"From the Mediterranean to the Atlantic: The Role of the Town-ports of Northern Iberia in the Connection of the European Economy in Later Middle Ages", in Society for the Medieval Mediterranean 6th Biennial Conference In Memory of Simon Barton. Movement and Mobility in the Medieval Mediterranean (original) (raw)

"From the Mediterranean to the Atlantic: The Role of the Town-ports of Northern Iberia in the Connection of the European Economy in Later Middle Ages", in Society for the Medieval Mediterranean 6th Biennial Conference In Memory of Simon Barton. Movement and Mobility in the Medieval Mediterranean

The Iberian Peninsula enjoyed a strategic geographic position on the long-distance routes between the Mediterranean and Atlantic Europe from the eleventh to the fifteenth centuries, and on the expansion routes over the Atlantic Ocean. However, until the thirteenth century, the development of these maritime routes remained very modest, basically driven by maritime pilgrimages to Santiago de Compostela and the fleets of Crusaders from northern Europe who circumnavigated the Peninsula on their way to the new Christian kingdoms of the Mediterranean Levant between 1096 and 1270. From the thirteenth century onward, a shift unfolded from the Mediterranean to the Atlantic owing to political, economic and technological factors, thence granting the Atlantic façade a strategic position of the highest order within medieval commercial exchanges. The economy of the area evolved around three large hubs of growth: the Northern Cantabrian area, Lisbon to the West and Seville to the South. Urban historiography has granted priority to the study of these large ports over the smaller ones. However, investigations on maritime commerce, navigation, and port societies have proven the valuable role played by small and medium-sized ports within the “network” and have led to a correction of the myopic approach of macroeconomic studies. The foundation by royal decree of some fifty port towns between the twelfth and fourteenth centuries lay the structural foundations for the development of maritime routes along the Cantabrian coastline. In this sense, Cantabrian ports constitute a subset of the urban system of the Crown of Castile and its relations with the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, based on diverse factors such as geographic conditions, the political administrative dynamics, infrastructures, and economic and particularly commercial relationships, all of which was the object of this paper.