually men, but there were some major exceptions. For six months in 1316, for instance, the widow Ysabel of Tremblay held a virtual monopoly on sales of wool cloth to the French royal household, selling the royal family over 2000 livres’ worth of wool cloth. This was an enormous amount of money: a Parisian laborer at that time needed to work between four and six weeks to earn even one livre.

An ivory mirror case, dating to the second quarter 14th century – photo courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art

Food and drink for elite households traveled to Paris by both land and water. Cattle, pigs, and sheep were walked to Paris, where they were butchered at various designated butcheries, which had to have easy access to running water from the Seine. Wines from Burgundy came up the Seine River; wines from Gascony sailed up the Atlantic coast of France, entered the Seine River at Rouen, and then traveled south to the French capital. Wine sales frequently took place on the boats themselves. Fresh fish came from local artificial fishponds as well as from the Seine itself. For fresh fruit, herbs, vegetables, and rabbit meat, many Parisian aristocrats, and nearly all religious institutions, drew on produce from their own gardens; others bought fresh vegetables from itinerant peddlers who procured the produce from the owners of small commercial garden plots located in Paris’ northern suburbs.

Paris’ Skilled Artisans

Paris was extremely unusual in that its population of skilled artisans worked in a broad range of industries. Its stonemasons and glaziers were employed at a large number of local churches and residences, helping to establish Paris as a model for Gothic architecture elsewhere. Its luxury manuscripts, goldwork, and carved ivory were unmatched in quality; its fine linens decorated the banquet tables of kings and aristocrats in France, England, and Holland; its silk and gold embroideries rivaled those of England and Cyprus; its tapestries were matched only by those of Arras; and its armor was worn by the commanders of a number of leading battles of the fourteenth century. Paris was also a center of production for two kinds of woolen textiles: a prestigious summer textile known as “tiretaine,” which was woven with both wool and linen; and a mid-level wool textile that was exported throughout the Mediterranean.

These industries drew thousands of workers from both near and far. About 200 stonemasons were in constant demand starting around 1160, when Bishop Maurice of Sully initiated the rebuilding of Notre Dame Cathedral. They worked not only on Notre Dame but also on numerous parish churches, abbeys, and private residences. The stones themselves came from underground quarries just south of the city, in parts of what is now the Left Bank.

Some 300 goldsmiths created exquisite jewelry, crowns, dishware, and table fountains. A significant number of the goldsmiths who show up in the late thirteenth-century tax assessments were from England. They came to Paris to learn from the best masters in all of Europe. By contrast, the Italian armorers who are mentioned in the Parisian tax assessments were probably recruited from Milan because Milanese armorers were the best in all of Europe.

Paris had around 400 master wool weavers at the beginning of the fourteenth century. Those weavers required the labor of thousands of other Parisians. Some women carded the raw wool; others spun it into yarn or warped the yarn onto the looms. Men dyed the woven wool, fulled it, and hung it up to dry on tenterhooks; and both men and women sheared the final product in order to render it extremely soft.

Paris also had a prominent linen-weaving industry, with a significant number of women weavers and female linen merchants. They made and sold head coverings for women, undergarments for men and women, linen fabric for lining other textiles, and fine table linens. Paris’ silk industry included women who spun the yarn, male and female dyers, women who wove veils, and men who wove velvet. Some of the silk workers were from as far away as Cyprus, Venice, and Lucca.

Saracen style silk alms purse. 14th century, French. Silk, linen, gold leaf – photo courtesy The Metropolitan Museum of Art

The Parisian embroiderers’ guild included around 100 members in the early fourteenth century; three-fourths of them were women, including two who were from England, one from Lombardy, and one from Spain. The members of a second predominantly female guild—that of the makers of “Saracen-Style Silk Alms Purses”—also engaged in luxury embroidery. That guild included three women from Lombardy. Most of Paris’ embroiderers used silk and gold thread, working on a linen ground that was then cut out and appliquéd to pieces of silk or velvet. There were other women who specialized in spinning strips of gold around silk threads in order to make the gold thread.

With the help of these gold spinners and manuscript illuminators who drew the designs for them, Paris’ embroiderers made bedroom sets for kings, queens, counts, and countesses; liturgical garments for bishops and archbishops; altar frontals and chapel hangings for churches and private residences; embroidered clothing; and exquisite embroidered alms purses that were in high demand throughout France.

War and Decline

After 1407, the prosperity that had given rise to Paris’ exceptional population of merchants and artisans came to a sudden halt, due to the Hundred Years’ War and to a civil war among nobles who were jockeying for control of the royal court. By 1420, Paris’ population had diminished by about a half, and many of its luxury industries ceased to exist. Even after the end of the Hundred Years’ War in 1453, prosperity did not return to Paris’ artisanal community, as the king now resided in the Loire Valley.

Sharon Farmer is Professor Emerita from the University of California, Santa Barbara, where she taught medieval European history for 33 years. She is the author of two books and a number of articles on medieval Paris.