nobility or the Church, and their insistence on traditional rights over tenants and serfs, led to unrest among the peasantry which in northern Spain in particular became almost endemic, and which in the late fifteenth century helped to trigger civil war. Long before that unrest had begun to vent itself more ominously against the Jews. In 1391 a wave of pogroms, starting in Seville, swept the whole country within two months. The Jews were a sitting target for discontent, and all, including monarchs, began to exploit the tendency. It was an important milestone in the hardening of attitudes towards the nonChristian population, a change which by the end of the fifteenth century was to culminate in programmes of forced conversions and expulsions.

None the less it would be a mistake to judge the fourteenth century in a wholly negative fashion. Spain remained an area of great promise. If Catalonia bore the brunt of economic decline, Castile on the other hand saw equally dramatic growth of sheep-farming and wool exportation. The Hundred Years War, which had severely hit the English wool trade, was Castile's blessing. Along with the wool trade grew wool-related industries, and there was an important growth in Castile's ports--Santander and Seville--and in shipbuilding, and these in turn led Castilian trade in the Atlantic in other produce. In this as in many other ways Castile can be seen to be preparing itself for a new era.

In Italy, where political conflict had long been endemic, crises might appear difficult to spot. But there are signs, and more substantive ones than the anguish of contemporary commentators about the country's plight. There is evidence of a decline in population before the first outbreak of plague, and also of economic problems, heralded by the spectacular crashes of the Bardi and Peruzzi banks in the 1340s. Italy was dealt if anything more than its due share of waves of plague and famine, often in combination or rapid succession, and for the century or so following the Black Death there are figures pointing to the decline of trade and industry for several towns, notably Florence and Genoa. But the evidence does not all point in the same direction, and the picture of decline could

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