Preliminary Programme

In this paper, I shalll first examine the urban elites'
commercial activities in the Spanish Mediterranean ports,
particularly in Barcelona: what kind of commodities these
elites wanted to trade; which destinations and routes they
had in mind; and, above all, what kinds of commercial
networks they were able to organize.

In the second part of the paper, I shall look at the
consequences of these commercial activities at the social
level, one of them being the enrichment and the upliftment
of new families. Such a process generated new political
aspirations, which in turn created social tensions and even
serious conflicts with the old ruling classes in the late
Middle Ages. (Show less)

In all and each one of the Castilian cities the oligarchies aspire along the Last Middle Age to control the urban power. However, these elites, configured and consolidated along this period, are different in each city. They depend ultimately on the specific economic, social and political processes of each urban system.
In an entire group of cities, generally located in the north half of the Castilian Kingdom, the patricians were compound fundamentally for merchants, money changers, transport companies and artisans that constitute, already at the end of the Middle Age, an important financial class. As such, they don't only monopolize the urban springs of power, but rather of years behind come also controlling the economic activities of their city. They are detected controlling the nets of urban supply, exercising as contractors and exporters, as investors in municipal and real, sure rents, credits, transports, banking and loan.
In spite of it, the analysis in its ways of life throws similarities and uniformities with other elites “noble” very significant. The merchants also look for to be meant of the rest of their neighboroughs becoming joint in a way of life and of a specific mentality, distinctive of their condition of dominant class. And, the same as it happens in other cases, in the purest logic of the feudal system to the one that belongs the medieval city entirely, this form of life and mentality seeks to reproduce that of the dominant feudal class. It is not, therefore, bourgeois, but deeply aristocratic.
The analysis in the ways of life and social aspirations of these “gentleman-merchants” it will demonstrate to what extent the grade of “aristocratization” of the urban elites in the XVth century Castile was deep (Show less)

The economic growth in the cities of Valence Kingdom during the XVth century allowed the consolidation of a merchant elite. The behaviour of this group in characterized by strategies of social advancement, like the imitation of aristocratic manners and the entry into the urban oligarchy power.
My paper will analyze the principal examples of these strategies in order to raise three questions:
1. The characterization of noble uses into the merchant elite like an individual signs or like a group action.
2. The chronology of social advancement of merchants and its concretion like an evolution of each generation of merchants or like a general evolution of Valencian urban society, especially since the half of XVth century until the 'Germanias' revolt at the beginning of XVIth century.
3. The problem if the fascination by noble manners was an alternative to the development of merchant profession or only a complementary element for the commercial and financial activities. (Show less)

Talking of the treason of the medieval bourgeoisie was a formula by which Ferdinand Braudel summed up a change in the activities and values of the ruling group in the lower-Medieval cities in different Mediterranean areas at the turn of the 15th to the 16th century. This supposed a personal route to ennoblement and the abandonment of the entrepreneurial character that was typical of these and which had, until then, sustained economic growth. The concept, upheld by historians such as Jaume Vicens Vives or Bernard Chevalier who applied it to Spain and France, was later varied by historians who, through economic, political and social studies, proposed a major continuity in the ideal of the life of the bourgeoisie. This view did not relate the economic upheavals of the end of the Middle Ages with a radical change in the ruling urban group. Nevertheless, in recent years, the mutation of the values of the ruling group has again come to be seen as one of the axes of the economic slowdown and consequent social change. Viewed from new angles, such as cultural history, this is seen as one of the basic causes of the backwardness of countries such as Catalonia in the face of the new challenges that arose at the turn of the 15th to the 16th century. With these different historiographic interpretations well implanted, the existence of important heuristic sources facilitates a highly conclusive revision of the theme, especially through following different prosopographies in diverse moments and chronologies. (Show less)