Businessmen and social mobility in late medieval Italy

The essay examines the role played by the businessmen in the socio-economic and socio-politic mobility that took place in the Italian cities between the mid-fourteenth and the beginning of the sixteenth century. The paper, based largely on the most innovative results of the most recent historiography, aims to change the traditional view of the late Italian Middle Ages as an era characterized by the decline of the entrepreneurial dynamism and the re-emergence of social models based on aristocratic prominence. It will therefore be evident that the pattern of so many urban oligarchic governments is a later reality matured in modern age.