L'arruolamento degli equipaggi nei regni della Corona d'Aragona (secc. XIV-XV)

From the eleventh century, as a result of urban growth and of the trade development , ports of the Mediterranean become nodes of the western economy. Simple and equipped harbours are progressively structured in a complex system that connects areas of production and market, by bringing business, capital, assets and investments. The book focuses in particular on the significant relationship between port and city, illustrating the dynamic economic and political, military, social and cultural rights of maritime cities. The interaction between critical analysis and a wide selection of sources – from the works of Arab geographers to legislative acts, from nautical charts and portolans to private and public financial documents, from insurance policies to procedural acts - returns as in a large fresco the dynamic world of the Low Middle Ages Mediterranean ports, in which ships, goods and men were protagonists of European expansion.

This paper aims to clarify the composition of the Catalan-Aragonese fleet in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries, analyzing the social and geographical origin of enlisted sailors, the recruitment methods, roles and salaries. Research is based on large amount of information contained in about 40 unpublished records covering the time span between 1342 and 1458 with data on about 10,000 sailors, enlisted on armed vessels in the ports of the Crown. The information used to verify that the transformations in late medieval maritime wage invest. In particular, it emerges: 1) the progressive shrinkage of the availability of ships and men for the widening of the geographical range of enlistments 2) the slow transition from volunteer crews to the inclusion among the ranks of the crew of prisoners, a process already documented in the second half of the fourteenth century and more massively in the next century 3) a deepening of hierarchies and the wage gap with the downgrading of classes of simple sailors and rowers 4) the problem of desertion 4) the tightening of regulation and the differentiation of sentences in the decades following the plague Similarly to what is documented in Genoa and Venice, the paper shows how the revolution in the Catalan navy nautical produced a clear distinction between the roles of board, scoring more quickly than in other areas of the Mediterranean the gradual shift to the rows the convicts "to Força "that will form the backbone of the armies in the transition to the modern age.