Attività mercantili e finanziarie nelle città italiane dei secoli XII-XV: spunti e riflessioni sulla base della più recente storiografia

sergio tognetti

2018-01-01

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Abstract

The essay discusses the role played by commercial and financial activities in the structuring of urban economies in late medieval Italy. Adopting a perspective that takes more account of trade on a regional scale as the primum movens of the commercial revolution, the author analyzes three different economic cycles: the one linked to the great and general expansion of the XII-XIII centuries, the one that is framed under the label of the 'fourteenth crisis' and finally the new fifteenth-century expansive phase which is located in the context of the regional Renaissance states. Among the 'variables' at the centre of the discussion a central position is reserved to the subject of competition (both internal and international) and to the weight exerted by politics, with an eye for the Catalan-Aragonese expansion in the Mediterranean between the XIV and XV centuries.