Intercursus Magnus
| Type | Commercial treaty |
|---|---|
| Signed | 24 February 1496 |
| Signatories | |
| Parties |
| Type | Commercial treaty |
|---|---|
| Signed | 1506 |
| Location | Weymouth, England |
| Effective | Never ratified; repudiated by Margaret, Duchess of Burgundy |
| Signatories |
The Intercursus Magnus was a major and long-lasting commercial treaty signed in February 1496 by Henry VII of England and Philip IV, Duke of Burgundy. Other signatories included the commercial powers of Venice, Florence, the Netherlands, and the Hanseatic League.
The Wars of the Roses, a series of dynastic civil wars between two cadet branches of the house of Plantagenet, had been fought in several sporadic episodes, mainly between 1455 and 1485. In 1485, the Lancastrian Henry Tudor defeated the Yorkist king Richard III on Bosworth Field and married Elizabeth of York, daughter of Edward IV and sister to the Princes in the Tower, to unite the houses. In 1490, a young Fleming, Perkin Warbeck, appeared and claimed to be Richard, the younger of the Yorkist "Princes in the Tower" and, thus, a pretender to the English crown. In 1493, Warbeck won the support of Edward IV's sister Margaret, dowager duchess of Burgundy. She allowed him to remain at her court, and gave him 2,000 mercenaries.
After the Black Death in the late 14th century, England began to dominate the European cloth market, with trade reaching a first peak in 1447 when exports reached 60,000 cloths. The Low Countries were one of England's major export markets, particularly Antwerp. The cloth trade was important to Burgundy, as well as being a major component of the English economy. It was a major act of domestic and foreign policy, thus, for Henry VII to issue a trade embargo — reciprocated by Philip IV, Duke of Burgundy — as a result of Margaret's meddling, with Henry forcing the Merchant Adventurers, the company which enjoyed the monopoly of the Flemish wool trade, to relocate from Antwerp to the Pale of Calais and ejecting Flemish merchants from England.
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