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Medieval governments are one of the principal elements of the commercialization paradigm at the heart of a recent interrogation into the nature of the Mediterranean economy at the beginning of the fourteenth century.1 The local ecological diversity in much of the Mediterranean emphasized by Nicholas Purcell and Peregrine Horden made exchange within and between regions a particularly Mediterranean necessity.2 Markets became the late medieval nexus of ‘connectivity’ in the Mediterranean world, and their development made possible specialization, which particularly in the countryside, allowed agriculture to challenge the Malthusian limits long thought to limit agrarian productivity, notably by stimulating non-agrarian activities. We are for example, only beginning to appreciate the important scale of rural industry, exemplified by the recent study of medieval lime kilns in the western Mediterranean by Christophe Vaschalde.3It is thus fitting that for this volume dedicated to an historian of the Provençal state, we examine how the medieval state in Provence and the South of France affected the diffusion and intensification of access to markets both in cities and in the countryside. Our approach to the role of the state in the Mediterranean owes a debt to another great historian of medieval government, the late Stephan Epstein who pioneered the application to the medieval Mediterranean context of the institutional model of economic growth developed by Douglass North and Robert Fogel4. This model proposed that the reduction in the cost of doing business created by the peace and order, which medieval governments sought to establish from the twelfth century onwards was more significant than technological innovation as the motor of the long period of economic growth in the thirteenth century. Epstein critiqued the consensus view, exemplified by historians of the 1960’s and 1970’s like Robert Lopez and Michael Postan, for whom economic growth was the result of extending the cultivation of land, new technologies, long-distance trade and the division of labour in towns.5 Because Epstein placed such importance upon institutions, we cannot but invoke him and the institutional perspective he championed when we look at the role of the modern state in the changes in the Mediterranean economy at the beginning of the fourteenth century. The empirical base for his argument was Sicily, but his analyses complement nicely the arguments of historians of England like Richard Britnell who emphasized the growth of local markets rather than trade between cities as a motor of economic growth.6 Thus Epstein considered problems in Mediterranean food supply in the early fourteenth century to be a result of bottlenecks and other market inefficiencies rather than the result of technological stagnation or environmental shocks.7 Subsequently, following the Black Death, Epstein argued that governments in southern France, Lombardy and Sicily fostered the economic recovery of the fifteenth century by limiting monopolistic urban policies, thus permitting the emergence of integrated regional networks of trade.8 This is why in his view Tuscany never recovered the economic position it held before 1350 ; Florentine mercantilism, unchecked by any larger government, throttled the economic growth of towns in the Tuscan principality it dominated in the Early Modern period.9 In his doctoral dissertation published in 1992, Epstein argued that Sicily suffered less of an economic and demographic crisis in the fifteenth century than elsewhere in the Mediterranean because the Aragonese state, following the tradition of the Normans and Hohenstaufen, limited the ability of towns to impose monopolistic and self-serving policies on their hinterlands.10 He died tragically at the age of 47 before he could address the question of the role of the state in the economic slowdown before the Black Death, but it can be noted that the problems of the early fourteenth century occurred at a time when the monarchic states of southern Europe underwent changes which imperilled the institutions which had for a century and a half allowed peasants and merchants to trade and transport with less risk.11I would like to take up this question of the importance of institutions of state governance in the economic problems of the first half of the fourteenth century from the perspective of recent studies of Provence and southern France. Two very different arguments can be made. On the one hand, the rapid development of state power in France and Provence in the later Middle Ages burdened traders and peasants in the western Mediterranean with costs, especially the direct and indirect costs of war. On the other hand, these burdens were accompanied by institutional innovations in government which may have favoured economic growth in towns and perhaps even more so in the countryside. Warfare is the most obvious problem, which state actors posed to the Mediterranean economy in the fourteenth century, warfare which was the direct result of the success of governments in becoming large and powerful.12 The most destructive and longest conflict in the western Mediterranean was ignited by the Sicilian Vespers in 1282, which set off nearly continuous war between Angevin Naples and Aragon until 1302, and which involved the papacy and France in an invasion of Catalonia in 1284.13 The peace of 1303 unleashed Catalan corsairs which threatened the coast of North Africa during the rest of the half-century, increasing insecurity in a theatre where Castile, Aragon and Granada had been locked in a struggle since 1291 with the Marinids of Morocco. This conflict was thus complicated by internecine warfare among these erstwhile allies, which prolonged the conflict until 1340.14 After the peace of 1303 between Aragon and the Angevins, imperial armies invaded Lombardy and Tuscany, setting off a resumption of the conflicts between Guelf and Ghibelin cities which had been relatively peaceful during the last third of the thirteenth century ; this warfare devastated Italy for three decades beginning in 1313. From the perspective of trade, these conflicts increased risk and thus transaction costs ; John Munro estimates that maritime shipping costs doubled between 1290 and 1400. These increases had a particularly negative impact on the feasibility of shipping bulk food stuffs for which transport was a major element of cost.15 The dangers of shipping grain were real, particularly in time of dearth. Henri Bresc provides many examples of the disruptions of shipping by official and unofficial piracy ; for example, in 1333, during one of the most severe and widespread famines in the Western Mediterranean, Aragonese privateers seized a ship loaded with wheat bound from Sardinia to Collioure and took it to Valencia. The same year, merchants from Languedoc suffered 1000 lbs. of loss after the seizure of a cargo of grain bound from Constantinople.16The unprecedented scale of late medieval warfare is well known ; let me illustrate it with one example: in September of 1340, after the Great Famine, but prior to the Black Death, Philippe vi paid the wages, in gold, of 28,000 mounted soldiers and 16,700 foot soldiers ; if we add to these figures support personnel, camp followers, and horses, the French crown had the financial and logistic task of supporting the population of a second Paris.17 The capacity of medieval governments to finance such extraordinary efforts is a testimony to their ability to tap the wealth of subjects to an unprecedented degree. The effects of such taxation upon demand in the Mediterranean were certainly important ; while David Herlihy saw war spending in fourteenth-century Florence as a means of mobilizing capital and stimulating demand in the urban economy, the more general opinion supports the opposite conclusion ; not only did war taxation reduce incomes and demand, it may have done so unevenly, according to John Munro, transferring wealth in relative terms to the better off.18 In the case of Florence, peasants in the contado saw their taxes double between 1330 and the 1390’s, and the per capita tax rate in the contado before 1348 was double that in the city.19What was the impact of war taxation on the Mediterranean rural economy? The catastrophic impoverishment of highland peasants in Navarre at the beginning of the fourteenth revealed by Mauriche Berthe’s remarkable study of the royal taxation is localized and probably exaggerated by fiscal evasion.20 Édouard Baratier noted a similarly dramatic drop of population in the alpine provençal baillie of Puget-Theniers in the 1340s, but the document which he cites blames poor weather which led to bad harvests and indebtedness to Jewish moneylenders rather than taxation for the loss of population.21 A detailed portrait of the impact of war taxation on peasants emerges from the archives of Oise, a village in the lower Alps of Provence.22 In Provence, economic growth as judged by the index of population growth, was strong between 1250 and 1315 ; with the exception of some highland regions in the county of Forcalquier, taxable hearths increased from between 10% and 50% between 1263 and 1315. This growth stopped around 1315-1323 in the highlands, but not before 1345 on the plateaux and coastal regions. Oise was one of the villages that stopped growing after 1315, but in 1334 about a third of the families owned two oxen, which suggests that a significant group of wealthy peasants remained prosperous, despite 20 or so years of no population growth.The strain of war taxation increased progressively during this period. The Angevin counts of Provence transformed their right to levy a feudal aid, or quista, from an exceptional tax in the thirteenth century, to one levied nearly every two years between 1295 and 1352. In order to meet the rising burden of taxation, the village of Oise employed two strategies. First, it borrowed, as a community, beginning in 1319, six times explicitly to pay taxes before 1350, and five more times around the date the taxes were due. Their second strategy was to distribute the taxes and the burden of borrowing progressively, through a register of estime, a primitive cadaster, which ensured that peasants paid in proportion to their wealth. Both borrowing and a progressive tax system were extremely widespread among villages in Provence. Borrowing ensured that the count would receive his money on time. The use of registers of estimes was part of a sophisticated and wider comital policy of devolving power to village communities.After the arrival of the Angevins in Provence in 1246, Charles i ended the autonomy of many urban communes, but his policies and those of his successors encouraged villages and some towns to develop institutions of local government, particularly in areas where the counts were challenged by powerful baronial families.23 After an initial period of centralized tax collection around 1300-1310, during which the count’s officers levied taxes themselves proportionally to wealth, the counts changed their policy and devolved the burden to villages, which both relieved the state of the complex task of administering local taxes, and perhaps shifted some of the blame for rising taxation to local institutions. In any event, villagers could be expected to be more vigilant in ensuring that everyone paid their due share, when shortfalls created by evaders had to be made up by their neighbours. This fiscal policy gave village communities administrative and jurisdictional powers, and created direct institutional links between these villages’ governments and central power, both fiscal and juridical. This not only made taxation more efficient, but it also provided villages with the means to resist seigneurial exactions through comital courts, including when the count himself was the direct lord of the village, as was the case in Oise. There were thus direct economic benefits to villages from the way war taxes were imposed which may have compensated somewhat for the burden of taxation itself ; moreover, the general increase of village autonomy at the expense of local seigneuries probably reduced the jurisdictional barriers to trade, as has been demonstrated in the case of seigneurial tolls on roads which local communities challenged successfully in comital courts.24Angevin taxation in Provence was linked, through the Gianfigliazzi, the Bardi, and other Florentine bankers to the same financial markets in Tuscany, which provided the ready cash to fuel England’s long struggle with France during the first half of the fourteenth century.25 The linkages between financial markets in Tuscany and the burdens of war finance in Northern Europe and in Florence itself, destabilized Florentine markets in 1342, leading to a cascade of banking failures, and a fiscal crisis of the signoria florentine itself which was only resolved by renouncing the traditional Guelf alliances with the papacy and Angevin Naples and by slashing interest payments on communal loans and consolidating them into the famous monte.26 Most importantly, the signoria restricted actions against debtors to communal courts which dithered for decades over claims against the failed banks, precious time which allowed the magnate families to salvage their wealth. The commercial court, la Mercanzia which had served to guarantee credit in the most important banking center of the medieval world, turned against customers.27 The remarkable resilience of the Italian financial system until the stresses of war finance broke it down in the 1340’s is evidence of the underlying strength of the Mediterranean economy until that time.The rise of the modern state led to marked interventions by government in trade and markets, and the general model proposed by Epstein would argue that this was beneficial, in the case of territorial states like Sicily. This is because by limiting the monopolies of towns and seigneuries, states promoted market integration, thus reducing coordination failures and opening up commercial opportunities to the countryside. One of the most interesting avenues to explore from this perspective is the rise of the textile industry in southern France in the period 1250-1350. Monique Bourin describes a thriving textile industry centered in Beziers, Narbonne and Carcassonne, but involving many smaller localities in the west of Languedoc ; 14 towns besides these three major centers sent cloth to the Fair of Pézénas in 1346. This textile industry apparently arose later than the more celebrated draperies of Flanders ; the first mention is from Montpellier in 1121, but these draperies do not appear in any markets until the middle of the thirteenth century. From then on the growth of the Languedocian textile towns was remarkable. The parallel between the development of these draperies between 1250 and 1300 and that of royal power in Languedoc is compelling, particularly in light of the fact that so much cloth was produced in secondary centers.28Perhaps the most important royal policy affecting Languedocian textiles was the creation of fairs of which Pézenas and Montagnac are the best known, but not the sole examples. Their creation was a royal prerogative and they were granted only after an inquest had been held to insure that a new fair would not harm an existing fair. Pezenas and Montagnac were small towns centers with no obvious vocation as commercial centers aside from their location where routes converged from Carcassonne, Auvergne and the Rhone valley at two crossings on the Hérault River near the coast. Their principal advantage lay in the fact that they were part of the royal domain. Their importance as fairs derived in large part from royal privileges exempting merchants, most notably the subjects of the king of Aragon, from judicial judgements, notably of marque and prise, from any tribunals save the jurisdiction of royal officers at the fairs themselves. Epstein argued that these fairs strangled competitors by convincing the king to withhold similar privileges from them, but this could only apply to the period after 1345.29The fairs already existed at the end of the thirteenth century, and between 1300 and 1330 is the period when the expansion of the cloth industry is most apparent, and perhaps most threatened, according to the documents analysed by Bourin. Pezenas and Montagnac were the fourteenth century equivalent of the fairs of Champagne: their domination of international trade in Languedocian draperies stimulated rather that limited the development of many smaller textile centers and fairs which were the matrix of a Languedoc woolen industry, a complex textiles ecology integrating the production of merino and other wools, cochineal, and pastel in the production of draperies ranging from luxurious scarlats to more middle range blanquets.30Royal power further intervened in the production of Languedocian textiles with a protectionist policy, which was the object of an intense political debate in Narbonne revealed in the document of 1330 studied by Bourin. The royal edict of 1277 forbidding the export of raw wool appears to have been a simple strategy for upping the price of royal licenses of export sold to Italian merchants, but after the Franco-Catalan War of 1284-85, the political climate changed. Languedocians drapers were intensely aware of the competition from producers in Perpignan in particular, and Philip the Fair responded to their pressure with a prohibition against export of raw materials for cloth production, reiterated in 1318, in exchange for a tax of 12 d. per cloth exported, the gabelle. However there was serious resistance to this policy from opposing commercial interests in Languedoc ; if the consuls of Narbonne redacted a detailed argument in favour of the prohibition to export wool, it was because another group of local merchants were offering the king 150,000 pounds to suppress the ban.31 There were good arguments to make on both sides of the question ; beyond the obvious profits to be had by exporting sacks of wool, there was a larger question of the costs of aggressive protectionism in the context of the whole of Mediterranean trade. David Abulafia has shown that, despite the Sicilian Vespers and the French crusade against Aragon in 1285, around 1300, the registers of Lamberto de Sambuceto in Cyprus show that Occitan merchants subject to the Kings of France, Naples and Aragon cooperated closely, partly out of linguistic affinity, more certainly because they were small fry in a Levant trade dominated by Venice and Genoa.32The development of the Languedocian draperies in the thirteenth century, and of the deep commercial economy in general, depended upon the abundant monetary emissions of Melgueil, and in the second half of the thirteenth century, the imposition of a royal monopoly on money based upon the denier tournois, which continued to be minted in sufficient quantity to support the development of exchange.33 Édouard Perroy discounted the notion that the devaluations of Philip the Fair and his sons perturbed seriously the economy at the turn of the thirteenth century.34 The question remains open of whether a general shortage in the supply of precious metal occurred in the Western Mediterranean in this period. Bimetallism was well established in the Mediterranean and it tended to diminish the intrinsic value of silver deniers and their divisionary monies, because the stability of gold was the principal concern of merchants, political pressure and the object of royal prestige. Merchants exported silver in order to profit from arbitrage in North African ports, and the intense circulation of small coinage led to loss of silver from simple wear and tear.35 The notarial registers of Provence in the fourteenth century attest to a long-term attrition in the value of small coins in terms both of both silver and gold. On the other hand, Provençal notaries allowed their customers to compensate for devalued coinage by allowing transactions to be indexed in terms of monies of known value ; in Provence this was most often the silver gros tournois until the 1330’s, when the florin increasing became a second coin of reference.36The notarial system also provided a means of surmounting the shortage of coinage through credit arrangements. However in rural Provence, the evidence from the notarial archives of Trets is that a huge amount of coinage actually circulated, particularly in the period 1320-1347, when silver seems to have been most scarce. Here the tendency throughout this period is towards a substitution of Angevin coins for outside monies, which suggest that the abundance of coins, and in particular of deniers, was the result of a deliberate royal policy.37Indeed the notarial system was probably the single most significant institutional contribution to the diminishing cost of transactions in the Western Mediterranean in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries.38 Of course, notarial registers and the Roman law, which underpins them, antedate the imposition of state power in Southern France, and Provence. Nonetheless, in Provence and Southern France, mechanisms of enforcement come of age in the second half of the thirteenth century, with the arrival of effective royal power. Daniel Smail has demonstrated the synchronicity of increase in both notarial activity and comital courts in Angevin Marseille, between 1290 and 1350, and while his subsequent research suggests that Marseille courts were theatres of political rivalry, the daily routine of comital courts preserved in account rolls from regional capitals like Digne and Saint-Maximin from 1300 on show local judges handing down dozens of judgements per court session against small and medium debtors.39 These efficient mechanisms for enforcing notarial contracts lowered the market threshold for peasant trade and helps to explain why peasants and rural artisans were drawn into specialised activities which diversified and strengthened the rural economy in the first half of the fourteenth century.Thus the rise of modern territorial state in the early fourteenth century created difficult problems for the economy before the Black Death, but it also provided some solutions. Wars increased the risks of doing business, and levied a crushing burden of taxation, which drained the resources of consumers, and in particular of rural consumers. Monarchic states creatively tapped into the resources of rural populations by devolving responsibility to them for taxation while leveraging those resources through borrowing to the point where it threatened the financial stability of Tuscany, the center of European banking. No doubt the financial structure of local communities in Provence, were equally threatened by their own access to credit to pay the King’s tax. Yet, as we have seen, this was a period of growth at least in some regions. This growth was fostered by the ambitious efforts of the rising state to exercise sovereignty over money and over the local jurisdictions, which competed incoherently to establish monopolies over resources, which markets could more efficiently allocate, in particular to people in the countryside. It is perhaps in the countryside that the power of the state had the greatest impact, through notaries and courts, which brought the cost of enforcing contracts within the reach of peasants. Taxation by the Provençal state did at least support village institutions, which made the equitable distribution of the fiscal burden a political issue for local communities. It may be overly optimistic to believe that registers of estime distributed village taxes fairly, but that was the ideal, and they probably did relieve the poorest. Most importantly, taxation gave villages rights, which weakened seigneurial jurisdictions, reduced the cost of lordship and lowered the costs of entry into the market place for those at the base of society.