Foreign Merchants and the Parish. Local Commemoration as a Part of the Integration Process in Late Medieval Bruges

This paper examines the individual religious and charitable endowments of foreign merchants with the parish in the mercantile city Bruges. Previous research often assumed the foreign merchants relied exclusively on the different friaries in the city for their religious needs. The different nations owned a chapel at one of the friaries and organized collective masses and memorial services for their members. Contact with the parishes was therefore not needed as the nation functioned as a parish in many ways. And yet, some merchants from various nations chose a parish institution for their personal religious or charitable endowment. By comparing the different endowments made by merchants from the German Hanse, the Italian city states and the Spanish peninsula within one city, this paper investigates the different types of relationship between some merchants and the parish community. The Italian and Hanseatic merchants in the fifteenth century combined their identity as foreign merchant perfectly with a high ...