Els mercaders catalans i la cultura de l’Edat Mitjana al Renaixement

Abstract

The study of medieval merchants has often suffered from a distortion derived from the image of pre-capitalist economic agents whose behaviour is inspired by typically bourgeois cultural values. On the basis of a more rigorous definition of this social group, this article uses the case of medieval Barcelona in order to develop an hypothesis concerning the evolution of merchants throughout the late medieval cri­sis and the beginning of the Renaissance. The analysis seeks to relate predominant models of social mobility with the political identity of the medieval city and the culture characteristic of merchants. Thus, the article establishes a dynamic model in which the social role of the merchant-entrepreneur open to risks is relativised with reference to a model of social ascent which is patrician-rentier and ultimately aristo­cratic. This process is interpreted in the light of the particular evolution of the Crown of Aragon through the late medieval crisis and the following centuries, stres­sing, on the one hand, the precariousness of Barcelona as an economic centre, and, on the other hand, the political failure of the model of cooperation between feudal monarchy and autonomous merchants which had characterised the period of expan­sion. From this context, the cultural evolution of the merchants of Barcelona is interpreted by analysing inventories of their libraries. We stress a remarkable level of reading during the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The moral universe of these merchants can be characterised by the combination of Christian piety and a kind of utilitarian attitude, which seemed to be regulated by the clerical discourse of influential authors like Francesc Eiximenis. With the political decadence of mer­chants as a social group, and in the context of the full Renaissance, there was howe­ver a consolidation of their tendency towards cultural mediocrity.