In the late Middle Ages, a city’s unpaid debts could land any of its citizens in jail. A new study follows a Carthusian monk who travelled the Lower Rhine hunting merchants from Holland on behalf of unpaid creditors, and finds that such reprisals worked well enough to keep lenders willing to lend.
The study, by historian Jaco Zuijderduijn of Lund University, was published in The Economic History Review on May 19, 2026.
Every citizen as collateral
Cities in the Low Countries borrowed heavily, sometimes spending up to 60% of their income on debt service, and many of their lenders were foreigners. In Haarlem in the fifteenth century, 74 to 96% of annuity holders lived elsewhere.
Foreign lenders had no seat in the city councils, so what made them trust a city? Zuijderduijn points to the community responsibility system, under which annuity contracts made every citizen personally liable for the city’s debts. If the city defaulted, creditors could arrest its citizens and seize their goods wherever they found them.
The hunt for Hollanders
His main source is a 59-page account drawn up in 1493. In 1483, ‘s-Hertogenbosch had bought two annuities, worth 400 and 200 Rhenish guilders a year, from Dordrecht, Haarlem, Delft, Leiden and Gouda, financing the purchase by selling 42 annuities of its own. By 1485 the Holland cities had stopped paying.
The 42 creditors first turned on ‘s-Hertogenbosch itself. They had citizens arrested in nearby towns and had two mayors jailed as hostages, who spent about 14.5 months in prison in total.
Then the creditors and the city joined forces against Holland. Among the attorneys they appointed in August 1491 was Dirck van Dynther, a monk from the Carthusian monastery in Vught, which itself held an 18 guilder annuity from the city.
Dirck travelled to Deventer, Kampen, Zwolle and a toll house on the Rhine at Lobith to intercept merchants returning from the Frankfurt fair. Hanseatic towns refused to allow arrests, and the Hollanders, warned of his colleague’s presence in Frankfurt, took other routes home.
Still, he paid informants, staked out a house where a merchant was hiding, and arrested dozens of traders at fairs. Most were released within days after swearing an oath or naming sureties, and some escaped by swearing they were not from Holland.
What the reprisals recovered
Arrests yielded confiscated wares worth 644 guilders, at a cost of 56. Stopping payments on the 26 annuities ‘s-Hertogenbosch owed in Holland saved 620 guilders a year, though it prompted Amsterdam to arrest citizens of ‘s-Hertogenbosch in return.
Seizing Holland-owned rents, annuities, farms and land in the border towns of Waalwijk and Tilburg brought in an estimated 300 guilders a year, about half of what the city owed its own creditors.
Zuijderduijn concludes that sanctions mattered as much as reputation in giving cities cheap credit. That raises a puzzle: why did cities keep a system that put their own merchants at risk into the early modern period? His answer is that public debt bought political and economic privileges from rulers that cities valued more than their merchants’ safety. ‘s-Hertogenbosch itself sought a moratorium on reprisals in 1499 and was still renewing such protection a century later.
Study Details:
- Title: Hunting for Hollanders: The community responsibility system, trade sanctions, and public debt in the late-medieval Low Countries
- Authors: Jaco Zuijderduijn
- Journal: The Economic History Review
- Publication Date: May 19, 2026
- DOI: 10.1111/ehr.70126