Table Of ContentEconomies, Public Finances,
and the Impact of Institutional Changes
in Interregional Perspective
SEUH
36
Studies in European Urban History (1100–1800)
Series Editors
Marc Boone
Anne-Laure Van Bruaene
Ghent University
Economies, Public Finances,
and the Impact of Institutional Changes
in Interregional Perspective
The Low Countries and Neighbouring German Territories
(14th-17th Centuries)
Edited by
Remi van Schaïk
H
F
Cover illustration: after Quinten Metsys, The moneylender and his wife, sixteenth century.
© [Koninklijke Musea voor Schone Kunsten van België, Brussel / foto: J. Gelyns/ Ro scan]
© 2015, Brepols Publishers n.v., Turnhout, Belgium
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a
retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means,
electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise,
without the prior permission of the publisher.
D/2015/0095/40
ISBN 978-2-503-54785-5 (printed)
ISBN 978-2-503-54823-4 (online)
Printed on acid-free paper
Contents
Personalia vii
Acknowledgements xi
Introduction
Remi van Schaïk
Economies, Public Finances, and the Impact of Institutional Changes
in Interregional Perspective: Some Introductory Remarks 3
Peter Hoppenbrouwers
Three Decades of Economic and Social History
of the Medieval Low Countries: A Summary Survey 11
Marjolein ’t Hart
Coercion and Capital Revisited.
Recent Trends in the Historiography of State-Formation 23
Industry and Trade
Tim Soens, Peter Stabel & Tineke Van de Walle
An Urbanised Countryside? A Regional Perspective
on Rural Textile Production in the Flemish West-Quarter (1400-1600) 35
Job Weststrate
The Impact of War on Lower Rhine Trade
from the Fifteenth to Seventeenth Centuries 61
Finances and Politics
David Kusman & Jean-Luc Demeulemeester
Connecting Regional Capital Markets in the Late Medieval
Low Countries: The Role of Piedmontese Bankers as Financial Pathfinders
and Innovators in Brabant, Guelders, Flanders and Hainaut (c.1260-1355) 83
Bart Lambert
The Political Side of the Coin: Italian Bankers and the Fiscal Battle
between Princes and Cities in the Late Medieval Low Countries 103
v
Contents
Rudolf A.A. Bosch
The Impact of Financial Crises on the Management of
Urban Fiscal Systems and Public Debt
The Case of the Duchy of Guelders, 1350-1550 113
Jelle Haemers
A Financial Revolution in Flanders?
Public Debt, Representative Institutions, and Political Centralisation
in the County of Flanders during the 1480s 135
Evaluation
Wim Blockmans
Regional Interactions. Some Afterthoughts 163
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Personalia
Wim Blockmans (1945) is emeritus professor at Leiden University. He mainly
worked on state formation and representative institutions in late medieval Europe, and the
Burgundian Netherlands in particular. His most recent books include Metropolen aan de
Noordzee (2010) and Emperor Charles V 1500‑1558 (2002), revised as Karel V, Keizer van
een wereldrijk (20124).
Rudolf A.A. Bosch (1984) recieved his MA degree in History at the University
of Groningen. Between 2008 and 2014 he was preparing his PhD thesis on the impact
of political and economic transformations on urban societies and public finances in the
Duchy of Guelders between c. 1350 and 1580 at the Groningen Research Institute for
the Study of Culture. He has published on several aspects concerning the urban history in
the Low Countries, more specifically the socio-economic history of towns in the Eastern
Netherlands and the financial relations between the Duchy of Guelders and the German
Lower Rhine area.
Jean-Luc Demeulemeester (1965) is professor at the Université Libre de
Bruxelles, at the Solvay Brussels School of Economics and Management, the Political
Science Department and at the Arts and Humanities Faculty. At Solvay Brussels School
of Economics and Management he is the co-director of the Centre for Economic and
Financial History (joint with K. Oosterlinck and J.J. Heirwegh) of the Emile Bernheim
Research centre CEB. He is the co-founder and co-editor (with Dora Costa, Berkeley, and
Claude Diebolt, CNRS Strasbourg and Humboldt Universität zu Berlin) of Cliometrica.
A Journal of Historical Economics and Econometric History.
Jelle Haemers (1980) was trained as an urban historian at the University of
Ghent. He is professor at the department of Medieval History of the University of Leuven
since 2010 and a member of the Jonge Academie of Belgium since 2013. He wrote his first
book on the Ghent revolt of 1449-1453 (2004). In recent years his research interests have
widened to encompass other kinds of social and political conflicts in the late medieval
town, notably in the Low Countries (1100-1600). He also published on the use of social
theory and auxiliary sciences in history, the late medieval nobility and the financial history
of court and towns. He has completed his second book, on the political conflict between
the Flemish cities and Maximilian of Austria in the 1480s (For the Common Good. State
Power and Urban Revolts in the Reign of Mary of Burgundy, 1477‑1482 (2009)), which was
awarded with the prestigious “Frans van Cauwelaert-prize” of the Royal Academy of Arts
and Sciences of Belgium. Most recently his De strijd om het regentschap over Filips de Schone.
Opstand, geweld en facties in Brugge, Gent en Ieper (1482‑1488) was published (2014). His
current major research project is a study of popular politics in the late medieval town.
Marjolein ’t Hart (1955) specialised in early modern social and economic his-
tory. After her graduation and PhD she held positions at various universities (Groningen,
Leiden, Erasmus Rotterdam, VU University Amsterdam, University of Amsterdam,
New School for Social Studies New York, Trinity College Dublin and Columbia
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Personalia
University New York) and in various disciplines (history, sociology, political sciences).
Her main publications include The Making of a Bourgeois State. War, Politics and Finance
during the Dutch Revolt (1993); A Financial History of the Netherlands 1550‑1990 (1997);
De wereld en Nederland. Een sociale en economische geschiedenis van de laatste duizend jaar
(2011), and The Dutch Wars of Independence. Warfare and Commerce in the Netherlands
1570‑1680 (2014). Presently she is head of the research department of the Huygens
Institute for the History of the Netherlands in The Hague and professor History of State
Formation in Global Perspective at VU University in Amsterdam.
Peter (P.C.M.) Hoppenbrouwers (1954) is professor of Medieval History at
Leiden University. He is the co-author, with Wim Blockmans of Introduction to Medieval
Europe 300‑1500 (2014²). His main fields of interest are peasant communities, household
and family, local lordship and military organisation, and cultures of violence in the medi-
eval Latin West.
David Kusman (1969), postdoctoral researcher associated with the
Interuniversity Attraction Pole Program 7/26 “City & Society in the Low Countries
(1200-1850)” at the Université Libre de Bruxelles, graduated from this university in
2008 with a doctorate in medieval history, published in 2013 in the Studies in European
Urban History Series, 28, under the title: Usuriers publics et banquiers du Prince. Le rôle
économique des financiers piémontais dans les villes du duché de Brabant (xiiie‑xiv e siècle).
His current researches focus on credit and information during the Late Middle Ages.
Bart Lambert (1981) was a research assistant at the University of York, working
on the ahrc-funded project “England’s Immigrants, 1330-1550: Resident Aliens in the
Later Middle Ages” and is presently lecturer at Durham University. He is the author of The
City, the Duke and their Banker. The Rapondi Family and the Formation of the Burgundian
State (1384‑1430) (2006), “Pouvoir et argent. La fiscalité d’État et la consommation du
crédit des ducs de Bourgogne (1384-1506)” (Revue du Nord, 2009), “Bonnore Olivier:
courtier de la fiscalité bourguignonne (1429-1466)” (Revue Belge de Philologie et d’Histoire,
2012) and “Friendly Foreigners: International Warfare, Resident Aliens and the Early
History of Denization in England, c. 1250-c. 1400” (English Historical Review, 2015). He
is currently editing a volume on Luxury Textiles in Italy and the Low Countries during the
Late Medieval and Early Modern Period, to be published with Ashgate.
Remi van Schaïk (1950) studied History at the Katholieke Universiteit
Nijmegen and the University of Ghent. After research fellowships and teaching activities
at the Universities of Nijmegen, Rotterdam and Groningen, he was working as a policy
advisor for research in the Faculty of Arts of the University of Groningen, and is senior lec-
turer in Medieval History at the same university since 1995. He is publishing on financial,
economic and social history, and on socio-religious history, especially of the northern and
eastern Low Countries. His publications include De Tielse kroniek (1983, together with
others), Walfridus van Bedum (1985), Belasting, bevolking en bezit in Gelre en Zutphen
(1350‑1550) (1987), and substantial parts of Onder vele torens. Een geschiedenis van de
gemeente Bedum (2002), and of the Geschiedenis van Groningen, vol. I (2008).
Peter Stabel is professor of Medieval History at the University of Antwerp
and member of the Antwerp based Centre for Urban History. He publishes on the social
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Personalia
and economic history of the cities of the medieval and early modern Low Countries. His
recent research interests cover craft guilds, textile manufacture, labour markets, gender and
princely courts in the Low Countries and he is also studying the representation of urbanity
and market regulation in the cities of the medieval Islamic world.
Tim Soens (1977) is associate professor of Medieval and Environmental
History at the University of Antwerp (Belgium). He has studied Medieval History at the
University of Ghent (Belgium), where he obtained his PhD in 2006, investigating water
management and the interaction of man and nature in coastal Flanders in the medieval
and early modern period. Within the Antwerp Department of History, Tim Soens has
developed a new research line “Environment and Power”, concentrating on the historical
relationship between human societies and the natural environment, and the way this inter-
action was steered by evolving power constellations and formal and informal institutions.
Tineke Van de Walle completed her MA degree in History in 2012 at the
University of Antwerp. She graduated on a research project concerning pilgrim accounts
to Jerusalem in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and the perception on urbanity,
supervised by Professor Peter Stabel. From 1 October 2013 onwards, she is working as PhD
fellow of the Research Foundation Flanders (FWO) on a project on suburbanisation in
the late fifteenth and sixteenth at the Centre for Urban History (University of Antwerp).
Job Weststrate (1975) studied history at Leiden University and Humboldt-
Universität in Berlin from 1993-1999. He obtained his PhD at Leiden University for his
dissertation In het kielzog van moderne markten. Handel en scheepvaart op de Rijn, Waal en
IJssel (2007). Lastly he worked at the University of Groningen as a postdoctoral researcher
within the “Cuius Regio”-Project (www.cuius-regio.eu), part of the EuroCORECODE
programme of the European Science Foundation. His project explored the regional cohe-
sion of the Guelders-Lower Rhine region in the Late Middle Ages and Early Modern
Period.
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