Volume 66, Issue 1 - Credit in the Middle Ages / Kredite im Mittelalter Guest Editors: Stephan Nicolussi-Köhler, Marco Conti and Kirsten Wandschneider

This special issue focuses on the financial behaviour of different participants in European medieval and early modern financial markets. It extends our knowledge of the financial strategies employed by households, merchants, charities, city governments and corporations by asking what investment opportunities, ways of saving money and maintaining cash flow were available to different socio-economic groups in premodern societies. Borrowing and lending activities were not limited to formal capital markets, but also included informal financial transactions within social networks. In many cases, people did not rely on a single financial institution, but used a variety of financial intermediaries and strategies, each with its own advantages and disadvantages. Medieval and early modern capital markets often involved different institutions that complemented each other. The current issue contributes to our understanding of early financial behaviour by highlighting specific historical markets and actors, ranging from institutional actors (governments, charitable institutions) to merchants, craftsmen, and peasants, including many women.

Not all major Italian cities of the late Middle Ages could rely on an established and organised system of public debt like Florence, Venice, Genoa, and others. The study of one such city, Bologna, reveals that whenever the city found itself in serious financial straits, outside of ad hoc impositions, it found a solution for financing public expenditure in the credit of private individuals. In Bologna during the communal period (1288–1327), loans seem to have been an investment reserved for the elite of the ruling pars ; by contrast, some additional data on loans to the commune during the period of the Visconti lordship (1350–1360) seem to indicate how this form of financing was a way to make the Bolognese participate in the redistribution of public money through the interest received on the loans. Moreover, data concerning tax farmers highlight the complex interaction of Bolognese society in the tax system, where a part of society decided to invest regularly in the management of indirect taxes.

Managing the poor’s funds in the Middle Ages was a great responsibility and a rather complex task that relied on the involvement and contributions of numerous persons, not least on the voluntary work of well-educated men. Using the example of the poor relief administration in the small German town of Kalkar in the Duchy of Cleves, this article deals with the efforts to generate the means that were necessary to provide for the resident poor and to allow the wider distribution of alms on a regular and reliable basis. This work particularly addresses the mechanisms of securing revenues and making investments by the urban authorities and their commissioners. It also serves as an introduction to poverty and poor relief in the Lower Rhine region, looking into the preconditions that were essential to guarantee its smooth functioning. Moreover, the paper considers the role of annuities and rents in the financing of poor relief and other means of generating income, endeavours to economise and avoid waste, and finally examines the types of credit used by the poor relief wardens themselves and their interactions with debtors.

This paper provides an overview of the various financial resources that existed in medieval Tirol to meet financial needs, using notary registers and court records from the 14 th century as sources. These provide ample evidence of an active capital and land market in rural areas, which offered various ways of saving and investing money. Saving and investment behaviour was crucial for coping with external adversities such as harvest failure, but also with life events (marriage, bringing up children, retirement), and households sought to manage these risks. The results show that the poor and the rich behaved differently when it comes to investing and saving, and that their behaviour was strongly influenced by access to different financial instruments.

The connection between public spending and the ambitions of urban elites is a common topic in the historiography of the late Middle Ages. However, it is still unclear how city finances and private capital interacted before the use of sophisticated financial systems of the late 13 th to early 14 th centuries. The case study of Siena provides an analysis of many different archival sources that date back to the first half of the 13 th century. Data show a cycle starting with deficit spending by the city to support the war effort. The deficit was financed by the municipality with large-scale borrowing from wealthy citizens, later repaid with revenues from direct taxes. For the lenders, this was a very low-risk investment that yielded medium-low returns. However, loans to the city were more a political tool to secure a position of power, rather than just an economic opportunity.

This article consists of a systematic analysis of a large sample of the first purchasers of annuities issued by the urban governments of Catalonia between the years 1313 and 1367. Based on preliminary literature on the subject, it gathers, describes, and contextualizes, both from the point of view of the fiscal and financial development of the Crown of Aragon as a whole and from a more local perspective, unpublished references to operations of this type from the beginning of the 14 th century. In the second part, it analyses a sample, based on unedited data as well as specific studies, of 1,399 annuities sold by eight urban centres between the years 1330 and 1367 (the settlements are in different parts of Catalonia, ranging from big cities like Barcelona or Girona to small towns). These operations are examined according to their chronology, features of contracts and interest rates. Moreover, their buyers are also studied in light of their gender, socioeconomic status, and place of residence. The first purchasers of public debt in Catalonia appear to have been speculative investors, attracted by a financial product that, while lacking complete security, offered high interest rates and the theoretical promise of recovering the capital upon repayment of the credit.

Hospitals were among the wealthiest organizations in medieval cities. Their directors managed portfolios consisting of real estate and financial instruments; as a result, they also handled large quantities of money. It has been suggested that they used these to provide a variety of financial services and performed early banking functions. In this study I focus on the role hospitals played in allowing the general population to invest in financial instruments that could serve as old age pensions. Two hospitals in Amsterdam issued corrodies: pensions in kind that gave investors the right to lifelong board and lodging in the hospitals. They also issued life annuities: lifelong monetary pensions. Since both contract types were automatically terminated at death, they required relatively low investments and were ideal for securing an income in money or in kind during one’s final years. In this article, I will demonstrate that via the practice of issuing life annuities and corrodies, these hospitals played a central role in providing the late-medieval urban middle class with access to pensions. I will also show that thresholds for investing were sufficiently low to allow Amsterdam’s middle class to invest in both life annuities and corrodies.

This article examines investment opportunities in northern Italian states in the 17th and 18th centuries, with a focus on the private credit market. The research is based on loan contracts drawn up by notaries and on fiscal and administrative documents. Thanks to the service provided by notaries, who operated as informal financial intermediaries, investment in the credit market became accessible even to those unfamiliar with financial activities, including small landowners, artisans, and women. Crucial within this network was the role played by religious institutions, particularly women’s convents, for some of the profits from lending activity represented the main source of income. Although land was the preferred sector in pre-industrial times, this study shows that an increasing amount of capital was invested in private credit networks, which offered higher returns with limited risk, as these loans were always backed by collateral. Within the most dynamic markets, new and innovative instruments were devised, providing great flexibility in terms of collateral, maturity and profitability.

This study is the first to establish a chronology of food crises in Germany from the sixteenth century to their disappearance in the late 1860s based on a standard methodology to detect cycles in commodity prices. To this end, we develop an aggregate rye price series, deflate it by a consumer price index and decompose this real price in trend and cyclical components using the Butterworth filter. Years are classified as food price crisis when the cyclical component exceeds the trend component by 20 percent or more. Using this methodology, we identify 24 food crises between the 1540s and 1871. Additional information from other research is employed to assess the demographic consequences of food price crises. Viewing the latter from an aggregate perspective suggests four distinct regimes of food crises driven by climate change and economic forces.