The “Seminar in Medieval Studies” will take place on the 15th of November, at 4pm: “Centralidades en contacto: las conexiones Valencia-Portugal dentro de las redes mercantiles euromediterráneas (finales del siglo XIV – principios del siglo XV)“, by Doctor Carlos Crespo Amat, online (via Zoom).

Abstract:
It is evident that the location of Portugal and Valencia at the longitudinal extremes of the Iberian Peninsula meant that, at an economic level, both political entities experienced analogous and global processes during the final centuries of the Middle Ages as constitutive elements of a higher space that integrated to the Mediterranean and the Atlantic through exchange networks.

The reason is twofold. From a spatial point of view, the historic kingdoms of Portugal and Valencia have two elements in common. One of them is facilitated by its territorial configuration organized latitudinally around the coastline. The other is given to them by the sharing of the same geographical unit. Both have a point of convergence in their historical trajectory. Thus, from a temporal point of view, its location within a subcontinent – ​​the Iberian Peninsula – surrounded by water everywhere except for the Northeast led both political formations to assume a centrality between the north of Europe and the Southeast of the Continent, North Africa and the Near East when the trade routes that interconnected them were configured and consolidated as transnational economic circuits, a fact that can be dated between the end of the 14th century and the beginning of the 15th century.

On this basis, an attempt will be made to characterize the strategies, networks, and, ultimately, the fit of foreigners in the societies of the main maritime centers based on the study of the presence of Portuguese in Valencia and of Valencians and other operators of the Crown of Aragon in Portugal, as well as the pattern of installation or economic projection of Castilians and extra peninsular operators (essentially Italian) in them.

Biographical note: 
Carlos Crespo Amat has an international doctorate in Medieval History from the University of Alicante (2021), a degree he accessed after completing the Interuniversity Master’s degree in Medieval European Identity coordinated by the University of Lleida (2016), and a Bachelor’s degree in History from the University of Alicante (2014), obtaining all three degrees with honors. Currently, he is an integrated researcher at the Institute of Medieval Studies (IEM-FCSH/NOVA), where he develops the research project PORTIVAL – Projection and Organization of Transnational Exchange Networks in Valencia and the Portuguese Atlantic: 1350-1450. Since 2021, he has also been an honorary collaborator of the research group of the University of Alicante Public Power, Society, and Culture in the Kingdom of Valencia, ss. XIII-XV, to which he has belonged in different roles since 2016. He has also been a visiting researcher at the Higher Council for Scientific Research, the Università degli Studi di Firenze, and the Université Paris-Cité. For more than four and a half years, he was a predoctoral researcher hired by the Department of Medieval History, Modern History, and Historiographic Sciences and Techniques at the University of Alicante.

His lines of research are articulated around late medieval political-economic relations, the 19th-century and 19th-century foundations of the market economy, and the actors contributing to its development between ca. 1350 and ca. 1450 in the kingdom of Valencia and the Iberian and Euro-Mediterranean spaces that integrated it at a global level. This interest is evident in his doctoral thesis, which is the study of a – until then unexplored – process experienced between Castile, the Crown of Aragon, and the Mediterranean: the formation of a transnational market in the kingdom of Valencia during the Late Middle Ages ( 1370-1430) and which was awarded the International Prize for the Best Doctoral Thesis on the Crown of Aragon awarded in 2022 by the Association of Historians of the Crown of Aragon (HISCOAR). The analysis carried out allowed us to define the phenomena of economic osmosis generated between these three geographical areas through the configuration and consolidation of commercial circuits of a supra-state nature, a definition whose development has been synthesized in several scientific articles and in a monograph that will be released soon.