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In chancelleries and other facilities concerned with the authoring of official documents, collections of mo…

It appears to be one of the paradoxes of medieval history that the order of Francis of Assisi, of all groups, also made innovative contributions toward the justification of commercial activities and toward a sophisticated view of them. But the works of the controversial Franciscan Spiritual Peter John Olivi (d. 1298) in particular show that poverty-grounded spirituality and the Scholastic justification of property, commerce, and wealth were not necessarily mutually exclusive. Of especial interest is a reflection by Olivi on particular loan transactions, in an insight seen by M. Wolff as the "prime source," which undertook "in the literature of economic ethics something approaching a cautiou…

Augustine's sermon on Luke 16:9 ( Sermo 113) constitutes a fundamental text of patristic social and economic ethics. Augustine's commentary portrays the possession and acquisition of earthly goods as a negl…

Until the advent of industrialization, economic activities were primarily restricted to agrarian production. In addition to decisive turning points such as the emergence and subsequent crisis of manor…

In the Middle Ages, as in antiquity, the concept of oeconomia was related to the order and administration of the household, and thus to an elementary form of social life. It is indicative that neither a general…

Trade in the Frankish Realm The intensity and the organization of trade in the centuries that followed the collapse of the Roman Empire are the subject of a long scholarly debate that has predominantly rev…

More space must be allowed the theory of the just price according to Thomas Aquinas and his school, in view of its significance both for discussions at the time and for mo…

Early medieval legislation in respect…

In accordance with their systematic character, the summary commentaries of those 13th- and 14th-century theologians in particular who had connections with Paris (→Scholasticism) took up the initiative…

The Early Middle Ages The term "commercial revolution" (R. Lopez) has become established for the time between the mid-11th and 13th centuries, since in this period the economic, social, and political coor…

As written witnesses to matters of a legal nature, official documents constitute both a principal historical source and a profound cultural phenomenon of the Middle Ages. In principle, an official doc…

The theory and practice of economics in the Middle Ages developed on the foundation of and in reaction to understandings owed to classical antiquity. Until the Late Middle Ages, economic doctrine was influenced by the idea of the oikos ("…

At the time of its greatest expansion and internal consolidation in Europe, the Carolingian Empire (→Carolingians) occupied a central area of dominion in both political and geographical terms. In the …

The employment of literacy and the development of an ordered world of writing in the legal and administrative realm in the Middle Ages is an inheritance from the Greco-Roman world (→the Christianizati…

In the centuries that followed upon the collapse of the Western Roman Empire, the highly sophisticated organization of trade that had existed in ancient times gradually disintegrated. While Byzantium …

The central building blocks for the formulation of the Church's basic stance toward economic questions were meanwhile subsumed under the varieties and definitions of usury ( usura). The early medieval prohibition of usury and …

Medieval trade was in many respects a continuation of the economic practices of the Roman Empire. In spite of the Arab expansion, the primary economic zone of the Latin West still lay in the Mediterra…

"Business texts" (Geschäftsschriftgut), sometimes used as an umbrella term (e.g. by A. von Brandt) and sometimes as a complementary term (e.g. by H. Patze), are differentiated from diplomatic document…