Mendicants and Merchants in the Medieval Mediterranean: An Introduction

Abstract

When the mendicant orders were founded in the thirteenth century, they quickly began to cultivate mutually beneficial relationships with the emerging merchant class. This special issue of Medieval Encounters is an interdisciplinary study of the complex connections that developed between the two groups throughout the Mediterranean during the late medieval period. These relationships have rarely been addressed in the scholarship on this period, but in urban centers throughout the medieval Mediterranean, friars and merchants crossed paths daily and the evidence of their interaction reveals the extent to which the two communities came to depend upon one another.