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Life Insurance in Fifteenth-Century Barcelona

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  03 February 2011

Robert Sidney Smith
Robert Sidney Smith
Affiliation:
Duke University
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Extract

Italian sources have so far furnished the principal materials for the study of medieval business history in the Mediterranean area. Florence, Genoa, Pisa, and Venice, it seems fair to say, were the cradles of important commercial institutions. For their merchant guilds, sea loan contracts, and various forms of business organization, other Mediterranean towns were largely in debt to the Italian cities. In Catalonia, a region that experienced a remarkable expansion of overseas trade during the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, the borrowing and adaptation of Italian institutions were continuous. But in Barcelona, the presumptive birthplace of the Llibre del consolat de mar, the early development of deposit banking and marine insurance law was a product of Catalan initiative. It is highly possible that the rich historical archives of Barcelona will also yield important data for the study of early life-insurance and annuity practices.

Type
Articles
Information
The Journal of Economic History , Volume 1 , Issue 1 , May 1941 , pp. 57 - 59
Copyright
Copyright © The Economic History Association 1941

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References

1 Usher, A. P., “Deposit Banking in Barcelona, 1300–1700,” The Journal of Economic and Business History, IV (1932), 121–155Google Scholar; Smith, R. S., The Spanish Guild Merchant, Durham, N. C., 1940, 52–53Google Scholar.

2 A full account of this is found in an article by Sans, J. Miret y, “La Esclavitud en Catalufia en los últimos tiempos de la edad media,” Revue hispanique, XLI (1917), 1–109Google Scholar.

3 An Introduction to the History of Life Assurance (London, 1912), 199Google Scholar.

4 Bensa, Enrico, Il contratto di assiurasione nel medio evo (Genoa, 1884), 129Google Scholar.

5 Archivo General de Protocolos de Barcelona, Notoriado de Pedro Triler, 1499–1502 (October 14, 1501).

6 A. G. de P., Notoriado de Antonio Vila, leg. 25 (March 7, 1467).

7 A. G. de P., Notoriado de Pedro Triter, 1499–1502 (May 22, 1501). The premium was £3 on a valuation of £40.

8 Bensa, 129–131, 234–235, 228–229.

9 A. G. de P., Notoriado de Pedro Triter, 1499–1502.

10 Ibid., May 6, 1501. The amount of insurance was £40 and the premium, £2 12s. (6.5 per cent).

11 Ibid., June 7, 1501.

12 Ibid., January 4. 1502.

13 Assisted by a grant-in-aid from the Social Science Research Council, I worked in the Barcelona archives during the summer of 1936—but not after the eighteenth of July.

14 An Introduction to the History of Life Assurance, 198–199.