Indebted cities were a widespread phenomenon during the Ancien Régime. However, some found ways to innovate the management of their municipal debt, whilst others fell prey to over-indebtedness or default. In this article we have left the success stories aside and focused on the latter. Using early modern Antwerp as a case study, we have disentangled the underlying mechanisms that ultimately lead to over-indebtedness and (in some cases) default. Whilst the economic climate and the relationship between city and state have been rightly identified as major factors in the previous literature, our contribution brings another element to the table, namely, the inflexibility of long-established rent arrangements and the entanglement between the ruling elite and the rentiers. We show that there was a strong overlap between both groups, which had a huge impact on the financial policy of cities during the early modern period.

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Abstract:The emergence of factor markets during the transition from the Middle Ages to the early modern period was of crucial importance for long-term economic development. Despite Flanders and Brabant being situated in one of the most densely urbanised regions within Europe at the time, the current historiographical debate lacks a quantitative analysis of the market for land in the late medieval and early modern Low Countries. This article focuses on the transmission of rural property in the southern Low Countries from the 1400s up until the end of the eighteenth century. Using time-series data on the rural land market for a selection of case studies within Inland Flanders and Brabant has enabled me to present a long-run analysis of the changes in the market value of land, the market activity and the overall nature of the rural peasant land market. My findings show a tendency towards fewer but larger holdings being transferred on the land market. The path-dependent nature of this process had a significant impact upon the changing proto-capitalistic nature of agriculture within the southern Low Countries. As per capita market activity declined and the average transfer size increased, the farmers’ dependency on the lease market grew effectively speeding up the pauperisation processes in Inland Flanders.

Een comparatieve analyse van het stedelijke fiscale en financiële beleid in de zeventiende eeuw * Abstract From the middle ages onwards, cities were encapsulated in the financing of the (nascent) state. In order to meet the royal need for cash, cities resorted to selling rents. These practices are well studied within historiography. However, how the financing of the state and the corresponding mounting debt levels transformed the urban fiscal system remained much less studied. In this article, we set out to disentangle the relationship between the state, the town and the urban fiscal structure. The financial fortunes of Antwerp, Amsterdam and Madrid during the seventeenth century were used as case studies. We show that whereas Amsterdam's debt levels were kept under control, debt-income ratios in both Antwerp and Madrid grew excessively. The spiralling out of control of urban finances compelled both the city magistrates and the state to intervene and restructure the urban fiscal system. The ensuing political struggle between the city and the state resulted in different outcomes for Antwerp and Madrid. Whereas the magistrates of the former managed to strengthen their economic power over the city, the revenues of the latter became increasingly intertwined with that of the Habsburg monarchy. We conclude that long after the economic growth of the sixteenth century the rise of the unified fiscal state was still severely hampered in the Southern Low Countries due to a sovereign in constant need for cash in combination with strong regional tendencies towards particularism. * De auteur dankt M. Limberger, T. De Moor en de anonieme referenten van het tijdschrift voor het becommentariëren van eerdere versies.

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