Whether material conditions improved for the peasantry after the Black Death and into the fifteenth century remains an open question, not only for late medieval and Renaissance Florence, but for all of Europe. Historians of a Malthusian bent have seen an economic golden age for the peasantry following in the wake of fourteenth-century pestilence. From radically opposed perspectives, other historians such as the Marxist Guy Bois and the non-Marxist David Herlihy have also found prosperity for the peasantry at least in parts of Europe and for a portion of the fifteenth century. However, more recently still other historians with various methods and political agendas have argued the opposite: the fifteenth century saw at best continued misery, not recovery, for the Florentine peasantry.

Yet, despite differences in political and methodological orientations, historians have posed these questions almost exclusively within the contexts of long-term social and economic causes; the affairs of state or politics more generally, especially at the level of specific events, largely have been left out. Was the condition of the Florentine peasantry during the Renaissance oblivious to changes in political regime - to the rise of the Albizzi's govero stretto in 1393 or the rise of the Medici in 1434? Or, did other political events have long-term consequences in shaping the fortunes of Florentine peasants?

This chapter will present data from a series of tax records from twenty-nine sample villages in the rural territory or (more precisely) the contado of Florence, from the Black Death through the fifteenth century.