Portugal in a European context: essays on taxation and fiscal policies in late medieval and early modern Western Europe, 1100-1700

340 Pages·2023·5.948 MB·English

by  Rodrigo da Costa Dominguez, Amélia Aguiar Andrade

PALGRAVE STUDIES IN
THE HISTORY OF FINANCE
Portugal in a
European Context
Essays on Taxation
and Fiscal Policies
in Late Medieval
and Early Modern
Western Europe,
1100–1700
edited by
Rodrigo da Costa Dominguez
Amélia Aguiar Andrade
Palgrave Studies in the History of Finance
Series Editors
D’Maris Coffman, Bartlett Faculty of Built Environment, University
College London, London, UK
Tony K. Moore, ICMA Centre, Henley Business School, University of
Reading, Reading, UK
Martin Allen, Department of Coins and Medals, Fitzwilliam Museum,
University of Cambridge, Cambridge, UK
Sophus Reinert, Harvard Business School, Cambridge, MA, USA
The study of the history of financial institutions, markets, instruments and
concepts is vital if we are to understand the role played by finance today.
At the same time, the methodologies developed by finance academics can
provide a new perspective for historical studies. Palgrave Studies in the
History of Finance is a multi-disciplinary effort to emphasise the role
played by finance in the past, and what lessons historical experiences have
for us. It presents original research, in both authored monographs and
edited collections, from historians, finance academics and economists, as
well as financial practitioners.
·
Rodrigo da Costa Dominguez
Amélia Aguiar Andrade
Editors
Portugal
in a European Context
Essays on Taxation and Fiscal Policies in Late
Medieval and Early Modern Western Europe,
1100–1700
Editors
Rodrigo da Costa Dominguez Amélia Aguiar Andrade
Interdisciplinary Centre of Social Institute of Medieval
Sciences Studies—NOVA FCSH
University of Minho Nova University of Lisbon
Braga, Portugal Lisboa, Portugal
ISSN 2662-5164 ISSN 2662-5172 (electronic)
Palgrave Studies in the History of Finance
ISBN 978-3-031-06226-1 ISBN 978-3-031-06227-8 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-06227-8
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Foreword
For millennia, states have been preoccupied with their own formation
in contexts of threats to security, internal conflicts with aristocratic and
urban, ecclesiastical hierarchies with rebellions, peasantries and a need to
integrate diverse populations into polities of compliant subjects. Histo-
ries of when, how and why between 1453 and 1815 hundreds of ruling
regime and elites from all parts of Europe were conquered by rivals
or merged by agreements (often cemented by dynastic marriages) into
empires, dominions, realms, princedoms, churches, republics and cities
fill university libraries.
Led by North’s restoration of insights first elaborated by the German
historical school, the dominant concern for the modern generation of
economic historians has been to investigate connexions between insti-
tutions and long-run economic development. As economists, they have
unfortunately remained under-informed about the origins and evaluation
of promotional, neural and malign states behind the constructions, main-
tenance and political destruction of the institutions selected by economic
theory as preconditions for the supply of three indispensable public goods
for private investment, the extension of markets and innovation—namely,
external security, internal order and protection from predation.
Nevertheless, the reorientation of economic history to accord a central
weight to institutions has implied a re-engagement with traditions of
political history concerned with state formation. Attempts by economists
to cut out or through that body of scholarship by resorting to analyses
v
vi FOREWORD
based on rational choice, rent-seeking behaviour by elites’ constitutions
for freedom exposés of the logical errors of mercantilism and the futility
of warfare could only be dismissed by historians as ontologically superfi-
cial and by econometricians (as the frontiers of that enticing discipline) as
theoretically naïve.
Economic historians have anticipated that a middle range of grounded
generations about paths and patterns of state formation could emerge
(as Schumpeter suggested) from comparative investigations into path-
dependent variations in the relative fiscal and financial capacities of
European states to fund the provision of external securities, internal order
and political stability required for the formation and operation of an
interrelated set of institutions required to promote and sustain economic
growth over long spans of time.
To date, such comparisons have been limited to a small sample of states
that happen to have preserved records of amounts of taxes, loans and
credits that some central governments assessed and borrowed as funds
available to spend for purposes that can be retrospectively recognised as
promotional for the growth of economies. Furthermore, most publica-
tions on the “rise of Europe’s fiscal and financial states” not only exclude
important countries such as Portugal and major provinces of modern-
day Italy, but work with a chronology that virtually ignores the medieval
foundations of European states.
The editors of this volume are to be thanked and congratulated by
those of us who have explored the tax revenues, loans, credits and fiscal
institutions for later centuries, that possess both data we have fortunate
enough to access, and primary sources for the study of institutions. Their
evidence reveals that their origins can be traced back to the Middle Ages.
Narratives comparing the rise, decline and disappearance of European
states that neglect influences, developments and divergences that origi-
nated in this period are seriously under-specified. All the essays in this
book go a long way towards repairing the intellectual myopias of trun-
cated chronologies and expertly qualify our views on the formation of
European states and Portugal’s insertion in this context.
London, UK Patrick K. O’Brien, FBA
Professor Emeritus
of the University of London
FOREWORD vii
Patrick K. O’Brienis Centennial Professor of Global Economic History at the
London School of Economics (retired). He was Director from 1990–1998 of
the Institute of Historical Research and before that Reader in Economic History
and Professorial Fellow of St. Antony’s College, Oxford. His research interests
include world trade, technology and historiographical traditions; historiographical
traditions in the construction of global economic history; the evolution of inter-
continental trade from Roman Empire to 1846; macro inventions and macro
inventors in English cotton textiles from Kay to Cartwright; the economics
of European expansion overseas from the conquest of Ceuta to the Impe-
rian Meridian; the formation and efficiency of fiscal states in Europe and Asia
1500–1914.
Contents
Introduction 1
Amélia Aguiar Andrade and Rodrigo da Costa Dominguez
Medieval and Early Modern Portuguese State Finances:
Sources and Evidence
The Study of Medieval Fiscal History in Portugal: Results
and Problems (1951–2020) 17
Amélia Aguiar Andrade
The Collection of Annates in Portugal During the Papacy
of Avignon, c. 1316–1377: Just Another Case of Apostolic
Tax-Collecting in a Realm at the Back of Beyond? 45
Mário Farelo
Is the Economy an Issue? Kings and Economic Legislation
in Medieval Portugal 67
Hermínia Vasconcelos Vilar
A Difficult Transition: Portuguese State Finances Between
Later Medieval and Early Modern Times, c. 1415–1530 91
Rodrigo da Costa Dominguez
ix
x CONTENTS
Taxes and Fiscal Institutions in a Maritime Empire,
15th–16th Centuries: A Comparative View of Overseas’
Territories Under the Portuguese Crown 115
Susana Münch Miranda
Portugal in a Broader Perspective: The Later Middle Ages
and Some Remarks for a Transition Towards the Early
Modern Period 139
Amélia Aguiar Andrade and Rodrigo da Costa Dominguez
The Development of State Finance: Portugal in European
Context
Introduction—Constructing the Modern Fiscal States:
Ruptures, Changes, and Permanencies 151
Rodrigo da Costa Dominguez and Tony K. Moore
The ‘Resource Curse’ of Mediaeval English State Finance,
C.1155–1453 159
Tony K. Moore
A History of Taxation in the Kingdom of France (Twelfth
to Fifteenth Centuries): Policies, Rules and Practices 177
Florent Garnier
Fiscal Tradition and Innovation in Italy, 1350–1650 201
Luciano Pezzolo
A Treasury in Transition: Changes and Continuity
in the Management of Castilian State Finances During
the Reign of Isabella I (1474–1504) 219
Pablo Ortego Rico
Public Debt in Late Medieval Crown of Aragon: A(Nother)
Financial Revolution? 247
Albert Reixach Sala and Pere Verdés Pijuan
Why Holland Had a Financial Revolution, but Flanders
and Brabant Did not 279
Marjolein ’t Hart