Corporatism and political participation

all inhabitants with the basic need of one kilogramme per day for six weeks. On the total expenditure of 78,306 pounds, approximately the city’s yearly budget, in the end all but 4,321 pounds (5.5 percent) were recuperated through sales at fixed prices.

This daring intervention in the market for basic food avoided the excessive rise of the grain prices (the so-called King-effect), such as the multiplication by 12 and even 24, mentioned by several contemporary chroniclers in the cities of Brabant. The Flemish aldermen’s capacity to design a huge collaborative investment for “the common weal”

of the three capital cities proved productive. The experience of the bulk cargoes along the Atlantic coast gave an impulse towards regular maritime connections between the Mediterranean and the North Sea.

IV endeavoured to conquer Flanders adding the rich county to his royal domain. In the context of dynastic ambitions, patrician waning dominance, and workers’ claims for fair governance, justice, and autonomy, the king’s support to the local patriciates formed clearly cut hostile parties. Although the social and economic issues played a role in all Western towns around 1300 and during most of the fourteenth century, the conflict was most virulent in Flanders, due to the implication of the mightiest monarchs and large cities⁵¹. The military invasion of Flanders by the French royal army, in two stages, 1297 and 1300, led to further escalation. It fostered a sense of community against the foreign occupation, culminating in a revolt and a great battle in 1302, in which the French chivalry was ingloriously defeated by an army predominantly composed of urban and rural militias. As the urban militias had since decades been based on the corporative structure, the craftsmen used the momentum to obtain their guilds’ autonomy and grasp their due share in urban government. The great merchants’ trading monopoly was abolished, allowing the rise of a middle class.

And the urban administration switched from Latin and French to the vernacular Dutch language. The triumph of the Flemish craftsmen inspired social revolts in Liège and some cities in neighbouring principalities.

Repeated French invasions, patrician counterrevolutions, a great peasant revolt (1323-28)⁵², as well as bloody conflicts between the two largest crafts, those of the weavers and the fullers, fostered political instability during most of the fourteenth century. The recurrent outbursts of the plague occurred relatively unnoticed among the various other incisive disturbances⁵³. In the largest and most unruly city of Ghent, the political system could be stabilized only in 1360, but from then it remained effective until 1540. The ongoing conflicts between the weavers and the fullers resulted in the latter’s permanent exclusion from political power. The urban community was divided in three social classes, the “members”: the old patriciate, the 53 small crafts, and the weavers’ craft including five associated minor craft guilds in the textile sector. The two benches of 13 aldermen were each composed of three patricians, including the first seat in each bench, and five seats for each of the two groups of crafts. The count and the patriciate choose four electors on their common behalf, and the other two members each two. The election of the aldermen representing the crafts was organized in five removes. The aldermen were designated

51 COHN, Samuel K. – Lust for Liberty. The Politics of Social Revolt in Medieval Europe, 1200-1425.

Cambridge MA: Harvard UP, 2008.

52 TEBRAKE, William H – A Plague of Insurrection: Popular Politics and Peasant Revolt in Flanders, 1323-1328. Philadelphia: Pennsylvania Unversity Press, 1993.

53 BOONE, Marc – “Urban Space and Political Conflict in Late Medieval Flanders”. Journal of Interdisciplinary History 32 (2002), pp. 621-640; BOONE, Marc; PRAK, Maarten – “Rulers, Patricians and Burghers. The Great and the Little Traditions of Revolt in the Low Countries”. In DAVIDS, Karel; LUCASSEN, Jan (eds.) – A Miracle Mirrored: The Dutch Republic in European Perspective. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995, pp. 99-134.

by their ‘member’s electors, but the appointment required the agreement of the electors of the two other “members”. The 23 neighbourhoods and five associated crafts of the weavers’ “member” first choose an electoral college of six masters and six companions; the supreme dean of the weavers had a say in the appointment of the two electors. In the ‘member’ of the small crafts, the 53 guilds and their supreme dean played similar roles, considering the internal representativity. The whole system was based on multiple checks and balances aiming at the consolidation of the power relations and the public order⁵⁴. Basically similar systems aiming at securing the political participation of the craft guilds while keeping the social equilibrium intact, were found in most other large cities with a numerous, and therefore potentially dangerous industrial population. The Ghent system was the most complicated due to the high number of guilds, the large population, and the long tradition of internal divisions, but conflict ‘constituted an essential feature of political life’ in all cities⁵⁵. 7. Outreach.

The strength and the level of autonomy of medieval cities depended on their capacity to concentrate essential resources over which the traditional ecclesiastical institutions, landed aristocracies, and princes had little control. Their growth depended essentially on the security and extent of their connections with the regions of their supply and export. Competition appears to be a natural, including human, phenomenon fostering the survival of the fittest: aristocrats and princes fought for expansion over land, sea-faring merchants competed to monopolize the access to lucrative resources and markets. North-Italian shippers reached out to the Levant, the Black Sea, the Maghreb, and merchant companies supported by their city government established trading posts in dozens of ports around the Mediterranean.

In the eleventh century, they gradually superseded the North-African and Levantine shippers who had dominated the routes and ports until then. Genoa and Pisa cleared the western Mediterranean from those they saw as Muslim pirates, while Venetians secured free trade in the Byzantine empire by 1082, albeit it still except for Cyprus and the Black Sea. The crusades would soon extend western positions in the Levant and provide direct access to the abundant markets of scarce goods, refined products, and precious raw materials⁵⁶.

54 BOONE, Marc – Gent en de Bourgondische hertogen ca. 1384- ca. 1453. Brussels: Academy, 1990, pp.

36-47.

55 UYTVEN, Raymond van – “Het stedelijk leven 11^de-14^de eeuw”. In Algemene Geschiedenis der Nederlanden, vol. 2, Haarlem: Fibula, 1982, pp. 222-241; LANTSCHNER, Patrick – The Logic of Political Conflict in Medieval Cities. Italy & the Southern Low Countries, 1370-1440. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2015, pp. 95-199, 207 (quote).

56 ABULAFIA, David – The Great Sea: a Human History of The Mediterranean. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013, pp. 271-303.

No doubt, the Italian merchants displayed greater dynamism than their trading partners in the south and east. They admired the Muslims’ superior material culture and higher knowledge in some fields such as medicine, pharmacology, astronomy, mathematics, and geography. Their main quality may well have been their willingness to learn, adopt and adapt the novelties they discovered, and to make a productive use of them. New types of ships and more efficient navigation techniques would be the basic features of the exceptional expansion of North-Italian, later also Catalan maritime trade. The merchants’ autonomy vis-à-vis monarchic rule and close connections with the city magistrate helped them to go for their own profit. The integration of the petty aristocracy from their surrounding countryside into the urban elite facilitated the supplies with basic food and raw materials, while the overseas connections provided opportunities to extend the supply of grain far beyond the hinterland’s productive capacity, and, in the case of Genoa, even without an immediate rural hinterland. In general, however, every city needed solid commercial and judicial control over its immediate hinterland to secure its sheer necessities and guarantees for the security of their merchants and their properties abroad.

Magistrates of dominant cities in North and Central Italy preferred to negotiate their relations with subordinated communes, limiting the use of violence to recalcitrant noblemen. The city’s superior power in commercial and military terms was so self-evident that smaller communities tended to accept the terms of agreement to be protected against other, possibly less benevolent, contenders⁵⁷. Trade disputes abroad were managed as prudently and quickly as possible by negotiation and mediation by the consul; political pressure by the metropolis would be mobilized only in extreme cases. In general, the communities were maintained in their customary rights, on the condition of obedience, taxation, and, in the case of rural communities, furnishing grain to the capital. Thanks to their wealth, dominant cities mostly were in the position to offer generous terms to smaller towns and communities they wished to incorporate in their regional state system. This can be demonstrated through the fiscal inquiry held by Florence in 1427 in its state, as shown in Table 1. The 14 percent of the state’s total population living in the capital owned over two-thirds of all property, and 78 percent of mobile capital, while the two-thirds of the population living on the countryside owned just below 16 percent of all property, and barely five percent of the mobile capital⁵⁸.

57 JONES, Philip – The Italian City-State…, pp. 335-521.

58 HERLIHY, David; KLAPISCH-ZUBER, Christiane − Tuscans and their Families. A Study of the Florentine Catasto of 1427. New Haven & London: Yale University Press, 1985, p. 94.