OFFICIAL EXCHANGE OF goods and money in fourteenth-and fifteenth-century Italian cities took place against the backdrop of a rhetorical discourse of salvation and thus a Christian religious framework. However, despite what we might be tempted to believe, this does not mean that the form taken by the market or a Western trading economy emerged in a Christian context from a social framework established by objectively Christian urban communities, nor by Christians being present in a given area as inhabitants or residents. As has now been amply demonstrated by studies devoted to clarifying what citizenship effectively meant in late medieval Italy, being a citizen of a city could mean very different things, as degrees of citizenship were varied and ambiguous. Rather, institutional dynamics and governmental powers set up to control Christian cities in Italy defined and imposed the forms of belonging to the Christian community, and the languages which defined what were authentic, or rather legitimate, methods of commercial aggregation.

In other words, Christian commercial dynamics would seem—in actual daily life in the sources—to have been the result of pressure exerted by politics on economics or, more precisely, the consequence of political choices characterized by the preliminary adoption of Christian charismata drawn from a long documentary tradition as the badge of all conceivable authenticity and legitimacy. While it is normal historiographical practice to limit analyses of the markets of a given period to an examination of the relationship between the specifically local context of the market and its political and cultural structures as a whole, in analyses of late medieval Italian markets, it seems much more useful and meaningful to break out of the straitjacket of an exclusively locally-based approach to understand the long-term perspective against the backdrop where markets were located. All this in an Italy like that of the fourteenth-and fifteenth centuries, at least as far as north-central Italy is concerned, which was specifically marked out by the interweaving of local and international policies and the overweening presence of the Church and canon law imposed by Roma or Avignon. And, last but not least, it was also marked by the dissemination of legal analysis of economic practices by contemporary lawyers and theologians.