"Institutions and the Crisis of the Fourteenth Century in the Catalan Pyrenees"
Abstract:
This paper explores what caused the widespread late-medieval transition from economic growth to economic decline—the “crisis of the fourteenth century”—through an in-depth examination of economic growth and decline in the Pyrenean Catalan town of Puigcerdà and its surrounding region, Cerdanya, during the late-thirteenth and early-fourteenth centuries. Against traditional production-focused narratives based on northern European evidence, it argues that in this region, economic change, both positive and negative, and in particular, the onset of economic crisis in the fourteenth century—which, in Puigcerdà, was precipitous and severe—was sparked and shaped by political and institutional changes, often related to state-building and territorial warfare, and by the way that these changes shaped the choices available to merchants, artisans and peasants on the ground. More broadly, this paper thus argues for greater attention to political and institutional factors in analysis of late-medieval economic crisis.
