Economies, public finances, and the impact of institutional changes in interregional perspective the low countries and neighbo

Economies, 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
Personaliavii
Acknowledgementsxi
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

vi

163



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 history. 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
vii


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 medieval 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 lecturer 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

viii

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 interaction 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 HumboldtUniversität 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 cohesion of the Guelders-Lower Rhine region in the Late Middle Ages and Early Modern
Period.

ix






Acknowledgements
On 8‑9 June 2012, an international conference took place in the large monumental
court room of the former Groningen court, now housing the Faculty of Theology and
Religious Studies of the University of Groningen, entitled “Economies, Public Finances,
and the Impact of Institutional Change: Towards a Comparative Approach of Regions in
the Medieval and Early-Modern Low Countries and its Neighbouring Territories”. The
conveners were Rudolf Bosch, MA, and the editor of this volume. The conference was held
in the context of an ongoing research project on state formation, economic transformation
and urban society in the Duchy of Guelders in the late Middle Ages. The present volume
is the result of this conference.
The conference was financed by the Groningen Research Institute for the Study of
Culture (ICOG), the Posthumus Institute (the Research School for Economic and Social
History in the Netherlands and Flanders), the Onderzoekschool Mediëvistiek (Research
School for Medieval Studies in the Netherlands and Flanders) and the EuroCORECODE
programme “Cuius Regio” (funded by the European Science Foundation). The organisers
are most grateful for their generous support.
We would also like to thank the chair persons of the panel sessions, Professor
Dick E.H. de Boer and Professor Raingard M. Esser, who aptly introduced the speakers
and kept discussions well on track. Most of the scholars who presented a paper at the
conference kindly agreed to refashion the annotated text of their presentation into a
contribution to this volume. Unfortunately not all speakers had the opportunity to join
the ranks of the authors. On the other hand, we managed to “contract” one participant
of the 11th Conference on Urban History at Prague (August, 29-September 1, 2012), Dr
Bart Lambert of Durham University (formerly University of York) to add his reworked

presentation delivered in Prague to this volume. I wish to thank all twelve authors for
their patience and willingness to include my many comments on earlier drafts and for their
helpful suggestions for my introduction to this volume.
Finally, as the editor of this volume I am more than happy that the editors of
the series “Studies in European Urban History (1100‑1800)”, Professor Marc Boone and
Professor Anne-Laure De Bruaene, were prepared to incorporate this collection of essays
as a volume in these series after constructive feedback from external referees. I would also
like to thank Dr Jelle De Rock, who carefully directed the practical handling of the process
from manuscript to book.
Remi van Schaïk
Groningen, November 15, 2014

xi





Introduction



Economies, Public Finances, and the Impact
of Institutional Changes in Interregional
Perspective: Some Introductory Remarks*
Remi van Schaïk
University of Groningen

Political processes and socio-economic developments are strongly interconnected.
On the one hand, political friction, wars and trade blockades will certainly have had

a negative influence on rural and urban development; on the other hand, economic
centres, especially towns, in their turn shaped the ways in which the process of political
integration was directed. Towns can be seen as particularistic elements opposed to the
excessive centralisation of power, but economic and financial “containers” that were
essential for the financing of political aims. Not only demographic size, economic
functions or fiscal potential of individual cities, but also the part they played in formal
and informal political and economic networks is decisive in understanding the role of
cities during the long and turbulent period prior to the formation of the Dutch Republic.
In particular, analysing the development of public finances in the investigation of these
relations is crucial. In that respect we link up with a historiographical trend that has
been prominently represented in the last two or three decades by the Ghent medievalists
Walter Prevenier and Marc Boone, although the tradition itself goes back to Hans Van
Werveke’s book of 1934 or even that of Georges Espinas of 1902.1 New research will
remain necessary, both on urban finances and their impact and on seigniorial finances –
not as an institutional study of financial systems as such, but as a study of the mechanisms
of power acquisition and preservation of power.2 Below, Marjolein ’t  Hart will show
the merits and perspectives of such investigations by analysing recent trends in the
historiography of state formation.

I would like to thank Mrs. Ingrid Sennema for correcting my English.
See for instance Marc Boone en Walter Prevenier (ed.), Finances publiques et finances privées au Bas Moyen Âge.
Public and private finances in the late Middle Ages (Studies in urban social, economic and political history of the medieval
and modern Low Countries, 4) Leuven-Apeldoorn, 1995, and Marc Boone, Karel Davids & Paul Janssens (ed.), Urban
government and the market for annuities in Western Europe (14th-18th centuries) (Studies in European Urban History, 3),
Turnhout, 2003. Besides the “founding” books of Georges Espinas, Les finances de la commune de Douai. Des origines au
xve siècle, Paris, 1902, and Hans Van Werveke, De Gentsche stadsfinanciën in de middeleeuwen, Brussels, 1934, I have to
mention the magnum opus of Raymond Van Uytven, Stadsfinanciën en stadsekonomie te Leuven van de XIIe tot het einde
der XVIe eeuw (Verhandelingen van de Koninklijke Vlaamse Academie voor Wetenschappen, Letteren en Schone Kunsten
van België, Klasse der Letteren, 44), Brussels, 1961.
2

Cf. Richard Bonney (ed.), Economic systems and state finance (The origins of the modern state in Europe, 13th to 18th
centuries, theme B), Oxford, 1995, and Simonetta Cavaciocchi (ed.), La fiscalità nell’economia Europea secc. XIII-XVIII.
Fiscal systems in the European economy from the 13th to the 18th centuries (Fondazione Instituto Internazionale di storia
economica “F. Datini”, Prato, Serie II – Atti delle “Settimane di studi” e altri convegni, 39), Florence, 2008.
*
1

Economies, Public Finances, and the Impact of Institutional Changes in Interregional Perspective, ed. by Remi Van Schaïk,
Turnhout, 2015 (Studies in European Urban History, 36), p. 3‑9.
F H G
DOI: 10.1484/M.SEUH-EB.5.103702


Remi van Schaïk

So far, research into the territory of what we usually call the Low Countries has
mainly been focused on the southern and western principalities, especially the counties of
Flanders and Holland, and often mainly within its political borders. As highly urbanised
and economically successful territories under the centralising government of the
Burgundian-Habsburg dukes, they formed a perfect test-case for the relationship between
successful urban economic development and one of the most intriguing processes of state
formation in European medieval and early modern history. For the County of Holland,
much research has also been conducted into the role of the spectacular economic rise
during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and the specific ways of urban development
in connection with the political supremacy of this region in the Republic of the late
sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries.3 Because of the existing focus on Flanders and
Holland it would be highly relevant to confront the latest insights relating to the southern
and western regions of the Low Countries with those relating to the eastern regions
like for instance Guelders, and, moving across today’s state borders, the neighbouring
German regions, especially the Lower Rhine region. The Duchy of Guelders would have

been connected for a longer period with some German principalities like Cleves, Jülich,
Berg, Mark and Ravensberg, if the last Duke of Guelders, William from the House of
Jülich-Berg (1539‑1543) had not been forced to renounce that part of his territories
and transfer it to Emperor Charles  V as Lord of the Low Countries, as was stipulated
by the Treaty of Venlo in 1543.4 Until the formation of the Dutch Republic (and even
thereafter, but to a lesser degree) the economic, political and cultural orientation of the
eastern regions of the Low Countries was directed eastward to a far greater extent than
is generally assumed.5
The recent publication of Bas van Bavel’s book Manors and markets, which
provides an overview and a new interpretational framework of the social and economic
history of the medieval Low Countries, has evoked considerable debate.6 One of the
main issues in the debate on this synthesis, which will be discussed in more detail by Peter
An overview in Wim Blockmans, “The economic expansion of Holland and Zeeland in the fourteenth-sixteenth
centuries”, in Studia historica oeconomica. Liber amicorum Herman Van der Wee, ed. Erik Aerts et al., Leuven, 1993, p. 41‑58.
Important is the more recent monograph of Jessica Dijkman, Shaping medieval markets. The organisation of commodity
markets in Holland, c. 1200-c. 1450 (Global Economic History Series, 8), Leiden, 2011.
4
See Wilhelm Janssen, “Kleve-Mark-Jülich-Berg-Ravensberg 1400‑1600”, in Land im Mittelpunkt der Mächte. Die
Herzogtümer Jülich-Kleve-Berg, Kleve, 19852, p. 17‑40, and several contibutions in Frank Keverling Buisman et al. (ed.),
Verdrag en Tractaat van Venlo. Herdenkingsbundel, 1543‑1993) (Werken Gelre, 43), Hilversum, 1993.
5
Some examples in this context: Volker Henn, “Die niederrheinisch-ostniederländische Raum und die Hanse”, in “zu
Allen theilen inß mittel gelegen”. Wesel und die Hanse an Rhein, IJssel & Lippe, ed. Werner Arand & Jutta Prieur, Wesel, 1991,
p. 11‑32; Rudolf A.A. Bosch, “De zaak Hendrik Haeck. Een case-study naar de politieke, sociale en financieel-economische
aspecten van kredietrelaties tussen het hertogdom Gelre en het Duitse Nederrijngebied, 1450‑1550”, in Stedelijk verleden in
veelvoud. Opstellen over laatmiddeleeuwse stadsgeschiedenis in de Nederlanden voor Dick de Boer, ed. Hanno Brand, Jeroen
Benders & Renée Nip, Hilversum, 2011, p. 89‑104, and Dick E.H. de Boer, “De Moderne Devotie: reflectie, educatie
en sociale-culturele cohesie in de Duits-Nederlandse grensregio”, in Frömmigkeit, Unterricht und Moral. Einheit und Vielfalt
der Devotio Moderna an den Schnittstellen von Kirche und Gesellschaft, vor allem in der deutsch-niederländischen Grenzregion,
ed. Dick E.H. de Boer & Iris Kwiatkowski (Die Devotio Moderna. Sozialer und kultureller Transfer (1350‑1580), 1),

Münster, 2013, p. 9‑28. New research for the region Groningen indicates that the orientation economically and culturally was
predominantly eastward well into the sixteenth century: cf. Jeroen F. Benders, Een economische geschiedenis van Groningen.
Stad en Lande, 1200‑1575 (Groninger Historische Reeks, 39), Assen, 2011, passim; Remi van Schaïk, “Een samenleving
in verandering: de periode van de elfde en twaalfde eeuw” in Geschiedenis van Groningen I. Prehistorie-Middeleeuwen, ed.
Maarten G.J. Duijvendak et al., Zwolle, 2008, p. 151‑167, and Remi van Schaïk, “Consolidatie en bloei: de periode van
de dertiende en begin veertiende eeuw”, Ibidem, p. 220‑227.
6
Bas van Bavel, Manors and markets. Economy and society in the Low Countries, 500‑1600, Oxford, 2010. A broad
debate on this book was published in the Tijdschrift voor Sociale en Economische Geschiedenis, 8, 2011, p. 61‑138.
3

4


Introductory Remarks

Hoppenbrouwers in his contribution below, is whether differences in premodern socioinstitutional arrangements, such as markets, property structures and socio-political power
relations, can be exclusively (or mainly) responsible for the divergent paths of economic
development and the momentum of relative socio-economic growth and decline or
stagnation which different regions within the Low Countries and Westphalia or the Lower
Rhine-area witnessed during the late Middle Ages and the early modern period. Some
scholars argue that Van Bavel has marginalised some of the more “traditional” explanatory
factors, such as geography, demography, urbanisation, technological development, capital
accumulation, commercialisation and trade networks and politico-economic systems as
main factors or “prime movers” for economic development in the Low Countries. In order
to deal with this problem new research into regional differences in both institutional and
macro-economic developments should be carried out on a comparative basis, whereby both
central regions and regions traditionally considered peripheral are studied equally. This will
result in a much wider array of case-studies which in turn can provide a more diverse and
articulate overview of regional differences and similarities within the Low Countries and

their neighbouring territories.
Although a regional approach of the socio-economic history of the Low Countries
now seems widely accepted among historians, this had not yet led to the creation of
a platform on which scholars could present their findings and integrate them into an
ever growing body of knowledge on regional divergence of both institutions and socioeconomic structures. The conference of June 2012 in Groningen was organised for exactly
this reason. Its aim was to foster the development of this comparative approach and to
offer an opportunity for historians to present their research into economic development,
socio-political structures and institutions in different regions within (or on the fringes
of ) the Low Countries and to engage in fruitful and in-depth discussions on research
outcomes and methods. Thus useful comparisons between these case studies could be
made, chronologically, geographically as well as thematically. The overall theme of this
conference was, therefore, the way and extent to which differences in economic systems
and stage of development, and the impact of institutional change affected the political
economy and fiscal systems of regions, or vice versa. One major problem which had to
be tackled was the non-convergence of economic regions, social and political networks,
political borders and even fiscal systems. A similar problem was the question whether a
set of variables could be regarded as supra-regional, interregional, regional, local or even a
mix of all of these.
These deliberations, and many others, have resulted in the present collection
of articles. This volume is divided into three sections. Continuing along the lines of
these introductory remarks is the contribution of Peter Hoppenbrouwers on recent
historiographical trends in the study of economic and social history of the medieval Low
Countries.7 The contribution of Marjolein ’t Hart on trends in the historiography of state
formation during the Middle Ages and early modern period in a broader European and
even global setting also fits into this section. Thus, the first three contributions provide
See most recently also Daniel R. Curtis, “Trends in rural social and economic history of the pre-industrial Low
Countries. Recent thems and ideas in journals and books of the past five years (2007‑2013)”, in BMGN – Low Countries
Historical Review, 128‑3, 2013, p. 60‑95, published after the completion of the article of Hoppenbrouwers.

7

5


Remi van Schaïk

a broad, historiographic introduction, serving as a basis for the collection of case-studies
which is divided in two sections: “Industry and Trade”, and “Politics and Finances”.
The section “Industry and Trade” is devoted to economic themes in relation to
politics and institutions. The first article in this section, by Tim Soens, Peter Stabel and
Tineke van de Walle, deals with the contested distinction between urban and rural industry
in southwest Flanders during the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In their contribution on
the remarkable development of textile industries in the Flemish West Quarter, the authors
aim to transcend traditional methodological boundaries and explanatory frameworks
between rural and urban history when accounting for the amazing success of this regional
specialisation in textile industries. Whereas a dispersed cluster of villages in the castellany
of Bailleul (in present-day France) became the centre of high-quality production of highquality cloth, Hondschoote in the coastal region of Bergues-Saint-Winnoc specialised in
much cheaper light woollens, the famous “Hondschoote says”. Whereas cloth production
in Nieuwkerke involved the whole region, the Hondschoote production of says seems to
have been much more concentrated, leading to an apparently more classic type of urban
development. The authors argue that only an integrated view on both the dynamics of
international trade and the regional characteristics of the rural economy can offer more
satisfactory explanations for regional trajectories of economic development. Moreover, this
expansion of rural textile industry raises important questions on the interaction between
politics, institutions and economics. The two main centres of textile production in the
Flemish West Country came into the hands of two of the most powerful noble families
at the heart of the Habsburg state apparatus in the sixteenth-century Low Countries. The
centres of textile industry were situated right on the border of administrative districts,
and from 1477 onwards in the border region between the Habsburg Low Countries and
France. This border location may actually have been quite favourable for further economic

development. The institutional framework of the region was distinct from that of the rest
of the County of Flanders because of the conspicuous presence of small-scale fiefs, often
in the hands of farming elites. In this way this contribution highlights the importance of
enlarging the scope of social and economic history in the Low Countries by including
regions outside the well-studied “home countries” of Flanders, Brabant and Holland.
Job Weststrate has investigated the impact of war on interregional trade contacts
in the Lower Rhine area between the fifteenth and seventeenth centuries. His contribution
links up with the central theme of this volume in several ways. It explores the impact of
small-scale and large-scale warfare on riverine trade in the Rhine Delta and deals with
the question to what extent warfare affected the institutional framework of trade in this
region: what were the effects on the functioning of political borders, how were commercial
networks affected, did warfare change access to specific markets and if so, how did this
influence the shape of commercial regions? Finally, it touches upon the question of how
many of the changes that can be discerned in riverine trade during the sixteenth and
seventeenth centuries can be attributed to the impact of warfare. Did prolonged warfare
induce change fundamental shifts in the economic landscape, or is war to be regarded as a
catalyst, speeding up processes that were already underway?
The biggest section, “Finances & Politics”, contains four contributions that are
connected by the theme of public debt. David Kusman and Jean-Luc Demeulemeester
are discussing the role of Italian bankers on regional capital markets in four regions
6


Introductory Remarks

between the second half of the thirteenth and the first half of the fourteenth centuries.
They have studied the circulation of credit instruments at a very early stage to shed light
on the dynamics and efficiency of interregional financial markets in the late-medieval
Low Countries such as annuity markets in the case study of the indebted Vaucelles abbey.
The authors show that even though the late-medieval economy of the Low Countries

was entangled in a set of quite heterogeneous political configurations such as bishoprics
(Cambrai, Liège), principalities (Brabant, Flanders, Guelders) and semi-autonomous
lordships (Mechelen), a significant degree of financial integration could still be achieved
between economically backward regions and highly monetised regions. This development
was due to the intermediation of Piedmontese bankers, who successfully opened new
credit markets for rich burghers investing their capital on an interregional scale. This
intermediation was pivotal in bringing about political changes in Guelders for example,
once the public debt was transferred to the Count of Flanders. Finally, the authors
shed light on the process whereby certain towns – such as Mechelen – which, owing
to their advanced financial system, became meeting points between public and private
forms of credit. The dense network of town moneychangers, brokers and Piedmontese
moneylenders collaborating hand in hand to perform banking functions through the town
exchange implies that, contrary to what has been asserted before, Bruges was no exception
in the financial landscape of the southern Low Countries. Moreover, in Mechelen
information could circulate smoothly on an interregional scale on financial markets as well
as commodity markets (grains and wool).
While we are on the subject of Bruges and Italian bankers, in his contribution
“The Political Side of the Coin” Bart Lambert deals with the role of capital in the sociopolitical development of late-medieval cities and regions and focuses on the Flemish city
of Bruges which, because of its position as a hotspot for international trade and banking,
could draw on capital markets that were far more developed than elsewhere in the Low
Countries. The abundant availability of funds and the attractive rates at which they could
be obtained provided the Bruges aldermen with means to run the financial administration
of their city which urban authorities in the rest of Flanders and the surrounding regions
did not have at their disposal. Supplied by foreign, mainly Italian, investors who had no
local ties and, certainly during the Burgundian period, had a preference for the princely
cause, the easily accessible capital also enabled those urban groups who were keen to win
ducal power to develop a policy which, in the end, sacrificed the political independence of
their city. Rather surprisingly, a more highly developed capital market than in other places
in Flanders and other regions of the Low Countries thus resulted in a more pronounced
political subjection of the city to the central powers. This view differs slightly from the

conclusions of Kusman and Demeulemeester, as mentioned above.
One of the mainstream arguments in the scholarly debate on public finances
is that financial crises were a prime mover in the process of financial innovation and
modernisation, which in turn are thought to have been an important factor in premodern
economic growth. The political economy of premodern towns in the Low Countries was
primarily shaped by the socio-political elites, who monopolised town government and
thereby were able to shape financial institutions in their best interests. The late medieval
financial crises in cities of the Duchy of Guelders are treated by Rudolf Bosch. At the end
of the fifteenth century urban economies in the Eastern Netherlands were struck by severe
7


Remi van Schaïk

political and economic crises just like the Burgundian Netherlands as a whole.8 Continuous
warfare ruined local economies, leading to the narrowing of the tax base, while the rising
expenditure provoked by warfare forced town governments to contract loans excessively on
domestic and foreign capital markets. In Holland, the financial crises which were the result
of the same downward financial spiral, led to a “financial revolution” which paved the way
for the economic, financial and political dominance of Holland during the seventeenth
century.9 In Guelders, however, financial institutions were much more stable and political
elites responded conservatively to the challenges posed by warfare and economic stagnation.
Here financial crises did result in the ending of the monopoly of the urban socio-political
elites on financial decision-making. Therefore, at macro level financial crises did not lead to
innovations and scaling-up in the field of financial institutions, but at local level financial
crises did indeed lead to institutional and socio-political transformations, although small
and protracted.
Jelle Haemers confronts us with the “ins and outs” of the financial problems of
Flanders during the reign of Maximilian of Habsburg at the end of the fifteenth century,
just like Bosch is doing with the crises in Guelders’ cities. He prefers to speak about an

“evolution” of the fiscal system, rather than a “revolution”, as was assumed by James D.
Tracy on the basis of his study on Holland under Habsburg rule. It must be emphasised
that this question of evolution or revolution is a topic in the current scholarly debate.10
Changes in credit granting differ from region to region, but of course changes in the
financing of the public debt transcend regional boundaries. It is a fact that in the sixteenth­
century Holland borrowed many accounting techniques and innovations from fifteenthcentury practices in Flanders. This could explain why the regions are similar in many
ways, with the same ruling dynasty (and their entourage of top officials), and, particularly
as it relates to financial transactions, many “transregional” trading links. Yet there are
regional differences that perhaps support Van Bavel’s argument that political traditions and
institutional achievements explain why the so-called “financial revolution” in Flanders does
not manifest itself in the fifteenth century. Taxes such as those imposed by Holland in the
sixteenth century were uncommon in late medieval Flanders. This was partly because the
Flemish cities were largely independent from the Burgundian-Habsburg dynasty and had
defended their autonomy for centuries. They refused to give up the collection of indirect
(or consumer) taxes to the princely level. The Holland cities, on the other hand, had a
less violent tradition in that respect, although they also had some form of administrative

8
See also Remi van Schaïk, “Drie vijftiende-eeuwse bestaanscrises in de Nederlanden. Oorzaken, kenmerken en
gevolgen”, in Leidschrift. Historisch Tijdschrift, 28‑2, 2013, p. 67‑84.
9
Most recently about this subject: Jaco Zuijderduijn, “De laatmiddeleeuwse crisis van de overheidsfinanciën en de
financiële revolutie in Holland”, in Bijdragen en Mededelingen betreffende de Geschiedenis der Nederlanden, 125, 2010, p. 3‑24.
10 Cf. James D. Tracy, A financial revolution in the Habsburg Netherlands: renten and renteniers in the county of Holland
(Berkeley-London, 1985), Wantje Fritschy, “A ‘Financial revolution’ reconsidered. Public finance in Holland during the
Dutch Revolt, 1568‑1648”, in Economic History Review, 56, 2003, p. 57‑89, and C. Jaco Zuijderduijn, Medieval capital
markets. Markets for renten, state formation and private investment in Holland (1300‑1550) (Global Economic History Series,
2), Leiden-Boston, 2009.

8

Introductory Remarks

autonomy.11 Therefore, tradition can explain why it did not go beyond one more step in the
“evolution” in Flanders compared to the more revolutionary events in Holland.
From this case we can conclude that, as Van Bavel has maintained, not only
institutions account for economic evolutions, but also historical circumstances and
engrained traditions. In the case of Flanders the urban revolts of the fifteenth century have
in fact caused a retardation in the centralisation of public finances.
At the closing session of the Groningen conference Wim Blockmans already
presented, relatively extempore, a final evaluation, but he also expressed his willingness
to deliver a more thorough evaluation after reading the written and edited texts of all
contributions. He emphasises that the regional variation in the levels of demographic,
economic and institutional development is really striking. He draws attention to the
demographic factor in the economic evolution of regions – especially the level of
urbanisation – in addition to the degree of accessibility in terms of the available transport
system.
In short, case-studies on a regional and regional-comparative level are of crucial
importance for research on changes in economics, finance and politics. I think that the
symposium and this collection of essays prove this point convincingly. At the same time
it has to be emphasised that much research still needs to be done to gain a thorough
understanding of regional and interregional interactions.

The tradition of considerable autonomy in collecting direct (ducal) taxes by at least the larger cities within their own
town territory is also known from the Duchy of Guelders, as was showed in Remi van Schaïk, “Taxation, public finances
ad the state-making process in the late Middle Ages: the case of the duchy of Guelders”, Journal of Medieval History, 19,
1993, p. 268. For the relatively strong financial autonomy of the Guelders cities and therefore the collection of indirect taxes
by themselves see my “Oorsprong en vroege ontwikkeling van stadsrekeningen in de Nederlanden”, in Handelingen van het
Genootschap voor Geschiedenis te Brugge, 133, 1996, p. 160‑161.

11

9



Three Decades of Economic and Social
History of the Medieval Low Countries
A Summary Survey

Peter Hoppenbrouwers
Leiden University

The aim of this paper is to briefly introduce the major lines of research into the economic
and social history of the Low Countries during the second half of the Middle Ages between
the appearance of the standard work Algemene Geschiedenis der Nederlanden (“General
History of the Netherlands”, henceforth AGN) in the early 1980s and the publication,
in 2010, of two major monographs dealing specifically with the medieval period: Bas
van Bavel’s Manors and markets and Wim Blockmans’s Metropolen aan de Noordzee
(“Metropolises at the North Sea”). To what extent, and in which directions, have our ideas
about the economy and society of the medieval Low Countries shifted over the three
decades that lay in between these defining events?
The Paradigm of the 1970s
There can be little doubt that much did happen. Partly, this was the logical outcome of
the big popularity that social and economic history could boast throughout the 1970s and
1980s. It resulted in a growing number of publications on social, economic, demographic
and geographical subjects. According to a calculation by Ad van der Woude, at that time
the doyen of demographic and rural history in the Netherlands, and a leading member
of the editorial board of the AGN, those four aspects took up 37% of the total number

of pages of the chapters on early modern history in the AGN. Not only was this twice as
much as in the “old” AGN, which dated from the 1950s, but this 37% also made social
and economic history into the largest single subject category in the AGN’s volumes on the
early modern period, followed at an ample distance by political, institutional, and military
history, which covered about 25%.1 The percentage for economic and social history was
slightly lower – about 30 – for the four volumes dedicated to the Middle Ages. Of special
interest were the chapters on the evolution of man-made landscapes, on the expansion
of settlement, on agriculture, trade and industries, and on urbanisation in Volume 2. In
Volume 4 this picture is complemented with often quantified data on the demographic,
economic and social consequences of the crises of the fourteenth century.
1
Ad van der Woude, “De ‘Nieuwe Geschiedenis’ in een nieuwe gedaante. Inleiding op de delen 5 tot en met 9”, in
Algemene Geschiedenis der Nederlanden, ed. Dirk Peter Blok et al., vol. 5, Haarlem, 1980, p. 9‑35, there 9. The final version
of this article was closed in March 2013. Literature or other information that appeared after March 2013 is not discussed,
but the titles of some important recent publications have been included in the notes.

Economies, Public Finances, and the Impact of Institutional Changes in Interregional Perspective, ed. by Remi Van Schaïk,
Turnhout, 2015 (Studies in European Urban History, 36), p. 11‑21.
F H G
DOI: 10.1484/M.SEUH-EB.5.103703


Peter Hoppenbrouwers

The contents of Volume 4, in particular, was fine-tuned to the conceptual framework,
designed for the social and economic-historical sections of the AGN and set forth by Van
der Woude in his thorough introduction to the volumes on the Early Modern Period. This
framework consisted of two components: a “methodologically static element” – coinciding
with Ferdinand Braudel’s “layered-structuralist view” – and a “methodologically dynamic
element” – coinciding with Wilhelm Abel’s “secular trend”. The former, which referred

more specifically to Braudel’s idea to distinguish three tempi in historical time according to
which geophysical & geographical, social & economic, and political “things”, respectively,
happen, became the basis for the thematic division of the subject matter in the AGN. The
latter referred to the cyclical alternation of long-term phases of growth- and contraction in
pre-industrial society, that could be reconstructed by means of serial data on demographic
and economic base figures (e.g. birth- and mortality rates; commodity prices and wages).2
The popularity of economic and social history in the history departments of the
Humanity faculties, as well as in the historical sections of the faculties of Economy, Social/
Behavioral Sciences or Social Geography, at Dutch and Flemish universities would remain
considerable throughout the 1980s, and much has been achieved in the first two decades
following the appearance of the AGN. The fruits of these efforts did find their way not
only to a large number of academic dissertations, to professional journals, thematic series
and edited volumes, but also to regional and local journals, and, last but not least, to the
“medieval” chapters of countless new histories of towns, villages, and provinces that have
appeared during the last four decades.3
The substantial increase of output was accompanied by methodological
innovations, not just in terms of comparative history, but also, for example, in the fields
of quantification, and of prosopography and [social] network analysis. Historians of the
1980s and the 1990s were the first to profit from the invention of the personal computer
and the internet, which within a decade revolutionised the collection and the statistical
analysis of historical data. An the end is not yet in sight: the latest “digital toys”, such as
GIS (Geographic Information System) applications for historical mapping and ever more
sophisticated software for digital text analysis, already found their way to the avant-garde
of economic and social history.4
From a theoretical point of view, the output from the last two decades of the last
century reveals that the conceptual markers, driven into the historiographical landscape
by Van der Woude, certainly have been guiding, but, happily, not all-determining. A
Van der Woude, “De ‘Nieuwe Geschiedenis’”, p. 12‑17.
New Dutch and Belgian journals, relevant in this field, that were started since the 1970s: Tijdschrift voor Sociale
Geschiedenis (1974‑2003), Historisch-Geografisch Tijdschrift (1982- ), NEHA-Bulletin (1987‑2003), Tijdschrift voor

Waterstaatsgeschiedenis (1992- ), Tijdschrift, later Jaarboek voor Ecologische Geschiedenis (1996/1998- ), Tijdschrift voor Sociale
en Economische Geschiedenis (2004- ), and Stadsgeschiedenis (2006- ). Rare remain, certainly for the period of the Middle
Ages, monographs on (just) the economic and/or social history of a province, such as Jeroen F. Benders, Een economische
geschiedenis van Groningen. Stad en Lande, 1200‑1575 (Groninger Historische Reeks, 39), Assen, 2011.
4
Pioneering in the field of GIS applications is the “Precadastral Atlas of Friesland” project of the History Department of
the Fryske Akademy at Leeuwarden. Its aim is to reconstruct the early modern or even late medieval ownership of all farms
in the present-day province of Friesland by way of back-projected mapping of the earliest cadastral data (of 1832) on earlier,
precadastral, data in fiscal registers of 1700 and 1640. Johannes A. Mol & Paul N. Noomen, “De Prekadastrale Atlas van
Friesland”, in Caert-Thresoor. Tijdschrift voor de Geschiedenis van de Kartografie in Nederland, 17, 1998, p. 33‑37, and the
website www.fryske-akademy.nl/index.php?L=2&id=102. For digital text analysis see, for instance, the work of Dr José de
Kruif of the Department of History at Utrecht University, who, as a social historian, specialises on reading culture and the
media in the nineteenth century.
2
3

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Three Decades of Economic and Social History of the Medieval Low Countries

good example with regard to the medieval history of the northern Low Countries in
particular is offered by the many studies on the so-called Great Reclamation, the massive
(although small-scale) reclamation of the vast peat moors, coastal marshes, and river basin
lands that may have covered as much as half the surface of the present-day Netherlands
in the Carolingian Age. In a sense, the further exploration of this theme may be seen as a
follow-up of Henk van der Linden’s directional survey in AGN, but soon new ground was
broken. This was at least partly due to the fact that research in this direction was not only,
or not even primarily, undertaken by medieval historians pur sang, but also by historical
geographers and archaeologists.5 The results have been spectacular. Not only has our basic

knowledge of the Great Reclamation as an emancipatory process of human ingenuity and
enterprise vastly increased, it also has revealed the reclamations’ profound effects on the
“institutional architecture” of the countryside: the formation of local communities with a
large extent of self-government, the fitting in of church instititutions (parishes, ambulatory
ecclesiastical courts) and monasteries, the arrangement of property rights to land and of
modes of rent appropriation, the institutionalisation of an elementary ecological concern,
the regulation of town-country relations. In short, thanks to recent research our view of an
extremely dynamic but also complex process which had enduring, deeply formative, if not
performative, effects on the social and economic structure of the countryside, and a clear
“international”, eastward, diffusion, is far richer than it was thirty years ago.
At the same time, the felicitous outpour of new studies on the Great Reclamation
in the 1980s and 1990s marked the end of an era. Most of them, despite being part of a
multidisciplinary approach to the theme, were the products of individual research projects.
Both the virtual disappearance of historical geography as an academic discipline and
fundamental changes in the organisation of scientific research during the last decade or so
have made this mode of operation unthinkable. These changes had everything to do with
the ever more urgent wish of universities and such national organisations for scientific
research as NWO (The Netherlands) and FWO (Flanders) to give academic research,
also in the field of history, more leverage and to accommodate individual undertakings
under broad umbrella projects by means of magic words like core, spearhead, focus,
interdisciplinarity and thematic embedding. Two other wishes that came top-down were to
better organise, manage, and control scientific research, as well as to improve the realisation
and supervision of PhD research. They gave occasion for the foundation of a jungle of new,
and often ephemeral, research institutes and graduate schools.
Succesful Projects of the Last Decades
If, once in a while, we like to run down such bureaucratic silliness, we shall have to admit
that the increase in published research output has been sped up further; created a class of
academic entrepreneurs, focused on attracting large amounts of “external” research money
English surveys in Peter Hoppenbrouwers, “Agricultural production and technology in the Netherlands,
c.  1000‑1500” in Medieval farming and technology. The impact of agricultural change in Northwest Europe, ed. Grenvill

Astill & John Langdon, Leiden, 1997, p. 89‑114, and Peter Hoppenbrouwers, “Dutch rural economy and society in
the later medieval period (c. 1000‑1500): an historiographical survey”, in Rural history in the North Sea area: an overview
of recent research (Middle Ages – twentieth century), ed. Erik Thoen & Leen Van Molle (CORN Publication Series, 1),
Turnhout, 2006, p. 249‑282. After this date appeared Chris de Bont, Vergeten land. Ontginning, bewoning en waterbeheer
in de westnederlandse veengebieden (800‑1350), (Alterra Scientific Contributions, 27), 2 vols, Wageningen, 2009.
5

13