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The shrewdness and trickery of thieves was a universal theme. In Boiardo's romance epic Orlando innamorato, the poet portrays a thief, called Brunello, as one who can climb smooth surfaces like a spider, conceal himself in daylight and take a ring from a woman's finger without her feeling it. Needless to say, such fantastic exaggeration of thieves' skills is no reflection of reality. A more ‘realistic’ portrayal of robbers' ruses occurs in the tales of Sercambi: they set traps on the road for unsuspecting victims, and they cheat their accomplices. In Sacchetti, a miller who knows how to distract his customers' attention while he stole some of their grain prompts the narrator's comment that ‘Thieves’ cunning is like that: they use all the tricks in the book to take what belongs to other people.' Italian city statutes on theft may be divided into two classes: those that set an elaborate tariff, and those that did not. Tariffs were constructed with two variable elements: the value of the theft and the number of offences. The value of the theft could be divided into a number of monetary levels, varying between two and seven. Only at the highest level (over 50 or 100 lire) was death by hanging imposed for a first offence. Below that point there were escalating sequences of fines or corporal punishments starting with the stocks or a whipping and proceeding through the removal of one or both ears or amputation of a hand. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In March 1385, Nanna, a widow of Bologna, and Barbarina, a priest's daughter, were prosecuted by the Podestà through ex officio inquisition for concerting together to make ‘incantations and spells (facturas)’. Nanna had allegedly said to Barberina: If you want Simon the son of Fra Silvestro, whom you love, to love you and not to be able to love another woman, and to marry you, you will have to do the following incantations and spells: feed him some of your menstrual blood, by putting it in a pie (pastrino); take some of your pubic hair, burn it, grind it to a powder, and put it in his food; and, at the third hour of night, enter our garden, your hair dishevelled, and say this incantation: ‘I get up in the east with Simone and with all his family, with breeches on my head and hair on my feet. O demon, where are you going, where do you come from? I am going to Barbarina…’. Barbarina, according to the indictment, at once set about following these instructions. She made the pie with some of her blood, though when Simone did not come to dinner as expected, she had to throw it away when it became rotten. She burned some of her hairs, and put them in food that Simone ate. She performed the nocturnal incantation. In response to the prosecution, the two women appeared and denied the charge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In his book The Boundaries of Eros, Guido Ruggiero tells a history of increasing government intervention in sexual matters during the Renaissance, in response to the alarming growth of a culture of illicit sexuality. Using the records of several Venetian courts in the period from 1348 to 1500, Ruggiero examines five main sexual crimes, namely fornication, adultery, sacrilegious sex, rape and sodomy. He gives shape to his narrative in three different ways: by examining language, penalties and prosecutions. First, he looks at judicial language, that is, how cases are described and reported in the court records. One aspect of this is the perceived nature and scope of the injury. Here he finds an evolution from a simple concern with damage or dishonour to the father or family of the victim (characteristic of the mid-fourteenth century) to more heightened alarm at contempt for God, law and justice, which grows by stages in the later fourteenth century, and comes to eclipse family honour. The language used regarding some crimes, however, was special: sex with nuns was sacrilegious, as the injured party was God; and sodomy was condemned as likely to provoke God's destructive anger on the city. Another aspect of judicial language is the descriptive vocabulary: Ruggiero contrasts the ‘distant and antiseptic’ language of heterosexual rape cases with the abundant physical detail of sodomy cases. This contrast is used to suggest the significance attached to each type of offence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Late-medieval England was a land of dichotomies. The most conspicuous were those between upland and lowland, dispersed and nucleated settlement, woodland and champion, weak and strong lordship, free and customary tenants and tenures, remoteness and proximity to major markets, and between the marches and the metropolitan core. Some of these contrasts were inherent in England's climate and topography, others sprang from deep-rooted human institutions such as field systems, manors, and property rights, while yet others derived from the centralising and differentiating forces of governments and commercial exchange. Many of these dichotomies had a strong north–south dimension but this does not necessarily mean that there was such a thing as a ‘North–South divide’ or that distinctions between the North and the South should be privileged above other spatial and regional differences. The strength and nature of these dichotomies also varied over time, depending upon whether centripetal or centrifugal tendencies were more to the fore. Any systems shift in the balance between these two tendencies was likely to heighten the tensions between core and periphery thereby giving rise to expressions of northern (and southern) consciousness (Jewell 1994). This is what seems to have happened at the close of the Middle Ages. It was then that the dichotomy between North and South in the medieval period was probably at its most pronounced. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Britain is now called England, thereby assuming the name of the victors. This, the most noble of islands, 800 miles long and 200 broad, was first called Albion, then Britain and is now known as England. Crossing the deep sea, he [Henry the Second] visited Ireland with a fleet, and gloriously subdued it; Scotland also he vanquished, capturing its king, William … He remarkably extended the kingdom's limits and boundaries [until they reached] from the ocean on the south to the Orkney islands in the north. With his powerful grasp he included the whole island of Britain in one monarchy, even as it is enclosed by the sea. The English and others The historian A. J. P. Taylor once argued that the unification of Germany in the nineteenth century was brought about not by nationalist forces but through a series of wars against other countries – Denmark, Austria, France. The substance of German unity and German national consciousness was not, as the liberals claimed, a deep sense of German culture but the deposit of wars and conflicts that forged a Germany confident of its strength and eager to expand its power. Prussia, which of all the German states had the least interest in German nationalism, was the agency through which Germany achieved this self-definition as a ‘crusading’ power, charged with the mission especially of civilizing the East (Taylor 1945: 114–5). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The eastern mainland exhibited a number of unique features whose interpretation became particularly embroiled in 19th and 20th century politics. The eastern mainland is here defined as the Red River basin and surrounding uplands, the eastern half of the Annamite Chain, the coastal lowlands, and the Mekong delta. The most obvious difference between this region and the rest of the mainland was the east's unique exposure to Chinese culture, which began in systematic fashion with the incorporation of the Red River basin into the Chinese empire between 43 and 938 c.e. Encountering a monarchy that congratulated itself on fidelity to Confucian norms, Frenchmen in the late 1800s developed what has been termed “the little China fallacy”: they assumed that Vietnam owed everything to Chinese tutelage, made few independent advances, and thus was no more able than its “stagnant” northern mentor to enter the modern world without European direction. That this endorsement of Europe's historic mission would appeal to many colonizers is hardly surprising. Curiously, however, long after the French left Indochina, the notion that China provides the most appropriate template continued to grip even resolutely anticolonial Western historians who inherited the scholarly apparatus of colonial researchers, together with the Sinocentric bias inherent in Chinese-language records. So too the alliance c.1950–1978 between Vietnamese and Chinese Communism may 1have encouraged linkage in the minds of anti-Communist scholars and those sympathetic to Communism alike. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Our detailed examination of mainland history begins with the western sector of the mainland in part because it is convenient to proceed west to east and in part because here I am best able to address regional conundrums with indigenous-language primary sources. Moreover, insofar as any sector can be representative of so varied a region, the western mainland has a good claim. In duration and degree, for example, post-charter disruptions were intermediate between those of the central and eastern mainland. The same may be said of intrasectoral tensions: Upper Burma reemerged as the dominant zone within the western mainland in the 1630s. This was long after Ayudhya had established its preeminence in the central mainland, but almost 170 years before Hue gained a secure authority along the yet more fragmented eastern littoral. As elsewhere, political change had a cyclic character: periodic breakdowns encouraged administrative reform, but reformed administrations collapsed before destabilizing economic growth, external attacks, and domestic factionalism. Whenever the capital region was in trouble, restive provinces were quick to magnify its difficulties. Thus Lower Burma exploited Upper Burma's problems in the 1280s and 1740s, and when the south faltered in the late 1500s, Upper Burma returned the favor. With the interior home to Burmans and the south to Mons, endemic north–south tensions had an irreducible, if fluid, ethnic component. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

At the end of the Viking Age the establishment of three separate Nordic kingdoms hardly seemed a self-evident course of future events. The prospect of direct Danish rule over most of southern Scandinavia, combined with an indirect overlordship of other parts of the region, must have appeared at least as likely. Yet, in the course of the early Middle Ages the kingdoms of Norway and Sweden came to comprise most of their later territories on the Scandinavian peninsula and developed far enough for their survival to be secured. During the same period Christianity was firmly established in all Scandinavian-speaking communities and its Church reached the organisational stage where bishops ruled territorial bishoprics from permanent sees with cathedrals, monastic institutions were firmly established, and payment of tithe was being introduced. From the beginning of the twelfth century the Nordic churches were also organised as a separate church province under the supremacy of the archbishop of Lund (Part II). All this does not mean that the political and ecclesiastical situation was stable at the onset of the high Middle Ages in the mid-twelfth century. The three kingdoms lacked centralised systems of government and their unity was seriously threatened by dynastic rivalry and succession disputes. In Iceland the original distribution of power among numerous chieftains within an all-embracing community of laws was in the process of being disrupted by the concentration of power in the hands of a small number of prominent families whose leaders ruled territorial lordships. As a separate legal entity on a smaller scale, the archipelago of Føroyar seems to have been dominated by chieftains and large landowners. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the mid-fourteenth century, when the Black Death reached Scandinavia, there were about a hundred towns in the region. They varied greatly in size and importance, and were unevenly distributed. Denmark was the most densely urbanised with some sixty towns scattered all over the realm; almost all of them were (or had once been) accessible by sea. Norway only had about a dozen towns, all but one (Hamar) situated on the coast. In Sweden, including the Finnish part of the kingdom, there were almost thirty towns, most of them – and the most vigorous – along the Baltic coast and in the Lake Mälaren region. There were no towns in Iceland and the northern parts of Norway and Sweden. The only possible exception was the important trading place of Vågan in the Lofoten Islands whose urban status is a matter of debate (see Chapter 11). In the early fourteenth century there was, therefore, a relatively dense pattern of towns in the southern part of Scandinavia, which were concentrated in the coastal areas and linked by the traditional sailing-routes. This pattern was to determine the urban system of Scandinavia for the rest of the Middle Ages (and long afterwards). The few new towns established between 1350 and 1520 were complementary and generally unimportant. No new Danish towns were founded or granted privileges in the second half of the fourteenth century but in the fifteenth century Denmark saw almost thirty new foundations, many more than in the other kingdoms. However, with one exception, Landskrona in Skåne, they were of little importance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The beginning as well as the end of the period 1350–1520 is marked by historical events of considerable significance both in Nordic and general European church history. In 1350 most churches with their institutions faced the acute as well as the long-term effects of the Black Death. The year 1520, on the other hand, was the year in which Luther definitely broke with the papacy, publishing two of his main programmatic works, An den Adel deutscher Nation and the treatise on the Babylonian captivity of the Church, and burning the papal bull of excommunication. It was also the year of the ‘Stockholm Massacre’ in which two bishops were executed in flagrant disregard of privilegium canonis. In 1350 the Church, like the State, faced new and great challenges just when its resources had been greatly reduced. Its national and international organisation was in principle still intact, and in Scandinavia no doubts were raised about its raison d'être. In 1520, however, questions were raised about its organisation, teaching and practices. At the beginning of the period the Danish ecclesiastical sphere of influence had already been reduced by the sale of Estonia to the Teutonic Order in 1347. In the course of the period the Norwegian church province lost several of its suffragan sees. In 1349 the bishop of the Hebrides (Sodor) was exempted by the pope from his obligation to visit his metropolitan, the archbishop of Nidaros. The papal schism also led to a division of the see, as Man was subordinated to York in the fifteenth century and to Canterbury in the sixteenth century, while the Hebrides (Episcopatus Insularum), for a period directly subordinated to the pope, followed the obedience of Avignon like the other Scottish sees and was in 1472 together with Orkney subordinated to the recently established province of St Andrews. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

During the eleventh century Christianity was accepted as the public religion in most of Scandinavia (see Chapter 7). By the end of that century the Christian faith had superseded pagan beliefs in Denmark, Norway and the Norse island communities of the Atlantic, but this happened more slowly in eastern Scandinavia. In Sweden, pagan attitudes persisted even in regions where many people had been converted. The situation there was described in about 1130 by the Anglo-Danish monk Ailnoth: “The Svear and Götar, however, seem to honour the Christian faith only when things go according to their wishes and luck is on their side; but if storm winds are against them, if the soil turns barren during drought or is flooded by heavy rainfall, if an enemy threatens to attack with harrying and burning, then they persecute the Christian faith that they claim to honour, and with threats and injustice against the faithful they seek to chase them out of the land.” In some areas pagan burial customs continued to be practised long after churches were built. For example, on the island of Öland off the coast of south-east Sweden a community that had a stone church by the early twelfth century continued to cremate some of their dead even in the second half of that century. In the sparsely populated northern provinces of Hälsingland, Medelpad and Ångermanland on the west coast of the Gulf of Bothnia it was not until the first half of the thirteenth century that the settled agrarian population completely abandoned paganism for Christianity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The decline and stagnation in settlement caused by the Black Death and the ensuing plague epidemics led to various kinds of crisis phenomena in rural societies throughout central, western and southern Europe. This is the reason why the term ‘late medieval agrarian crisis’ has been coined to describe the period from the mid-fourteenth to the mid-fifteenth centuries, though the grounds for using it have also been questioned. The effects of population losses and settlement contraction varied considerably among the European countries but certain structural changes occurred in most parts of Europe. As shown above (Chapter 18) rural society in Scandinavia was also marked by the repercussions of a dramatic loss of population well into the second half of the fifteenth century when the first signs of recovery manifested themselves in some areas. The decrease of population led to great economic and social changes, set in motion by the attempts of different groups to adapt to and take advantage of the new situation. Developments in the Nordic countries were in some respects similar to those in the rest of Europe but many differences can also be noted. As Scandinavia was neither economically nor socially a homogeneous area before the mid-fourteenth century the results and effects of the population loss also varied considerably within the region. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the early and high Middle Ages there was a considerable expansion of population, settlement and production not only in Scandinavia but all over Europe. By the early decades of the fourteenth century it appears that this expansion had begun to slow down in western and northern Europe and that a decline even occurred in places. Clearing of the land had advanced into areas of poorer soil or less favourable climate, or had led to the establishment of farms that were too small to be viable. Population sizes may thus have been approaching the limits of subsistence. It should be noted, however, that this ‘marginal land theory’ and the assumption that a decline in population had, for example, already set in around 1320 in England have also been criticised as insufficiently evidenced. Another factor was that serious epidemics were beginning to break out by that time. Moreover, the climate started to turn colder towards the end of the thirteenth century and the period from approximately 1330 to 1390 appears to have been a cold interval in Scandinavia. In 1931 the historian C. A. Christensen showed that land prices in Sjælland dropped dramatically from about 1330, reflecting a corresponding fall in land rents. From this it has generally been assumed that an agrarian crisis was in evidence in Denmark by the first half of the fourteenth century, with deserted farms being referred to around 1315 and abandoned churches in the diocese of Ribe by the beginning of the fourteenth century. More recently, however, it has been argued that the latter signs of crisis have not been sufficiently documented. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The history of mentality deals with a great variety of topics; ultimately, it is a way of regarding history rather than a particular discipline. For this reason, a short survey like the present chapter has to be fairly selective, the more so as this approach to history – with some exceptions – has been introduced fairly recently to Scandinavia and has not resulted in many empirical studies. This treatment of mentality will be linked to the two great organisations that were built up in Scandinavia in the high Middle Ages: the monarchy and the Church. In this way, it will also be possible to treat mentality in close connection with ideology, i.e. to discuss changes in the implicit aspect of thought and behaviour as well as doctrines and constitutional principles. The old society and the new: a royalist programme of the thirteenth century A main theme in most surveys of the Scandinavian countries until around 1300 is the growth of the state (cf. Chapter 12). The mental aspect of this development is illustrated particularly clearly in The King's Mirror, a Norwegian work from the mid-thirteenth century, formed as a dialogue between a father and a son. To its author the king is first and foremost a judge, a picture which accords well with the above-mentioned development of royal justice in Norway at the time. As God's representative on earth, he should represent an impersonal justice above the parties and judge them according to their merits, taking into account not only the external facts of the case but also its circumstances, the intentions of the criminal, as well as his or her whole personality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Development of settlement Sedentary settlement in Scandinavia was predominantly agrarian during the Iron Age and the Middle Ages. Grain cultivation and animal husbandry were the basic means of providing sustenance, but were complemented, according to local conditions, by various forms of hunting, fishing and gathering. We have seen (Chapter 1) that large parts of Scandinavia are marginal for agriculture. In high-lying areas and in the far north climate does not permit grain growing. Areas of high elevation also lack the necessary conditions for pastoralism, which can, on the other hand, be successfully practised in Iceland and also in favourable locations in Greenland. Nevertheless, the Nordic climate is considerably more favourable than at the same latitudes in many other parts of the globe. This is mainly due to the effects of the Gulf Stream. The positive difference between mean annual temperature in various parts of Sweden and global mean temperature at the same latitudes is between 5 and 7°C. The distribution of sedentary settlement at the beginning of the Middle Ages, i.e. around AD 1000, can be established in various ways. The archaeological record, mainly cemeteries and dwelling sites, points to the extent and locations of such settlement. With the exception of Finland, types of place-names can be used to determine the age of settlements; for example, certain types of suffixes in place-names belong largely to the Viking Age and earlier periods, others to the Middle Ages and later periods. However, there are also types of names that were widely used during both the Viking and Middle Ages. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Traditionally, the two royal rune stones at Jelling (see Chapter 6) mark the beginning of Danish history. The smaller one bears the inscription ‘King Gorm made this monument in honour of his wife, Tyre, the pride of Denmark’. The larger one relates that ‘King Harald ordered these monuments to be made in honour of his father, Gorm, and his mother, Tyre – that Harald who won for himself all Denmark, and Norway, and made the Danes Christian’. Exact dating of runes is rarely possible, but on the basis of the royal names, known from foreign written sources, the Jelling inscriptions have been dated to the second half of the tenth century. They present the first two generations of the royal dynasty that has reigned in Denmark ever since. In the ninth and tenth centuries the title of konungr (king) could be used by several petty rulers at the same time but on the Jelling stone it is reserved for the single ruler of the whole of Denmark and at least part of Norway. In the country itself the name of Denmark (tanmaurk, modern Danish Danmark) first occurs on the Jelling stones. However, Denamearc was already known to the Norwegian magnate Ohthere (Ottar) who visited King Alfred in England in about 890, and shortly afterwards Abbot Regino of Prüm (d. 915) mentions the name of Denimerca in his Chronica. The name consists of two parts: ‘Dan’ designates the people, the Danes (OD danir), whereas ‘mark’ has several meanings. One of them, ‘borderland’, would seem to fit the situation of the country at that time, though it is uncertain which border is meant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

STUDIES ATTEMPTING to explain the origin of the Industrial Revolution in England usually go no farther back than the late seventeenth century. There were a few attempts in the 1960s to take the story to the medieval period. A. R. Bridbury tried to demonstrate that the economic growth that led to the First Industrial Revolution can be traced to the late Middle Ages. In 1968 Sidney Pollard and David Crossley made such an attempt. Then in 1969, in a rather provocative paper, Max Hartwell invited historians to take a long-term view of the thousand years of English economic history that preceded the Industrial Revolution, in part, to mitigate the parochialism arising from, “the tendency of each historian to elevate his period, his growth factor, his depression or crisis, to a status of prime importance, either in the history of capitalism or of industrialization … ” More recently, in an intellectual effort covering more than 20 years and devoted to the development of an institutional theory of economic history and economic performance, Douglass North has traced the rise of the Western World from the era of the hunters and gatherers to the Industrial Revolution in England. North's central focus is to identify the critical long-term institutional changes that determined the direction of long-term economic change and performance, the central factors responsible for major institutional shifts over long periods of time, and the mechanisms by which change was effected. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THE EVIDENCE PRESENTED in the two preceding chapters makes it clear enough that the Industrial Revolution in England was the first example of trade-led economic development, and that the sources of trade expansion, or the “Commercial Revolution,” which propelled the process to higher grounds in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, were located in the Atlantic world. The task in this chapter is to show the factors that made possible the expansion of Atlantic commerce between 1500 and 1850. For this purpose, it is pertinent to examine the state of trade and production in the major regions of the Atlantic world in the middle decades of the fifteenth century before the establishment of regular seaborne contact across the Atlantic. This exercise helps to show the factors which operated to promote or constrain the growth of trade in the major regions of the Atlantic in the centuries preceding the development of multilateral trade across the Atlantic. It is argued that in the centuries or decades preceding the opening up of the Atlantic to regular seaborne commerce, the main constraint to the growth of production and consumption in the individual regions was limited opportunity to trade. In turn, limited opportunity to trade resulted from several factors – the range of resources in each region of the Atlantic; the level of development of the division of labor (local, regional, and international); inland transportation costs; and government trade policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Whether material conditions improved for the peasantry after the Black Death and into the fifteenth century remains an open question, not only for late medieval and Renaissance Florence, but for all of Europe. Historians of a Malthusian bent have seen an economic golden age for the peasantry following in the wake of fourteenth-century pestilence. From radically opposed perspectives, other historians such as the Marxist Guy Bois and the non-Marxist David Herlihy have also found prosperity for the peasantry at least in parts of Europe and for a portion of the fifteenth century. However, more recently still other historians with various methods and political agendas have argued the opposite: the fifteenth century saw at best continued misery, not recovery, for the Florentine peasantry. Yet, despite differences in political and methodological orientations, historians have posed these questions almost exclusively within the contexts of long-term social and economic causes; the affairs of state or politics more generally, especially at the level of specific events, largely have been left out. Was the condition of the Florentine peasantry during the Renaissance oblivious to changes in political regime - to the rise of the Albizzi's govero stretto in 1393 or the rise of the Medici in 1434? Or, did other political events have long-term consequences in shaping the fortunes of Florentine peasants? This chapter will present data from a series of tax records from twenty-nine sample villages in the rural territory or (more precisely) the contado of Florence, from the Black Death through the fifteenth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In recent years, the debate on the nature and outcome of the late medieval ‘crisis’ has taken a new lease on life. According to the more recent interpretation, the demographic and political ‘crises’ acted as a catalyst for structural changes that pushed the late medieval economy onto a higher path of growth, rather than ushering in a long phase of contraction, as has long been argued by historians of a ‘neo-Malthusian’ persuasion. This revisionist case rests on two propositions. In the first place, the consequences of the demographic slump following the Black Death are seen in a more optimistic light. On the supply side, the demographic crisis reduced population pressure on basic agricultural resources and made it possible to make more efficient use of land and labour; on the demand side, the sharp tightening of labour markets caused a redistribution of income from landlords and employers to the peasantry and urban wage earners, who spent much of their increased disposable income on cheap manufactures and on foodstuffs with higher added value. This claim has a long intellectual pedigree and has gained a broad acceptance among scholars. The second proposition is that the rise in the late middle ages of more centralised states, and the consolidation of parcellised sovereignty that it entailed, reduced the institutional costs of trade in commodities and information both by lowering feudal and urban tariffs, and by aiding the development of more efficient and integrated trading networks. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In 1409 Leonardo Bruni wrote in a letter to Niccolò Niccoli that a state was a society of people united in jurisdiction and living under the same laws (civitas autem est congregatio hominum iure sociatorum et eisdem legibus viventium). As Riccardo Fubini has pointed out, Bruni was articulating the pride which the Florentines must have felt at the beginning of the fifteenth century as they witnessed the spectacular expansion of their dominion over neighbouring cities; they believed they were participating in the foundation of a new territorial entity. Brum's notion that the acceptance of a single body of laws constituted an essential element of statehood was reflected in the new set of statutes compiled in 1415. In a conscious imitation of Justinian's example, the Florentines aimed to publish a coherent collection of laws that would be binding both on their own citizens and on their subject territories. The Florentines had been preoccupied for some time with the mass of confused and contradictory legislation that had been issued over the years. The statutes of 1409, the work of Giovanni da Montegranaro, were an attempt to bring some order to this near chaos. The 1415 version, drawn up under the auspices of Paulus de Castro and Bartolomeo Volpi and better known thanks to its eighteenth-century edition, was revolutionary, both in terms of its organisation and in terms of its purpose, which was to provide a legal code for the new territorial state that had emerged. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The Florentine statutes were based on Roman law and Florence regarded itself proudly as heir to Rome. As Leonardo Bruni boasted in his Laudatio of Florence, ‘your founder is the Roman people – the lord and conqueror of the entire world’ and since their ‘imperium was equal to the entire world … therefore to you also, men of Florence, belongs by hereditary right dominium over the entire world and possession of your parental legacy’. Dominion (dominium, dominio) was the word used by the Florentines to describe their growing state at this time; and, although Bruni tells us that no one, after seeing the city, failed to believe that Florence was capable of acquiring ‘the dominion and imperium of the whole world’, he was careful not to lay claim to imperium by hereditary right. For Florence was still legally subject to the German emperor, and to have described its state as an empire would have been tantamount to laesa maiestas. Since Bruni was also laying claim to Florence's republican inheritance from Rome, he was equally careful to stress that the city was founded ‘when the imperium of the Roman people was at its peak’ – that was before the Caesars and their successors had deprived the Romans of their liberty, hence Florence's own inherited love of freedom and hatred of tyranny. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

It was in 1986 that Gian Maria Varanini invited historians, in their study of the Italian territorial states, to look beyond the phase of ‘accomplished stability’ to a ‘prehistory’ in which the characteristic practices of these states took shape. Convinced that the modes of governing of the Italian states were not new with the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, Varanini argued that these political structures originated in the communal period: in the experience of establishing control over the countryside and in the development of a hierarchy among the north Italian cities. Seen from the perspective of this communal prehistory, the formation by Florence of a territorial dominion was not an inevitable process, but a process open to different possible paths for development. If, therefore, a linear understanding of political development is abandoned, I should prefer to speak of the ‘material constitution’ of the territorial state. This seems a term well suited to describing the early hierarchy of Tuscan cities and the asymmetries among them that historically preceded the creation of a Florentine dominion. To anticipate this chapter's conclusion, the Florentine process of expansion took place slowly, and in continual interaction with the territorial expansion of rival states. The ordering of the territory did not follow a unitary scheme, nor was there a progressive refinement of public functions; what took shape, rather, was a system characterised from the beginning by a low degree of integration among its components. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the century that followed the Black Death of 1348, the republic of Florence became the dominant power in Tuscany, absorbing within its dominion a large number of formerly independent communes and their rural territories, so that the area controlled by Florence nearly tripled in size. The plague itself seems to have contributed to Florentine expansion, for, although the disease roughly halved the population of all of the Tuscan urban centres, Florence, as the region's largest city, still commanded resources that permitted her to capitalise on the new weakness of her neighbours. Florentine growth was accomplished through a steady series of purchases, conquests and alliances (see Map on p. 3) and it was accompanied by important efforts to integrate newly acquired lands into the Florentine state. The century of dramatic territorial expansion had important and lasting consequences for the political and economic history of Florence and Tuscany. It also corresponded with the first flourishing of the cultural phenomenon we know as the Florentine Renaissance. It used to be thought that the Renaissance was an affair strictly for cities. A distinguished scholarly tradition has long held that the distinctive urban society of late medieval Italy made possible the political and philosophical speculation of humanist scholars as well as the masterpieces of Renaissance artists. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Geographical background By the strictest definition, East Anglia corresponds to the medieval diocese of Norwich: Norfolk, Suffolk and south-eastern Cambridgeshire. For the purposes of this chapter the whole of Cambridgeshire and Huntingdonshire are included (Map 22.10). East Anglia had wide areas of high fertility and a good climate. The long curve of its coastline ensures easy access to the sea even for inland places; sailing distances to important parts of the continent are short. Although there are many harbours for small craft, good major harbours are few and liable to be affected by recurrent problems both of erosion and of silting. In the early part of our period the configuration of the central part of the East Anglian coastline was very different from what it is now. A great estuary extended to within a few miles of Norwich which was probably the major port for the area. The estuary silted up and was drained in or by the eleventh century. It was this which allowed the development of Yarmouth on a sandbank at the estuary's mouth. Inland communication by water was of fundamental importance. The rise of Yarmouth and of Lynn is largely to be explained by each lying near the focus of a major river system. A lesser one converged near Ipswich. There is evidence that minor rivers were much more important for transport in the middle ages than was later the case. The road system of medieval East Anglia has been imperfectly studied. It is, however, likely that the significance of Norwich as a great hub for far-reaching roads is old. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Measured in terms of their populations, twenty or so towns emerge as important provincial centres with some 2,000 taxpayers in 1377. To these must be added Exeter, which doubled in size during the fifteenth century to emerge as the third largest provincial town in 1524–5, and Edinburgh, whose population was growing towards c. 12,500 by 1560 (see Table 18.1). York alone achieved a size or status comparable to large European towns such as Antwerp, Bremen or Lyon. Most of the greater towns of Britain were distinguishable from market towns by the scale and intensity of their urbanity: physical size and appearance, complex internal economic and social structures, sophisticated government and regional significance. Even so, few enjoyed the close formal interdependence of a large Italian, French or German town with its contado or umland. In Britain, administration outside urban liberties commonly remained subject to the crown. Coventry, Gloucester and York were exceptions: Coventry by acquiring some 15,000 acres of the manor of Coventry, Gloucester through its incorporation of thirty or so villages in 1483, and York as the result of its jurisdiction over an adjacent rural wapentake, the Ainsty. Population size in 1377 reflected the economic vitality of towns which had recovered from the depredations of the Black Death. Though population losses varied, it is likely that many of the greater towns lost a third to a half of their inhabitants between 1348 and 1349. Some, like Boston and Winchester, were already beyond their most successful phase by 1348–9 and retained their rank on the strength of earlier prosperity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Demand for urban goods and services There is a striking contrast between any analysis of changing demand in the late middle ages and that of earlier centuries. Changes in the period 600–1300, at least at the level of generalisation attempted in Chapter 5, may be summarised with the broad statement that the rising income of landlords, the growth of rural demand and the expansion of long-distance trade were all favourable to the growth of urban incomes over long periods of time. For most of that long period the evidence is not good enough for any much more subtle refinement. No comparable simplicity is viable for the shorter and much better documented period from 1300 to 1540, and it is difficult to generalise about the performance of late medieval urban economies with any firm assurance. As in the past, the urban households of landlords often contributed a large and distinctive part in the composition of demand affecting townsmen. This was not true only of the small episcopal or monastic towns where it is most obvious. One of the most striking instances is Westminster, where the royal Court with its associated institutions of government, together with Westminster Abbey, and the visitors to both, generated trade both in Westminster itself and in London nearby. Besides numerous manufacturing industries that could prosper in this context, the victualling trades conspicuously benefited. The court and the abbey generated an exceptional demand for meat and so created local employment in grazing and butchering. Heavy dependence upon the presence of large households was the lot of many smaller towns. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By the early fourteenth century London was pre-eminent among English urban communities. Whether ranked according to wealth or according to population, its pre-eminence was undisputed. Although London was larger, more populous and wealthier than other English towns, it was distinguished from them not only by size and volume: it developed, in the period covered here, characteristics which were distinctive. London was different not only in scale, but also in kind. This pre-eminence is reflected in the creation and for the most part survival of a remarkable series of administrative records. Although the chamberlain's records (including the apprentice and freedom registers) were destroyed in a fire in the seventeenth century, the City is rich in custumals, record books and wills and deeds enrolled in the Husting court from the mid-thirteenth century. The pleadings in the mayor's court survive from the end of the thirteenth century and the records of the meetings of the court of aldermen and court of Common Council from 1416. In addition to the City's official records, there survive thousands of testaments enrolled in the ecclesiastical courts, pre-Reformation records of some thirty of London's parish churches and material of great interest from the archives of the livery companies. Much of this material, particularly that from the city's own administration, has been edited and calendared. Moreover, in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries the Londoners developed a taste for ‘London chronicles’, i.e. histories of England written in the vernacular and divided into mayoral, rather than regnal, years. These chronicles throw some fitful light upon the course of English history, but rather more light on the thought-world of the Londoners who commissioned and bought them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A century ago the most famous of all Cambridge historians of the medieval English town declared that he was ‘far from thinking that any one history should be told of all our boroughs’. In some ways F. W. Maitland has proved even wiser and more prophetic than he knew. For many of its readers this present volume may itself suggest that a truly unified history of late medieval British towns is an unattainable ideal. The more intensive the research conducted on individual late medieval towns in recent years, the more apparent seems the singularity of each urban place. Because of the nature of the surviving evidence, nearly all late medieval boroughs tend to be studied as if they were autonomous islands in a non-urban sea – even if in fact their insularity was always more apparent than real. The economic fortunes of all major provincial English towns, from Exeter to Newcastle, were dependent not only on external political, administrative and social pressures but also on all-pervasive networks of national and international trade like those which made them increasingly vulnerable to competition from London merchants in the years before and after 1500. Moreover, when one is able, only too rarely, to examine variations in a town's population and productivity at extremely close quarters during a brief period of time, what tends to be revealed is not stability but a situation of continuous and even alarming short-term volatility. It was only after the middle ages were over that new economic and political structures, and eventually the processes of mass industrialisation, gradually began to impose a greater degree of social equilibrium within what had previously been a more or less permanently ‘crisis-ridden’ urban scene. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The problems of explaining change in Chinese economic history The difficulties of adapting explanations of economic change in European history to the Chinese experience have challenged some of the best specialists working on Chinese history throughout the twentieth century, as well as a number of equally gifted social theorists and comparativists. Many scholars have developed expectations for economic change in China based on readings of economic change in Europe because this is the better studied area. Indeed, until the last few decades, most general arguments about historical change in agrarian economies and the development of industrial economies had as their empirical base, either implicitly or explicitly, some assessment of European experiences of capitalism. When we take European developments as the norm, all other experiences appear to be abnormal. We begin to search for what went wrong in other parts of the world. This is especially the case for a civilization like China where improvements in agricultural production and handicrafts were joined to the spread of commercialization and urbanization beginning in the tenth century to create what one tradition of Japanese scholarship has labeled China's “modern age” (kinsei). The Japanese Marxist tradition, as we've seen in Timothy Brook's earlier chapter, disputes this assessment, but shares with interpretations of China's “modern” (by European standards) tenth-century economic development the challenge of explaining the absence of a European-like set of economic changes thereafter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

If one wonders what is the “sense” of their endless chase, why [businessmen] are never satisfied with what they have, and thus inevitably seem to act in senseless ways in terms of any purely worldly approach to life, they would occasionally respond, if they knew how to answer at all: “to provide for my children and grandchildren.” But, that argument not being peculiar to them but working just as well for the traditionalist, they would be more likely to respond in a simpler, most exact fashion, that business with its constant work had become “indispensable to their life.” That is in fact the only accurate explanation and brings out what is so irrational in this lifestyle from the point of view of personal happiness, that a man exists for his business, and not the other way around The Rise of the West? The West, capitalism, and the modern world-system are inextricably linked together – historically, systemically, intellectually. But exactly how, and why? This is a question on which there has been little consensus up to now, and there is indeed less and less. The imbrication of the three concepts (three realities?) reached its apogee in the nineteenth century. But how even do we delimit this nineteenth century? – 1815–1914? or 1789–1917? or 1763–1945? or even 1648–1968? [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

How do the fluctuations in economic activity affect the number of strikes? Obviously, through their effect on unemployment. When this goes down, when the working day gets longer in the factories, due to new orders, when workers are employed six or seven days a week, instead of four or five, they realize (without having to consult the statistics) that business is going well and they try to take advantage of the situation. Hence, strikes. When, on the contrary, unemployment soars, when workers see some of their fellow workers being dismissed, and the number of working hours and days curtailed, they hesitate to strike, at least over wage issues, for fear of being replaced by the army of the unemployed. The curve of strikes dwindles. Therefore, there is a relationship of cause and effect between the fluctuations of unemployment and those of strikes. HOW THE LABOR-MARKET ARGUMENT RUNS Labor-market theories of strikes claim that union behavior and the propensity to strike are heavily dependent on the state of the labor market. As early as the beginning of the twentieth century, in two seminal articles, Rist (1907, 1912) argued that there exists a strong relationship between the business cycle and strike activity, but that this relationship is mainly indirect, mediated by the state of the labor market. According to Rist (1912, pp. 748–9), “the rise or fall of strikes is related to the fluctuations of unemployment, because it is through the rise or fall of unemployment that industrial hardship or prosperity is felt by the workers.” [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The English Reformation was the creation of the English monarchy, more an act of state than in any other part of Europe apart from Scandinavia: the result of one man's obsessive quest for a male heir, rather than a nation's search for the way back to the Church of the Apostles. If Henry VIII had not sought a divorce from his first wife at the wrong moment for the Papacy, it is unlikely that he would have been propelled away from Rome, and it is unlikely that anyone else in England would have had the strength to force a break against his will or the will of his successors. Sixteenth-century England was one of the most centralised states in Europe; Henry VII (1485–1509) and Henry VIII (1509–47) had brought it out of a long political crisis to a remarkable degree of subservience to royal wishes. The kingdom which the Tudors controlled so effectively was largely a patchwork of rural societies. Where one can discern urban Reformations in England, they were small-scale and circumscribed by government policy, because English urban centres were nearly all small and limited in initiative by Continental standards. Only London could challenge comparison with the Imperial cities of Germany, and London's weight was never decisively or consistently thrown behind either conservatism or reform; both viewpoints were strongly represented among its clergy and people, but neither side could outface the other without the necessary lead from the Crown up the river at Westminster. Only occasionally did the English Crown's command of events falter. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The two centuries from the early fourteenth to the early sixteenth form one of the more enigmatic periods in European history. It was one of continuous warfare and civil disturbance, yet it saw the birth of humanism and the beginnings of the Renaissance. It has been represented as a period of economic depression, while at the same time the peasantry in some parts of Europe enjoyed a higher material living standard than at any other time in the Middle Ages (Fig. 7.1). It was an era of extreme bigotry, intolerance, and superstition, and at the same time of reason and enlightment. Its art showed a preoccupation with death, and at the same time it could display the lightness and grace which we associate with the Renaissance. These many contradictions spring from the horrific experiences of the Great Plague and its subsequent recurrences. The bubonic plague reached western Europe in the ships of the Genoese at the end of 1347. It came from the Crimea in the bloodstreams of infected rats, having been brought to the Crimea in the baggage of merchants from the Far East. Wherever the ships called, the pathogens of the plague went ashore with the crew and spread rapidly through the local population. Their vectors were the black rat and the flea, the former carrying and nurturing the bacillus, the latter distributing it to all whom it bit. Crowded, dirty, and rat-infested homes were ideal for its diffusion. It spread fast. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By the early fourteenth century the period of medieval economic growth was over; the population of Europe reached its peak at about this time, and the spatial pattern of cities was to develop no farther before the nineteenth century. POLITICAL GEOGRAPHY The political map of Europe had assumed a form which, with minor changes, it was to retain into modern times. Only in the Balkan peninsula, where the Byzantine empire was clinging desperately to its last foothold, were major changes still to come. In most of Europe political control was becoming more centralized, and kingship more absolute. Feudalism, as a mode of government, was weakening, though its outward symbols were as conspicuous as ever. Only in eastern Europe and Russia were feudal relationships tending to strengthen. In the Spanish peninsula the southward advance of the Christian states had reduced the Moorish kingdom of Granada to the Sierra Nevada and neighboring coastlands. To the north, Castile, having absorbed Léon and other petty states, reached from the Biscay coast in the north to the Strait of Gibraltar (Fig. 6.1). It dominated the Meseta, while around its periphery lay Navarre and Gascony, Aragon and Portugal. Only Castile still had a boundary with the Moors and still continued its centuries-old crusade against them. Portugal and Aragon were casting their eyes beyond the seas and were beginning that commercial expansion which was to take them to Asia and the New World. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The centuries from the early ninth to the early fourteenth saw the rise and splendor of medieval civilization. They saw also the emergence of a political organization of the land which underwent little fundamental change before the end of the eighteenth century: an increase in population which stretched to its limits the agricultural resources of Europe, and the development of a pattern of cities, that remained almost unaltered until the Industrial Revolution. Not until the nineteenth century do we encounter again a period of comparable development and change. THE INVASIONS The period began with another wave of invaders from beyond the core areas of western and central Europe. These came from Scandinavia, westward from the fjords of Norway and the plains of Denmark to the British Isles and France, eastward from Sweden to the shores of Russia and overland to the Black Sea (Fig. 5.1). The first of these sea raiders reached the shores of western Europe before the death of Charlemagne; the last landed on those of northern Britain two and a half centuries later. Their raids were but an episode in European history, but they had, locally at least, far-reaching consequences. The sudden explosion of Nordic peoples in the ninth century is as enigmatic as that of the Tartar peoples during previous centuries. It has been attributed to political struggles within Scandinavia, to overpopulation, and to environmental change in this climatically marginal land. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Until a few decades ago, historians of economic change in the sixteenth century concentrated predominantly on the towns, the centres of manufacture and nodal points for both regional and interregional trade. It was held that European expansion overseas, the opening of new markets and new sources of raw materials, above all the acquisition of the precious metals of South America, justified calling the age that of early capitalism. The fact that most people lived on the land and were engaged in exploiting it appeared immaterial in this context, inasmuch as the land and its use appeared still to be limited by ‘feudal’ conditions and thus could not be a part of the progressive developments which were to lead to the Industrial Revolution. However, a scheme that separated town from countryside demonstrated its inadequacy in explaining the emergence of the modern industrial societies of Europe when the attempt was made to transmit the results of a process lasting four centuries to the countries of the Third World. There those one-sided notions concerning industrialisation regularly led to failure. Thus we have come to realise how fundamental the transformation had to be which would enable an agrarian society to undertake industrial growth. A rural economy engaged in producing food, raw materials and in addition beasts as the only mobile source of energy, an economy which of necessity involved a large part of the population, needed to be transformed into an economically defined separate sector to be called agriculture – a sector capable of guaranteeing the provisioning of society in a planned and predictable fashion, but employing only a small part of the population. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

THE preconditions on the eastern side of the Atlantic helped shape the development of the transatlantic slave trade and slavery in the Americas. The Old World background features were numerous, and there are many facets that could be considered. To deal with all of them would require more space and time than is available. Nevertheless, it is possible to address the most significant features. These include the decision to use imported slaves in the Americas, the role of disease in that decision, the distinctions between small-scale and large-scale slavery, the role of sugar, and the availability of black slaves. At the time of their initial contacts with the peoples of the Americas, both the Spaniards and the Portuguese hoped to make use of the factory (feitoria, factoría) system, in which they would establish links with an existing trading network and exchange their goods for those of the local peoples. This was the policy the Portuguese had successfully followed as they progressed down the west coast of Africa. However, such a strategy depended on having a number of conditions present. These include a sufficiently developed trading network among the indigenous peoples and the presence of goods and commodities that the Europeans could acquire through exchange. Those conditions were present in Africa, but they were missing in the New World. As the Spaniards explored and conquered the islands of the Caribbean and the American mainland, they found that they could not establish a commercial network of trading factories, because no preexisting trading networks were available. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The family is the first refuge of the individual when the state fails him. The family was an open-ended, low-keyed, unemotional, authoritarian institution which served certain essential political, economic, sexual, procreative, and nurturant purposes. In 1676 the Reverend William Sampson was inducted into the living of Clayworth in Nottinghamshire. From the first he kept a diary in which he recorded significant events within his parish. Very wisely, he began by compiling a list of his parishioners. He counted 401 heads, and noted that there were ‘no popish recusants … nor are there (thanks to God) any other dissenters’. Twelve years later he compiled a second list, this time with greater care and ‘according to ye Order of Houses & Families, down ye North side of ye town, & up ye South-Side, and lastly those of Wyeston’, a hamlet nearby. In his second census he was at pains to give the occupations and interrelationships of those who made up the 91 households within the parish. The result is a complex pattern of familial structures. Of the 91 households the great majority were nuclear, each consisting of parents and children with at most a servant living in. Thirteen were headed by a widow or widower with children. There were only four single-person households, three of them widows, one with a servant living in. There was little evidence in Clayworth that the extended family included grandchildren and other relatives, but in no less than 26 there were servants, some of whom must have been farm labourers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Surprisingly enough no authors (except for Kosok … in estimating coastal population) have used the carrying capacity of the present area encompassed as a check on maximum population. Carrying capacity is, of course, an optimal concept – what could be if all constituent factors operated optimally. Human populations cannot expand forever. Densities are ultimately limited by the environment's ability to sustain them. One of the principal limits to population is the supply of essential foodstuffs. The population of Europe in the years prior to the Black Death in the mid-fourteenth century appears to have surpassed the limit and was suffering from a series of inadequate harvests and famine before the devastating epidemics of 1348. The population of Central Mexico under the Aztecs also seems to have exceeded the carrying capacity of its agricultural economy. Sherburne F. Cook has suggested that extensive practice of human sacrifice by the Aztecs was an implicit societal attempt to redress the balance between inhabitants and land. Study of the maximum carrying capacity of an ecological system can assist the researcher in establishing population bounds, but, as we shall see, there are many variables in the equation, and the estimated limits are far from precise. The human factor adds a major complication in assessing the ecological potential of a region. No two groups of people are exactly the same. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

US Consulate, Alexandria, Egypt, — —, 1896 Sir: The present epidemic of cholera in Egypt emphasizes the importance which attaches to international sanitation and the geography of disease. Introduction Throughout history, the fear of disease has been well founded. The Book of Revelation relates the story of the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse. The picture revealed by the opening of the seals is grim indeed, but it was old even then. The first and second riders on their white and red horses represent wars of conquest and civil war. The third horseman with his black horse represents famine. The fourth horse, ridden by Death, is ‘sickly pale’. Death has an additional right – to kill by pestilence. But, as the twentieth century has progressed, so the pace of the pale horse has slackened in many parts of the world under the onslaught of medical science and the global vaccination programmes of the World Health Organization, while war and famine have continued to surge ahead. Over the last 100 years, the spectacular falls in mortality from the classic infectious diseases, coupled with the apparent successes of global campaigns against smallpox and malaria, have brought a sense of security. Plagues and epidemics could be viewed as essentially historical phenomena, scourges which had devastated past human populations, but which had largely been eliminated by the advent of vaccines and antibiotics. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

‘Revolution’ in its fullest sense should mean a vital transformation of society, something far beyond any ordinary shaking-up, a decisive transfer of power both political and economic. This can happen very seldom. But Europe has known many lesser eruptions, resembling it in some measure. Overt class conflict has been only occasional, disharmony among classes or social groups has been ubiquitous, and in all these collisions its presence can be traced. They have been of many species; and with Europe's always uneven development growing more and more uneven, forms of revolt belonging to distinct stages of history might be going on in different regions at the same time. Europe's mutability must be traced to fundamental features of its makeup. Underlying them has been its duality, the discordant nature it derived from its Roman-Christian and Germanic-feudal ancestry. Both strands made for close interweaving of state and society, in most of Asia joined by mechanical, external clamps. Both gave rise to a wealth of political or politically relevant institutions of all kinds, which forces of change could work on and through, even if often obstructed by them. In Europe also, unlike most of Asia, many autonomous polities packed close together meant that exterior factors were always liable to intensify internal frictions. In medieval times movements of revolt included those of peasants against landowners, towns against lords, urban workers against employers in centres of nascent capitalism, peoples against foreign domination. Most strident of all was the example set by the dominant class itself, the feudal lords. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Before and after Let us first take a look at the birth and death columns which appear regularly in our newspapers: most of the announcements are to do with elderly people; there are some deaths of young adults or children, of course, usually the victims of accidents, but the typical announcement is that of the funeral of a widow of about 80, attended by two of her children and about four or five grandchildren. We have hardly any similar evidence for the sixteenth century, with the exception of a few family records, but by using the method of family reconstitution we could find analogous cases. To leave behind one or two children and four or five grandchildren, if one was lucky enough to live to 80, was not unusual. At first sight, there seems to be little difference in the composition of families and in the kinship relations: in the sixteenth century, as in the twentieth, the dominant type is the nuclear family, made up of father, mother and children. The gap between generations has not changed much either: about twenty-five to thirty years, as a result of a relatively high age of marriage; western Europe has never known adolescent marriage: in India, in 1891, the average age of girls on marriage was only 12½, while in western Europe it was as high as 23. The maximum life span has not changed much either: in the twentieth century as in the sixteenth, this does not exceed 115 years; and the reported cases of extreme old age owe more to the lack of official records or to general ignorance, than to the quality of life or the progress of medical science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]