IMC 2010: Sessions

Classical and more recent studies state the fact that economic developments and political / military incidents are closely interrelated. Surprisingly, very little research has been done on this intersection so far, which has put a tight limit on chances for dialogue and collaboration between the two disciplines. This is partly due to the low number of sources allowing direct insights into areas where war and economy overlap, as, for instance, books of the treasuries would. Therefore, many studies remain impressionistic or tend to focus on cultural aspects.
Another way to address these connections, however, depends on the perspectives we take at the history of merchant companies, military evolution, and actors who participated in war and economy.
The aim of this section is to present basic aspects of the entanglement of military and economic evolution in later Middle Ages. Military organisation and execution of warfare created markets of labour, service, and violence (soldiers, mercenaries, and entrepreneurs of warcraft), markets of goods (cloth, weapons, food, fodder, luxury goods), gave rise to secondary markets (slaves, ransoms, luxury goods, booty, second-hand goods) and necessitated new ways of financing warfare.