[Sca-cooks] OT -- 15th century economic and prices

[Stanza693 at wmconnect.com]

In a message dated 12/12/2007 10:55:19 PM Mountain Standard Time, Stefan li 
Rous passed on the following inquiry:


> Please remember that his not on this list so CC any replies to him at  
> tandrad at emory.edu  as well.
> 
> Thanks,
>    Stefan
> 
> =====
> From:       tandrad at emory.edu
> Subject:     Medieval Economies -- Query from a Historian
> Date:     December 11, 2007 10:26:33 AM CST
> To:       stefan at florilegium.org
> 
> Dear Mr. Harris,
> 
> In doing some research on the medieval conquest of the Canary Islands
> of 1402, I came across your wonderful website. I have had considerable
> difficulty trying to imagine what 7000 French livres must have been
> worth in the early fifteenth century and found extremely little in the
> scholarly literature. Your site seemed to me to be one of the few
> places where people were thinking about what the medieval economy
> _felt_ like, or how it might have been experienced.
> 
> (The reason I'm interested in the sum of 7000 livres is because that's
> how much the French Norman Knight Jean de Bethencourt had available
> (by selling his feudal domaines and a pirated ship) to fund his
> conquest of the Canaries. It must have been a very large sum, but it
> wasn't enough to finish the job, and he had to ask for help from the
> King of Spain, which is why the Canaries became Spanish and why so
> much of the New World is Spanish-speaking.)
> 
> Do you have any advice about how one might gain this kind of
> understanding? Any articles or publications that might shed light on
> this issue would be most appreciated.
> 
> Thank you!
> 
> Tonio
> Tonio Andrade
> Assistant Professor of History
> Emory University
> 
> 

Hi, Stefan. 

First, the Obligatory food comment:

In 1402,
a ca'ntara of red wine cost 23 maravedi'es
a ca'ntara of white wine cost 40 mrs.
a rabbit cost 3 mrs.
(p. 141, MacKay)

Now, to answer the question at hand, bearing in mind that I know little about 
the Canaries and French currency.  I 
would be trying to build an equivalency to something I have researched and 
are fairly documentable, which would be 
the coins of Spain.

I would suggest that one course of action to follow would be:

1.  Discover the "value" of livre in silver weight.
     The website, www.bookrags.com/livre, suggests that around the mid-1300s 
the livre was devalued from 1 pound of 
silver to somewhat less than 1/20th of a pound silver.  It also suggests that 
around that time, the livre was also 
called a franc.  Being an internet source, take that with a grain of salt.

2.  Find a Spanish coin equivalent.
     There is an excellent source for 15th century Spanish economics called 
__Money, Prices, and Politics in 15th 
century Castile__ by Angus MacKay.  It was published by the Royal Historical 
Society in London in 1981.  There are a 
number of charts and helpful resources in it including a thorough 
bibliography.  Some of the sources are French so 
they might point to other useful sources that more directly answer the 
professor's question.  If a direct Castillian 
equivalent isn't found, MacKay also discusses Aragonese florins and Genoese 
lire briefly.
     There is also LIBRO which has several books on Spanish economy published 
online.  It is found at:  
libro.uca.edu     If he does a google search on maravedi real and limits the 
search to the libro.uca.edu domain, it should pull up the relevant pages.

3.  Examine the value of objects in light of the equivalency found in #2.
To give you some idea, based on MacKay's book, in 1462, a mark of silver was 
valued at 1152 maravedi'es. A maravedi' 
is worth 1/16th of a real.  That means, if my math is correct, that a mark of 
silver is worth 72 reales.  To give 
you another example, the lawyer for the Burgos Cathedral earned an annual 
salary of 1500 maravedi'es or just over 1 
mark of silver.  (In "my time", Ferdinand and Isabella set it at 34 mrs to 1 
real.)

Another course of action would be to look for minting records of France.  The 
economic information in MacKay's book 
is based on an equation he built relating the Price of a mark of silver to 
the number, value, and and the purity of 
the coins minted from that mark of silver.

I hope that gives the professor some ideas from which to proceed.  Sorry that 
I wasn't a direct help.

--
Constanza Marina de Huelva
1490's Castillian persona   </HTML>