From AD1000 to 1800, Europe transformed itself from a rural backwater to the leading global power, exporting its technologies and living styles to the rest of the world. The present research project proposes to look at the Holy Roman Empire as a microcosm of states and cities interacting in a federal context, and as an untapped source of quantitatively analyzable data, to understand the causal drivers of the economic, social and political transformations that propelled this change.In particular, the following questions will be analyzed: (1) What determined the spatial expansion of urban and commercial structures in the Middle Ages? (2) What is the role of climatic changes in this context? (3) What is the role of paradigms of power (self-organizing autonomous cities vs. autocratic territorial states) in fostering economic change, and how did this role change over time? (4) What is the role of state capacity in historical development?To do this, the present research project aims to assemble a novel dataset (from printed and archival sources) encompassing the whole experience of the medieval and early modern world, in order to provide a quantitative, unified view of these developments. These data will be analyzed in a quantitative fashion applying state-of-the-art econometric analysis. The project will contribute to the literature on the institutional determinants of development by expanding the horizon of causal mechanisms of development considered, by considering the spatial and temporal heterogeneity of these effects, and by embedding the analysis in a dataset with unprecedented level of detail and temporal scope.