Sessions

This session investigates the often invisible yet foundational infrastructures of credit, trust, risk management, and economic information that sustained the urban economies of the late medieval Western Mediterranean. Cities such as Barcelona, Valencia, Naples, and Marseille were not passive environments for commerce, but active producers of legal, cognitive, and institutional frameworks that enabled markets to function across space and time. These cities served as nodes of economic coordination, simultaneously managing uncertainty and generating legitimacy for financial and commercial practices.

The session seeks to reframe the late medieval city as a key actor in the circulation of knowledge, creditworthiness, and risk mitigation. We are particularly interested in how urban institutions—such as notarial systems, merchant tribunals, and consular courts—operated as information-rich environments that structured and facilitated economic life. Alongside these formal mechanisms, we welcome studies that address the informal circuits of trust and social reputation that shaped long-distance trade and capital flows, often in the absence of state enforcement. These dynamics are largely recoverable thanks to the written legacy preserved in urban centres, where chancelleries, notarial registers, commercial documents, and legal records serve as the principal sources for medieval economic history. This session invites reflections on the practices of written record-keeping, the materiality of these sources, and the methodological tools—particularly palaeography and diplomatics—essential for their analysis and interpretation. Cities not only structured economic coordination but also produced and safeguarded the very records through which economic historians reconstruct systems of credit, contractual practices, and strategies for managing risk.

We invite papers that engage with:
– The architecture and diffusion of urban credit instruments (e.g., bills of exchange, censals, maritime loans);
– Urban responses to economic volatility—such as war, famine, defaults, or monetary instability;
– The infrastructures of economic information: archives, correspondence, brokers, and rumours;
– The interaction between local governance and transregional commercial networks;
– Merchant strategies for coordinating exchange across fragmented jurisdictions and legal cultures;
– Comparative analyses of Mediterranean cities as financial and commercial hubs.
The session draws inspiration from economic history, urban studies, and new institutional economics. It encourages contributions grounded in archival research and theoretical reflection and highly welcomes approaches that integrate econometric methods within the field of economic history. Whether through microhistorical reconstructions, network analyses, or formal modelling of institutional performance, this session aims to foreground the role of cities as essential agents of coordination and innovation in the late medieval Mediterranean.

Customs accounts record the flow of goods, one of the most fundamental urban functions. Examining the ‘social life of things’ in the urban marketplace, customs accounts give us the potential to look at the goods being traded, their prices, and their quantities. How far can we observe the growth and contraction of urban industries through imports and exports? What can we tell about the standard of living and character of urban life from the records of the goods traded through those towns and cities?
Customs accounts also offer historians an unparalleled source for urban connectivity and trade networks. Mercantile activity was at the heart of the life of most medieval and early modern towns and cities, and customs records give us an unparalleled record of the networks and connections over which trade occurred. How did patterns of connections between cities change over time? How did merchants employ ships and shipmasters from across Europe, and how did they collaborate or compete on different trades?
Materiality can also be explored in customs records, both in terms of close analysis of the objects described as objects of trade, and in terms of the life and activity of the quayside and custom house. The variety of goods traded, and the terms used to describe them, give a unique perspective of the ‘consumer revolution’. The materiality of the port and shipping are also unlocked in customs records: thousands of chests, barrels, hogsheads, boxes, maunds and baskets flowed between towns, and sustained industries all of their own.
Customs records also open up other perspectives. How did the work of customs officials change across the medieval and early modern period? How did the records of customs and tariffs change over time and between jurisdictions? How did the authorities keep oversight of bustling ports and city gates, and how did the spatiality of these places influence the practices of merchants, ships’ crews, and carters?
As pre-modern ‘big data’, customs records offer huge analytical potential, and lend themselves to digital methods from Social Network Analysis to spatial analysis in GIS. We encourage submissions on pre-modern customs records from all contexts and approaches for this comparative session.