Title - Benedic, Domine, nos et haec tua dona: Northern Crusades, Institutions and Early Economic Development

Abstract: In this paper, I propose to measure the persistence of the institutions over the economic activities in a setting with varying institutional enforcement over time. Recent literature highlights the long-run interaction between the institutions, urban autonomy, and early economic development in Western Europe before the industrial revolution. However, the role of institutional enforcement by the ruler/lord is neglected, or the causality between the institutional environment and early economic development is missing. The empirical setting proposed in the presentation aims to study the interaction between the Northern Crusades between the 12th and the 16th centuries in the Baltic region and the spread of the town charts across the border of the Teutonic Order state. I intend to employ the polish immovable monuments database, made available by the National Institute of Cultural Heritage, as a proxy for urban development. I aim to use the varying institutional environment and the arguably exogenous expansion of the Teutonic Order to shed new insights on early economic development and, potentially, the reversal of the Order’s economic fortune in the Prussian region.