Institutional Change and Economic Transformation in the Pyrenees in the Late 13th and Early 14th Centuries

This paper argues that institutional changes, connected to state-building and territorial warfare, were among the leading factors shaping economic change (positive and negative) in the later middle ages. It demonstrates the importance of this factor by tracing the economic transformation of the Pyrenean town of Puigcerdà, and the surrounding valley of Cerdanya in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, primarily through notarial evidence. The separation of the Crown of Mallorca from the Crown of Aragon in 1276, which created a boundary and removed trade privileges, and a 1291 tax instituted to fund defensive walls in a period of tension between these two realms led the merchants, artisans and even peasants of the valley of Cerdanya to entirely reorient their commercial networks, and the focus of their local artisanal and agricultural activity. The new political boundary between the two realms reduced the profitability of the region’s prior agricultural focus on raising livestock for export to major cities such as Barcelona. Even more dramatically, the imposition of a tax in 1291 caused merchants who had previously imported northern and Languedocian cloth into Puigcerdà and then re-exported it into other Catalan towns to almost immediately abandon a route through Puigcerdà in favor of a route through another Pyrenean town, La Seu d’Urgell. Cut off from the profitable business of importing and redistributing cloth, the town's merchants quickly turned to investing in the local cloth industry, even importing cloth-workers directly from Champagne to dye woolen cloth in Puigcerdà. Over the following decades, the economy of the town of Puigcerdà became overwhelmingly specialized in the production of woolen cloth, and the export of this cloth into Catalonia. At the same time, cereals and livestock for meat consumption declined as the primary commodities produced by Cerdanya’s peasants, in favor of wool.