Corporation (feudal Europe)

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In feudal Europe, a corporation (from the Latin corpus, corporis a body)^[1] was an aggregation of business interests into a single legal body, entity or compact, usually with an explicit license from city, church, or national leaders. These functioned as effective monopolies for a particular good or labor. Most notably, merchants, bankers, notaries, blacksmiths, shoemakers. These corporations experienced their greatest development between the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries and declined and then disappeared between the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. In Italy, these corporations were mainly called Arts or Crafts Corporations, in Germanic-speaking countries Guilds.