Kathryn L. Reyerson

Commercial law and merchant disputes: Jacques Coeur and the law of Marque

In the decree of condemnation of 29 May 1453, issued by King Charles VII of France, among the many charges leveled against his Argentier Jacques Coeur was the following: “And in addition the said Coeur was found charged by the said information to have exacted and unduly obtained several large sums of deniers from the marques of the Genoese, of Provence and of Catalonia. . . .”1 The law of marque was an area of medieval international law which involved reprisal and reimbursement to merchants whose goods were unjustly seized by pirates or privateers or whose debts were not repaid. Victims could appeal to the political authority of the perpetrators for compensation, but should their requests go unhonored, they might address their complaints to their own political authority, often a king, or a town which could accord what was called a letter of marque permitting the victim to seek retribution for his wrong by penalizing compatriots of the perpetrators. In the fifteenth century reprisals were at times transformed into taxation on trade to generate funds to pay compensation to victims. This remedy instituted a bureaucratic approach, eliminating the thorny problem of whether one was pirate or privateer/corsair, thus illegal or sanctioned, and permitting an enterprising merchant like Jacques Coeur who appears to have had nothing of the pirate about him, though much of the insider trader/extortionist/manipulator of finance and co-mingler of royal and personal funds, to profit through financial speculation as well as in the capacity of victim.2 Such an evolution also allowed for

The Adolescent Apprentice/Worker in Medieval Montpellier

This study explores the experiential dimensions of apprenticeship and work as part of the adolescent life phase in fourteenth-century Montpellier on the basis of approximately two hundred surviving notarial contracts. The strong role of family in apprenticeship of young men and women, the acquisition of specific occupational skills, character formation, and the well-being of the apprentice/worker are discussed. Apprenticeship for Montpellier youth represented a lengthy (early teens to late twenties) and elaborate transition between childhood and adulthood.

Montpellier and Genoa: The dilemma of dominance

Abstract During the high and late middle ages, Genoa was a dominant force in Mediterranean commerce. This study examines the relationship between Genoa and the Southern French town of Montpellier in three historical eras: the twelfth century to about 1180; from the 1180s to about 1270; and from 1270 through the mid-fourteenth century. In the first era Genoa, along with Pisa, exercised economic hegemony over the coast of Southern France. In the second period, Montpellier gradually emancipated itself from Genoese commercial control. In the third era interaction between Montpellier and Genoa became increasingly complex because of the growth of French influence in Languedoc. The French monarchy sought to control southern French commerce with a requirement in 1278 that Italian merchants reside in Nimes and trade through Aigues-Mortes, and later in the 1330s with the offer of a transport monopoly over goods from southern France to Genoese admirals Doria and Grimaldi. Montpellier resisted these French efforts, invoking its commercial independence and political allegiance to the Majorcan king. By the mid-fourteenth century Genoese pretensions to commercial dominance over Montpellier were hollow reminders of the past, but the Genoese legacy of business technology remained strong.

Changes in Testamentary Practice at Montpellier on the Eve of the Black Death

The Black Death arrived in southern France, at Marseille, in January 1348. It then spread westward, reaching Carcassonne by February and Perpignan by March. There is no exact chronology of the outbreak of the plague in Montpellier. However, the disease probably appeared by March 1348, since it spread along trade routes and the town was considerably closer to Marseille than both Carcassonne and Perpignan. The recorded toll of the Black Death in Montpellier at first seems great enough to account for any changes in the behavior of the population in the plague year. For this commercial and financial capital of Lower Languedoc, 1348 was generally termed “lan de la mortalidat.”

Urban–Rural Connections

There were close ties betw een town and country in Montpellier and its region. Networks and connections linked the urban market to rural producers. Woman and men were involved in agricultural production. The case study of the mercer Bernarda de Cabanis reveals interesting connections with women of the agricultural milieu of the Montpellier hinterland. Bernarda lent money to the wives of cultivators and accepted in-kind reimbursement in mercery. She trained agricultural women as mercers in apprenticeship. She also marketed mercery in Montpellier. The question is raised of whether her entrepreneurship had philanthropic overtones as a kind of microcredit. Bernarda’s actions in lending and teaching a trade permitted women of modest cultivator status to acquire marketable skills.

Women of the Marketplace: Horizontal and Vertical Links

The central Herbaria Square of Montpellier was the site of retail activity of market sellers or hucksters who set up their stalls in the early morning, renting a small space daily from the owners and renters of houses around the square. Litigation over control of the square between Agnes’s grandson and the consuls and king of Majorca has left witness testimonies by the square’s market sellers, 15 women testifying for the side of Agnes’s family. Through the voices of these hucksters are revealed a stable, long-lasting community of women who sold goods on the square and benefitted from the vertical ties they entertained with elite and middling women whose protection and involvement may have contributed to their stability and modest success.

A Community of Prostitutes in Campus Polverel

In a suburb of Montpellier on the road to the sea, one finds a community of prostitutes who rented rooms and owned houses in several streets in the neighborhood of Campus Polverel. Many of them were immigrants to Montpellier. They were connected to urban officials, auctioneers, who owned houses in Campus Polverel as well and rented them rooms. These women supported each other, bought chests and clothing from each other and the auctioneers, and seemingly made a living. This is a marginal community that was legitimate in Montpellier, where prostitution was regulated but tolerated in the later Middle Ages. The last chapter suggests a link between elite women like Agnes and these same prostitutes.

Agnes’s Networks of Property

Agnes’s will provides insights about her fortune in money and real property. The detailed testamentary bequests of Agnes’s will reveal significant real property holdings along with monetary gifts to grandchildren. In addition to her family mansion located in the center of town and family rental properties on the central Herbaria Square, she had two significant clusters of real property, one near a city gate and the other in the suburbs near the church of Saint Denis. Agnes chose three sets of universal heirs representing each of her daughters’ lines; she endowed them with the responsibility of funding the bequests to their individual family members. Family ties were reinforced by the distribution of these holdings to her survivors and by the topographic clustering of real property.

Agnes’s Networks of Philanthropy

Agnes’s testamentary philanthropy and her involvement over decades in a charitable organization called the Ladies of Wednesday, which raised alms to feed the sick poor in hospitals, permit the exploration of networks of philanthropy. Agnes was a strong supporter of marginal women through her bequests to convents of repentant women. She endorsed the Franciscan movement—her confessor was a friar—and chose burial at the Franciscan convent. The convent was located in the same suburb as Campus Polverel. The church attached to the hospital of Saint Eloi, where the elite Ladies of Wednesday mustered to go out into the town to collect alms and provide succor to the poor, was also in this suburb. The commitment of elite women like Agnes to charitable activity as well as patronage sustained Montpellier society in the decades prior to the Black Death.

Agnes’s Family Networks

Agnes’s family networks are the topic of this chapter. Agnes and Petrus had three daughters, and Agnes in her extensive will, 40 years after we first meet her in the surviving documents, mentioned 15 grandchildren. Two of her daughters had predeceased her, leaving six and eight children. One of her son-in-laws was dead by the time Agnes made her will. Her daughters and granddaughters made impressive marriages, greatly enlarging the family circle and the Bossones’s family networks. Her sons-in-law and grandsons were involved in business and the law. The horizontal ties across differing occupations of the Montpellier urban elite—merchants, changers, drapers, legal specialists—created an impressive family web that would have anchored the Bossones at the top of Montpellier society.