Mediterranean trade in the Pyrenees: Italian merchants in Puigcerdà, 1300-1360.

Abstract

Based on an examination of surviving notarial evidence from the Pyrenean town of Puigcerdà, this article investigates the ties between the inland mountainous regions of the Mediterranean and broader Mediterranean trade net- works in the later Middle Ages. It shows that, following the rapid expansion of cloth production in the Catalan Pyrenees during the late thirteenth century, Italian (mainly Tuscan) merchants, some themselves from smaller interior towns, began travelling not only to the major Mediterranean coastal ports but also, through them, into the inner Catalan Pyrenees, where they sold cloth-dyeing materials from at least 1302 on. The commercial activity of these merchants appears to have grown during the first decades of the fourteenth century as cloth production in Puigcerdà continued to grow and persisted at least into the 1360s. Through a comparison between the number of Italian merchants operating in Puigcerdà and those in the smaller Catalan town of Castelló d’Empúries, this article also reveals that the level of access to Mediterranean products and trade in inland mountainous regions was significantly lower than that of the coast. Both towns appear to have been part of one interconnected network that saw some of the same merchants trading in Puigcerdà and in Castelló. This network was likely based in Perpignan, where a high number of the Italian merchants resided. The number of Italian dyesellers in coastal Castelló far outstripped those in Puigcerdà, suggesting that while the inner Pyrenees were tied to Mediterranean trade, these economic connections were less dense than those in coastal areas, and more limited by local geography.