2

THE COMMERCIAL REVOLUTION

OF THE MIDDLE AGES

950-1350

3
 The
Commercial Revolution
of the
Middle Ages
950-1350

ROBERT S. LOPEZ

4
5
 To The Yale Department of History, with admiration and gratitude

6
 Preface
This little book aims at showing a rather unfamiliar facet of medieval Europe's
image: not cathedrals and castles, but, mainly, the walled cities and open country
that were the stage of a commercial revolution between the tenth and the fourteenth
centuries. Here, for the first time in history, an underdeveloped society succeeded in
developing itself, mostly by its own efforts.

Such a statement could of course be challenged. It may be argued that men have
been developing ever since they diverged from monkeys, or that the New Stone Age
marked a steep acceleration as compared to the Old Stone Age, or that the ancient
civilizations of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and China increased their production beyond
comparison with their prehistoric predecessors. On the other hand, it may be
observed that growth during the Commercial Revolution of the European Middle
Ages was far slower than during the Industrial Revolution of the modern period,
which in turn fell short of the breath-taking tempo of our own time.

All this is true, but economic development in each of its premedieval phases came
to a full stop before the ceiling of what we would today call an underdeveloped
society was broken. And if medieval growth was not fast, it was altogether
irreversible; it created the indispensable material and moral conditions for a
thousand years of virtually uninterrupted growth; and, in more than one way, it is
still with us. Today, as we endeavor to keep growing amid prophecies of impending
doom, and as we try to promote growth in underde veloped countries, we have
something to learn by studying the circumstances of the medieval take-off.

One cannot summarize four centuries of European economic history in less than
two hundred pages without constant oversimplification. This is especially dangerous
when documents are inadequate, quantitative data unavailable, and interpretations
controversial. In order to pay sufficient attention to the leading role of commerce,
which seems to me the great turning point of medieval economy, I may have
understressed agriculture because it was less dynamic, religious and political
theories because they were less influential, institutional and cultural by-products
because they were less central to the process. The reader, I hope, will look for what I
have said and not for what I have regretfully omitted. By appending a very sketchy
bibliographic note I offer him some ammunition to shoot at my possible and
probable distortions and errors. That they are not more numerous I owe in part to a
grant from the National Foundation for the Humanities, which has enabled me to fill
many gaps in my knowledge of urban development.

Even the shortest historical essay must carry acknowledgments. Let them be brief.
Once more, as in my earlier books, they begin at home: my wife, my mother, my
children, my family in Milan and Brussels have done much more than reading parts
of the manuscript: they have given healthy aeration to my ivory tower. Etienne

7
 Kirschen, my brother-in-law, has plugged a few cracks in my analysis of economic
growth, for in my approach to economic history I see "economic" as an important
attribute, but the noun is "history." Teachers, colleagues and students to whom I feel
indebted are too many for individual mention; I may single out Harry Miskimin,
who has played in turn the roles of student, colleague, and adviser, and embrace all
others in a collective expression of thanks. Finally, I shall pay tribute to the dead,
who are the staunch friends of every historian: medieval dead such as Francesco di
Balduccio Pegolotti, an authority on commerce, or Walter of Henley, an authority on
farming; and recent, beloved dead such as Gino Luzzatto, who cautioned me against
stretching sources beyond what they really say, and my father, Sabatino Lopez, who
planted in me the impression that there may be some good in man, even though evil
yields higher economic returns.

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 Contents
1

ROMAN AND BARBARIAN PRECEDENTS 1

THE GRANDEUR THAT WAS ROME 1

ROMAN AGRICULTURE 3

ROMAN COMMERCE AND INDUSTRY 6

CRAFTS AND CREDIT 8

THE COLLAPSE OF THE EMPIRE AND THE LONG DOWNWARD TREND 10

AGRICULTURE IN THE BARBARIAN AGE 13

THE TRADES IN THE BARBARIAN AGE 18

CATHOLIC EUROPE AND HER NEIGHBORS 22

THE GROWTH OF SELF-CENTERED AGRICULTURE 27

THE TURN OF THE DEMOGRAPHIC TIDE 27

PATTERNS OF AGRICULTURAL EXPANSION 30

CHANGES IN THE DIETS AND THE CROPS 36

ANIMALS AND TOOLS 41

COMMUNITIES AND INDIVIDUALS 48

THE TAKE-OFF OF THE COMMERCIAL REVOLUTION 56

THE USES OF AGRICULTURAL SURPLUS 56

THE JEWS 60

THE ITALIANS 63

COINS AND CREDIT 70

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CONTRACTS 73

TRANSPORTATION 79

THE UNEVEN DIFFUSION OF COMMERCIALIZATION 85

THE NERVE CENTERS OF THE REVOLUTION 85

PATTERNS AND OBJECTS OF TRADE 91

THE MEDITERRANEAN SCENE 97

DEPOSIT BANKING AND FINANCE AS AN OFFSHOOT OF TRADE 103

FROM GREENLAND TO PEKING: THE EXPLOSION OF ITALIAN TRADE 106

THE NORTHERN MEDITERRANEAN 113

IN A LOWER KEY 119

BETWEEN CRAFTS AND INDUSTRY 123

MERCHANTS AND CRAFTSMEN 123

CRAFT GUILDS 125

THE RISE OF THE WOOLLEN CRAFTS 130

GUILD BALANCE AND PREINDUSTRIAL RISE IN OTHER FIELDS 138

THE RESPONSE OF THE AGRICULTURAL SOCIETY 148

DYNAMISM AND INERTIA IN THE AGRICULTURAL WORLD 148

THE COMMERCIAL COMPONENTS OF AGRICULTURAL GROWTH 154

THE DARK SIDE OF THE PICTURE 162

FROM ATTRITION TO CONTRACTION: THE REVOLUTION COMES TO A

HALT 164

SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING 169

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INDEX 176

11
 1
Roman and Barbarian Precedents
THE GRANDEUR THAT
WAS ROME
History is an ever-changing continuum; without some account of the earlier
period, we can hardly understand why the Commercial Revolution was at the same
time the end product of a long tradition and the beginning of a new one.

The great expansion of the later Middle Ages succeeded a great contraction in the
early Middle Ages, which in turn had come after the expansion of the Classic Ages.
This alternation of crest, trough, and crest can be observed not only in the economic
field, but in almost every aspect of life: literature and art, philosophy and thought,
politics and law also were affected, though not all to the same extent. The greatest
achievements of the Greeks and the Romans were not in the economic field; yet the
inventiveness of the former and the efficiency of the latter were more than enough to
make the Greco-Roman economy the most successful one in the recorded history of
antiquity. Let us take a quick glance at its main traits in the prime of the Roman
Empire, that is, approximately, from Augustus (29 B.C.-A.D. 14) to Marcus
Aurelius (161-180).

All along the broad belt of territory around the Mediterranean Sea, which formed
the spine of the Empire, the population had grown and lengthened its life
expectancy. It is true that the average span was about twenty-five years, but this is
not much less than that of Egypt in 1948 (thirty-one years) or China in 1946 (thirty-
five years), which had then both been affected by another fifteen centuries of
medical and technological progress. The elites in the Roman towns and the large
country estates lived in luxury. A substantial middle class enjoyed a comfortable
existence. Town laborers and peasants were much worse off, but there is virtually no
archaeological evidence that they were afflicted by such malnutrition diseases as
India, for instance, has not yet been able to stamp out. Slavery was a tragic scourge,
but the number of slaves was diminishing; their condition had generally improved;
and there may have been some truth to the statement of a Roman ambassador at the
court of Attila the Hun: "We, the Romans, treat our slaves better than you treat your
free subjects." At any rate, a freed slave became every inch a man, and his son could
aspire to the highest positions. Though class consciousness was always present, the
Romans had no use for racism. Naturally they felt superior to the untamed and
unpolished nations beyond their frontiers, but they were willing to teach their
civilization and way of life to the "barbarians" who individually or in group,
spontaneously or under pressure, came under their rule. Thus the greatest melting

12
 pot in history went to work: many nations became one, and eventually all free men
within the Empire shared the burdens and the benefits of citizenship.

The formation of such a large community, which enjoyed for more than two
centuries (the first and second after Christ) the blessings of low taxation, security,
and almost unbroken internal peace, was bound to open extraordinary economic
opportunities. The Roman Empire constituted a home market stretching from
England to Egypt and from Morocco to Armenia, knit together by the Mediterranean
and the military roads leading to the interior, and welded by a basic uniformity of
tastes, living standards and class distribution. The imposing ruins of Roman theaters,
bathhouses, and other community buildings, mostly erected by private contributions
but open to all, still bear witness to the economic power of the richer citizens. The
abundant and often refined equipment retrieved from the ashes of Pompei, the sands
of Leptis Magna, or the mud of London reflects the high level of production for the
commoners in every provincial town. Essential foodstuffs were easily available: the
accumulated fragments of earthen containers for imported olive oil, dumped outside
the urban wall, added an eighth hill (Mount Testaccio) to the original seven of
Rome. The Romans planted vineyards wherever the climate consented; more
important, they made drinkable water available everywhere. No doubt they were
less imaginative and searching than the Greeks, but they knew better the value of
material conveniences. As Frontinus, one of the directors of the imperial water
service, put it, "Who would compare with our mighty aqueducts the idle Pyramids
or the famous but useless works of the Greeks?"

Still, in their justified impression that they were well off, the Romans let go the
greatest of all opportunities: economic growth. Growth, of course, is upsetting and
tends to lose its appeal once a satisfactory equilibrium has been attained. This holds
in economics as well as in art, in politics, and in war. Each of the great empires
which had flourished before Rome sooner or later had grown up to such a point that
it found a comfortable level, and sought no further. Similarly, in the last two
centuries before Christ, republican Rome had matched her breathless military
expansion with a measure of entrepreneurship and commercial adventure; but the
political convulsions which accompanied that growth scared the landed aristocrats
who originally held the power, and who eventually won the day. Augustus restored
peace and dedicated the Empire to agricultural tranquillity and the pursuit of the
golden mean, "aurea mediocritas." Every citizen was made to feel safe and well-
adjusted to the standard of living to which his social position entitled him, but he
was not encouraged to strive for more. Stability, not opportunity, was held out as the
most desirable goal.

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 ROMAN AGRICULTURE
The conservative ideal of the Roman empire found its mainstay in agriculture,
which was the occupation of the overwhelming majority, and the most respected
source of revenue for the rich and the poor alike. By the time of Augustus, classic
husbandry had achieved its highest degree of sophistication, and the basic formulae
for the exploitation of the soil had hardened.

In general, the Romans employed manpower unsparingly to get from the

minimum of land the largest amount of vegetable calories. The virtues and the
limitations of their methods were rooted in the ground and conditioned by the
climate of Greece and peninsular Italy, the original homes of classic culture. Both
countries are sheltered from excessive changes of temperature and well endowed
with sunshine; the usually thin and light laver of cultivable earth answers readily to
the farmer's care, and it is possible for the population to live healthily on a diet of
cereals, roots, olives, fruits, and wine, without much meat. On the other hand, water
resources are scant and unevenly distributed during the year; there are but few
stretches of flat ground, many rocks and stones, and the long dry spells tend to
reduce to dust the vegetable mould. Sudden, heavy rainfalls may then carry the dust
downhill, ultimately obstructing the flow of rivers into the sea and forming
mosquito-ridden marshes. Forests on mountain tops and slopes offer a natural
defense against erosion; but they are seldom thick, and they yield too easily to the
axe of the lumberman, the plough of the farmer, and eventually the teeth of goats
and sheep which take turns in baring the wooded areas and keeping them bare.

Had the Greek and Roman farmers been unaware of these dangers, they would
soon have reduced their countries to deserts. They did, however, display remarkable
skill and perseverance in soil conservation. Only the best land was cropped every
year (in some cases as much as three times a year), but with a suitable alternation of
crops. On inferior soil, it was normal to let the land rest every second year. Animal
manure, ashes and marls, alfalfa and other fertilizing plants were widely used. On
steep declivities, the farmers offset the pull of gravity by organizing the earth into a
series of terraces; they built reservoirs and canals to preserve and distribute the
precious water. Above all-and this is the essence of what we still call "dry farming"-
they spread moisture deep below the sunparched surface by repeated criss-cross
plowing, light plowing, of course, or else the mould would be ground into powder.
A large proportion of the agricultural operations were done by hand, with small,
ingenious tools; as regards livestock, the farmers preferred small animals, easily fed
on what could not be used by men. Thus the good land was cultivated almost like a
garden; it produced enough to support a dense population of frugal eaters, but the
individual food producers had little surplus after they had fed themselves with
whatever they could raise on their small rectangles of land.

In the long run, however, the very success of classic agriculture tended to upset

14
 the tight balance between manpower and crops. Peasant families, assured of
comfortable subsistence and full employment, would grow and multiply until they
saturated the country; then they had to encroach upon pastures, woods, and even the
portion of land that was saved for the alternation of cropping and fallow. The dearth
of pastures further restricted the number of horses and oxen that might save human
labor in transportation and farming. Donkeys, goats, and sheep were inferior
substitutes, which required no choice fodder but yielded hardly enough labor, meat,
milk, and manure to make up for what they ate. Thus, in the long run, over-cropping
and deforestation got the better of the ingenuity and hard work of the farmers, and
the soil could no longer feed the large labor force without which dry farming could
not be successful. Then the land had to be abandoned to sheep and goats, until
further degradation transformed it into stony deserts on top and marshy wasteland at
bottom.

Still, saturation was not inevitable so long as intensive agriculture could spill over
into freshly conquered, sparsely settled barbarian territories. When peninsular Italy
became too crowded, Roman farmers established colonies in the northern Italian
plain and in the fertile belt of North Africa. Here, and in the other provinces which
were successively annexed and colonized, better conditions of soil and climate made
it possible to relax somewhat the requirements of Mediterranean dry farming. The
traditional chessboard pattern of intensively cultivated fields was modified to allow
more room for grazing grounds and woods, but there was no radical change from an
economy of saturation to one of abundance, because farmers do not easily give up
their customary ways and are slow in taking over whatever good there may be in the
ways of less advanced neighbors. Moreover, the frontier ceased to advance as the
Empire embraced peace, and settlements tightened up. Even so, down to the last
centuries of imperial Rome the northern regions next to the border of Gaul and
Germany remained comparatively prosperous, and northern Italy was not in serious
distress, while wide stretches of peninsular Italy and Greece had become
wildernesses contended between goats and wolves, and waiting for any barbarians
who could step in and make some use of the land.

15
 ROMAN COMMERCE AND INDUSTRY
Though most farmers and peasants individually produced very little surplus, the
aggregated surplus of millions of agricultural workers was easily enough to support
a large number of towns and to foster the development of industry, commerce, and
banking. Much as they admired agriculture and depended on it, the Romans literally
identified "civilization" with cities (civitates). Only a few of these were fairly large
(Rome itself can hardly have contained much more than two hundred thousand
inhabitants within the Aurelian walls of the late third century), and the five hundred
"cities" of Roman North Africa may have averaged less than two thousand
inhabitants each; their population was swollen by landed proprietors and farm
laborers, and their prime raison d'etre was political and administrative rather than
economic. Still, there were artisans and shopkeepers in every town; there were
landowners who drew considerable incomes by exploiting large estates through the
work of undernourished slaves and depressed tenants; there were tax farmers,'
manufacturers of military stores, contractors of public works, transport agents,
loansharks, and many other traders who took advantage of the opportunities offered
by the gigantic size of the Roman Empire. In turn, their concentrated purchasing
power, added to that of millions of poorer consumers, formed a substantial total. For
a long time, the Empire was at peace, taxes were moderate, and internal duties
almost insignificant. There was no dearth of mineral resources, and the imperial
mints relentlessly struck gold coins for the larger transactions, silver for the more
ordinary ones, and copper for daily needs.

Under these circumstances, one may ask why the Roman economy remained so
close to subsistence level, and why industry, commerce, and finance never really
took off. Because ours is an industrial civi lization, contemporary economists tend to
consider industrialization as the keystone of economic build-up; because credit plays
a paramount role in financing new industries, they often look at it as the magic rod
to stir up sleeping potentials of growth. History, however, seems to warn us that in
an underdeveloped country credit does not come easily to those who lack capital,
and commercialization has to precede industrialization. A merchant who will take
risks and exploit price differences from one place to another may rapidly transform a
small initial investment into a sizable capital. He may then use all or part of his
gains to promote industrial development and market the products; he may also
extend credit to other merchants, with an eye to business opportunities rather than to
usurious returns from consumption loans to the poor and the spendthrift.

In the Roman Empire, however, the scope of commercial enterprise was restricted
not only by the ordinary shortcomings of underdeveloped economies, but also by
peculiar limitations in both of the fields where high rewards were possible:
indispensable goods for the masses, luxuries for the choosy rich. The government
took over in full or in part the production and distribution of salt, grain, metals,
marble, and military uniforms. Foreign trade was severely handicapped by laws

16
 which, had they been rigidly enforced, would have forbidden the export of gold,
strategic materials, foodstuffs, and almost anything that a foreigner might accept in
exchange for his own goods. At any rate, not many foreign goods were desired in an
Empire which produced almost everything it cared for. Interregional commerce
within the Empire was more lively, but dwindled as the entire Roman world became
more and more uniform. Differences in latitude, and hence in climate, are not
exceedingly great between one Mediterranean region and another; wherever they
went, the Romans planted the vegetables and trees which they liked, and shunned
both the far North, where grapes would not ripen, and the far South, where olive
trees would not grow. Likewise, provincial craftsmen gradually learned to imitate
the best industrial products of Greece and Italy; the specialties of other regions were
either adopted and copied everywhere or crowded out by more fashionable models.

The most serious obstacle to commercial development, however, was a

psychological one. Trade was regarded as a base occupation, unworthy of gentlemen
though not really unbecoming for commoners who would be unable to find a more
dignified means of support. This prejudiced view was sanctioned by laws which,
purportedly in order to make it easier for poorer people to earn their living, forbade
noblemen to engage in commerce. It is true that longdistance commerce, when
carried out on a large scale, was "not so very discreditable" (to use Cicero's
judgment); still a man of that profession could fully redeem himself only if he
retired from business as soon as he had gathered enough money to buy land and live
like a gentleman. There were, of course, grasping men whom no legal or social
disapproval could stop; we do hear of senators exercising petty trade through men of
straw, and of plebeians trying to pass off as respectable men while clinging to their
well-established exportimport business. Nevertheless, the bad odor of commerce
encouraged the natural propensity of affluent landowners to dissipate their capital in
conspicuous consumption, and enticed status-seeking merchants to sink in
uneventful agriculture the accumulated assets of thriving commercial enterprises. It
also led the government to disregard trade in its planning.

One notable consequence was that the great military roads, built and kept up at
staggering public expense, were too narrow for large carts and often had gradients
too steep for any carts. Since pack animals were then extremely expensive, and
transporting a standard cartload of hay over thirty miles doubled its price, long-
distance commerce had to depend almost entirely on transportation by water. This,
too, was taxed by the government's frequent requisitions of ships; but it was
definitely cheaper. In fact, transportation by water ranked next to long-distance trade
as a business where a daring entrepreneur could attain a fairly high economic
reward.

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 CRAFTS AND CREDIT
With a few exceptions, craftsmen and industrial workers were at the bottom of the
social ladder and had the smallest opportunities for economic self-improvement.
Industries requiring strength rather than ability, such as mining, were almost entirely
manned by slaves and convicts, and the competition of slaves contributed heavily to
depress the earnings of even the most skilled free artisans. The Roman republic,
when political strife was bitter and social mobility greater, had outlawed all craft
guilds. The early Empire permitted them only on condition that they concern
themselves solely with religious ceremonies and charitable purposes. The late
Empire made them responsible for the regular delivery of a fixed quota of products,
regardless of manpower supply and of market opportunities. No doubt passive
resistance, strikes, and flight from work were not entirely unheard of, but at no time
were guilds allowed to strive for collective action in defense of the craftsmen's own
interests. And though there must have been a few success stories, it was extremely
difficult for individual artisans to gain wealth and status through the work of their
hands.

What kept industry down to a very low level of productivity was its inadequate
mechanization, a much more serious shortcoming than inadequate animal power
was for agriculture. Yet machines of various kinds had been invented and were used
in ambitious projects, such as public buildings, hydraulic works, and highway
construction. All this, however, required capital, and capital was in the hands of
landowners who had no mind for industry (or, at most, drafted their slaves and
tenants to make bricks, tools, and other agricultural implements for their own large
estates); of merchants who could spare little beyond their investment in commerce
proper; and of a government whose economic goals went no further than insuring
stability, peace, and bread for all. It is said that when someone suggested to Emperor
Vespasian to employ in public constructions a machine which would lift more
weight than a whole team of workers, he replied, "Let me rather give food and work
to these poor people." Without capital, and hence with modest tools, a craftsman
soon reached the ceiling of the production he could achieve single-hand- edly. This
in turn tended to create a closed circle: he produced little surplus because he lacked
labor-saving devices and money to hire many assistants, and could not buy the
devices or hire the assistants because he produced little surplus. No doubt the circle
could be broken if he found somebody willing to lend him capital; but the low return
of the investment made it impossible for him to obtain credit at reasonable terms.

Credit, at any rate, played a modest role in the Roman economy. Lending money
at interest was not illegal, but was regarded as still more despicable than engaging in
trade; for, as the philosophers taught, money is not consumed by the user and, unlike
trees, does not bear fruit. It certainly bore no fruit in terms of economic growth
when invested in consumption loans to the destitute and the spendthrift; such loans
carried the highest charges and for that reason attracted the capital of greedy men of

18
 all classes. Money changers and deposit bankers lent to merchants at lower rates, but
were hamstrung by the mediocrity of the business world, and never grew into
something that could be remotely compared to modern commercial and industrial
development banks. Credit was a will-o'-the-wisp when it was not usurious
pawnbroking; the prudent, conservative spirit of the Roman society could hardly
conceive wealth otherwise than as a tangible collection of fields, houses, cattle,
slaves, movable objects, or hard cash. This view proved so compelling for the
imperial government that when wars and other emergencies forced it to spend more
than it received through ordinary taxation, it did not try to bridge the gap by
borrowing from the citizens against the collateral of its immense assets.
Extraordinary taxation and currency debasement were carried farther and farther,
until all sources were exhausted and the Empire became disastrously insolvent
without ever contracting any debts.

19
 THE COLLAPSE OF THE EMPIRE
AND THE LONG DOWNWARD
TREND
It is hardly necessary to say that in recorded history, peace is a rare, almost
abnormal phenomenon. The two relatively peaceful centuries of the early Empire
were but a long interlude between the three centuries of offensive wars which built
up the Roman commonwealth and the three centuries of defensive wars which
brought it down. By 476, the western half of the Empire had been completely
overrun by the "Barbarians" (that is, "foreigners," most of whom spoke Germanic
languages). Yet the invaders were less numerous, less formidable, and, in general,
more backward than the Greco Roman community; almost to the last minute, they
accepted invitations to immigrate peacefully as mercenaries, allies, and future
citizens; they conquered not by their own strength but by Roman default.

Why did the Roman will and ability to resist wear out? If we leave aside the
possible impact of psychological changes, which cannot be adequately explored in
the framework of economic history, the cause that immediately comes to mind is the
relentless, increasing financial strain, amply documented as early as the late second
century A.D. In the long run, the Empire could provide the money and manpower
needed to hold back the Barbarians only by crushing the lower and middle classes
under the burden of excessive taxation and labor service. Moreover, the sacrifices
the imperial government demanded caused most citizens to lose interest in its
preservation and turn their best efforts and hopes increasingly towards the Kingdom
of Heaven. Still it would be difficult to explain why the resources of the great
Greco-Roman community were so woefully inadequate, if some internal drain had
not contributed to depleting its already limited reserve of strength.

Men are the prime material of history; let us look first at demography, that is,
population trends. Even when Rome was in its heyday, an average life expectancy of
twenty-five years was barely enough to insure a modest increase in the number of
adult laborers which its economy badly needed to produce a surplus. A slight change
in the proportion of births to deaths would transform the increase into a deficit; and
though certain regions were overpopulated, the Empire needed all its men for the
inflexible task of feeding and equipping not only the producers themselves, but also
a large army and a cumbersome bureaucracy. Ever since Augustus' time, the
government had taken steps to promote marriage and parenthood among Roman
citizens; but children do not come by decree, and the birth rate inexorably declined.
It was still lower among slaves, whose numbers could no longer be swollen through
capture at war; for the early Empire was usually at peace, and the later Empire was
seldom victorious. Worse still, the wars of the later Empire caused the death rate to
soar, not so much on account of battlefield casualties as because they were apt to
bring famine in their wake, and famine in turn exposed men to disease. At the same

20
time, the triumph of Christianity made ecclesiastic celibacy a depressant of the birth
rate.

Very probably, however, the demographic crisis had still deeper roots. The
cyclical flows and ebbs of disease and famine, which can be observed over
multisecular periods, seem to be connected with certain "pulsations" of climate, of
which historians are just beginning to take stock. Less long and sharp than the great
prehistoric alternations of glacial and interglacial periods, these pulsations have
brought about, in historical times, slow yet telling changes in the average
temperature and humidity of the earth. Scattered but consistent evidence indicates
that the last centuries of antiquity and the first ones of the early Middle Ages were
especially cold and wet. This might not in itself have been disastrous for the
normally warm and dry Mediterranean world, but it made the traditional techniques
of dry farming less successful and accelerated the already advanced process of
erosion. It was a great shock for Rome, in the fifth century, to be sacked by the
Ostrogoths; but the slow degradation of the surrounding countryside, which
preceded those dramatic events, was a greater economic catastrophe. Campania was
turning into a stony wilderness, Etruria into a malarial swampland. Some other
regions were less affected by soil exhaustion and endemic disease, but none was
spared by the dramatic succession of "pestilences" which ravaged the Greco-Roman
world over and again, from the year 180 to the mid-sixth century. These periodical
epidemic outbursts were probably caused by several agents, but the greatest killer
undoubtedly was the bubonic plague. There have been only two multisecular periods
in recorded history when the plague, normally confined to some pockets in the Far
East, repeatedly spread all over the Eurasian continent: the one we have just
mentioned, and the stretch between the mid-fourteenth century and the mid-
seventeenth. It is probably not an accident that both periods coincided with a cold
and wet pulsation of the climate.

By the fifth century of our era, when the Barbarians finally broke through the
Roman defenses in the West, the population of the Empire was reduced in numbers,
weakened by undernourishment, demoralized by defeat, and oppressed by
overtaxation. Yet its resistance had not collapsed everywhere: the eastern half of the
Empire rolled back the invaders, mended its fences, and headed for another thou
sand years of respectable survival. In the West, the victorious Barbarians did not
deliberately set out to destroy what was left of the old order, but usually tried to
patch it up in order to enjoy its advantages. The task, however, was clearly too hard
for them. Their numbers were so small that the whole nation of the Ostrogoths,
coming under Theodoric to conquer Italy, could shut themselves for several months
within the walls of one Italian city, Pavia, and wait there for a favorable turn of the
war. Above all, their political organization and technological equipment were so
modest, that they were utterly incapable of arresting the decline of the ailing Roman
economy. Recovery came more readily to the eastern half of the Empire-what we
call the Byzantine Empire-and there the Barbarians could be of no help because they
were thrown out.

21
 In a broad sense, the barbarian age lasted until the tenth century in the parts of
western Europe where the tide turned sooner, and, in other parts, until the twelfth or
even the fourteenth. When it was ended, the European nations achieved something
better than recovery: they produced a more dynamic economy than those of Rome
and Byzantium. Unconsciously, the Barbarians prepared the ground by quickening
the ruin of the old order and allowing the wreckage to disintegrate. The new order,
however, was not their work but that of later generations and mixed teams.

22
 AGRICULTURE IN THE
BARBARIAN AGE
The economic set-up of the Barbarians, both in their countries of origin and in the
conquered provinces, is harder to describe than that of the Romans. Not only is
information scantier, but it reveals sharp differences between coarse Saxons and
comparatively refined Burgundians, between far-away Scandinavians and Visigoths
camping near the Roman heart of the Empire. We shall stress the traits which were
most unlike those of the Greco-Roman world, but we must not forget that the two
cultures also had many points in common and drew ever closer during the long
peace that followed the age of invasions and migrations.

The culture of the Barbarians was even more thoroughly rural than that of the
Romans, but it was less deeply rooted in the soil. It still had a touch of nomadism,
mingling agriculture proper with hunting and herding, because men did not yet fully
control nature, allowed forests and waters to cover some of the best land, feared
wolves and craved game. They relied less heavily than the Romans on cultivated
plants and more on meat and milk; rather than striving to preserve the fertility of the
soil through laborious techniques, they alternated frequently their cultivations from
one field to another while letting cattle graze on a large part of their holdings.
Eventually, if it was possible, they moved on to virgin land and cleared it, while
allowing the forest to close in again behind them. Slash and burn agriculture (that is,
cutting down trees, setting fire to the underbrush, and cultivating the ash-enriched
soil until it is exhausted) yields high returns at first sowing; it was practiced in
northern Russia until recently and still is widespread among underdeveloped peoples
where forests are thick and land is thinly populated. This improvident, adventurous
way of life, or some modifications of it, greatly increased the danger of starvation
and checked the increase of the population. On the other hand, any increase had to
be met either by more sparing ways to exploit the soil, or by contests with other
people for a new share of the thinly settled, but not inexhaustible space. The early
history of the barbarian tribes is full of clashes and pushes from end to end of the
great northern European plain; the conquest of the western half of the Roman
Empire is only its last chapter. Thereafter, it became indispensable for the invaders
to pause and learn how to conserve the soil. Their economy of waste drew closer to
the economy of saturation of the conquered people.

Conversely the Romans, whose numbers had been diminishing although they still
made up the majority of the population in the former territory of the western
Empire, were less and less driven to lavish labor on unrewarding soil. The trend had
begun long before the fall of Rome. Soil exhaustion, heavy taxation, and insecurity
conspired to make small farms unattractive. Independent peasants left their exposed
land in droves, and sought shelter in the large estates (saltus or villae) where a great
landowner employed great numbers of dependents to cultivate the better patches or
to graze animals on the worse ones. The landowner was seldom tender-hearted, but

23
he had to treat laborers with some consideration as labor became a scarce
commodity, and he could withstand all kinds of pressure better than an ordinary
peasant. It made little difference for the latter if and when a Roman master was
displaced by a Barbarian; likewise, a Barbarian who had not received a large estate
when settling down on Roman territory faced the same problems as a Roman small
farmer, and tried to meet them in the same way. Thus, gradually, the chessboard of
cultivated fields broke up, and large empty spaces surrounded the loosely exploited
holdings of powerful men; trees grew again on deforested hills, brush covered the
spreading marshes, and the economy of saturation came to resemble the economy of
waste. The gap between Barbarian primitiveness and Roman decadence, which was
shrinking in the political and intellectual fields, narrowed down in the methods of
cultivation and patterns of settlement as well.

That the gap was not entirely closed depends primarily on geographic features
which men cannot radically change. We have noted the main characteristics of the
Mediterranean countries: a collection of small stretches of comparatively level land,
hemmed in by the sea and the mountains; much sunshine, little rain, moderate
seasonal variations of temperature. Continental Europe, the original home of the
Barbarians, is almost exactly the opposite: an endless plain, well provided with
water and ill favored by the sun, with prolonged cold winters and scorching
summers. Left to itself, the heavy soil will bring forth tall trees and fodder for wild
or tame animals of any kind; cultivation requires none of the ceaseless pampering
demanded by the Mediterranean lean earth, but a concentrated effort with powerful
tools. To some extent, this fundamental contrast was blurred by migrations of men
and techniques. First, the Romans had expanded their husbandry far beyond the
Mediterranean shores, in regions which had some or all of the characteristics of
continental Europe: the Po Valley, northern France, England, and the Rhineland.
Then, the Barbarians swarmed into the peninsulas and islands of the Mediterranean,
and introduced there some of their techniques, for they were not so primitive that
they had no useful agricultural practices to teach their more sophisticated neighbors.
As centuries went by, the contrast between Romans and Barbarians became less
significant than the geographic division between Mediterranean and continental
methods, or between northern and southern Europe-a division that does not coincide
precisely with any political, national, or linguistic borders, yet still affects
agriculture today.

To what extent was the agriculture of the barbarian age successful in its main
tasks of feeding the laborers and producing surpluses for other consumers or
reserves for lean years? The extreme poverty of information, especially for the
central centuries of the barbarian age, has led some historians to cast forward the
shadow of the initial, disastrous meeting of Roman decadence with German
primitiveness, and to assume that things went from bad to worse ever after. This is
probably an exaggeration: the diminished demographic pressure, the abandonment
of much submarginal land, the disbanding of the costly administrative superstructure
of the Roman Empire, the simpler though not slighter appetites of the German ruling
class, and the reduced impact of war and taxation must have brought some relief.

24
Relief, however, was bought at the price of a general lowering of standards.
Governments cut down their services still faster than their demands; roads, irrigation
systems, and other public works deteriorated in the formerly Roman territory and
hardly existed in the other parts of western Europe; illiteracy became almost
universal among laymen and far from rare among the clergy; a chronically
insufficient labor force was hard put to obtain the bare necessities for themselves
and a few luxuries for their coarse masters. No doubt prices during the early Middle
Ages sank to an all-time low; but this was a token of monetary and economic
stagnation, not a result of abundance.

In a justified reaction against a totally catastrophic interpretation of the so-called

Dark Ages some modern scholars depicted barbarian Europe as a great breeding
ground of technological innovations. As a matter of fact, certain new tools and
techniques that contributed significantly to the European recovery from the tenth
century on may be traced back to the barbarian period (or even earlier); but their
diffusion or their impact cannot possibly have been great in an age that is otherwise
represented by the extant sources as utterly depopulated and depressed. A few
figures on the yield of cereals tell the story with terrible eloquence. Under the late
Roman Republic and early Empire, the average yield in the Italian peninsula was
four times the seed, with peak harvests above ten times the seed in the better soils of
Sicily and Tuscany; much later, in thirteenthcentury England, a threefold yield was
regarded as unprofitable unless prices were unusually inflated; but in the
Carolingian period, which was probably the high point of the barbarian age, the
largest harvests on record were just above twice the seed, the lowest ones fell below
one and a half times the seed. This means that at least one half of the cultivated area
served merely to produce seed. No doubt hunting, fishing, dairy products, and
vegetables grown in wellmanured backyards supplemented the diet; but it is no
wonder that in a society where bread was so scarce and uncertain the term "keeper
of loaves," hlaford, came to mean, in Anglo-Saxon, "master," or lord.

Yet we must also keep in mind that the barbarian age brought about some
equalization among the ill-nourished people of the lower classes. Ancient Rome had
richer aristocrats and more comfortable free farmers, but was beset by landless
proletarians and depended on slave labor. Whether rich or poor, all free citizens
were equal before the law, but slaves were cattle at the mercy of their master. The
long depression of the barbarian age fostered the growth of an intermediate group,
made up of degraded freemen and promoted slaves, all of whom were substantially
free in their relations with third parties but unfree in their relations with a master or
lord. The new social group, which eventually inherited the old name of the slaves
(servi, serfs), also absorbed many able-bodied proletarians. At the bottom of society
there only remained a dwindling number of unenfranchised slaves and disabled or
idle beggars. This complex evolution, which began before the fall of Rome and was
protracted into the later Middle Ages but took its longest stride in the barbarian
period, cannot be described in detail here. Let us note, however, that its fundamental
causes were the demographic depression and the lack of physical and economic
security. Insecurity, as we have seen, forced the humbler freemen to submit or

25
 "recommend" (commendare) themselves to stronger and richer people. Scarcity of
manpower eliminated involuntary unemployment and forced slave owners to
improve the lot of their human cattle in order to make them more resistant and
willing to work. Some historians also ascribe an important role to the preaching of
the Church, but this is debatable. No doubt Christianity promises the Kingdom of
Heaven to the submissive and proclaims all souls equal before God, but organized
religion is seldom revolutionary on earth, and practical ethics does not so much
determine practical economics as it adjusts to it.

Be that as it may, this much is sure: the barbarian age tarnished the luster of the
upper class and debased the living standard of most of the people, but it had work
for every able-bodied man. In moral terms, it may be argued whether a more equally
shared misery is better or worse than a diversified profile of riches and poverty. In
economic terms, a low platform may serve for the launching of economic growth,
but this cannot occur without the injection of some powerful driving force, and no
such force is visible anywhere before the tenth century.

26
 THE TRADES IN THE
BARBARIAN AGE
The predominance of agriculture over all other occupations became crushing in
the barbarian age. Food surpluses were too small to support a substantial number of
people who did not produce and gather their share; the privileged few who had both
food and money to spare usually had robust appetites but small interest in the
refinements of life, and kept their treasures idle in their coffers or froze them in
readily enjoyable jewelry rather than investing them in business ventures. This,
more than any substantial outflow of precious metals towards the richer countries
beyond western Europe, accounts for the fact that prices tumbled down in the midst
of scarcity of most goods and services, and coinage was reduced to a trickle of coins
with the highest purchasing power, while the smaller denominations used in daily
transactions gradually disappeared. People normally endeavored to produce (or have
produced by their dependents) nearly all they needed. What small transactions still
occurred, and many larger ones, could be carried out by exchanging one good for
another (such goods might range in value from a loaf of bread or a cupful of grain to
an estate with its cattle and serfs); money was used exceptionally for large purchases
and for the storing of wealth.

This general picture, however, must be enriched with many nuances. It is virtually
impossible to distinguish one chronological period from another in the agricultural
history of the barbarian age, because agriculture changes but slowly, and produces
very few quantitative records, most of which are significant only for the specific
territory from which they come. It is a little less difficult to take guesses at the
evolution of commerce and the crafts. Yet even there, the sustained and learned
debate that has engrossed the attention of economic historians for almost fifty years
is now dying out without any general agreement. The basic argument concerned a
comparative assessment of the first and second halves of the Barbarian Age: in
France, the Merovingian and the Carolingian periods; in Italy, the Lombard and the
Carolingian; in England, the early and the late Anglo-Saxon; and so forth. Before
the discussion started, it was taken for granted that decline had been continuous
during the first half, with a low point in all economic activities other than sustenance
agriculture by the seventh or early eighth century, and that the Carolingians in the
late eighth and early ninth centuries had brought about a revival, unfortunately
nipped in the bud by the collapse of their empire and the subsequent wave of
invasions. This profile, however, was not based on quantitative data on commerce
and industry in the two periods (especially for the first one there are none that can be
of much help), but mainly on the assumption that economic trends ran parallel to
better known trends in literacy and literature, art and philosophy, government and
war. Such an assumption deserved to be challenged and it was, even to the extent of
reversing the diagnosis and pronouncing the Carolingian period an economic low
point after a not too unsuccessful Merovingian, Lombard, or early Anglo-Saxon
period. More evidence was dug out, but none of it was conclusive, and the revision

27
elicited a number of counter-revisions.

We still lack quantitative data and the debate is moot. But it has served at least
two useful purposes. On the one hand, we have been reminded that the evolution of
crafts and, above all, that of international commerce are linked to international
events. As a matter of fact, the changing relations of the West with Byzantium, the
surge of Islam in the seventh century, and its consolidation over the southern half of
the Mediterranean world (from Syria to Spain) had European repercussions that we
can no longer neglect. On the other hand, attention has been attracted to the
difference between an early period, when the Roman legacy had not been totally
dispersed but adjustment to changed conditions had not really begun, and a late
period, when Rome was merely a distant memory but a new economic formula was
slowly emerging. It matters little that we cannot tell which of the two periods was
slightly better than the other, for both of them were fundamentally depressed.

Geographically, too, there were disparities which partly coincided with the north-
south partition we noted in agriculture, but went deeper and included more local
variations. In Italy a debased tradition of urban life and activities survived the first
Barbarian conquest by the Ostrogoths and the "Roman" reconquest by Justinian, the
famous Byzantine emperor of the sixth century. Soon after, the Lombards occupied
the larger part of the country but were to some extent infected by the habits of the
areas still held in the name of Byzantium; and even Charlemagne's Franks when in
Rome had to do like the Romans. Thus a tenuous but unbroken thread connected the
ancient Italian city with the late medieval one. In Spain also there was no total
eclipse between the waning town life of the Visigoths and the waxing life introduced
by the Arab conquerors. Indeed, the whole Mediterranean facade of western Europe
benefited from relations with the Byzantine and Islamic worlds, and sharply
contrasted with the isolation of the countrified hinterland.

A more modest kind of trade, ruder crafts, and more primitive towns also began to
appear during the barbarian age along the other "Mediterranean" formed by the
North Sea and the Baltic Sea: the Frisians, the Anglo-Saxons, the Scandinavians,
and the Rhinish Germans competed for the opportunities arising along the frontier
between half-civilized Barbarians and uncivilized ones, often alternating trade with
agriculture, piracy, and war. Some commerce also was possible inside western and
central Europe, wherever a monastery or an episcopal see established a group of
potential consumers, or an unusually sophisticated lord was not content with what
his serfs could make for him. In the larger part of Europe, however, the visitations of
trade tended to be as unexpected as famines, plagues, and invasions; as a matter of
fact, these calamities drove holes into the thin armor of countrified selfsufficiency,
and then the not-always-available help of an international merchant (often, a Jewish
one) was the only alternative to starvation. But there also were more pleasant
windfalls, such as the appearance of a peddler on a feast day; and even the most
backward village had to buy salt if it could not obtain it otherwise.

We must beware of overestimating the size of commerce in the barbarian age:

28
 even at the best moments and in the most lively places, it was very small. Industrial
activity must have been still smaller, apart from the low grade crafts that are the
indispensable complement of country life: ordinary smithery and carpentry, coarse
pottery and weaving, and other types of production meant primarily for immediate
use on the spot and not for sale on the market. But we must beware even more of
dismissing what market economy there was as a negligible quantity. In a still
atmosphere the softest breeze matters. We often hear, in early medieval sources, of
"large" cities, "rich" merchants, "famous" smiths: that is what they looked like in the
context of the time. Just as slaves were slightly upgraded because they were getting
rare, so did skilled workers and merchants cut a more respectable figure than their
better equipped but more commonplace Roman predecessors. Many of them, it is
true, shared the fate of the great majority of freemen, forced to recommend
themselves to a powerful lord; but others maintained their independence, and some
gained acceptance into the higher ranks of society. The most striking case in point is
that of the moneyers (manufacturers of coins), who rose from the unenviable
condition of hard-driven workmen in the Roman imperial mints to that of
independent entrepreneurs or high officials of the barbarian governments. Their
numbers, productivity and skill had fallen far below those of their Roman
predecessors; but the maker and handler of money had become an important
personage when coins were scarce and credit hard to obtain.

These hopeful signs, however, were more than offset by the agricultural, military,
and religious shape of the barbarian society. The western Church upbraided the
quest for wealth, of which the merchant seemed the most typical representative, and
bolstered the rational arguments of the ancient philosophers against the money
lender with a moral condemnation of interest charges as sins against charity. Among
influential laymen there were not many intellectuals or civil servants who could
mitigate the instinctive contempt of the upper class for any member of society who
did not normally fight or hunt. Even in the largest and best managed estates which
were geared for the production of a salable surplus and collected modest dues in
cash from tenants, the golden rule was seeing to it that "it should not be necessary to
request or buy anything from outside." Without the stimulating medium of
substantial towns, merchants and craftsmen had to seek their customers in a myriad
of unreceptive rural mansions and hamlets, and could not easily enlarge their
operations and grow rich enough to command respect.

29
 CATHOLIC EUROPE AND
HER NEIGHBORS
Of all the changes that the barbarian age brought to the GrecoRoman world the
most clear-cut and irreversible was the change of geographical frameworks. In three
successive stages, the Mediterranean community gave way to new political,
intellectual, and economic constellations. First the collapse of the Roman protective
barriers in the West enabled the Barbarians not only to lower the cultural level of the
conquered countries but also to raise slowly the level of their native lands. Then
Byzantium found it impossible to keep its higher, more conservative civilization
firmly in touch with the interbred civilization of the West. Lastly, the Arabs
submerged more than one half of the Mediterranean territories and established there
an original blend of the Greco-Roman and Persian cultures with their own. Thus, by
the time of Charlemagne, the sea that had functioned as the central highway of the
GrecoRoman community became the border between three different communities,
which in the lack of an appropriate economic term may be identified through their
predominant religions: Islamic, Orthodox, and Catholic. Their centers of gravity
were far apart: Baghdad, the capital of the caliphs, was a stepping stone to inner
Asia; Constantinople was the gateway to the Black Sea and Asia Minor; Aachen,
closer to what we have called "the northern Mediterranean" than to the classic
Mediterranean, indicated the northern and Germanic interests of the Carolingians.
Nevertheless, the three communities had not entirely turned their back on the old
Roman sea, nor had they broken all relations with one another. Before leaving the
barbarian age, we must take a brief look at the economy of the two great neighbors
of the emerging Catholic Europe.

Byzantium was the political continuation of the late Roman Empire in the east, on
a territory which alternatively expanded and contracted with the fortune of war but
always loomed large as compared to the petty barbarian states. Her basic economic
assets and liabilities also bore a Roman stamp: on the active side of the balance, a
skillful agriculture of the intensive Mediterranean type, a diversified industry, an
active commerce based on cash and to a smaller amount on credit, a good number of
easily accessible towns; on the passive side, high taxation, little mechanization, and
deeprooted biases against nonagricultural pursuits. The favorable characteristics,
however, were enfeebled because Byzantium had smaller resources than Rome, was
seldom at peace, and could not entirely escape the agents of depression that affected
more severely the barbarian West. The population diminished, its culture declined,
its composition changed as many Barbarians were admitted as colonists or allowed
to stay in territories temporarily lost to them. Most towns survived, and so did the
opposite poles of the lower classes (slaves, and the poorer free men), but few cities
thrived and an intermediate status similar to Western serfdom made its appearance.
Like their Roman predecessors (but unlike most barbarian kings) the Byzantine
emperors felt responsible for the welfare of their subjects, but their means were
inadequate and their frequent interventions in economic affairs were often unfair or

30
unwise. More important still, the very fact that economic conditions had not
intolerably worsened encouraged conservatism where innovation would have been
useful. Nevertheless, there were valuable novelties, especially in shipbuilding,
commercial practices, and the luxury industries of silk and glass. Above all,
whatever was preserved of the ancient economic organization was easily enough to
keep Byzantium far ahead of the Catholic West until the tenth century at least.

The economy of Islam defies summary description: the central caliphate and the
splinter states that began to emerge in the late eighth century embraced the most
diverse lands, peoples, and traditions. Moreover, the sparse sources of the early
Islamic period are barely beginning to attract the expert attention that economic
historians have long been devoting to Latin and Greek sources. It is beyond doubt
that the Arab conquest brought dividends soon after the initial destruction; there was
hardly a "barbarian" interlude comparable to the long depression of the West. In the
Sasanian (Persian) Empire, which they swallowed whole, and in Syria, Egypt, and
Northwest Africa, which they wrested from Byzantium, the Arabs inherited going, if
not thriving economies, and absorbed the techniques of two mature civilizations.
The amalgamation under one flag of all that territory, plus the Iberian peninsula, a
large proportion of Central Asia, some parts of India, and, of course, Arabia,
engendered new potential for growth, but growth was not easy in the presence of the
adverse demographic and economic trends we have noted in Catholic Europe and
Byzantium. These trends, we may now add, seem to have occurred in all other parts
of the Old World for which any economic evidence is available, such as preIslamic
Persia and post-Han China, though timing and intensity varied to some extent.

There are reasons to believe that in the Islamic world as a whole the cycle ran
about a hundred years ahead of Catholic Europe. By the tenth century, when Europe
was just getting out of depression, some Muslim countries were well on the way to
their medieval peak. Their growth had almost everywhere stopped or slowed down
by the end of the twelfth century, while Catholic Europe was only approaching her
zenith. On the other hand, even at its highest point the economic growth of Islam
was not much greater than that of Byzantium and definitely smaller than that of the
late medieval West. The Arabian Nights are fascinating but misleading; they see
Baghdad in the age of Harun al-Rashid through a magnifying glass. Actually most
roads were poor or nonexistent, ships were small, coinage was barely adequate, and
the conspicuous consumption of a few rich people did not make up for the
destitution of the masses. Because nomadic grazing and caravan trade had been the
basic occupations in their country of origin, the Arabs tended to despise farming and
respected traveling commerce, the profession of Mo hammed himself. But although
this unusual bent could provide a fresh stimulus to economic growth, it was partly
offset by the Arabs' traditional disinclination for political order and teamwork.
These contradictory drives, moreover, were braked by the reemerging biases of the
conquered Persian, Byzantine, and Spanish upper classes, who lived in cities but had
always looked down on trade. Nevertheless, in the early Middle Ages the economic
pace of the Islamic world was distinctly faster than that of Catholic Europe, if only
because it drew its resources and techniques from an incomparably larger range of

31
lands and cultures.

Unquestionably, the Muslim and Byzantine experiences could and did transmit
precious teachings to Catholic Europe. We shall indicate, in due time, the principal
elements that added power to the European awakening from the tenth century on.
Many other borrowings are attested by the Arab or Greek etymologies of a large
number of economic terms in the vocabulary of every west European language. In
the Barbarian period, however, Europe was unprepared to learn, and her more
advanced neighbors felt no urge to teach. This does not mean that communication
was absolutely impossible: both the Byzantine and the Muslims welcomed strangers
who would contribute ideas, manpower, and commodities; Islam in its early
centuries was particularly tolerant of foreign religions. Without being always
intolerant, the barbarian states of western Europe were more provincial (or, rather,
tribal); some Saxon and Anglo-Saxon laws took for granted that a stranger for
whom nobody would vouch should be sold as a slave or treated as a thief. In spite of
these extreme statements, however, aliens traveled to and fro under the protection of
a royal safeconduct or a pilgrim's garb, periodical markets offered privileged
meeting grounds, and many semiautonomous seaports, especially in Italy, were open
to trade with both friendly and unfriendly foreign countries.

To this we shall return later; but we must stress at once that whereas the impact of
economic and cultural exchanges with the Islamic world was usually limited by
mutual incomprehension, friction with Byzantium was less of an obstacle to
communication and grudging admiration. Very likely the balance of trade of
Catholic Europe (if we may use such a prestigious term for a trickle of goods) was
more favorable in the relations with the Islamic coun tries. They provided a
practically inexhaustible market for European heavy raw materials (timber, iron,
copper) and slaves, while selling to Europe a modest amount of spices and luxury
goods. But it is doubtful whether an underdeveloped country gains more by what it
exports than by what it imports. Though Byzantium bought little from Catholic
Europe and was a constant source of irritation as a wayward, yet more successful
sister, it was to her that Westerners turned first when they looked for refined wares,
artistic knowhow, and economic or political models that were not available at home.
Paradoxically, imitation became indispensable when the Carolingians, after unifying
most of the Barbarian states, claimed back the Roman primogeniture that had passed
on to Constantinople and endeavored to set up a western Empire that would match
or outdo Byzantium. Though Charlemagne was deeply attached to German customs
and Roman devotion, he and his immediate successors were gradually driven to look
abroad for a model of imperial organization. The Byzantine Empire was the only
suitable model they could find.

In the economic field, the Carolingians strove, with a stronger religious undertone
and a weaker or hazier technique of enforcement, to pursue much the same aims as
their eastern imperial rivals. With a somewhat cross-eyed look at earthly power and
eternal salvation, they forbade the smuggling of Christian slaves, arms, and other
essential materials into foreign territory, they organized and supervised markets for

32
 internal trade, restricted or entirely outlawed "usurious" interest, and tried to reach a
uniform, stable system of weights, measures, coins, and prices. They did succeed in
establishing a fixed proportion of weights, reflected in the ponderal and monetary
equivalence of a pound to 20 shillings and 240 deniers; that equivalence survived, in
England at least, down to our days, but its main purpose was flouted by the decline
of the actual weight and alloy quality of coins and the fluctuations of prices. Still,
had the Carolingian Empire endured, Catholic Europe might perhaps have become a
centralized, authoritarian, land-rooted monarchy combining Byzantine with
Barbarian characteristics. It crumbled before the end of the ninth century, and the
budding nations of the West were released to work their way up by trial and error, in
an original key.

33
 2
The Growth of
Self-Centered Agriculture
THE TURN OF THE
DEMOGRAPHIC TIDE
Manpower was the essential asset and motor in the lightly mechanized economy
of the ancient world. Its scarcity and diminished skill became a dominant problem of
the barbarian age. We cannot be surprised if the revival and soaring of the later
Middle Ages coincided with a resumption of population growth accompanied by a
resurgence of skill.

When did the demographic tide turn? The beginnings are hidden in the least
documented centuries of the barbarian age. It takes time before the growth of a
small quantity snowballs to noticeable size. Although we cannot be reasonably sure
before the tenth century that in a large part of Catholic Europe the vicious circle of
low population, low production, and low consumption was broken, we cannot rule
out the possibility that change began somewhat earlier. We do hear, in the
Carolingian age, of new villages being founded, woods being cleared, and settlers
being attracted by monasteries, castles, and other sheltered places. Such fragmentary
evidence, however, can be interpreted in more than one way: monastic and
seigniorial agglomerations may grow at the expense of unprotected centers;
clearings may accommodate people who have abandoned exhausted fields
elsewhere; new villages may disappear soon after they have been established. It may
be somewhat safer to refer to the record of two major factors affecting the
demographic trends, climate and plagues. The last of the catastrophic pestilences
that swept through the Eurasian continent took place in 742-43. Later sources still
mention epidemics of various kinds, but not before the Black Death of the mid-
fourteenth century do we encounter calamities of major spread and proportions.
Information on climate is less reliable because it is available only at a few widely
separate places, and because changes in climate do not affect all places equally. Still
the little we know about the normally cold regions in the far north of Europe and the
adjacent seas indicates a warm "pulsation" that began in the ninth century or slightly
earlier and made the great Scandinavian migrations possible at latitudes previously
obstructed by ice. In the ninth century, too, we come across the first definite tokens
of crowding in two districts where the fertility of the land and the presence of an
important city created a favorable conjuncture: the Parisian area and the
surroundings of Milan. One wonders whether this incipient but localized growth had
a bearing on the so-called Carolingian renaissance, whose achievements, remarkable

34
though they were, affected only a small minority of the people and were mixed with
signs of economic discomfort and technological inadequacy.

Be that as it may, the Carolingian Empire was soon brought down by the high
mortality rate of its latter rulers, the weakness of its internal structure, and a sudden
resumption of barbarian invasions. It would be tempting to ascribe the invasions to
the hunger for land of nations swollen by population growth, but we never hear of
large numbers. There is no positive reason to explain the new round differently from
the earlier drives of Germans, Huns, and Arabs on the civilized world: no special
demographic pressure is necessary for seminomadic people to reach for ill-defended
grass beyond the fence rather than nurse their own meadow. As a matter of fact, the
Scandinavians who carried out ubiquitous raids in western Europe, made a dazzling
career in Russia, colonized Iceland and Greenland, and touched America by the year
1000, were Germans of the outer fringe. The Slavs who pushed relentlessly
westwards on a long front were only cousins of the Germans, but their customs were
not very different from those of the early Goths and Franks. The Magyars who
entrenched themselves in the Danubian region belonged to the, same uncouth family
as the Huns, scourge of the late Roman Empire. The Muslims of various
provenances who conquered the major islands of the Mediterranean from Sicily to
Cyprus and carried further north their razzias for slaves and other booty were the
descendants (some of their fellow citizens said, "the dregs") of the larger and more
spirited hosts that had created the Arab caliphate. What was new about the new
invaders was not their demographic or economic stature, but the texture of their
target: no longer a majestic if decadent empire like Rome, Byzantium or Persia, but
a half-barbarian empire (or the equally semibarbarous kingdoms that coexisted with
it or arose from its disintegration) which could hardly bring together its local
deputies and plug the gaps of a sparsely inhabited frontier. Both the attacks and the
defense were discontinuous and flexible; there was no capital or central arsenal
whose fall might deliver an entire country into the hands of a determined enemy, but
an endless succession of mediocre castles, monasteries, and self-contained
settlements. All this made penetration easy and conquest slippery; it also shortened
the time needed for reconstruction, whether the Barbarians were ultimately ousted,
absorbed, or accepted as masters.

The invasions and the political disorders did not seriously interfere with the flow
of the demographic tide. By the tenth century, the signs were clear and
unmistakable: the population was growing. Moreover, it tended to leave the more
isolated locations for larger villages and towns. This, at the beginning, was more
often an answer to insecurity in the open country than an indication that agriculture
was making more room for urbanized nonagricultural pursuits. Eventually, however,
commerce and industry were bound to benefit by the process. Even by the most
lavish standards of settlement, there was no dearth of unoccupied space for
cultivation. It took many generations before the sustained demographic growth
supplied the manpower needed to eliminate the wide uninhabited stretches which
made communications difficult, organization spotty, and food supply inadequate.
And though there is record, sooner or later, of cvercrowding and overcropping in

35
 some regions, at other places there still were underpopulated areas and unreclaimed
(but not unreclaimable) districts in the fourteenth century, when the long period of
demographic growth came to a full stop. In the most literal sense, at no time in the
Middle Ages was the wolf kept away from every door. No doubt agricultural
underpopulation is not a rigid factor: the optimum density varies according to the
nature of the soil, the quality of tools and techniques, and the amount of surplus
allotted for the support of nonagricultural people. But these variables in turn are not
unelastic: an increased concentration of labor may improve the land, multiply the
tools, ameliorate the techniques, and stimulate nonagricultural activities. In our own
days the Israelis have shown how the immigration of intelligent, resolute people can
transform a desert into a thriving landscape supporting large cities. Not without
reason medieval writers tended to regard a dense rural population as a prime
indication of general prosperity: in the larger part of Catholic Europe, the initial
move towards economic growth was made by men determined to re-create their own
landscape.

36
 PATTERNS OF AGRICULTURAL
EXPANSION
Anyone who has tried to cultivate his backyard-to say nothing of larger spaces-
knows the infinite diversity of challenge and response within the same plot.
Multiply this by the surface of Europe, the span of centuries, the differences among
individuals and people in an age of imperfect communication, then consider that
most of the record is lost (actually, more often than not it was never compiled) and
that what little remains has only begun to be studied, and you will realize the
impossibility to describe the local manifestations of the agricultural expansion
between the tenth and the fourteenth century. We can surmise the general trend, but
we have hardly any figures to measure it before the late twelfth century. When
figures begin to appear, they are so scattered in time and space that any averaging of
them is bound to be misleading. With these warnings in mind, we still find it
necessary to inscribe tentatively a few details in our inevitably oversimplified
contour map.

Details, indeed, are the core of reality in the tenth century and most of the
eleventh, when virtually all efforts, whether economic, intellectual, or military, were
discontinuous, circumscribed, unco ordinated, and often at cross purposes with other
efforts. The failure of the Carolingian attempt at harnessing the whole of Catholic
Europe under a joint political and ecclesiastic leadership uncovered the flimsiness of
the underpinnings of the restored "Roman Empire" in the West. No alternative
solution on a more than local or, at most, regional scale was in sight. There followed
a protracted period of confusion and struggle: at one time or another every social
group, every village, every family had to fight for property, liberty, and physical
survival not only against foreign invaders but also against their closest neighbors. It
is not surprising that the voices reaching us from that period are full of distress and
frustration; the more so, as most of them come from monasteries, churches, royal
officers, and other beneficiaries of the old order, whose holdings were choice targets
for the depredations of the new barbarians, the usurpations of ruthless lords and
adventurers, and the uprisings of dissatisfied tenants and serfs. Later historians, who
accepted these sources less uncritically, have described the tenth and early eleventh
centuries as an age of localism and revolution, the thorny but not unsuccessful
beginning of a great revival. No doubt law and order have certain plain advantages;
but the law of the barbarian age was crude and ineffective, and the Carolingian
order, for all its lofty religious ideals, would have frozen the immense majority of
the population under the unmovable control of a privileged few. We read something
different in the forecast gloomily enounced by Agnellus of Ravenna, an ecclesiastic
writer of the Carolingian decadence: "Slaves shall marry the daughters of their lord,
and the lowly shall marry the noble, and from those born of impurity there shall
come judges and dukes, and they shall overturn the earth." To the extent that the
prophecy came true, it means that Catholic Europe moved from stagnation at the
lowest level to a social and economic mobility full of dangers but open to hope.

37
 At first, the dangers seemed to overshadow the hope. Not all the overflow of the
population went to activate new and promising land. Some people were abducted or
sold abroad as slaves, others were killed by war or famine before they could durably
win over fresh soil, many were needed merely to repopulate areas that had just been
laid waste. But enslavement, warfare, and starvation were nothing new, and there
already had been vacant homesteads (mansi absi) in the midst of otherwise thickly
settled Carolingian estates. The difference is that from the tenth century on net gains
exceeded losses and tended to stick, no matter whether agricultural expansion was
promoted by a monastery deploying its serfs on its property, or by a warrior
enlarging his grip around a conquered stronghold, or by a peasant community
encroaching on seigniorial preserves, or by a frontiersman venturing out in the wild.
We shall never know who were the most effective promoters in the early period: it is
relatively easy to follow the activity of an ecclesiastical institution, which usually
wrote down its exploits, but much harder to assess the achievements of squatters,
who became reluctantly vocal only when their claims were challenged. There are
lands which seem to have been settled, abandoned, and settled again more than
once, and one cannot always tell whether the intervals correspond to a failure of the
colonizing attempt, a predictable move of seminomadic cultivators, or a prolonged
rest granted to the soil by people who do not yet know how to maintain its fertility.
Sometimes we have to wait many decades before knowing for sure that a certain
territory has been permanently annexed to the developed portion.

The patterns of settlement are as diversified as the agents, but we can single out
prevalent regional trends, usually determined by a combination of factors: physical
environment, ethnic tradition, and historical circumstances. "Prevalent," of course,
does not mean `,omnipresent"; we still are oversimplifying.

The rugged individualism of the people, the basic harshness of the soil and
climate, and a sudden improvement of the latter between the late ninth century and
the late eleventh gave wings to the Scandinavian expansion without altering
substantially its primitive characteristics. At the beginning, agriculture proper and
village settlements played a significant if modest role only in the Danish islands and
in some stretches of what is today southern Sweden. In the rest of Scandinavia an
extremely sparse population lived by fishing, hunting, and, above all, stock raising.
We are told that Ottar, the northern Norwegian who explored the White Sea and
befriended King Alfred the Great, owned twenty cows, twenty swine, twenty sheep,
and no less than 600 reindeer. Some of his fellow countrymen won glory, gold, and
power by raiding, trading, conquering, and settling down in Russia, northwestern
Europe, and even some re gions of the Mediterranean; but their economic
contribution (positive or negative) soon became indistinguishable from that of the
much larger population already living and working there. The Scandinavian mark
was more deeply etched in Iceland, which they colonized between 874 and 930; in
Greenland, their next springboard; not, however, in Newfoundland. Iceland before
their coming had been known as "the desert in the Ocean," and Greenland was
almost unoccupied, but "Vinland" (Newfoundland?) was sparsely inhabited by
natives who drove the Norsemen off and left America for rediscovery to Columbus.

38
It is amazing that a handful of pioneers, with rudimentary tools and no navigational
instruments, could go that far; more amazing that they chose to settle down and farm
in such inhospitable lands while there still was room in Scandinavia, and while
softer countries further south invited many of their brothers. It is true that fishing
and lumbering were of great help, more so than in the motherland. But we must not
underestimate the appeal of empty expanses on men unwilling to bow to a common
discipline. And though the loosely organized republic of Iceland never really throve,
it nurtured a brilliant literature; back at home the Scandinavians gradually organized
polities similar to the older ones of Catholic Europe, but the age of adventure faded
into both economic and cultural mediocrity.

Let us now move, for the sake of contrast, to the sun-drenched shores of the
Mediterranean. In a large part of northern and central Italy, the ingenious work of
Roman agriculturists and the chessboard plan of fields designed by Roman
agrimensors had never entirely disappeared; nor had the skills of classic farming
been cast totally aside. Centuries of desertion and neglect had their redeeming
feature in the fact that exhausted soil had recovered its fertility and deforested
mountains had regained their mantle. Nevertheless it took much courage and
industry for the Italians from the tenth century on (and in some cases as early as the
eighth) to reclaim the land, drain the marshes, restore the irrigation works, defy
foreign raiders and, only too often, native robbers of every class and status. The
ensuing agricultural redevelopment did not merely reconstruct the classic
agricultural landscape, but modified it in many ways and brought under culture
much ground that had seemed too swampy or too steep to the Romans. To
encourage resettlement and stimulate improvements, whoever owned the land had to
meet the peasants half way. There were long leases, sharecropping agreements,
premiums of various kinds for anyone who would plant vines and olive or chestnut
trees. Peasant communities argued endlessly with a bishop, an abbot, a count about
their rights, their dues, their share in the common pastures, the borders of individual
plots. In many cases, however, there could be no argument because the peasants had
a written title in their hands. Literacy, if not literature, contributed to the recovery in
another way: Latin manuals of agriculture were copied in monasteries, and served as
primers of husbandry in the land for which they had originally been written.
Freedom was less full than in the Scandinavian outposts, but it was more clearly
defined; and no peasant had to fend for himself in loneliness, none forgot that if he
did not like his lot he could usually look for another lord or a town that would
welcome his services. Indeed, rural and urban growth were at all times closely
interdependent.

The Scandinavian pattern is an extreme example of agricultural expansion into

virgin land; the Italian, an extreme example of agricultural comeback in land
rejuvenated by a long hibernation. Between the extremes there was room for infinite
nuances. The early stages of the Christian reconquest in the Iberian peninsula led to
colonization and reclamation by farmers who initially enjoyed still greater liberties
than those of Italy; but the new input of labor and skill did not quite balance the
exodus of many Muslim farmers, who had previously carried out a reclamation of

39
 their own. Southern France on the whole resembled Italy and Spain, but things
changed rapidly as one moved farther north. Although certain by-products of the
Roman colonization never lost favor in Merovingian France and its enlarged
successor, the Carolingian Empire-the vine, for instance, gained ground both before
and after the tenth century-the pattern of recovery was largely shaped by barbarian
or, at least, medieval practices. Large estates usually applied to newly gained areas
the same type of collective agriculture and spaced settlement as before (though they
improved their techniques and reduced the spaces), and tried as best they could to
absorb whatever was left of small independent farming. Small tenants and serfs, on
the other hand, inched forward mainly by the primitive method of "assarts," that is,
by clearing small v. ooded stretches around the corner while the lord was not
looking, burning the underbrush, and starting culture with the hope that their claim
would be recognized. Much the same can be said about England, but here the
barbarian coloring was stronger, if only because the superficially Romanized natives
had been largely driven out by the Anglo-Saxons and, later, also by Danes. Farmers
gained ground, but so did sheep, which were the special asset of the country, and
hunting continued to be an important source of food for lord and peasant alike.

At the same time, the outer ring of Catholic Europe expanded as the new
barbarian invaders settled down and took their place in the family of organized
societies. Apprenticeship was shorter because the cultural difference between them
and the half-barbarian peoples of post-Carolingian Europe was smaller than that
between the Barbarians of old and the inhabitants of the late Roman Empire. The
Frisians and the Saxons had already been incorporated into the Carolingian Empire;
under the combined influence of missionaries, soldiers, and rulers coming from the
old provinces they gave up their wild anarchic tendencies and took over most of the
agricultural practices and organization of northern France. By the late tenth century
the Frisians were actively participating in the reclamation of coastal marshes that
went on from the mouth of the Rhine to that of the Loire, while the Saxons were
applying to the western Slavs the lessons they had been forced to learn from the
Carolingians. (The further expansion of German agriculture will be described later.)
The Slavs, in turn, had long lived in villages and practiced agriculture at a level but
slightly inferior to that of the Saxons; some of their tools and plants were better, and
contributed to the progress of western agriculture. The Magyars did not shed readily
their nomadic habits-we are told that as late as the twelfth century they spent much
time under tents-but they welcomed foreign influences. "Immigrants," says one of
their earliest books, "bring in different languages, customs, tools, and weapons. This
diversity is an ornament for the realm, a decoration for the court, and an object of
fear for our enemies." Only the Irish, in spite of their early adoption of Christianity
and their remarkable artistic development in preCarolingian times, remained almost
impenetrable to foreign custom. For unaccounted reasons, probably rooted in social
custom, they continued to cherish isolated farmsteads and to raid one another's
cattle. Thus they missed almost entirely the economic growth sweeping the rest of
Europe, and ultimately they lost even their rugged independence.

40
 CHANGES IN THE DIETS
AND THE CROPS
The growth of the population and the extension of the cultivated area forced
Catholic Europe out of the contracted stability where it might have indefinitely
lingered. They could not, however, automatically insure economic growth. The
survival of a larger number, if it is not accompanied by a proportionally increased
per capita productivity, may pull a civilization downward: Egypt, India, Java, and
China are modern examples, whereas Japan and a large part of the Western world
exemplify the opposite process of productivity increasing faster than population and
space under culture. It is true that space is finally inelastic. We are now facing a new
threat, that of crowding the earth beyond the limit of physical comfort. This
problem, however, had no urgency for the medieval man. Within the fences of his
village or the walls of his town the air might be full of stench, the water unclean, the
neighbors too close, the living quarters cramped; his ability to move might be
restricted by law or impeded by insecurity; but he did not live on an overcrowded
planet. Food production was the basic problem, to an extent that we cannot easily
grasp in the affluent society of our day, even though hunger is not unknown in our
United States, and though every year countless thousands of people still die of
hunger or malnutrition in other parts of the world.

Famines, that is, acute and widespread outbursts of hunger, are recorded more
consistently than ordinary malnutrition in the sources of a chronically
undernourished society. The fact that mentions do not become more frequent in the
records of the tenth and early eleventh century, though both the number of people
and that of extant sources steadily increase, is an indirect testimony to the success of
agriculture-and also to the improvement of communications, which enhances the
mobility of food and people in and out of the most stricken districts. By the early
thirteenth century, large-scale famines became quite rare. But that does not mean
that malnutrition had been conquered. The obstacle was not only quantitative but
also qualitative: there was no clear knowledge of the elements that go into a
balanced diet, but only an intuitive selection based on experience and, above all,
availability. Needless to say, what was available to the lord was not necessarily
available to the serf. One fact is certain: in the form of bread, porridge, or mush,
cereals were almost everywhere the basis of human alimentation, in the middle ages
as in classic antiquity-so much so that in low Latin and some of the vernaculars
everything else is called companaticum, "accompaniment of bread." This took care
of carbohydrates; the intake of proteins and vitamins was skimpier. Happily, milk
with its byproducts was available throughout Catholic Europe, but it was very
important only among herdsmen. Fresh fruit played a significant role in the south,
meat was less sparingly consumed in the north, fish was helpful wherever sea or
fresh water was not too far, eggs were ubiquitous. The migrations of the barbarian
age blurred but did not abolish the partitions between the areas of olive oil and lard
or butter, and those of wine and beer; either wine or beer were well nigh

41
indispensable where water was unsafe. Leguminous and green plants were useful
supplements to the diet. Roots were consumed out of necessity, but they were
usually regarded as only one notch higher than grass, the ultimate resort in time of
famine; subsisting on roots only was, together with chastity, the great exploit of
hermits and saints.

Let us fill in this sketchy, static food map with a few details, and observe the
details in the background of medieval change. Cereals had the lead: there were no
radical innovations in the cultivated varieties, but the shifting preferences for one or
another variety reflected significant changes in tastes, techniques, and standards of
living. The Romans gave the highest priority to soft wheat (triticum vulgare, an ill-
suited scientific name for the finest type of grain), which makes the best white
bread. Coarser cereals such as spelt and other husked wheats, millet, and barley
were raised chiefly for the use of animals, though slaves and poor country people
also ate them; rye and oats were known as weeds or, at best, fodder crops. But both
rye and oats resist cold climates better than does soft wheat and do not demand as
much care. The Barbarians spread their cultivation and gave them a prominent place
in human consumption, while sharing barley and spelt with animals and using both
barley and oats for brewing a beer as thick as soup. Beer, it must be noted, was the
outstanding barbarian contribution to the diet. Then, from the tenth century on, soft
wheat gradually regained first place, first for the rich, then for the middle class,
lastly for lower class people. It did not, however, displace the other grains, which
still were good enough for less discriminating palates and for fodder, and could be
sown in seasons or soils where soft wheat would not succeed. As for rice, the only
important medieval addition to the family of Europe's cultivated cereals, it was
introduced to Spain and Sicily by the Arabs but played no significant role elsewhere
before the early Renaissance; this was a pity, because its food value is higher than
that of wheat.

Qualities of cereals, however, were less important than quantities. Although

overall figures are lacking, we know for sure that total production increased
continuously and rapidly between the tenth century and the thirteenth; so did per
capita production, but at a slower pace because the population also was growing.
The increases should be linked to three factors: the surface under cultivation, the
yield, and the rotation of crops. The expansion of the cultivated area defies
measurement but can hardly be overestimated: the reduction of empty spaces and
the advance of the frontier (which took greater proportions after the eleventh
century) must have multiplied many times the arable surface. The yield, in spite of
technological advances which we shall consider later, nowhere came close to the
proportions we would regard as adequate today: a crop amounting to about four
times the seed seems to have been the average expectation throughout the later
Middle Ages, though fairly sharp variations can be observed according to soil,
years, and type of cereal. But the difference between a three-to-fourfold yield and
the dismal one and a half or twofold yield of the Carolingian period divides a
probability of survival from a probability of starvation. One failing harvest was
enough not only to destroy the surplus of a normal Carolingian harvest, but also to

42
deplete the seed stored for the following year, especially as lords had to be fed and
churches claimed their share, no matter how poor the crop. A fourfold norm, on the
contrary, reduced considerably both the immediate and the long run consequences of
one bad year.

Nevertheless, the margin between input of seed and output of crop remained too
small to encourage bold experiments in quickening the cycles of cultivation. As an
English manual of husbandry still warned in the late thirteenth century, it was better
to make a good harvest every other year than two poor harvests every three years.
This is probably the main reason why efforts at changing from a two-course to a
three-course rotation, which were first recorded in the ninth century and made slow
progress in the age of agricultural growth, were circumscribed to a few areas where
the climate and soil were especially favorable and the yield could be sustained by a
generous supply of fertilizer. Very likely the overall increase of production owing to
such localized accelerations of the cycle of cultivation was smaller than the increase
resulting from the modest, but more widespread rise of the average yield; and it
would be premature to suggest at this early time a sharp separation between
"progressive" countries with the faster cycle and "stagnant" countries with the
slower rotation. Indeed, in all probability the greatest factor of increased cereal
production was the expansion of the area under cultivation, and the most important
novelty of the post-Carolingian period was the final elimination of seminomadic
agriculture. This, in turn, by completing the ring of sedentary peoples brought to the
farmers another dividend: the end of barbarian invasions, if not that of barbarous
wars.

It is now time to turn from bread (and porridge) to companaticum. This will also
help us to understand the shifts in the balance on which the whole system of
cultivation rested. We have seen that the gap between a Mediterranean agriculture
based on tight settlement with a prevalently vegetarian diet, and a continental
agriculture resting on spaced settlement with a larger consumption of meat, had
diminished during the early Middle Ages, but had not disappeared. It was further
narrowed down in the age of agricultural growth; yet in some respects it became
more visible. Horticulture, a great source of vitamins and one of the strongpoints of
Roman farming, had been further developed by the Muslims in Spain and Sicily. In
the age of agricultural growth Iberian and Italian farmers brought it to new heights
under the stimulus of urban demand. They also paid special attention to beans, peas,
and other leguminous plants, both as food crops and as fertilizers. As a mat ter of
fact these plants get their nitrogen directly from the air, not from the soil. If buried
they return nitrogen to the ground ("green manuring," recommended by Roman
manuals and then again in an Italian manual of the thirteenth century); if eaten they
are a good source of protein for men or beasts. Thus they can partly make up for
deficiencies of manure and of meat in countries that cannot spare much land for
cattle. Italy had experimented with all kinds of crop rotation in antiquity and
continued to do so in the Middle Ages. Recent studies have disclosed a great variety
of cycles, including three-course rotations. Apparently every farmer strove to obtain
crops as often as his land would bear; in some cases, more than once a year. The

43
danger was overcropping; for fallowing was always desirable, if only to restore
moisture to the soil, and irrigation alone might be inadequate to offset the dryness of
the climate. About Mediterranean France and the Iberian peninsula we know rather
little: irrigation was widely practiced, but the two-course rotation seems to have
prevailed.

A more regular alternation of winter sowing and spring sowing, conducive to the
three-course system, was possible in the damper climate and heavier soil of northern
France, England, and Germany. Though English manuals of the thirteenth century
warmly recommend the accelerated cycle, documents do not indicate that its
adoption was anywhere generalized. But it is in England and, still more, in France
that we come across the earliest, most consistent examples of what was to become
the standard rotation in the agricultural revolution of the eighteenth century: first
year, winter wheat or rye; second year, spring grains and leguminous plants; third
year, fallow. This proportion was often maintained even where fallowing was
practiced in each field every other year (that is, when a threefold staggering had to
be grafted on a two-course alternation of crops and rest). One is led to think that the
basic reason was not a desire to accelerate the cycle but an attempt at playing safe
with the whims of seasons. Spring crops were both a means to provide additional
fodder and an insurance against a possible failure of a usually larger crop sown the
preceding winter. No doubt northern Europe had larger and better pastures than
southern Europe, but it also relied more heavily on meat and dairy; it could not fall
back for companaticum on its meager supply of green vegetables, fresh fruits, or
olive fats. If winter crops succeeded, spring fodder served mainly to fatten the herd
and increase the stock of draught animals; if they failed, men could slaughter more
animals and eat or use for seed the product of the spring crops.

It would be tedious to pursue one by one the other components of companaticum.

Let us close with another reminder of the enormous difference between the diet of
the rich and that of the poor. Most of the meat and most of the finer vegetables and
fruit were normally earmarked for the table of the lord or the affluent farmer. There
were exceptions when the coming of winter or a bad fodder crop rushed the
slaughtering beyond the considerable capacity of the rich to consume meat or to salt
it away, and when a bumper crop or a bad turn of climate threatened to spoil the
vegetables. Hunting and an occasional catch of fish (sometimes, even of a stray
whale) might offer extraordinary treats, but free hunting and fishing was more and
more contained by seignorial preserves as settlement became tighter. It was hardly
advisable to hang for a hare, and tame rabbits, the only medieval addition to
domestic animals, were not as tasty as warren rabbits. Spices and other imported
delicacies were totally beyond reach for the lower income brackets, until the
thirteenth century at least. Only pork was fairly easily available to all peasants: a pig
can feed on any scraps, and no lord would defy the immemorial custom of allowing
at least one pig per tenant to share acorns with his own herd. Deservedly, the
medieval pictorial and sculptural representations of the "labors of the months"
always devoted three or four of their panels to the short career of the animal that
brought joy to most people. Wine making also was good for a panel or two, but beer

44
 making did not seem worthy of special notice and was subsumed in the panels
concerning the production of cereals.

45
 ANIMALS AND TOOLS
Except where a different climate and soil called for another type of husbandry,
medieval agriculture could not radically improve upon the best methods of classic
agronomy. These were the fruit of a culture that had produced masterpieces in
almost every field; even the most accomplished gentleman farmer of the eleventh or
twelfth century would hardly know much that his Greek or Roman counterpart had
not known better than he. Classic agriculture, however, was not overly concerned
with saving human labor. This is the aspect of farming where the Middle Ages made
their most significant contribution, not so much because scientific knowledge
increased or because masters became more charitable as because the supply of labor
diminished. A larger use of improved agricultural tools and animal breeds enabled
fewer men to cultivate the same area as before and to expand widely into new land,
including some that would have been unusable without the new technology.

When, where, and how widely were individual innovations adopted? The answer
cannot be simple. The archaeological and written testimony is scant; worse still, it is
often deceptive. The first mention of an important but unglamorous contrivance may
be centuries later than its appearance; more centuries may elapse before the
contrivance is widely adopted in a dynamic environment, and then again before it
wins general acceptance or before its applications are worked out and put to use. In
spite of improved communications, there still are surprising lags today: a wooden
hook, first represented in Pharaonic art, still serves as a plough in Egypt; American
restaurants have not yet realized the practical advantages of the espresso machine.

A shortage of labor first became evident in the late Roman Empire, but it was
difficult to break traditions that had long been successful. The shortage continued in
the barbarian age, but innovation cannot flourish in a weak, lull, incommunicative
society. By the tenth century, tradition had been forgotten, inertia had been
shattered, and the shortage had become Vless crippling. In postCarolingian Europe
slave labor was largely a thing of the past; serf labor, which now made up the bulk
of manpower, was not increasing so fast that it could be ruthlessly exploited or
thoughtlessly squandered. Necessity, the mother of invention, had found at last a
congenial breeding ground. This does not mean, of course, that all medieval
innovations were born at the same time. Some of them were a carry-over of Roman
or Hellenistic contrivances that had not seemed very useful in the labor-rich classic
world. A few originated with one or another of the barbarian nations, which by liv
ing in a different climate at a different cultural level had found useful solutions of
their own; but it is often hard to decide which ones were already in use in the
outlying provinces of the Roman Empire, or came in at the same time as the
Barbarians, or were learned at a later time from Slavs and other peoples of the outer
fringe.

Let us begin with a Hellenistic invention that made most of its progress in the

46
Middle Ages: the water mill. It was used in antiquity for grinding cereals, but the
high cost of installation and maintenance restricted its diffusion; rich men put their
slaves to the grind, and the poorer housewives did their own grinding by hand. Only
in the larger cities and exceptionally large estates would the cost of a water mill be
covered by a steady, plentiful supply of grist. An Irish poetical legend credits a king
of the third century with fetching "beyond the sea" a mill builder in order to give a
rest to the slave girl who was bearing his child; but poets are not the best economic
analysts. What caused water mills to multiply during the Middle Ages was a
combination of two factors: slaves all but disappeared, and lords forced all of their
dependents to send their grist to the seignorial mill. One third of the estates listed in
a Carolingian inventory of St. Germain-des-Pres had water mills, some of them
installed by the living abbot. By 1086 a good proportion of some five thousand mills
that have been counted in England utilized the water of her innumerable rivers.
Water power thus became the second major natural source of energy harnessed for
human use; the first one, fire, had been captured as early as the stone age. The mill
itself, gradually fitted for a variety of industrial uses was to become almost as
ubiquitous in the later Middle Ages as steam, electric, or internal combustion
engines in modern times.

In agriculture the competition of the water mill forced lords and farmers who had
no running water or whose rivers were somebody else's property to replace
millhands with animals; but animals, too, were badly needed for other farm work. A
better solution was eventually provided through the windmill. A windmill is less
powerful than a water mill and does not lend itself to diversified industrial
applications; but it can be built almost anywhere at a moderate cost, and the wind is
nobody's private property. All this explains why its origin and early di Fusion cannot
be followed as easily as those of the water mill. We do not hear of it in antiquity, but
by the early twelfth century it is found in places as far apart as Iran and England,
and its features vary rather sharply from one country to another. The most likely
guess is that it originated at some time in the early Middle Ages in an arid, windy
region of the Muslim world or of the Christian south (whether Byzantine or
Catholic) and spread rapidly after the tenth century. But the last word on the
problem has not yet been said. Windmills of different types may have been
independently invented at different places.

The origin and diffusion of the heavy plough, which was better suited than the
Mediterranean aratrum to the heavier soils of continental Europe, are still harder to
trace. It certainly was not a Roman product, but we cannot decide whether it must be
credited to the Gauls, the Germans, the Slavs, or some Central Asiatic nation; and
perhaps each of these peoples was responsible for one of the gradually improved
types that appeared in succession. The Roman aratrum was a fairly light,
inexpensive, wheelless instrument of wood, usually strengthened with strips of iron,
and fitted with a share that did not cut deeply into the ground. Conceived for the
needs of dry farming, it enabled the farmer to cross-plough his field with at most a
pair of oxen or asses, and even without a team if he could not afford one or chose to
till almost inaccessible scraps of land; but it required much additional toil with

47
spade and hoe. In spite of this shortcoming, low cost and easy handling insured its
adoption throughout the Roman Empire. In France and England, for instance, it still
was widely used at the end of the Middle Ages. Nevertheless a more powerful
instrument, capable of cutting deep furrows, was desirable to tap the fertility of the
moist, thick soils that abounded in continental Europe, and indispensable to open
land that was literally inpenetrable to the light plough. It also would save most of the
spade work.

The solution came through the insertion of wheels between the ploughshare and
the team. The wheels served as a fulcrum for the ploughman to put more pressure on
the share, supported larger and heavier shares, and lent mobility to an otherwise
cumbersome engine. We catch a first glimpse of the heavy plough in an obscure
passage of the Elder Pliny (first century A.D.), which mentions a wheeled
plaumaratum (or ploum aratrum?-the word may have been misread by copyists),
pulled by eight oxen, and used by some of the Gaulsprobably those of the Po valley,
Pliny's home land. If this instrument was the same as the carruca ("cart" in Latin,
from which charrue, "plough" in French) mentioned in Carolingian documents, we
can surmise a development like that of the water mill: a useful but costly innovation
of antiquity made headway when labor became critically short and great landowners
commanded the ploughing. But the story was probably less simple, because wheeled
ploughs came of many types and at different times. Almost invariably one gets the
impression that the first experiments were made on the Eurasian steppe and carried
westward by migrating Barbarians.

We may omit a description of other improvements in the design of the plough and
of virtually all agricultural implements-such details, important though they were,
would be lost on any reader who does not happen to be conversant with medieval
farming-but we must point out some of the repercussions in other fields. Nearly all
of the improved tools called for a larger use of iron or steel. Though the Barbarians
had learned in Central Asia highly advanced techniques for making, with inlaid
steel, swords and buckles that were stronger and more supple than the Roman ones,
they did not waste those laborious methods on ordinary farm tools. Carolingian
inventories mention an extremely limited amount of iron and steel utensils, most of
them intended for lumbering and carpentry; in the barbarian age a smith was not an
ordinary artisan, but almost the equal of a goldsmith. Advances in farming
equipment were interdependent with the multiplication of forges in the following
centuries. The fact that smiths were for a long time more numerous in Italy than in
the northern countries should make us cautious in estimating the speed with which
the more efficient tools gained wide acceptance in the regions of Europe that needed
them most. It also adds weight to the assumption that technical progress usually
entailed a greater dependence of individual farmers on the powerful men or the
organized village communities that alone could afford expensive equipment. To this
we shall return later.

There was still closer interdependence between the development of tools and
progress in animal husbandry and transportation. The heavier the plough, the larger

48
the team. From this angle the northern countries, and the Barbarians in general, had
a substantial head start over the Mediterranean countries and peoples: they had
larger pastures and larger herds. Oxen continued for a long time to be the preferred
draught animals: they had more strength than donkeys, more patience than mules,
more resistance to disease than horses, and they cost three or four times less in
fodder than horses. Nevertheless in southern Europe one or two donkeys often were
all a farmer could afford (and in Morocco one can still see today odd teams
composed of a camel and an ass). In central and northern Europe donkeys were
sometimes used, but it was no problem to get together a large team of oxen, and in
the twelfth century oxen began slowly to be displaced by horses. All of these
changes were connected with innovations in harnessing, feeding, and breeding, and
we can no more decide where the first spark came than solve the problem of priority
between the hen and the egg.

The Romans used to harness draught animals side by side. This was efficient
enough when only a pair of oxen or horses was teamed, but it must have taken a
skilled charioteer and a lot of space to get

good results from eight horses frontally harnessed for a circus race, and one
wonders what would have happened with eight oxen frontally yoked to a plough.
Tandem harnessing provided the obvious solution. Again, to keep the yoke in its
right position on the withers of oxen the Romans used satisfactorily a simple strap
around the neck. A similar device around the neck of horses, whose anatomy is
different, interfered with their breathing. A stiff collar resting on the shoulders of the
horse eliminated the difficulty. The hoof of the horse was not sufficiently protected
by the "sandal" used by the Romans; the nailed horseshoe gave it fuller protection.
All of these innovations probably came to Europe from different parts of Asia, much
on the same tracks as heavy ploughs. Collar and shoe helped the horse to become a
serious competitor of the ox; what could be done to help the latter? In Italy, oxen
were sometimes shod; in France and Spain, their yoke was raised from the neck to
the horns; the advantages, if any, were not significant enough for other countries to
follow suit.

The Old and New Attachment

49
 SOURCE: "Classical" draft harness, eleventh century; illumination from Latin ms
8318 in the Biblioth6que Nationale. "Modern" draft harness, first half of tenth century,
from an illumination in Latin ms 8085, Bibliotheque Nationale. Both as reprinted in
Robert S. Lopez, The Birth of Europe (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, Ltd., 1966; New
York: M. Evans & Co., Inc., 1967), p. 133.

Medieval and modern partisans of the horse tend to link its progress from the
twelfth century on to a drive for greater efficiency: its speed, they say, was more
valuable than the stolid strength of the ox, especially in countries where rain and
cold limit the good days for ploughing. But actually the contest was settled along
national lines: France converted to horses (and in some cases to mules), Italy
remained faithful to oxen (one pair was enough for her light plough), England often
used mixed teams where horses had to adjust to the pace of oxen. Granted that
medieval farmers were not as learned as modern agronomists, they must have used
in their choice of draught animals some of the discernment they displayed in their
experiments with new tools. In the early Middle Ages common sense forbad the use
of horses except for transporting people: a good horse cost more than a slave. From
the tenth century on prices fell down as careful breeding and generous feeding
produced cheaper and stronger work horses (not without some loss of speediness);
but there were other priorities to be taken into account. How convenient was it to
raise oats for horses where one might have grown wheat for men? Would oats be a
more suitable crop than beans in a cycle of production? Was horse manure a more
valuable by-product than cow dung or, for that matter, sheep or pigeon droppings?
Answers to these and other questions varied from place to place. Again we are
thrown back to those problems of ecological balance which medieval men
endeavored to learn by trial and error, and modern scientists strive to teach with
moderate success-for now, as in the Middle Ages, food production has to make
room for other economic activities; long range interests are at odds with immediate
profits; and sheer stupidity takes a large toll of natural resources.

50
 COMMUNITIES AND
INDIVIDUALS
Whatever his personal inclinations, economic necessity made man a social being.
The empty spaces of early medieval Europe offered to a few rugged individualists
only a temporary chance to live dangerously alone. Sooner or later ascetics ran out
of hermitages, frontiers got crowded, and isolated farms were enmeshed in villages.
Living in a closely integrated community, on the other hand, extended to most
individuals a better chance of survival when sheer survival was threatened, and a
greater opportunity for advancement when things began to look up. Political
circumstances worked the same way. Full liberty and independence were hard to
shoulder for all but the most powerful people, and even these depended for power
on the assistance of armed retainers and hard-working serfs. The barbarian age had
seen first the decadence of the central government, then the failure of the
Carolingian effort to restore it; the following centuries saw the growth of local
government by powerful people (more specifically, of feudalism)-and, slightly later,
the rise of town government in competition with feudal lords. Although towns, too,
were communities, they broadened prospects for individual liberty wherever they
could reach; but feudalism was by far the prevailing influence in the larger part of
the European countryside between the tenth century and the twelfth, and continued
to play a great role for the rest of the Middle Ages.

Feudalism is a system of government, not a form of agricultural exploitation; but

two of its characteristics had a direct bearing on the organization of agrarian
communities and must be mentioned at the start. On the one hand, it strengthened
the hand of many landowners by giving them governmental powers and keeping the
agents of the central government off their land. On the other hand, it tightened the
solidarity of the community by upholding the notion that people do not "own" but
merely "hold" God's land as a tem porary trust, and that nobody, whether master or
servant, can claim a right over another man without accepting a responsibility
towards him. Lest this may lead us unduly to idealize social relations in the feudal
age, let us add at once that in practice most lords shirked their responsibility while
enforcing ruthlessly their twofold political and economic rights. Still the economic
interdependence of all members of a community was a hard fact, not merely a
political theory. In the limited horizon of a village the serfs and the lord (or, more
often, the steward of an absentee or wandering lord) were bound together by a
coarse familiarity, which was not unlike that of masters and slaves in the old
American South, but probably less arbitrary because medieval serfs had better ways
to hold back their cooperation or sneak out of the manor.

Manor (with its derivative, "manorialism") is the term by which English historians
designate the integrated, self-centered, almost introvert village community that was
prevalent in the larger part of feudal Europe. Like mansus (peasant homestead) and
mansion (lordly house), manor comes from Latin manere, to dwell or to inhabit.

51
This neutral, but chronologically circumscribed expression seems preferable to
"economic feudalism," which refers to only one characteristic of manorialism, its
congeniality with political feudalism. As a matter of fact what made a manor
peculiar was not only the lord's power over it but also the tightly cooperative
organization of an agriculture which had been designed to insure collective survival
at the expense of individual initiative and of contacts with the outside world. Such
an organization played in the hands of the lords, but predated him; it was enhanced
by the introduction of new methods and tools requiring joint effort, but sank deeply
into the grooves of barbarian and even prehistorical country life. In the primeval
village nearly every activity had to be geared to the production of food and other
elementary necessities; a modest surplus might be set aside for future emergencies
and the support of religious and military leaders, but none could be shipped to still
nonexistent cities.

No doubt the medieval manor had gone a long way beyond that stage: the
administrative superstructure had grown into the two classes of "those who fight"
and "those who pray," proverbially contrasted with the lowly mass of "those who
work"; production for the market was an indispensable if marginal part of the
agricultural effort. Nevertheless the original postulates of earlier times were still in
evidence: solidarity and team work came first, and cash payments did not make
exchanges in kind obsolete. What gradually dissolved manorialism was not the
decline of feudalism (for there could be manorial communities of free peasants
without a lord, and feudal retainers living on cash fees rather than on land fiefs) but
the growth of an extrovert economy based on the market. The more a manor
contributed to what we call the gross national product, the less it maintained its
original character as a self-centered, self-sufficient economic unit.

We no longer believe that there was a specific age to be called "the rise of money
economy" or "the break-up of the manor." Money economy never plunged below the
European horizon, and individual manors kept breaking up, that is, opening
windows to the outside world. Yet for a long time and in a large part of Europe the
inward pull of communities huddling for self-preservation was stronger than the
outward push of individuals venturing out for self-fulfillment, with the sole
exception of a few strong men. The age of agricultural revival gradually upset the
balance, but the scale was tipped only where and when the revival of towns and
trade threw a much heavier weight into it. Again and again, while the early
expansion of European agriculture opens loopholes for peasants to seek more liberty
on new land, we watch free men "recommending" themselves as serfs to a baron or
to an abbot and free villages inviting a lord to be their suzerain, apparently without
open constraint, because liberty without security is not yet a sufficient gift. This may
happen at any time between the tenth century and the fourteenth, although instances
become rare after the beginning of the twelfth and there are countries where by the
ninth century the manor has lost its grip, if it ever had any. Hence, without ever
forgetting that diversity is the essence of agricultural history, we still feel justified in
referring to the first two hundred years after the turn of the demographic tide as an
age of predominantly manorial, or self-centered, agriculture in the larger part of

52
Europe.

It is much harder to choose a definition that will fit all kinds of manors. Probably
the most convenient is still the one which was derived from a few English estates
that first attracted the attention of economic historians: a manor is a village
community where unfree peasants cultivate a lord's demesne or domain (land
directly managed by him) in return for the use of another portion of his estate, while
a substantial part of the land remains more or less open to all parties for grazing,
gathering wood, and possibly trapping and hunting. Let us hasten to stress, however,
that by the mid-thirteenth century, even in the most "manorialized" parts of England
the definition fits snugly no more than one half of the villages. Some manors had no
demesne, some had no peasant holdings, some had no unfree tenants, a few had not
even a lord. If one crosses the Channel or merely wanders into Wales, the d"finition
needs further stretching. Yet if what was once regarded as the "typical" manor is
rather an extreme example or an ideal model, it brings out best the peculiar set-up
that makes so many medieval villages different from modern villages and from the
"typical" villages of the Greco-Roman world.

The division of the cultivated land into two parts, lord's demesne and peasant
holdings, may have been a medieval trend if not an outright innovation. It resembles
the political division of feudal kingdoms into several duchies or counties, one or two
of which are a domain governed directly by the king with the help of his hired
agents, whereas the others are entrusted to autonomous vassals in return for specific
services. Since communications were difficult, and only a combination of land and
status could buy the loyalty of the vassals, it was unpractical for the king to keep all
of his territory in his hands, but dangerous to leave it all in care of others. The count
of one county faced smaller obstacles with reduced means, and tried to meet them in
a similar way. Whatever his rank and the number of manors under his economic
control, the lord of a manor faced almost the same problems. Though the "villeins"
who worked the land were much lowlier than noble vassals, they were not slaves; it
was virtually impossible to deprive them of the house and plot they regarded as their
own, except by offering them a secure place in the lord's household. Still the lord
could not safely turn over to them all of the land and depend on their good will; nor
could he easily keep in hand the whole manor, even if he delegated the task to his
agents. The best compromise for him was to retain only a portion of the tilled land
(usually smaller than the sum of the peasant holdings) and to maintain in his
immediate service, beside the indispensable stewards and butlers, a skeleton team of
farm laborers who would insure continuity of care. The other peasants, normally
free to attend to their holdings, paid various dues in kind or in cash, and took turns
in helping the resident staff of the demesne on a certain number of days in the week
or year. Both dues and services varied from one manor to another, and in each
manor according to status; for there were innumerable shades of serfdom, to say
nothing of free peasants. Common pastures, waste and woodland also played a
significant role in the economy of the manor. Lord and peasants shared them
according to certain rules: usually, for instance, only the lord could cut trees, but
villeins took dead wood for their hearths and green wood for their tools. The lord

53
claimed a lion's share of hunting and fishing, if only for the fun of it, but the
peasants clung stubbornly to their residual rights.

It is not surprising that there was endless bickering about the amount and nature
of peasant dues, the sharing of common land, the responsibility for royal and
religious taxation, and other details that made or broke the affluence of the lord and
the welfare of the villeins. The struggle was not quite as uneven as it might look at
first. The lord was the most powerful member and principal manager of the
community, the chief judicial authority, and either God's representative (if an
ecclesiastic individual or institution) or the representative's employer (if a layman).
But the peasants had on their side their number, their passive resistance, their talent
to erode and elude what they dared not oppose, and often their legal or illegal
compacts. Above all, the entire community was aware of limits that could not be
overstepped without wrecking the economic balance on which lord and peasants
equally depended. This collective conscience expressed itself in the immemorial
customs of the manor, suggested detailed regulations and timetables for work, and
assigned to everyone his duties, his rights, and his land. The lord had to supply the
temporal protection of the sword and the spiritual protection of the altar, the
technical and legal experience of his agents, and the most costly permanent
installations: mill, well, barns, often a repair shop. The peasants contributed, in
addition to labor, their carts and the mobile agricultural tools. In his castle and his
guarded preserve the lord did what he pleased; in their hovels and their vegetable
gardens the peasants did what they could; in the open fields most agricultural
operations had to be done in common, and innovations, if any, required general
consent.

Even as the mark of the Roman chessboard is still visible in many parts of
Mediterranean Europe and Africa, so the peculiar pattern of open fields has not been
erased by later enclosures in a large part of Germany, England, and France, where it
may have been established long before manorialism, possibly at the time of first
agricultural settlement, or at least in the wake of a prehistoric invasion. Aerial
photographs, which are excellent for bringing back the palimpsest of the earth, also
show at some places, such as the Po valley, the encroachment of manorial
agriculture on the Roman one: the rectangles where the contemporaries of Virgil
hoed and ploughed in the privacy afforded by their hedges and stone walls underlay
the strips where the contemporaries of Charlemagne carried out cooperative
agriculture. As a matter of fact, neither the lord's portion nor the peasant holdings
formed compact blocks but usually consisted of a number of narrow slices scattered
all over the manor. These ribbons of land were not separated from one another by
permanent enclosures, but only by temporary fences. This arrangement apparently
was dictated by practical reasons. The strips were open so that cattle could get in
after the harvest, eat the stubble, and enrich the soil with manure. They were
scattered so that each member of the community should have an equal share of good
and inferior land, and partake of every crop raised on the manor-winter crop and
spring crop, wheat and oats, beans, and, of course, grass where the soil had to rest.
They were long and narrow so that the heavy plough should not have to turn too

54
 frequently; moreover, different farmers had to contribute beasts to the team, and
none wished to work somebody else's land all day. This, at least, is the explanation
scholars contrived, mainly in the nineteenth century, to make sense out of an
allotment that looks strange to a modern observer. One could object that the heavy
plough normally came later than the long strips, or that the great difference in the
number of strips held by individual peasants nullified whatever equality was
provided by their being scattered. Nevertheless, the explanations are plausible, and it
is difficult to test them since the peasants, who were the most interested party as
they cultivated both their plots and those of the lord, are a silent race, and you
cannot trust lords, stewards, or manorial judges to have always interpreted faithfully
their thought.

Survival of the Roman Centuratio in Italy

SOURCE: Checkerboard pattern of fields near Padua (after Meitzen). From The
Cambridge Economic History of Europe (New York: Cambridge University Press,
1959); as reprinted in Lopez, The Birth of Europe, p. 54. Reprinted by permission of
Cambridge University Press.

Typical Cultivation of a Medieval Manor

55
Souaca: Plan of a village surrounded by open fields; the letters a, b, c, d, etc., indicate
the owners having a strip in each of the fields. From Gordon East, An Historical
Geography of Europe (London: Methuen & Co., Ltd., 1943); as reprinted in Lopez,
The Birth of Europe, p. 176. Reprinted by permission of Methuen & Co., Ltd.

We shall make no attempt at going over the multifarious variations and

modifications of the manor in the different parts of Catholic Europe. Even a sketchy
description would fill many pages without altering substantially the picture of the
classic type. But we must note that the type lost many of its traits when and where
feudal institutions were weak, towns were strong, law was written rather than
customary, a large proportion of the peasants were freemen, and, above all, nature
and tradition did not favor the open field and the heavy plough. All of these
circumstances existed in some parts of southern France, of the Iberian peninsula,
and more pronouncedly of Italy, ever since the beginning of the agricultural revival.
That does not mean that all aspects of manorial economy were absent. Serfdom had
made great strides in the early Middle Ages, the large estate under a powerful man
was a familiar feature as early as the last centuries of the Roman Empire, common
pastures and woods had pre-Roman origins. But one came easily across villages
without a lord, lords without a demesne, and peasants cultivating their fields in
severalty, that is, without reference to the community of which they were members.
Although the growth of the population and the intensification of culture often caused
excessive fragmentation of the land, efforts were continuously made to regroup the
small plots into compact holdings; nor did the necessity of letting cattle in after
harvest prevent farmers from building durable fences. Communal solidarity did
exist, but it went mostly into special channels, such as collective care of the
irrigation works, collective maintenance of roads, or collective resistance against the

56
 "unjust exactions" and "evil customs" that avid lords or their lessees tried to
introduce.

Less progressive than northern France or England in certain sectors of agricultural

technology, Italy was ahead of them in feeling the impulse of the Commercial
Revolution. We cannot shift, however, our attention from self-centered to
commercialized agriculture until we have examined the first, seminal changes on the
front of trade.

57
 3
The Take-Off of the
Commercial Revolution
THE USES OF AGRICULTURAL
SURPLUS
Even as demographic growth was a prime motor of agricultural progress, so
agricultural progress was an essential prerequisite of the Commercial Revolution. So
long as the peasants were barely able to insure their own subsistance and that of
their lords, all other activities had to be minimal. When food surpluses increased, it
became possible to release more people for governmental, religious, and cultural
pursuits. Towns re-emerged from their protracted depression. Merchants and
craftsmen were able to do more than providing a fistful of luxuries for the rich and a
very few indispensable goods for the entire agrarian community. From this point of
view, it is proper to say that the revolution took off from the manor.

It takes more than food surplus, however, to reorient a society from agrarian
balance to commercial restlessness. We have seen that the Roman slave-exploiting
landowners, who controlled the larger part of agricultural surplus, did not participate
actively in business; commerce and industry expanded to a point, then settled down
in golden mediocrity. The medieval lords on the whole were still more
contemptuous of trade; the best one would expect of them was that they might
patronize a slightly improved version of commercial and industrial mediocrity. A
pattern of this kind may be observed in the long history of China, in spite of obvious
differences in detail. China's ancient economy and society had many points in
common with those of ancient Rome: agriculture was paramount, commerce and
industry were adequate but marginal, security and stability rather than growth were
the supreme ideal of the ruling classes. In the early Middle Ages demographic
decadence and barbarian invasions upset the balance, but China had a prompter and
fuller recovery than the European West. Frontier expansion was in full swing there
while the Carolingians were still fumbling, early ripening rice swelled the crops
while France was only beginning to convert to the three-course rotation, and the size
and wealth of the Chinese cities dwarfed that of Marco Polo's Venice. In spite of
this, China never had a commercial revolution; there was progress in size but no
mutation in kind. Agriculture remained paramount, commerce and industry were
still adequate but marginal, security and stability had been set on a higher level but
still were the ideal of a basically unchanged society.

Halfway between the western and the far eastern world, a sharper change seemed

58
in the making when the Islamic power emerged amid the depression of the early
Middle Ages. The agrarian foundations of the society were shaken. Honest
merchants, according to Mohammedan doctrine, deserved to sit in heaven with the
martyrs and the prophets. Another writer pointed out that "the different peoples" of
the earth had at long last been "brought together in mutual understanding." As a
matter of fact, the early centuries of Islamic expansion opened large vistas to
merchants and tradesmen. But they failed to bring to towns the freedom and power
that was indispensable for their progress. Under the tightening grip of military and
landed aristocracies the revolution that in the tenth century had been just around the
corner lost momentum and failed. Without pursuing our comparisons any further, we
may state that the European commercial revolution was a unique phenomenon, the
unexpected result of a chain reaction that began almost accidentally in a few
peripheral towns of Italy.

Let us consider again the notion of surplus. "A bare subsistence level" does not
mean the same thing to all people, and is seldom identified with the minimum intake
of food absolutely required to keep a man alive. Especially when the initial per
capita consumption is not far above that minimum, a large proportion of food
increases may be used merely to raise the level of subsistence. Unfortunately we
cannot be too precise on that score. The elaborate attempts that have recently been
made at computing in calories, on the basis of rare and dubious data, the
improvements of the European diet during the Middle Ages inspire little confidence.
Perhaps we can do better by the impressionistic device of comparing food served to
the poor at different times and places: for instance, to the inmates of a Tuscan
almshouse in 765, a measure of bread, two containers of wine, and two of a thick
gruel of beans and millet drenched in olive oil or fat; but, to the inmates of a
Champagne house in 1325, meat three times a week and either eggs or herring
beside bread, oil, salt, and onions. The rich increased their food consumption much
more, according to their status. All told, it would appear that rural northern France,
southern England, and some parts of western Germany both grew and consumed the
largest amount of food. They neither exported great quantities nor played a leading
part in the Commercial Revolution; golden mediocrity was their achievement.
Whether they gained in happiness what they missed in growth is not an economic
but a psychological question.

There is some charm in the words ascribed to no less a man than King Louis VII
of France (1137-1180), the first husband of Eleanor of Aquitaine and rival of King
Henry II of England: "The King of England has men, horses, gold, silk, gems, fruit,
wild beasts, and everything else. We in France have only our bread, our wine, and
simple gaieties." Henry II was richer because his domains also included half of
France but he fleeced his subjects and played havoc among his adversaries in order
to win fame, extend his possessions, and crush ever-resurgent rebellions.
Traditionally, the prowess of England's tax collectors matched that of the king.
Louis VII was less warlike and cunning than Henry, and hence is known as an inept
ruler. He might have spared his subjects, but for the fact that he was extremely pious
and spent great sums on an unsuccessful crusade. In his time, the royal domain was

59
small and France as a whole contributed little to the royal budget (the word,
incidentally, derives from Old French bougette, little bag).

The king's vassals, both lay and ecclesiastic, took over where their suzerain
stopped. Castles and churches mushroomed through the land and absorbed a
considerable part of the available surplus of food and labor. A map of the
simultaneous progress of vineyard planting and church building in the Bordeaux
region illustrates the competition between spirits and spirit; far be it from us to extol
the former above the latter, which produced inestimable moral and artistic riches,
but the former had a stronger immediate impact on gross national product. And
although castles cost less than cathedrals, and all wars by definition are defensive,
the frequent crossings of armies that lived off the land and burned impartially all the
huts and barns on their path consumed a good deal of resources. We do not need to
pursue the impact of these and other incidental burdens on the economic growth of
each country; nor can we calculate it with precision. The incidence, however, varied
considerably and we have to keep it in mind when estimating the assets that were
actually available for economic investment. No doubt church and castle building
was not totally barren of profit (for the builders at least), and produced intangible
dividends of material and moral satisfaction for the community. Even wars handed
back to a few a fragment of what they took from the many. Still we cannot place on
the same plane a primarily destructive activity and a constructive one, or expect the
same results from a new bell tower as from a new water mill. Above all, medieval
Europe had little room for investment over and above preservation of life. Granted
that wars cost infinitely less than today, that the church rendered all sorts of
educational and recreational services unobtainable elsewhere, and that government
was far less demanding than the modern state, the sacrifice was proportionately
heavier for the medieval man.

All this notwithstanding, enough surplus was left to give a commercial revolution
a start. But who was there to make the first move? The claim that the very idea of
craving for profit was alien to the feudal age is probably exaggerated: the acquisitive
instinct is universal. Charlemagne displayed it in the management of his manors no
less than in his wars of conquest. The abbots of Cluny were as proficient in
collecting real and movable estates as in attracting devoted souls. With commerce,
however, they were ill at ease; a man of high dignity might perhaps do some buying
and selling through a trusted middleman, but would hesitate to expose his name on
the market place. In the theoretical structure of feudal society there scarcely was
room for a middle class between the exalted religious and lay lords and the lowly
but irreplaceable laborers. Paupers were more acceptable than merchants: they
would inherit the Kingdom of Heaven and help the almsgiving rich to earn entrance.
Merchants were gold-hungry, said Rathier, the Belgian bishop of Verona; they were
less useful than farmers who fed the entire population, said Aelfric, the English
abbot of Eynsham; they did not know what honor means, said Ramon Muntaner, the
Catalan soldier-adventurer. "Largess," that is, squandering wealth on gifts and
conspicuous consumption, was one of the most honored virtues in Scandinavian
sagas and Romance chivalry poems. Every code has its exceptions, but the bias

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 existed in the tenth century as in the age of Augustus, in Germany as in China; it has
not been entirely dispelled today. It took exceptional men in exceptional
circumstances to break the spell and make commerce the most rapidly expanding, if
not the largest frontier of the medieval West.

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 THE JEWS
The early medieval beginnings had been far from auspicious. What was left of
local trade was in the hands of unimpressive native merchants (negotiatores), but
long distance Mediterranean trade, the only one that offered substantial profits if not
social status, was practically controlled by Easterners: Syrians, Jews, and Greeks.
The Arab invasions did not end all relations between East and West, but opened to
Syrian merchants wider Asiatic markets toward which they turned. Neither the
Lombard nor the Carolingian conquests entirely wiped out Byzantium's shrinking
footholds in Italy, but Greek merchants were encouraged by their government to
wait for customers at home. Thus the Jews alone were left to provide a link,
however tenuous, between Catholic Europe and the more advanced countries
beyond it: the Islamic world, the Byzantine Empire, even India and China. At the
same time, that is, between the ninth century and the eleventh, the Jews strengthened
their position virtually in every locality of Europe where they saw a chance for
trade. They dealt in salt, wine, grain, cloth, slaves, anything that any landlocked,
countrified place had to sell or buy. For certain villages, the resident or transient Jew
represented the only window open on the world.

The tenth century and the early eleventh marked the high point of Jewish
prominence in long distance trade, not only in Christian countries, but also in the
larger part of the Muslim world. The absolute volume of their transactions was of
course restricted by the limited opportunities of that age, but their share of the total
was so considerable that Frankish and Byzantine regulations of foreign trade often
referred to "the Jews and the other merchants," as if Gentiles were a nondescript
minority. The pronouncements of western rabbis on commercial matters and the
correspondence of Jewish merchants in Egypt present the same picture of a wide
and tight network of interconnected communities, whose members were keenly
aware of what was going on in far-away countries and whose business methods were
far in advance of those of their nonJewish contemporaries, and in some respect even
better than those of ancient Greece and Rome. Money lending was one of their
activities, but it did not yet play a central role.

The peculiar economic position of the Jews was to some extent a by-product of
their religious identity and social structure. There could be no idle military
aristocracy among underprivileged aliens. Ecclesiastic pursuits could not become a
full-time occupation, for even rabbis were expected to study the holy texts and
explain them for the love of God, but to earn their living in an ordinary profession:
Rashi of Troyes, the great eleventh-century scholar, was a wine merchant.
Agriculture, the main occupation of the nonJewish majority, was not entirely
forbidden to the Jews, but the possibility of sudden expulsion and the difficulty of
obtaining help from Gentile hands made it unattractive. Hence the Jews felt driven
to concentrate their efforts and their money on trade. Literacy, an asset for the
conduct of business, was fostered as a necessary tool for religious learning.

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 Communication with foreign coreligionists, another asset, was an indispensable
antidote to isolation within alien surroundings. It is true that some of the Jewish
ritual obliga tions and interdictions hampered economic activities, but a most
elaborate casuistry usually found ways to get around most difficulties.

On the other hand, although anti-Semitism did not reach its more virulent stage
before the Crusades, the fact remained that the Jews were not fully accepted in
Muslim society, still less in the Christian one. They were, at best, tolerated, but
nowhere secure. This dark, dense cloud had a thin silver lining. Because the Jews
were not full citizens of any state, they were nowhere full aliens; because they
remained outside the religious community of the land, they were not required to
observe all of its commandments. The function of neutral intermediaries between
peoples separated by war or by different creeds, allegiances, and levels of culture
suited them well. But they also were cast in a more unsavory role: that of a god-
forsaken minority, singled out for malodorous yet lucrative tasks, which ranged
from tanning hides to collecting taxes, and from ferrying slaves to extending loans at
charges proportionate to high risks. Thus, partly by choice and partly by necessity,
the Jews again and again emerged as pioneers and specialists in a great variety of
important trades. Almost invariably, however, their very success increased their
unpopularity. Sooner or later the moment came when needy princes or hungry mobs
found pretexts to seize their property, kill or drive out some of them, and force the
survivors to start again from scratch while their enemies dissipated the forfeited
capital in immediate consumption or war.

So long as the Jews were allowed to retain their profits and to reinvest them more
or less as they pleased, they quickened the economic development of every country
where they lived. The Iberian peninsula; the regions between the Rhine and Meuse;
and Provence, where they were especially numerous, drew considerable benefits
from their presence. The city of Lubeck in her heyday bragged that she could do
without Jews, but hardly any other town in central and eastern Europe could
honestly make such a claim. In the long run, however, the luckiest Jews were not
those who gained prominence among less enterprising Gentiles, but those who plied
obscurely a marginal line of trade in one of the more dynamic countries where the
native merchants did not depend on their help. Italy was the most notable example.

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 THE ITALIANS
There may be advantages in being less than a full citizen, but it is still better to be
a citizen in more than one country. Multiple allegiance did not look peculiar or
dishonorable in the feudal age, when almost every vassal owed loyalty to more than
one suzerain and every land depended on more than one lord. Not only then, but at
all times double allegiance was an inevitable remedy for a town or district that was
caught between two warring adversaries and had to give some tokens of submission
to both sides at once. This was the case of many Italian (more precisely, Italo-
Byzantine) seaports that preserved their ties with the Byzantine Empire after their
hinterland succumbed to either the Lombard or the Frankish conquest. Some of
them had been prominent in antiquity, but the two seaports that emerged on top,
Venice and Amalfi, had, remarkably enough, no Roman past. Their early history is
shrouded in legend, but in both cases one extraordinary circumstance is clear much
before the tenth century: the upper class owned some land but took an active part in
maritime trade.

As early as 829 the will of Venetian Doge Justinian Partecipazio mentioned

among his assets a substantial sum (1,200 silver pounds) invested in oversea
commercial ventures. Venice was then practically independent, but honored her
allegiance to Byzantium by supplying naval assistance, and used her eastern
connections to unlock the gates of the Western Empire. She also maintained with
Muslim Africa and the Levant as good relations as the sudden transitions from cold
to hot war permitted. Thus she gradually built up a thriving triangular trade, based
on the exchange of eastern luxury goods (mainly spices, silks, and ivories) and
western heavy commodities (iron, timber, naval stores, and slaves). Moreover, the
Venetians had two important wares of their own: the salt of their lagoons, and the
glass of their furnaces. By the tenth century some glass blowers had made their way
into the upper class, which thus acquired still another unusual component, master
craftsmen. A writer of Pavia, the Italian administrative capital at the center of the Po
valley, stresses the weirdness of the Venetian way of life: "These people do not
plough, sow, or gather vintage ... They come with their merchandise and buy grain
and wine in every market place." In the early years of the eleventh century the
Venetians imposed their protectorate on a number of seaports of the upper Adriatic,
but made no attempt at building a territorial empire that would have diverted their
interests from sea trade to agriculture.

Amalfi looks like a variation on the same theme. Its autonomy began
approximately at the same time as that of Venice; its prosperity also was based on
the exchange of western and eastern commodities, to which local crafts added
textiles of an unusually large size. There were, however, significant differences.
Perhaps because her small territory was not safely encircled by lagoons but
imperfectly sheltered by mountains, Amalfi had greater difficulty in asserting her
independence from the lords of the hinterland, and failed to eliminate the

64
competition of Naples, Gaeta, Salerno, and other seaports in her vicinity; eventually,
in 1073, she had to bow to the conquering Normans, as did her neighbors and rivals.
Again, maritime interests were less overwhelmingly prevalent than in Venice:
Amalfi exported not sea-salt but olive oil, and her ruling class included many
landowners. Lastly, whereas the Muslim side was the weakest in the triangular trade
of Venice, Amalfi was strong in Constantinople but found her best rewards in Egypt.
Not without dangers, however: in 996 rumors of an impending Byzantine attack and
an accidental fire in the arsenal of Old Cairo aroused the mob against all Christians
in town. We are told that more than a hundred merchants from Amalfi were
massacred, that their lodgings were ransacked, and that financial losses amounted to
about 90,000 dinars (84 pounds of coined gold), a staggering figure for the time.
Even in the Byzantine Empire the Italo-Byzantine merchants aroused antagonism
because they were foreign and because they enriched themselves; but unlike the
Jews they were backed by governments and fleets of their own. They demanded,
and obtained, special quarters where they could live according to their laws and
beliefs, in relative security, with facilities for sleeping, warehousing, praying, and
washing up. In the course of the eleventh century the continuous growth of their
trade in the Levant and Africa was accompanied and fostered by the slower
development of a network of extraterritorial enclaves or colonies, whose importance
hinged not on the tiny surface they covered but on the rebates of tariffs granted to
them and on the opportunities offered by the surrounding region.

As the progress of Venice and Amalfi was shifting the center of economic and
naval power from the Byzantine and Muslim to the Catholic shore of the
Mediterranean, two seaports from the "barbarian" part of Italy joined the race. Pisa
and Genoa, too, were driven into a predominantly commercial way of life by an
original handicap. In the tenth century their territory had been frequently laid waste
by Muslim raiders looking for slaves and other booty; not even the towns had been
spared. Led by their urban nobility, the Pisans and the Genoese fought back,
expelled the Muslims from Corsica and Sardinia, and followed them up in their
Spanish and African bases of operation. As the struggle went on, the economic
structure of the towns changed: they built up their shipping, captured booty, and
invested it in additional shipping with which they could trade. The turn of the tide
was completed in 1088, when a combined fleet of Pisans, Genoese, and Amalfitans
sacked "Africa" (Mahdiya, then the capital of what is today Tunisia) and withdrew
only after obtaining commercial privileges. Six years earlier, a treaty between
Venice and Emperor Alexius Comnenus had marked a similar turn: the Byzantine
Empire, pressed simultaneously by the Turks in the east and the Normans in the
west, bought massive naval assistance from the Venetians at the heavy price of
exempting them from all the duties still paid by his own subjects in a whole row of
Mediterranean seaports. The Mahdiya expedition, blessed by Pope Victor III and
carried out by a Christian coalition against the Infidels, was like a miniature
rehearsal of the First Crusade (preached in 1095); only the feudal host was missing.
The treaty between Venice and Alexius Comnenus, which made the native
Byzantine merchants underprivileged in their own land, was a distant premonition of
the fall of Constantinople to the Venetians and the barons in the Fourth Crusade.

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 To all this we shall return later, but let us first pause a moment for an anecdote.
Back in 829, when Venice was little more than a village and her Doge staked his
money in commercial ventures, Emperor Theophilus began his splendid rule in
Constantinople, then the largest and wealthiest city in the Christian world. One day,
as he looked at the sea from the Great Palace, he noticed a beautiful merchant ship
entering the port. When told that it belonged to his wife he angrily berated her-"God
made me an emperor, you would make me a ship captain!"-and ordered the ship and
the cargo to be burned down. A learned man, he certainly remembered the Roman
law, taken over in a later Byzantine code, which forbad gentlemen to trade "so that
the plebeians and merchants may more easily transact their affairs." (The law did not
forbid the sovereign, however, to take a share of mercantile profits; traditionally the
Greek ship owners were taxed so heavily that they could hardly increase their
working capital.) Century after century, the Byzantine historians related with high
praise the "act of justice" of Emperor Theophilus. The last to do so was a secretary
of Alexius Comnenus, the emperor who had to mortgage the commercial future of
Byzantium to Venetian ship owners. He did not see any connection between the
justice of Theophilus and the injustice of Alexius; we do. Although in 1082
Constantinople still was the largest and wealthiest city in the Christian world, she
was no match for her former vassal state where nobody was business-shy.

Still the rise of a few dynamic seaports would have had no revolutionary effect if
the hinterland had failed to respond. Ancient Athens had created a commercial
empire and fairly successful industries, but Greece as a whole lagged behind. Much
more recently, Singapore and Hong Kong were islands of modern enterprise with a
sluggish background. Tenth-century Italy, however, was ready-more ready than in
the heyday of the Roman Empire. No doubt her towns had become smaller and
poorer, but they had broken loose from the agrarian moorings that had held them
back in antiquity. Most of them were ruled by a bishop or other lord who had no
control over the district. The great landowners had deserted them for their castles or
manor houses; there still was a fairly large number of minor noblemen who owned
land in the vicinity and lived in town, but their weight no longer offset that of the
majority of people engaged in trade and the crafts. Virtually all of the inhabitants
were freemen and took some part, be it very small, in the municipal assemblies and
the lower administrative tasks. Merchants as early as 750 served in the army on
equal foot ing with landowners of equivalent income, and all citizens were
responsible for the defense of the walls. These unique political and social
circumstances enabled the Italian towns to react to the stimulus of demographic
growth and agrarian revival more promptly than did the rest of Europe. As early as
the tenth century, the opposition between those who fight or pray and those who
work was not as significant as the solidarity of townsmen versus men of the country.
The business fever, when it came, left almost no one untouched.

Perhaps the most telling change occurred among those noble families that grew
too large to live comfortably off their inherited land. Outside Italy the
supernumerary children tried to escape poverty and boredom through an ecclesiastic
career, marriage to a noble heiress, or military service at somebody's hire. In the

66
Italian towns they more often found the same opportunities and thrills by pooling
their capital in business ventures, which involved a chance to pick up along the way
a fight with pirates, brigands, unfriendly lords, and possibly Infidels. In turn,
commoners who made good in their trade found no bars to political activity: the two
leading families which vied for control over Rome while the popes and the emperors
were locked in the Investiture Struggle (the Pierleoni and the Frangipane) descended
respectively from a Jewish moneylender and a Gentile craftsman. Indeed it is
usually difficult, in the scanty documents of the tenth and eleventh centuries, to tell
apart the merchants who had bought real estate with the profits of trade, and were
called "honorable" or "noble," from the noblemen who had sold their estate,
invested the proceeds in trade, and married merchants' daughters. By the twelfth
century all of them were lumped together as "magnates" (literally, "big shots"),
while the rest of the people were known as "populars." The distinction, however,
was based on wealth more than on status and did not prevent a much closer
economic and political collaboration than that between noblemen and serfs in the
manors and in many towns outside Italy. It was, hence, comparatively easy for the
entire urban population to overthrow or buy off the town's immediate lord and
establish a communal government of their own, under the direction of the magnates
but with a measure of participation by all citizens. Because commercial and
industrial activities were the main interest of nearly all members of the community,
including the leaders, the states that thus emerged ("communes") geared their
internal and foreign policy to the protection and promotion of business above all.

Local self-government was only a first target: it freed the citizens from the
uncongenial administration of a lord whose interests could hardly coincide with
theirs but made no room for expansion beyond the narrow territory inside and
around the town walls. Like the agrarian revival, the urban surge was fueled by
continuous demographic growth, which both drove the people to look for new
outlets and made the new outlets springboards for accelerated demographic growth.
It was a faster chain reaction than that of agriculture because a successful town
attracted immigrants from the country; moreover, life expectancy seems to have
been normally higher, probably because townspeople had a better diet and were less
affected by local famines. It has been estimated (with a large margin of possible
error) that the total population of England rose from 1,100,000 inhabitants in 1086
to 3,700,000 in 1346; but the population of Milan and Venice must have risen in the
same period from less than 20,000 to well above 100,000 each.

Again, lords and peasants for a long period could gain space by clearing spare
land of the manor; townspeople ever since the beginning needed more than spare
building space within their reach. They wanted control over agricultural resources
that would insure them against starvation, unrestricted access to outside sources of
manpower for their enterprises, clear highways and low tariffs wherever their goods
had to be routed, and open doors in as many foreign markets as possible. They also
wished to complete their autonomy by eliminating all claims by higher suzerains to
their money, their services, and their allegiance. It was obviously impossible for all
towns to achieve all of these aims fully; one might almost say that the sky was the

67
 limit, and, besides, every town had to compete with others for most of the goals.
Nevertheless, Italian towns as a whole made great progress on all fronts, not only by
economic and diplomatic pressure, but also by resorting to open warfare to an extent
that was unparalleled in the other parts of Europe where towns were growing and
striving for the same aims. And though these wars diverted from economic
production a good deal of resources, it cannot be denied that they yielded
considerable economic dividends to the conquering communes.

We cannot linger on the intricate details of political and military history, but the
outstanding, early success of the Commercial Revolution in Italy hinged partly on
that of the bourgeois armies and navies that backed persuasion and entrepreneurship
with physical power. It was not overly difficult for the major Italian seaports to gain
mastery of the Mediterranean against the declining Muslim and Byzantine fleets,
and to use their sea power as a bargaining instrument to get what they wanted from
territorial lords who needed maritime support. During the Crusades and on other
occasions requiring a crossing, Venice, Genoa, and Pisa assisted dukes, kings, and
emperors not as subordinate towns but as fully independent states; only the seaports
of southern Italy and Sicily eventually had to submit to the Norman kings and
declined ever after. It was much harder for the towns of the interior to blast their
way amid lords whose heavy cavalry was initially more than a match for the massed
arbalesters and pikemen of the bourgeoisie. Still persistence and numbers gradually
prevailed. Each town harassed the feudal rulers of its district, debauched their serfs
by offering employment and protection, eroded the land around their castles, and
finally forced them to become members of the commune as the only alternative to
total ruin. Lastly, a league of Lombard towns defeated at Legnano in 1176 the
supreme lord of ItalyEmperor Frederick Barbarossa-and won complete
independence except for an empty acknowledgment of his theoretical suzerainty.
Soon after, the Tuscan towns attained the same status without having to fight
another battle.

This did not bring peace to Italy; there was continuous conflict between one town
and another, and between powerful families and classes within each town. Conflict,
however, was not peculiar to the urban world; the feudal world beyond the Alps,
which on the whole managed to dominate the country and keep a hold on the
partially self-governing towns, was far from peaceful. With an admixture of horror
and admiration, a German chronicler who was a bishop and a relative of Barbarossa
described northern and central Italy as a cluster of urban republics which obeyed no
lord and put into highest public office "workers in the mechanical arts, who in other
nations would be rejected like the plague." Obviously he overstressed the radical
character of the new states: "mechanical workers," that is, artisans, still played only
a minor role where money was the main source of power. In the twelfth century the
Italian communes were essentially governments of the merchants, by the merchants,
for the merchants-the ideal platform for the Commercial Revolution.

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 COINS AND CREDIT
Money, as represented in documents and physically preserved in coin collections,
is the most available and possibly the most sensitive instrument to feel the economic
pulse of the Commercial Revolution in its early stages. As usual, we lack overall
figures, but the general outline is clear. Throughout Catholic Europe, but more
sharply in Italy, the long deflationary trend of the early Middle Ages was reversed,
approximately with the same timing as the population trend. The first tokens of
change probably go back to the late Lombard period (eighth century) in Italy and to
a somewhat later moment in other parts of the Carolingian Empire, but the real turn
occurred in the tenth century. While payments in kind became increasingly rare, the
mass of coinage grew at a much faster rate. It also changed in nature. Gold,
especially useful for the largest payments or for hoarding, was no longer struck.
Silver, useful for ordinary transactions and, when heavily alloyed with copper and
issued in small denomination, for the smallest ones, not only reappeared where it
had been abandoned as a monetary metal but became everywhere the only precious
minting material. Pure silver, however, did not endure; coins were more and more
debased by a growing proportion of copper, and their weight also was diminished.
By the end of the twelfth century each of the Italian communes issued nothing but
miserable looking, brownish, tiny deniers whose silver content was but a small
fraction of the silver denier of Charlemagne. When the Italian merchants wished to
pay large sums in cash without carrying heaps of their puny coins they had to use a
variety of foreign coins, ranging from the English silver penny (which, almost alone
in Catholic Europe, had not been de based) to Byzantine and Muslim gold coins; or
else they could use ingots of precious metals, or, again, nonperishable spices and
other commodities as valuable as precious metals.

What do these developments suggest in terms of economic growth? Since coins

are struck at the order of governments, the simplest answer would be that kings,
dukes, and communes spent more than they could afford and tried to cover their sins
by imposing the same face value on less and less good metal. To a large extent this
is true, but in the long run-and, in a commercialized society, even without delay-no
government can nullify the laws of economy, whether it knows them or not. People
have a way of realizing that money is no longer what it used to be-more easily so
when it consists of hard coins that can be weighed, assayed, and told by their color-
and respond to debasement by raising prices. Higher prices force the government to
strike a larger amount of money unless price control is established. The last man
who tried to stabilize prices was Charlemagne, and he failed. Another explanation
that has been offered is likewise inadequate though not factually inaccurate. The
rapid increase of goods and services available for money made it impossible for the
mints to turn out as many good coins as were needed. Some precious metal was
obtained by melting works of goldsmithry, a larger amount by stepping up the
exploitation of mines, and an unknowable quantity by importing it from the
Byzantine and Muslim world through war action and a favorable balance of trade,

69
yet the supply never caught up with the demand. This, too, is probably true, but if
the mass of money had been chronically insufficient one would expect prices to
decline, in terms of precious metal if not in face value of coins. We know on the
contrary that real prices, with a few exceptions, went up. It has been calculated that
the cost of living in England quadrupled between 1150 and 1325. Hence we must
conclude that the velocity of circulation also increased.

This was a consequence rather than a cause of the general acceleration of

exchanges, but governments unwittingly contributed to the process. The more they
debased the coinage, the faster the coins changed hands in daily payments for
humbler goods and services that had previously been hard to get on a retail basis.
The baker sold individual loaves to consumers who had been wont to make their
own, to have it made by unpaid dependents, or to purchase it intermittently in large
quantities for storage; the mason worked for daily wages and took care of small jobs
for occasional customers instead of committing himself to a single employer in
return for food and lodgings. Large amounts of debased coins, foreign coins of
higher value, or ingots served for substantial transactions when hard cash was
absolutely required. A growing proportion of business affairs, however, was carried
out more conveniently by credit operations, and these further multiplied the velocity
of circulation.

Unstinting credit was the great lubricant of the Commercial Revolution. It was
altogether a novel phenomenon. We have seen that the Greco-Roman economy was
well supplied with cash of all kinds but ill-suited for commercial credit on a large
scale, and that the economy of the barbarian age was deficient both in cash and in
credit; it never got far off the ground. The take-off of the following period was
fueled not by a massive input of cash, but by a closer collaboration of people using
credit. It did not occur in Germany, where new silver mines began their activity
between the tenth and the twelfth century, but in Italy, where the gulf between
agrarian capitalists and merchants was narrowed down. A few members of the lower
nobility dehoarded precious metals, a few moneyers transformed bullion into coin, a
few sailors and soldiers got hold of war booty. These modest contributions to the
existing capital went a long way because credit enabled a small investment of hard
cash to go to work simultaneously at more than one place.

This development has to be surmised rather than proved on the basis of scant
indications in the sources of the tenth and eleventh centuries; its consequences
become clear by the twelfth century, when the movement of capital can be followed
in the more abundant documentation of a few key cities. No doubt we still find a
good number of straight loans at high interest rates, most of which look like
usurious consumption credit rather than commercial investments; but a larger
proportion of the contracts explore novel formulas of partnership and other
arrangements for the sharing of risks and profits. To this the Church may well have
contributed by its insistence that loans are sinful unless they are "gratis et amore
Dei," that is, granted without interest in the spirit of charity; but it would be a
mistake to ascribe solely to religious influence a change that stems from the same

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 cooperative attitude involved in the collaboration of men of all classes in the
political struggle that lead eventually to the emergence of independent communes.

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 CONTRACTS
The development of commercial contracts is as crucial in the history of trade as
that of tools and techniques in the history of agriculture. Only a few contracts are
clearly related to GrecoRoman ones. The others are almost certainly medieval
innovations, but the accidental staggering of the extant documents, and the tendency
of commercial practices to spread rapidly along trade routes, make it hard to decide
when and where a new type of contract first occurred. As we proceed from
Byzantine hagiographies of the seventh century to Arab legal texts of the eighth,
Jewish commercial correspondence of the early eleventh, scattered Venetian
contracts of a slightly later period, and ultimately a mass of Genoese notarial records
of the twelfth century, chronological data must be rearranged according to logical
deductions, and no conclusion can be safe until, in the thirteenth century, the same
basic contracts seem to be available throughout the Mediterranean world.

Still it is significant that the contract which displayed the closest cooperation
among fellow merchants, though first mentioned in Muslim law and occasionally
found in the earliest Venetian sources under the name of rogadia ("by prayer"),
seems to be especially popular with the African Jews, whose togetherness was
strengthened by the special dangers of minority status. Under the stated terms of
rogadia a merchant pledged to transport goods of another, and presumably to trade
with them, as a friendly gesture and without compensation. If the contract did not
conceal a charge that was unmentioned in order to escape religious sanctions against
"usury" (for interest taking was forbidden among fellow Jews as well as among
Muslims and Christians), we have to assume that merchants took turns in lending
free assistance to one another, even if they were not joined in a partnership. This
patriarchal contract, however, soon became obsolete in Venice and seems to have
been unknown in other western towns. It was later replaced by the contract of
commission, whereby a merchant took care of another's business for a percentage
commission or a fixed fee; but this became convenient only when and where the
risks of trade diminished.

A better rewarded but more committing solidarity was created by partnership

(societas), a Greco-Roman contract which survived in medieval law. Partners pooled
their capital and labor and shared both profits and risks. Unfortunately every partner
was held jointly and unlimitedly liable for the debts of the others: that is, a merchant
who intended to invest a small sum for a short time could lose everything he owned
if any of his partners incurred obligations they were unable to honor. The danger
was smaller in partnerships for the operation of a petty craftsman's workshop or a
retail store, which neither required nor attracted much capital and credit, but was a
serious threat in trade on a larger scale. In the latter case it seemed preferable to
graft the conventional bond of partnership on a more reliable tie, the family. The
earliest documents of Venice bear witness to the popularity of the fraterna, not so
much a partnership of the Roman type as an adaptation to commerce of a patriarchal

72
institution: the joint administration of goods inherited by two or more brothers and
invested in trade. By the twelfth century a more flexible contract, the compagnia
(from cumpanis or companion, "sharer of the same bread"), offered a better solution.
It brought together not only brothers but also less close relatives-mostly cousins, but
also sonsin-law chosen among the brightest employees-and required only the
investment of a limited sum for a limited time. Liability, however, still was joint and
unlimited for all partners.

Ordinary partnerships and family partnerships never lost their prominence in land
trade. The former grew in numbers but not in size, for mediocrity was the price of
safety: the unsatisfied creditor of a small shopkeeper might not even suspect that the
debtor had partners. The cornpagnia, on the contrary, tended to expand in a large
number of inland cities ranging from Piacenza and Asti to Lucca and Siena. The
partners extended both their family and their investments; they renewed the contract
after the first term had elapsed, and often welcomed outsiders' contributions "above
the social capital," that is, interest-bearing deposits resembling modern bonds.
Success, however, usually led to overconfidence: sooner or later one of the partners
contracted a "bad debt," and his insolvency dragged the others into ruin.
Nevertheless the trade and credit offered by the partnership while it lasted had
promoted independent activities which were not necessarily involved in the failure.
Up to the mid-thirteenth century no compagnia became large enough to wreck by its
collapse the economy of a whole town. Even as business cycles did not prevent the
long-run economic growth of the nineteenth century, so the boom-and-bust pattern
of the medieval compagnia did not interrupt the main upward trend of land trade.

Maritime trade, on the other hand, neither needed nor could afford such a pattern.
The fraterna soon become obsolete in Venice and probably never appeared in
Genoa; the compagnia was represented mainly by detached agents of foreign
partnerships whose home was in an inland city. Joint and unlimited liability was an
intolerable hazard where the greatest prudence and honesty could not prevent total
loss on account of shipwreck or piracy. Happily, no commitment had to exceed the
duration of a one-way or, at most, a round-trip voyage, for every affair had its
natural conclusion with the arrival (or failure to arrive) of the goods, after which
new commitments could be undertaken on a clean slate. The solidarity of a family
was less crucial than that of people in the same boat. As early as Greco-Roman
times the latter had suggested agreements to apportion the contribution of
merchandise each voyager would have to jettison if needed (the so-called Rhodian
sea law); early Byzantine custom (the Nomos Nautikos) had added provisions in a
similar spirit for the sharing of risks and profits. The contract of column, widely
used in Amalfi and other Italo-Byzantine seaports of the south as well as in the
Dalmatian town of Ragusa-Dubrovnik (but, apparently, not in Venice), probably
stemmed from there. All contributions of capital and labor by those who traveled on
a ship -captain, sailors, merchants-were listed in a column of the ship log; risks and
profits were shared according to the value ascribed to each contribution. Thanks to
its patriarchal character the con tract has survived down to our days in the small
fishing business of the Adriatic, but it did not suit capitalistic forms of trade. After

73
the twelfth century, the column fades away from records.

Greco-Roman law made large use of another contract, the sea loan, which
remained in favor throughout the Middle Ages although it gradually lost its
prominence. Like the ordinary loan, it entailed an interest charge and did not involve
the lender into a partnership relation with the borrower; but restitution of the loan,
which was extended only for the duration of a single or round-trip oversea voyage,
was waived in case of total loss on account of shipwreck or enemy attack. This
clause enabled the parties to claim that the charge was not "usury" but what we
would call an insurance premium. Sea loans are very frequently encountered in the
records of every Christian seaport, but their popularity diminished in the mid-
thirteenth century both because the popes ruled that the premium was in fact usury,
and because insurance began slowly to develop as an independent form of business.
Moreover, maritime trade like land trade called for closer collaboration than that of
a straight loan. This need was met by another contract, the colle- gantia
("colleagueship") or commenda ("recommendation"), which joined the advantages
of the sea loan (duration for a voyage only, no liability of the lender towards third
parties) with the main advantages of the partnership (sharing of risks and profits
between lender and borrower, no suspicion of "usury").

The commenda, which some modern writers improperly call "sleeping

partnership," was a medieval innovation of the highest importance and contributed
greatly to the faster growth of maritime trade as compared to the slower progress of
capitalistic forms in land trade. Its place of origin is still debated: the Islamic and
Byzantine countries seem to have the best claims, but the western commenda differs
from its oriental counterparts in some details, and one cannot rule out the
independent emergence of similar contracts at different places. In its simplest Italian
forms, a stay-athome party lent capital to a traveling party who was expected to
invest it in commercial operations for the duration of a round-trip voyage. The
lender bore all risks of capital and was entitled to a share of the profits (three-fourths
in the majority of cases). The managing borrower bore all risks of labor and kept
back the rest of the profits. Third parties came in touch with him alone and had no
claim against the lender, whether or not they knew of his existence.

Inasmuch as the lender ostensibly received without personal effort the larger part
of the profits (and in most of the earliest contracts gave specific instructions to the
manager concerning the destination of the voyage and the type of wares to be
bought), one would think at first of an unequal association of a rich capitalist with
an impecunious laborer; but this was by no means the most frequent case. The same
man could be simultaneously a lender in some contracts and a borrower in others;
that is, he spread his risks and multiplied his profits by adding capital of his
colleagues to such part of his own capital as he took along on a voyage, and by
entrusting the rest of his capital to colleagues traveling to other seaports. Again, an
impecunious man could take his chance in big business by entrusting a small sum to
a great merchant who would not spurn the smallest contribution to his working
capital. As for the unequal apportionment of profits, it probably was largely offset

74
by the fact that only the manager really knew how much profit had been gathered; in
early contracts he was expected to back his accounting with some kind of proof, but
at a later time the lender pledged to believe his word "without an oath or a witness."
In conclusion, the commenda was the closest medieval antecedent of our joint-stock
companies, which attract investments of any size from all kinds of people, are
limitedly liable, and do not feel bound to give detailed accounts to stockholders. No
doubt a commenda lasted only for one voyage, but nothing prevented a satisfied
lender from entrusting his capital to the same manager again and again.

All the contracts we have mentioned, and others we have been forced to omit,
involved credit; this tended to reduce the merchants' need for specialized credit
institutions. What we could call banking developed slowly on three independent
levels: pawnbrokers, deposit bankers, and merchant bankers belonged to different
social classes and specialized in different types of credit, although they might dabble
in one another's business as a side activity or move from their level to another.
Jewish pawnbrokers in Italy were outclassed and outnumbered by "Lombards"
(Christian natives of Chieri and other northwestern towns) in the unsavory but indis
pensable line of lending money against a pawn to the poor, improvident, or
unsuccessful traders and to other people whose credit was not good. A pawnshop
was entitled to the same grudging toleration as a house of prostitution: its owner was
seldom molested but knew that he was heading for eternal damnation unless he
repented and returned his "ill begotten" profits to the Church, stewardess of the
poor. Interest charges were of course high but did not normally exceed those exacted
today by small loan agencies, which face far smaller risks in this world and the
other.

Deposit banking was a more honorable line, although in the strict definition of the
Church it also would be classed as "usury." It was an almost spontaneous offshoot of
money changing. During the day a changer displayed a heap of coins on his banca or
bench in a public place; at night he locked it in a well-guarded coffer. It was easy for
him to lend any surplus he might gather in the exchange business, and easy for
others to use his coffer to deposit coins they did not immediately need. This led the
changer to grant credit to reliable customers at a much lower interest charge than a
pawnbroker, and to pay a still lower interest to people who allowed him to use
money deposited with him. City governments asked him to keep an eye on
circulation, denounce forgeries, and occasionally to advance cash to the treasury.
They required the changer to keep a reserve that would cover his outstanding
obligations, and in return recognized the entries in his book of accounting as legal
proof of a disbursement. Gradually the practice prevailed for most merchants to
keep an account with a banker and carry out their local transaction by a simple
transfer on the banker's book, without any cash changing hands. In turn the changer
granted credit, usually by allowing a customer to make an overdraft; but he had to
beware of overextending his operations lest a rush on his funds exhaust his reserve
and swallow all of his goods. Deposit banks grew more slowly than compagnia
partnerships for trade; yet, almost invariably, they eventually were dragged into the
same boom-and-bust pattern.

75
 Large scale credit for long distance operations was part and parcel of contracts
among merchants. It took longer to become an independent line of business, mainly
through exchange contracts negotiated by the largest merchant companies. The
process was well on its way by the late twelfth century, but it can best be described
in a later period, when merchant banking fully matured.

76
 TRANSPORTATION
By releasing agrarian income for investment in business and by making credit
operations more flexible the Commercial Revolution had removed two of the main
stumbling blocks that impeded economic growth in antiquity. It was less successful
in eroding another block, inadequate mechanization. Unlike contracts and other
mental techniques, which can be improved at little or no cost, tools require
considerable investments for delayed rewards; there was progress, but no
revolutionary change. We have already come across certain innovations in
agricultural hardware, and in the next chapters we shall take up a larger number of
novelties in industrial equipment. Transportation, which is as essential to commerce
as currency, must be briefly considered here.

Land transport, even today more expensive than transportation by water, found its
most serious limitations in the condition of roads. For all their shortcomings, the
Roman ballasted highways were a considerable legacy to that part of Europe which
had been welded together by the imperial might; but their upkeep would have
required a strong central authority commanding huge gangs of slaves or drafted
laborers. They slowly broke down through centuries of neglect, and whatever was
left of long distance trade in the early Middle Ages had to depend almost entirely on
internal waterways. Meanwhile a new, more flexible and complex, but flimsier road
network began to take shape. Towns were linked to one another not by a single
master highway, but by several winding trails of beaten earth and loose stones,
sometimes bolstered by wooden planks. Each trail offered an alternative connection
whenever war, unbearable tolls, or bad weather made another way impassable. Like
most other aspects of public works and services, roads were now built and
maintained mainly by private industry (halfcommercial, half-religious organizations
being at the forefront) at a minimum cost in money and labor. It is hard to tell
whether the economy gained by diminished expenses more than it lost by increased
impediments to heavy traffic. No doubt the diffusion of tandem attachment, the stiff
horse collar, and the horseshoe, added power to animal traction; so did the
introduction of axled pairs of cart wheels in the place of independent wheels which
tended to lose their parallel alignment whenever a turn was made. (Independent
wheels still make it hard to turn smoothly baby carriages and tea wagons, which
normally have no axles.) But heavy carts cannot be used on nonballasted roads
except on dry, even soil.

A high proportion of late medieval transport was more happily entrusted to pack
animals, especially mules, which were more suited to rugged mountain crossings.
Progress in this sector was tied not so much to better saddles and bundles as to
improved breeding and feeding, which placed at the disposal of merchants cheaper
and sturdier beasts, and secondarily to the horseshoe. Between the ninth century and
the twelfth the price of mules dropped radically, and their numbers steeply
increased. No longer was it necessary to heap crushing burdens on the shoulders of

77
porters, forced by serfdom or need to carry loads over the highest hills. Muleteers
and carters, however, did not thrive enough to form powerful companies; land
transport remained the business of small entrepreneurs, petty craftsmen rather than
capitalist merchants.

Transportation by sea opened broader perspectives. A small boat might cost no

more than a pair of mules and carry a trifling load, but large ships were in the top
class of capital goods-so much so that their construction, ownership, chartering, and
operation gave occasion to credit arrangements, investment pools, and risk-andprofit
sharing contracts as complex as those of commerce proper. Indeed long-distance
traders, shipowners and ship captains in the larger maritime cities often belonged to
the same social group and would easily swap or combine roles. Far from exploiting
them as ruthlessly as the Roman and early Byzantine governments had done,
western rulers of the later Middle Ages who needed the cooperation of shipowners
dealt with them in the same gingerly, if not quite respectful, way that they treated
people able to advance credit or supply military support. Their own governments
would of course require naval service whenever necessary, but hardly ever without
equitable compensation and usually for purposes directly relevant to the shipowners'
welfare. Nor were owners and captains the sole beneficiaries of commerce carried
out through their ships; sailors normally were entitled to take along some freight of
their own and to add to their salary the profits of trade. The popular image of the
galley slave fits both late antiquity and the early modern period but not the Middle
Ages, when labor was scarce and oarsmen were proud, free citizens and tough
fighters. Initially the change in status of ordinary sailors probably was one of the
many effects of the demographic depression of the early Middle Ages. Their
subsequent rise to higher income brackets, however, was due to the fact that the
world of shipping was copiously irrigated with money.

Shipbuilding has a good deal in common with architecture; it called for almost as
much skill, imagination, and daring as the construction of the great medieval
cathedrals and castles. It would take too long to describe in detail the different types
of ships and their component parts or tackles; let us only point out that the need to
provide suitable vessels for a great variety of purposes and the desire to combine to
a smaller or greater degree the advantages of sails with those of oars led to incessant
and fruitful experimentation. Everything else being even, propulsion by oars insured
a higher average speed and greater independence from changes of wind and weather,
especially if the deck was long and narrow enough; but it required a large crew
which swelled the payroll, consumed food, and competed with cargo for the
available space. Propulsion by sails economized everything except time (and even
time if the wind happened to be favorable), but made a ship more vulnerable to
storms and enemy attacks, the latter a constant danger in the medieval
circumstances; military protection could be sought for by the addition of soldiers to
the sailors, but soldiers were just as costly and no better fighters than oarsmen. The
most successful vessels were a compromise between oarship and sailship, the
characteristics of the latter being more valuable when bulky and inexpensive cargoes
were carried, and less acceptable when speed and security were essential for the

78
 transport of precious wares on dangerous waters.

Two basic traditions existed side by side and exercised some mutual influence:
that of the northern seas, which was grafted on the prehistoric tradition of floating
hollow tree trunks, and that of the Mediterranean, which had acquired far greater
sophistication in Greco-Roman times and continued to evolve. In the early Middle
Ages even the hollow tree trunk (monoxylon, as the Byzantines called it) rendered
great services: cargoes were normally small, and the light Viking ships could easily
be transferred to the smallest internal waterways and carried on men's shoulders on
short waterless stretches. With the addition of planks joined at an angle to the trunk,
which thus acquired the function of a keel, the northern ship could become more
capacious. The more planks were added, however, the harder it became to balance
the ship under sails. As for the full potential of the keel, it was not realized before
the last two or three centuries of the Middle Ages, when northern Europe began to
shorten the economic gap that separated her from the more advanced south.

The Commercial Revolution of Italy and the western Mediterranean put to work
every kind of ship, from lithe, tiny rowboats to broad, roomy sailing "nefs," but tied
its fortune especially to the galley and its many relatives. A repeatedly improved
descendant of the standard Roman ship and of later Byzantine models, equipped
almost equally well for oar and sail propulsion, for commerce and for battle, the
galley fully justified her name, "swordfish" or "galeoid shark" (galaia or galea in
Byzantine Greek). The wooden spear that prolonged her pointed bow was capable of
breaking a hostile ship as easily as the elongated hull broke the waves; a complex
system of masts and sails, including some triangular ("lateen") ones, enabled her to
make the most of any wind, in spite of the handicap of a rather flattened keel. There
were different varieties of the galley, and the dimensions could be altered according
to cargo and speed requirements, but length was always emphasized against width.
The larger the ship, the easier it became to bear the overhead of a numerous crew.
As a matter of fact, sizes tended steadily to grow, but not nearly as much as the
churches and fortresses built by contemporary architects. Although shipbuilders had
to be more careful of economic considerations than cathedral builders, whose
reward was in heaven, they coped with space problems by increasing the number
rather than by expanding the size of ships. Cost problems were usually met by
combining in each ship a sufficient amount of light, precious commodities with a
sufficient bulk of heavy merchandise, which had the additional advantage of
stabilizing the narrow vessel.

Venetian Galley of the Fifteenth Century

79
 SOURCE: Bas-relief on the Contarini tomb, Padua; as reprinted in Lopez, The Birth
of Europe, p. 139.

Let us not hasten to proclaim that medieval shipwrights lacked the skill or the
courage that at a later period produced the great carracks, cogs, and caravels of the
"age of discovery." Economic growth could proceed no faster than the expansion of
production and consumption all over Europe. So long as it was difficult to fill large
ships at one stroke by calling at a few main seaports, a galley had to remain small
enough to enter a large number of minor harbors and often to anchor at open
beaches. Short haul navigation was necessary not so much because of technological
shortcomingsnavigational instruments by the twelfth or early thirteenth centuries
were almost as advanced as in the Renaissance-as because the lack of good inland
and coastal roads made it imperative to unload car goes as close as possible to their
final destination. In turn, roads would not be improved so long as economic growth
did not put sufficient pressure on people who were to use them; and since economic
growth depended partly on good roads and large ships, transportation was enmeshed
in a closed circle. To pry the circle open, the Commercial Revolution needed the
collaboration of producers and consumers everywhere, the merchants providing the
spark, the whole society offering the fuel. It was a long process, which we shall
describe in the following chapters.

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 4
The Uneven Diffusion of
Commercialization
THE NERVE CENTERS
OF THE REVOLUTION
An economic revolution is not as sharply defined as a political one. Both the
Declaration of Independence and Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations are of 1776; but
while no one will question that the American Revolution broke out in 1776 and
attained its goal by 1783, it would be impossible to single out an initial and a
terminal date for the Industrial Revolution and preposterous to expect that it could
achieve radical change in less than ten years. The same can be said for the
Commercial Revolution, a concept that has not yet won as general acceptance as
that of the Industrial Revolution, mainly because a large number of economic
historians have little training in pre-modern history and little inclination to look for
radical change where the lack of reliable statistical material limits the opportunities
for quantitative study.

Quantity, however, is only one dimension of history and does not provide clear-
cut subdivisions within a millennium of sustained growth. With the exception of
approximately two centuries (from the mid-fourteenth to the mid-sixteenth, but the
interval was not exactly the same in every part of Europe), the economy of Europe
has been expanding ever since the tenth century. Naturally the figures of our day
dwarf those of the Industrial Revolution; these in turn are much larger than those of
the Commercial Revolution. The chain reaction of mutually strengthening factors,
however, does not substantially differ from one subperiod to another. The population
increases; per capita production soars; technology progresses; means of payment
and transportation become faster; both capital and consumption respond to the
contradictory but not incompatible stimuli of concentration in the hands of a few
leaders and distribution to previously underprivileged people; underdeveloped
regions get involved in the general movement; the whole economic process affects
more and more deeply the social structure, the shape of culture and the entire way of
life.

To define the Commercial Revolution as opposed to subsequent phases of

economic growth we must consider not so much the differences in quantity as the
mutations in kind. Even as industrialization gave the leading role to the industrialist,
so commercialization transferred economic leadership from the landowner to the
merchant. This does not mean, however, that merchants became the richest, most

81
powerful, most numerous, or (least of all) most prestigious class throughout Europe.
In fact, at no time during the Commercial Revolution did agriculture lose its place as
the occupation or livelihood of the overwhelming majority; indeed, it still was
predominant over the wide expanses of Europe a good many years after the
beginning of the Industrial Revolution. Yet commerce between the tenth century and
the fourteenth became the most dynamic sector of the economy in one country after
another, and merchants were the main promoters of change. Like industrialization at
a later time, commercialization did not spread evenly. We have singled out the Jews
and the Italians as early starters; let us add that throughout the Commercial
Revolution no other group concentrated its efforts on trade as thoroughly as the
Jews and none entirely matched the drive of the Italians. Some nations, however,
eventually almost caught up with the latter, whereas a few owed whatever progress
they made not to local initiative but to foreign merchants visiting their markets or
coming to their towns.

Towns were the nerve centers of the Commercial Revolution; no wonder, for
under any circumstance a concentrated population responds to economic stimuli
more promptly than a scattered one. Medieval urbanization and commercialization
were mutually supporting phenomena; but we must remember that town
development need not be linked to commerce more than to industry or agriculture.
We have seen that the heart of the ancient city was the public square where
landowners discussed politics and farming. Their substantial and diversified
consumption, and that of the local administrative, military, and religious officials,
supported a number of merchants and craftsmen, but did not make them equal
partners. Many craftsmen were slaves; many merchants lacked citizen rights; and in
many of the innumerable Roman "cities" agriculturists and officials were not only
more influential and wealthy but also more numerous than the trading class. The
Commercial Revolution did to the medieval city what the Industrial Revolution was
to do to the entire European scene. It gradually shook the numeric, economic and
political predominance of landowners and officials and made the market, instead of
the public place or the cathedral squares, the main focus of urban life.

The term "market" (from the Latin mercatum) may mean both a gathering of
merchants and their gathering place. In the latter sense, the Romans used more
commonly the term forum, and they ordinarily called a merchant negotiator, that is,
business man. During the later Middle Ages "market" and "merchant" (mercator)
gradually crowded out the older words, probably because in the barbarian period the
withering of urban life had made permanent market places and resident business
men superfluous in all but a few towns. There was not enough to do for traders to
get together every day at the same place or wait for customers in a shop. The
collapse of continuous trade, however, stressed the significance of periodical
gatherings, and these would grow in numbers, size, and complexity wherever and
whenever economic activities picked up. They ranged from weekly or monthly
encounters, where townspeople and country people of the immediate surroundings
exchanged handfuls of local goods in the course of a few hours, to annual affairs,
usually lasting several days, where customers from a larger area bought provisions

82
for the whole year, sold any surplus they produced, and got hold of a few outlandish
objects. At their lowest level, daily markets opened no more than a loophole in a
wall of self-sufficiency: many transactions were carried out directly between the
producer and the consumer, sometimes by barter, and nobody had to spend the night
away from home. Annual markets, usually called fairs after the feria (feast or
holiday) to which they were linked, called for more complex arrangements. Any
empty space might do for professional merchants to set up their stalls and pitch their
tents (tienda still designates the shop in modern Spanish), but they would not come
from afar unless they had some assurance of free and easy access, some advantages
and conveniences during their stay, and, of course, a reasonable chance for profit.

Urban growth did not destroy the temporary markets, which had been ordinarily
confined outside the walls or segregated in the yards of churches and castles, but
eventually transferred the bulk of trade to what we might call the shopping and
business sections of the town. Stately halls for sectional or specialized trade,
covered plazas and arcaded alleys, long rows of craftsmen's houses with a shop open
on the street came alive in a picturesque disorder of which we can still get an idea
when we visit the suks and bazaars of certain Muslim towns, from Marrakesh to
Istanbul, where industrial pollution has not yet replaced preindustrial dirt. The more
important transactions of wholesale or luxury trade were carried out more discreetly
in the office of a notary or a guild, the inner rooms of a merchant's mansion, the
private quarters of a sea captain or the premises of a company of merchant bankers.
Obviously not all towns attained the same size and complexity, but many of them
fitted the statement of Chretien of Troyes, the famous French writer of the late
twelfth century: "One might well believe that in a city a fair is being held every
day." More proudly, a Florentine chronicler of the early fourteenth century pointed
out that his city had no use for special markets or fairs: you could buy and sell any
amount of anything at any time. He exaggerated but slightly: Florence at her
medieval peak, with a busy population of better than 100,000 inhabitants, a mint
output of 500,000 gold florins a year, a wool production of 80,000 pieces of cloth, a
meat consumption of 4,000 oxen, 80,000 lambs and 30,000 pigs, a wine
consumption of 25 million quarts, a fertile district ruled by her independent
commune, and the largest business companies in the Christian world, hardly needed
the stimulus of periodical marts.

In all but a very few urban centers, however, markets and fairs continued to play
an important role. Some economic activities are essentially seasonal: the gathering
of certain crops, the opening of snow and icebound routes, the sailing dates for large
convoys of ships, the traditional time for shearing sheep, preparing cheese, or
delivering cloth to the wholesaler determined spurts that could best be channeled
into a fair. Travel took a long time, and a merchant would be encouraged to take a
specific trip if he knew that he would reach an extraordinarily large number of his
colleagues and an unusual variety of goods. Moreover, markets and fairs tied their
fortune to special facilities and privileges not normally available on the spot. Not
many towns outside northern and central Italy enjoyed full independence and still
fewer controlled the country around them; ordinary trade, therefore, had to cope

83
with all kinds of obstacles in the unfriendly context of a feudal government and an
agrarian society. No doubt the interests of lords and farmers were not in everything
different from those of towns and traders, nor was unrestricted commercial liberty
the ideal of most towns. A compromise was always possible, but it would be more
easily attained for the limited duration of a fair than for the entire year. Lords and
towns alike would then be willing to interrupt any war, lower any toll and tax, waive
the customary restrictions on the residence and activities of aliens, grant speedy and
informal justice according to international commercial law, strike abundant coinage
of good and uniform quality, recognize and enforce written or verbal obligations,
renounce such obnoxious customs as aubaine (confiscation of the property of
deceased aliens), ius naufragii (seizure of the goods, and sometimes of the survivors,
of wrecked ships), and reprisal (forfeiture of the wares of all fellow citizens of a
defaulting merchant). Even the greediest prince and the most protectionistic town
usually realized that at least temporary concessions were needed to get a market
going, and that a going market would bring money and supplies outlasting the
suspension of normal burdens.

Still if the absolute volume of transactions in markets and fairs kept increasing as
the Commercial Revolution progressed, their share of total trade inevitably
diminished. Seasonal factors cannot be entirely eliminated, but a steadier demand
will elicit a more evenly distributed offer; sailors and muleteers will prolong their
operations under all but the most forbidding weather; and craftsmen will use stocks
of raw material to spread their work throughout the year. By the late thirteenth
century a Pisan manual of business foresees only one slack month out of twelve, and
the detailed notarial records of Genoa show no serious variation at any time of the
year. Less successful cities on peripheral shores or in the countrified center of
Europe are more sensitive to seasonal fluctuations, but a city that for a long series of
years has attracted peasants to her weekly market and merchants to her annual fair
will normally become a permanent nerve center of trade.

As early as the seventh century the "Lendit" fair near Paris may have been the
prime factor of the commercial ascendancy of the city, but by the thirteenth century
its concentrated activity added no more than a trimming to the continuous trade of a
hundred Parisian guilds. As for the Champagne "fairs," which eclipsed all others
from the late twelfth century to the early fourteenth, they owed their success to the
fact that they had less and less in common with the traditional annual marts. Held at
four towns of the same region, in an unbroken rotation that encompassed practically
the entire year, they served mainly as money and commodity exchanges for
merchants who converged there from all parts of Europe and were hardly interested
in local affairs. Commodities were represented by samples, if at all; cash was almost
entirely replaced by instruments of credit; the location of Champagne, astride some
of the main roads from the Mediterranean to the North Sea and from the Channel to
the Baltic, supplied a suitable common ground for business by correspondence and
payments by compensation of credits and debts. But when the Italians, who had
been the most important patrons, began using their ships to go directly to the North
Sea coast and established permanent offices in Flanders, the Champagne fairs

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 withered away.

Apart from seasonal and intermittent flurries, the special "liberties" connected
with markets and fairs had insured their early success. This prop, however, did not
last long; for as merchants gained power and self-assurance, they demanded and
obtained the same liberties wherever and whenever they visited a town. Commerce
thrives on freedom and runs away from constriction; normally the most prosperous
cities were those that adopted the most liberal policies. No doubt military power and
economic superiority often interfered successfully with free competition: thus the
English kings continued to herd foreign purchasers of wool in appointed ports and
"staple" centers, and the Venetian republic submitted German im porters of spices to
rigorous controls. Even in these cases, however, it is doubtful whether restrictions
really improved the position of a nation that produced the best wool and of a city
that had access to the best spices; with looser regulations, Spain sold large amounts
of wool and Genoa gained a good share of the spice market. This, however, is not
the place for a retrospective examination of the merits of protectionism and free
trade; the available data for the Middle Ages are too incomplete to warrant general
conclusions in a moot debate which even today is influenced by political as well as
economic considerations.

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 PATTERNS AND OBJECTS
OF TRADE
Not the least contribution of urban to commercial growth was the insertion of the
fresh, sustained, and widespread demand of a middle class between the relatively
unelastic demands of two largely self-sufficient classes: a few landed rich who could
afford but seldom needed to buy, and many landed poor, who needed to buy but
seldom could afford it. Salt is indispensable for survival, and some people will not
live without costly jewels; but the Commercial Revolution got its fuel mainly from
the multiplication and diversification of both customers and wares. Its success was
marked by the fact that, although the flow of merchandise and the volume of
transactions increased faster than the total population, prices kept going up and
governments worried more and more that supply might be outstripped by demand.
No doubt per capita consumption rose at all levels as greater productivity and better
distribution made higher standards of living possible for all classes; but nowhere
was the rise as directly translated into commercial growth as in the towns, because
townspeople produced specialized goods and depended on trade for nearly
everything else. Against the concentrated temptation of desirable objects displayed
in the shops and acquired by a next-door neighbor, the sermons of ecclesiastic or lay
moralists and the frequently enacted sumptuary laws were of little avail. Inevitably,
the luxury of yesterday tended to become the treat of today and the necessity of
tomorrow.

We must not, however, overestimate a consumption drive that even in our days
does not hit all people with the same intensity. Starvation and poverty have not yet
disappeared in the United States, and the average living standard in a small
Mississippi town is far below that of a northern megalopolis; the spread of
prosperity in medieval Europe was much more uneven. Indeed, a rapid economic
growth tends to increase the distance between minimum and maximum levels. At
the highest level many kings and dukes in the thirteenth century were better off than
Emperor Charlemagne in the ninth, but there were noblemen who still lived on the
edge of poverty in isolated castles. The conspicuous consumption of the upper
bourgeoisie in a large Italian or Flemish city matched that of the highest English or
German nobility, but the middle class in the great majority of towns had to be
content with little. At the lowest level, the diffusion of shirts may perhaps be taken
as a test case for economic and social differences. Strictly speaking, a shirt is not a
necessity; it does little to protect its wearer from the cold, but adds to his comfort
and also to his health as it can be frequently washed. Virtually nobody in the early
medieval West wore anything under his dress; the very word camixia ("shirt" in
Latin) is of late medieval origin. But coarse hairshirts made their appearance toward
the end of the barbarian period among the richer and sophisticated people. It took
many centuries before Italian peasants generally wore them, still longer before they
entered French farmhouses, and the Commercial Revolution did not introduce them
everywhere else. Meanwhile the Italian bourgeoisie and the French nobility grew so

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accustomed to better underwear that they began to regard a hairshirt as an
instrument of penance. French literary sources nevertheless insisted that lower class
people ought not to pamper their rough skin with smooth underwear; German
sources complained that they often did; only in the most developed regions of Italy
was the wearing of linen or, at least, cotton shirts among farmers and petty workmen
taken for granted.

These illustrative examples may be enough to indicate the lags between one
country and another. One wishes there were precise figures to measure the lags
quantitatively, but we must be content with a few approximations. It has been
calculated that by the late thirteenth century the taxable exports from England (by
no means one of the least developed countries in Europe) often amounted to a
quarter million pounds sterling a year; but this, even if we consider that the English
pound was worth at least four Genoese pounds, is much less than the almost four
million pounds of taxable exports and imports that went through the harbor of
Genoa in 1293. In turn, the Genoese figure seems to be roughly ten times as high as
the value of exports by sea from Lubeck, the most important German port, in 1368.
Again, Italy in the early fourteenth century had four cities that attained or surpassed
100,000 inhabitants (Venice, Milan, Florence and Genoa), but Paris apparently never
reached that figure. Ghent (the largest city in highly developed Flanders) may have
had 50,000 inhabitants, Lubeck and London were smaller, and many of the German
"cities" had no more than one or two thousand inhabitants. No doubt the difference
between Italy north of the Tiber and the most retarded parts of Europe during the
Commercial Revolution was as significant as that between England or the United
States and India or China during the Industrial Revolution. Such discrepancies
forbid generalizations about the impact of both "revolutions." Any attempt at
calculating an average between maximum and minimum growth (or no growth at
all) would bring no meaningful results. The most convenient solution is to keep the
underdeveloped majority in mind, but to focus attention on the economic leaders, if
only because their activity is better documented.

At first glance, if we compare the patterns of trade in the Commercial Revolution

to those in the Industrial Revolution, certain differences will strike us, apart from the
already noted fact that all proportions are almost unbelievably smaller. Luxury
products and the custom of the rich tend to play a more important role than
commodities for mass consumption. Many if not all business men show greater
interest in enlarging profit margins on a limited number of sales than in enlarging
the number of sales on a limited profit margin. Even the strongest and most
specialized partnerships seldom turn down as irrelevant or insignificant any business
that comes their way. A fairly large part of retail exchanges do not require the
intervention of a middleman, as many craftsmen sell some of their product in the
front window of their own shops and many free peasants bring some of their
produce to the daily or weekly market. All of these characteristics were the heritage
of antiquity and of the early Middle Ages; development did not change old patterns
overnight. Still the volume of exchanges will look impressive enough if we bear in
mind that the sea trade of Genoa in 1293 was three times as large as the entire

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revenue of the kingdom of France in the same year, when King Philip the Fair
encountered the greatest difficulties in raising that amount of money. Likewise, the
other characteristics that in modern perspective would belittle the image of the
Commercial Revolution change aspect when set against the background of their
time.

What limited trade in ordinary and bulky goods was not so much the lack of a
potential market as the high incidence of transportation costs on wares that had to be
moderately priced. Hence most of it had to be carried out locally or regionally, on a
small scale and with feeble concentration of capital. Such petty transactions left
little trace in extant documents. This makes it hard for the economic historian to
observe their increase during the Commercial Revolution, which may nevertheless
have been proportionately greater than that of luxury trade. It has been estimated
that by the early fourteenth century as much as 100,000 barrels of wine were
exported from Gascony to England in a single year, mainly by small traders and on
small ships. This particular figure may have to be revised downward, but there is no
doubt that salt, grain, preserved fish, nonperishable fruit, cheese, timber,
nonprecious metals, wool, cotton, and some ordinary dyestuffs were shipped in
ever-larger amounts, at longer distances, and on bigger vessels as time went by.
Waterways and roomy sailships (or barges, when a small river or artificial canal had
to be utilized) were the preferred means of conveyance, but even the heaviest
commodities might be loaded on a galley or another fast ship when they were
urgently needed or in order to add weight to the light and valuable wares included in
the cargo. Even transportation by land became more convenient as roads were
improved all over Europe. Progress was especially important in the Alpine passes,
which could best withstand the competition of waterways by offering shortcuts
between the Mediterranean and the northern or northwestern regions. The opening
of the St. Gotthard pass in 1237 with a new road and bridge for pack animals and the
widening of the Septimer to fit small carts in 1338 were the most significant
breakthroughs; they diverted towards Germany some of the traffic pre viously
directed to Champagne via the western passes and in turn forced French transport
agents to improve their services.

Land routes played a smaller role in northern Europe, but by enlarging their ships
(usually at some sacrifice of speed) the merchants of the "northern Mediterranean"
(North Sea and Baltic Sea) promoted a trade that depended heavily on basic raw
materials and other bulky goods whose production entailed comparatively little
labor, such as timber, cereals, and salted fish. The merchants of the classic
Mediterranean had a much greater choice of refined commodities, but took
advantage of the generally higher living standard and denser population to call at
every port and pick up every crumb of possible trade. (This, incidentally, was the
positive aspect of what is often disparagingly called their lack of specialization.)
Venice, for instance, never relented in her efforts to increase her hold on the salt
market, which had been her earliest trump card, and handled by sea, river, or land
route large amounts of grain, oil, wine, iron, copper, tin, mercury, timber, fruit, soap,
live animals and slaughtering meat, ordinary leather goods, and coarse textiles, in

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addition to the best luxury products that labor could make and money could buy.

It was, however, the latter that afforded the best chances for gain and produced
and required the largest concentrations of capital. One thinks at once of spices, that
prestigious class of wares which is usually associated with medieval long-distance
trade and almost neutralizes the vulgar odor of herring and beer with an inviting
aroma of cinnamon and nutmeg. What went under the general name of "spices" in
the middle ages, however, was not all prestigious, aromatic, or expensive. The most
detailed manual of commercial practice in the early fourteenth century, by Francesco
di Balduccio Pegolotti, lists alphabetically no less than 288 items, almost evenly
divided between "gross" and "minute," under the heading of spices. Besides a
compact group of seasonings, perfumes, medicinals, and dyestuffs, we come across
commodities as unrelated to one another as copper, cotton, wax, paper, and glue.
Again, a large number of Pegolotti's "spices" come from the Muslim and Byzantine
world or the farther regions of Asia and Africa, but many are products of Italy and
other European countries. Not included or barely mentioned in the list, but more
profusely described elsewhere in the book, are many other wares of any type, price,
and origin, such as staple food stuffs, furs (mostly from northern Europe), twenty-
three varieties of raw silk (mostly from the Middle and Far East), and the vast,
nearly ubiquitous family of textiles. Apart from the almost total omission of most
manufactured goods of iron, wood, and glass, the manual accurately reflects the
extreme variety of the objects of international trade at the zenith of the Commercial
Revolution but does not help us to classify or rank them according to their
importance.

Without trying to rearrange or complete this panorama, let us single out the
leading components of the main axis of international trade, an axis that had Italy as
its pivot and joined northwestern Europe with the Levant. Throughout the
Commercial Revolution the strongest assets of the Levant fell into two groups of
high priced raw materials: spices proper (that is, seasonings, medicinals, and
dyestuffs), topped by pepper, which was almost as important as salt to add flavor
and preserve food while refrigeration was unknown; and fineries ranging from
precious stones and ivory to raw silk. Objects of industrial art also played an
important role in the earlier years, but Italy gradually beat the Orient at its own
game and turned from importer to exporter. Europe at first struck a balance mainly
by exporting to the Levant nonprecious metals and timber in bulk, but soon added to
the list a growing variety of industrial products: glassware, arms and other iron
ware, and above all woolen and linen cloth. Imbalances one way or the other could
be corrected by shipments of gold and silver, which might offer incidental profits if
the ratio between the two metals was different at the two ends of the axis; but the
stock of precious metals was quickly exhausted. The best solution normally was to
make the aggregate value, bulk and weight of eastbound shipments as closely
equivalent as possible to those of westbound shipments, so that the potential of
means of transport might be fully exploited both ways and that the entire initial
investment might work for profit from beginning to end.

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 How much profit? Obviously no generalized answer is possible. In the Middle
Ages as now, the average rate of profit tended to be related to the average rate of
risk, but individual stories ranged from triumph to failure. High risks and high
profits were predominant in the early stage of the Commercial Revolution; they
were instrumental in forming the first accumulations of capital and lifting a number
of intelligent and fortunate merchants above the general mediocrity of early
medieval traders. Three successive commenda agreements of 1156-1158, whereby a
Genoese investor trebled his initial investment of slightly more than 200 pounds,
and the traveling party earned almost 150 pounds as his share of the profits, are a
characteristic example of good fortune. Later, competition forced down the average
profits, but greater security and the widening of the market enabled careful
managers to increase their assets more steadily than ever before. Commerce then
lost much of its adventurous and almost heroic features; it tended to become a
routine, which the senior members of the merchant class could direct from their
desk, through branch employees and commission agents, instead of accompanying
personally a large proportion of cargoes. In Italy by the early fourteenth century the
average interest rate on commercial loans had declined to between twelve and eight
percent. (At the same period, in a fairly prosperous German town of the interior,
Nuremberg, the legal rate was 43 percent, but the Holzschuher company charged 94
percent for loans to Jews!) Yet there always remained sectors and kinds of trade
where war, piracy, storms, sharp fluctuations of demand and supply, great distances
or unfamiliar surroundings offered to an adventurous man an opportunity to pursue
high profits and risks. In 1341 the Venetian merchant Francesco Loredan carried to
China a recommendation letter of his uncle, which said in part: "If this journey goes
well, I shall live comfortably the rest of my days; if it does not, I shall sell all I
own." Only a brief survey of the uneven progress of commerce and merchants in
various directions of the compass can give us an idea of opportunities encountered
and the way they were, or were not, seized.

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 THE MEDITERRANEAN SCENE
We no longer regard the Crusades as the main turning point of European economy
from inertia to aggressivity and from poverty to riches. The turn came earlier,
chiefly through internal changes: the growth of the population, the increase of
agricultural production, the emergence of a self-confident merchant elite. Still it is
undeniable that the great Christian offensive against Islam (and later, against the
"bad Christians" of Byzantium) dramatically en larged the surface of contact
between the fast developing society of Catholic Europe and the riper but less
flexible societies on its eastern and southern borders. Actually this kind of encounter
had already occurred in two regions which were totally or partially reconquered
from Islam in the eleventh century: Sicily and Spain. Both before and after their
return to the Christian fold those regions enjoyed exceptional prosperity, less
because of their own production than owing to international trade. "Come to
Palermo for business and pleasurel" writes a Jewish merchant to his correspondents
in Muslim Africa. Similar spurts occurred in the states of the Crusaders and later in
various lands taken from the Byzantine Empire; the details belong to political, not
economic, history. Yet neither Sicily nor Spain nor the Holy Land nor the Byzantine
territories preserved any lead by the thirteenth century, when the center of gravity
had definitively moved to the "big four" of northern and central Italy (Venice,
Milan, Genoa, and Florence), whose powerful merchants had a firm grip on the
routes towards the fertile and industrious European hinterland and endeavored to
reach far beyond the declining Islamic facade into the depth of Asia and Africa.

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 The durable economic value of military expansion, which often produced
backlashes in the slow withering of occupied areas and the exasperated hostility of
unconquered countries at the back door, consisted chiefly in the customs rebates and
physical facilities offered to merchants abroad. We have seen that concessions of
this kind had already been granted to citizens of Venice and other Italian seaports in
a small number of Byzantine and Muslim harbors. In the twelfth century the
Crusaders were more generous, both because immunities or (as we would say today)
extraterritorial rights fitted within the feudal pattern and because they obtained
military and economic assistance in return: many Italian communes and a few
seaports of southern France, Catalonia, and Dalmatia obtained fiscal privileges and

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autonomous quarters, encompassing in certain cases entire sections of towns and
small suburban plots. By the end of the thirteenth century the Muslims had
reconquered all of the Crusaders' holdings, but much wider opportunities had
opened elsewhere. In 1204 the conquest of the larger part of the Byzantine Empire
by "Frank" barons and Venetian seamen had given the latter bridgeheads in every
port and made Venice the sole ruler of Crete and other Greek islands: "one fourth
and a half of the Empire," it was said at the time. In 1261 the Byzantine emperor
assisted by the Genoese recovered Constantinople; still the Venetians kept most of
their gains and the Genoese in turn built a similar colonial empire at the expense of
their ally. On the other hand, repeated attempts by Frank armies and Italian fleets to
conquer Egypt or parts of it failed. This, however, did not prevent the merchants of
several Italian, southern French, and Catalan towns from obtaining customs rebates
and physical facilities in a large number of Muslim harbors all along the African
coast and what was left of Islamic Spain-not by force but by diplomatic means.

An admittedly rough evaluation of tolls collected by Genoa from traders using her
facilities abroad clearly shows that political control was not as essential as free
access to markets: in the fourteenth century the revenues from Pera, a suburb of
Constantinople that formed a walled enclave under Genoese rule, were less than
double the revenues from Alexandria, where Genoa merely rented a small cluster of
buildings (fondaco or fondoq) which the Muslims locked up at night. In turn the
revenues from that fondaco were more than one fourth as large as toll revenues from
sea trade in Genoa herself. Nevertheless we should not minimize the effects of sea
power and territorial expansion. Diplomatic pressure paid off not only because the
policy of granting privileges to foreign merchants was as acceptable in the
Byzantine and Muslim seaports as in the feudal markets and fairs of the West, but
also because the presence and superiority of western naval forces all over the
Mediterranean could not be safely ignored. The fact that most ships could be used
interchangeably for commerce and for war made the interplay of economic and
military power tighter. Again, territorial expansion tore down barriers that
diplomacy could at most lower; the cost of occupation and defense might be high,
but each of the Italian colonies had some agricultural or mineral resource and
markets that could be profitably developed.

The combination of war and trade was equally effective in the mutual competition
of European seaports. No doubt each town relied primarily upon the skill, capital,
and organization of its merchants, the natural and artificial advantages of its harbor,
and whatever local agricultural and industrial resources were at hand. An early start
and the sophisticated business methods we described in the preceding chapter placed
Venice in the lead; Genoa, the only sea town that succeeded in catching up with her,
owed a good deal to her flexibility in the face of new and bold techniques; yet
neither tradition nor innovation could remain forever the exclusive property of two
towns. To maintain and increase their edge, both Venice and Genoa found it
necessary to fight. Venice made good her claim to supremacy over the Adriatic by
subjecting many seaports to her rule and forcing others to accept limitations on their
long distance trade. Genoa found it harder to affirm her primacy over the broader

93
expanse of the western Mediterranean, but she subdued the entire Ligurian coast,
beat Pisa in a protracted struggle for control over Corsica and parts of Sardinia,
nipped in the bud the expansion of Narbonne, Marseille, and Montpellier, and
yielded as little ground as possible to Barcelona, a late comer which showed unusual
ability to grow. Unlike the northern Italian seaports, which were independent
communes, the French and Spanish seaports were somewhat handicapped by the
overhanging power of a feudal lord or a king, who collected heavy tributes and often
embroiled them in his own quarrels; Barcelona, however, had the good fortune that
the king of Aragon, her overlord, almost always backed her. At any rate, if the
winners at war reaped the best rewards of long distance trade, the losers found some
compensation in the continuous expansion of short-haul navigation. Only Venice,
Genoa, and to a smaller extent Barcelona were fully equipped to defy enemy fleets
and pirates and sent large convoys of ships straight out to a network of far-away
ports which obeyed or respected their flag. Satellite seaports could save overhead
costs and risks by specializing in the redistribution of imports and exports along the
coast.

Internal trade more often than not shared some of the characteristics of satellite
sea trade. There were no long and untrammeled crossings under heavy military
protection from home port to a colony or a privileged landing place, but a slower
progress along routes of which only the first stretch was home territory and the
others, if any, were subject to tolls and petty harassment by foreign governments.
Only the- communes of northern and central Italy ruled a considerable amount of
territory and tried to enlarge it in a relentless struggle: Milan, Florence, and to a
more limited degree smaller centers such as Verona and Lucca succeeded in
subjecting other communes to restrictions like those imposed by Venice and Genoa
on satellite ports. In the other Mediterranean countries the towns of the interior were
lucky if they controlled the immediate suburban space or could rely on the
protection of a strong territorial lord. These shortcomings, however, mattered little
in markets and fairs; for those who attended them a series of bilateral agreements,
multilateral alliances, and collective shows of force made long-distance journeys
tolerably safe. Self-interest persuaded all powers along a route not to cut their own
throat by imposing exorbitant tolls or letting robbers go unpunished, since
dissatisfied merchants would make a detour through more hospitable land. When
two cities on the Po River wanted to get rid of the competition of another which lay
between them, they went to work on a canal that would deflect the river's waters.

Craft specialization, however, supplied a more effective means for a city to

compete with the others. Every city was able to supply a great variety of goods to its
district, but Lucca made the best silks, Brescia had an edge in arms manufacturing,
Bologna provided huge quantities of shoes, Cremona was famous for inexpensive
"fustians" (textiles of cotton mixed with wool). Milan alone established her renown
on being proficient at almost everything, much as Philadelphia in the early stages of
American industrialization. Again, every city tried to attract skilled workers from
other cities while forbidding her own to bring their skills elsewhere. Industry, like
commerce, was less diversified outside Italy, and some of the best items had to be

94
 imported by itinerant merchants such as the "mercers," but in Italy even the smallest
towns often had wellstocked shops and at least one specialty of their own.

95
 DEPOSIT BANKING AND
FINANCE AS AN OFFSHOOT
OF TRADE
Credit organization was another tool of commercial competition. We have seen
that although credit was normally involved in all but the smallest operations of
trade, its development as a specialized profession was fairly slow even in Italy.
Indeed, medieval banking in its more powerful manifestations remained an offshoot
of commerce.

Pawnbrokers, of course, existed nearly everywhere, but their methods and interest
rates were not adjusted to the needs of legitimate commerce. Most deposit bankers
were natives of towns of the interior: Asti and Piacenza in the Po valley had an early
lead but were soon joined by a number of Tuscan towns; Florence and Siena gained
prominence. Southern France, too, had in Cahors an internationally famous center of
deposit banking. Even the most successful members of the profession, however, did
not have sufficient reserves in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries to compete with
the great international merchants as financial backers of large commercial ventures.
The comparatively moderate interest they charged made them especially useful to
craftsmen and petty traders but limited their chances to build up their capital.
Moreover, the growth of deposit banking was braked in two utterly different
directions. On the one hand, municipal regulations usually raised the bankers to the
status of auxiliary supervisors of currency and the money market but endeavored to
insure their solvency by submitting their operations to special controls. On the other
hand, ecclesiastic tribunals did not distinguish commercial interest from usury and
lent assistance to any unscrupulous borrower who wished to fool his banker (at least
once!) by refusing to pay back anything but the original amount of a freely
contracted interest-bearing loan.

What ordinary deposit bankers could not do came easier to international

merchants engaging in the banking business as a side activity. Whether or not they
formally registered as deposit bankers, merchants could legitimately practice the
same credit operations in connection with their trade: they accepted interestbearing
deposits, extended loans at higher interest rates, and, above all, took full advantage
of instruments or letters of exchange to charge whatever interest they wished
without incurring the censure of the Church. These letters were contracts whereby a
party received from another an advance in local currency and promised repayment
in another currency and another place. Ostensibly the main purpose was to provide
the second party with foreign money abroad while saving him the risk and expense
of taking along an equivalent amount of local currency; if this was the case, as it
may well have been at an early stage, the first party would have been entitled to a
service charge for changing the currency and taking care of the transfer. Since the
local currency was paid in advance, however, and repayment was delayed until the

96
letter or the second party had reached his destination, the transaction actually
involved a loan by the second party to the first, for which the first party was charged
an interest easily concealed in a doctored-up rate of exchange. Even the difference
of currency and place could be eliminated by a second contract or a clause reversing
the operation (that is, arranging for a transfer of the foreign currency back to the
original place and in the original currency). The latter, fairly transparent trick
(ricorsa or "dry exchange"), however, was not indispensable for a large merchant
company whose business called for a continuous flow of payments back and forth
from the same place, the Champagne fairs for instance. Already known to both
deposit bankers and merchants of the late twelfth century (and probably earlier), the
letter of exchange became the most widely used instrument of credit in the course of
the thirteenth, as its flexibility was increased by the intensification of overland trade
and as its advantages to hide interest charges became more obvious. For the latter
purpose, exchange clauses also were grafted into the sea loan contract, but maritime
trade utilized them more sparingly because the short-term commenda contract met
many of its needs in an unimpeachable way.

Although the letter of exchange, like other business techniques, gradually spread
throughout the Mediterranean world, large-scale credit based on it became the
specialty of a small number of Italian merchant "companies" which rapidly grew to
what may be called, in comparison with the average size of inland enterprises,
colossal proportions. Unlike sea traders, they could not back their economic
penetration with military might; but they used credit grants as a weapon to pry
commercial concessions from foreign governments, concessions as a lubricant to get
their import and export trade rolling, trade as a means to increase their owned or
borrowed capital, capital as prop for further credit grants. Almost paradoxically, the
most valuable friend of these companies, which depended so heavily on "usury
sins," was the Pope. He badly needed their services in transferring tributes and
wares from and to the remotest corners of Europe, and could not afford to look
closely into the canonic orthodoxy of their methods; on the contrary, he was ever
willing to recommend their partners to Catholic princes and, in extreme cases, to
threaten ecclesiastic punishment on debtors who refused to pay.

Nevertheless, the congenital fragility of compannia partnerships made the largest

companies most vulnerable. Princes were notoriously bad payers. Joint and
unlimited liability, which Siena and other cities tried in vain to make less stringent,
placed a tremendous responsibility on every one of the numerous partners. Discord
among partners brought down in 1298 the Bonsignori company of Siena, then
probably Europe's largest dispenser of credit. Two years later, the death of Gandolfo
Arcelli, the wealthiest taxpayer in Paris where he managed the business of the
Borrino company of Piacenza, caused the precipitous decline of the partnership.
Between then and 1346 one Florentine compannia after another failed. The most
powerful among them (Bardi) in 1318 had balanced its books on a figure of about
875,000 florins, more than six times the amount for which some years later the king
of France bought Montpellier from her lord; it failed in 1346 without recovering
credits of more than a million florins on the kings of England and Sicily. The

97
 magnitude of these figures, however, bears witness to the ability of credit to
multiply itself.

98
 FROM GREENLAND TO PEKING:
THE EXPLOSION OF
ITALIAN TRADE
In spite of business failures, mounting taxation, piracy, wars, uneven distribution
of wealth, and other disturbing factors, the thirteenth century completed for northern
and central Italy, and to a lesser degree for the rest of Mediterranean Europe, the
transition from inadequate or insecure supply to affluence (in medieval terms at
least). Never before had such a large proportion of the population been free from
want, or such a variety and abundance of goods been constantly available-not in
ancient Rome at its peak, not in Byzantine and Islamic countries at their best. People
complained about ever-rising prices, but earnings generally went up still faster, and
almost anything could be had at a price. If a harvest failed somewhere, ships could
promptly import grain from another country. If a war or an embargo obstructed a
source of fine cloth, an order at the Champagne fairs could get much the same cloth
from another producer. Even the chronic shortage of metallic currency-a greater
nuisance for ordinary customers than for businessmen who could pay by transfer
orders on their bank accounts or letters of exchange-was alleviated when Genoa
issued fine gold genoins in 1252, Florence followed suit a few months later with her
gold florins of the same weight, and many other communal and royal mints took
similar steps after a while. We need not discuss the intricate and controversial
interpretations of the background of the reform; probably the decisive, though not
the sole factor was a steep rise in the price of silver, which in 1252 momentarily
exceeded one-tenth of the price of gold. The new gold coins released much silver for
ordinary payments, provided a stable international currency in the midst of wild
debasement and chaotic diversity, and advertised the economic superiority of Italy
over the declining Byzantine and Muslim countries whose gold reserves were
dwindling.

The problems of plenty are different from those of scarcity. No great

modifications were needed in the basic contracts that had served the merchants in
the age of high risks, small markets, and thin competition, but adjustments had to be
made to the fact that the number of sellers had increased in proportion to that of
buyers, and efficiency rather than daring would lead to success on a diminished
profit margin. We have mentioned the organization of convoys to make voyages
safer; but it still was expedient for isolated ships to take chances, and travel risks
could best be separated from commercial risks by making insurance, like banking, a
specialized profession. Progress was slower, because insurance can hardly differ
from gambling so long as it is not subdivided among very many insurers and spread
over very many ships; but we can watch the first meandering experiments in the late
thirteenth century, and by the early fourteenth Genoa and Florence are distinctly in
the lead. They also seem to be ahead of other Italian towns in the evolution of
commercial and banking accounting, which gradually changes from scribbled

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memos to separate columns for credit and debt, and ultimately to rigorous double
entry bookkeeping of the kind that is still used (with the help of computers) today.
These tools greatly helped a merchant to keep track of involved business, check the
operations of his partners and agents, and learn from the past how to plan for the
future. More literary or scientific tools, ranging from manuals of commerce to maps,
will be considered briefly when we take a look at the impact of the Commercial
Revolution on culture, an impact that was felt earlier and more sharply in Italy than
in the other Mediterranean countries.

Perhaps the most striking by-product of growing maturity was the consolidation
of colonies and the increasing reliance of international traders on quasi-sedentary
agents abroad. Some economic historians, looking at the past in modern perspective,
have saluted what they called "the advent of the sedentary merchant" as a sudden,
revolutionary change, which made business more efficient by eliminating the waste
of time and interruption of contacts the "traveling merchant" of old incurred when
he boarded a ship or rode a horse instead of sitting behind his desk. This, however,
is an oversimplification. Peddlers, like modern traveling salesmen, were always on
the move, and ordinary shopkeepers hardly ever had to move; but international
merchants had good reasons to alternate office work and business trips. The trips
gave them access to the latest news and the best bargains; taking turns with
associates and partners saved them much slow and uncomfortable travel, but cut
down their profits. Gradually, however, as profit rates went down and access to
commercial opportunities broadened, the premium for traveling fell below the cost
of travel. An increasing proportion of transactions was carried out by
correspondence: ships conveyed messages and contracts back and forth; a weekly
courier service from and to the Champagne fairs brought price lists and market
analyses to the home offices of Italian partnerships and shuttled back with detailed
instructions to local representatives; a growing number of Italian merchants moved
their headquarters from their native towns to a permanent outpost abroad.

The move was not always easy. Some foreign cities and princes, wishing to
reserve the best opportunities, discouraged immigration by restricting residence
permits or hiking taxes on resident aliens; but others were more open-minded or
responded to pressure. Colonies, of course, welcomed citizens of their motherland.
Their original population was usually made up of younger sons, junior partners,
salaried employees and commission agents who speeded back home as soon as they
could. As time went by, people of any age settled down in the colony, begat children
from local women, and built replicas of their home cities abroad. "So many are the
Genoese-so scattered world wide-that they form other Genoas -wherever they
reside," said proudly a vernacular poet of the thirteenth century. Each outpost in turn
served as a jumping board for further expansion; and even where no colony existed,
Italian penetration deepened inside Europe. A Lucchese compagnia with branches in
France sent agents as far as Greenland to collect papal tithes payable in sealskins,
whalebone, and sinews of whales. The Florentine tithe collectors in England
gradually displaced the local Jews as credit agents and gatherers of wool from
monastic institutions. Money lenders from Asti and Pistoia used their first footholds

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in Savoy and Burgundy to spread their nets all over France. Central and eastern
Europe were less affected, but individual Italians made their way here and there,
with trades as different as farming, mining, and importing arbalests.

Greater breakthroughs were achieved by sea. As the Mediterranean got crowded

with ships and the demand for goods beyond it pushed prices up, Italian pressure
mounted against the political and economic barriers that separated it from the Black
Sea, the Red Sea, and the Atlantic Ocean. The first lock was broken in 1204, when
the Byzantine Empire, which used to forbid foreigners to sail beyond
Constantinople, was temporarily overthrown. First the Venetians, then (as allies of a
partially restored Byzantine Empire in 1261) the Genoese established a cluster of
colonial outposts all around the Black Sea. Repeated attempts at conquering Egypt
and reaching the Red Sea through the Suez bottleneck failed, but the rise of the
immense Mongolian Empire, stretching all the way from China to the Russian
shores of the Black Sea and the Mediterranean coast of Asia Minor, suddenly
disclosed to Italian merchants an immense field of operation. In the course of the
thirteenth century virtually the entire continent of Asia, many times larger than
Europe-the places of origin of innumerable spices, the greatest sources of silk, the
homes of both highly sophisticated nations and utterly primitive tribes, whose
combined numbers and resources dwarfed the familiar European scene-was welded
together by the terrible, merciless Mongolian might, then transformed into a
relatively friendly confederation of four Khanates (Golden Horde, Persia, Turkestan,
and China). Here Italian enterprise was welcomed as a counterweight to that of the
Arabs, the Hindus, the Chinese, and other traders still smarting under the Mongolian
heel.

It took almost the entire century before the followers of Chingiz Khan and his
successors changed their policies from brutal warfare to peace and toleration; nor
was the change immediately evident to the frightened Europeans. Uncommon
perceptiveness and flexibility enabled the Italian merchants (first the Genoese and
the Venetians, then traders from inland cities) to realize that by trusting the
Mongolians they could bypass the Arab intermediaries of Far Eastern trade and
travel safely over virtually unknown lands towards the coveted, fabulous wealth of
the "Indies," under which name the Westerners used to lump together all countries
beyond the Islamic Middle East. Marco Polo, the Venetian, is but one of many who
picked up the challenge between the second half of the thirteenth century and the
first half of the fourteenth. His book made him alone deservedly famous. It must not
cause us to overlook the rank and file of merchants whom commercial contracts and
narrative sources show motion back and forth from the Mediterranean to Peking or
to Zayton, the seaport opposite Formosa on the Chinese mainland, where a
miniature colony of Italian merchants took root for a short time. Other merchants,
after reaching Turkestan from South Russia or Asia Minor and Persia, crossed the
Mongolian border into Delhi, the capital of the largest Muslim state in India. A
much larger number did not go that far, but made Tabriz in Persia, Sarai on the
Volga River, and even Urgench in Central Asia (the namesake of organdi cloth) as
familiar as were Constantinople and Alexandria a century earlier. Genoese

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shipbuilders, hired or protected by the Khan of Persia, sailed the Caspian Sea and
the Persian Gulf. The most daring attempt, however, was one that failed: in 1291
two Genoese brothers, Ugolino and Vadino Vivaldi, loaded two galleys with
merchandise and crossed the strait of Gibraltar with the intention of reaching "the
Indies" by a "westward route" (that of Columbus or that of Vasco da Gama?-the
documents are not clear on this point), but they never came back.

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 The Italian penetration into the Asiatic continent was much more than a collection
of isolated adventures. Its practical importance is stressed in a few pages of
Pegolotti's manual of commerce, which describe minutely the northernmost route,
from the Crimea to Peking, as one that was "perfectly safe by day and night." Yet
even that route, which could be covered in about nine months, entailed expenses and
risks that severely restricted its attractiveness. It paid to export directly to China the
finest French and German linen and to bring back China silk, because the price
differential outweighed the cost of those light, valuable wares, but other
commodities could be exchanged only along shorter stretches of the route, as was
the custom for inland trade in Europe. Another route, from Asia Minor and Persia to

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 India or China, was somewhat shorter but riskier. A route entirely by sea from the
Persian Gulf along the shores of the Indian Ocean, was comparatively cheaper but
took more than two years. Obviously the capital and, above all, the manpower of the
Italians were not adequate for a thorough exploitation of their opportunities in Asia,
but if we consider the similarly inadequate means with which the Portuguese and the
Spaniards in the sixteenth century began their expansion in the eastern and western
"Indies," the potential of the earlier Italian expansion will look strong enough.

A nearer, and hence more easily exploited frontier lay beyond the strait of
Gibraltar. Originally the keys of the passage between the Mediterranean and the
Atlantic belonged to the Muslims, who controlled Morocco and Granada; but even
before a CastilianGenoese fleet broke the Moroccan sea power in 1293 the lock had
never been too tight for individual ships to go through. As early as the twelfth
century the Genoese began sailing south along the Moroccan coast, looking above
all for mysterious "Palola," the Senegalese region from where much gold came at a
low price. They cautiously lengthened their routes during the thirteenth century and
reached the Canary Islands in the early fourteenth. Then the Portuguese and to a
smaller extent the Castilians and French took over the lead in the step-by-step
exploration of the southern Atlantic, which was to produce its greatest dividends in
the fifteenth century with Vasco da Gama. In the period with which we are
concerned, however (before 1350), the most momentous maritime expansion was
not along the southern but the northern Atlantic coast. Unlike the African sea lanes,
which persistent legends populated with monsters and filled with terrors, the
European sea lanes from Gibraltar to Flanders and England were not frightening for
the Mediterranean sailors. Economic considerations, however, long dissuaded Italian
seamen from competing with the Portuguese, Castilian, Basque, French, English,
Flemish, and Dutch seamen who ploughed the Atlantic with smaller ships and over
shorter stretches. Italian trade went north more cheaply by land routes through the
Alps.

Between the end of the thirteenth century and the beginning of the fourteenth,
however, the Genoese and the Venetians found ways to transport their wares more
cheaply over direct sea routes to La Rochelle, Southampton and Bruges by
combining precious and bulky wares more ingeniously on galleys that were enlarged
enough to increase their payload, yet not too much to impair their speed. The first
convoys that reached the North Sea from Venice and Genoa around 1315 determined
the virtual annexation of the northern Atlantic coast of Europe to the Mediterranean
sphere of influence and transferred to the Italians a large proportion of the foreign
trade of England, France, and the Low Countries. Beyond these points, however,
navigation from the Mediterranean became too circuitous to be competitive with
land routes through the Alps. The northern seas remained the preserve of northern
sailors.

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 THE NORTHERN
MEDITERRANEAN
We have already pointed out the broad physical analogy between the classic
Mediterranean and the long arm of the Ocean that stretches from the eastern British
coast to the dead ends of the Baltic. Germany occupies its middle, with the Jutland
peninsula protruding northwards much as Italy protrudes southward at the center of
the Mediterranean; the location of Lubeck and Hamburg, at the root of the
peninsula, may be roughly compared to that of Venice and Genoa at the root of Italy.
Some analogy can also be detected between the historical processes that led to
Italian predominance in the southern Mediterranean and German predominance in
the northern seas.

In Germany as in Italy, the agricultural revival and military recovery from the
tenth century on enabled a number of towns to develop their local and long-distance
trade, to challenge the authority of the emperor and his vassals, and eventually to
build up a commercial and colonial empire. Trade was the main driving force, but
economic penetration often was supported by the sword. Again, as in Italy, some of
the towns that played a prominent role in the early period-Cologne, Mainz, and
Ratisbon above allwere old Roman centers where a trickle of trade had never ceased
flowing, if only because a resident bishop or lay lord maintained a cluster of
potential consumers within their walls. They were joined, however, by new urban
nodes and episcopal sees sprouting in the wake of the German eastward expansion
under the Carolingians and their successors: Bremen, Hamburg, and Magdeburg,
like Venice and Amalfi, were children of the Middle Ages. Even the internal
structure of the urban society in the early period of expansion, so far as we can tell
through a much scantier documentation than that of Italy, was not unlike that of
many Italian towns. Closely knit groups of interrelated families (the "patricians," as
modern historians rather improperly call them) all but monopolized public offices;
they also were leaders in long-distance trade and owned much land, including
valuable plots around the market place. Some of their ancestors may well have been
petty noblemen who felt the attraction of trade.

Analogies, however, go no farther than this. The German urban development was
slower than the Italian one and did not attain as much. Not before 1288 did Cologne
finally break the power of her archbishop in the battle of Worringen, and to achieve
that goal she needed the help of other feudal lords; still the archbishop and other
vassals continued to rule over most of her district. Hemmed in and often harassed by
the territorial princes in their vicinity, the German towns generally had to settle for
something less than the rugged independence and all-pervasive commercialism of
the Italian communes. They invited imperial protection and, finding it inadequate,
often huddled together in regional leagues. They let lingering feudal and agrarian
interest weaken the main commercial and industrial bent of the urban community.
As a partial compensation for the resulting mediocrity of their economic and

105
political progress, they were spared some of the dramatic business crises and fierce
conflicts that filled with tension the urban history of Italy. Moreover, the relations
between merchants and princes did not have to be unfriendly; common interests in
Germany produced remarkable instances of collaboration. As early as 1120 the duke
of Zahringen joined twenty-four prominent merchants in founding Freiburg-im-
Breisgau, and the same pattern was followed in the foundation of Bern. Prolonged
collaboration with princes was instrumental in Germany's greatest urban success, the
formation of what was eventually to be called the Hanseatic League.

Hansa, it must be noted, was a term commonly used in northern Europe, chiefly
but not exclusively to designate associations of merchants; its original meaning
probably was "armed convoy," which appropriately describes the military
underpinning of trade. Long before the thirteenth century several hansas appeared
and disappeared at different points along or near the southern coast of the North Sea;
but the Hanseatic League "par excellence" was founded only in 1369, when Cologne
and other Rhinish towns joined a preexisting, informal alliance of German seaports
of the "northern Mediterranean." This alliance, however, was the crowning product
of the relentless commercial and military expansion of Germanic people from the
ninth century on. In the ninth and early tenth centuries, when the prowess and
seamanship of the Vikings dominated the entire northern world, only the Frisians, a
hardy folk of peasant-traders living between Rhine and Weser, dared to compete
with the Scandinavians. With less primitive methods Westphalian merchants carried
forward the challenge between Weser and Elbe in the late tenth and early eleventh
centuries, but did not yet threaten the Scandinavian predominance in the Baltic. The
tide began to turn in 1143, when Lubeck, originally a Slavonic settlement whose
ruler had welcomed German settlers but had succumbed to the aggression of a
German lord, was founded again as a wholly German town by Henry the Lion, the
cousin and rival of Frederic Barbarossa.

Lubeck, placed on the eastern side of the narrow neck of land that separated the
Baltic from Hamburg and the North Sea, was ideally located to serve as the master
link between the two halves of the northern Mediterranean while the Scandinavians
still had the Jutland straits firmly in their grip. For more than one century after her
second foundation two co-belligerent drives caught almost all of the southern Baltic
and its hinterland into a net. German merchants hopping from one river mouth or
natural harbor to another used their naval and commercial proficiency to found a
series of towns, all of which looked upon Lubeck as the kingpin of their trade and
the ancestral home of their leading families. German knights sweeping through the
inland plains used their superior armament and organization to crush the resistance
of thinly settled Slavs and Balts, and made the wilderness alive with settlements of
peasants brought in from as far as Westphalia and Flanders. Ever since the
beginning the German advance into pagan or scarcely Christian countries had been
wrapped in vaguely religious colors; it became officially a crusade in Latvia and
Estonia, where the Teutonic Order of knights preceded or assisted the merchants
with its remarkable combination of ruthless force and business talent. Lithuania
alone resisted to the end. Poland and Russia, which had long been Christian and

106
fairly well developed, held out against conquest but welcomed commercial
penetration. A belated attempt by the Danes to stop German penetration failed. By
1274 Reval, originally a Danish outpost in Estonia which had been subsequently
absorbed into the German sphere, could write to Lubeck: "Our two towns belong
together like the arms of Christ crucified." Theirs was a silver cross, wrought of
German conquering trade.

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 As a matter of fact, between the late eleventh and the late thirteenth centuries the
Scandinavian military and economic power collapsed. No doubt the merging of the
Scandinavian elites with much larger native populations in Russia, Normandy, and
southern Italy was an inevitable consequence of overexpansion; so was the fall of
the Viking possessions in the British Isles. But the contraction of their power in their
home waters of the northern Mediterranean calls for still another explanation,
especially as their unruly tribes at the same period should have gained strength
through consolidation into the three kingdoms of Denmark, Norway, and Sweden.
Indeed the king of Norway brought under his control the remote, poverty-stricken
Scandinavian communities in Greenland and Iceland; the king of Sweden annexed

108
peripheral Finland; but the vigorous campaigns of several Danish kings could not
for long prevent the Germans from evicting the Danes from their once extensive
domains on the southern and eastern Baltic shores. Again, the Scandinavian
"brotherhood" of merchants at Visby in the central Baltic island of Gotland was
eclipsed by the community of "German visitors of Gotland," which was the first
core of the future Hanseatic League. More than that, by a combination of diplomacy
and warfare the German merchants gained special privileges at the great fairs of
Skanor (in the Danish-dominated part of southern Sweden), in all ports of the
Swedish kingdom, and in all those of Norway except the extreme north.

All told, the German pattern of penetration into the Scandinavian sphere of
influence and home ports resembled that of the Italian merchants on Byzantine and
Islamic shores. Like the Greeks and the Muslims, though in a much more primitive
context, the Scandinavians were early starters who failed to keep up with economic
and social progress. Sea trade with them was not so much the business of free
townsmen as that of noblemen and peasants with a knack for navigation. Their
ships, which had supplied models to all northern peoples, were now smaller than the
German cog, a sturdy sailship fitted for the bulkiest cargoes. They lagged behind the
Germans in replacing the traditional lateral rudders with a central rudder, more
effective to steer ponderous ships. All of their commercial techniques were getting
out of date.

Let us not infer that the "Easterlings" (as German traders were then called in
England; the suggestion that the pound sterling may have borrowed its name from
them is a seductive but improbable guess) had caught up with Italian or Catalan
techniques. It was enough for them to be more advanced than their competitors in
the northern seas. Their versions of the partnership and commenda contracts,
possibly derived from still simpler Scandinavian models, were cruder and hazier
than their Mediterranean counterparts. Double-entry accounting and insurance were
totally unknown. Credit organization was rudimentary, although commercial interest
rates in Lubeck became as low as in Italy and the bankruptcy of Hermann Clendenst
in 1335 shook the town as thoroughly as the contemporary bank failures in Florence.
Literacy was fairly widespread, but not as much as among Italian or Belgian
burghers. The cities of the Easterlings in the course of the thirteenth century became
nearly as independent as the Italian communes, but their ruling classes were more
closed, and the hinterland, as that of the Catalan ports, escaped their control. On the
other hand, the Easterlings were less embroiled than the Italians in party strife,
mutual competition, and fights for oversea empires. They generally avoided inter-
city rivalry by accepting Li beck's leadership, and reduced the quest for permanent
colonies by shuttling rapidly across narrow stretches of sea and back to home ports.
One establishment at the eastern end of their longest route-the "yard" at Novgorod,
which they captured from the Scandinavians-and three at the outer prongs of the
western end-the "steelyard" at London, the "kontor" at Bruges, and the autonomous
quarter at Bergen-took care of most of their oversea needs. Even here their holdings
were no larger than the earliest Italian enclaves: the establishments and privileges
were permanent, but the population consisted chiefly of temporary callers, and

109
 sovereignty rested with the local rulers.

Most of the objects of German sea trade reflected a less developed economy than
that of the classic Mediterranean. Oriental spices and refined wares, which for a
short time around the tenth century had reached Scandinavia through the Russian
rivers, now came to Germany from the west, as did other luxuries of French and
Italian origin. The demand, however, was limited to the fairly small number of
people who could appreciate and afford them. Far more important was the flow of
raw materials from Russia, Poland, and the new and old German hinterland: rye,
grain, timber, pitch, tar, honey, wax, and furs. More timber, pitch, and tar came from
Scandinavia. Bohemia and Hungary sent some of their precious and non-precious
metals; England, her wool and hides. The odor of salted herring, less sweet but more
substantial than that of spices, dominated the scene. Without the salt of nearby
Luneburg, Lubeck might never have risen above mediocrity, but she soon had to
supplement it with French and Portuguese salt. The herring trade had its main center
at the Skanor fairs: the king of Denmark still collected tolls and his subjects
unloaded the fish, but the Lubeck merchants were the most important buyers. We
lack figures for our period, but by 1368 their purchases came close to 34,000 barrels
and rose steadily thereafter. In conclusion, the list of commodities included very few
noble items, but it missed none of the basic necessities of life.

110
 IN A LOWER KEY
International trade was by no means an Italian and Easterling monopoly: the
economic and political unification of Europe, which is still far from achieved today,
would have been absolutely unthinkable in the Middle Ages. By the early fourteenth
century only the Catalans withheld from the Italians a significant share of long
distance commerce in the classic Mediterranean, and only the English and Dutch
held their own in the western corner of the northern Mediterranean, but many bulky
goods of the Atlantic regions, such as Gascon wine and Basque iron, were still
transported mainly by local ships, and short-haul navigation was everybody's
business. All but a fraction of the goods produced far from the sea were forwarded
to the surrounding regions and to the main commercial collection centers by local
merchants.

In these backwaters and inner recesses of Europe, business tended to be carried

out in a lower key: capital, credit, turnover, organization, and the size of individual
enterprises were generally smaller than with the Italians and the Easterlings. There
were, however, substantial differences from place to place. France, which was in the
forefront of agricultural progress and productivity, and fairly proficient in many
crafts, played a very modest role in long-distance trade. Provence and Languedoc,
which had made some progress at an early time in Mediterranean trade, found it
difficult to keep up with the Italians in the thirteenth century and tended to lean
more heavily on specialized crops such as wine and woad (a dyestuff). At the same
period, Flanders was driven by the very success of her textile industries to
concentrate all efforts in that field. Almost none of the other French regions suffered
from the dramatic food shortages that almost forced the Italians to become
merchants; taxation, weighed in favor of agricultural interests, absorbed a large
proportion of available surpluses, and what was left sufficed to invite foreign
merchants who supplied whatever goods might still be desired from other countries.
We have seen that in 1292 an Italian merchant banker headed the list of taxpayers in
Paris (noblemen and clergymen were exempt); five of the six who followed him also
were Italian. The only Frenchman was Pierre Marcel, probably an ancestor of
Etienne Marcel, who was provost of the merchants and a leader of the revolution of
1365. Add that long dynasties of merchants, such as those which ruled the Italian
communes, were extremely rare: in medieval France, as in ancient Rome, enriched
businessmen more often than not withdrew from trade the best part of their profits,
bought land and a title of nobility, and placed their sons in the service of the king.

Much the same pattern prevailed in England, but the proximity of the sea to most
of her territory and a smaller diversification of local production and crafts increased
the attraction of trade. International exchanges throve on England's surpluses of
wool and thirst for wine. The comparative backwardness of commercial and credit
organization forced the English merchants to depend heavily on the Jews and, after
these were squeezed dry and expelled, on Italian merchant bankers. Still, though

111
foreigners aggressively competed for all commercial opportunities, the king, one of
the few western sovereigns to exercise effective economic control over his realm,
endeavored to reserve for English ships and traders a substantial share. Catalan
merchants, too, leaned heavily on royal support and made the most of it; but the
kingdom of Aragon was not as productive as England, and the inertia of the feudal
hinterland slowed down the spirited activity of Barcelona and other seaports.

Backwardness, however, was by no means an unsurmountable impediment to

active or, at least, passive international trade while commercialization engulfed one
region after another. In the crowning phase of the Commercial Revolution
(thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries) some of the late starters caught up with
many early risers that had failed to gain momentum. Castile and Portugal, having
almost completed the reconquest of the Iberian peninsula from the Muslims, began
to wake up to the great opportunities available to them on the high seas. Increased
production of metals and intensified use of their internal river system enabled
southern Germany, Austria, and Bohemia to insert themselves in the mainstream of
long distance trade, using Venice, Cologne, and Vienna as their ultimate links with
the two Mediterraneans and the Orient. Farther east, Poland and Serbia channeled
their commerce to sea through such ports as Gdansk on the Baltic and Dubrovnik
(Ragusa) on the Adriatic. Even Russia, which had lost long before her southern
provinces to invaders from Asia (the Petchenegs and, later, the Cumans), was still
more seriously handicapped when the tremendous power of the Mongolians
established itself firmly in the south and submitted to its overlordship the rest of the
country. International trade did not come to a full stop, but had to be channeled
mostly through the Genoese and Venetian Black Sea colonies or through Russia's
Baltic outpost of Novgorod, a citystate allied with the Easterlings.

As for other early risers who lost speed, we shall not linger on the economic
decline of the Byzantine and the Muslims, whose homes were beyond the confines
of Catholic Europe, but we cannot leave the Jews entirely unmentioned. The twelfth
and thirteenth centuries were a period of increased religious awareness and mili
tancy at all levels of society; moreover, all governments strengthened their hold on
their subjects; further, the numbers, proficiency, and organization of native traders
made progress throughout Catholic Europe. All this was bound to reduce the
acceptability and usefulness of alien minorities within the fold. Even the Italian
financiers, who were not "infidel" and enjoyed the protection of the Pope as well as
that of their states, occasionally suffered confiscations and other harassment in
thirteenth- and fourteenth-century France and England. The Jews fared much worse.
They were gradually crowded out of honorable commerce and herded into the
highly dangerous lines of business that would make them hated because of their
ruthlessness and ruthless because of the hate they encountered. No doubt there
continued to be princes and towns that needed the Jews, whether for respectable or
disreputable operations; and the general expansion of economic opportunities may
on the whole have caused the absolute size of their transactions to grow.
Nevertheless, their proportional share in the benefits of the Commercial Revolution
tended to become ever more marginal and insecure.

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113
 5
Between Crafts and Industry
MERCHANTS AND CRAFTSMEN
The Industrial Revolution has so radically altered the relation between merchant
and industrialist, that it takes some effort for us to realize how crucially important
the capital, credit, connections, and initiative of merchants could be for the
development of medieval crafts. Like his Roman counterpart, the medieval artisan
tended to be the prisoner of a closed circle: he produced little because he had
inadequate tools, and had inadequate tools because he did not produce fast enough
to gather capital and invest it in mechanization. His horizons, too, were limited by
his small productivity: he had neither the means nor the incentive to enlarge his
operations by massive borrowing and hiring, or to broaden his market by searching
for customers beyond his immediate reach. Whatever industrial growth had occurred
in antiquity was due primarily to the interest that government officials and affluent
landowners had in provisioning themselves; still the craftsmen, whether they were
slaves or freemen, seldom rose to a high material and social standing, and if they
did, usually hastened to change profession or live as gentlemen on unearned income.
The early Middle Ages promoted slave artisans to serf status and occasionally paid
lip service to the moral nobility of labor-were not St. Joseph and all the apostles
laborers?-but offered no fresh opportunities for industrial development. From the
tenth century on, however, the rise of the merchant class brought forth a new source
of potential support. As middlemen between supply and demand, merchants had a
personal stake in the expansion of both; they had capital, extended credit, and
promoted their business through market research. No unsurmountable prejudice
separated them from craftsmen: many if not all of them originally came from the
same social background, and the struggle for urban emancipation from feudal
control supplied a common cause, in the eleventh and twelfth centuries at least.

Still we must consider that wealth created rank among merchants, and that birth
and profession, too, played a significant role. A petty trader born of undistinguished
parents would be pleased to befriend an established artisan and perhaps to marry his
daughter, but could do little to help the artisan's workshop. On the other hand an
affluent, esteemed businessman would respect a goldsmith and possibly a master
shipwright, but often looked down upon ordinary craftsmen, almost in the same way
as great noblemen looked down upon ordinary merchants. This need not have
prevented him from backing a dependable artisan in many ways, by ordering goods
and paying in advance, by granting loans for the purchase suggesting and new
markets and methods. The relationship between a rich finding by merely or tools,
and materials raw of trader and an impecunious producer, however, lacked the spirit

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 of solidarity that characterized agreements between fellow merchants, even when
one of the parties had all of the money and the other contributed only his work. At
worst, a merchant might take advantage of the craftsman's economic inferiority to
charge him an exorbitant interest or underpay his products. At best, he gave the
craftsman a fair deal but not enough credit to buy elaborate machinery or stock up
raw materials for future expansion. Deposit bankers were often more willing to
extend credit to artisans, but they had limited resources and could not take chances
as freely as merchant bankers or great merchants.

Yet commerce and industry were strictly related. Most artisans were part-time
traders, since they sold some of their products directly to the public. High quality
work on valuable materials, fast production of simpler wares for mass consumption,
or even extraneous factors such as a full warehouse in a besieged city, a nest egg
lent to needy colleagues, or a marriage with a woman of property could transform a
craftsman into a merchant entrepreneur, who did not toil with his own hands but
sold the handicraft of others. Conversely, most merchants traded not only in
unprocessed foodstuffs and raw materials, but also in manufactured goods. A
merchant whose business depended heavily on the products of a craft might invest
in it a considerable proportion of his capital and labor and become a part-time or
full-time craft entrepreneur.

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 CRAFT GUILDS
While lagging behind the dynamism of trade, medieval industry was by no means
immobile; nor was its average mediocrity without compensating factors. Craftsmen
shared the benefits which the Commercial Revolution, and the agricultural progress
on which it was based, generally bestowed upon the middle and lower classes from
the tenth century on: more food, better communications, relief from the worst forms
of personal bondage, some labor-saving devices, and, above all, expanding
opportunities. No doubt we often hear of ruthless exploitation of the lower ranks by
usurers and entrepreneurs; but the relentless, ubiquitous immigration of apprentices
and laborers looking for employment in the workshops of every town seems to
indicate that working conditions were more attractive in the urban crafts than on the
fields-be it only because no village could match the variety of occupations,
distractions, and hopes available even in the sleepiest towns.

Beside offering freedom to the serf and social mobility to the free, towns gave to a
growing number of people a chance to join the urban guilds. These, like the
merchant guilds of various kinds that appeared in many towns between the tenth
century and the twelfth, were professional associations that tried to monopolize a
branch of trade and to promote its interests. Craft guilds, however, had a longer life
and mcfulness than the merchant guilds, which after a while merged into the
government of merchants that was the commune, or degenerated into cliques of big
businessmen and of petty tradesmen. They also differed from merchant guilds in
two essential ways. Whereas merchant guilds accepted members on a foot of
equality but allowed each of them to tip the balance in his favor by pursuing
unlimited gains, craft guilds brought together employers and employees, masters
and apprentices as unequal partners, but strove to insure for all members an equal
chance of advancement and success.

The balance was maintained by curbing the inclination of any member to grab
more than his share of the business. As a matter of fact, craft guilds reflected the
modest possibilities of feebly capitalized and mechanized workshops, whose owners
could hardly reach for unlimited gain without overworking their dependents or
crowding out their colleagues. They functioned at their best in small towns, where
security was more desirable than opportunity, or in those larger cities that were
consumption centers rather than production hubs. Paris, where the butcher's guild
eventually became the most powerful among a hundred professional associations or
metiers, is the outstanding example of the latter kind. The guild structure, however,
was elastic enough to fit any urban type and any profession. By 1294 more than
36,000 out of almost 50,000 inhabitants of Bologna were members of a guild or
relatives of members, according to a careful extrapolation of fragmentary statistical
evidence. Beside 2,000 students and 1,500 members of the clergy, less than 10,000
people were either too high or too low to be included in a guild structure that in
Bologna covered not only craftsmen and shopkeepers but also such professional

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men as notaries and physicians.

To return to craft guilds proper, they easily attained their goals, security and
balance, with a stable number of members sharing fairly stable opportunities. They
could adjust their rules to moderate, steady growth, but fast economic growth
subjected them to a strain. Insofar as they succeeded in regulating growth without
stopping it, they spared their humbler members the extreme sufferings that were
inflicted on the slave gangs of antiquity and the factory hands of the early Industrial
Revolution. Their braking action, however, tended to maintain the entire craft at an
economic level closer to Greco-Roman "golden mediocrity" than to the moving
escalators of modern industrial capitalism.

We shall not try to compare the craft guilds that arose from the tenth century on
and attained their fullest development in the thirteenth (but even then did not cover
all people in all crafts) to the ancient and early medieval organizations that preceded
them and in some cases probably engendered them; such problems of origin are
highly controversial and blurred by the lack of adequate evidence. Even for the
period of the Commercial Revolution we must depend for information on flexible
customary rules or, at best, fragmentary and often contradictory statements;
moreover, certain activities of the craft guilds were illegal, and the guilds
themselves often had a long clandestine existence before obtaining official
recognition. Fully codified by-laws can be found mostly for the period after 1300,
and experience has shown that they must not be read back into the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries. The main lines of the craft guilds' internal structure, however,
are clear enough.

A guild was a federation of autonomous workshops, whose owners (the masters)

normally made all decisions and established the requirements for promotion from
the lower ranks (journeymen or hired helpers, and apprentices). Inner conflicts were
usually minimized by a common interest in the welfare of the craft and a virtual
certitude that sooner or later every proficient apprentice and industrious journeyman
would become a master and share in the governance of the craft. To make sure that
expectations would be fulfilled, a guild would normally forbid overtime work after
dark and sometimes limit the number of dependents a master could employ; this also
served to maintain substantial equality among masters and to prevent overexpansion
of the craft. The latter danger, however, did not become serious before the second
half of the fourteenth century. So long as the prospects for sustained growth
remained open, there were none of the unreasonable restrictions that gave a bad
name to later guilds: it was fairly easy for an outsider to obtain admission, for a
master to enlarge his staff, for an apprentice to qualify as a master. At worst, a
dissatisfied craftsman could bring his skill to another town; though guilds and town
governments endeavored to forbid emigration of experienced artisans, they seldom
could prevent a fugitive from being welcomed elsewhere. Guilds often stressed their
concern for producing good wares at low prices; their statements to that effect
should be neither disbelieved nor overrated. Then, as now, the main object of a
producer could not be to serve God and the public, but to sell his goods at a profit;

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still he knew that shoddy goods at inflated prices would not keep him in business.
The religious, patriarchal character of guilds and the pressure of what was
essentially a buyer's market were mutually reinforcing influences; it is idle to debate
which one was stronger.

Though craft guilds had to present a subdued, benevolent image in a milieu that
looked with suspicion at associations of humbler people, their outer structure
embodied, in a rudimentary way, some features of both the cartel and the labor
union. In order to bolster the economic potential of individual workshops without
destroying their autonomy, each guild endeavored to represent the entire
membership as a united front. First of all, it tried to standardize the quality, size, and
price of its typical products. This helped not only to prevent underselling by unfair
competitors (whether within or outside the guild) and underpaying by greedy
wholesalers, but also to place the wider reputation of the collectivity behind each
master. Inasmuch as advertising was not an accepted practice, and some medieval
regulations even forbade an artisan to attract attention to his products with a nod or a
sneeze, the certifying seal of a guild was the best means to bid for distant markets.
Only his neighbors might recognize the watermark of a distinguished papermaker,
but Fabriano paper was, and still is, known everywhere. In rather exceptional cases a
guild might go so far as to pool the resources of its members in collective purchases
of raw materials or collective sales of finished products. These initiatives, however,
met with strong resistance in a society obsessed by fear of scarcity and hatred of
monopolistic or oligopolistic practices. More often, guilds utilized admission fees
and membership dues for a variety of social activities: virtuous ones such as
religious ceremonies and assistance to impoverished members, wicked ones such as
the bibulous banquets which together with gambling and fornication offered the
easiest escape from the monotony of lower middle class life, and dangerous ones
such as intervention in political strife.

Before the thirteenth century the ruling merchants usually paid little attention to
the demands of craftsmen, although some crafts. men usually held minor offices in
the town government. Gradually, however, the disunion of the oligarchs and the
growing numbers of guildsmen in the more industrialized cities upset the balance of
power. Nevertheless, the first outbursts of popular riots (generally in the first half of
the thirteenth century) were often repressed in blood. In the end, however,
government by rich merchants was replaced by what was called "government by the
people" but turned out to be, more often than not, a mixed rule by both rich and
middling merchants and by master artisans of the more substantial crafts. In the
major Italian cities the change was generally completed before the end of the
thirteenth century; still there was no peace, for other artisans of lower standing
began putting pressure to join the ranks of the ruling "people." In Flanders the
textile workers triumphed over the French king and the oligarchs at Courtrai (1302)
but the subsequent defection of the count, their ally, reduced the effects of their
victory; in nearby Brabant they were crushed by the duke at Vilvorde (1306).
Elsewhere in Europe "popular" government arose still later, if at all.

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 Without lingering on political events, let us point out that partial control of the
government transferred to privileged categories of artisans or craft entrepreneurs
some of the economic advantages that had been previously reserved for the
merchants who shaped the policies of their communes without ever forgetting their
personal interests. By the same token, however, the continuing exclusion of a larger
number of craftsmen widened the economic and social distances that already
existed, among and within the crafts, between the rich and the poor. The contrast
was not too pronounced inside the humbler crafts, where masters were only a little
better off than apprentices, and in the artistic ones, where talent could offset rank. It
was sharp, and grew ever sharper, in the broad, diversified industries where masters
used their political power to keep subordinate workers and auxiliary craftsmen
under their thumb, and entire guilds fell practically under the control of other guilds.
To stress the opposition between upper and lower middle classes, some German
writers used such transparently biased terms as "the good ones" and "the bad ones."
More graphically, the Florentines distinguished "the fat people" from "the thin
people." The latter definition, in a city where paupers on welfare lists protested in
1346 because free distributions of white bread had fallen below two pounds a day,
may be an overstatement. There is no doubt, how ever, that although the delicate
balance of the guild system adjusted fairly well to the slow progress of ordinary
crafts, it was easily upset by the faster acceleration of anything approaching true
industrial growth. Granted that the Commercial Revolution did not immediately
produce an industrial revolution, in certain fields it led to what we might call a
"preindustrial rise," that is, more than a craft but less than an industry of the modern
kind.

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 THE RISE OF
THE WOOLLEN CRAFTS
While commercial expansion and capitalism had their first medieval successes in
luxury trade, where large profits could accrue from small sales, industrial
development could best proceed from small profits on large sales. Textile industries
were not the only ones that served an essential, universal need-metals, fuels, leather
and hides, pottery and glassware, building and furniture, ships and other means of
transportation were other significant examplesbut they have been pacemakers of
industrial progress at least twice in the last thousand years. As a matter of fact,
certain technological and organizational developments in the cotton industry of the
eighteenth century started the Industrial Revolution that is still with us;
developments of the same kind, if not of the same size, in the woollen industry of
the twelfth century initiated the "preindustrial rise" of the Middle Ages. (One is
tempted to look still further back, and regard some innovating aspects of the
Byzantine and Muslim silk industries before or around the tenth century as the
harbingers of the earliest medieval revival; but we know too little about that period
to express more than a tentative suggestion).

The causes of this consistent priority have never been fully investigated, but we
can suggest some. The production of textiles easily breaks down into a succession of
specialized operations entrusted to separate guilds or working units. The
interdependence of the operations in turn invites reintegration of all units under a
single management. Each operation can be considerably quickened by fairly simple
tools and machinery. The flexibility and light weight of both the raw materials and
the finished products minimize the impact of transportation costs on the
concentration of the manufacturing process wherever cheap labor and initiative are
available. The wide range of qualities, costs and, prices of textiles maximizes the
range of potential customers. Moderate transportation costs and diversified markets
appeal to the merchant capitalists whose help is essential for the transformation of
many scattered crafts into one integrated industry.

It is generally agreed that the Industrial Revolution took off in England, where an
exceptionally dense population and a high degree of urbanization sustained the
internal market, a successful maritime and colonial expansion enlarged the external
market, and merchant capitalists were willing to finance the mechanical innovations
that radically transformed the cotton industry. It did not matter that cotton fibers
were not produced locally; eighteenthcentury England was a fertile ground because
she bred enterprising men who were somewhat less restrained by class prejudice and
rigid regulations than those of most other countries. Not all other countries,
however; just across the sea, Holland possessed much the same advantages as
England, including a strong tradition in the textile industry, but failed to respond at
the crucial moment, possibly because she had a smaller population and had already
given all that she could give. These brief remarks about the better known

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developments of the eighteenth century may be of some help in finding explanations
(either by analogy or by contrast) for the less documented preindustrial rise of the
Middle Ages. Curiously, the geographic locale was approximately the same, with
the two sides of the North Sea playing the opposite role: England was the country
that did not make the most of her opportunities, Flanders and the adjacent regions
were the ones that did. Italy, which in the Middle Ages had the greatest assets, did
not respond at once, although she partly made up for lost time after the mid-
thirteenth century; she had her priority not in the woollen industry but in that of silk
which was more geared to luxury consumption and Oriental trade.

Let us start from the beginning. As early as the Carolingian period, Flanders
(which then included some French-speaking provinces to the south and was closely
connected with Brabant and Frisia) was noted for her fine raw wool and dependable
textiles. So was England, which raised more sheep and apparently used larger looms
to make the extra-long cloaks that shocked the conservative taste of Charlemagne.
(While the emperor complained to the king of Mercia about that English
extravagance, still longer linen cloth produced by the looms of Naples aroused the
admiration of a sophisticated traveler from Baghdad). The demographic explosion
of the following centuries, however, pushed the Flemish and the English into
opposite yet complementary directions. England, which had land to spare and a
demanding feudal monarchy, concentrated her efforts on agriculture and sheep
raising, while the textile-producing towns lost momentum. Flanders, where land was
scarce and many peasants had to seek a living as far as the German eastern frontier,
let pastures be replaced by intensively cultivated plots for the benefit of her growing
towns, and turned to commerce and industry. Her development resembled to a
certain degree that of Italy in the same period: some members of the lower urban
nobility joined a bourgeoisie whose ranks were swollen by immigrant serfs, and
feudal government had to make room for a measure of municipal autonomy. The
commercial vocation was easily stirred in a country that faced the Strait of Dover
and had such neighbors as the Frisian sea merchants and the Meuse river merchants.
Ships loaded with continental goods crossed to England and sailed back with the
best English wool; other ships, river barges, horses and mules carried Flemish cloth
to German markets, the Champagne fairs, and in some instances even as far as
Genoa. This movement, which culminated in the second half of the twelfth century,
might easily have transformed Flanders into a major commercial power; but it was
braked and eventually brought almost to a full stop by the very success of the
preindustrial development that was its underpinning. Enough capital had been
gathered and invested to insure the success of an industry feeding entirely on
imported material; now many merchants became sedentary craft entrepreneurs,
while others lent money or just lived off their income. There was no dearth of
foreign merchants who would be eager to import wool and export cloth for a profit.

Hindsight tends to justify this turn in the allocation of limited resources. Flanders
was too small to bid for primacy both in the woollen industry and in trade; in the
latter field she faced stiff competition from larger nations, but in the former, by the
thirteenth century, she was far ahead of all rivals, with Italy alone posing a still

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distant threat. Industry was more manpower-hungry than commerce, in spite of
partial mechanization. It absorbed not only entrepreneurs, skilled artisans, and
apprentices, but also an ever-rising stream of unskilled country people, who had no
elbow room at home and would rather be proletarians in the nearest city than
pioneers in the German and Slav far east. We have no exact employment figures, but
probably more than half the estimated 50,000 inhabitants that made Ghent the
largest city in northwestern Europe drew their livelihood directly or indirectly from
the woollen industy. The proportion may have been still higher in Ypres, a slightly
smaller city which in 1313 accounted for no less than 40,000 pieces of cloth
according to the latest estimates; nearby Louvain and Malines produced about
25,000 pieces each. By way of comparison, Troyes, Champagne's capital, is said to
have made barely 2,000 pieces annually; all of England, then facing a depression,
exported 4,422 pieces over a twelve-month period in 1347-48). The scale was still
vastly inferior to that of the Industrial Revolution, but it had definitely outgrown that
of ordinary medieval crafts.

The Belgian cities, moreover, were surrounded by dozens of urban centers in the
entire area between the Seine and Rhine, which produced internationally famous
woollens on a smaller scale but with similar methods and organization. Florence
was getting close to Flemish employment and production figures; many cities in the
Po valley turned out cheaper woollens and fustians (of wool and cotton mixed
together) for a combined number of pieces that may have exceeded that of Flanders.
There was hardly a town in Europe that did not produce some cloth with the simpler,
old-fashioned artisan methods.

The rate of mechanization also was halfway between that of ordinary crafts and
that of the early stage of the Industrial Revolution. Both in the eighteenth century
and in the twelfth the first breakthrough was achieved in the central stages of
spinning and weaving, two processes that were so interlocked that acceleration in
one of them called for an equal acceleration in the other. The Industrial Revolution
went through a, rapid succession of mechanical innovations, each of them related to
the name of an inventor; the preindustrial rise was content with two simple and
inexpensive laborsaving devices, which can neither be dated with precision nor be
assigned to a known inventor: a pedal loom in the place of the hand loom, and a
spinning wheel in the place of the distaff and spindle. Actually there would have
been no technical bar to applying the already existing power of the water mill to
both the spinning

wheel and the pedal loom, as was done for a while in the Industrial Revolution.
As a matter of fact, by the mid-thirteenth century water power was applied in Italy
to the throwing which prepared the delicate yarn for the silk industry. Wool yarn,
however, was coarser and cheaper; there was no incentive to invest in a costly
machine while it was possible to put out the wool to underpaid spinstresses. On the
other hand, it paid to equip the "walkers," who pressed and tightened the cloth by
trampling upon it, with fulling mills; England's retarded adoption of the machine
contributed to her temporary decadence in a craft for which she still produced the

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 finest and most plentiful wool. It also paid to endow dyers with larger vats, shearers
with longer scissors, and other specialists with a variety of improved tools; to say
nothing of the adoption of better coloring stuffs and mordants, especially for the
more valuable grades of woollen. No doubt every new device created hardship for
those who did not employ it; the fulling mill, in particular, displaced many
"walkers," but in the end mechanization tended to create additional jobs.

Textile Centers in Europe in the Thirteenth Century

SOURCE: Lopez, The Birth of Europe, p. 279. Copyright © 1966 by J. M. Dent &
Sons, Ltd. Reprinted by permission of M. Evans & Co., Inc., and J. M. Dent & Sons,
Ltd.

In the Middle Ages as in the eighteenth century, but to a smaller degree, division
of labor went together with mechanization, and industrial integration restored
unified management to the dismembered operations of the craft. There were,
however, no factories and no mergers of workshops into large industrial firms. By
the midthirteenth century we sometimes hear of more than thirty separate steps in
the production of cloth, and of almost as many guilds or unorganized but distinct
groups of workmen responsible for them. One of the guilds, usually that of the

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drapers (drapiers in French, lanaioli in Italian), owned or controlled most of the
capital and overlooked all operations from the purchase of raw materials to the
marketing of finished products. Whether he came from a family of artisans or from
one of merchants, a thirteenth-century draper was hardly a handicraftsman, although
he ordinarily had the main skills and might take a hand in the manufacturing of a
piece of cloth when he was not too busy supervising it. We may call him an
entrepreneur, provided we remember that he had a workshop, not a factory, and that
his activity was still encased in the framework of a guild. In the early fourteenth
century, about 200 workshops of lanaioli had a share in the Florentine cloth
production totaling 75,000 pieces a year. Later in the century, Milan had no less than
363 workshops, and the northern drapers' guilds were similarly subdivided. The
other guilds, too, consisted of many autonomous units; their members worked in
residences they owned or rented, and so did most of the unorganized laborers.
Machinery on the whole was not so heavy, and processes not so interdependent, that
it would be necessary to herd all workers under one roof; the entrepreneur merely
put out the material in succession to each of the craftsmen responsible for a stage of
production. By leaving to each subordinate unit the responsibility of running its own
business, the drapers saved overhead and made it easier to adjust their orders to the
annual and seasonal fluctuations of the market.

A rapid survey of the personnel involved in the Flemish woollen industry will
help us understand its stratified structure. On top of the whole organization, not in
Flanders alone but in the broader Franco-Belgian area surrounding it, an interurban
merchant association, the Hansa of the Seventeen Cities (which by the thirteenth
century actually included more than twenty cities) endeavored with mixed effect to
coordinate the export of "Francigene cloth" to the fairs of Champagne and other
meeting places of foreign traders. Its functions were largely superseded in the
fourteenth century, when Bruges, a Flemish city, became the main terminus of
shipping from both the classic and the northern Mediterranean thanks to its river
port on the Zwyn.

Then there were the drapers, who not only dominated the industry in their native
towns but also held important offices in the municipal government. Through
political influence, and still more through economic pressure-by expanding or
contracting the purchases of raw materials, the orders to the auxiliary guilds and
other workers, and the shipping of goods for sale, they regulated to a large extent the
output and prices of each type of cloth, in the light of foreseeable demand in both
the international and the national market.

Below the drapers, but not as far below as the drapers would have liked, were
three guilds of specialized craftsmen whose productivity and earning capacity were
increased by heavy or elaborate tools: the dyers above all, then the fullers, and lastly
the shearers. (Indeed, in some English towns the dyers played the leading role which
elsewhere fell to the drapers.) A dyer who owned his vats and used expensive dyes
rendered essential services to several drapers at one time and could be bullied by
none; a fuller was in a similar position if he had a mill, but the peripheral location of

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 the mill on a suburban river might limit his participation in town life; a shearer
depended on his manual skill as much as on the moderate investment represented by
his tools. This partly explains why the "blue nails" (dyers) played a prominent role
in the popular revolution of the early fourteenth century, but the shearers remained
in the background and the fullers bunched together with the weavers in earlier
revolts that ended in failure.

Yet the weavers formed the indispensable core of the profession, were skilled
workers using special tools, and eventually obtained official recognition for their
guilds. With unconscious irony a twelfth century writer called them "knights on
their feet who, by leaning on their stirrups (the pedals of the loom) relentlessly urge
on their sober steeds." Sober is a fitting expression: by riding the pedal loom from
eight to thirteen hours a day (the work day went from sunrise to sunset), a weaver
could make a tolerably good living and scrape together some savings, but an illness
or a temporary business recession could force him to run into debt or sell his tools,
thus mortgaging his future at the hands of the money lender or the draper, who often
were the same person. To the daring weaver, emigration might offer a remedy,
although it was generally forbidden by town statutes; the rise of the industry in
thirteenth-century Italy owed no little to a handful of Flemish immigrants. Note that
the normal yearly production of a loom did not exceed thirty pieces of cloth.

Still below the weavers, but not quite at the bottom of the industrial pyramid,
were such specialists as the combers and the carders, to whose modest skills and
light tools the entrepreneurs paid some respect. At Douai in 1229, for instance, it
was decreed that carders might request the town government to order an increase in
their wages, provided the cost of living and market conditions permitted it. The
town government, however, was in the hands of the drapers, one of whom, jean
Boinebroke, from an inquest into his estate after his death appears to have been one
of the most wicked exploiters and usurers that has ever lived.

At the very bottom of the woollen industry was a depressed crowd of unskilled
men and women who attended to such tasks as threshing and washing wool,
spinning and warping, and had no chance to leave their hovels in town or in the
suburban area except when they did domestic chores at the home of the
entrepreneur. If the preindustrial rise did not revert to slavery or force workers into
factories, it made more than a beginning in creating a proletariate and building a
slum section. There is not much comfort in pointing out that extreme poverty in the
rural areas could sink still lower.

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 GUILD BALANCE AND
PREINDUSTRIAL RISE
IN OTHER FIELDS
We cannot undertake in a few pages to explore one by one the other crafts that
were affected to some degree by the medieval preindustrial rise; most of them,
moreover, have bequeathed us fewer documents, or the documents have been less
thoroughly studied. Without leaving the textile crafts, let us recall that silk cloth
production in Italy was not far below woollen production in value if not in volume.
Lucca, the principal center ever since the tenth century, lost her unchallenged
primacy in the late thirteenth, when disgruntled craftsmen exported their talents and
brought the throwing mill to Bologna and other cities; but she kept ahead of her
competitors thanks to her unbroken tradition of superior artistic design and technical
flawlessness. Again, the production of linen for garments, underwear, and bedding
may have been larger than that of woollen; some fabrics were cheap but the best
grades were exported to faraway places, even to China where no European woollens
could be profitably shipped. Champagne and, to a lesser degree, the Swiss and
German Rhineland were the most thriving centers of the craft, which was scattered
all over northern Europe from the Low Countries to Russia, and to some extent in
Spain, Italy, and Greece as well. Cotton textiles were chiefly for poorer customers;
production depended less on specialized craftsmen than on religious orders, women,
and country people who spun and wove as a side activity when their ordinary work
slackened. Cheap labor and broad market opportunities, however, attracted many
great merchants of northern and central Italy as early as the twelfth century to build
up the production of fabrics of mixed cotton and wool (fustians or mezzalani).
Around 1200 a piece of fustian sold for about one twentieth of the price of a piece of
the best woollen; on this basis it was possible for a few entrepreneurs to give
impulsion to a putting-out industry that came close to that of the English textile
business on the eve of the Industrial Revolution.

The most remarkable manifestations of industrial entrepreneur ship, however,

occurred not in the textile crafts but in a mining, chemical, and commercial line of
business partly related to them: alum. This double sulphate of aluminum and
potassium, in a more or less pure form, found in the medieval processes almost as
ubiquitous applications as those of sulphuric acid in modern industry. The most
important uses were as a hardener in tanning (not a highly mechanized craft,
although it eventually employed water mills, but one that served virtually every
man), and as a color fastener in dyeing. Mineral deposits were very numerous
around the Mediterranean and not rare elsewhere, but qualities varied considerably
from one quarry to another, and affected the value of dyed materials. The fact that
around 1300 alum from Volcano and Lipari (two small islands near Sicily), a good
but not superior grade, was warmly recommended in England, merely accepted in
Flanders, and strongly forbidden in Italy may help explain why England lost her

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supremacy to Flanders, and why Flanders could not prevent the Florentines from
reexporting at great profit Flemish cloth dyed and finished in Florence. The best
method of production was fairly simple, but time consuming: first calcination of the
hewn material, then repeated leaching, then boiling, then slow crystallization in a
vat; the purest and most valuable crystals emerged on top of the vat, the bottom
yielded only inferior debris. A bulky material, alum was transported cheaply only by
sea, preferably as ballast. Obviously the returns of producing and selling it would be
maximized if the same entrepreneur owned a large quarry, processed the mineral in
large vats, carried it in large ships, and controlled a large share of the market. Such
an entrepreneurial paradise was conceived and welded together by the extraordinary
ability and energy of a thirteenthcentury Genoese merchant, Benedetto Zaccaria.

The activities of Zaccaria defy summary description. A member of the upper

merchant class in his city, he earned money and renown as a naval commander at the
service of the Byzantine Empire, of his own city, and of the kings of Castile and
France. Beside winning battles under various flags he wrote in French a plan for the
blockade of England, carried out delicate diplomatic missions, and was at different
moments a pirate in the Aegean sea, a crusader in Syria, the governor of an
Andalusian seaport, and the ruler of a Greek island. Between the Crimean peninsula
and the Flemish shore there was scarcely a port that was never visited by one or
many of the ships he personally owned, and scarcely a line of Genoese or
Mediterranean business that he passed by. Let us consider only the moves that built
his alum empire.

Zaccaria was a young but experienced trader in wool, cloth, and color dyes when
he noticed a huge, clean deposit of alumite at a short distance from the good seaport
of Phocaea, in Asia Minor. In 1274, he took advantage of a mission to the Byzantine
court to obtain as a fief the whole region in return for naval assistance. There was
only one quarry, also in Asia Minor, that yielded still better minerals; by political
maneuvering Zaccaria blocked temporarily its exports, then by commercial bidding
gained a share in them. Meanwhile he and his closest collaborators equipped the
alum refineries near Phocaea with enormous vats, and protected them with a fortress
on the land side and with cruising ships on the sea side. Italian technicians and
artisans, and even a physician, joined the crews of sweated Greek laborers; fifty
years after the opening of the works, a new agglomeration of about 3,000
inhabitants had grown to the south of the older seaport. The ships of Zaccaria took
turns in transporting ever heavier alum cargoes to all destinations on the
Mediterranean; they had on board weapons and soldiers in sufficient numbers to
withstand an attack, and in some cases they also were covered by maritime
insurance contracts. So long as northern Europe had to be reached by overland
routes alum could not easily bear the cost of transportation to the main textile
centers of England and Belgium; no wonder that ships belonging to the Zaccaria
family were among the first mentioned as plying the direct sea route from the
Mediterranean to England, as early as 1278. Twenty years later, a son of Zaccaria
was sending alum ships to Bruges, while Zaccaria himself was helping the French
king in his war against Flemish rebels. The naval campaign, however, was

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interrupted by a very medieval incident: Zaccaria heard that a group of male and
female crusaders was preparing to sail from Genoa, and dropped everything in order
to join them. Actually there was no crusade, and Zaccaria died not much later (1307
or 1308), but his descendants kept the alum industry and trade going. Around 1330
the annual production of Phocaea was estimated at almost 700 tons of refined alum,
for an aggregate value of more than 50,000 Genoese pounds a modest amount in
modern perspective, but an enormous sum for a single medieval entrepreneur. (Total
alum production was of course much larger, but nowhere else controlled by a single
man; three other mines in Asia Minor, for instance, had a combined output of about
1,800 tons).

The balanced, almost placid development of the decentralized building crafts

forms a striking contrast with the sharp preindustrial rise of Zaccaria's concentrated
alum business. On the basis of modern experience, some historians have postulated
great booms of real estate and housing values as the inevitable consequence of
medieval urbanization and economic growth. Such views, however, have so far
found little confirmation in empirically collected data. New houses went up all the
time, both to cope with demographic expansion and to keep up with rising
expectations of comfort; but we do not hear of master masons or carpenters trying to
grow rich by transforming their small scale operations into a mechanized integrated,
chain-producing industry, or of merchant entrepreneurs financing and organizing a
speculative contractors' trade. Random research on this still insufficiently explored
subject suggests that masons' and carpenters' earnings left almost no margin for
productive investment, and that merchants regarded houses as a conservative and
prestige-giving investment but not a very profitable one. A study of rents paid for
certain houses and shops in the commercial heart of Florence over a 52-year period
that included the sharpest turns in both the economic and the demographic trends
shows that the rents reacted to the changing conjuncture very moderately if at all.
Perhaps the distances within a town were still too small to make a central location
particularly desirable, and the frequent enlargements of city walls made it easy to
prolong any crowded street into inexpensive suburban space.

No doubt there was more to medieval building than ordinary houses. Cathedrals,
castles, town walls, bridges, and other monumental structures required an
abnormally strenuous, concentrated, and prolonged effort. They could easily have
stimulated industrial growth if they had been intended to yield unrestricted profit to
the architects, the contractors, and the large crews of skilled and unskilled laborers
who worked wonders with highly ingenious, yet altogether simple, methods and
tools. (The basic tools were indeed so simple that a substantial proportion of the
craftsmen assembled for such ambitious enterprises came from regional or
international "lodges" of freemasons who were ever ready to pack up and move
wherever an extraordinary need for help persuaded authorities to disregard any
monopolistic claim of the local guilds.) In the Middle Ages as in antiquity, the
greatest architectural commitments did not aim primarily at economic profit but at
otherworldly or worldly security and glory, usually mixed with aesthetic
gratification. The financing came from ecclesiastic, seigniorial, or communal funds,

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sometimes supplemented by more or less voluntary contributions from the broader
public. They were sparingly administered by the promoters themselves or their
representatives, who dealt out to the builders rather modest salaries and wages or, at
most, conservatively calculated lump sums "for the task."

From a strictly economic point of view, we might note once again that cathedrals
and castles took from the builders and from society as a whole much more than they
paid back in terms of material welfare; bridges and other public works not only
exacted smaller sacrifices, but also contributed more directly to economic growth.
There are strong reasons to believe that in the thirteenth century the construction of
Europe's tallest Gothic church crippled the development of Beauvais, hitherto a
promising center of the textile industry, whereas the construction of a daring bridge
near the Gotthard Pass hastened the transformation of southern Switzerland from a
dead end of Germany into a live threshold of Italy. Man, however, lives not by bread
alone. Let us not apply to cathedrals and bridges the invidious distinction that
Frontinus made between the valuable Roman aqueducts and "the idle Pyramids or
the famous but useless works of the Greeks." Let us consider, too, that the status of
medieval builders represented great progress over the wretched condition of the
slaves who built the Pyramids and the forced laborers who built the aqueducts.

Progress in mining and metallurgy was conditioned by conflicting pressures,

which can be mentioned but briefly. The Commercial Revolution was by no means
as dependent on metals as the Industrial Revolution. Wood, earthenware, and
glassware rendered most of the services we now expect of nonprecious metals,
which were then used only where extraordinary sharpness, sturdiness, or
watertightness were indispensable. Precious metals were still the mainstay of
monetary circulation and tantalized bullionist sovereigns and unproductive hoarders,
but instruments of credit reduced their importance in the more developed countries.
Every stage of production, from extracting the ore to delivering a finished artifact,
demanded slow and painstaking manual work. No doubt economic and social
conditions varied from one stage to another: the heavy toil of the miner was far less
remunerative than the refined work of the goldsmith or the swordmaker, and there
was at least a shade of difference between a maker of horseshoes and a maker of
spurs. Small enterprise, however, was the common denominator. Rich or poor,
virtually all members of the large and ramified family of smiths showed their
predilection for the not too crowded workshop and the urban craft guild. A more
rustic tradition, deriving from that of manorial agriculture, prevailed in the
communities of miners and smelters of the mountainous, wooded recesses where
most mines lay. Each family cultivated its share of the seam, but the methods in
making pits, lifting ores, and smelting metals, as well as the hours of work and the
division of profits were determined collectively by representatives of the miners
and, usually, those of the prince or landowner who claimed part of the products as
the lord of the soil. To a still greater degree than craft guilds, the customs of the
miners (of which the earliest extant codification goes back to Trento in Northern
Italy, 1185, and the largest body was issued in the Bohemian kingdom, 1249 and
1300) aimed at stability and equality at the price of mediocrity. They made mining a

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more decent occupation than it was in antiquity, when working in the mines was one
of the worst penalties inflicted on criminals, but they provided no incentive for
commercial investment and entrepreneurship.

Now let us look at the other side of the coin. Even though the demand for metals
increased less than that for textiles, it certainly grew. We have mentioned the
widespread adoption of iron and steel parts for agricultural tools; excellent blades
and armor were the pride of the medieval knight, pikes and lances the typical
weapon of yeomen and townspeople; few were the houses where some metal
cauldrons did not strengthen the battery of breakable pots. The perennial hunger for
silver, that lies behind so many governmental and private decisions, could not be
merely an effect of greed, insecurity, or unfavorable balances of payment, but
corresponded to a real need. Gold coinage, gradually introduced to almost every part
of western Europe between the mid-thirteenth and the mid-fourteenth centuries,
stimulated the quest for gold without diminishing that for silver. Again, miners were
not just another subspecies of plain country workers; German miners, in particular,
were reputed and welcomed throughout central and eastern Europe for their
uncommon skills.

One could describe the history of mining in those regions as a series of

sensational strikes and rushes, sometimes resulting from careful prospecting, more
often incidental to forest clearing and frontier movement. As early as the tenth
century the discovery of copper- and silver-bearing lead ores in the primeval
woodlands of central Germany determined the growth of nearby Goslar from
insignificant hamlet to capital of the Empire. Similar strikes in the following
centuries led to the development of such thriving miners' towns as Freiberg in
Saxony, Jihlava (Iglau) and Kutna Hora (Kut- tenberg) in the Bohemian kingdom,
Stora Kopparsberg in Sweden, and still other self-governing municipalities which
brought a whiff of the Commercial Revolution to hitherto underdeveloped areas. But
mining and metallurgy also gained new momentum in districts where they had been
practiced in antiquity and almost abandoned in the barbarian age. The tin mines of
Cornwall and Devon, exploited ever since prehistory, attained their peak in the
thirteenth century, with a production of about 700 tons in one year; but they were in
the periphery of economic development, and a Florentine company of merchant
bankers that acquired an interest in them found the traditional methods and tools of
the miners too inefficient for profit. Much greater profits were obtained from the
iron mines of the island of Elba, of Etruscan and Roman fame; they were close to
the main centers of Italian trade and became the bone of contention between Pisans
and Genoese. The high quality iron of the Basque mountains was separated from its
northern markets by the stormy bay of Biscay; the solution of the problem entailed
progress in another field, that of steering. Good iron provided solid hinges for a
central rudder, which had certain advantages over the lateral rudders previously
used. We hear of the new rudder as a Basque specialty before 1300, and the same
instrument that first helped Iberian iron-laden ships at a later time was to accompany
Iberian caravels on the routes to the eastern and western Indies.

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 Two problems limited the growth of mining and metallurgy: the heavy
consumption of fuel and the high cost of nonmechanized labor. Neither was fully
solved during the Commercial Revolution, and this kept production down; the
maximum figure we have just quoted for tin is not out of line with the
approximately 4,500 tons of Basque iron exported in 1293. There were, however,
important innovations, most particularly in the use of water and wind power. At
various times in the thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, modified types of the
water mill were adopted here and there for driving forge-bellows, for activating
heavy trip-hammers, for crushing ore, and for draining water from the deeper pits.
Inventiveness was also displayed in the design of hearths, ovens, and furnaces.
Remarkably, the blast furnace, which was the most significant step towards modern
metallurgy, came as a byproduct of religion: it was first adopted in the twelfth
century for casting huge church bells. Not much later, casting was also applied to
making statues and household objects; but the process did not attract much capital
and attention before the last years of the Commercial Revolution, when it was
employed for the murderous purpose of making guns. Men in general, and
governments in particular, seem to be readier to spend for death than to invest in
life.

The shotgun wedding of metal and powder, however, could not have as decisive
effects as a humbler mating of metal and coal. So long as wood remained virtually
the only industrial fuel, mining and metallurgy were bound to consume far greater
amounts than they replaced in more efficient tools and machines. No doubt wood
was readily available wherever a new mine was opened in a forest clearing, but the
very success of the mine burned it up at a dangerous pace. A net gain was possible
only if coal was used as fuel, but its ugly color and bad smell discouraged potential
users. Deforestation, and the presence of surface coal, by the thirteenth century got
the better of consumers' resistance at Newcastle in England and at Liege in Belgium;
but there was no great breakthrough, for Newcastle was not close to the best iron
mines, and the best coal seams at Liege were found right under the urban soil. The
gains of coal-andsteel industry and the griefs of industrial pollution did not really
get going before the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth century.

Of the other medieval crafts that had potential for growth we shall mention only
two that made some progress beyond the normal structure of guilds. Glass making in
its most famous medieval manifestation, Gothic "stained" (or, more properly,
painted) windows, was enmeshed in the same restraints that prevented cathedral
builders from becoming preindustrial entrepreneurs. The larger market of ordinary
houses did not take promptly to glass windows, which could not be produced
cheaply by the normal process of blowing. Hollow vessels, however, were made as
rapidly and cheaply as the market would bear; the best qualities fetched high prices;
Venice maintained throughout the Middle Ages a strong edge over all competitors-
and, incidentally, was the first to exploit industrially the scientific discovery of
eyeglasses, as early as 1300. The glass industry, however, presented the same
inconveniences as coal metallurgy: the furnaces were a fire hazard and gave out
malodorous smoke. Hence the government obliged all glassmakers of the city to

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 move to the suburban island of Murano. Togetherness, constant government
supervision, and the close relations of the master craftsmen with the merchant
entrepreneurs who exported the Venetian specialty oversea and overland, lent the
Murano guilds of glassmakers some characteristics of an integrated industry and
trade, but did not lead to an organization as tightly knit as that of the textile guilds.

A much larger potential for profitable entrepreneurship existed in the production

and commerce of salt, whether from coastal lagoons and ponds or from rocks. The
process by evaporation, however, was so simple, and salt-ponds so widespread, that
it was difficult to bring them under unified control over large areas, although
merchants from cities as far apart as Venice and Lubeck endeavored to do it. Salt
mines were not as dispersed, and merchants could fairly easily persuade a
government or a landowner to farm out to them the right of exploiting individual
mines. Such was notably the case of the enormous mines of Wielicka, near Cracow,
which were farmed first by German entrepreneurs, then by Genoese merchants; but
a farmer's hold was revokable at the expiration of a contract and did not include
feudal rights or any political or military power. We encounter a good number of
successful businessmen in the salt industry and trade, but never a figure that may be
compared to Zaccaria, the king of alum.

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 6
The Response of the
Agricultural Society
DYNAMISM AND INERTIA IN
THE AGRICULTURAL WORLD
To close our survey of economic growth and commercialization we have to take
another look at the world of cathedrals, castles, and country people. For all the
expansion of trade and crafts, agriculture (with such related activities as herding and
lumbering) continued throughout and beyond the Middle Ages to be the main
occupation or source of income and power for the overwhelming majority of the
European population.

This is hardly surprising: the shifting of the occupational balance from mainly
agricultural to mainly nonagricultural is a very recent phenomenon. As late as the
mid-nineteenth century, with the Industrial Revolution well on its way, no large
nation in Europe except England had disengaged more than half of its population
from agricultural pursuits, and if we lumped together the population of the whole
world today we would, no doubt, find that agriculture still is the prevalent
occupation or source of income and power. Any attempt at calculating proportions
in the Middle Ages would produce no more than guesses, but certainly agriculture
loomed still larger at that time, with the Commercial Revolution well advanced but
industrialization barely sketched. Although independent merchant republics by the
thirteenth century controlled nearly all of northern and central Italy, and more or less
autono mous urban communities pockmarked all of the other regions, most of the
European surface was still in the shade of agrarian monarchies and fiefs. Again,
although the organization of the church was traditionally hinged on cities, and
although two townbased regular orders (the Franciscans and the Dominicans) in the
thirteenth century had challenged the supremacy of land-based monasticism,
agrarian interests and ways of thinking still were paramount in ecclesiastic circles.
Indeed, agriculture had bridgeheads in every town: there were peasants living within
the walls of the smaller ones, representatives of the king or territorial lord in all but
the entirely independent cities, and religious institutions and powerful families
living on income from country estates even in the Italian business capitals.

By its sheer mass and power, the agricultural society offered to the penetration of
the Commercial Revolution both the widest opportunities and the strongest
resistance. The former are obvious: though per capita consumption and production
were higher in the cities, the aggregate production and consumption power of the

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countryside were incomparably greater, potentially at least. Still we must not forget
the resistance. It partly stemmed from the instinctive antipathy of country people
towards city people, a cleavage that has always existed and manages to survive in
our highly industrialized, urbanized world. In the Middle Ages the antagonism was
first deepened by the hostility of tough barbarian conquerors against soft Roman
townsmen, then almost institutionalized by the feudal notion of a tripartite society of
noblemen, clergymen, and peasants (with no recognized role for traders), and lastly
exasperated by the resentment of conservative, slow-moving lords and farmers
against pushy and revolutionary burghers. The Church, too, in spite of the efforts of
Aquinas and a few other thinkers to reach a more equitable appreciation of the
functions and needs of merchants, was unable to overcome the strictures of its own
oldfashioned economic theories, formed in agrarian surroundings and hardened by
Greco-Roman biases against trade. Not only did it include in the same
condemnation usury proper and what we would call commercial interest, but it
picked up the popular assumption that most merchants must be greedy exploiters
and cheats. In turn the merchants normally charged interest, resented the pride of the
lords and ridiculed the coarseness of the peasants (and here they rejoined the lords,
who ordinarily held in contempt all laborers, including those who fed them). We
cannot linger on these and other psychological disagreements in an economic essay,
but we must note their unfavorable impact on collaboration between agriculturists
and traders.

Mutual dislike, however, could not hinder profitable business relations as

seriously as did the fact that agriculturists and traders marched to the beat of
different drummers. The contrast in its extreme manifestations is best illustrated by
a comparison between certain manorial obligations based on custom "existing from
time immemorial" and certain commercial contracts dated not only by the day but
even by the canonical hour (matins, prime, tierce, sext, nones, vespers, complin).
Again, in Italian thirteenth-century cities literacy is an absolute requirement for
merchants and craftsmen, but in a good many rural districts it is unheard of among
peasants, abnormal among lay lords, and not to be taken for granted among lower
clergymen. Merchants travel constantly and bring back useful economic
information, but knights move only for war or pilgrimage and carry in their baggage
too much complacency and xenophobia to leave room for learning; as for the
peasants, they may take a few hints from their neighbors or export skills of their
own to colonization lands, but they are usually too unlearned or too poor to engineer
major changes. Scholars and high clergymen are more apt to travel with an open
mind, but religious, philosophical, or political interests more often than not engross
their attention and prevent their acquisitive instincts from engendering practical
schemes for profit. Indeed, profit for profit's sake is a typically mercantile
aspiration; preachers call it a sin. Not profit but "subsistence," calculated in
proportion to status, is the acknowledged goal of the agrarian society. An ordinary
English peasant may have to be content with dark bread and ale, whose prices are
actually regulated by the king, whereas a monarch needs oversize subsistence; but
even the king of France is expected to live off "his property," that is, the produce of
his landed estates meagerly augmented by petty dues in cash, and only special

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emergencies entitle him to ask for extraordinary "aid."

These generalizations must of course be strongly qualified. To a still greater

extent than trade, agriculture varies almost incredibly from one place or time to
another. The difference between city and country dwindles to a minimum in the
thickly settled parts of Italy and Belgium; and even those internal provinces of
northern and eastern Europe that are least accessible to the main currents of trade do
not forever stand still. Literacy and elementary accounting begin to find favor
among members of the landed elite, at first chiefly as intellectual pastimes or legal
and political equipment, but soon after as economic tools; the progress is best visible
in the comparatively well-preserved manorial records of England. Powerful
monastic orders gradually raise their expectations from enlarged subsistence to a
frank pursuit of gain; the most conspicuous example is offered by the almost
ubiquitous Cistercians, originally dedicated to personal toil on the land, then
entrenched at the head of a network of "granges" where serfs and hired dependents
carry out tillage or sheep-breeding with rational organization and methods.
Nevertheless, we must keep in mind that subsistence needs were the prime motor of
agricultural progress before the Commercial Revolution got going, and direct
consumption continued thereafter to play a fundamental role in the economic life of
the country. Population growth drove nobles, farmers, and peasants to look for new
land and improved techniques: more land and improved techniques in turn
supported further population growth. The chain reaction may be quickened by the
input of commercial capital and initiative, but does not absolutely need it. Before we
consider the commercial components of agricultural development, let us assess as
best we can, on the basis of the spotty and hence disputable evidence we now have
in hand, the elementary ingredients.

So far as we can tell, the rural population continued to grow throughout Europe
until the Great Plague of 1346-48, and in some places (especially in eastern Europe)
resumed its growth for a number of years after that crisis. It is probable that by the
thirteenth century, if not earlier, accelerated urbanization caused the country to gain
proportionately less than the cities. Nevertheless, the absolute size of the agricultural
population was large enough to take urbanization in its stride without slowing down
considerably its absolute natural increase. Again, the famine of 1315-17 had serious
effects, but it was followed by many excellent harvests in the period 1325-45, in
some parts of England at least; its repercussions can hardly have lingered thirty
years to deliver the undernourished survivors and their children to the Great Plague,
as has been sometimes claimed. Any increase in the incidence of birth control, about
which we know virtually nothing except that it was practiced, may have affected the
population curve more substantially; for only a very high birth rate could insure
continuous demographic growth while the average expectation of life at birth, again
in England, was about one half that of today: between thirty and thirty-five years
according to the best estimates. (This in turn was better than the ancient Roman
average of about twenty-five years, almost equal to China's average in 1946, and not
much worse than the English average of barely above forty years in 1838-54.)

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 The tentative demographic profile we have thus traced agrees with available
information on the expansion of cultivated areas, which went on, as a whole,
unabated up to the mid-thirteenth century or shortly after and did not come
anywhere to a full stop before the mid-fourteenth. The widest development
opportunities continued to be found in the east and north central plains, where
professional colonization entrepreneurs (locatores, sometimes designated by the
prestigious title of magistri indaginis, "searchmasters") often assisted German, Slav,
and Magyar princes and prelates in the gigantic task of filling the country with new
farming settlements and adding strength and efficiency to older ones. We know very
little about personalities and individual achievements, but the basic problems and
strategy emerge clearly from twelfth and thirteenth century charters. The
entrepreneur had to secure a concession and plan the layout of the future village
according to the best economic and military considerations. He had to advertise in
the more crowded countries to the west the advantages of receiving sizable plots of
fertile land under convenient conditions of tenure; in the early period Flemish and
Westphalian farmers responded eagerly, but increasing competition with urban labor
markets made recruitment harder in spite of the continuing population pressure.
Above all, the locator arranged for the transportation of the immigrants, supported
them until the first harvest, prepared temporary shelter in enclosed camps, built
churches, mills, and other utilities. In return for this, he normally received from the
overlord a package of rights and privileges resembling those of a vassal: part of the
land as his free share, rents and dues from such public conveniences as bakeries,
fisheries, inns, and mills, and the hereditary charge of administrator and judge of the
new settlement. Whatever the original status of the agricultural promoters (there
were noblemen, farmers, and townsmen), their economic role was not much unlike
that of the merchant promoters we have met in the industrial field: they gathered
capital, invested it at considerable risk, and contributed their technical competence
and experience to the success of the enterprise.

There was successful expansion at many other places-not only in peripheral areas
such as the subpolar forests of northern Scandinavia and Russia or in the war-torn
borderland between Christian and Muslim Iberia, but also in smaller underpopulated
pockets such as the swampy "fenlands" of England and the broken coasts of western
Corsica-but by the mid-thirteenth century most of the better land in western and
southern Europe was either thickly settled or fenced off as hunting, fishing, or
grazing reserves. When, around 1300, we find that in certain districts of Normandy,
Lincolnshire, or the Tuscan highlands the population was as large as today or even
larger, we must conclude that some of the cultivated land was marginal and some
was overcropped. It is not sure, however, that Europe as a whole had overstepped
what then were the optimum limits of intensive agriculture: evidence is too scattered
and sometimes inconsistent to warrant generalizations; moreover, optimum limits
ought to be calculated with reference to the normal expectations of the times. In
other terms, lords and peasants were accustomed to abysmally lower rewards in
subsistence and surplus than modern agriculturists take for granted for the same
amount of land and labor; so long as those rewards were obtainable, they would not
feel that they had transgressed the law of diminishing returns.

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 We have pointed out at the beginning that progress in medieval agriculture
depended to some extent on technological advances, but to a larger extent on the
expansion of the cultivated area; the latter increased total production, but only the
former could boost per capita production. Under these circumstances, it seems un
fortunate that technological advances tended to slow down at the same time as the
land still available for expansion shrank. Nearly all of the basic inventions and
improvements in medieval agriculture, from the wheeled plough to the first
experiments in threecourse rotation of crops, can be traced back to the initial stage
of expansion or earlier. To the later period we must ascribe a good number of minor
improvements, but only two major ones: the introduction of the windmill and the
addition to the plough of mould-boards which turned over the soil at greater depth.
In agriculture the main technological contribution of the twelfth and thirteenth
centuries was not a continuing flow of fresh innovations and more fruitful practices
as in commerce and industry, but the slow propagation of earlier ones. This was
undoubtedly an important achievement, for new machines and methods had in every
instance to be adjusted to the particular ecology and needs of the place; the fact
remains, however, that the average yield of cereals only doubled between the tenth
century and the fourteenth, whereas commercial profits and industrial production
grew at a much higher rate.

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 THE COMMERCIAL
COMPONENTS OF
AGRICULTURAL GROWTH
When we compare the steady but slow progress of self-centered agriculture with
the accelerated gains brought about by commercialization, we are reminded of
Daniel Defoe's imaginative comparison in his Complete English Tradesman (1726),
published shortly before the take-off of the Industrial Revolution: "An estate's a
pond, but trade's a spring: the first, if it keeps full, and the water wholesome, by the
ordinary supplies and drains from the neighboring grounds, it is well, and it is all
that is expected; but the other is an inexhausted current, which not only fills the
pond, and keeps it full, but it is continually running over, and fills all the lower
ponds and places about it." In the Middle Ages already, the impact of trade spurred
certain sectors of the agricultural world to faster changes than those determined only
or primarily by subsistence needs. Reactions, however, varied sharply from one
country to another, from one social group to another, from one generation to
another; we can briefly describe the main directions of change, but we shall not
undertake to follow in detail the amount of progress accomplished in each region at
every moment.

Probably the most widespread and obvious change was the general replacement of
payments and tributes in kind (that is, in goods and services) by payments and
tributes in cash or credit. This is what old-fashioned books used to call "the rise of
money economy" as opposed to an earlier stage of "natural economy" or "closed
economy." We now realize, however, that at no time in the Middle Ages was the
European economy so introvert that every community lived exclusively on the
natural products of its own soil and labor; there always were exchanges, no matter
how small, and mediums of exchange to carry them out. Further, we no longer draw
a firm line between money proper (that is, coins or written means of payment
expressing a value in coin, such as instruments of credit or banknotes) and other
mediums such as grain, oxen, cigarettes, or any other goods or services that at a
given time happen to be more universally accepted in payment (in economic terms,
"more liquid"). The legendary King Midas, who transformed all he touched into
gold, was unfit to live; there were times and places in the Middle Ages when coined
gold and silver would not easily be exchanged for other goods and services, but
oxen were a sufficiently liquid "money." Still, coins normally possess many
advantages that make them more liquid; by using them to a larger extent, agriculture
fitted more snugly into the context of commercialization. As for credit, the great
lubricant of the Commercial Revolution, it also made progress in agricultural
economy, but not as much as in trade, and with more mixed effects. Merchants
usually borrowed at moderate interest rates, looked forward to considerable profits
for their investments, and could cover themselves against excessive risks by such
contracts as the sea loan, the commenda and, later, insurance. Agriculturists had

138
little or no coverage against risks, expected no extraordinary profits, and often paid
high interest charges.

Actually the agricultural society resorted to credit for consumption purposes more
frequently than for investment and develop. ment. If a harvest failed, a consumption
loan, no matter how usurious, might be the only means for an improvident or
impecunious farmer to survive until the next harvest. Certain forms of agrarian
credit offered him some protection against unpredictable variations of climate: by
selling "grain on the stalk" (before it was harvested) for a predetermined price, no
matter how cut down by the buyer, a farmer might happen to receive at once a larger
sum than the crop would be worth at harvest time. Ordinarily, however, excessive
borrowing would reduce not only a needy or reckless consumer but also an
overambitious investor to destitution and expropriation. Yet if we disregard his
personal plight, a transfer of land from prodigal or inefficient hands to a more
rational management may be counted an economic gain. Some of the best run
baronial and ecclesiastic estates were built up by foreclosed mortgages; conversely,
a negligent baron or abbot quickly dispersed the accumulated acquisitions of his
predecessors. Though the official doctrine of the Church disapproved of all forms of
interest-bearing loans, the records bear witness to systematic despoliation of tenants
and neighbors at the hand of church administrators; they needed not lend at
especially high rates, but more often than not they displayed greater order and
persistence than their lay counterparts. Merchants were masters of the lending game,
but their familiarity with the cooperative methods of trade made them more open to
agreements that would help the borrower as well as the lender. Especially in Italy
and southern France, they favored contracts whereby they advanced to tenants seed,
animals, and tools in return for an increased but not unreasonable share of the
product (up to one half). No such arrangements were offered by the hated Italian and
Jewish usurers who made their living in the smaller towns and villages of Europe by
fleecing depressed or spendthrift agriculturists. Yet it is doubtful that they charged
more than native usurers; and they might have been more lenient if they had been
less exposed to confiscation, extortion, and excommunication.

If credit on the whole tended to impoverish and enslave the inhabitants of the
country, cash had the opposite effect. It enabled both lords and peasants to shop for a
greater variety of market goods and spurred them to increase their marketable
production in order to procure more cash; further, it loosened all inherited per sonal
attachments to a master, a community, and a routine. Since maximum "liquidity"
brought some benefits to all parties, it met with little opposition in the regions that
had long been accessible to the free and individualistic practices of urban milieus,
and penetrated fairly easily even in the most secluded manorial communities. The
lord eagerly commuted the reluctant and inefficient deliveries of commodities and
labor owed by the villeins into fixed monetary dues, and used part of the proceeds to
hire specialized seasonal help for a better exploitation of his demesne; sometimes he
chose to put out to lease the demesne as well and live entirely on rents, with no
further concern for the management of his land. The peasants took advantage of
released time and dispensation from consignment of specific goods to orient their

139
production towards an external, competitive market; sometimes they chose to
supplement agricultural income by setting up rustic workshops or accepting such
work as was put out by the urban crafts. Distinctions between serfdom and free
tenancy became blurred as both entailed financial rather than personal obligation,
and this accelerated the movement towards universal enfranchisment. By the mid-
thirteenth century, serfdom had almost entirely disappeared in northern and central
Italy; in France it was officially abolished on royal estates in the early fourteenth
century and became exceptional in several regions on private domains; great patches
of free peasantry emerged at about the same time in Switzerland, southern and
western Germany, the Low Countries, and, somewhat later, in England. What is
more, serfdom, like labor services and payments in kind, now tended to fade away
quietly, no longer as a result of clashes between dependents and masters, but mainly
because neither party regarded it as very helpful. The agrarian ideal of security
based on permanent mutual obligations was slowly bending towards the commercial
quest for opportunity based on temporary contractual agreements.

The influence of trade was more direct and powerful in promoting specialization.
It did not seriously affect the general tendency of agriculturists to produce
indiscriminately all the basic foodstuffs needed for their own maintenance, but it
guided them in planning the production of surpluses. Preexisting local traditions
were strengthened or weakened accordingly as soil quality, communications, labor
conditions and skills favored or hindered a specific culture. In the early period of the
Commercial Revolution, even the most unpromising districts strove to produce more
cereals than they ordinarily consumed, if only to make sure that they would have
enough on a bad year. By 1300, however, the Teutonic Knights were gaining partial
control of the northern international market; their freshly developed lands were
fertile; large rivers conveyed their crops from the flat hinterland to the Hansa ports;
labor was cheap and everything was efficiently organized. On southern markets,
Sicily, ancient Rome's granary, still played an important role thanks to its good
maritime communications and the depressed standard of living of its peasants;
Italian merchants, however, were increasingly relying on countries outside Catholic
Europe, from southern Russia and the Balkans to Morocco, for supplementary
imports. There were many minor exporters-Brandenburg, Suffolk, Ile-de-France,
and many others-but some of the lands that would have been most suitable,
including the Po valley and the Belgian plain, did not even take care of their own
needs.

Not unlike cereals, wine was produced for local consumption wherever vines
would grow, even in Gloucestershire where, according to the French chancellor of
Henry II, one had better gulp it .,with closed eyes and with tense jaws." The early
period of the Commercial Revolution was marked by almost indiscriminate
expansion: landlords granted plots and reduced dues to any tenant who planted new
vineyards, sourly fermented juices were made palatable by the addition of honey
and spices, and medieval containers were not tight enough to let age bring out the
distinction between superior and inferior kinds. By the thirteenth century, however,
the map of prized brands was taking shape, and certain districts (Auxerre, for

140
instance), had converted all their soil to vineyards. The same provinces of France
that are famous today gave the best and most widely exported dry wines; costly
sweet wines were the specialty of Greece; Italian and Rhineland wines had regional
fame rather than international celebrity. What mattered in every instance was not
only the natural virtue of soil and climate, but also the proximity of waterways; for
the weight of the barrels made overland transportation exceedingly expensive, and a
barrel easily collapsed when carried over a bumpy road.

Though not a product of the soil, preserved fish cannot be omitted from the top
triad of best-selling food crops. Scanian herring, as we have seen, was firmly in the
lead, but international trade paid much attention to other fish, ranging from tough
Icelandic stockfish to mellow caviar of the Black Sea. To a smaller extent, English
bacon, Scandinavian butter, Iberian and Italian nuts, Cyprus sugar, and many other
foodstuffs (too many for listing) had also become the object of specialized
production and trade.

Industrial (or rather, "preindustrial") development also stimulated agricultural

specialization. Wool, like grain and wine, had been and continued to be produced
everywhere: the demand kept growing, and virtually no lord was too rich or peasant
too poor to neglect the cash that sheep could raise for him. The lower French,
Italian, and German grades were good enough for homespun or cheap and medium-
priced commercial textiles. When the very best was desired, northern Europe called
for English wool, and southern Europe for Spanish or African wool. Apparently
English sheep were so scrawny that one of them gave at most one pound of wool;
but there were perhaps as much as eight millions of them (two for every inhabitant
of the kingdom), and the king, whose finances heavily depended on wool duties,
pushed the product with foreign merchants while forbidding them to take out in cash
their earnings from anything they sold or lent. This, and the generally acknowledged
superiority of English wool, after the mid-thirteenth century, endangered the
standing of Spanish and African wool in the Italian quality market. Perhaps in
response to the challenge, the Castilian king in 1273 granted extraordinary
privileges to the guilds of migratory sheep; Genoese merchants shortly after turned
their attention to an African breed that was destined for a great future, the long-
haired merino. Still it took more than two centuries before Castilian-bred merinos
eclipsed all competitors; moreover, Spain paid a heavy price in the damage inflicted
by sheep shuttling back and forth through miles of forest and cultivable land.

It would be long to run through the list of medieval industrial crops, even if we
limited it to textile fibers and vegetable dyestuffs, which were as prominent among
those crops as was cloth-making among industries. Let us consider only the two
commonest dyes, sold by the ton rather than by the pound and ground by mills
rather than by hand: red madder and blue woad. Both of them were cultivated
almost ubiquitously, but in the course of the Commercial Revolution the production
tended to concentrate in a few districts at a short distance from industrial regions.
Madder root fetched higher prices, but it had to grow for two years before it was
picked, and uprooting destroyed the plant. Woad leaves, on the contrary, were

141
picked four or five times a year without harming the plant; or else the plant could be
fitted into the rotation of cereal crops. It was sown in arable fields after grain had
been harvested, picked before the next sowing of food crops, and the stalks without
leaves were reused as fodder. Sooner or later any intelligent farmer was bound to
realize that woad was more profitable than madder; by the fourteenth century a
change in fashion, that made red-colored cloth less approved than blue-colored cloth
in elegant circles, accelerated the shift and caused woad production to soar.

We cannot always tell what influence profit-minded merchants may have had in
promoting changes in production and fashion, but a pervasive connection between
commercial and agrarian initiative is clearly indicated in the Italian manuals of
commercial practice that appear from the late thirteenth century on. They describe
with almost incredible precision the quality, cost, size, and other characteristics of
every commodity available at every seaport or distribution center where merchants
and agriculturists met. They often tell what ways and means of transportation are
cheaper and safer, what taxes and tolls one has to expect, when an item will be ready
for delivery, and how abundant is the normal crop. One of the manuals shows us the
agents of a Florentine company of merchant bankers making the rounds of Apulian
villages where the best local cheeses are sold, and, a few pages further, other agents
of the same company using a list of every Cistercian and Premonstratensian
monastery of England where fine wool can be had.

Lay and ecclesiastic landowners often meet the merchants more than half-way.
One example will suffice, that of Thierry d'Hirecon, a slightly younger
contemporary of Benedetto Zaccaria (he died in 1328), who was Bishop of Arras
and owner of several estates in northern France. Like Zaccaria, Thierry managed his
business with the most advanced methods that the mature experience of the
Commercial Revolution had found. For ploughing and harrowing, the fundamental
operations in the production of cereals, he employed domestic servants, who lived
on the estate the whole year, and paid them both food and wages; for the smaller
tasks he hired unattached farm hands, paying them by the day or the job, in cash or
in kind, as seemed most convenient to him. He used iron tools and four-horse
ploughs unstintingly, prepared the winter's sowing by four successive ploughings,
and thus obtained such bumper yields for wheat as 8.7 to one in a recorded case, and
12.8 to one in another. The spring crop, in one of his estates, at least, consisted
mainly of soil-enriching leguminous plants. Cereals sold best in the Flemish cities:
the bishop shipped them directly by water to merchants of Ghent and Bruges, paying
for transportation in one recorded instance about 17 per cent of the selling price. He
also sold wood, by auction or retail sales, raised pigs for profit, and doubled in less
than one year his original investment in a flock of sheep, which he had bought in fall
when prices were lowest and resold at a more favorable moment after having taken
and sold their wool.

No doubt Bishop Thierry was as outstanding among agriculturists as a Bonsignori

or a Bardi among merchants. Arras, his see, was a thriving industrial and financial
center in the midst of unusually fertile land. Still his discriminating management

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 indicates a change of mentality that was no longer restricted to a few urbanized
areas. If one compares the manual of agriculture of Pietro de Crescenzi, a Bolognese
judge and landowner, with the approximately contemporary English manual of
Walter of Henley (thirteenth century), one finds that the former is more sophisticated
and aware of Roman agronomic theory, but the latter has practical experience and
shrewdness enough to make the most of every chance for profit. And if Padua,
Venice, and other Italian cities were first in providing mechanical clocks on public
squares to remind people that time is money, a few English castles did not take long
in following suit.

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 THE DARK SIDE OF
THE PICTURE
To go back where we started, let us remember that only a small fraction of the
agrarian scene is clearly visible, mostly through documents written by and for the
enterprising rich. Much of the rest is literally immersed in darkness, on which
scholars have but recently begun to project the dim light of such auxiliary sciences
as the study of pollens and the analysis of buried metals. And while it does not seem
unwarranted to assume that by and large t' ! pattern of commercial development in
the better-known leading cities resembled that of obscure ones, we cannot make the
same assumption in regard to agricultural development; the country, it will never be
said too often, is a poor conductor. Even in the restricted area for which information
is available, we can and should notice conflicting drives.

We have pointed out that increasing commutation of payments in kind and labor
services into monetary rents generally benefited both the lords and the peasants. All
parts of this statement, however, need qualification. At one time or another, many
lords discovered that the flat cash dues for which they had settled were whittled
down by debasement of coinage and increased cost of living. Then they tried to
reintroduce some form of alternative payment (either cash or commodities and
labor, at their choice), or they imposed new contributions, no longer as landowners
but as feudal governors of the land. The peasants, too, not always found it
convenient to scrape together cash for rent by offering their produce and labor in an
unpredictable open market, where the weak and the needy might be mercilessly
exploited. Especially if their land was overcropped, burdened with debts, or exposed
to enemy incursions, they would rather preserve or restore the ties of the traditional
village community, where the lord carried most responsibilities in return for fixed
labor services and prorated deliveries of goods. Personal freedom, a great step
forward if it opened the door to expanding opportunities, became an undesirable
burden if it entailed heavy additional liabilities. Significantly, the French ordinance
of 1315, which offered to the king's serfs enfranchisement in the lofty name of the
"natural liberty of all men," added in the same breath that should anyone choose "to
remain in the humiliation of serfdom," he would nevertheless be subject like the
others to a new war tax imposed on free men.

Opportunity existed in agriculture as in commerce, but it was less accessible and,

above all, less elastic. Not only were there many villages that remained out of reach
of the Commercial Revolution, but every village depended on a delicate ecologic
balance that was easily upset by progress. Demographic growth was generally a
factor of economic development, but if the population of a specific locality grew too
fast and the excess was not absorbed by urbanization and emigration, plots became
too small for efficient cultivation, and no adequate provision was made for the
livestock whose draft power, fleece or meat and, above all, whose manure were
badly needed. If, on the contrary, too much space was allotted to sheepraising or

144
 industrial crops, the community lost its primordial asset, the ability to feed itself.
Protected seigniorial forests and ponds, the object of peasants' hatred, were no
longer large and well distributed enough to neutralize the accumulative ravages of
deforestation, soil erosion, and hydraulic disorder caused by countless generations
of men and sheep. The small commercial farmer dreaded abnormally bad and
abnormally good harvests almost equally: the former depleted granaries, the latter
depressed prices. Liquid capital, generally scarce even among the largest
landowners, was not always poured into productive investments such as the
purchase of tools and livestock, but often spent for irrational acquisition of scattered
additional land, or for those enormous banquets and celebrations that broke the
monotony of country life. And even the best administrators miscalculated their
chances: the extant accounts of estates seldom match the high yields optimistically
suggested by manuals of agriculture, and some of them, especially after the mid-
thirteenth century, show declines.

Can we reconstruct, on such localized evidence, a general trend? The

disconnected texture of the agrarian landscape tended to isolate failure as much as
success. Overcrowding and underpopulation, blight and bliss existed side by side.
By the thirteenth century, as documents become more abundant, we catch glimpses
of trim, thriving farmers' towns (in Tuscany, for instance) with communal
administrators, judges and notaries, with artisans of all crafts, with stores full of city
goods, and even with schools. We find affluent communities of herdsmen in the
highest valleys of Switzerland, and we can identify a few rich peasants almost
everywhere. On the other hand, poverty does not spare the high-born. There is the
lord of Tintinnano near Siena, who begs the commune for money to buy a pair of
sandals; there are the numerous children of the lower nobility, whose only hopes for
decent living are a profitable marriage (sometimes with the daughter of a rich
farmer) or military, religious, and bureaucratic employment with a higher lord.
Towns offer hope to the ambitious and the uprooted; but a great many peasants are
unable or unwilling to move, even if they have to live in more wretched
circumstances than the lowest urban proletarians. They sleep in mud hovels or
caves, which they sometimes share with chickens and other farm animals, own
almost no furniture or linen, and can stretch the scarce food grown in their tiny plots
only by working for miserable wages on other people's land. Still the worst degree
of destitution in the thirteenth century does not seem as stark as that of many serf
and slave peasants of the tenth; and increased distances between the very rich and
the very poor are the normal result of ages of growth, including our own. All told,
there is no reason to depart from the tentative diagnosis we suggested in regard to
population growth, expansion of cultures and technological progress: continuing
improvement throughout the age of the Commercial Revolution, with constant or
increasing acceleration up to the mid-thirteenth century, but with a tendency towards
a slackening pace in the last decades of that century and the first half of the
fourteenth.

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 FROM ATTRITION TO
CONTRACTION: THE
REVOLUTION COMES
TO A HALT
The retardation of agricultural development in the last hundred years before the
Great Plague of 1346-48 had an attenuated parallel in a number of disturbances that
affected commercial and craft development to some extent. Demography is the
sector where the parallelism was closest: many towns seem to have slowed down or
arrested their growth after 1250, and even Florence, after attaining her medieval
peak around 1300, underwent a very slight population decrease. The adverse trend,
however, was not so pronounced or generalized that it may not be explained by
intensified birth control or various local causes. The other unfavorable occurrences
were still more localized, or external to the main economic process: wars in France,
in the Levant, and between or inside towns; taxation and forced loans connected
with the wars; bank failures that did not, however, prevent the formation of new
banks on the ruins of the old ones; declining profits in ordinary trade, but with lower
risks; contractions in the Flemish woollen industry and the Lucchese silk industry
that may have been offset by the expansion of younger textile centers; depletion of
certain silver mines that was probably compensated by exploitation of other veins. It
has been claimed that these and other attritions, combined with the retardation of
agricultural growth, prepared the ground for the more serious blow of the Great
Plague and its consequences. This is an attractive hypothesis, but we lack precise
data to prove or disprove it. - -- - -- - - - - - ---

At any rate, we must distinguish the strains of agriculture, which affect essential
needs such as the nourishment of the cultivator and irreversible processes such as
soil erosion, from the incidental setbacks that trade can take in its stride and
sometimes turn into advantages. War brings dividends to the merchant and the
maker of swords. Forced loans suggest to the businessmen in charge of municipal
finances the gimmick which might have made the Roman Empire both solvent and
popular if the emperors had thought of it: funded debt, that is, an advance of capital
which does not have to be returned at any specified time but brings to the lenders a
steady income from the proceeds of regular taxation. It was always possible for a
merchant to diversify his investments according to his preferred ratio of risks and
profits. Commercial and industrial competition produced both winners and losers,
but the net result, in a world that was still too fragmented for international
monopolies, cartels, and protectionisms to stifle initiative, was a continuous search
for new methods, new routes and new markets. Without going into further detail, let
us point out that the very mechanism of economic growth generates at every step its
own wear and tear, its jams and imbalances; but it also mends itself by resharpening
its parts, removing or turning one obstacle after another, adding new tools and
discovering fresh outlets. Indeed there are indications that, in Genoa at least and

146
most probably at other places whose evidence has been less thoroughly studied,
cycles of crest and trough like those that characterized the so-called "dynamic
equilibrium" of a very long stretch of the Industrial Revolution were already at work
in the thirteenth century and possibly in the twelfth as well. They caused temporary
trouble and worry, but they did not deflect the upward direction of the secular trend.

Whatever the attrition, on the eve of the Great Plague the medieval merchant was
seemingly bound for ever greater economic success. He had just added China to his
backyard, insurance to his fences, many kinds of mills to his tool shed; he wore new
glasses to verify his new double-entry books of accounting, and probably did not
mind the new medicine some doctors were prescribing, "water of life," that is,
distilled spirits. In his home town, he made the good and the bad weather, with a
self-assurance, or indeed an arrogance his Greco-Roman predecessors would never
have dreamed of, and his modern successors would not dare display. Quite cocky
even abroad, when dealing with sovereigns who depended heavily on his economic
or military cooperation, he spoke more softly to the great monarchs of the age. Still
his actual power was transparent under the mantle of the most intractable king of the
strongest European state, Philip the Fair of France (1285-1314): the sovereign who
challenged both Pope Boniface VIII and King Edward I of England entrusted his
tangled finances to a Florentine merchant (Musciatto Guidi) and his fledgling navy
to a Genoese merchant (Benedetto Zaccaria).

No doubt there were many people who complained that alien moneylenders came
"with nothing but a pen and an inkpot" to write down the advances made out to
kings or peasants in the form of simple vouchers, and in return for such scribblings
eventually carried off the material wealth of the land. But the merchants also wrote
books in large number. It is no small token of their ascendancy in the thirteenth and
early fourteenth century that the most widely copied and read book was that of
Marco Polo, where practical information on markets interlards the romance of
travel, and that the greatest poem of the entire Middle Ages was written by a
registered if not very active member of the Florentine guild of spice-sellers, Dante
Alighieri. The merchants also built town halls, arsenals, hospitals, and cathedrals.
When the Great Plague struck, Siena had just begun work on an extension of her
enchanting Duomo, so that it would outdo the cathedral of her neighbors and
commercial rivals in Florence. Evidently the crash of the Bonsignori bank had not
destroyed Siena's financial competitiveness. The Great Plague did: the majestic,
unfinished remains of the "Duomo Nuovo" eloquently confirm the testimony of
written records.

It is not our task to follow up the general crisis that brought the Commercial
Revolution to a halt after 1348, and it would be impossible to examine in a few lines
the debated problems of its origin, impact, limits, and duration. In the writer's
opinion, the commercial attrition and agricultural saturation that preceded the crisis
were not incurable. They might have been solved if they had not been compounded
by three agents of secular depression. These may have been latent before 1346-48
but came to the fore in the second half of the thirteenth century: protracted and

147
 destructive wars in western Europe and the entire continent of Asia; a sudden return
of periodically recurring, hemisphere-wide epidemics that went on for almost three
hundred years; and a new pulsation of climate that made it harder for nature to
repair the wounds inflicted by man. War, plague, climatic change: these had been the
major disasters that broke the economy of the Roman Empire. Happily, the
Commercial Revolution had built up economic strength and resilience far beyond
the classic peak of golden mediocrity; hence the economy of medieval Europe
declined somewhat, but did not fall.

148
 Suggestions for Further Reading
I: GENERAL WORKS

The Cambridge Economic History of Europe, vols. I-III (1941-63; partially revised
edition of vol. I, 1966), is the most comprehensive survey of the entire medieval
period and altogether the best cooperative work on the subject. It includes essays by
eminent masters, some of whom also were gifted writers. Too large and uneven for
easy reading from cover to cover and not everywhere up to date, it remains
nevertheless indispensable for consultation, methodology, and extensive
bibliographic guidance. (Henceforth referred to as C.E.H.)

Three smaller volumes in the French collection Nouvelle Clio (Presses

Universitaires) cover the same ground with less emphasis on facts and with useful
suggestions of work to be done: R. Doehaerd, Le haut moyen dge occidental,
economies et societes (Paris, 1971); L. Genicot, Le XIIIe siecle europeen (1968); J.
Heers, L'Occident aux XIVe et XVe siecles, aspects dconomiques et sociaux (1966).

The best one-volume cooperative history in English is the Fontana Economic

History of Europe, I (Fontana, London, 1972), which brings up to date (in a
sketchier way) the bibliography of C.E.H. and touches some problems inadequately
examined in it, but in no way supersedes it. Another cooperative history (in German
but with international collaboration), Handbuch der europaische Sozial- and
Wirtschaftsgeschichte, is expected to appear soon (Ernst Kleist, Stuttgart). Of one-
author, onevolume works the most detailed is probably that of G. Fourquin, Histoire
economique de l'Occident medieval (Presses Universitaires, Paris, 1969), a useful
book, whereas R. Latouche's mediocre The Origins of Medieval Economy (Barnes
and Noble, New York, 1961) hardly deserved an English translation. Lastly one may
mention G. Hodgett, A Social and Economic History of Medieval Europe (Methuen,
London, 1972), clear but elementary, and R.H. Bauder, The Economic Development
of Medieval Europe (Thames and Hudson, London, 1971), more original, and
sometimes controversial.

Of economic histories restricted to individual countries the following should be

noted: ENGLAND, J. Clapham, A Concise Economic History of Britain up to 1700
(Cambridge University Press, 1949), somewhat outdated but readable and well
balanced; M.M. Postan, The Medieval Economy and Society, an Economic History
of Britain, 1100-1500 (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1972), vigorously
controversial. ITALY, G. Luzzatto, An Economic History of Italy from the Fall of
the Roman Empire to 1600 (Barnes and Noble, New York, 1961), somewhat
outdated and very concise but excellent; and the essays of various authors, with an
introduction of C.M. Cipolla, all in Italian, Storia dell'economia italiana, I
(Boringhieri, Turin, 1959). FRANCE, not so much the old and mediocre Histoire
efconomique de la France, I, by H. See and R. Schnerb (Colin, Paris, 1948), as the

149
essays of various authors edited by R. Cameron, Essays in French Economic History
(Irwin, Homewood, Ill., 1971). SPAIN, J. Vicens Vives, An Economic History of
Spain (Princeton University Press, 1969), partly outdated but excellent.
GERMANY, F. Liitge, Deutsche Sozial- and Wirtschaftsgeschichte, in Enzyklopadie
der Rechts- and Staats- wissenschaft (Berlin, 1960), competent, short, dull. NEAR
EAST, the essays of various authors, edited by M.A. Cook, Studies in the Economic
History of the Middle East (Oxford University Press, 1970).

While referring the readers to the works listed above for further bibliographic
information, we should specifically mention two classic works that have lost nothing
of their methodological value even though the information is dated and some of the
hypotheses are no longer regarded as valid: H. Pirenne, Histoire economique et
sociale du Moyen Age (2nd ed., partially revised by H. Van Werveke, Presses
Universitaires, Paris, 1963), and M. Bloch, Feudal Society (University of Chicago
Press, 1960). Though not on the same level, R.L. Reynolds, Europe Emerges
(University of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 1961), contains stimulating suggestions.
Lastly, my own The Birth of Europe (Evans-Lippincott, New York, 1967) develops
more fully some of the concepts outlined in the present book.

II: PARTICULAR TOPICS AND PROBLEMS

The central methodological problem in economic history-combining the humanistic

approach of history with the social science approach of economics-can be tackled in
more than one way; see, for instance, the March 1971 issue of the Journal of
Economic History, where scholars of different tendencies, generations, and
preparations have reviewed past works and offered suggestions for the future.
Unfortunately, however, what should be an enriching dialogue between historians
trained in economic analysis and economists aware of historical structure is still
hampered by mutual diffidence and inferiority complexes. The debate has lately
centered on a badly-put question, whether quality or quantity is the prime raw
material for study. They actually are two faces of the same coin: adjectives usually
imply a quantitative assessment (we call "rich" a man who owns or cams more than
a certain amount), figures derive their significance from qualitative judgments ("five
percent of the population was literate" explains nothing unless we consider what was
read, what was absorbed, and what influence it had on the entire society). When it
comes to medieval economic history, whose extant sources deliver very few and
often unreliable figures, with adjectives mostly reflecting the views of privileged
individuals or classes, economic historians need all the help of both general history
and general economics to draw a plausible though never definitive picture.

Alan (with woman, of course) is the protagonist of history and the measure of all
things; but in medieval demography, prudence is the best part of valor. Even the
most erudite and technically sophisticated general works, such as J. Russell, British
Medieval Population (University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque, 1948) and
R.J. Mols, Introduction a la demographic hislorique des villes d'Europc du XIVe au
XVIIIe siecle (3 vols., University de Louvain, 1954-6), are based on hazardous

150
extrapolations from fragmentary positive data. We do have precise information for
small stretches of time and space; for the rest, we must mainly rely on a mass of
impressions.

G. Duby, Rural Economy and Country Life in the Medieval West (University of
South Carolina Press, Columbia, 1968), offers an excellent survey of the history of
agriculture from the Carolingian period to the end of the Middle Ages, where
analysis and synthesis, economic realities and historical ideologies are equally
stressed; its bibliography is almost exhaustive. His Guerriers et Paysans, PIIe-XIIe
siecles (Gallimard, Paris, 1973) goes farther back in time and broadens the picture to
other aspects of economic life. Less important, but still useful for its grasp of
peasant customs, is R. Grand and R. Delatouche, L'Agriculture au Moyen Age (De
Boccard, Paris, 1950). Those who prefer a strictly economic approach to a broadly
humanistic one may choose to read B.H. Slither van Bath, The Agrarian History of
Western Europe (Arnold, London, 1963), a competent book, sometimes beclouding
the insufficiency of extant data under bold extrapolations and sheer guesswork. On
the other hand, E. Sereni, Histoire du paysage rural italien. (Laterza, Bari, 1964),
supplementing strictly economic information with an unusual wealth of pictorial and
literary material, will be especially suggestive for some other readers.

No recent book is devoted to a general survey of the history of commerce, but

chapters IV and V of C.E.H., II, and chapter II of C.E.H., III (respectively by M.M.
Postan, R.S. Lopez, and R. de Roover), give an almost complete panorama if read
consecutively. None of the later general works on medieval economic history covers
the ground or the bibliography as thoroughly, though R. Roehl's chapter 3 in the
Fontana Economic History ("Patterns and Structure of Demand") provides
interesting if sketchy comments on one aspect not adequately dealt with in C.E.H.,
and though bibliographies, of course, are more up to date in later works. On the
other hand, the general history of commerce plays an important part in the best
books of urban history. Leaving a few monographs on individual cities for the third
section of this orientation, we mention here the following studies concerning whole
regions or merchant classes: J. Le Goff, Marchands et banquiers du Moyen Age
(Presses Universitaires, Paris, 1956); J. Lestocquoy, Les villes de Flandre et d'Italie
sous le gouvernement des patriciens (Presses Universitaires, Paris, 1952); P.
Dollinger, The German Hansa (London, 1970); A. Sapori, Le marchand italien au
Moyen Age (Colin, Paris, 1952); D. Waley, The Italian City-Republics
(McGrawHill, New York, 1969). General bibliography on medieval cities and
comments on urban typology are in R.S. Lopez' paper, "The Crossroads within the
Wall," included in O. Handlin and J. Burchard, ed., The Historian and the City
(M.I.T. and Harvard University Presses, 1963).

There is no recent book on the general history of industry either, and C.E.H. deals
in detail with only two branches, woolen cloth (by E. Carus- Wilson; good, but
somewhat English-centered) and mining (by U. Nef; good, with some moralistic
undertones); but Sylvia Thrupp's ch. 6 in the Fontana History provides an excellent
if short survey, with an underdeveloped bibliographic list. A few monographs on

151
individual crafts will be mentioned in the third section. Strictly connected with the
subject is the good book of P. Wolff, Histoire gdndrale du travail, I, part 1 (Nouvelle
Librarie de France, Paris, 1961; the illustrations are an asset); so is S. Thrupp's
chapter on guilds in C.E.H. III.

The history of techniques (both tools and methods) is an important part of all
aspects of economic history; so is that of transportation. On hardware the largest but
not everywhere the best surveys are the cooperative ones edited by C. Singer, A
History of Technology, vols. II and III (Oxford University Press, 1956-7), and by M.
Daumas, Histoire ginerale des techniques, vols. I and II (Paris, 1962-7); but one
should not miss Lynn White's stimulating, if occasionally overenthusiastic,
Medieval Technology and Social Change (Oxford University, 1962), and the spirited
sketch of S. Lilley, Men, Machines, and History (London, 1948). On business law
and methods the comments, texts, and bibliography of R.S. Lopez and I.W.
Raymond, Medieval Trade in the Mediterranean World (Columbia University Press,
New York, 1955) and the previously mentioned chapter of R. de Roover in C.E.H.
III provide a virtually complete survey. Nothing of the kind exists for transportation,
but the Actes of the Colloque International d'Histoire Maritime (M. Mollat, ed.;
Paris, 1956ff.), plus the sketch of R.S. Lopez, "The Evolution of Land Transport in
the Middle Ages," in Past and Present (1956) are of some help.

On the-crucially important subjects of money, credit, and prices there is a plethora

of monographs but no satisfactory general survey. C.M. Cipolla, Money, Prices and
Civilization in the Mediterranean World (Princeton University Press, 1956) is a
stimulating introduction to some aspects; further bibliography on monetary history
can be found in R.S. Lopez, 1l ritorno all'oro nell'Occidente duecentesco (Edizioni
Scientifiche italiane, Naples, 1955); on banking and credit several essays included in
A. Sapori, Studi di storia economica, 3 vols. (Sansoni, Florence, 1955) are
fundamental, but one can also use Sapori's popularization, Merchants and
Companies in Ancient Florence (limited edition: La Fondiaria, Florence, 1955) and
de Roover's The Rise and Decline of the Medici Bank (Harvard University Press,
1963, though the latter focusses on a later period.

Studies on the relations between church, state, and businessmen are innumerable
and mostly restricted to specific aspects; some of them will be listed in the third
section. Relations between economics and culture have been discussed mostly in
short papers, such as H. Pirenne, "L'instruction des marchands au Moyen Age,"
Annales d'Histoire Economique et Sociale, I (1929), and, in the same magazine,
R.S. Lopez, "Economie et architecture medi@vale" (1952); the debate is still in
progress.

III: MONOGRAPHIC WORKS

An adequate bibliography of monographs (both books and articles, some of which

are as significant as some general books) would take up another volume, and
duplicate the bibliographies of the works quoted in the first two sections. The small

152
numbed listed hereafter is an arbitrary sampling, with preference given to studies at
least partly in English or French.
(a) Individual cities, regions, or social groups

F.C. Lane, Venice, a Maritime Republic (Johns Hopkins University Press, Baltimore,
1973).

R.S. Lopez, Su e giii per la storia di Genova (Universiti di Genova, 1975).

D. Herlihy, Pisa in the Early Renaissance (Yale University Press, New Haven, 1958).

F. Schevill, History of Florence (Constable, London, revised 1961).

L. Martines, ed., Violence and Civil Disorder in Italian Cities (University of

California Press, 1972).

E. Baratier and F. Reynaud, Histoire du Commerce de Marseille, II (Plon, Paris,

1951).

H. van Werveke, Bruges et Anvers (Brussels, 1944).

L. Genicot, L'dconomie rurale namuroise au bas moyen dge (University de Louvain,

1943).

E. Le Roy Ladurie, Les paysans du Languedoc (SEVPEN, Paris, 1966).

E. Miller, The Abbey and Bishopric of Ely (Cambridge University Press, 1951).

R.H. Hilton, Social Structures of Rural Warwickshire in the Middle Ages (Oxford
University Press, 1950).

J.A. Raftis, Tenure and Alobility, Studies in the Social History of the English Villages
(Pontifical Institute of Medieval Studies, Toronto, 1964).

J. Klein, The Mesta: a Study in Spanish Economic History (Harvard University Press,
1920).

R. Chazan, Medieval Jewry in Northern France (Johns Hopkins University, 1973).

C. Verlinden, L'esclavage dans 1'Europe mdclidvale, I (University de Ghent, Bruges,

1955).
(b) Particular periods or problems

A. Havighurst, ed., The Pirenne Thesis (Heath, Lexington Mass., 1958).

A.R. Lewis, The Northcrn Seas: Shipping and Commerce, A.D. 300-1100 (Princeton

153
 University Press, 1958).

P.H. Sawyer, The Age of the Vikings (Arnold, London, 1962).

R.L. Reynolds, Europe Emerges: Transition toward an Industrial Society (University

of Wisconsin Press, Madison, 1961).

J.Z. Titow, English Rural Society, 1200-1350 (Allen and Unwin, London, 1969).

B. Kedar, Merchants in Crisis, 1270-1400 (Yale University Press, 1975).

Villages desertes et histoire economigue, XI-XVIIle siecles (SEVPEN, Paris, 1965).

J. Gl@nisson and J. Day, Textes et documents d'histoire du moyen dge, XIV-XVe

siecles, I: Les "crises" et leur cadre (SEDES, Paris, 1970).

Les constructions civiles d'interet public dans les villes d'Europe au moyen age (PRO
CIVITATE, Brussels, 1971).

G.H.T. Kimble, Geography in the Middle Ages (London, 1935).

J.W. Baldwin, The Medieval Theories of the just Price (American Philosophical
Society, Philadelphia, 1956).

B. Tierney, Medieval Poor Law (University of California Press, Berkeley, 1959).

E. Coornaert, Les corporations en France avant 1789 (Paris, 1949).

C.M. Cipolla, Literacy and Development in the West (Penguin, Harmonds- worth,
1969).

W.M. Bowski, The Finance of the Commune of Siena (Clarendon, Oxford, 1970).
(c) Production, demand, labor, and communications

R. Dion, Histoire de la vigne et du vin en France (Doullens, Paris, 1959).

E. Fournial, Les villes et l'economie d'echange en Forez, XIIIe et XIVe siecles (Paris,
1967).

D. Knoop and G.P. Jones, The Mediaeval Mason (Manchester University Press,
1967).

E. Power, The Wool Trade in English Medieval History (Oxford University Press,
1941).

C. Gaier, A.R. Bridbury, England and the Salt Trade in the Later Middle Ages
(Oxford, 1955).

154
 C.M. Cipolla, Clocks and Culture (London, 1967).

B. Geremek, Le salariat dans 1'artisanat parisien du XIIIe au XVe sickle (Paris,

1968).

F.C. Lane, Navires et constructeurs a Venise pendant la Renaissance (SEVPEN, Paris,

1965, a revised translation of an earlier book in English).

J.E. Tyler, The Alpine Passes, 962-1250 (Blackwell, Oxford, 1930).

Productivity was the theme of the third international conference of Prato, which is to
appear shortly.

IV: PERIODICALS, SERIALS, COLLECTED ESSAYS

Some of the most important essays have appeared in collected works by a

distinguished scholar, or in his honor. Of these publications, too, only a few
examples can be listed here: the studies in honor of Gino Luzzatto, Lucien Febvre,
Armando Sapori, Robert L. Reynolds, Fernand Braudel, and the collected studies of
Marc Bloch, M.M. Postan, Hans van Werveke are mines of information and ideas.
No less important are the published proceedings of international conferences, such
as those of the Conferences internationales d'Histoire economique (Stockholm,
1960; Aix-en-Provence, 1962; Munich, 1965, etc.) and those of the Istituto
Internazionale di Storia Economica Francesco Datini (Prato, annually since 1968).

Specialized magazines are indispensable to keep up with current research and

discussions, both for the articles they contain and for the bibliography they bring up
to date. The most important are, in alphabetical order: Annales (Economies,
Societes, Civilisations (formerly entitled Annales d'Histoire Economique et
Sociale); Anuario de Historia econdmica y social; Economia e storia; Economic
History Review; Journal of Economic History; Journal of European Economic
History; Journal of Social and Economic History of the Orient; Past and Present;
Scandinavian Economic History Review; Vierteljahrschrift fur Sozial- and
Wirtschafts- geschichte. But there are significant contributions also in magazines of
a more restricted scope, and often in magazines of general history or general
economics. Economic historians may soon have to resort to abstracts, as scientists
have for a long time; which would be a pity, for no tabulation or summary can
entirely represent the detail.

155
Index

156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
Table of Contents
ROMAN AND BARBARIAN PRECEDENTS 11
ROMAN AGRICULTURE 3 13
ROMAN COMMERCE AND INDUSTRY 6 15
CRAFTS AND CREDIT 8 17
THE COLLAPSE OF THE EMPIRE AND THE LONG
18
DOWNWARD TREND 10
AGRICULTURE IN THE BARBARIAN AGE 21
THE TRADES IN THE BARBARIAN AGE 18 26
CATHOLIC EUROPE AND HER NEIGHBORS 22 29
THE GROWTH OF SELF-CENTERED AGRICULTURE 33
PATTERNS OF AGRICULTURAL EXPANSION 30 36
CHANGES IN THE DIETS AND THE CROPS 36 40
ANIMALS AND TOOLS 41 44
COMMUNITIES AND INDIVIDUALS 48 50
THE TAKE-OFF OF THE COMMERCIAL REVOLUTION 57
THE JEWS 60 61
THE ITALIANS 63
COINS AND CREDIT 70 68
CONTRACTS 73 71
TRANSPORTATION 79 76
THE UNEVEN DIFFUSION OF COMMERCIALIZATION 80
PATTERNS AND OBJECTS OF TRADE 91 85
THE MEDITERRANEAN SCENE 97 90
DEPOSIT BANKING AND FINANCE AS AN OFFSHOOT OF
95
TRADE
FROM GREENLAND TO PEKING: THE EXPLOSION OF
98
ITALIAN TRADE
THE NORTHERN MEDITERRANEAN 113 104
IN A LOWER KEY 119 110
BETWEEN CRAFTS AND INDUSTRY 113
CRAFT GUILDS 125 115
THE RISE OF THE WOOLLEN CRAFTS 130 119
166
GUILD BALANCE AND PREINDUSTRIAL RISE IN OTHER
125
FIELDS
THE RESPONSE OF THE AGRICULTURAL SOCIETY 132
THE COMMERCIAL COMPONENTS OF AGRICULTURAL
137
GROWTH 154
THE DARK SIDE OF THE PICTURE 143
FROM ATTRITION TO CONTRACTION: THE REVOLUTION
145
COMES TO A HALT 164
SUGGESTIONS FOR FURTHER READING 148
INDEX 155
Though most farmers and peasants individually produced very
164
little surplus, the aggregated surplus o

167