In the late Middle Ages and in the early modern period, the European continent was characterised by a vast mobility of skilled and unskilled labour: Italian merchants established themselves in Bruges and in other commercial centres, German soldiers and craftsmen intermittently lived in Italy, merchants from many different nations met at trade fairs which regularly took place in Frankfurt am Main and in other cities and countless journeymen went on the road before they established themselves as master craftsmen somewhere. This migration was accompanied by an exchange of commodities, technologies and ideas across all political borders. One may think that these different exchange processes would have led to an economic convergence on the European continent. Why this was not, or was only to a certain extent the case, will be discussed in the second section of this essay.
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