Economic and Financial Crises and Transformations in Sixteenth-Century Europe

Financial revolutions in Europe have been ascribed to the Italian innovation of the bill of exchange in the thirteenth century and to the British ordering of government debt at the end of the seventeenth and beginning of the eighteenth centuries. Less attention has been paid to the series of financial crises and ensuing transformations in teh sixteenth century, occuring especially in the 1550s and involving at least five broad and parallel changes in national and international finance.