The Economic Expansion of Lombardy, 1300–1500: A Study in Political Stimuli to Economic Change

Abstract

Lombardy underwent an agricultural revolution (and a connected process of general economic growth) in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. The basis for this transformation was a series of fundamental institutional changes. These latter—consisting most importantly of the transfer of control over the land into new hands—must in turn be attributed essentially to the policies of the Visconti and Sforza dukes who, through direct or indirect means, encouraged, initiated, facilitated, and acquiesced in the processes by which the change took place.