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.
[Illustration: MEDIÆVAL TRADE]
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 Ægean 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 Cæsar.
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.
[Illustration: GREAT NOVGOROD]
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 Innsbrück, 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 mediæval 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 Lübeck, 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.
[Illustration: THE HANSA SHIP]
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 happened 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.