HOW THE CRUSADES ONCE MORE MADE THE MEDITERRANEAN A BUSY CENTRE OF
TRADE AND HOW THE CITIES OF THE ITALIAN PENINSULA BECAME THE GREAT
DISTRIBUTING CENTRE FOR THE COMMERCE WITH ASIA AND AFRICA
THERE were three good reasons why the Italian cities should have been
the first to regain a position of great importance during the late
Middle Ages. The Italian peninsula had been settled by Rome at a very
early date. There had been more roads and more towns and more schools
than anywhere else in Europe.
The barbarians had burned as lustily in Italy as elsewhere, but there
had been so much to destroy that more had been able to survive. In
the second place, the Pope lived in Italy and as the head of a vast
political machine, which owned land and serfs and buildings and forests
and rivers and conducted courts of law, he was in constant receipt of
a great deal of money. The Papal authorities had to be paid in gold and
silver as did the merchants and ship-owners of Venice and Genoa. The
cows and the eggs and the horses and all the other agricultural products
of the north and the west must be changed into actual cash before the
debt could be paid in the distant city of Rome.
This made Italy the one country where there was a comparative abundance
of gold and silver. Finally, during the Crusades, the Italian cities had
become the point of embarkation for the Crusaders and had profiteered to
an almost unbelievable extent.
And after the Crusades had come to an end, these same Italian cities
remained the distributing centres for those Oriental goods upon which
the people of Europe had come to depend during the time they had spent
in the near east.
Of these towns, few were as famous as Venice. Venice was a republic
built upon a mud bank. Thither people from the mainland had fled during
the invasions of the barbarians in the fourth century. Surrounded on all
sides by the sea they had engaged in the business of salt-making. Salt
had been very scarce during the Middle Ages, and the price had been
high. For hundreds of years Venice had enjoyed a monopoly of this
indispensable table commodity (I say indispensable, because people, like
sheep, fall ill unless they get a certain amount of salt in their food).
The people had used this monopoly to increase the power of their city.
At times they had even dared to defy the power of the Popes. The town
had grown rich and had begun to build ships, which engaged in trade
with the Orient. During the Crusades, these ships were used to carry
passengers to the Holy Land, and when the passengers could not pay for
their tickets in cash, they were obliged to help the Venetians who were
for ever increasing their colonies in the AEgean Sea, in Asia Minor and
in Egypt.
By the end of the fourteenth century, the population had grown to two
hundred thousand, which made Venice the biggest city of the Middle Ages.
The people were without influence upon the government which was the
private affair of a small number of rich merchant families. They elected
a senate and a Doge (or Duke), but the actual rulers of the city were
the members of the famous Council of Ten,--who maintained themselves
with the help of a highly organised system of secret service men and
professional murderers, who kept watch upon all citizens and quietly
removed those who might be dangerous to the safety of their high-handed
and unscrupulous Committee of Public Safety.
The other extreme of government, a democracy of very turbulent habits,
was to be found in Florence. This city controlled the main road from
northern Europe to Rome and used the money which it had derived from
this fortunate economic position to engage in manufacturing. The
Florentines tried to follow the example of Athens. Noblemen, priests and
members of the guilds all took part in the discussions of civic affairs.
This led to great civic upheaval. People were forever being divided
into political parties and these parties fought each other with intense
bitterness and exiled their enemies and confiscated their possessions
as soon as they had gained a victory in the council. After several
centuries of this rule by organised mobs, the inevitable happened. A
powerful family made itself master of the city and governed the town and
the surrounding country after the fashion of the old Greek "tyrants."
They were called the Medici. The earliest Medici had been physicians
(medicus is Latin for physician, hence their name), but later they had
turned banker. Their banks and their pawnshops were to be found in all
the more important centres of trade. Even today our American pawn-shops
display the three golden balls which were part of the coat of arms
of the mighty house of the Medici, who became rulers of Florence and
married their daughters to the kings of France and were buried in graves
worthy of a Roman Caesar.
Then there was Genoa, the great rival of Venice, where the merchants
specialised in trade with Tunis in Africa and the grain depots of the
Black Sea. Then there were more than two hundred other cities, some
large and some small, each a perfect commercial unit, all of them
fighting their neighbours and rivals with the undying hatred of
neighbours who are depriving each other of their profits.
Once the products of the Orient and Africa had been brought to these
distributing centres, they must be prepared for the voyage to the west
and the north.
Genoa carried her goods by water to Marseilles, from where they were
reshipped to the cities along the Rhone, which in turn served as the
market places of northern and western France.
Venice used the land route to northern Europe. This ancient road led
across the Brenner pass, the old gateway for the barbarians who had
invaded Italy. Past Innsbruck, the merchandise was carried to Basel.
From there it drifted down the Rhine to the North Sea and England, or it
was taken to Augsburg where the Fugger family (who were both bankers
and manufacturers and who prospered greatly by "shaving" the coins with
which they paid their workmen), looked after the further distribution to
Nuremberg and Leipzig and the cities of the Baltic and to Wisby (on the
Island of Gotland) which looked after the needs of the Northern Baltic
and dealt directly with the Republic of Novgorod, the old commercial
centre of Russia which was destroyed by Ivan the Terrible in the middle
of the sixteenth century.
The little cities on the coast of north-western Europe had an
interesting story of their own. The mediaeval world ate a great deal of
fish. There were many fast days and then people were not permitted to
eat meat. For those who lived away from the coast and from the rivers,
this meant a diet of eggs or nothing at all. But early in the thirteenth
century a Dutch fisherman had discovered a way of curing herring, so
that it could be transported to distant points. The herring fisheries of
the North Sea then became of great importance. But some time during the
thirteenth century, this useful little fish (for reasons of its own)
moved from the North Sea to the Baltic and the cities of that inland
sea began to make money. All the world now sailed to the Baltic to catch
herring and as that fish could only be caught during a few months
each year (the rest of the time it spends in deep water, raising large
families of little herrings) the ships would have been idle during the
rest of the time unless they had found another occupation. They were
then used to carry the wheat of northern and central Russia to southern
and western Europe. On the return voyage they brought spices and silks
and carpets and Oriental rugs from Venice and Genoa to Bruges and
Hamburg and Bremen.
Out of such simple beginnings there developed an important system of
international trade which reached from the manufacturing cities of
Bruges and Ghent (where the almighty guilds fought pitched battles with
the kings of France and England and established a labour tyranny which
completely ruined both the employers and the workmen) to the Republic
of Novgorod in northern Russia, which was a mighty city until Tsar Ivan,
who distrusted all merchants, took the town and killed sixty thousand
people in less than a month's time and reduced the survivors to beggary.
That they might protect themselves against pirates and excessive
tolls and annoying legislation, the merchants of the north founded a
protective league which was called the "Hansa." The Hansa, which had
its headquarters in Lubeck, was a voluntary association of more than
one hundred cities. The association maintained a navy of its own which
patrolled the seas and fought and defeated the Kings of England and
Denmark when they dared to interfere with the rights and the privileges
of the mighty Hanseatic merchants.
I wish that I had more space to tell you some of the wonderful stories
of this strange commerce which was carried on across the high mountains
and across the deep seas amidst such dangers that every voyage became a
glorious adventure. But it would take several volumes and it cannot be
done here.
Besides, I hope that I have told you enough about the Middle Ages to
make you curious to read more in the excellent books of which I shall
give you a list at the end of this volume.
The Middle Ages, as I have tried to show you, had been a period of very
slow progress. The people who were in power believed that "progress"
was a very undesirable invention of the Evil One and ought to be
discouraged, and as they hap-pened to occupy the seats of the mighty, it
was easy to enforce their will upon the patient serfs and the illiterate
knights. Here and there a few brave souls sometimes ventured forth
into the forbidden region of science, but they fared badly and were
considered lucky when they escaped with their lives and a jail sentence
of twenty years.
In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries the flood of international
commerce swept over western Europe as the Nile had swept across
the valley of ancient Egypt. It left behind a fertile sediment of
prosperity. Prosperity meant leisure hours and these leisure hours gave
both men and women a chance to buy manuscripts and take an interest in
literature and art and music.
Then once more was the world filled with that divine curiosity which has
elevated man from the ranks of those other mammals who are his distant
cousins but who have remained dumb, and the cities, of whose growth and
development I have told you in my last chapter, offered a safe shelter
to these brave pioneers who dared to leave the very narrow domain of the
established order of things.
They set to work. They opened the windows of their cloistered and
studious cells. A flood of sunlight entered the dusty rooms and
showed them the cobwebs which had gathered during the long period of
semi-darkness.
They began to clean house. Next they cleaned their gardens.
Then they went out into the open fields, outside the crumbling town
walls, and said, "This is a good world. We are glad that we live in it."
At that moment, the Middle Ages came to an end and a new world began.