In nearly every respect, the conditions that had contributed most to medieval Europe's escape from economic backwardness between 1000 and 1300 – benign weather, relatively peaceful internal politics, steady demographic growth, agrarian and settlement expansion – were changed and in many areas even reversed in the course of the next century and a half. Historians have attached a whole series of disparaging descriptions to this unfortunate epoch: calamitous, depressed, demographically disastrous, war bound, famine and plague ridden, to name a few. In short, the traditional image of the European economy in the interval between Dante and Columbus is that of a slump coming between the remarkable growth of the earlier age and the no less remarkable expansion into the Atlantic and beyond after 1450.

This conventional picture has been radically altered in recent years. A generation of research has dispelled much of the doom and gloom surrounding the period to show, on the contrary, that it was one of the most formative and important eras in the business history of Europe. Having said this, however, it is important to avoid understanting the magnitude of the challenges facing business in an era when the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse were anything but an abstraction. This introduction will provide a brief overview of the problems presented by the scourges of famine, pestilence, and war during the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.

First, the success of the grain-based rural economy described in Part I concealed a great danger, for much of northern Europe was barely suited for grain cultivation, particularly for the ever-fickle wheat grain.