RaESETfides · Mint the Gap: Coinage, Land Market and the Economic Rise of Medieval Italy

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.