Project description
How northern Italy became medieval Europe’s economic powerhouse
During the 11th and 12th centuries, Egypt had the most advanced economy in the Mediterranean. By the late 12th century, some Italian towns began to take over maritime commerce, shifting it to northern Europe. However, little is known about this transition. The ERC-funded RaESETfides project will unravel how small polities in northern and central Italy became the economic hub of Latin Europe during the 12th and 13th centuries, maintaining this status into the Early Modern era. Focusing on institutional changes, the project will analyse archival records from Genoa, Milan, Pisa, Rome, Siena, Venice and Verona, exploring exchange rates, land price evolution, currency debasement, and the transformation of credit markets.
Objective
The functioning of medieval economies has been widely debated and often misunderstood. RaESETfides will tackle the problem by looking at one of the most obscure conundrums in the history of the central Middle Ages: how could a group of small polities in the upper half of the Italian peninsula become the economic powerhouse of Latin Europe during the 12th and 13th centuries – a characteristic it would maintain, in fact, until the early modern era. The project will sit within a rapidly-developing field in the economic history of the Middle Ages. In The Donkey and the Boat: Reinterpreting the Mediterranean Economy, 950-1180 (OUP, 2023), Chris Wickham has shown that, during the 11th and 12th centuries, the most advanced economy of the Mediterranean basin was Egypt, but he also hypothesised that from the last quarter of the 12th century some Italian towns managed to take over much of the maritime commerce and shift it to northern Europe. How exactly this happened, however, remains to an extent a mystery, which is all the more fascinating when one considers that north-central Italy was agriculturally poor, politically fragmented and ravaged by constant warfare – the unlikely candidate to widespread economic prosperity. RaESETfides aspires to make a major contribution by taking into account an ill-studied area of research – that is, the institutional changes of north-central Italian polities and the economic impact of such changes. It will do so through the large-scale investigation of the written evidence preserved in the archives of seven cities, namely Genoa, Milan, Pisa, Rome, Siena, Venice and Verona, which will serve as a basis to pursue four innovative objectives – consisting in the study of exchange rates, of the evolution of land prices, of the debasement of the currency and of the transformation of credit markets. The project will take place at the University of Bologna, which has a vibrant historical culture but lacks, at present, a focus on medieval economy.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
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CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques. See: The European Science Vocabulary.
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Project’s keywords as indicated by the project coordinator. Not to be confused with the EuroSciVoc taxonomy (Fields of science)
Programme(s)
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HORIZON.1.1 - European Research Council (ERC)
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HORIZON-ERC - HORIZON ERC Grants
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(opens in new window) ERC-2025-STG
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40126 Bologna
Italy
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