Before the Black Death: progress and problems -- Economics, culture, and geography of early medieval trade -- Tools of trade: business organization -- Traders and their tools -- The politics of business -- Business gets bigger: the super-company phenomenon -- Business in the late Middle Ages: a harvest of adversity -- The new business environment of the Middle Ages -- Business responses to the new environment -- The fifteenth century: revolutionary results from old processes -- Sources of capital in the late Middle Ages -- A new age for business.