Principal Investigator

Alex Sapoznik is Reader in Late Medieval History at King’s College London and Principal Investigator of the project. Her research specializes in the economic and social history of the later Middle Ages. She has published on peasant agricultural productivity in England, visual culture and agricultural technology in northern Europe and credit networks in the German Hanse region.

Her research considers land productivity, technological innovation, resource allocation and food security, and the implications of these for standards of living and economic growth. From this, she has become increasingly interested in the intersection of economy, environment and culture in the pre-modern world, themes first explored in the project ‘Bees in the Medieval World’, funded by a Leverhulme Trust Research Project Grant (2018-2021), which was the first large-scale study of bees, beekeeping and bee products in the Middle Ages. ECOMEDS builds on and expands from the avenues of inquiry that developed from that project.

Post-Doctoral Research Associate, Italian Sources

Fabrizio Ansani is a specialist in the history of late medieval war economy and military commodities. He earned his Ph.D. cum laude in Early Modern History from the Università degli Studi di Padova (2018), where he studied the innovations in artillery technology in Renaissance Florence. After being awarded a two-year postdoctoral fellowship by the Istituto Italiano per gli Studi Storici (2018-2020), he returned to his alma mater to conduct research on the logistical challenge of fifteenth-century permanent armies (2020-2022). During the term, he was also the principal investigator for a departmental project on saltpetre trade.

This interest in the diplomacy of strategic material has eventually led him to a successful application for a British Academy Newton International Fellowship with the University of Exeter (2023-2024).  He has written extensively on many aspects of early modern warfare, including the establishment of permanent offices and the formation of military archives, the distinctive fashion of mercenary captains and the involvement of the Medici Bank in the arms trade. His articles have appeared in both and national and international journals, including ‘Technology and Culture’, ‘The Journal of Military History’, and ‘Business History’.

His recent monograph on warhorse procurement explores the international market for equine resources and the control exerted by the rising renaissance states on such a fundamental asset, thus aiming a new interpretation of late medieval economic policies. On ECOMEDS Fabrizio works on Italian archival sources, deepening his knowledge in the late medieval trade in natural resources, territorialization processes, and material culture.

Post-Doctoral Research Associate, Crown of Aragon

Lluís Sales obtained his PhD in Medieval History at the Universitat de Girona (2019). He has specialized in the study of private credit and nonpayment in rural contexts during the later Middle Ages. He has worked with unpublished documents issued by local jurisdictional civil courts to describe the mechanisms through which default was pursued (and thus upheld the credit market). In different publications he has underpinned the capacity of serf peasantry in Catalonia to become involved in actions in court in defence of their own economic interests. He has also focused on other aspects of the peasants’ standards of living, commercial livestock breeding and trade of commodities. He has previously worked as a research associate at King's College London (2018-2021) on the project ‘Bees in the Medieval World’ and at the Universidade Nova de Lisboa (2021-2024), researching maritime and overland trade into Barcelona in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries. Both projects involved extensive study of commodity trade, including of honey, wax, cloth, saffron and dried fish. On ECOMEDS Lluís works on archival material from the Crown of Aragon and related regions.