Roberto Sabatino Lopez

Roberto Sabatino Lopez (October 8, 1910 – July 6, 1986), also known as Robert S. Lopez, was an Italian-American historian of medieval European economic history. He taught for many years at Yale University as a Sterling Professor of History.

Lopez, a native of Genoa, Italy, received a doctorate from the University of Milan in 1932 and taught medieval history at various universities in Italy until 1939, when he fled Benito Mussolini's regime to come to the United States. Hoping to find employment at an American university, Lopez enrolled in the graduate history program at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, which awarded him a Ph.D in 1942.

From 1942 to 1944 Lopez worked in the Italian section of the Office of War Information in New York. There he met his future wife, Claude-Anne Kirschen. He afterwards maintained that his successful courtship of her was his supreme wartime accomplishment. They married in 1946 and had two sons, Michael and Lawrence.

After the war, Lopez was hired as an assistant professor at Yale, where he rose through the academic ranks to full professor, and finally, Sterling Professor of History. At Yale, Lopez helped create the graduate program in Medieval Studies^[1] and trained a number of distinguished medieval scholars, among them David Herlihy, Edward M. Peters,^[2] and Patrick J. Geary. He retired from the faculty in 1981 after 35 years at Yale.

Lopez's main contributions to the field were in the history of trade and commerce in the medieval Mediterranean. He was particularly interested in showing the dynamism and creativity of medieval towns and economic networks, which were frequently compared unfavorably to those of the Renaissance and early modern period. In his best-known book, The Commercial Revolution of the Middle Ages (1971, with numerous reprints), Lopez argued that the key contribution of the medieval period to European history was the creation of a commercial economy, centered at first in the Italo-Byzantine eastern Mediterranean, but eventually extending to the Italian city-states and over the rest of Europe. Lopez noted that it was in fact the Renaissance period which was characterized by economic decline.^[3] Lopez's scholarship was underpinned by his expert knowledge of medieval agriculture, industry and especially coinage.

Lopez died from cancer in 1986. His library and papers were acquired by Arizona State University.^[4]

Books by Robert S. Lopez

• Medieval Trade in the Mediterranean World (edited with Irving W. Raymond) (1955; 2nd ed. 1969)
• The Tenth Century: How Dark the Dark Ages? (1959)
• The Birth of Europe (1966)
• The Three Ages of the Italian Renaissance (1970)
• The Commercial Revolution of the Middle Ages (1971)
• Byzantium and the World around It: Economic and Institutional Relations (1978)
• The Shape of Medieval Monetary History (1986)

Notes

Further reading

• Harry A. Miskimin, David Herlihy and A.L. Udovitch (eds). The Medieval City: Studies in Honor of Robert S. Lopez. Yale University Press, 1977.
• Archibald R. Lewis, Jaroslav Pelikan and David Herlihy. "Robert Sabatino Lopez". Speculum 63:3 (1988): 763-65.

External links

• Robert S. Lopez (1979). "The Birth of Medieval Banking"
• New York Times obituary
• Survey of Lopez's career and scholarship (at Arizona State)