The Land Commenda in the Late Medieval Crown of Aragon and the Rise of a ‘Democratic’ Investment Culture

This paper presents evidence for the use of the ‘commenda’ contract as a means of investment and accumulating entrepreneurial capital in the Bages region of Catalonia during the later thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. This use of a ‘land commenda’ in eastern Iberia is at present known only to a few specialists, but it might have been more widespread and deserves further study. The land commenda helped fuel the commercial boom in Catalonia in the decades around 1300. It was often utilized by smaller investors and modest entrepreneurs, and helped mobilize capital from a broad spectrum of Catalans. The chronology of land commenda use suggests that as interest rates declined in the later fourteenth century, and as new instruments were developed, smaller investors’ savings were left underutilized. Introduction: The Significance of the ‘Land Commenda’ in Catalonia, c. 1280-1350 This article aims to highlight the significance of a type of investment instrument which I term the ‘land commenda’.1 This is a version of the well-studied ‘commenda’ contract which is usually associated with Italian maritime commerce in the period before 1350.2 Briefly stated, a commenda is a fi1 Note that this term was not used by contemporaries, who merely called it a ‘commenda’. But the term is used here in order to highlight the relatively unknown and novel use of this instrument by people who were engaged in purely land-based commerce. As noted below, this usage has been known to Catalan and Valencian economic historians for some time. 2 A spate of works by John Pryor in the late 1970s and early 1980s did much to shape current