Markets for Land, Labor, and Capital in Northern Italy

Home , Land (1975–2002), Northern Italy

Journal of Interdisciplinary History, xli:4 (Spring, 2011), 503–531.

MARKETS FOR LAND, LABOR, AND CAPITAL Bas J. P. van Bavel Markets for Land, Labor, and Capital in Northern Italy and the Low Countries, Twelfth to Seventeenth Centuries A major debate in the history of late medieval and early modern Western Europe concerns the relationship between town and country. Can towns be considered Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/41/4/503/1699154/jinh_a_00201.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 the stimuli for the development of an otherwise stagnant and con- servative countryside, or were they a paralyzing inºuence on a po- tentially energetic and productive rural economy? Those engaged in this question have paid ample attention to market exchange between town and country but more with regard to commodity markets than to the markets for land, labor, and capital. Witness, for example, the abundant literature on urban food provisioning, market integration, and agrarian specialization as a response to urban demand, as well as on the institutions of the commodity markets through which this interaction between town and countryside occurred.1 Although some of these studies include a discussion of the possible negative roles of towns—including the effects of their market privileges or monopolies—most recent literature stresses the innovative, modernizing effects of urban stimuli on the rural economy. The temptation to attribute this positive role to the towns is even greater with respect to the rural markets for land, labor, and capital. Although systematic investigations of these factor markets as bridges between town and countryside are lacking, it seems logical, on ªrst glance, to privilege the role of the towns in Bas J. P. van Bavel is Professor of the Economic and Social History of the Middle Ages, Utrecht University. He is the author of Manors and Markets: Economy and Society in the Low Countries, 500–1600 (New York, 2010); “The Organization and Rise of Land and Lease Mar- kets in Northwestern Europe and Italy, c. 1000–1800,” Continuity and Change, XXIII (2008), 13–53. The author thanks Bruce Campbell, Paolo Malanima, Maarten Prak, and the participants in the workshop “Economic Town-Country Relations in Europe in the Later Middle Ages and at the Beginning of the Early Modern Period” (Vienna, 2007) for comments on an earlier version of this article. Thanks also are owed to the late Larry Epstein for his energy and will- ingness to exchange ideas. © 2011 by the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and The Journal of Interdisciplinary History, Inc. 1 For the historiography of the debate, see Stephan R. Epstein, “Introduction,” in idem (ed.), Town and Country in Europe, 1300–1800 (New York, 2001), 4–9. 504 | BAS J. P. VAN BAVEL the exchange of land and rural labor, which were otherwise often assumed to have been encapsulated in feudal, manorial, or familial networks. This article overcomes such teleological assumptions, on the basis of a long-term, comparative analysis of the organization of factor markets between town and countryside. The cases compared are two of the most advanced and urbanized economies of Europe, those of north-central Italy and the Low Countries.2 These two regions differed politically during the later Middle Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/41/4/503/1699154/jinh_a_00201.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 Ages. In north-central Italy, urban elites were dominant, whereas in the twelve principalities of the Low Countries, territorial lords/ princes, town patriciates, and the rural nobility all had a political role. But in other respects, especially in economics and demogra- phy, the two areas had many similarities. First, they were the most densely populated parts of Europe, though their respective chro- nologies of population growth differed. North-central Italy reached its late medieval peak in population density c. 1300. Be- fore the Black Death, Tuscany’s population was roughly sixty people per km2; in north-central Italy, the ªgure was around forty-ªve to ªfty. After the mid-fourteenth century, however, population numbers plummeted, only to return slowly to their c. 1300 levels during the late sixteenth century. In the Low Coun- tries, the impact of the Black Death was less severe; population growth quickly returned to its former levels. The late ªfteenth and sixteenth centuries saw relatively strong population growth in the Low Countries compared to other parts of Europe. By the late sixteenth century, the Low Countries had almost caught up with north-central Italy in population density, with roughly forty people per km2.3

2 See, for example, George W. Grantham, “Espaces privilégiés: productivité agricole et zones d’approvisionnement dans l’Europe pré-industrielle,” Annales: Histoire, sciences socials, LII (1997), 697–725; Bruce M. S. Campbell et al., A Medieval Capital and Its Grain Supply: Agrarian Production and Distribution in the London Region c. 1300 (London, 1993). This privileg- ing of towns has a pedigree going back to Adam Smith (ed. W. B. Todd), An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (New York, 1979), 411–417. In Book III, Chapter 4, “How the Commerce of the Towns Contributed to the Improvement of the Country,” Smith’s list of improvements includes order and good government and the liberty and security of individuals who had before lived almost in a continual state of servile dependency on their superiors. 3 Giorgio Chittolini, “Cities, ‘City-States’ and Regional States in North-Central Italy,” Theory and Society, XVIII (1989), 689–706; Wim P. Blockmans, “Stadt, Region und Staat: ein Dreiecksverhältnis: Der Kasus der Niederlande im 15. Jahrhundert,” in Ferdinand Seibt and Winfried Eberhard (eds.), Europa 1500 (Stuttgart, 1987), 211–226; Giovanni Federico and Paolo Malanima, “Progress, Decline, Growth: Product and Productivity in Italian Agricul- ture, 1000–2000,” Economic History Review, LVII (2004), 445–447; David Herlihy, “Popula- MARKETS FOR LAND, LABOR, AND CAPITAL | 505 The two regions also formed the most urbanized parts of Eu- rope, Italy again taking the lead. Compared to most other parts of Europe, Italian towns were already prominent in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. But urbanization was especially rapid in northern Italy during the thirteenth century, when population increased sharply in the large cities of Florence, Venice, Genoa, and Milan. Around 1300, 21 percent of north-central Italy’s population lived in cities—a ªgure almost three times higher than that in most Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/41/4/503/1699154/jinh_a_00201.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 other parts of Europe. From the mid-fourteenth century onward, however, the degree of urbanization slowly declined, to approximately 18 percent c. 1600.4 In the Low Countries, urbanization started later but took place more rapidly than in Italy. The process gained momentum during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. At the beginning of the fourteenth century, the urbanization rate in the Low Coun- tries was roughly 20 percent, the highest proportion being in the south, primarily Artois and Flanders. After the Black Death, absolute population numbers in the cities temporarily declined, but, unlike in Italy, the urbanization rate in the Low Countries continued to increase. In the late ªfteenth century, the urbanization rate for the Low Countries was already as high as 34 percent. These urban dwellers were scattered among a host of small and medium- sized towns. In the mid-sixteenth century, the rate in the Low Countries had risen even further, especially in Holland; at this point, the Low Countries had become by far the most urbanized part of Europe, despite having only a few large cities.5 Both regions, Italy ªrst, underwent strong economic development, and even some real growth, in the later Middle Ages. In the thirteenth century, Italy was the most advanced economy in western Eurasia. At the time, both gdp per capita and agricultural output per worker were far higher in Italy than in the surrounding areas. After the fourteenth century, however, the economy stagnated and then precipitously declined, as indicated by the substantial and long-lasting fall in real wages that began during the tion, Plague and Social Change in Rural Pistoia, 1201–1430,” Economic History Review, XVIII (1965), 225–244. 4 Malanima, “Urbanisation and the Italian Economy during The Last Millennium,” Euro- pean Review of Economic History, IX (2005), 101–103. 5 Blockmans et al., “Tussen crisis en welvaart: Sociale veranderingen 1300–1500,” Algemene Geschiedenis der Nederlanden, IV (1980), 42–86; Jan de Vries, European Urbanization (London, 1984), 28–43, 271–276. 506 | BAS J. P. VAN BAVEL ªfteenth century in northern Italy. During this period, economic leadership in Europe shifted to the Low Countries, which developed continuously from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century. Around 1600, gdp per capita in the northwestern part of the Low Countries was at a level almost double that of the surrounding parts of Europe, and nominal wages were much higher than any- where else in Europe, including Italy.6 A ªnal point of similarity is that the market exchange of land, Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/41/4/503/1699154/jinh_a_00201.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 labor, and capital in both places emerged relatively early, that is, in the high and late Middle Ages. The speciªc rules and arrangements of their respective markets, however, differed considerably. The distinctive organization of each market played a major role in blocking or promoting the further rise of market exchange and concomitant competition, and in shaping its trajectory and pace of economic and social development. This article leaves aside these possible effects, concentrating instead on a comparison of how the institutions of market exchange developed in the countrysides of north-central Italy and the Low Countries. It focuses not on the market for commodities, which has already attracted signiªcant historical research, but on the institutional organization of factor markets, which have re- cently been recognized as crucial to understanding patterns of pre- industrial economic development. The type of systematic comparison that this article attempts, however, has rarely been attempted.7 The development of market institutions can be understood only by looking at the political and social setting of their formation, and by analyzing who formed, maintained, and used these institutions. Moreover, it mandates an investigation of the social

6 Federico and Malanima, “Progress, Decline, Growth,” 456–458; Robert C. Allen, “The Great Divergence in European Wages and Prices from the Middle Ages to the First World War,” Explorations in Economic History, XXXVIII (2001), 427–431; Jan Luiten van Zanden, “Wages and the Standard of Living in Europe, 1500–1800,” European Review of Economic His- tory, II (1999), 175–197; de Vries and A. M. van der Woude, The First Modern Economy: Suc- cess, Failure, and Perseverance of the Dutch Economy, 1500–1815 (New York, 1997), 619–632. 7 Van Bavel, Tine de Moor, and van Zanden, “Introduction: Factor Markets in Global Economic History,” Continuity and Change, XXIV (2009), 9–21. The few exceptions in systematic comparison are Rosemary L. Hopcroft and Rebecca J. Emigh, “Divergent Paths of Agrarian Change: Eastern England and Tuscany Compared,” Journal of European Economic His- tory, XXIX (2000), 9–51; for the capital market, Jaco Zuijderduijn, “Assessing the Rural Economy: Household Wealth, Economic Trafªc and the Domestic Market in Holland and Tuscany, 15th And 16th Centuries,” unpub. paper (Utrecht University, 2007). Other compari- sons deal only with the market for goods. MARKETS FOR LAND, LABOR, AND CAPITAL | 507 distribution of land and capital, as well as the changes in this distribution over time, to determine which social groups were involved in market exchange and what their positions were. In this case, the cast of characters includes patrician landowners, merchants, guild craftsmen, and political ªgures in the towns and rural landowners, tenant farmers, peasants, and village inhabitants of the countryside, particularly in Tuscany, Flanders, and Holland, for which good documentation is available. Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/41/4/503/1699154/jinh_a_00201.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 the market exchange of land In north-central Italy, manorial, communal, and lordly restrictions on the exchange of land largely disappeared during the high Middle Ages. Absolute, exclusive property rights to land and a land market emerged earlier there than in any other part of Europe, including the North Sea area. Land sales, including sales by peasants, are recorded for various parts of Italy, from as early as the eighth/ninth centuries. A further acceleration of land sales in the market took place during the eleventh century in Tuscany, around Milan and Bergamo, but also in the Abruzzi of central Italy. In the second half of the twelfth century, the legal clariªcation of property rights, the introduction of standard land measures, and the institution of civil courts that guaranteed and regulated land transactions served to stimulate the expanding land market even further. The result of the combined effect of these inºuences is evident, for example, in the acceleration of the land market around Pistoia, Tuscany, from 1180 to 1220.8 From the thirteenth/fourteenth century onward, however, a more delicate situation emerged, largely because of the growing inºuence of urban elites, who exerted a negative inºuence on rights to land, particularly in the well-developed city-states. Urban courts, exploiting their jurisdiction in the countryside, often sided 8 Van Bavel, “The Organization and Rise of Land and Lease Markets in Northwestern Eu- rope and Italy, c. 1000–1800,” Continuity and Change, XXIII (2008), 13–53. See the examples of land-sale records in Laurent Feller, “Quelques problèmes liés à l’étude du marché de la terre durant le Moyen Âge,” in Simonetta Cavaciocchi (ed.), Il mercato della terra secc. XIII– XVIII: Atti delle “Settimane di Studi” e altri convegni, XXXV (Prato, 2003), 21–45. Chris Wick- ham, “Land Sales and Land Market in the Eleventh Century,” in idem, Land and Power: Studies in Italian and European Social History, 400–1200 (London, 1994), 257–274; idem, The Mountains and the City: The Tuscan Apennines in the Early Middle Ages (New York, 1988), 242–256; E. Huertas, “Between Law and Economy: ‘Divided Property’ and Land Rent Market in Tuscany, Twelfth–Thirteenth Centuries,” in Phillipp Schoªeld and Gérard Béaur (eds.), Prop- erty Rights, Land Market and Economic Growth (Turnhout, 2010). 508 | BAS J. P. VAN BAVEL with urban landowners, creditors, and speculators, as shown for fourteenth-century Florence and Siena, thus damaging security of property for the rural population. Furthermore, the costs of litiga- tion and legal aid sometimes became prohibitive for villagers.9 Italy’s early lead in the registration of land transfers also disappeared. The public notaries who performed this service as early as the eleventh century mainly operated in the cities, but they also extended their activities to the countryside. By c. 1200, an elabo- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/41/4/503/1699154/jinh_a_00201.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 rate system of public notaries, whose decisions had full legal validity, was in place. By the thirteenth century, written charters had even become obligatory for more substantial transactions of im- movable property in various Italian city-states. A notary’s signature provided sufªcient legal authorization; no additional validation by public courts was necessary.10 This procedure, which made the opportunity to register land transfers widely available, was probably the most advanced in Eu- rope until the northern parts of the Low Countries established a better system of public courts and registration during the fourteenth century. Italy’s notarial registration started to compare un- favorably to this system because of its territorial fragmentation, which made it difªcult for potential buyers to determine which notarial register held the information that they needed. The numerous overlapping jurisdictions worked to the beneªt of the more powerful parties. This situation, in combination with the biased urban courts and the high cost of legal fees, made property rights to land insecure, particularly for peasants. Eventual systematic registration in the catasti of the late ªfteenth century might have improved matters, since these ªscal registers often had evidential value, as in Treviso, but most peasant property had already disappeared by then (see below).11 In the Low Countries, lords or lordly courts usually handled the registration of land transfers until the thirteenth/fourteenth century. Thus could they exercise some control over land transac-

9 See Duane J. Osheim, “Countrymen and the Law in Late-Medieval Tuscany,” Speculum, LXIV (1989), 317–337, for the Lucca area, where the situation was relatively favorable compared to other Tuscan areas. 10 Petra Schulte, Scripturae publicae creditor: Das Vertrauen in Notariatsurkunden im kommunalen Italien des 12. und 13. Jahrhunderts (Tübingen, 2003), 100–108. 11 Mathieu Scherman, “La distribuzione della ricchezza in una città: Treviso e i suoi estimi del Quattrocento (1434–1499),” in Guido Alfani and Michela Barbot (eds.), Ricchezza, valore, proprietà in età preindustriale, 1450–1800 (Venezia, 2009). MARKETS FOR LAND, LABOR, AND CAPITAL | 509 tions and levy taxes over these transactions. In the southern parts of the Low Countries, such as Flanders and Brabant, the lordly tax on the sale of land could be as much as 8 to16 percent of the selling price. In the later Middle Ages, and especially in the northern parts of the Low Countries, public courts—mainly instituted by towns and villages but recognized by territorial lords and often incorpo- rated in princely administration—took charge of registration. Be- ginning in the fourteenth century, the voluntary registration of Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/41/4/503/1699154/jinh_a_00201.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 private land transfers by public courts in the aldermen books became common practice in the cities, spreading to village courts in the ªfteenth century.12 The early development of public registration in these parts of the Low Countries, where it became more important than any- where else in Europe, was connected to the strong inºuence of the authorities and public courts in legal matters. A network of public courts arose in the countryside, partly formed under the inºuence of village communities. Parties increasingly preferred to transfer land, and to register the transaction, in a public court rather than in private, primarily because of the stronger legal security vis-à-vis third parties. The court books or protocols had both legal validity and evidential value. Although registration was not gratis—small sums were charged for looking into protocol or making copies—the amounts involved were not prohibitive.13 In several parts of the northern Low Countries, the territorial lords made judicial conveyance in a public court compulsory, often on penalty of nulliªcation, and they ordered the courts to register all enacted deeds. This strategy suited the ªscal interests of the governments, enabling them to check the property returns of all taxable persons. In the mid-sixteenth century, many parts of the Low Countries established compulsory registration in the public courts of either the town or the countryside. This process pre- cluded public notaries in the ªeld from fulªlling this role, in contrast to areas in the south of Europe, such as Italy. In fact, notaries were often prohibited from engaging in registering land transfers.14

12 Van Bavel, “The Land Market in The North Sea Area from a Comparative Perspective, 13th–18th Centuries,” in Cavaciocchi (ed.), Il mercato della terra, 130–131. 13 Ibid., 119–145. 14 F. C. J. Ketelaar, “Van pertinent register en ordentelijk protocol: Overdracht van onroerend goed in de tijd van de Republiek,” in De levering van onroerend goed (Deventer, 1985), 39–42. 510 | BAS J. P. VAN BAVEL Proof and accessibility of registration in a central, public place greatly enhanced transparency and security for potential buyers, including villagers. The same procedure was increasingly applied to transactions in the capital market, such as the registration of new mortgages and the selling of real-estate rents by a public court, thus protecting people from unexpected rent burdens on land that they had bought. It also reduced both insecurity and cost, conferring an equal position on all of the participants, both urban Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/41/4/503/1699154/jinh_a_00201.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 and rural. The lease market was even more important than the land market for increasing the mobility of land. In most parts of the Low Countries, the ten-year term was predominant, but terms of nine, eight, six, or three years were also in evidence. In Italy, similar terms prevailed. Although lease contracts could be extended or renewed, mobility of land in this market was high. North-central Italy was ahead of the Low Countries in the introduction of short- term leasing. In Tuscany, leasing had already started to appear spo- radically in the eleventh century; commercial short-term leasing gained momentum from the late twelfth century onward. By c. 1300, short-term leasing had become established in Tuscany as well as in the Po Valley. In the Low Countries, leasing started to appear within the next ªfty years or so, early from a European perspective. The short-term lease arrived in the most urbanized regions, such as Flanders, Brabant, and the Rhineland, during the second half of the thirteenth century. Short-term leasing had also started in the highly urbanized areas of north-central Italy.15 In the Low Countries, as leasing escalated, it showed regional differences that deviated from those in its ªrst incarnation, determined by marketing possibilities and, especially, the social distribution of land and power. In the later Middle Ages, short-term leasing became dominant in such moderately urbanized regions as the Guelders river area, where most of the land owned by noble- men and religious houses were in large tracts. After the dissolution

15 Van Bavel, “Land Market in the North Sea Area,” 137–139; Samuel K. Cohn, Creating the Florentine State: Peasants and Rebellion, 1348–1434 (New York, 1999), 103. Hopcroft and Emigh, “Divergent Paths of Agrarian Change,” 14; Philip J. Jones, “From Manor to Mezzadria: A Tuscan Case-Study in The Medieval Origins of Modern Agrarian Society,” in Nicolai Rubinstein (ed.), Florentine Studies (London, 1968), 205, 220–221. Van Bavel, “The Emergence and Growth of Short-Term Leasing in the Netherlands and Other Parts of North- western Europe (Eleventh–Seventeenth Centuries): A Chronology and a Tentative Investiga- tion into Its Causes,” in idem and Schoªeld (eds.), The Development of Leasehold in Northwestern Europe, c. 1200–1600 (Turnhout, 2009), 185–189. MARKETS FOR LAND, LABOR, AND CAPITAL | 511 of manorialism, these lords divided the former manors into small parcels of land and started to lease them out. In the fourteenth/ early ªfteenth century, three-quarters of the land there was under short-term lease, rising to approximately 85 percent around 1500. In areas where peasants predominated—such as Drenthe and, to a lesser extent, inland Flanders—short-term leasing did not rise so quickly; only 20 to 35 percent of its land was under short-term lease during the ªfteenth century. Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/41/4/503/1699154/jinh_a_00201.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 The example of highly urbanized inland Flanders shows that social property relations, not urbanization, determined these differences. In north-central Italy, short-term leasing also remained insigniªcant in areas where peasants predominated, such as some of the mountainous areas. More generally, the importance of leasing is associated with speciªc social-property structures—particularly, nonmanorialized large landownership. In contrast to the Low Countries, however, Italy exhibits a connection between leasing and urbanization; large landownership in north-central It- aly was often in the hands of urban elites, mainly situated closer to the cities (see below). Thus, in 1427, one-half to two-thirds of the tenants within a 20 km radius around Florence were sharecroppers with short-term leases (mezzadria), compared to 25 percent within a 40 km radius and 19 percent in Tuscany as a whole.16 Another important element in the organization of leasing, and its effects on economic development, was the payment of the lease; the main divide was between a ªxed rent and a share of the gross output of the tenancy. In the plains of Lombardy, where, in the ªfteenth and sixteenth centuries, large tenant farms of 50 to 130 hectares developed, ªxed rents predominated, paid mainly in cash. In general, however, sharecropping became ever more important elsewhere in north-central Italy during the course of the later Middle Ages, particularly in such central regions as Tuscany, Umbria, and the Marches and further north in Emilia-Romagna from the twelfth century onward. By the ªrst half of the fourteenth century, one-half of the lease contracts around Pistoia and three-quarters of those around Siena were already sharecropping contracts.17 Sharecropping did not stop with the Black Death; in fact, it

16 Herlihy and Christine Klapisch-Zuber, Les Toscans et leurs familles: Une étude du catasto ºorentin de 1427 (Paris, 1978), 268–272 (maps on 275, 285). 17 Domenico Sella, “Household, Land Tenure and Occupation in North Italy in the Late Sixteenth Century,” Journal of European Economic History, XVI (1987), 491; Douglas F. Dowd, 512 | BAS J. P. VAN BAVEL proceeded further, sometimes attributed in the literature to labor shortages requiring landlords to shift from ªxed rents. It is striking, however, that mezzadria continued to intensify, even in the following periods of population growth, remaining the means of us- ing landownership until halfway through the twentieth century. It prevailed in regions where urban and burgher power was strong, and it was practiced mainly on burgher-owned land. At the beginning of the fourteenth century, for instance, four-ªfths of the Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/41/4/503/1699154/jinh_a_00201.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 landownership of Siennese burghers was devoted to mezzadria, in contrast to merely one-ªfth of all rural landownership. Appar- ently, sharecropping suited burgher interests, as the discussion of the markets for capital and labor below indicates.18 Unlike in Italy, the importance of sharecropping began to di- minish in the Low Countries from the thirteenth/fourteenth centuries. Thereafter, sharecropping was mainly limited to highly infertile soils and periods of insecurity, such as wars; otherwise, it had almost completely disappeared. Burgher landowners in the Low Countries used leasing for ªxed, monetary rents, not sharecropping. A mere technical description of land ownership, lease, and land exchange reveals little about the working of these institutions; the social distribution of landownership had marked effects on how they functioned in practice. The data show a clear increase of burgher ownership over time, both in Italy and the Low Coun- tries. In Italy, however, it started earlier and was more extensive, increasing rapidly and almost without interruption from the thirteenth to the mid-sixteenth century and resulting in the clear dominance of burghers in the social distribution of land. In a sam- ple area around Siena during the early fourteenth century, roughly 65 percent of the land already belonged to burghers; 26 percent of the land belonged to mainly urban-based institutions. At the time, burgher ownership was still increasing. Between 1320 and 1330,

“The Economic Expansion of Lombardy, 1300–1500: A Study in Political Stimuli to Eco- nomic Change,” Journal of Economic History, XXI (1961), 148–149, 154. 18 Hopcroft and Emigh, “Divergent Paths of Agrarian Change,” 24–26; Elmar Sabelberg, Der Zerfall der Mezzadria in der Toskana Urbana: Entstehung, Bedeutung und gegenwärtige Auºösung eines agraren Betriebssystems in Mittelitalien (Cologne, 1975), 116–146, 217–219; Emigh, “The Spread of Sharecropping: The Political Economy of Transaction Costs,” Ameri- can Sociological Review, LXII (1997), 423–442. Giovanni Cherubini, Signori, contadini, borghesi: Ricerche sulla società italiana del basso Medioevo (Florence, 1974), 295–301. MARKETS FOR LAND, LABOR, AND CAPITAL | 513 approximately 34,000 lire’s worth of property in this area was transferred from burghers to countrymen, whereas 77,000 lire’s worth was transferred from countrymen to burghers. In the Flor- entine contado of 1427, only 18 percent of rural property was owned by countrymen, declining to about 14 percent by the end of the ªfteenth century. In extreme cases, such as the parish of Montecalvi, 18 km southwest of Florence, all of the members of a household were either complete paupers or owned no land.19 Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/41/4/503/1699154/jinh_a_00201.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 In the early sixteenth century, burghers of Cremona in Lom- bardy owned 57 percent of the land in the Cremonese contado, even when the properties belonging to urban religious institutions are excluded. Similar ªgures can be observed elsewhere in the north, as in the Po Valley and the Venetian terraferma, where burghers held one-half to two-thirds of the land. Only in the infertile, mountainous areas did rural landownership—mostly organized in commons—remain signiªcant.20 In the Low Countries, the growth of burgher ownership started in the south—Flanders and Brabant, where the ªrst economic growth and urbanization occurred. However, burgher ownership never became dominant there. In the surroundings of Antwerp, for instance, one of the most important metropolises of the period, burgher landownership was relatively limited. Only in the immediate surroundings and in a small area north of the city was burgher landownership substantial, reaching 20 to 30 percent of the total area. Similarly, after a period of growth in the thirteenth century, burgher ownership in the surroundings of Ghent stagnated in the ªfteenth century. City dwellers in Ghent never took control of rural-landownership structures.21 In Holland, burgher landownership did not expand until much later. At the beginning of the sixteenth century, Holland was still largely characterized by a peasant landownership that dated back to the reclamation era of the eleventh to thirteenth

19 Cherubini, Signori, contadini, borghesi, 73–99, 278–288, 304; Elio Conti, La formazione della struttura agraria moderna nel contado ªorentino (Rome, 1965), 97–102, 245, 395–411. 20 Epstein, “The Peasantries of Italy,” in Tom Scott (ed.), The Peasantries of Europe from the Fourteenth to the Eighteenth Centuries (London, 1998), 89. 21 Michael Limberger, Sixteenth-Century Antwerp and Its Rural Surroundings: Social and Eco- nomic Changes in the Hinterland of a Commercial Metropolis, ca. 1450–ca. 1570 (Turnhout, 2008), 189–213. Erik Thoen, Landbouwekonomie en bevolking in Vlaanderen gedurende de late middeleeuwen en het begin van de moderne tijden: Testregio: de kasselrijen van Oudenaarde en Aalst (eind 13de–eerste helft 16de eeuw) (Ghent, 1988), 512–527. 514 | BAS J. P. VAN BAVEL centuries. The holdings were small and mostly worked by their owners—free colonists who had received the land with full property rights. The landed property of burghers, which was as frag- mented and small-scale as that of peasants, did not augment until the mid-sixteenth century, when wealthy town dwellers began to acquire land on a larger scale in the central, most urbanized part of Holland. Around 1560, more than 40 percent of the land in this part of the province was in urban hands, spread between burghers Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/41/4/503/1699154/jinh_a_00201.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 and institutions from a multitude of towns, with overlapping spheres of inºuence. In contrast to the Italian situation, no single city dominated landownership structures.22 From 1580 to 1620, burgher landownership in Holland increased to 50 percent or more of the “old” land and probably 80 to 90 percent in the newly created polders, ªnally reaching the percentages common in north-central Italy a few centuries earlier. But Holland was an exception in the Low Countries. Most other areas had a modest share of urban landownership, not exceeding one-quarter of the total land in most cases—that is, less than half of the Italian amounts, despite urbanization rates in the Low Coun- tries that were twice as high as those in north-central Italy. The impact of the growth in burgher landownership varied, depending not only on its scale but also on a wider sociopolitical context, as is evident in an analysis of the population’s ªscal burden as distributed between town and countryside. In Holland, these ªscal effects were weak, since burgher landownership there, unlike in other parts of Western Europe, was not exempt from central territorial taxes, and burgher landowners were not favored over their rural counterparts. From the late fourteenth century onward, the count of Holland—in his capacity as central, territorial lord—ªercely enforced the levying of taxes on burgher-owned land, sometimes despite opposition from the cities. Moreover, the counts of Holland had become less and less dependent on rural landownership for their revenues, anyway; towns and burghers provided an increasingly large proportion of taxes, loans, and beden (taxes levied by consent of the estates). Although the towns succeeded in preventing the taxation of foreign trade and commercial capital, thereby lowering their tax burden relative to the country-

22 Van Bavel, “Rural Development and Landownership in Holland, c.1400–1650,” in Os- car Gelderblom (ed.), The Political Economy of the Dutch Republic (Aldershot, 2009), 167–196. See also de Vries, The Dutch Rural Economy in the Golden Age, 1500–1700 (New Haven, 1974), 45–46. MARKETS FOR LAND, LABOR, AND CAPITAL | 515 side, the gap in taxation diminished from c. 1470 to 1540. In 1542 and 1568, the Hapsburg regime introduced commercial/industrial taxes, as well as proportional real-estate taxes. Although these taxes were partly revoked after the Dutch Revolt, the general process was clearly leading to a more equal distribution of the tax burden between town and countryside.23 In the fourteenth century, taxes in the Italian city-states were levied by urban governments, at the behest of the urban elite, who Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/41/4/503/1699154/jinh_a_00201.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 managed to shift ªscal pressure to the rural population. The Flor- entine contado of the thirteenth century does not yet indicate the existence of this exploitive relationship, but in the following period, the population and the tax base in the countryside were declining while ªscal demands were rising. As a result, tax pressure on the rural population doubled between 1330 and 1400, particularly in the mountainous areas, where peasant landownership was relatively strong and tax rates exceedingly high. In 1393, the tax rate in the mountainous areas amounted to 3 percent of property value, compared to 1.6 to 2.0 percent in the hills and plains of the contado and 1.4 percent in the city of Prato. Moreover, urban property in the countryside was exempted from rural taxes.24 Landowning in north-central Italy became much more at- tractive for burghers than for peasants. The Florentine tax re- arrangement of 1427 may well have been an attempt to alleviate the tax burden for the countryside, by ªnding a more equitable distribution of the burden and by taxing real estate less, but its effects were moderate and its measures partly revoked. This situation was not restricted to Tuscany; it also prevailed in the north of Italy. In the provinces of Cremona, Milan, and Pavia within Lom- bardy during the ªfteenth century, plots of land owned by people living in the countryside were taxed at a rate four to eight times greater than a similar plot owned by a burgher.25

23 J. A. M. Y. Bos-Rops, Graven op zoek naar geld: De inkomsten van de graven van Holland en Zeeland, 1389–1433 (Haarlem, 1993), 76, 96, 225–226, 240, 253–254. See also Peter Hoppen- brouwers, “Town and Country in Holland, 1300–1550,” in Epstein (ed.), Town and Country, 73. Blockmans, “The Low Countries in the Middle Ages,” in Richard Bonney (ed.), The Rise of the Fiscal State in Europe, c. 1200–1815 (New York, 1999), 281–308; Ferdinand Grapperhaus, Alva en de Tiende Penning (Zutphen, 1982), 42–54, 286–293. 24 Anthony Molho, Florentine Public Finance in the Early Renaissance, 1400–1433 (New York, 1971), 23–36, 81–87. Cohn, Creating the Florentine State, 71–81, brings differentiation into this picture via discussion of the contado in Florence. 25 Chittolini, “Notes sur la politique ªscale de Charles Quint dans le duché de Milan: Le ‘nuovo catasto’ et les rapports entre ville et campagne,” in Blockmans and Nicolette Mout (eds.), The World of Emperor Charles V (Amsterdam, 2004), 147–148. 516 | BAS J. P. VAN BAVEL The growth of urban-elite landownership also affected the functioning of land and lease markets and land use. In Italy, this growth went in tandem with the rapid rise of mezzadria, often in combination with the consolidation of family farms, on a sharecropping basis. In the Low Countries, and particularly in Holland, the increased landowning of urban elites was concomitant with the emergence of leasing and an increase in the size of farms. Bur- ghers used only a small part of the land that they owned; the Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/41/4/503/1699154/jinh_a_00201.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 greater portion was leased. Unlike in central Italy, however, no sharecropping on family farms emerged. Instead, burghers leased separate parcels on a competitive lease market for ªxed monetary rents; the large holdings composed of these parcels were fully spe- cialized for the market. The strong demand for agrarian and proto- industrial commodities from towns in Holland and Flanders played into this land deployment, but the difference between the Low Countries and similarly urbanized Italy indicates that some- thing more was behind it. In fact, the exact arrangement of the capital and labor markets, and the bargaining power of those who participated in them, played a crucial role. the market exchange of capital Capital markets developed early in northern Italy, but they remained conªned mainly to trade, the urban services sector, and advanced systems of public debt throughout the ªfteenth and sixteenth centuries. Despite the wide range of commercial debt contracts and other instruments of commercial credit that were available in Italy centuries earlier than elsewhere in Europe, such credit does not appear to have been extended to farmers. Before the Black Death, credit in the countryside was expensive everywhere in Europe; perpetual rents (loans secured on real property, mainly land) were from at least 9 to 12.5 percent per year. Other forms of credit could entail harsh conditions, often leading to default, or interest rates that surged to 50 percent. Not until the centuries following the Black Death did the difference between Italy and northwestern Europe mani- fest. After 1348, interest rates in the rural capital markets declined throughout Europe, as a result of demographic collapse and the increase of capital per capita. But compared to northwestern Europe, and especially the Low Countries, the decline of interest rates in the Italian countryside was less pronounced, and interest rates remained more volatile. Studies of early ªfteenth-century MARKETS FOR LAND, LABOR, AND CAPITAL | 517 Tuscany suggest that rural credit markets in Italy remained imper- fect or nonexistent.26 Well-functioning credit markets emerged in rural sections of the Low Countries. The most important instruments for obtaining credit were perpetual rents and life rents, ªrst observed in Flanders and Brabant during the thirteenth century and in the northern parts of the Low Countries c. 1300. From that point forward, long-term credit at relatively low interest rates became widely Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/41/4/503/1699154/jinh_a_00201.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 available in both town and country—to farmers and even peasant smallholders—offering ample security to rent buyers through public courts under princely surveillance. The decline of interest rates, which reºected improvements in the organization of the capital market and continued even during the population increase of the ªfteenth and sixteenth centuries, further boosted the attractiveness of this credit system. In Flanders, the interest rate for perpetual rents sold by private parties and secured on land was 10 percent in the years around 1280, 8 percent around 1430 (these rents now redeemable and thus more favorable to renters), and 6.3 percent around 1570. The decline of interest rates was steeper and credit easier to obtain in Holland, even for peasants with smallholdings, and both creditors and debtors could expect maximum security. A ªscal register from Waterland, an area north of Amsterdam, reveals that one-quarter of the peasant population in the late ªfteenth century and nearly one-half in the ªrst decades of the sixteenth century was involved in the capital market, as was almost every village community in its capacity as a public body. Interest rates in Holland’s countryside ºuctuated between 5.3 and 5.8 percent on average, compared to 5.6 and 5.7 percent in the nearby town of Edam. The near absence of a rent differential between town and countryside shows Hol- land’s capital market to have been better integrated than those elsewhere, reºecting its superior institutional framework.27

26 Epstein, “Peasantries of Italy,” 98–101; for a more pessimistic view, Hopcroft and Emigh, “Divergent Paths of Agrarian Change,” 16. See also Herlihy, “Population, Plague and Social Change,” 240–241. Zuijderduijn, Medieval Capital Markets: Markets for Rents between State Formation and Private Investment in Holland (1300–1550) (Boston, 2009), 242–246 (Hol- land), 261–267 (Italy). 27 Thoen and Tim Soens, “Appauvrissement et endettement dans le monde rurale: Etude comparative du crédit dans les différentes systèmes agraires en Flandre au bas Moyen Age et au début de l’Epoque Moderne,” in Cavaciocchi (ed.), Il mercato della terra, 710–711; Zuijder- duijn, “Assessing the Rural Economy”; idem, Medieval Capital Markets, 242–246. 518 | BAS J. P. VAN BAVEL In some parts of the Low Countries, rents could be sold without land as collateral, funded only by movables. This innovation was particularly important for tenant farmers, who had no land to offer as collateral and were often dependent on their landlord for credit to obtain working capital. The security on the capital market and the guarantees offered by the public authorities and princely administration allowed this instrument to develop in highly urbanized regions, where landownership was only one of Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/41/4/503/1699154/jinh_a_00201.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 the many forms of property, as well as in some rural areas. A secure and accessible capital market was crucial in balancing power relations between the parties involved in a lease, contributing to the rise of open, ºexible, and competitive lease markets.28 Holland’s situation was exceptional. In north-central Italy, as in most parts of Europe, rural credit suffered and insecurity was high, particularly for tenant farmers with no real estate to offer as security, leaving them at the mercy of pawnshops or landlords. Capital markets were often inaccessible to peasants and farmers, both as creditors and debtors. In Italy, particularly in Tuscany and Umbria, the rural capital market was in an extraordinarily bad state, given the unequal relationships that urban landlords had with their tenants. This situation allowed landlords to use their social and political status to control the markets for goods, capital, labor, and land—mainly by way of the sharecropping system—and thus create ample opportunities for rent seeking. In north-central Italy, wealth, consisting mainly of landed property, had a highly skewed distribution, biased toward towns. During the late sixteenth-century, 26 percent of the wealth in the province of Brescia, Lombardy, belonged to countrymen and 74 percent to burghers, who comprised altogether no more than 12 percent of the population. In 1427 Tuscany, around 67 percent of the taxable wealth was in the hands of Florentines, who consti- tuted 14 percent of the Tuscan population. Wealth was unequally distributed within Florence, too. The Gini coefªcient of wealth distribution was as high as 0.79, compared to 0.75 in the secondary cities of Tuscany and about 0.6 in the countryside. Correcting for the paupers not included in the registration, the ªgure for Flor- ence could be as high as 0.85. The wealthiest 1 percent of Floren- tine households held 27 percent of the city’s wealth and 18 percent

28 Van Bavel, “Land and Lease Markets,” 38–39. MARKETS FOR LAND, LABOR, AND CAPITAL | 519 of the wealth in the Florentine Republic. The distribution of capital and movables was particularly unbalanced. No less than 78 percent of Tuscany’s movable wealth in 1427 concentrated in Flor- ence, 13 percent in the six other big towns, 4 percent in the Florentine contado, and 5 percent in the more outlying districts.29 The three-quarters of the Tuscan population in the countryside held only 9 percent of movable wealth and almost no liquid assets; rents and taxes continuously drained the countryside of Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/41/4/503/1699154/jinh_a_00201.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 coins. An average Florentine household owned º. (ºorins) 349 worth of movable assets, compared to no more than º. 6 per household in the countryside. Moreover, sharecroppers, let alone rural laborers, rarely owned livestock. Because the rural population had hardly any savings or any other insurance against hard times, peasants, especially sharecroppers, became increasingly in- debted, tied by their debts to landlords. The seventeenth century witnessed even further impoverishment of the Tuscan countryside.30 In the late medieval Low Countries, notwithstanding regional differences, wealth was much more evenly spread between town and countryside. In the town of Edam and the surrounding rural district of the Zeevang, for instance, urban and rural households were assessed to have a similar level of wealth from 1460 to 1560. Almost all of the peasants owned their homes, and most of them owned land and cattle. Although the distribution of liquid assets between Edam and its hinterland was not entirely equitable, about one-quarter of peasants managed to accumulate substantial savings. Not until the late sixteenth century did wealth begin to shift increasingly to towns, resulting in the depletion of peasants’ liquid assets, land, and cattle. Thereafter, developments in trade and industry began to favor town dwellers enormously.31 From 1500 to 1650, total capital wealth in Holland—increas- 29 Allesandra Rossini, Le campagne Bresciane nel cinquecento: Territorio, ªsco, società (Milan, 1994), 33, 124, 195; Herlihy and Klapisch-Zuber, Les Toscans, 241–260. See also Zuijderduijn, “Assessing the Rural Economy”; Goldsmith, Premodern Financial Systems: A Historical Compar- ative Study (New York, 1987), 148–154. 30 Herlihy and Klapisch-Zuber, Les Toscans, 272–279; for a slightly less pessimistic view because of livestock advanced by landlords to tenants, Emigh,”Loans and Livestock: Comparing Landlords’ and Tenants’ Declarations from the Catasto of 1427,” Journal of European Economic History, XXV (1996), 705–723; Frank McArdle, Altopascio: A Study in Tuscan Rural Society, 1587–1784 (New York, 1978), 72, 98–101, 109–116. 31 Zuijderduijn, “Assessing the Rural Economy.” For proto-industries, see van Bavel, “Early Proto-Industrialization in the Low Countries? The Importance and Nature of Market- 520 | BAS J. P. VAN BAVEL ingly conªned to a small urban elite—increased from 10 to 12 million guilders to 500 to 550 million guilders, more than tripling per capita wealth in real terms. The distribution of wealth was most skewed in Amsterdam, where taxed wealth in 1630 was º. 63 million, of which the top 1 percent owned one-third. The Gini coef- ªcient, 0.74 in 1585, rose to 0.85 in 1630, similar to Florence’s in 1427. In other parts of the Republic, and in the southern Low Countries, the concentration of wealth was only slightly less se- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/41/4/503/1699154/jinh_a_00201.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 vere. In 1622, Leiden’s index was 0.79, and in 1627,The Hague’s was 0.76. The smaller towns and the countryside fared better, but inequality in wealth distribution generally increased from 1500 to 1650.32 The organization of the rural capital market and the social distribution of wealth affected the economic opportunities available to the rural population. In Italy, the rise of sharecropping from the twelfth to fourteenth century initially stimulated urban landowners to invest in the countryside, particularly in conjunc- tion with the appoderamento—the creation of farms for lease to sharecroppers. The farmhouses of these poderi were often con- structed of stone and surrounded by stalls, stables, ovens, and other outbuildings, at great expense to their owners. But from the fourteenth century onward, the negative effects of such investments increasingly outweighed the positive ones; the urban elite tended to spend money in rural areas more to elevate their status than to promote intensive, real growth. The elaborate villas built in Tus- cany beginning in the second half of the ªfteenth century and in the Veneto where Palladio worked are certainly cases in point. Any practical use that these structures were once intended to serve in agriculture, administration, and storage eventually succumbed to the pursuit of pleasure and indulgence in conspicuous con- sumption. Hence, the sums expended on them were at least partly unproductive.33

Oriented Non-Agricultural Activities in the Countryside in Flanders and Holland, c. 1250– 1570,” Revue Belge de philologie et d’histoire, LXXXI (2003), 1109–1165. 32 Van Zanden, “Economic Growth in the Golden Age: The Development of the Econ- omy of Holland, 1500–1650,” in Karel Davids and Leo Noordegraaf (eds.), The Dutch Econ- omy in the Golden Age: Nine Studies (Amsterdam, 1993), 13–16, 21–23; idem, “Tracing the Beginning of the Kuznets Curve: Western Europe during the Early Modern Period,” Eco- nomic History Review, XLVIII (1995), 643–664; Goldsmith, Premodern Financial Systems, 204– 206. 33 Jones, “From Manor to Mezzadria,” 227–234; Reinhard Bentmann and Michael Müller, Die Villa als Herrschaftsarchitektur: Versuch einer kunst- und sozialgeschichtlichen Analyse (Frankfurt MARKETS FOR LAND, LABOR, AND CAPITAL | 521 The rise of sharecropping and the scarcity of money and credit in the countryside also affected the independence of the rural population. In the absence of a well-functioning, open capital market in the Italian countryside—especially for short-term lease- holders unable to offer land as a possible security—sharecropping was the main source of working capital. In the sharecropping system, lessors were largely responsible for supplying implements, livestock, and seed. Sometimes sharecroppers borrowed working Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/41/4/503/1699154/jinh_a_00201.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 capital from lessors in the form of a cash advance or tools, livestock, seed, or crops in the ªeld. In this system, the capital market and the lease market intersected, the landowners being the source of capital for the farmers who leased their lands. The opportunity for landowners in Italy to interlink and exploit both markets left tenants in a highly precarious position.34 The accessibility of wealth, liquid assets, capital markets, and relatively low interest rates in the Low Countries during the later medieval period conferred a certain economic and social power on farmers and peasants. Not until the seventeenth century did wealth begin to devolve to a small urban elite (most intensively in Holland) as it had in north-central Italy a few centuries earlier. Yet, the capital market in the Low Countries remained fairly accessible to the rural population at low cost. the market exchange of labor The market exchange of labor stands much in need of research. But what is clear at this juncture is that farmers and peasants in both Italy and the Low Countries had become legally free in the later Middle Ages and that manorialism had become weak. After the thirteenth century, hardly any manorial labor services remained, and hardly any people were still bound to the land, thanks in part to the intervention of towns. In north-central Italy during the second half of the thirteenth century, towns accelerated the dissolution of serfdom by offering pre- miums on manumission to manorial lords or by generally con- demning the principle of serfdom, as did Bologna in 1257/58 and Florence in 1289. This opposition to serfdom was not so much am Main, 1979), 18–28, 34–37; Amanda Lillie, Florentine Villas in the Fifteenth Century: An Ar- chitectural and Social History (New York, 2005), 23–38, 147–154. 34 Daniel A. Ackerberg and Maristella Botticini, “The Choice of Agrarian Contracts in Early-Renaissance Tuscany: Risk Sharing, Moral Hazard, or Capital Market Imperfections?” Explorations in Economic History, XXXVII (2000), 241–257; Michael Toch, “Lords and Peas- ants: A Reappraisal of Medieval Economic Relationships,” Journal of European Economic His- tory, XV (1986), 168–177. 522 | BAS J. P. VAN BAVEL moral as competitive, intended to damage the rival power of manorial lords in the countryside.35 In the Low Countries, princes played a larger role in the de- mise of servitude and manorialism than they did in Italy, but towns made a signiªcant contribution by offering freedom to former serfs who resided within their limits for a year and a day. That serfs did indeed run away to the towns is shown, for instance, by the thirteenth-century treaties signed by lords in the Rhineland in an Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/41/4/503/1699154/jinh_a_00201.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 attempt to stop this practice. The counts of Guelders and Cleves came to such an agreement in 1242 when the count of Guelders complained that his serfs had migrated to towns in Cleves. But some manorial lords also dissolved their manors voluntarily, because of the economic opportunity that urban markets offered them outside the manorial system. In its turn, the dissolution of manorialism clearly opened new doors to the market exchange of labor.36 The decline of manorialism, however, did not eliminate restrictions on the sale of free labor. First of all, the opportunities for Italian countrymen to migrate or commute to cities and enter the urban labor market were limited. Citizenship and/or guild mem- bership were often necessary to secure such work. In the mid- thirteenth century, urban authorities in north-central Italy started to monitor in-migration from the countryside, preventing it out- right on occasion. This policy relaxed only after the population losses of the mid-fourteenth century. Certain cities, like Bologna in the ªfteenth century, became more or less receptive to rural immigration depending on the demographic balance. The population growth of the sixteenth century made measures increasingly more restrictive again, sometimes mandating that people from the countryside remain there to alleviate food shortages. Conversely, some cities prohibited their burghers from going to the countryside to work the harvest, as did Pisa in 1286.37 Urban authorities also intervened in the labor market by forc- ing countrymen to perform such services as building military forti- 35 Daniel Waley, The Italian City-Republics (New York, 1988), 84–85. 36 C. Siegfried Epperlein, Bauernbedrückung und Bauernwiderstand im hohen Mittelalter (Berlin, 1960), 67–75. 37 Alberto Guenzi, “L’immigration urbain au XVe siècle: Bologne,” Annales de démographie historique (1982), 33–42; A. Fasano-Guarini, “Politique et population dans l’histoire des villes italiennes aux XVIe et XVIIe siècles, ibid.,” 77–90; Herlihy, Pisa in the Early Renaissance: A Study of Urban Growth (New Haven, 1958), 51,158–159. MARKETS FOR LAND, LABOR, AND CAPITAL | 523 ªcations, maintaining roads and bridges vital to urban trade, repairing city walls, and transporting materials. They also conscripted hundreds, even thousands, of the strongest men for military or naval service, as happened in the Venetian terraferma–an obligation that fell disproportionately on the rural population.38 Nor did the industrial sector in the countryside witness the rise of extensive and ºexible wage labor, partly as a result, again, of urban and guild interference. In Tuscany, spinning and weaving Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/41/4/503/1699154/jinh_a_00201.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 took place primarily in the towns. In the late thirteenth century, the Pisan and Florentine cloth guilds brought rural producers under corporate control, restricting textile production in the countryside. By 1305, the Pisan guild succeeded in closing all textile workshops in its contado. Lombardy was the exception in north- central Italy. Because its towns and guilds were weak, its authorities were more tolerant of proto-industrialization, particularly in remote areas like the mountain valleys of Brescia and Bergamo, where a rural textile sector thrived from the late Middle Ages into the second half of the sixteenth century. Iron manufacturing also employed substantial numbers of wage laborers there.39 The sharecropping system fostered by the urban elite in Tuscany, Umbria, and elsewhere hindered the rural population from selling its labor for wages, ªrst, by creating large farms that required an entire family to work. The attempt by urban landowners to adjust the size of farms to achieve a balance between land and labor indirectly decreased both the supply of, and the demand for, labor. Second, sharecropping contracts not only stip- ulated the share of output to be delivered but also contained extensive regulations about the crops to be cultivated, with an increasing emphasis on such labor-intensive cultures as viticulture or olive-growing, which took an entire year. These contracts also tended to ªx tenants’ labor, specifying the number of plowings, the dates of sowing and harvesting, the extent of fertilizing, the length of ditches to be dug, the tools to be used, and so on. In contrast to most short-term lease contracts in northwestern Eu- 38 Jones, Italian City-State, 383, 566–567; Maria Neri, “Perugia e il suo contado nei secoli XIII e XIV, interventi urbanistici e legislazione statuaria,” Storia della Città, III (1977), 28–37; Rossini, Le campagne Bresciane, 242–249, 260–264. 39 Epstein, “Town and Country: Economy and Institutions in Late-Medieval Italy,” Eco- nomic History Review, XLVI (1993), 466–469; idem, Freedom and Growth, 115–142; Carlo M. Belfanti, “Rural Manufactures and Rural Proto-Industries in the ‘Italy of the Cities’ from the Sixteenth through the Eighteenth Centuries,” Continuity and Change, VIII (1993), 253–280. 524 | BAS J. P. VAN BAVEL rope, Italian sharecropping contracts were essentially labor contracts, offering tenants little or no freedom—tenants paying in labor, possibly remunerated below the market rate.40 Sharecropping of this sort can be viewed as a malfunctioning of the labor market. The lease contracts prohibited sharecroppers from selling their labor outside their farms, in the unlikely event that they even had time to do so after completing their assigned tasks. Since the urban elite in Tuscany were the main suppliers of Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/41/4/503/1699154/jinh_a_00201.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 credit to the sharecroppers, they could use debt bondage to tie people to the land, as well as to compel them to work on larger projects for low pay. In Altopascio, for example, Florentine landlords ordered their managers to employ debt labor fully to this end under the threat of imprisonment. Agricultural wage laborers were also subjected to tight restrictions, especially after the Black Death. The Florentine city councils passed the most oppressive labor laws in Europe, effectively freezing wages, setting high food prices, and impeding mobility. Peasants had no choice but to stay on burgher- owned farms. Those rural laborers and sharecroppers who violated the law were legally designated as rebels, to be buried alive. Not until the late fourteenth century, and in the face of sharp population decline, did Florence become more interested in attracting rural laborers than oppressing them.41 Rural labor markets and the exchange of labor between town and country were much more open in the Low Countries than in Italy, except in Flanders. Although clearly not as draconian as their Italian counterparts, urban authorities in Flanders had a tradition of intervention in the labor markets—both urban and, to a lesser extent, rural—often associated with guild inºuence on town governments. Migration from town to countryside and vice versa was sometimes prohibited, as was access to the urban labor market without consent of the aldermen. During a crisis involving the production and export of cloth around 1300, the count of Flanders allowed the governments of certain Flemish towns to crush the cloth weaving and ªnishing industry in the countryside by what-

40 Malanima, “Industrie cittadine e industrie rurali nell’eta moderna,” Rivista storica Italiana, XCIV (1982), 277; Amit Bhaduri, “Cropsharing as a Labour Process, Size of Farm and Super- vision Cost,” Journal of Peasant Studies, X (1983), 88–93. More empirical research is needed to test the assumption often found in literature that this remuneration was below the market rate. 41 McArdle, Altopascio, 72–78; Cohn, “After the Black Death: Labour Legislation and Atti- tudes towards Labour in Late-Medieval Western Europe,” Economic History Review, LX, (2007), 468–473. MARKETS FOR LAND, LABOR, AND CAPITAL | 525 ever means necessary, leaving only spinning and other simple activities to be performed by independent peasant households. Hence, these household activities absorbed all of the surplus labor in the countryside, limiting the scope for alternative forms of wage labor there. The Flemish towns also hampered or outlawed other rural activities, such as transport, trade, and brewing.42 Outside Flanders, these practices were much less apparent, partly because of the political weakness of the urban guilds vis-à- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/41/4/503/1699154/jinh_a_00201.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 vis the territorial lords. In Holland, the count permitted the few existing guilds to exercise little in the way of political initiative. Not until the seventeenth century did the Dutch guilds gain inºuence on the urban labor market and impose heavy restrictions on countrymen. Before this time, labor markets had been relatively open to them. The successful economies of the booming Dutch towns were able to absorb large quantities of rural labor, and the rural labor market in the northwestern parts of the Low Countries also thrived. In the ªfteenth/sixteenth centuries, arrangements in the country between employers and laborers were market-driven and based on a cash wage, paid daily, weekly, or monthly. Labor contracts in these areas were mostly formal and short-term—verbal agreements for the day and written ones for the year. Laborers were highly mobile because they were legally free and formally unrestricted.43 Moreover, after the ªfteenth/sixteenth centuries, urban authorities in the Low Countries rarely conscripted countrymen for

42 Jan A. van Houtte and Raymond van Uytven, “Wirtschaftspolitik und Arbeitsmarkt in den Niederlanden vom Spätmittelalter bis zur Schwelle des Industriezeitalters,” in Hermann Kellenbenz (ed.), Wirtschaftspolitik und Arbeitsmarkt (Munich, 1974), 48–58; Herman van der Wee, “Structural Changes and Specialization in the Industry of the Southern Netherlands, 1100–1600,” Economic History Review, XXVIII (1975), 217–210; David Nicholas, “Economic Reorientation and Social Change in Fourteenth Century Flanders,” Past & Present, 70 (1976), 8–11; Thoen, Landbouwekonomie, 1011–1014; van Uytven, “Die ländliche Industrie während des Spätmittelalters in den südlichen Niederlanden,” in Kellenbenz (ed.), Agrarisches Nebengewerbe und Formen der Reagrarisierung im Spätmittelalter und 19./20. Jahrhundert (Stuttgart, 1975), 65–66; Nicholas, Town and Countryside: Social, Economic, and Political Tensions in Four- teenth-Century Flanders (Bruges, 1971), 99–116, 188–221; van Bavel, “Proto-Industrialization,” 1124–1126. 43 Bert de Munck, Piet Lourens, and Jan Lucassen, “The Establishment and Distribution of Craft Guilds in the Low Countries, 1000–1800,” in Maarten Prak et al. (eds.), Craft Guilds in the Early Modern Low Countries: Work, Power, and Representation (Aldershot, 2006), 32–73; van Bavel, “Rural Wage Labour in the Sixteenth-Century Low Countries: An Assessment of the Importance and Nature of Wage Labour in the Countryside of Holland, Guelders and Flan- ders,” Continuity and Change, XXI (2006), 65–66. 526 | BAS J. P. VAN BAVEL Table 1 Urban-Rural Wage Differentials (1300–1650) north-central italy flanders holland

1300–1350 2.2–3.1 1.0–1.2 — 1350–1400 1.8–2.0 1.2 — 1400–1450 1.7–2.1 1.3–1.5 1.1–1.2 1450–1500 1.7–2.1 1.2–1.5 1.3 1500–1550 1.8–2.6 1.2–1.5 1.3 1550–1600 2.6–3.5 — — Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/41/4/503/1699154/jinh_a_00201.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 1600–1650 2.8–3.5 — — sources Paolo Malanima, “Wages, Productivity and Working Time in Italy, 1270–1913,” Journal of European Economic History, XXXVI (2007), 136, 165–166; Erik Thoen, Land- bouwekonomie en bevolking in Vlaanderen gedurende de late middeleeuwen en het begin van de moderne tijden: Testregio: de kasselrijen van Oudenaarde en Aalst (eind 13de–eerste helft 16de eeuw) (Gent, 1988), 953–960; van Bavel and Jan Luiten van Zanden, “The Jump-Start of the Holland Economy during the Late-Medieval Crisis, c.1350-c.1500,” Economic History Review, LVII (2004), 512–513. special projects, not even for such large-scale activities as building city walls or hydrological infrastructures, which could be con- strued as responsibilities that the urban and rural population might rightfully have shared. From the late fourteenth century onward, these large tasks were performed primarily by wage laborers from the countryside, hired by master contractors, as in the city of Bruges and its surroundings.44 The freedom and integration of labor markets in most parts of the Low Countries are reºected in the small differences in nominal wage between town and country. In Italy, because of restrictions on immigration and mobility, as well as variations in the cost of living, this difference could amount to 100 to 200 percent for similar occupations, as established especially in Florence but also in the areas further north. Despite restrictions on mobility and access to the urban labor market in the southern parts of the Low Coun- tries, the situation was better even there than in Italy. In Flanders, the difference between urban and rural wages was 20 to 50 percent, but in Holland, where restrictions were weakest, the difference was 10 to 30 percent, or even absent altogether (see Table 1). The effects of the institutional elements can also be seen in

44 Erika Kuijpers, “Who Digs the Town Moat? The Emergence of a Labour Market in Late Medieval Holland,” unpub. paper (Utrecht University, 2007); Jean-Pierre Sosson, Les travaux publics de la ville de Bruges XIVe–XVe siècles: les matériaux, les hommes (Brussels, 1977), 167–178, 215–216. MARKETS FOR LAND, LABOR, AND CAPITAL | 527 the growth of the volume of the labor market. In north-central It- aly, particularly in Tuscany and the other central regions, the rise of wage labor remained inhibited. Given all of the alternative instruments available for employing or coercing labor, urban landlords had hardly any need to employ free labor hired on an open market. Most of the labor was absorbed by family farms, anyway; opportunities for countrymen to hire out at a favorable rate were scarce. The only part of north-central Italy with a large pool of Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/41/4/503/1699154/jinh_a_00201.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 wage laborers was the environs of Milan in the Lombardy plain, where large farms were leased for ªxed rents, no sharecropping restrictions applied, and family-sized holdings never absorbed all of the labor. Whereas no less than 45 to 50 percent of households there in the late sixteenth century consisted of laborers, the percentage in the parts of Lombardy dominated by medium-sized farms leased for ªxed rents was 15 to 25 percent, and 15 percent or so in the peasant areas. The latter ªgure is probably not dissimilar from that found in Tuscany, with its many sharecropping farms.45 The labor market with the most freedom and the wage labor with the strongest growth in Europe were in the Low Countries, one-third to one-half of all labor being on a wage basis there during the sixteenth century. Calculations reveal that around the mid- sixteenth century in central Holland, almost one-half of the rural labor was wage labor, and in the Guelders river area, far more than one-half (about 57 percent), whereas in inland Flanders, the share was only one-quarter. Thus, the highest percentages were not necessarily in highly urbanized areas (such as inland Flanders) but in those areas where obstacles to free labor were weakest and the transition of the rural economy to agrarian capitalism had proceeded furthest. In Holland, farmers often combined work on their own holdings with wage labor elsewhere, mostly as part of a seasonal labor cycle. The large reservoir of wage laborers in the countryside contributed to the substantial workforce available for infrastructural works (including digging and diking) in both town and country.46 The large proportion of wage labor in the countryside (about

45 Sella, “Household, Land Tenure and Occupation,” 493–494. Examples of cities in Lom- bardy with the lowest percentage of ªxed rents are San Giuliano and Inzago. 46 Van Bavel, “Rural Wage Labour in the Sixteenth-Century Low Countries”; Lucassen, Naar de kusten van de Noordzee: Trekarbeid in Europees perspektief, 1600–1900 (Gouda, 1984), 160–171. 528 | BAS J. P. VAN BAVEL 50 percent or even higher) in the northwestern part of the Low Countries was probably greater than that found in the towns, though conªrmation will have to await further research about the urban economy. If the cities did, in fact, have the smaller proportion of wage labor, restrictions imposed by the guilds and urban governments could well be the reason.

Markets for land, labor, and capital emerged in north-central Italy Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/41/4/503/1699154/jinh_a_00201.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 as early as the twelfth to fourteenth centuries, probably as both a cause and an effect of economic growth. During this period, cities seem to have played a positive role in the creation of a favorable institutional framework for market exchange. However, by the fourteenth century, the social distribution of land and capital had skewed toward the urban elite, and the institutions of exchange favored their interests. Institutional arrangements no longer adapted to the needs of a developing economy or changing circumstances, in the long run stunting economic growth. In the Low Countries, these markets arrived later, from the thirteenth to the sixteenth century. But because the burgher elite there imposed fewer restrictions, and institutions were more neu- tral, markets became thicker and developed more favorably, as evident in the interest rates, the rapid growth of wage labor, the small wage differentials between town and countryside, and the ºexibility of the land market. Although the distribution of ownership was to become less equitable, it did so at a slower pace than in Italy. Even so, the institutions of market exchange do not seem to have inclined overwhelmingly toward the interests of the urban elite. Although more detailed investigation of the market institutions at ground level is necessary, several causes of the differences between Italy and the Low Countries can be identiªed. First, factor markets in Italy developed to some extent after—or at least si- multaneously with—the rise of cities, around the twelfth century, allowing urban elites to organize from the outset the institutions of these emerging markets according to their interests. In the Low Countries, however, the origin of factor markets did not coincide with, or appear after, the rise of cities. Holland, a case in point, was only superªcially urbanized when factor markets started to develop. Towns grew and their elites became more powerful in an environment where well-organized factor markets already functioned. MARKETS FOR LAND, LABOR, AND CAPITAL | 529 Second, the elites who controlled the factor markets in Italy were able to bend the factor markets to their interests even further because of the catastrophic impact of the Black Death, particularly on the important production of luxury textiles. The Black Death was not so disruptive in the Low Countries. Since the markets for land, labor, and capital were just beginning to develop there, the urban elites had fewer incentives and fewer opportunities to inºuence the growth of market institutions. Moreover, the econ- Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/41/4/503/1699154/jinh_a_00201.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 omy in many parts of the Low Countries actually proªted from developments after the Black Death. Holland, in particular, expe- rienced sharp economic growth in its capital-intensive industries and in its manufacture of specialty products for the middle class. Holland’s economy was well suited to function in a context of high wages, beneªting from the increased purchasing power of the middle classes in international commodity markets that ren- dered interference unnecessary.47 Third, rural interests in the Low Countries from the eleventh to the thirteenth century were able to take advantage of the rivalry between territorial lords and the burgher elite. Since the territorial lords had need of well-functioning, open markets, they promoted the registration of both land and capital transfers by public courts, thus increasing transparency and reducing transaction costs. In It- aly, particularly Tuscany, however, political power belonged more exclusively to the urban elite; rural interests had no counterweight to exploit. The urban elite used towns and their political power as instruments of surplus extraction, though in Lombardy from the late fourteenth century onward and in Venice from the early ªfteenth century, territorial rule permitted a situation more similar to that in the Low Countries.48 Even though the urbanization rate in the Low Countries was much higher than that in north-central Italy, the urban population there was dispersed among numerous small and medium-sized towns; the Low Countries did not have big urban centers like Venice or Florence. None of these smaller towns could dominate the countryside within this dense network. Only in exceptional

47 For the impact of the Black Death in Italy, see Herlihy, Medieval and Renaissance Pistoia: The Social History of a Medieval Town, 1200–1430 (New Haven, 1967), 62–77. The population of Pistoia’s countryside plummeted from 31,000 to less than 9,000 between 1244 and 1401 and that of the town from 11,000 to 4,000. Van Bavel and van Zanden, “Jump-Start.” 48 Zuijderduijn, Medieval Capital Markets, 111–137; Belfanti, “Town and Country in Cen- tral and Northern Italy, 1400–1800,” in Epstein (ed.), Town and Country, 292–314. 530 | BAS J. P. VAN BAVEL cases, notably in Flanders and Groningen, did towns succeed in creating an exclusive rural sphere of inºuence, though the Flemish count still offered an effective counterbalance. In the Low Coun- tries, towns competed with each other and with the territorial lord, inhibiting the further growth of their political and institutional power, and permitting villages and countrymen some lever- age to pursue their own interests. This situation clearly contrasts with that in north-central Italy, where a few cities succeeded in Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/41/4/503/1699154/jinh_a_00201.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021 expanding their own sociopolitical and economic sphere of inºu- ence, as well as their size.49 Fourth, as factor markets took shape in the Low Countries, the rural nobility and the peasants in Holland, parts of Flanders, and most of the inland regions held a strong and relatively independent position. Peasant dominance in property structures was not broken in Holland until the late sixteenth century and elsewhere even later or not at all. Rural communities were well organized, with effective legal instruments that afforded them consid- erable rights of self-determination and protection against urban interests. In north-central Italy, however, peasants owned land only in the marginal areas, and political, judicial, and administra- tive control devolved mainly to urban ofªcials. Only the remote hinterlands of the cities (the distretti) offered more elbow room for rural communities, especially in the mountainous areas where parties were able to organize corpi territoriali to defend rural interests during the 1560s and 1570s. In general, however, the position of the rural nobility, peasants, and village communities in north- central Italy was much weaker than in the Low Countries.50 These elements together formed a feedback cycle, reinforcing each other and further distinguishing north-central Italy and the Low Countries as the centuries progressed. The upshot is that towns, town governments, and urban elites were not automati- cally beneªcial to the organization and development of factor markets in the countryside, and that the relationship between town and country at any point in time depended on political and

49 Hoppenbrouwers, “Town and Country in Holland,” 77–78; Epstein, “Town and Country,” 456–465; Chittolini, “Cities.” 50 Blockmans, “Stadt, Region und Staat”; Hoppenbrouwers, “Town and Country in Hol- land”; Jones, Italian City-State, 365–370; Sergio Zamperetti,”‘Sinedri dolosi,’ La formazione e lo sviluppo dei corpi territoriali nello stato regionale Veneto tra ‘500 e ‘600,” Rivista storica Italiana, XCIX (1987), 269–320. MARKETS FOR LAND, LABOR, AND CAPITAL | 531 social developments. Where urban elites were strong and counter- balances missing or weakened, elites could exploit factor markets to their own ends, thereby negatively affecting the economy as a whole. In these cases, and perhaps more generally in the pre- industrial period, urbanization rates are not necessarily a good in- dicator of institutional quality or economic growth.51 Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/41/4/503/1699154/jinh_a_00201.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021

51 The point about urbanization rates as problematical economic indicators was made by Epstein, “Introduction,” 10–12, contra the (sometimes implicit) assumptions in works like Angus Maddison, The World Economy: A Millennial Perspective (Paris, 2001), 229. Downloaded from http://direct.mit.edu/jinh/article-pdf/41/4/503/1699154/jinh_a_00201.pdf by guest on 27 September 2021