labourers; appear to have benefited from the scarcity of both skilled and unskilled workers. The evident decrease in the size of armies and the increasing emphasis laid by governments on professionalism and expertise in their ranks, may also have some connection with the aftermath of the epidemics. It is notable that the largest English army (32,000 men) which sailed to France during the Hundred Years War was the force Edward III sent to besiege Calais in 1347, one year before the onset of the plague.
By 1420 the worst visitations of the disease were over and there was a discernible population increase in many European towns, especially in the densely urbanized regions of the Low Countries. By 1470, for example, over 45 per cent of the total estimated population of Holland and 36 per cent of Flanders, were urban dwellers, whereas only 10 per cent of the German emperor's subjects (excluding Hungary and Bohemia) lived in towns. Holland under the Valois dukes of Burgundy thus qualified for Fernand Braudel's appellation 'a modern, capitalist economy', while Flanders just failed to enter that privileged category. The effects of the Black Death must have played an important. part in the early development of capitalism, opening up resources which had perhaps previously been more thinly spread to opportunistic and adventurous merchants and financiers such as the Fugger of Augsburg, the Stromer of Nuremberg, the Bladelin and Moreel of Bruges, or the de la Poles of Hull and the Braunches of King's Lynn. The Medici bank--successor to the bankrupted Bardi and Peruzzi--did not possess a monopoly over the provision of credit in northern Europe and indigenous banking houses and financial syndicates, such as the English Wool Staplers at Calais, secured a larger share of the money market. Great wealth could be amassed in the northern world after the crises of the mid-fourteenth century, but it was very unevenly distributed.
The later medieval papacy has often been seen as the shadow of a formerly vigorous institution. As papal claims to universal
-304-