27

The Flemish city of Ypres, in the late 13th century at its economic peak as one of the most powerful producers of luxury woollens (drapery) in Europe, has left us about 6,000 debt contracts covering less than 50 years of the city’s history. We have nothing of this magnitude or richness from the north of Europe before the late 15th, or even the 16th century. The sources not only expose the complexity of the city’s socioeconomic structure, they also significantly illuminate the relationship between the city’s artisanal and small merchant class on the one hand, and the so-called patricians who governed the city and, along with other elite merchants, dominated the trade in luxury woollens, on the other. They also help explain both the genesis and the success of the uprisings against patrician rule that began in the late 13th century in Ypres and elsewhere in Flanders. In short, these records allow us to relate credit networks both to socioeconomic structure and to political events at a crucial time in the history of European urbanisation.