THE ECONOMIC AND SOCIAL DEVELOPMENT OF THE BALTIC COUNTRIES FROM THE FIFTEENTH TO THE SEVENTEENTH CENTURIES

Abstract

IN this paper I wish to present the main trends of the development of the Baltic countries for the period from the fifteenth to the first half of the seventeenth century. This subject has been examined more than once by historians, but it now needs re-assessment, on the basis of new documentation which is both voluminous and growing. I also wish to stress, perhaps rather more categorically than earlier scholars, the significance of the interdependence of the developments of western and eastern Europe. It existed already in this period, even though these developments proceeded along different lines. Finally, I want to show, by comparative methods, where the economic and social developments of the Baltic countries were similar and where they were different. I would like to recall, briefly, the essential changes which occurred in England and in the Low Countries in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, that is, in those western countries which had strong economic links with the Baltic region. I am thinking here of the great economic and social crisis which showed itself in the cessation of agricultural expansion, or even in regression, and also in the partial break-up of large estates. In England, sheep-farming developed both on seigneurial and on peasant property. In the northern Low Countries, the peasants concentrated more and more on cattle-farming and on dairy produce which they marketed in the towns and in the neighbouring countries. Much the same happened, if not as extensively, in western Germany, where the great monasteries in particular developed sheep-farming. In Germany, too, there was the development of the cultivation of plants used for industrial purposes. The rural economy of central and northern Italy experienced a renewed expansion from the beginning of the fifteenth century. Here, the cultivation of the silk-worm was introduced, as well as the cultivation of rice and other plants which were formerly imported from the east. As Postan, Schreiner and other scholars have shown, the crisis in cereal cultivation had already started at the beginning of the fourteenth century, as is shown by the fall in the price of corn. This crisis was greatly intensified over the whole of Europe by the great epidemics of the fourteenth century. The epidemics caused not only a fall in the number of consumers, but, even more