CEU Electronic Theses and Dissertations, 2021
| Author | Carr-Riegel, Leslie |
|---|---|
| Title | Italian Traders in Poland 1300-1500 |
| Summary | This thesis seeks to illuminate the lives of Italian tradesmen who came to the Kingdom of Poland during the Late Medieval period, exploring why these individuals came to Poland, their economic success and failures and how they influenced and were influenced by, the itinerant political, social, and economic factors at play in the region during the period. These Italian immigrants were relatively small in number, a little over a hundred individuals in two hundred years. They came to Poland from the northern city-states of the peninsula - Genoa, Venice, Florence, and Milan, but also other smaller communities. while the Genoese were the most numerically prevalent in the early fourteenth century and tended to dominate the eastern trade routes thereafter, no group was ever so prominent that they overwhelmed the others and alliances between members of different Italian states were common. Covered also are the wares handled by these merchants which included luxury fabrics, spices, cochineal, alum, slaves, salt, and mined metals. Particular attention is paid to the way in which Italians managed to purchase for themselves positions in the royal administration acting as tax-farmers and mine managers. A set of case studies highlights the lives of selected individual merchants, demonstrating their diversity of station and occupation together with their frequent similarities in conduct and approach. These individuals frequent involvement in legal cases is parsed, demonstrating that by choice, both Polish and Italian courts were used to unravel complex mercantile disagreements. The thesis is completed by a prosopographical dataset, including the primary sources related in chronological order to the over one hundred individuals identified for this work. |
| Supervisor | Jartiz, Gerhard, Szende, Katalin |
| Department | Medieval Studies PhD |
| Full text | https://www.etd.ceu.edu/2021/carr-riegel_leslie.pdf |
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