Revisions in Economic History: XII. The Trends in Italian Economic History in the Later Middle Ages
T-i HE current conclusions about the nature and the origins of long trends as a rule derive from the unique experience of the upward movement which accompanied and followed the Industrial Revolution. But from the point of view of both economic theory and economic history it is important to study the trends before the middle of the eighteenth century. Needless to say, studies of this kind are much impeded by deficiency of documentation-a deficiency which is specially marked in relation to the quantitative aspect of the problem. Nevertheless it is not altogether impossible to derive useful impressions from such evidence as there is. Italian economic evolution between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries can be made an object of interesting observations, for it is quite possible that movements of Italian economy in that period had almost the same international importance as movements of American economy have in our own time. But whatever their international significance, it is possible to discover certain distinct and welldefined trends in Italian economic evolution between the thirteenth century and the sixteenth.' From I200 to I300 a clear upward trend is discernible. Although quantitative measurements are lacking, there is little doubt that production was passing through a secular expansion. Thus in the thirteenth century it is possible to observe the great development of the Florentine cloth industry, of the Lucca silk industry, and of shipbuilding in the naval republics. The development reached its peak in the thirteenth century. The transaction demand for money grew progressively over a considerable period.2 Although the movements of prices have not been fully investigated the available indices create a strong presumption that the period saw a secular rise of values: the supply of money grew more, than the transaction demand for it. From the end of the thirteenth century and the first decades of the fourteenth there occurred a series of crises comparable in their gravity (if the scale of contemporary economy is taken into account) to the crisis which struck modern economy between I929 and I935. It will be sufficient here to cite the famous bankruptcy of the Florentine banking-houses. These crises ushered in a downward trend which continued to I400 or thereabouts. The existing documentation about the volume of production in this period is very deficient. We know, however, with certainty that production of cloth in the main industrial centre of the times-Florence-continually declined: from ioo,ooo pieces in the year