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GIS and real property: a view of Antwerp before its Golden Age (ca 1390–1430)
| Throughout the second half of the fifteenth century Antwerp succeeded in equalling and eventually supplanting Bruges as the financial, commercial and industrial focus of north-western Europe. The gradual shift from Bruges to Antwerp and the following era generally known as Antwerp’s Golden Age are subject of continuous research since the 1940s. Very little however is known about the first stage of Antwerp’s economic growth. In the last decades of the fourteenth century Antwerp grew steadily from a quiet regional market into a prospering trade centre, mainly because of a revival of the city’s two annual fairs. These fairs temporarily paralyzed trade in Bruges and served as key places where merchants of many nations based in Bruges met those coming overland from Germany and central Europe. The importance of the Antwerp fairs as vital centres of trade is generally acknowledged. But due to a lack of sources scholars have not yet been able to grasp their economic and social impact on the city. A GIS-based study of the Antwerp real property market between ca 1395 and 1430 yields new insights into the financial strategies of locals and foreigners and into the (social) geography of the growing medieval town, it can also contribute to our knowledge of the rise of Antwerp and the decline of Bruges.
In late medieval Antwerp, as in many other cities in the Low Countries, local magistrates recorded every transfer of real property located within the city’s jurisdiction. The Antwerp records are preserved from 1396 onwards. Similar and sometimes even older registers can be found in other cities. In the 1970s and 1980s such registers of real property transactions successfully served as an instrument to identify urban development trends in the pre-statistical period, or to study the distribution of wealth within pre-modern urban societies. Nowadays the voluminous records are seen as rich but highly unattractive sources. Surprisingly no-one has noticed their extreme suitability as intermediaries for the analysis of medieval and early modern urban societies by means of GIS. Using a method transferable to other Flemish and Dutch cities it is possible to convert non-spatial data derived from thousands of property transactions into spatial information fit for GIS-analysis. The same method can be used to construct rather accurate ‘cadastral’ base-maps of the medieval city upon which a wide variety thematic data can be overlayed and analyzed on the small-scale level of the single dwelling or parcel.
In this paper I discuss the construction of the GIS for late medieval Antwerp. And I will illustrate the system’s potential with the first results of my Ph.D. research on the Antwerp real property market as both social display and driving force of the late medieval growth of the city.
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