Spanish Merchants and the Wool Trade in the Sixteenth Century

Abstract

INTERNATIONAL COMMERCE has fascinated historians of early modern Europe for generations, in part, at least, because there was a widespread conviction that commerce was the motor of economic change in Europe, contributing to its expansion and eventual domination of the rest of the world. More recently, historians of economy and society have turned to other areas of study, particularly to agriculture, demography, and the formation of social classes. Yet international commerce remains a crucial topic, and, despite all the work that has been done, there are still important gaps in our knowledge of commerce in general and of the ways in which merchants carried on their business. One gap involves the activities of Spanish merchants at home and abroad and their contributions to the development of mercantile capitalism in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. In recent decades, exploitation of the archive of Sim6n Ruiz, the great sixteenth-century Castilian merchant, has done much to improve our knowledge of Spanish business affairs. Correspondence between Old Castile and Florence, Lisbon, Antwerp, and elsewhere by Ruiz and his associates provides ample testimony of the extension and importance of their interests.' Sim6n Ruiz was part of a network of Spanish merchants scattered through Europe whose activities predated the rise of Spanish political power and the acquisition of the American empire.2 Ruiz himself acted primarily as an importer of foreign manufactured goods to Spain. Inter-