HIST-338 Lecture Notes - Lecture 38: Giovanni Villani
24 Nov 2020
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Document Summary
There was little surplus left to generate fresh capital. As a consequence, food production fell perilously close to subsistence level. Signs of trouble had already emerged by the middle of the thirteenth century when occasionally low yields revealed how perilous was the balance between europe"s population and its food supply. Apart from territories beset by war, the tentativeness of the food supply became evident first on the farmlands most recently brought under cultivation during the economic expansion of the twelfth century. Even whole governments became entangled in the credit crisis, The cycle of indebtedness was hardly inexorable, the string of bank failures and commercial collapses in the first half of the fourteenth century is striking: the famed bardi and peruzzi banks of florence collapsed spectacularly in the 1340s. They were soon followed by the riccardi bank of lucca, whose massive loans to edward iii had kept the english government afloat for years.
