5What was the impact of war taxation on the Mediterranean rural economy? , Direct and Indirect Taxation in Tuscan Urban Finance, Ca. And you'll be the first to get our latest news. Taxation by the Provenal state did at least support village institutions, which made the equitable distribution of the fiscal burden a political issue for local communities. 6The strain of war taxation increased progressively during this period.
24 Drendel, Jews, Villagers and the Count, art. , from an exceptional tax in the thirteenth century, to one levied nearly every two years between 1295 and 1352. cit. Most importantly, taxation gave villages rights, which weakened seigneurial jurisdictions, reduced the cost of lordship and lowered the costs of entry into the market place for those at the base of society. Bimetallism was well established in the Mediterranean and it tended to diminish the intrinsic value of silver deniers and their divisionary monies, because the stability of gold was the principal concern of merchants, political pressure and the object of royal prestige.
cit., p.281: Baratier argues from a Malthusian perspective that migration from the highlands was seasonal: ces dplacements saisonniers sont videmment provoqus par un excdent de population, p.73; see also I. Jonas, Note sur un recours de feux dans la baillie de Puget-Thniers en1343, Provence historique, 27, 1977, p.59-80. 4 D.C. North, Transaction Costs, Institutions, and Economic History, Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics, 140, 1984, p.717; S.R.Epstein, Freedom and Growth. 17 P.Contamine, Guerre, tat et socit la fin du Moyen ge. If tourism is the driving force of Provence-Alpes-Cte d'Azur, the region is also in the lead when it comes to innovative sectors, such as high technology, biotechnology, microelectronics Education for its part is well developed with various universities, international schools, preparatory classes for specialist university courses, engineering, business schools All these institutes of higher learning help to contribute to the human capital needed on the region to meet current technological challenges. After the arrival of the Angevins in Provence in 1246, Charles. , was the result of a deliberate royal policy. John Drendel, The Modern State and the Economy in Provence and Southern France in the Early Fourteenth Century,Memini, 19-20|2016, 213-225. . Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society. Pacas motto and key of success could be summed up in one word: innovation. 1100, , Marchands de Narbonne et du Midi en Sicile (13001460),. After an initial period of centralized tax collection around 1300-1310, during which the counts officers levied taxes themselves proportionally to wealth, the counts changed their policy and devolved the burden to villages, which both relieved the state of the complex task of administering local taxes, and perhaps shifted some of the blame for rising taxation to local institutions. This conflict was thus complicated by internecine warfare among these erstwhile allies, which prolonged the conflict until1340. Taxation by the Provenal state did at least support village institutions, which made the equitable distribution of the fiscal burden a political issue for local communities. In any event, villagers could be expected to be more vigilant in ensuring that everyone paid their due share, when shortfalls created by evaders had to be made up by their neighbours. Les industries rurales dans lEurope mdivale et moderne. We are for example, only beginning to appreciate the important scale of rural industry, exemplified by the recent study of medieval lime kilns in the western Mediterranean by Christophe Vaschalde.3, 2It is thus fitting that for this volume dedicated to an historian of the Provenal state, we examine how the medieval state in Provence and the South of France affected the diffusion and intensification of access to markets both in cities and in the countryside. Here the tendency throughout this period is towards a substitution of Angevin coins for outside monies, which suggest that the abundance of coins, and in particular of. Histoire, Sciences Sociales, 13, 1958, p.231-59.
1 M.Bourin, S.Carocci, F.Menant, et al., Les campagnes de la Mditerrane occidentale autour de 1300; tensions destructrices, tensions novatrices, Annales. This growth was fostered by the ambitious efforts of the rising state to exercise sovereignty over money and over the local jurisdictions, which competed incoherently to establish monopolies over resources, which markets could more efficiently allocate, in particular to people in the countryside. which had served to guarantee credit in the most important banking center of the medieval world, turned against customers. However in rural Provence, the evidence from the notarial archives of Trets is that a huge amount of coinage actually circulated, particularly in the period 1320-1347, when silver seems to have been most scarce. A detailed portrait of the impact of war taxation on peasants emerges from the archives of Oise, a village in the lower Alps of Provence. An Economic History of Britain in the Middle Ages, Progress and Problems in Medieval England: Essays in Honour of Edward Miller. , diss. Both borrowing and a progressive tax system were extremely widespread among villages in Provence. Pezenas and Montagnac were the fourteenth century equivalent of the fairs of Champagne: their domination of international trade in Languedocian draperies stimulated rather that limited the development of many smaller textile centers and fairs which were the matrix of a Languedoc woolen industry, a complex textiles ecology integrating the production of merino and other wools, cochineal, and pastel in the production of draperies ranging from luxurious scarlats to more middle range blanquets.30, 12Royal power further intervened in the production of Languedocian textiles with a protectionist policy, which was the object of an intense political debate in Narbonne revealed in the document of 1330 studied by Bourin. 26 M. Becker, Florentine Popular Government (1343-1348), Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 106, 1962, p.365-6. In order to meet the rising burden of taxation, the village of Oise employed two strategies. ended the autonomy of many urban communes, but his policies and those of his successors encouraged villages and some towns to develop institutions of local government, particularly in areas where the counts were challenged by powerful baronial families. Urban and Rural Communities in Medieval France: Provence and Languedoc, 10001500. 1100 - 1730: A Study in International Competition, Transaction Costs, and Comparative Advantage, University of Toronto, Department of Economy, Working paper n.440, 2007. http://www.economics.utoronto.ca/index.php/index/research/workingPaperDetails/440. Paca is the 3rd richest French region and ranks 19th at the European scale. tudes sur les armes des rois de France 1337-1494. , Paris et La Haye, Mouton, 1972 (cole Pratique des Hautes tudes, Sorbonne. These increases had a particularly negative impact on the feasibility of shipping bulk food stuffs for which transport was a major element of cost. Monarchic states creatively tapped into the resources of rural populations by devolving responsibility to them for taxation while leveraging those resources through borrowing to the point where it threatened the financial stability of Tuscany, the center of European banking. This not only made taxation more efficient, but it also provided villages with the means to resist seigneurial exactions through comital courts, including when the count himself was the direct lord of the village, as was the case in Oise. John Drendel, The Modern State and the Economy in Provence and Southern France in the Early Fourteenth Century,Memini [En ligne], 19-20|2016, mis en ligne le 19 dcembre 2016, consult le 22 juillet 2022. This growth stopped around 1315-1323 in the highlands, but not before 1345 on the plateaux and coastal regions. Wars increased the risks of doing business, and levied a crushing burden of taxation, which drained the resources of consumers, and in particular of rural consumers. 36 J.Drendel, La monnaie dans les campagnes provenales pendant la premire moiti du xivesicle, in M. Bourin, F. Menant, L. To Figueras (eds), Dynamiques du monde rural dans la conjoncture de 1300: changes, prlvements et consimmation en Mditerrane occidentale, Rome, cole franaise de Rome, 2013, p.451-67. The dangers of shipping grain were real, particularly in time of dearth.
Royal power further intervened in the production of Languedocian textiles with a protectionist policy, which was the object of an intense political debate in Narbonne revealed in the document of 1330 studied by Bourin. 22 J.Drendel, Jews, Villagers and the Count in Haute Provence: Marginality and Mediation, Provence historique, 49, 1999, p.217-31.
Both borrowing and a progressive tax system were extremely widespread among villages in Provence. This is why in his view Tuscany never recovered the economic position it held before 1350; Florentine mercantilism, unchecked by any larger government, throttled the economic growth of towns in the Tuscan principality it dominated in the Early Modern period. 11 J. Munro, The New Institutional Economics and the Changing Fortunes of Fairies in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: The Textile Trades, Warfare, and Transaction Costs, in S.Cavaciocchi (ed. Although it is an inseparable activity of the PACA region,tourismis not the only force at play in the regional economy. Our approach to the role of the state in the Mediterranean owes a debt to another great historian of medieval government, the late Stephan Epstein who pioneered the application to the medieval Mediterranean context of the institutional model of economic growth developed by Douglass North and Robert Fogel4. 15 J.Munro, The Rise, Expansion, and Decline of the Italian Wool-Based Textile Industries, ca. , The Institutions of Village Government in Later Medieval Provence and the Origins of t. , Jews, Villagers and the Count, art. The same year, merchants from Languedoc suffered 1000lbs. The strain of war taxation increased progressively during this period. Diss., Universit de ParisIV, 2002. 16 H.Bresc, Marchands de Narbonne et du Midi en Sicile (13001460), Narbonne, Archologie et Histoires, XLVe t.II, Narbonne au Moyen ge, Fdration historique du Languedoc mditerranen et du Roussillon, 1973, p.93; A.Germain, Histoire de la commune de Montpellier, depuis ses origines jusqu son incorporation dfinitive la monarchie franaise.
Pezenas and Montagnac were small towns centers with no obvious vocation as commercial centers aside from their location where routes converged from Carcassonne, Auvergne and the Rhone valley at two crossings on the Hrault River near the coast. There were good arguments to make on both sides of the question; beyond the obvious profits to be had by exporting sacks of wool, there was a larger question of the costs of aggressive protectionism in the context of the whole of Mediterranean trade. Monique Bourin describes a thriving textile industry centered in Beziers, Narbonne and Carcassonne, but involving many smaller localities in the west of Languedoc; 14 towns besides these three major centers sent cloth to the Fair of Pznas in 1346. On the other hand, these burdens were accompanied by institutional innovations in government which may have favoured economic growth in towns and perhaps even more so in the countryside. cit., p.23-50; D.Smail, The Consumption of Justice: Emotions, Publicity, and Legal Culture in Marseille, 12641423, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2003. The catastrophic impoverishment of highland peasants in Navarre at the beginning of the fourteenth revealed by Mauriche Berthes remarkable study of the royal taxation is localized and probably exaggerated by fiscal evasion.20 douard Baratier noted a similarly dramatic drop of population in the alpine provenal baillie of Puget-Theniers in the 1340s, but the document which he cites blames poor weather which led to bad harvests and indebtedness to Jewish moneylenders rather than taxation for the loss of population.21 A detailed portrait of the impact of war taxation on peasants emerges from the archives of Oise, a village in the lower Alps of Provence.22 In Provence, economic growth as judged by the index of population growth, was strong between 1250 and 1315; with the exception of some highland regions in the county of Forcalquier, taxable hearths increased from between 10% and 50% between 1263 and 1315. 10 S.R.Epstein, An Island for Itself: Economic Development and Social Change in Late Medieval Sicily, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992. The commercial court, la. First, it borrowed, as a community, beginning in 1319, six times explicitly to pay taxes before 1350, and five more times around the date the taxes were due. The Rise of States and Markets in Europe, 13001750, London, New York, Routledge, 2000. ), Les industries rurales dans lEurope mdivale et moderne, Toulouse, Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 2013. Colloque de Rome, 2728 fvrier, 2004, , Paris, S.E.V.P.E.N., 1961, (Dmographie et Socits) p.71, 80-1; Laliena Corbera suggests that highland peasants of Navarre migrated temporarily to evade taxes, Les disettes,. This growth stopped around 1315-1323 in the highlands, but not before 1345 on the plateaux and coastal regions. 25 For the Gianfigliazzi in Provence, see A.Sapori, Le compagnie bancarie dei Gianfigliazzi, Studi Di Storia Economica Medievale, Florencem Sansoni, 1945, v. 10, p.927-973. of loss after the seizure of a cargo of grain bound from Constantinople. ; J. The most destructive and longest conflict in the western Mediterranean was ignited by the Sicilian Vespers in 1282, which set off nearly continuous war between Angevin Naples and Aragon until 1302, and which involved the papacy and France in an invasion of Catalonia in1284. The use of registers of estimes was part of a sophisticated and wider comital policy of devolving power to village communities. This conflict was thus complicated by internecine warfare among these erstwhile allies, which prolonged the conflict until1340.14 After the peace of 1303 between Aragon and the Angevins, imperial armies invaded Lombardy and Tuscany, setting off a resumption of the conflicts between Guelf and Ghibelin cities which had been relatively peaceful during the last third of the thirteenth century; this warfare devastated Italy for three decades beginning in 1313. 35 J.Munro, Medieval Monetary Problems: Bimetallism and Bullionism, Journal of Economic History, 43, 1983, p.294-298. Medieval governments are one of the principal elements of the commercialization paradigm at the heart of a recent interrogation into the nature of the Mediterranean economy at the beginning of the fourteenth century. Fer, technique et socit dans les Pyrnes centrales (. Thus Epstein considered problems in Mediterranean food supply in the early fourteenth century to be a result of bottlenecks and other market inefficiencies rather than the result of technological stagnation or environmental shocks. Rdige daprs les documents originaux, et accompagne de pices justificatives, presque toutes indites. paid the wages, in gold, of 28,000mounted soldiers and 16,700foot soldiers; if we add to these figures support personnel, camp followers, and horses, the French crown had the financial and logistic task of supporting the population of a second Paris.
7After the arrival of the Angevins in Provence in 1246, Charlesi ended the autonomy of many urban communes, but his policies and those of his successors encouraged villages and some towns to develop institutions of local government, particularly in areas where the counts were challenged by powerful baronial families.23 After an initial period of centralized tax collection around 1300-1310, during which the counts officers levied taxes themselves proportionally to wealth, the counts changed their policy and devolved the burden to villages, which both relieved the state of the complex task of administering local taxes, and perhaps shifted some of the blame for rising taxation to local institutions. Subsequently, following the Black Death, Epstein argued that governments in southern France, Lombardy and Sicily fostered the economic recovery of the fifteenth century by limiting monopolistic urban policies, thus permitting the emergence of integrated regional networks of trade. , Toulouse, Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 2013. This model proposed that the reduction in the cost of doing business created by the peace and order, which medieval governments sought to establish from the twelfth century onwards was more significant than technological innovation as the motor of the long period of economic growth in the thirteenth century. This fiscal policy gave village communities administrative and jurisdictional powers, and created direct institutional links between these villages governments and central power, both fiscal and juridical. The catastrophic impoverishment of highland peasants in Navarre at the beginning of the fourteenth revealed by Mauriche Berthes remarkable study of the royal taxation is localized and probably exaggerated by fiscal evasion. This is because by limiting the monopolies of towns and seigneuries, states promoted market integration, thus reducing coordination failures and opening up commercial opportunities to the countryside. cit., p.422. There were thus direct economic benefits to villages from the way war taxes were imposed which may have compensated somewhat for the burden of taxation itself; moreover, the general increase of village autonomy at the expense of local seigneuries probably reduced the jurisdictional barriers to trade, as has been demonstrated in the case of seigneurial tolls on roads which local communities challenged successfully in comital courts. On the other hand, Provenal notaries allowed their customers to compensate for devalued coinage by allowing transactions to be indexed in terms of monies of known value; in Provence this was most often the silver gros tournois until the 1330s, when the florin increasing became a second coin of reference. douard Baratier noted a similarly dramatic drop of population in the alpine provenal baillie of Puget-Theniers in the 1340s, but the document which he cites blames poor weather which led to bad harvests and indebtedness to Jewish moneylenders rather than taxation for the loss of population. Colloque de Rome, 2728 fvrier, 2004, Rome, cole franaise de Rome, p.284. , Les crises frumentaires et ltat moderne en Provence et en Languedoc, in P. Florencem Sansoni, 1945, v. 10, p.927-973. 18 D.Herlihy, Direct and Indirect Taxation in Tuscan Urban Finance, Ca. Languedocians drapers were intensely aware of the competition from producers in Perpignan in particular, and Philip the Fair responded to their pressure with a prohibition against export of raw materials for cloth production, reiterated in 1318, in exchange for a tax of 12d. per cloth exported, the gabelle. This growth was fostered by the ambitious efforts of the rising state to exercise sovereignty over money and over the local jurisdictions, which competed incoherently to establish monopolies over resources, which markets could more efficiently allocate, in particular to people in the countryside. Witha privileged climate, diversified natural landscapesand famous brands around the world such asSaint-Tropez, OM, the Cannes Film Festival and nearly 350 festivals, the PACA region relies on a strong tourism industry and imposes asthe first tourist destination of the French and the second for foreigners. Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics. , Turnout, Brepols, 2015 (The Medieval Countryside), p.251-72. , Regional Fairs, Institutional Innovation, and Economic Growth in Late Medieval Europe,, , Draperie roussillonnaise et draperie languedocienne dans la premire moiti du, Congrs de la Fdration Historique de Languedoc Roussillon, Perpignan, 1969, , Les foires en Languedoc au Moyen ge,. Their importance as fairs derived in large part from royal privileges exempting merchants, most notably the subjects of the king of Aragon, from judicial judgements, notably of marque and prise, from any tribunals save the jurisdiction of royal officers at the fairs themselves. Monnaies fodales et circulation montaire en Languedoc, , lorigine dune conomie contracte: les crises du, , Medieval Monetary Problems: Bimetallism and Bullionism,, , La monnaie dans les campagnes provenales pendant la premire moiti du. 31 M. Bourin, De nouveaux chemins, art. Actes du Colloque international Blankenberge, London, Variorum, 1980, p.385-405; J.Munro, The New Institutional Economics and the Changing Fortunes of Fairs in Medieval End Early Modern Europe: The Textile Trades, Warfare, and Transaction Costs, in Fiere e mercati nella integrazione delle economie, op.
The service sector is predominant and provides a good many jobs. Histoire, Sciences Sociales, 66, 2011, p.633-704. On the one hand, the rapid development of state power in France and Provence in the later Middle Ages burdened traders and peasants in the western Mediterranean with costs, especially the direct and indirect costs of war. ), Fiere e mercati nella integrazione delle economie europee secc. , Paris, Publications de la Sorbonne, 2002, and J.M. Of course, notarial registers and the Roman law, which underpins them, antedate the imposition of state power in Southern France, and Provence. 13 .Lonard, Les Angevins de Naples, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1954. Cities and Societies in Medieval Italy. AccueilNumros19-20Communauts urbaines et finances The Modern State and the Economy 1Medieval governments are one of the principal elements of the commercialization paradigm at the heart of a recent interrogation into the nature of the Mediterranean economy at the beginning of the fourteenth century.1 The local ecological diversity in much of the Mediterranean emphasized by Nicholas Purcell and Peregrine Horden made exchange within and between regions a particularly Mediterranean necessity.2 Markets became the late medieval nexus of connectivity in the Mediterranean world, and their development made possible specialization, which particularly in the countryside, allowed agriculture to challenge the Malthusian limits long thought to limit agrarian productivity, notably by stimulating non-agrarian activities. Their second strategy was to distribute the taxes and the burden of borrowing progressively, through a register of estime, a primitive cadaster, which ensured that peasants paid in proportion to their wealth. The Rise of States and Markets in Europe, 13001750, , Cities, regions and the late medieval crisis: Sicily and Tuscany compared,, An Island for Itself: Economic Development and Social Change in Late Medieval Sicily, , The New Institutional Economics and the Changing Fortunes of Fairies in Medieval and E, It is thus fitting that for this volume dedicated to an historian of the Provenal state, we examine how the medieval state in Provence and the South of France affected the diffusion and intensification of access to markets both in cities and in the countryside. Guerre, tat et socit la fin du Moyen ge. It is perhaps in the countryside that the power of the state had the greatest impact, through notaries and courts, which brought the cost of enforcing contracts within the reach of peasants. Most of them are small businesses or SMEs. ), Progress and Problems in Medieval England: Essays in Honour of Edward Miller, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996, p.46-67. On the Medieval Origins of the Modern Stat. From the perspective of trade, these conflicts increased risk and thus transaction costs; John Munro estimates that maritime shipping costs doubled between 1290 and 1400.
The notarial registers of Provence in the fourteenth century attest to a long-term attrition in the value of small coins in terms both of both silver and gold. 8 S.R.Epstein, Freedom and Growth. Sign up for our newsletter Because Epstein placed such importance upon institutions, we cannot but invoke him and the institutional perspective he championed when we look at the role of the modern state in the changes in the Mediterranean economy at the beginning of the fourteenth century. cit., , Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1971, p. 29-30, cited by, Les disettes dans la conjoncture de 1300. The rise of the modern state led to marked interventions by government in trade and markets, and the general model proposed by Epstein would argue that this was beneficial, in the case of territorial states like Sicily.
These efficient mechanisms for enforcing notarial contracts lowered the market threshold for peasant trade and helps to explain why peasants and rural artisans were drawn into specialised activities which diversified and strengthened the rural economy in the first half of the fourteenth century.
Essays by David Herlihy (Collected Studies, 108). It gets out while the going is good and is (after the Paris area) the 2nd French region as regards the setting up of companies. ; Nol Coulet examines a fascinating example of these dilatory tactics in Provence, N. Affaires dargent et affaires de famille en Haute Provence au, sicle: le dossier du procs de Sybille de Cabris contre Matteo Villani et la compagnie des Buonaccorsi. This fiscal policy gave village communities administrative and jurisdictional powers, and created direct institutional links between these villages governments and central power, both fiscal and juridical. ; J. Drendel, Les crises frumentaires et ltat moderne en Provence et en Languedoc, in P. Benito i Monclus, (ed. Their principal advantage lay in the fact that they were part of the royal domain. 12001400,, Florentine Public Finances in the Early Renaissance, 14001433, The unprecedented scale of late medieval warfare is well known; let me illustrate it with one example: in September of 1340, after the Great Famine, but prior to the Black Death, Philippe. xiii-xviii: atti della trentaduesima settimana di studi 812 maggio 2000, Florence, Le Monnier, 88, 2001, p.40551, and more generally J.Munro, Money Matters: A Critique of the Postan Thesis on Medieval Population, Prices and Wages, in J. Drendel (ed.
Oise was one of the villages that stopped growing after 1315, but in 1334 about a third of the families owned two oxen, which suggests that a significant group of wealthy peasants remained prosperous, despite 20 or so years of no population growth. No doubt the financial structure of local communities in Provence, were equally threatened by their own access to credit to pay the Kings tax. 23 J.Drendel, The Institutions of Village Government in Later Medieval Provence and the Origins of the Council of Trets, Historical Reflections/Reflexions Historiques, 19, 1993, p.250-66; N.Coulet, Les villages provenaux, la queste et le cadastre, in J.Drendel (ed. La socit rurale et les institutions gouvernementale au Moyen ge, Montral. The fairs already existed at the end of the thirteenth century, and between 1300 and 1330 is the period when the expansion of the cloth industry is most apparent, and perhaps most threatened, according to the documents analysed by Bourin. Lectures croises du, Numrique et tudes mdivales: enjeux pdagogiques et formation par la recherche, Rencontres, conflits, changes : lespace mditerranen au Moyen ge, Modles de saintet fminine, de Claire dAssise Isabelle de France : lintertextualit louvrage, Art et exprience esthtique dans la littrature du Moyen ge, Portail de ressources lectroniques en sciences humaines et sociales, Catalogue des 592 revues.
24 Drendel, Jews, Villagers and the Count, art. , from an exceptional tax in the thirteenth century, to one levied nearly every two years between 1295 and 1352. cit. Most importantly, taxation gave villages rights, which weakened seigneurial jurisdictions, reduced the cost of lordship and lowered the costs of entry into the market place for those at the base of society. Bimetallism was well established in the Mediterranean and it tended to diminish the intrinsic value of silver deniers and their divisionary monies, because the stability of gold was the principal concern of merchants, political pressure and the object of royal prestige.
cit., p.281: Baratier argues from a Malthusian perspective that migration from the highlands was seasonal: ces dplacements saisonniers sont videmment provoqus par un excdent de population, p.73; see also I. Jonas, Note sur un recours de feux dans la baillie de Puget-Thniers en1343, Provence historique, 27, 1977, p.59-80. 4 D.C. North, Transaction Costs, Institutions, and Economic History, Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics, 140, 1984, p.717; S.R.Epstein, Freedom and Growth. 17 P.Contamine, Guerre, tat et socit la fin du Moyen ge. If tourism is the driving force of Provence-Alpes-Cte d'Azur, the region is also in the lead when it comes to innovative sectors, such as high technology, biotechnology, microelectronics Education for its part is well developed with various universities, international schools, preparatory classes for specialist university courses, engineering, business schools All these institutes of higher learning help to contribute to the human capital needed on the region to meet current technological challenges. After the arrival of the Angevins in Provence in 1246, Charles. , was the result of a deliberate royal policy. John Drendel, The Modern State and the Economy in Provence and Southern France in the Early Fourteenth Century,Memini, 19-20|2016, 213-225. . Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society. Pacas motto and key of success could be summed up in one word: innovation. 1100, , Marchands de Narbonne et du Midi en Sicile (13001460),. After an initial period of centralized tax collection around 1300-1310, during which the counts officers levied taxes themselves proportionally to wealth, the counts changed their policy and devolved the burden to villages, which both relieved the state of the complex task of administering local taxes, and perhaps shifted some of the blame for rising taxation to local institutions. This conflict was thus complicated by internecine warfare among these erstwhile allies, which prolonged the conflict until1340. Taxation by the Provenal state did at least support village institutions, which made the equitable distribution of the fiscal burden a political issue for local communities. In any event, villagers could be expected to be more vigilant in ensuring that everyone paid their due share, when shortfalls created by evaders had to be made up by their neighbours. Les industries rurales dans lEurope mdivale et moderne. We are for example, only beginning to appreciate the important scale of rural industry, exemplified by the recent study of medieval lime kilns in the western Mediterranean by Christophe Vaschalde.3, 2It is thus fitting that for this volume dedicated to an historian of the Provenal state, we examine how the medieval state in Provence and the South of France affected the diffusion and intensification of access to markets both in cities and in the countryside. Here the tendency throughout this period is towards a substitution of Angevin coins for outside monies, which suggest that the abundance of coins, and in particular of. Histoire, Sciences Sociales, 13, 1958, p.231-59.
1 M.Bourin, S.Carocci, F.Menant, et al., Les campagnes de la Mditerrane occidentale autour de 1300; tensions destructrices, tensions novatrices, Annales. This growth was fostered by the ambitious efforts of the rising state to exercise sovereignty over money and over the local jurisdictions, which competed incoherently to establish monopolies over resources, which markets could more efficiently allocate, in particular to people in the countryside. which had served to guarantee credit in the most important banking center of the medieval world, turned against customers. However in rural Provence, the evidence from the notarial archives of Trets is that a huge amount of coinage actually circulated, particularly in the period 1320-1347, when silver seems to have been most scarce. A detailed portrait of the impact of war taxation on peasants emerges from the archives of Oise, a village in the lower Alps of Provence. An Economic History of Britain in the Middle Ages, Progress and Problems in Medieval England: Essays in Honour of Edward Miller. , diss. Both borrowing and a progressive tax system were extremely widespread among villages in Provence. Pezenas and Montagnac were the fourteenth century equivalent of the fairs of Champagne: their domination of international trade in Languedocian draperies stimulated rather that limited the development of many smaller textile centers and fairs which were the matrix of a Languedoc woolen industry, a complex textiles ecology integrating the production of merino and other wools, cochineal, and pastel in the production of draperies ranging from luxurious scarlats to more middle range blanquets.30, 12Royal power further intervened in the production of Languedocian textiles with a protectionist policy, which was the object of an intense political debate in Narbonne revealed in the document of 1330 studied by Bourin. 26 M. Becker, Florentine Popular Government (1343-1348), Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, 106, 1962, p.365-6. In order to meet the rising burden of taxation, the village of Oise employed two strategies. ended the autonomy of many urban communes, but his policies and those of his successors encouraged villages and some towns to develop institutions of local government, particularly in areas where the counts were challenged by powerful baronial families. Urban and Rural Communities in Medieval France: Provence and Languedoc, 10001500. 1100 - 1730: A Study in International Competition, Transaction Costs, and Comparative Advantage, University of Toronto, Department of Economy, Working paper n.440, 2007. http://www.economics.utoronto.ca/index.php/index/research/workingPaperDetails/440. Paca is the 3rd richest French region and ranks 19th at the European scale. tudes sur les armes des rois de France 1337-1494. , Paris et La Haye, Mouton, 1972 (cole Pratique des Hautes tudes, Sorbonne. These increases had a particularly negative impact on the feasibility of shipping bulk food stuffs for which transport was a major element of cost. Monarchic states creatively tapped into the resources of rural populations by devolving responsibility to them for taxation while leveraging those resources through borrowing to the point where it threatened the financial stability of Tuscany, the center of European banking. This not only made taxation more efficient, but it also provided villages with the means to resist seigneurial exactions through comital courts, including when the count himself was the direct lord of the village, as was the case in Oise. John Drendel, The Modern State and the Economy in Provence and Southern France in the Early Fourteenth Century,Memini [En ligne], 19-20|2016, mis en ligne le 19 dcembre 2016, consult le 22 juillet 2022. This growth stopped around 1315-1323 in the highlands, but not before 1345 on the plateaux and coastal regions. Wars increased the risks of doing business, and levied a crushing burden of taxation, which drained the resources of consumers, and in particular of rural consumers. 36 J.Drendel, La monnaie dans les campagnes provenales pendant la premire moiti du xivesicle, in M. Bourin, F. Menant, L. To Figueras (eds), Dynamiques du monde rural dans la conjoncture de 1300: changes, prlvements et consimmation en Mditerrane occidentale, Rome, cole franaise de Rome, 2013, p.451-67. The dangers of shipping grain were real, particularly in time of dearth.
Royal power further intervened in the production of Languedocian textiles with a protectionist policy, which was the object of an intense political debate in Narbonne revealed in the document of 1330 studied by Bourin. 22 J.Drendel, Jews, Villagers and the Count in Haute Provence: Marginality and Mediation, Provence historique, 49, 1999, p.217-31.
Both borrowing and a progressive tax system were extremely widespread among villages in Provence. This is why in his view Tuscany never recovered the economic position it held before 1350; Florentine mercantilism, unchecked by any larger government, throttled the economic growth of towns in the Tuscan principality it dominated in the Early Modern period. 11 J. Munro, The New Institutional Economics and the Changing Fortunes of Fairies in Medieval and Early Modern Europe: The Textile Trades, Warfare, and Transaction Costs, in S.Cavaciocchi (ed. Although it is an inseparable activity of the PACA region,tourismis not the only force at play in the regional economy. Our approach to the role of the state in the Mediterranean owes a debt to another great historian of medieval government, the late Stephan Epstein who pioneered the application to the medieval Mediterranean context of the institutional model of economic growth developed by Douglass North and Robert Fogel4. 15 J.Munro, The Rise, Expansion, and Decline of the Italian Wool-Based Textile Industries, ca. , The Institutions of Village Government in Later Medieval Provence and the Origins of t. , Jews, Villagers and the Count, art. The same year, merchants from Languedoc suffered 1000lbs. The strain of war taxation increased progressively during this period. Diss., Universit de ParisIV, 2002. 16 H.Bresc, Marchands de Narbonne et du Midi en Sicile (13001460), Narbonne, Archologie et Histoires, XLVe t.II, Narbonne au Moyen ge, Fdration historique du Languedoc mditerranen et du Roussillon, 1973, p.93; A.Germain, Histoire de la commune de Montpellier, depuis ses origines jusqu son incorporation dfinitive la monarchie franaise.
Pezenas and Montagnac were small towns centers with no obvious vocation as commercial centers aside from their location where routes converged from Carcassonne, Auvergne and the Rhone valley at two crossings on the Hrault River near the coast. There were good arguments to make on both sides of the question; beyond the obvious profits to be had by exporting sacks of wool, there was a larger question of the costs of aggressive protectionism in the context of the whole of Mediterranean trade. Monique Bourin describes a thriving textile industry centered in Beziers, Narbonne and Carcassonne, but involving many smaller localities in the west of Languedoc; 14 towns besides these three major centers sent cloth to the Fair of Pznas in 1346. On the other hand, these burdens were accompanied by institutional innovations in government which may have favoured economic growth in towns and perhaps even more so in the countryside. cit., p.23-50; D.Smail, The Consumption of Justice: Emotions, Publicity, and Legal Culture in Marseille, 12641423, Ithaca, Cornell University Press, 2003. The catastrophic impoverishment of highland peasants in Navarre at the beginning of the fourteenth revealed by Mauriche Berthes remarkable study of the royal taxation is localized and probably exaggerated by fiscal evasion.20 douard Baratier noted a similarly dramatic drop of population in the alpine provenal baillie of Puget-Theniers in the 1340s, but the document which he cites blames poor weather which led to bad harvests and indebtedness to Jewish moneylenders rather than taxation for the loss of population.21 A detailed portrait of the impact of war taxation on peasants emerges from the archives of Oise, a village in the lower Alps of Provence.22 In Provence, economic growth as judged by the index of population growth, was strong between 1250 and 1315; with the exception of some highland regions in the county of Forcalquier, taxable hearths increased from between 10% and 50% between 1263 and 1315. 10 S.R.Epstein, An Island for Itself: Economic Development and Social Change in Late Medieval Sicily, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1992. The commercial court, la. First, it borrowed, as a community, beginning in 1319, six times explicitly to pay taxes before 1350, and five more times around the date the taxes were due. The Rise of States and Markets in Europe, 13001750, London, New York, Routledge, 2000. ), Les industries rurales dans lEurope mdivale et moderne, Toulouse, Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 2013. Colloque de Rome, 2728 fvrier, 2004, , Paris, S.E.V.P.E.N., 1961, (Dmographie et Socits) p.71, 80-1; Laliena Corbera suggests that highland peasants of Navarre migrated temporarily to evade taxes, Les disettes,. This growth stopped around 1315-1323 in the highlands, but not before 1345 on the plateaux and coastal regions. 25 For the Gianfigliazzi in Provence, see A.Sapori, Le compagnie bancarie dei Gianfigliazzi, Studi Di Storia Economica Medievale, Florencem Sansoni, 1945, v. 10, p.927-973. of loss after the seizure of a cargo of grain bound from Constantinople. ; J. The most destructive and longest conflict in the western Mediterranean was ignited by the Sicilian Vespers in 1282, which set off nearly continuous war between Angevin Naples and Aragon until 1302, and which involved the papacy and France in an invasion of Catalonia in1284. The use of registers of estimes was part of a sophisticated and wider comital policy of devolving power to village communities. This conflict was thus complicated by internecine warfare among these erstwhile allies, which prolonged the conflict until1340.14 After the peace of 1303 between Aragon and the Angevins, imperial armies invaded Lombardy and Tuscany, setting off a resumption of the conflicts between Guelf and Ghibelin cities which had been relatively peaceful during the last third of the thirteenth century; this warfare devastated Italy for three decades beginning in 1313. 35 J.Munro, Medieval Monetary Problems: Bimetallism and Bullionism, Journal of Economic History, 43, 1983, p.294-298. Medieval governments are one of the principal elements of the commercialization paradigm at the heart of a recent interrogation into the nature of the Mediterranean economy at the beginning of the fourteenth century. Fer, technique et socit dans les Pyrnes centrales (. Thus Epstein considered problems in Mediterranean food supply in the early fourteenth century to be a result of bottlenecks and other market inefficiencies rather than the result of technological stagnation or environmental shocks. Rdige daprs les documents originaux, et accompagne de pices justificatives, presque toutes indites. paid the wages, in gold, of 28,000mounted soldiers and 16,700foot soldiers; if we add to these figures support personnel, camp followers, and horses, the French crown had the financial and logistic task of supporting the population of a second Paris.
7After the arrival of the Angevins in Provence in 1246, Charlesi ended the autonomy of many urban communes, but his policies and those of his successors encouraged villages and some towns to develop institutions of local government, particularly in areas where the counts were challenged by powerful baronial families.23 After an initial period of centralized tax collection around 1300-1310, during which the counts officers levied taxes themselves proportionally to wealth, the counts changed their policy and devolved the burden to villages, which both relieved the state of the complex task of administering local taxes, and perhaps shifted some of the blame for rising taxation to local institutions. Subsequently, following the Black Death, Epstein argued that governments in southern France, Lombardy and Sicily fostered the economic recovery of the fifteenth century by limiting monopolistic urban policies, thus permitting the emergence of integrated regional networks of trade. , Toulouse, Presses Universitaires du Mirail, 2013. This model proposed that the reduction in the cost of doing business created by the peace and order, which medieval governments sought to establish from the twelfth century onwards was more significant than technological innovation as the motor of the long period of economic growth in the thirteenth century. This fiscal policy gave village communities administrative and jurisdictional powers, and created direct institutional links between these villages governments and central power, both fiscal and juridical. The catastrophic impoverishment of highland peasants in Navarre at the beginning of the fourteenth revealed by Mauriche Berthes remarkable study of the royal taxation is localized and probably exaggerated by fiscal evasion. This is because by limiting the monopolies of towns and seigneuries, states promoted market integration, thus reducing coordination failures and opening up commercial opportunities to the countryside. cit., p.422. There were thus direct economic benefits to villages from the way war taxes were imposed which may have compensated somewhat for the burden of taxation itself; moreover, the general increase of village autonomy at the expense of local seigneuries probably reduced the jurisdictional barriers to trade, as has been demonstrated in the case of seigneurial tolls on roads which local communities challenged successfully in comital courts. On the other hand, Provenal notaries allowed their customers to compensate for devalued coinage by allowing transactions to be indexed in terms of monies of known value; in Provence this was most often the silver gros tournois until the 1330s, when the florin increasing became a second coin of reference. douard Baratier noted a similarly dramatic drop of population in the alpine provenal baillie of Puget-Theniers in the 1340s, but the document which he cites blames poor weather which led to bad harvests and indebtedness to Jewish moneylenders rather than taxation for the loss of population. Colloque de Rome, 2728 fvrier, 2004, Rome, cole franaise de Rome, p.284. , Les crises frumentaires et ltat moderne en Provence et en Languedoc, in P. Florencem Sansoni, 1945, v. 10, p.927-973. 18 D.Herlihy, Direct and Indirect Taxation in Tuscan Urban Finance, Ca. Languedocians drapers were intensely aware of the competition from producers in Perpignan in particular, and Philip the Fair responded to their pressure with a prohibition against export of raw materials for cloth production, reiterated in 1318, in exchange for a tax of 12d. per cloth exported, the gabelle. This growth was fostered by the ambitious efforts of the rising state to exercise sovereignty over money and over the local jurisdictions, which competed incoherently to establish monopolies over resources, which markets could more efficiently allocate, in particular to people in the countryside. Witha privileged climate, diversified natural landscapesand famous brands around the world such asSaint-Tropez, OM, the Cannes Film Festival and nearly 350 festivals, the PACA region relies on a strong tourism industry and imposes asthe first tourist destination of the French and the second for foreigners. Journal of Institutional and Theoretical Economics. , Turnout, Brepols, 2015 (The Medieval Countryside), p.251-72. , Regional Fairs, Institutional Innovation, and Economic Growth in Late Medieval Europe,, , Draperie roussillonnaise et draperie languedocienne dans la premire moiti du, Congrs de la Fdration Historique de Languedoc Roussillon, Perpignan, 1969, , Les foires en Languedoc au Moyen ge,. Their importance as fairs derived in large part from royal privileges exempting merchants, most notably the subjects of the king of Aragon, from judicial judgements, notably of marque and prise, from any tribunals save the jurisdiction of royal officers at the fairs themselves. Monnaies fodales et circulation montaire en Languedoc, , lorigine dune conomie contracte: les crises du, , Medieval Monetary Problems: Bimetallism and Bullionism,, , La monnaie dans les campagnes provenales pendant la premire moiti du. 31 M. Bourin, De nouveaux chemins, art. Actes du Colloque international Blankenberge, London, Variorum, 1980, p.385-405; J.Munro, The New Institutional Economics and the Changing Fortunes of Fairs in Medieval End Early Modern Europe: The Textile Trades, Warfare, and Transaction Costs, in Fiere e mercati nella integrazione delle economie, op.
The service sector is predominant and provides a good many jobs. Histoire, Sciences Sociales, 66, 2011, p.633-704. On the one hand, the rapid development of state power in France and Provence in the later Middle Ages burdened traders and peasants in the western Mediterranean with costs, especially the direct and indirect costs of war. ), Fiere e mercati nella integrazione delle economie europee secc. , Paris, Publications de la Sorbonne, 2002, and J.M. Of course, notarial registers and the Roman law, which underpins them, antedate the imposition of state power in Southern France, and Provence. 13 .Lonard, Les Angevins de Naples, Paris, Presses Universitaires de France, 1954. Cities and Societies in Medieval Italy. AccueilNumros19-20Communauts urbaines et finances The Modern State and the Economy 1Medieval governments are one of the principal elements of the commercialization paradigm at the heart of a recent interrogation into the nature of the Mediterranean economy at the beginning of the fourteenth century.1 The local ecological diversity in much of the Mediterranean emphasized by Nicholas Purcell and Peregrine Horden made exchange within and between regions a particularly Mediterranean necessity.2 Markets became the late medieval nexus of connectivity in the Mediterranean world, and their development made possible specialization, which particularly in the countryside, allowed agriculture to challenge the Malthusian limits long thought to limit agrarian productivity, notably by stimulating non-agrarian activities. Their second strategy was to distribute the taxes and the burden of borrowing progressively, through a register of estime, a primitive cadaster, which ensured that peasants paid in proportion to their wealth. The Rise of States and Markets in Europe, 13001750, , Cities, regions and the late medieval crisis: Sicily and Tuscany compared,, An Island for Itself: Economic Development and Social Change in Late Medieval Sicily, , The New Institutional Economics and the Changing Fortunes of Fairies in Medieval and E, It is thus fitting that for this volume dedicated to an historian of the Provenal state, we examine how the medieval state in Provence and the South of France affected the diffusion and intensification of access to markets both in cities and in the countryside. Guerre, tat et socit la fin du Moyen ge. It is perhaps in the countryside that the power of the state had the greatest impact, through notaries and courts, which brought the cost of enforcing contracts within the reach of peasants. Most of them are small businesses or SMEs. ), Progress and Problems in Medieval England: Essays in Honour of Edward Miller, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1996, p.46-67. On the Medieval Origins of the Modern Stat. From the perspective of trade, these conflicts increased risk and thus transaction costs; John Munro estimates that maritime shipping costs doubled between 1290 and 1400.
The notarial registers of Provence in the fourteenth century attest to a long-term attrition in the value of small coins in terms both of both silver and gold. 8 S.R.Epstein, Freedom and Growth. Sign up for our newsletter Because Epstein placed such importance upon institutions, we cannot but invoke him and the institutional perspective he championed when we look at the role of the modern state in the changes in the Mediterranean economy at the beginning of the fourteenth century. cit., , Cambridge, Harvard University Press, 1971, p. 29-30, cited by, Les disettes dans la conjoncture de 1300. The rise of the modern state led to marked interventions by government in trade and markets, and the general model proposed by Epstein would argue that this was beneficial, in the case of territorial states like Sicily.
These efficient mechanisms for enforcing notarial contracts lowered the market threshold for peasant trade and helps to explain why peasants and rural artisans were drawn into specialised activities which diversified and strengthened the rural economy in the first half of the fourteenth century.
Essays by David Herlihy (Collected Studies, 108). It gets out while the going is good and is (after the Paris area) the 2nd French region as regards the setting up of companies. ; Nol Coulet examines a fascinating example of these dilatory tactics in Provence, N. Affaires dargent et affaires de famille en Haute Provence au, sicle: le dossier du procs de Sybille de Cabris contre Matteo Villani et la compagnie des Buonaccorsi. This fiscal policy gave village communities administrative and jurisdictional powers, and created direct institutional links between these villages governments and central power, both fiscal and juridical. ; J. Drendel, Les crises frumentaires et ltat moderne en Provence et en Languedoc, in P. Benito i Monclus, (ed. Their principal advantage lay in the fact that they were part of the royal domain. 12001400,, Florentine Public Finances in the Early Renaissance, 14001433, The unprecedented scale of late medieval warfare is well known; let me illustrate it with one example: in September of 1340, after the Great Famine, but prior to the Black Death, Philippe. xiii-xviii: atti della trentaduesima settimana di studi 812 maggio 2000, Florence, Le Monnier, 88, 2001, p.40551, and more generally J.Munro, Money Matters: A Critique of the Postan Thesis on Medieval Population, Prices and Wages, in J. Drendel (ed.
Oise was one of the villages that stopped growing after 1315, but in 1334 about a third of the families owned two oxen, which suggests that a significant group of wealthy peasants remained prosperous, despite 20 or so years of no population growth. No doubt the financial structure of local communities in Provence, were equally threatened by their own access to credit to pay the Kings tax. 23 J.Drendel, The Institutions of Village Government in Later Medieval Provence and the Origins of the Council of Trets, Historical Reflections/Reflexions Historiques, 19, 1993, p.250-66; N.Coulet, Les villages provenaux, la queste et le cadastre, in J.Drendel (ed. La socit rurale et les institutions gouvernementale au Moyen ge, Montral. The fairs already existed at the end of the thirteenth century, and between 1300 and 1330 is the period when the expansion of the cloth industry is most apparent, and perhaps most threatened, according to the documents analysed by Bourin. Lectures croises du, Numrique et tudes mdivales: enjeux pdagogiques et formation par la recherche, Rencontres, conflits, changes : lespace mditerranen au Moyen ge, Modles de saintet fminine, de Claire dAssise Isabelle de France : lintertextualit louvrage, Art et exprience esthtique dans la littrature du Moyen ge, Portail de ressources lectroniques en sciences humaines et sociales, Catalogue des 592 revues.