active. It was at Bruges, for example, that the Anglo-Saxon queen Emma,
expelled from England, settled about 1030. In 991-1002 the list of
market tolls at London makes mention of the Flemings as if they were the
most important group of foreigners carrying on business in that
city.[77]
Among the causes of the commercial importance which so early
characterised Flanders, should be pointed out the existence in that
country of an indigenous industry able to supply the vessels that landed
there with a valuable return cargo. From the Roman era and probably even
before that, the Morini and the Menapii had been making woollen cloths.
This primitive industry was due to be perfected under the influence of
the technical improvements introduced by the Roman conquest. The
peculiar fineness of the fleece of the sheep raised on the humid meadows
of the coast was the final factor needed to insure success. The tunics
(_saga_) and the cloaks (_birri_) which it produced were exported as far
as beyond the Alps and there even was at Tournai, in the last days of
the Empire, a factory for military clothing. The Germanic invasion did
not put an end to this industry. The Franks who invaded Flanders in the
fifth century continued to carry it on as had the older inhabitants
before them--there is no doubt but that the Friesian cloaks of which the
ninth century historiographer speaks were made in Flanders.[78] They
seem to be the only manufactured products which furnished, in the
Carolingian era, the substance of a regular trade. The Friesians
transported them along the Scheldt, the Meuse and the Rhine, and when
Charlemagne wanted to reply with gifts to the compliments of the Caliph
Harun-al-Rashid, he found nothing better to offer him than “_pallia
fresonica_.” It is to be supposed that these cloths, as remarkable for
their beautiful colors as for their softness, must have immediately
attracted the attention of the Scandinavian navigators of the tenth
century.
Nowhere, in the North of Europe, were found more valuable products, and
they undoubtedly had a place, side by side with the furs of the North
and the Arab and Byzantine silk fabrics, among the most sought-after
export goods. According to every indication, the cloths which were made
mention of in the London market about the year 1000 were cloths from
Flanders. And the new markets which shipping was now offering to them
could not have failed to give a fresh impulse to their manufacture.
Thus commerce and industry, the latter carried on on the spot and the
former originating abroad, joined in giving Flanders, after the tenth
century, an economic activity that was to continue developing. In the
eleventh century the advances made were already surprising. Thenceforth
Flanders traded with the North of France, the wines of which she
exchanged for her cloths. The conquest of England by William of Normandy
bound to the Continent that country which heretofore had gravitated in
the orbit of Denmark, and multiplied the relations which Bruges had
already been maintaining with London. By the side of Bruges, other
mercantile centers appeared: Ghent, Ypres, Lille, Douai, Arras, Tournai.
Fairs were instituted by the Counts of Thourout at Messines, Lille and
Ypres.
Flanders was not alone in experiencing the salutary effects of the
shipping of the North. The repercussion made itself felt along the
rivers which end in the Netherlands. Cambrai and Valenciennes on the
Scheldt, Liège, Huy and Dinant on the Meuse had already, in the tenth
century, been mentioned as centers of trade. This was true also of
Cologne and Mainz, on the Rhine. The shores of the Channel and of the
Atlantic, further removed from the seat of activity of the North Sea,
do not seem to have had the same importance. Hardly any mention was made
of them, with the exception of Rouen, naturally in close contact with
England, and, further south, Bordeaux and Bayonne whose development was
much slower. As for the interior of France and Germany, they were
affected only very slightly by the economic movement which little by
little spread in that direction, either coming up from Italy or coming
down from the Netherlands.
It was only in the twelfth century that, gradually but definitely,
Western Europe was transformed. The economic development freed her from
the traditional immobility to which a social organization, depending
solely on the relations of man to the soil, had condemned her. Commerce
and industry did not merely find a place alongside of agriculture; they
reacted upon it. Its products no longer served solely for the
consumption of the landed proprietors and the tillers of the soil; they
were brought into general circulation, as objects of barter or as raw
material. The rigid confines of the demesnial system, which had up to
now hemmed in all economic activity, were broken down and the whole
social order was patterned along more flexible, more active and more
varied lines. As in antiquity, the country oriented itself afresh on
the city. Under the influence of trade the old Roman cities took on new
life and were repopulated, or mercantile groups formed round about the
military burgs and established themselves along the sea coasts, on river
banks, at confluences, at the junction points of the natural routes of
communication. Each of them constituted a market which exercised an
attraction, proportionate to its importance, on the surrounding country
or made itself felt afar.
Large or small, they were to be met everywhere; one was to be found, on
the average, in every five leagues square of land. They had, in fact,
become indispensable to society. They had introduced into it a division
of labor which it could no longer do without. Between them and the
country was established a reciprocal exchange of services. An
increasingly intimate solidarity bound them together, the country
attending to the provisioning of the towns, and the towns supplying, in
return, articles of commerce and manufactured goods. The physical life
of the burgher depended upon the peasant, but the social life of the
peasant depended upon the burgher. For the burgher revealed to him a
more comfortable sort of existence, a more refined sort, and one which,
in arousing his desires, multiplied his needs and raised his standard of
living. And it was not only in this respect that the rise of cities
strongly stimulated social progress. It made no less a contribution in
spreading throughout the world a new conception of labor. Before this it
had been serf; now it became free, and the consequences of this fact, to
which we shall return, were incalculable. Let it be added, finally, that
the economic revival of which the twelfth century saw the flowering
revealed the power of capital, and enough will have been said to show
that possibly no period in all history had a more profound effect upon
humanity.
Invigorated, transformed and launched upon the route of progress, the
new Europe resembled, in short, more the ancient Europe than the Europe
of Carolingian times. For it was out of antiquity that she regained that
essential characteristic of being a region of cities. And if, in the
political organization, the rôle of cities had been greater in antiquity
than it was in the Middle Ages, in return their economic influence in
the latter era greatly exceeded what it had ever been before. Generally
speaking, great mercantile cities were relatively rare in the western
provinces of the Roman Empire. Aside from Rome herself, there were
scarcely any at all except Naples, Milan, Marseilles and Lyons. Nothing
of the sort was then in existence which might be comparable to what
were, at the beginning of the tenth century, ports like Venice, Pisa,
Genoa or Bruges, or centers of industry such as Milan, Florence, Ypres,
and Ghent. In Gaul, in fact, the important place held in the twelfth
century by ancient cities such as Orleans, Bordeaux, Cologne, Nantes,
Rouen, and others, was much superior to what they had enjoyed under the
Emperors. Finally, the extension of the economic development of medieval
Europe went well beyond the limits it had reached in Roman Europe.
Instead of halting along the Rhine and the Danube, it overflowed widely
in Germany and reached as far as the Vistula. Regions which had been
travelled over, at the beginning of the Christian era, only by
infrequent traders in amber and furs and which seemed as inhospitable as
the heart of Africa might have seemed to our ancestors, now burgeoned
with cities. The Sound, which no Roman trading vessel had ever crossed,
was animated by the continual passage of ships. They sailed the Baltic
and the North Sea as they had sailed the Mediterranean. There were
almost as many ports on the shores of the one as on the shores of the
other.
From two quarters, trade made use of the resources which Nature had
placed at its disposal. It dominated the two inland seas which between
them bounded the admirably indented coast line of the continent of
Europe. Just as the Italian cities had driven back the Moslems from the
Mediterranean, so in the course of the twelfth century the German cities
drove back the Scandinavians from the North Sea and the Baltic, on which
hereafter were spread the sails of the Hanse Towns.
Thus the commercial expansion which first made its appearance at the two
points at which Europe came in contact with it--by Venice with the world
of the East, by Flanders with the Russo-Scandinavian world--spread like
a beneficent epidemic over the whole Continent. In reaching inland, the
movement from the North and the movement from the South finally met each
other. The contact between them was effected at the mid-point of the
natural route which led from Bruges to Venice--on the plain of
Champagne, where in the twelfth century were instituted the famous fairs
of Troyes, Lagny, Provins and Bar-sur-Aube, which up to the end of the
thirteenth century fulfilled, in medieval Europe, the functions of an
exchange and of a clearing house.
_Chapter V_
The Merchant Class
Almost always, in questions of origin, the amount of information
available is far from satisfactory. It is therefore impossible to
reconstruct an exact picture of the rise of the merchant class which
inspired the commercial movement and caused it to spread over all
Europe.
In certain countries, trade appears as an original and spontaneous
phenomenon. This was the case, for example, at the dawn of history in
Greece and Scandinavia. There, navigation was at least as old as
agriculture. Everything led men to engage in it: the deep conformation
of the coast-lines, the abundance of harbors, and the subtle attraction
of those islands and low-lying shores which were visible on the horizon
and which made a sea-faring life seem the more tempting because there
was so little to be hoped for from a soil as sterile as was that of the
homeland. The proximity of older and poorly defended civilizations held
out, in addition, the lure of rich plunder. Piracy was the initiator of
maritime trade among the Greeks of the Homeric era, as among the Norse
Vikings; for a long time the two vocations developed in concert.
Nothing of the sort, however, was to be found in the Middle Ages. There
was no sign of that heroic and barbarian occupation. The Germanic tribes
that invaded the Roman provinces in the fifth century were complete
strangers to a maritime life. They contented themselves with
appropriating the soil, and the shipping of the Mediterranean continued,
as in the past, to fill the peaceful rôle which had fallen to it under
the Empire.
The Moslem invasion which caused its ruin and closed the sea provoked no
reaction. The situation was taken for granted, and the continent of
Europe, deprived of its traditional markets, remained an essentially
rural civilization. The sporadic trade which Jews, pedlers and
occasional merchants still carried on during the Carolingian era was too
feeble and was too effectively discouraged by the invasions of the
Norsemen and Saracens to lend support to the belief that it was the
precursor of the commercial revival whose first symptoms were visible in
the tenth century.
It would seem natural to suppose, at first glance, that a merchant class
grew up little by little in the midst of the agricultural masses.
Nothing, however, gives credence to that theory. In the social
organization of the late Middle Ages, where each family was attached to
the soil from father to son, it is hard to see what possibly could have
induced men to exchange, for a livelihood made sure by the possession of
the soil, the aleatory and precarious livelihood of the trader. The love
of gain and the desire to ameliorate one’s condition must have carried,
at best, very little weight with a population accustomed to a
traditional way of living, having no contact with the outside world, in
which no novelty, no curiosity stirred the imagination, and in which the
spirit of initiative was probably completely lacking. Though they
frequented the small local markets the peasants never made enough money
out of them to be inspired with the desire for, or even to be inclined
to envisage the possibility of, a manner of life based on trade. Theirs
must have seemed to them merely a normal and customary occupation. The
idea of selling one’s land in order to procure liquid assets certainly
did not occur to any of them. The state of society and the general
outlook on life was entirely opposed to it. There is not the slightest
proof that anybody had ever dreamed of a transaction so bizarre and so
hazardous.
Certain historians have sought to set up as the forerunners of the
merchants of the Middle Ages those servitors whom the great abbeys
charged with procuring, from without, the indispensable commodities for
their subsistence and to whom they sometimes entrusted the selling, in
the neighboring markets, of the surplus of their own harvests and
vintages. This hypothesis, ingenious as it is, does not stand up under
examination. In the first place, the “abbey-merchants” were too few in
number to have an influence of any great moment. In the second place,
they were not free agents, but employees exclusively in the service of
their masters. It is not apparent that any of them ever carried on
business on his own account. No attempt has been successful, and none,
certainly, ever will be successful, to establish a connecting link
between them and the merchant class whose origins we are looking for
here.
All that can be asserted with certainty is that the commercial
_profession_ appeared in Venice at a period when nothing yet gave reason
to expect its spread in Western Europe. Cassiodorus, in the sixth
century, describes the Venetians as even then a sailor-and
merchant-folk. It is an established fact that in the ninth century some
very great fortunes were founded in the city. The treaties of commerce
which Venice later concluded with the Carolingian emperors or with those
of Byzantium, furthermore, leave no room for doubt as to the nature of
the life of her inhabitants. Unfortunately there are no existing data on
the manner in which their capital was accumulated and their business
carried on. It is more than probable that salt, prepared on the islets
of the lagoons, formed at an early date the substance of a lucrative
export trade. The coastal trade along the shores of the Adriatic and
especially the relations of the city with Constantinople resulted in
still greater profits. The extent to which the technique of Venetian
commerce had already been perfected by the tenth century is
extraordinary.[79]
At a period when everywhere else in Europe instruction was the exclusive
monopoly of the clergy, the ability to write was widespread in Venice.
It is perfectly obvious that there was a close relation between this
curious phenomenon and the development of trade.
It was the credit system, which, with the greatest probability, helped
commerce to reach at an early date the point it had attained. To be
sure, there are no records bearing on the matter, earlier than the first
part of the eleventh century. But the custom of maritime loans seems to
have already been so highly developed at this period that their origin
must necessarily be dated much earlier.
The Venetian merchant was in the habit of borrowing from a capitalist
the money necessary for financing a cargo, at a rate of interest which
averaged in general about twenty per cent. A ship was loaded by several
merchants acting in common, and the perils of navigation led maritime
expeditions to be made up of flotillas comprising several vessels manned
by large and carefully armed crews.[80] Everything tends to show that
the profits were extremely high. If, in this respect, Venetian documents
hardly give precise information, we can compensate for their silence by
means of Genoese sources. In the twelfth century maritime loans, the
equipments of ships, and business methods were alike in both cities.[81]
What we know about the enormous profits realized by Genoese mariners
must then hold equally true for their precursors of Venice. And we know
enough about it to be able to state that trade and trade alone, in the
one quarter as in the other, could have enabled those whose fortunes
energy and intelligence favored to acquire abundant capital.[82]
But the secret of the rapid and early fortunes of the Venetian merchants
is undoubtedly to be found in the close relationship which bound their
commercial organization to that of Byzantium, and through Byzantium to
the commercial organization of antiquity. In reality Venice belonged to
the West only by her geographical location; in the life that animated
her and the spirit that inspired her, she was foreign to it. The first
colonists of the lagoons, fugitives from Aquileia and neighboring
cities, brought there the economic technique and tools of the Roman
world. The constant and increasingly active relations which, from then
on, continued to bind the city to Byzantine Italy and Constantinople,
protected and developed that important commercial center. In short,
between Venice and the East, where was preserved the thousand-year-old
tradition of civilization, contact was never lost. Venetian navigators
may be considered as the successor of those Syrian mariners who were so
active, up to the time of the Moslem invasion, in the port of Marseilles
and the Tyrrhenian Sea. They had no need of a long and painful
apprenticeship to fit them for a great commerce. The tradition of it
had, with them, never been lost, and that is enough to explain the
peculiar place they occupy in the economic history of Western Europe. It
is impossible to gainsay that the commercial law and customs of
antiquity were the cause of the superiority which they showed and which
they held from the start. Thorough research will, some day, doubtless
supply definite proof of what is here merely asserted. There is no
doubt, meanwhile, but that the Byzantine influence, so characteristic of
the political constitution of Venice during the early centuries, had
also impregnated its economic constitution. In the rest of Europe the
commercial profession was tardily evolved from a civilization in which
every former trace of it had long since been lost. In Venice it appeared
at the same time as the city itself; there it was a survival from the
Roman world.
Venice naturally exercised a profound effect upon the other maritime
cities which, in the course of the eleventh century, commenced to
appear: Pisa and Genoa first, later Marseilles and Barcelona. But she
does not seem to have contributed to the formation of the merchant class
by virtue of which commercial activity spread little by little from the
shores of the sea towards the interior of the Continent. Here we find
ourselves in the presence of a quite different phenomenon, one which
there are no grounds for believing was connected with the economic
organization of antiquity. To be sure, Venetian merchants were to be met
with at an early date in Lombardy and north of the Alps. But it is not
apparent that they founded colonies anywhere. The conditions underlying
commerce on the land were, after all, too different from those of
commerce on the sea to make it likely that they had an influence of
which, furthermore, no existing records give indication.
It was in the course of the tenth century that there reappeared in
continental Europe a class of professional merchants whose progress,
very slow at first, gathered speed as the following century moved
forward.[83] The increase in population, which began to be manifest at
the same era, is certainly in direct relation to this phenomenon. It had
as a result the detaching from the land an increasingly important number
of individuals and committing them to that roving and hazardous
existence which, in every agricultural civilization, is the lot of
those who no longer find themselves with their roots in the soil. It
multiplied the crowd of vagabonds drifting about all through society,
living from day to day by alms from the monasteries, hiring themselves
out at harvest-time, enlisting in the armies in time of war and holding
back from neither rapine nor pillage when occasion presented. It is
among this crowd of foot-loose adventurers that the first adepts of
trade must, without any doubt, be looked for.
Their manner of life naturally drove them towards all those localities
where the affluence of the inhabitants gave them the hope of gain or of
some fortunate opening. If they assiduously took part in pilgrimages,
they were certainly no less drawn by the ports, the markets, and the
fairs. There they hired themselves out as sailors, as boatmen, as
dockmen or porters. Energetic characters, tempered by the experience of
a life full of the unexpected, must have abounded among them. Many knew
foreign languages and were conversant with the customs and needs of
divers lands.[84] Let a lucky chance present itself--and heaven knows
that chances are numerous in the life of a vagabond--they were
remarkably well equipped to profit thereby. And a small profit, with
skill and intelligence, can always be turned into a big profit. This
must have been particularly true in an era when the insufficiency of
communications and the relative rarity of merchandise offered for sale
must have naturally kept prices at a very high level. Famines were
multiplied throughout Europe, sometimes in one province and sometimes in
another, by that inadequate system of communications, and increased
still more the opportunities, for those who knew how to make use of
them, of getting rich.[85] A few sacks of wheat, seasonably transported
to the right spot, sufficed for the realizing of huge profits. For a
man, adroit and sparing no pains, Fortune then held out the prospect of
fruitful operations. It was certainly not long before nouveaux riches
made their appearance in the midst of this miserable crowd of
impoverished, bare-foot wanderers in the world.
Fortunately there happen to be sources of information which supply proof
that this was in fact the case. It will suffice to cite here the most
characteristic of them, the Biography of St. Godric of Finchale.[86]