Abstract
A further dimension is added to our understanding of the vita civile of the early fourteenth century by the knowledge that it was not destined to last. Although contemporaries had no real premonition of the fact, Italian society, which had been gradually climbing since the dark days of the tenth century, had now reached a plateau of prosperity and in front of it loomed an abyss. The catastrophes of the mid-fourteenth century, of which the Black Death was the most spectacular, affected the whole of Europe and other parts of the world besides, but nowhere were their results more marked than in communal Italy. As the most complex economy in the medieval world, Italy had most to lose from the disruption caused by famine, plague and warfare; the contraction of markets hit hardest the Italian merchants who handled such a high proportion of the long-distance trade. The ravages of mercenary armies which inflicted so much damage to France during the Hundred Years’ War were at least as severe in parts of Italy, where, around 1350, free companies of soldiers and camp-followers numbering tens of thousands lived off the country uncontrolled by any political authority, in a way reminiscent of the wandering barbarian invaders at the time of the breakdown of the Roman Empire.
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References
Plesner, L’Emigration de la Campagne à la Ville de Florence 163–5, 2269; E. Fiumi, Storia economica e sociale di San Gimignano (Florence 1961), 122; D. Herlihy, Medieval and Renaissance Pistoia (New Haven and London 1967), 62–6, 180–91. Unfortunately, the discussion of contado taxation in W. M. Bowsky, The Finance of the Commune of Siena (Oxford 1970), 225–55, reaches no conclusions on these questions.
For an admirable survey of present views on communal finance and debt, see Bowsky, op. cit. 279–97.
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© 1973 J. K. Hyde
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Hyde, J.K. (1973). The End of an Era. In: Society and Politics in Medieval Italy. New Studies in Medieval History. Palgrave, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-15504-0_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-15504-0_8
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