Chris Wickham, Europe’s Long Economic Boom 950–1300
Population, peasants, social mobility/differentiation, innovation in lordship, community resistance, money, urbanisation, markets, banking, globalisation, epidemics..
Chris Wickham wrote:
Chapter Seven
The long economic boom, 950–1300
Here is what we know about the economic expansion of the central middle ages, in a nutshell. Across the period 950–1300, the population of Europe multiplied by up to three times; there was an extensive process of land clearance, with woodland and rough pasture converted to arable to feed those new mouths; towns greatly expanded in size and number throughout the continent, making goods (above all clothing and metalwork) with an artisanal professionalism that had been much rarer earlier, and selling them far more widely; the use of coins (in this period, overwhelmingly in silver except in Byzantium) became much more common in daily exchange; agricultural specialisms began to develop; the movement of goods and people became, over all, far more extensive, particularly after 1150 or so; and the exchange complexity of western and southern Europe began to extend to the north as well. By medieval standards, this was an economic boom. A much larger population can simply mean that everyone gets poorer; not in this period, however, when there is no doubt that Europe’s economy was much more complex at the end of it than at the beginning, although there are signs, as we shall see, of some regions reaching a population ceiling in the early fourteenth century.
[EVIDENCE PROBLEMS]
Here, however, is what we don’t know:
why that demographic expansion actually began (and when); how it really related to the economic changes of the period; when long-distance exchanges of products became important (Italian merchants could be found in Flanders by the 1120s, but when did their presence become economically significant?); how much any region in Europe really gained from such exchanges, apart from the two great urban epicentres, Flanders and northern Italy; which social groups gained most from the growth in economic complexity, and whether that changed; how far production depended on peasant (i.e. large-scale) rather than aristocratic (i.e. restricted) demand; or the relative importance of agricultural products as against manufactured goods in the European ‘market’, seen as a whole.
We do not even really know such crucial basic details as what goods were actually made in twelfth-century Latin Europe’s largest city, Milan, and where they were sold, before Genoese commercial records (which capture only a small part of them) begin to be dense around 1190; when it was that English wool became the basic raw material for the Flemish cloth towns, let alone how and why; or why it is that the development of silver mines – in this period, a literal licence to print money – can so curiously seldom be seen to have had much of an effect on the prosperity of the wider region in which the silver was.
Our lack of knowledge here has several causes. It is of course the result of problems of evidence, for these are things our sources very seldom tell us directly about, at least before 1300; we will never get the full picture here, in fact, although future archaeological work will certainly help with some of it. But other causes derive from the failings of historians. One is the decline in fashionability of the large-scale serial work on medieval archive sets, which is the only way to get at patterns of development reliably (many current accounts present as ‘fact’ claims that go back to speculations made by pioneers in economic history in the 1960s and often well before, which have never been seriously tested). Another, an important one, is the fact that few people, except in some very localised contexts, have ever seriously tried to create an economic model of how the medieval world worked and fitted together. In most cases, instead, they have borrowed models from the industrialised or industrialising world and applied them to a historical period where things worked very differently, with at best discussions of how particular medieval socioeconomic structures or political policies ‘blocked’ a development which – supposedly – might otherwise have been more similar to that in, say, 1750.
These are problems that cannot be solved here, obviously. But they have to be borne in mind as we proceed. For the fact of this economic expansion is of essential importance if we want to understand the whole dynamic of medieval society in these central centuries and indeed later; but when it is explored here it must be recognised how far basic data and interpretations are missing.
Some general points are clear: the fact that Paris and the Paris basin became unusually economically active in the twelfth century, for example, is a basic context for the growth of the Paris schools and, later, university (for there was no point attracting students if there was no infrastructure to feed them), as well as for the capacity of Philip II of France, with only a restricted territory under his direct control, to match the resources of John of England in their wars in the early thirteenth century, and also for the concentration of resources which produced the striking density of very expensive new Gothic cathedrals in every city of northern France.
But, having said that, we must be honest and admit that we do not really understand how the economy of the Paris region worked in this period. At every stage we have to see that economic changes had important consequences, while recognising that we often cannot tell exactly how. That will be the tension underlying this whole chapter. But it is still better than trying to characterise the social, political, cultural shifts in Europe, particularly after 1150, without taking that economic context into consideration at all.
[POPULATION]
Demographic expansion, then: at least there is no doubt it happened, for a sense of there being steadily more people pervades our documentary records. The scale of it cannot be tracked exactly, however. The only half-reliable figures come from the English Domesday survey of 1086, and then from the English poll tax records of 1377, which come from after the Black Death, the plague which killed between a third and a half of Europeans between 1347 and 1352, and came back in waves later – the European economy was certainly different after that, and we will look at the post-1350 period separately [in a later chapter]. England seems to have had a population of around or above 2 million in 1086 and slightly more in 1377, so clearly had much more before the Black Death. How much more depends on much less complete and more locally based data, but around 5 million (an eleventh of what it is today) is a rough estimate for around 1300, the likely moment of peak population, and 1.5 million is conceivable for the tenth century, when the period of demographic expansion may have started; hence the calculation of a threefold multiplication. Rougher guesses for elsewhere in Europe fit this too; and the estate surveys of the Carolingian period give hints that in Francia the process may perhaps have already begun in the ninth century. The demographic rise probably reached its peak between 1150 and 1300.
[PEASANTS]
If a population triples in size, even if over 300 years, then peasants – always, as we have seen, the huge majority of the population – have to react. They can do so by limiting births (late marriage, stringent rules around sex, abortion, child abandonment), although evidently did not do so, or not enough, in this period. They can farm the land more efficiently, with more systematic crop rotations, better ploughs (which were available, but expensive), and more careful plantings of crops or pasturing of animals on soils which suit them best, even if this means having to exchange your wheat for someone else’s barley or sheep. They can clear nearby woodlands and moorlands and add to the arable fields at their disposal. Or they can move to towns, or even emigrate, to regions where there is more empty space (in Europe, this usually meant clearing wood- land again). European peasants visibly did all these things between 950 and 1300.
Peasants tend not to choose work-intensive farming methods, even where they are available, unless they have to, but this was a period when they did have to (they had more manpower, too, precisely because families were bigger). Organised three-field crop rotation, for example, slowly spread across north-west Europe, just as irrigation spread across al-Andalus and Arab-ruled Sicily, and, later, northern Italy. This intensification developed even more as time went on; not only irrigation in the south but also the introduction of new crops in the north made fallow years unnecessary in a few areas, such as parts of Norfolk and Flanders. There is also widespread evidence for small-scale clearance in already-settled land, as new village- and field-names referring to former woodland show throughout Europe, plus good evidence for land reclamation in marshy areas such as the deltas of the Rhine and the Po. And urban expansion is well documented throughout Europe in this period, as we shall see, which always means immigration, as no town before the modern period had more births than deaths (they were always unhealthy places – almost none of them had even rudimentary sewage systems, for example – and they were also home to the destitute, immigrants who had not been lucky, who died sooner); although moving to towns simply meant that peasants somewhere else had to grow the crops to sell to feed the new urban inhabitants.
What came rather slower was long-distance emigration. Peasants are highly averse to risk, and going off to seek one’s fortune in unknown countries has seldom appealed to them, before the great nineteenth-century colonisations. But the extension of the European political network eastwards, through the conquest and/or Christianisation of the Slav and Hungarian lands (earlier chapter], themselves often underpopulated, made it possible to see that a future in what is now Poland, for example, was less like stepping off the edge of the map. Indeed, once people began to move east (after around 1150, which in itself shows that it was slow to start), they were actively trawled for across Germany and the Low Countries by professional middlemen, employed by lords for that purpose; in return for a leading role in the subsequent settlement, their task was to collect up new settlers, offering them low rents and a stable village environment. The Germanisation of large portions of eastern Europe followed, only reversed in the forced population movements of the late 1940s. The settlers largely cleared land that had been forest before, but frequently expropriated previous inhabitants’ land as well, often with the active support of local powers, who were indeed by this point often themselves German. That is to say, this was not at all the colonisation of wholly virgin soil. (Still less were the other major colonial movements of the period, in Spain and Syria/Palestine – quite heavily populated regions.) But nonetheless, it did lead to a further gradual extension of the arable land of Europe.
One wonders whether, once European peasants realised that to maintain their living conditions in an age of population increase they would have to intensify their labour and extend their fields, there was ever a moment in which they were ahead of the game, and were actually better off. The answers are uncertain and contradictory. Clearing local woodland, for example, was not wholly beneficial; if one cleared it all, one would run short of firewood and building materials, not to speak of resources of wood and waste like swine-pasture and fruits/nuts; a grain monoculture made for a more monotonous and less healthy diet for a thirteenth-century peasant family than had been normal in, say, 900. It is at least the case, however – it is clear in the archaeology – that villages became more coherently planned and houses became better made across this period in many parts of Europe; in much of Italy in the twelfth century they moved from wood to stone, for example, and, although this was rarer in the north (where wood is so widely available and easy to use), stone foundations became slowly more common, as did more sophisticated wood construction techniques such as timber framing: all of these are signs of greater local expertise, and the resources to pay for it, that is to say village-level prosperity. By the thirteenth century, too, excavation shows that peasants more often possessed relatively standardised metalwork such as knives, and indeed dress ornaments (as also good-quality pottery jugs and bowls, although that was an older trend; note that archaeology tells us less about cloth), which indicates a greater access to markets which were themselves more numerous.
[… AND LORDS]
I will come back to markets later. They are not, however, only signs of peasant prosperity, for the steady commercialisation of society can be accompanied by increased landlordly pressure, and indeed often is. And this last remark also shifts the focus for us. The last three paragraphs have said little about lords; but most peasants, at least in the densely settled lands of the west and south, had landlords. In western Europe, only Italy and Spain had large numbers of free landowning peasants, although there were smaller regions where the same was true, such as the Alps, or the coastal regions of the Netherlands and northern Germany. As we saw [earlier chapter], there were certainly more in northern Europe, but the trend in nearly every part of the north in this period was towards the greater power of large landowners too. Lords were indeed in many cases swift to react to the possibilities of taking more from peasants, if peasants became capable of growing more; and the pressure on peasants from the rise in population was everywhere less immediate, perhaps indeed less visible, than the ever-present pressure on them from lordly exactions. It might indeed be argued that the pressure of the latter was more important for the Europe-wide agricultural expansion, commercialisation and growth in productivity than was population growth on its own. I do not think so for these centuries, for we can also track this expansion in regions of Europe (such as parts of Italy) where rents and dues did not yet increase significantly. But demography, the pressure of lords and the increase in agrarian productivity and commercialisation all worked on each other to produce a more complex economy in nearly every region of Europe.
The trends in the pressure of lords on peasants did not all move in the same direction in this central medieval period, all the same. Carolingian estate management frequently focused on the establishment of bipartite estates or manors, with peasants both paying rent and doing regular labour service on a demesne which was run entirely for the benefit of the lord: manors were never universal, but they represented a state-of-the-art management of an estate for profit. Early medieval estates also had often large numbers of unfree people on them with no legal rights, who owed high rents and most of the labour, and who were sharply differentiated from free peasants who had lighter burdens.
These two patterns became steadily less important across our period, and by the thirteenth century they were only really common in England, where indeed they had seen a revival at the end of the twelfth.
Elsewhere in Europe, manors had either never existed (in Spain or Scandinavia or the east) or else were losing coherence rapidly (already in the tenth century in Italy, by the twelfth in France) in favour of more flexible patterns of exploitation – surviving demesnes in France in the thirteenth century, for example, were largely cultivated by wage labour. Agricultural labour service, even in small quantities, still tended to mark unfree legal status, but both dropped back substantially in much of Europe across the period, even if neither had entirely ended before the Black Death. Rent-paying was the overwhelmingly dominant form of tenant obligations thereafter.
Conversely, the development of political rights over the peasantry, the seigneurie banale – rights to take dues for justice, pasturing and wood rights and the use of the mill, and rights to require labour for transport, castle-building and castle guard, as well as extra ad hoc and sometimes large exactions (in France, where these were particularly common, they were called taille, a ‘cut’) – could build up to substantial extra demands on top of rent, and could be exacted by some lords not just from direct tenants but also from free landowning peasants in the territory of a castle. France, western Germany, northern Spain and Italy were the main regions where these patterns could be found. Peasants subjected to all of this were sometimes so dependent that, as also in England, they were called by the old Latin word for slave, servus, serf in French.
Whether or not legally free in origin, they had drifted back into a practical unfreedom, often in the twelfth century; this development was further sharpened by the greater local use of written law, which often reintroduced or reinforced older conceptions of unfreedom. With all the dues available in a seigneurial régime, manorial labour service was hardly necessary any more; and such dues (in particular taille and its equivalents) were also easier to increase than rents, which tended quickly to become fixed.
[COMMUNITY ACTION]
Historians writing on the medieval peasantry until recently saw this set of developments as proof that peasants for the most part paid all their surplus, beyond bare subsistence, to lords, and remained close to destitution as a result. It is now rather less clear that this was always the case, even if we set aside the growing scale of the colonised areas of Europe, where settlers had much lower rents. Even in England, with its high and expanding indices of real unfreedom, rents were not in the thirteenth century at all as high as they could have been, given what we know of grain yields and subletting. And in Italy, Spain and France, one important trend of the twelfth century and early thirteenth was for peasant communities to band together to obtain franchise charters, documents in which the lord agreed to abandon unpredictable demands, and set out levels of exaction which were much more restricted. We can only reconstruct the context of such agreements from the outside; the texts tend to give us very sententious reasons, the good will of the lord and suchlike, for their enactment. A grandiloquent example is the agreement of 1207 made by the lord of Tintinnano, a small fortified village in southern Tuscany, to stabilise rents there:
Since Rome, which was once ruler and capital of the entire world, reached so far by holding to these three: equity, justice and liberty . . . so I, Guido Medico, . . . rector for the affairs of Tintinnano, considering the state of the castle and of the lords and faithful men who live there [which had gone] from good to bad and from bad to worse, because of inequity, injustice and servitude, and was by now reduced to nothing . . . I proposed to bring the situation back to its earlier good state and to improve it if I could. And I saw that there was no other way to fulfil this process unless the customary services, which the men of the place were accustomed and obliged to pay to their lords, were turned into rents, . . . so that the lords would not dare to require from the abovenamed men anything more against their will . . . This must contribute to the growth and improvement of the castle of Tintinnano, which, if it had a large population, would be so very flourishing among the castles of Italy . . .
In reality, despite these fine words, the peasants of Tintinnano, now Rocca d’Orcia, a couple of miles off the main pilgrim road from France to Rome (whence perhaps also some of Guido Medico’s more resonant phrases), were threatening to abandon the village altogether if their lord did not make some concessions to them. It is also very likely that the charter was given out in return for money from the peasants, who would have been prepared to pay a one-off sum to obtain the detailed rules for rent-paying and peasant rights which make up the rest of the text: documents like this do often admit that, even if not in this case. This mixture of struggle and pay-offs was replicated, with different emphases in each case, throughout Europe in the development of village franchises.
What franchises show in every case, however, is a community which managed to gain a level of economic stability, and greater local institutional strength as well, by collective action. We have seen that medieval politics was often collective; Carolingian and northern European assemblies show it, and so do Italian city communes. This worked in villages as well, throughout Europe. Even English villages, where franchises were rare, had collectively established customs. Village communities, which before 1000 were as far as we can see strong only in Spain and probably Denmark, across the central middle ages gained strength everywhere in Europe; they became protagonists, and their leaders gained institutional recognition, indeed calling themselves consuls in parts of Italy and southern France, on the model of cities.
These were members of the richest local families in nearly every case; peasant élites always gained most from political and economic autonomy from lords. But such élites needed the backing of a wider community, and that community gained too. Parishes and thus local religious activity were more and more village-based as well; and villages more and more had a serious economic role too, to run open fields in northern Europe, irrigation in the south, common pasture everywhere. This sort of collective protagonism, seldom in this period moving into outright revolt, is one reason why lords indeed did not exact as much from their peasants as they might have. It shows that peasants were not always victims in these social developments. It also gives some context to the archaeology of village prosperity. Although it is never yet possible to be entirely sure whether this prosperity (such as it was) preceded or succeeded the crystallisation of village communities and the obtaining of franchises, it does show, as the protagonism of communities also shows, that peasants could take some advantage from the economic expansion of these centuries, and perhaps sometimes even keep it.
[MONEY]
One steady trend, when seigneurial rights were added to rents, and even to an extent when they were not, was for the exactions by lords from peasants to be more often in money, as the eleventh century moved into the twelfth and thirteenth. The reasons are simple: there was more silver around, so it was actually possible to expect that peasants might have access to it; and lords increasingly preferred money rent, as it was easier to use it to buy goods.
When taxation restarted, usually in the thirteenth century, as we shall see in the next chapter, it was almost always in money too. The great mines of Goslar in Saxony from the 960s, Meissen in Saxony from the 1160s, Friesach in Austria from the 1190s, Jihlava in Bohemia from the 1220s, Kutná Hora in Bohemia from the 1290s, and (the exception to this central European set) Iglesias in Sardinia from the 1250s, each lasted a century or so. These, plus a host of smaller mines, in central-northern Italy and again central Europe, provided enough silver to be coined and recoined for all this period, although there were serious low points around 1100 and then again later around and after 1400. We have a substantial amount of evidence for the coins that resulted, for they survive, in hoards and excavations, and are also constantly referred to in narratives and documents. On archaeological sites, they are commonest from the early to mid-thirteenth century onwards, but written evidence shows they had already become by 1000 the point of reference for at least larger transactions throughout most of Europe. When lords switched to rents in money rather than produce, they had to have been confident that peasants could at least – so to speak – buy the coins they needed for rent by selling goods in local markets.
It is often still thought that an active exchange economy needs coins. This is not true; credit is enormously important in most exchange systems, then as now, and debt-credit agreements can be complicated without any physical money changing hands at all. The medieval economy worked on credit to a very large extent, indeed. We can assume it did in markets when peasants were buying or selling on too small a scale for coins to be useful (in twelfth-century England, a whole sheep went for four pennies, the smallest standard coin, before the price inflation at the end of the century); and certainly it did back at home, when grain was needed in advance of harvests, or goods had to be got together for a dowry, or when an extra field needed to be added to a peasant tenure to feed a growing family, but could not be paid for at once. The documents which show these sorts of transaction, which were ever more common in the most active local economies, show debts being totted up in coins, but these were never necessarily needed to pay debts back. All the same, coins steadily spread into all types of transaction, and by the thirteenth century their availability in western and southern Europe, at least, seems to have been taken for granted.
Once peasants were forced into market exchange by the need to pay rents in money, coins became steadily more normal in the countryside, which in turn facilitated the next (and more important) change, the growing practice of buying artisanal products rather than making them oneself. This was one essential backdrop to the other side of the economic transformations of this period, the growth of towns.
[URBANISATION]
Overall, the weight of urbanism in the central middle ages was not huge. In Domesday-Book England, where our earliest relatively good data come from, some 10 per cent of the population lived in towns (with, across Europe in 1050, a regionally varying range from maybe 2 per cent in Scandinavia to maybe 15 per cent in Italy). It is likely that all these proportions doubled by 1300. But we are still not talking of anything near to an urban dominance of the overall economy, except probably inside the close-packed network of medium-sized towns in Flanders and northern Italy, and in particular around the very largest towns in Europe: Paris and Milan at maybe 200,000 inhabitants in 1300; Constantinople (well down from its height a century earlier), Genoa, Venice and Florence at maybe 100,000; London at less, maybe 80,000, but acting as the undisputed centre of a coherent state. Only in Italy did towns rule the countryside politically, because independent Italian communes were all urban, although it must be recognised that the Flemish towns were locally hegemonic in practice too, under the ruling counts of Flanders, and spent much of the fourteenth century (and to a lesser extent both before and after) in revolt against their rulers. Outside these two networks, towns operated in an economic and political landscape dominated by rural powers; they cannot be seen separately from the aristocratic world that surrounded them and bought their products. (The old phrase of the British economic historian Michael Postan that towns were ‘non-feudal islands in the feudal seas’ is wholly inaccurate, then; indeed, urban leaders also held values identical to those of more traditional aristocrats, such as the need to defend one’s honour by violence, and were often hard to distinguish from them.)
It is not surprising, in fact, that after a generation of excited work in the mid-twentieth century on the supposed proto-capitalist potential of medieval urban economies, the best work of the next generation focused on the agricultural sector, although more recently good studies have been made again of both Flemish and English urbanism. To see how urban growth actually worked on the ground, however, let us look at examples. Here I will briefly describe three very different towns, Pisa, Ghent and Stratford-upon-Avon, and then consider wider questions on the basis of that. [these three case studies are omitted here, conclusions in next paragraph.]
… [Towns] operated at two different economic and geographical levels. One was the simple exchange between rural and urban. Town-dwellers for the most part did not grow their own food; they made and sold things, and got the coin to buy food from the countryside from that. Sometimes, when towns were large and/or dense, that exchange went very far into the countryside; London’s demand affected markets as far out as Dover, Oxford and even Peterborough; and Sicily from 1200 or so onwards became a bread basket for half the great central-northern Italian cities. But essentially this was a local exchange process.
The other level was the long-distance trade which connected Flanders to Italy, and both of them to far further afield. This became very elaborate. There had long been two major maritime networks around the edge of Europe, the Mediterranean and the North Sea. They had different ups and downs (in the early middle ages, the low point for the North Sea was the sixth century, in the Mediterranean the eighth), but both were expanding in the scale and density of shipping by the eleventh. There were by now important entrepôts in Constantinople, Alexandria (and Cairo further inland), Palermo, Almería and Venice for the Mediterranean; London, Bruges, plus inland Rhine ports such as Cologne for the North Sea. Venice, joined by Genoa and (more briefly) Pisa, later developed whole commercial and colonial empires in the eastern Mediterranean, in the wake of the Crusades. The routes by now expanded outwards, too, notably across the Baltic, hopping from port to port in what is now Germany and Poland – the towns which would in the fourteenth century league together as the Hanse – and then going along the great Russian rivers via Novgorod and Kiev to Constantinople again. And the rapid urbanisation of Flanders and northern Italy encouraged a network of more direct land routes too, even, remarkably, across the Alps. By the twelfth century, Italian and Flemish merchants met roughly halfway, in Champagne, where a series of six great annual fairs, set up entrepreneurially by the local counts, became in the thirteenth century an additional entrepôt on a European scale.
[MARKETS, BANKING GO GLOBAL]
Products from both Europe and beyond were exchanged in the Champagne fairs and elsewhere along these routes: silks from Byzantium and Syria; linen and sugar from Egypt; pepper and other spices from across the Indian ocean; the best woollen cloth from Flanders and Italy; arms from Milan; furs from Rus’. As exchange systems became ever more complex, long-distance credit agreements, made in Champagne and elsewhere, developed into organised banking, in which the Tuscan towns, Lucca and Florence at the forefront, became specialists.
By the end of the thirteenth century, the greatest banks became so large that they were themselves international-level middlemen (the Bardi and Peruzzi banks of Florence ran much of England’s wool export to Flanders) and by now lent not only to merchants but to kings, who needed instant money for wars and were prepared to pay high interest in return. …
… [That] did not end well for many, for kings, when they defaulted, did so on such a scale that whole banks collapsed: Edward I of England destroyed the Riccardi bank of Lucca in this way when he confiscated their assets in 1294 (they went under in the next decade); the Frescobaldi of Florence fell when Edward II ran into trouble in 1311; and the Bardi and Peruzzi, by now overextended, in part with loans to Edward III, fell in their turn in 1343–46. But by now it was possible for families to gain great wealth, and successful career paths over several generations, and major social and political prominence in their home towns (Giotto painted the Bardi and Peruzzi family chapels in Santa Croce in Florence), simply out of the financial and commercial market, that is to say mercantile capitalism – something which had never been possible in European history before, even under the Roman empire.
This pattern of development, especially when painted in romantic colours as it often is, has seemed so compelling to historians that it sometimes looks like ‘the’ medieval economic development par excellence, the proof that, if something had not gone wrong (perhaps the Black Death, perhaps the restrictive policies of medieval guilds, perhaps, although less likely, the Hundred Years’ War, or the early fifteenth-century silver famine), medieval Europe might have achieved the industrial capitalist breakthrough centuries earlier than it did.
In fact, however, European international exchange was not the most important part of the economic boom at all. For a start, Europe was not at the centre, but rather on the edge, of this exchange network; it stretched eastwards from there through Egypt to the Indian Ocean, extending as far as China, where, in the thirteenth century, the Yangzi valley was the most economically complex region in the world.
As far as Mediterranean trade was concerned, its real powerhouse until at least the fourteenth century was Egypt, focused on Cairo, which was (after Constantinople’s post-1204 decline [earlier chapter]) the Mediterranean’s largest city, double the size of Paris and Milan. Egypt also had specialist cloth-making factory towns like Tinnis and Damietta; its production of linen, as also sugar, was industrial in scale. The banking sophistication of Italian cities in the thirteenth century was largely borrowed from the merchant entrepreneurs of Cairo and Alexandria. Many of these were Jewish, which helps us to know about them, for a huge cache of medieval Jewish documents, the geniza, survives from Cairo, and these tell us a substantial amount about the complex commercial and financial practices of merchants in the Islamic world from the eleventh century to the thirteenth. (In Europe, by contrast, Jews were restricted to rather smaller-scale and more socially unpopular moneylending than the Italian bankers managed.) Genoa and Venice, in particular, largely depended on Egypt for their success as middlemen, and, although the Flemish and inland Italian cloth towns did not, Egypt outmatched them for a long time.
Secondly, the international commercial system, for all its glamour, was less significant in overall economic terms than the first level of the urban economy, the small-scale exchange of primary products and low-quality cloth and iron-work between towns and the countryside. The international system was above all a luxury system, focused on expensive items which would be sold to kings, aristocrats, senior clergy, urban patricians, and their clientèles. Banking went further than that, for it financed wars, and thus the distinctly less luxurious aspects of military logistics, but the arena remained that of high politics.
Only the need for consistent food and fuel supplies in every great town, for élites and workers alike, plus that for raw materials such as wool, linked this international network to the peasant majority. (Peasant sales did not always dominate this supply, too: in much of Italy, lords moved away from money rents in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, for they realised what profits could be made from their own sales of grain and wine to towns.) It was small towns and small-scale exchange that, very slowly and haltingly, introduced lower-cost manufactured products to a mass market, which would have been – and, eventually, was – a far more secure basis for the sort of industrialisation which took place 500 years later. We shall look again at the way the countryside became more commercialised at the end of the middle ages [in later chapter]; even then, no part of Europe was on any sort of path to industrial transformation. But that path, when it began in the end, would be waymarked with low-value products for rural buyers, not the argosies full of silk and spices which docked at Venice.
One commercial development of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries which was genuinely important, however, and which indeed linked the rural and urban parts of this chapter in lasting ways, was the tendency towards agricultural specialisms. As we saw earlier, one way peasants can cope with the pressure on land is to grow the crops which flourish best on that sort of land and to specialise in them, selling them outwards in return for crops which grow better on land elsewhere. They will probably not do this completely – rural communities living entirely on cash cropping, and thus buying, rather than producing, most of their food, were rare before the twentieth century. But we can track such specialisations, first at the local level and then more widely. In Italy, for example, already by the eleventh century we find that hillsides were often much more clearly specialising in vineyards than in previous centuries, and that the plains grew more grain; clearly, that sort of difference assumed exchange between the two. In England, the same happened between pastoral and agricultural areas, as there were each side of Stratford.
Slowly, however, entire regions began to specialise for export too. Grain could be grown almost everywhere, but rich areas which were close to rivers and the sea could export to grain-poor regions, as Sicily, as we have seen, did to the hyper-urbanised parts of north-central Italy; Polish grain would have a similar role by the end of the middle ages for much of northern Europe. Wine producers in France started off by specialising at the northern margin of vine cultivation, regions such as the Paris basin and Champagne, which were closest to those where wine could not be grown, but whose élites might want to drink it. But actually the vineyards on that margin were less productive and produced poorer wine than those further south (the famous and expensive bubbly Champagne did not develop until the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries); once transport infrastructures improved, large-scale production for export switched to Bordeaux and Burgundy, where the most lasting specialised viticulture developed. Wool production became intensive and export-led in England by the twelfth century; in central Spain and southern Italy, similar developments came later, in the thirteenth and fourteenth. Timber became a specialised production too, in the great woodlands that survived clearance and were close enough to convenient water courses, like the Black Forest beside the Rhine in Germany and the limitless coastal forests of southern Norway. Even dried fish became such a commodity; northern Norway’s very existence as a settled area largely depended on being able to sell stockfish via Bergen to England and further south still. These interlinkages, once established, survived. A product of the need to rationalise agriculture in a period of rising population and urban demand, they continued to provide exchange outlets even when the population dropped rapidly, in town and countryside, in the late fourteenth century. Indeed, those population drops fuelled a further move to pasture, that is to say to wool production, in many places in Europe, which would continue to be the basis for cheap woollen cloth in future centuries.
All the changes described in this chapter came on the back of a rising population. As I have implied several times, this would come to an abrupt halt when the Black Death hit Europe in and after 1347–52. What happened then we will look at [in later chapter]. But it is not quite the case that Europe was expanding its economy in all respects, right up to the eve of the great plague. Peasant populations can only do so much to cope with long-term population rises, without radical new technologies and cultivation methods. Those available to thirteenth-century peasants reached full capacity by the end of the century, and, from then on, as population grew, famines begin to be attested more and more in our sources. Previously, in years of bad harvests, rural communities could just about survive, but now, at the limits of demographic growth, this might not happen any longer. In 1315–17, often extending later, hard winters and wet summers exhausted the resources of the whole of northern Europe, and even the interconnected relationships we have seen developing were not enough to avert famine, after the first year at least. Grain and wine yields dropped dramatically, sheep epidemics reduced the wool supply to Flanders, even salt production suffered. The death toll, although hard to calculate exactly, was great; and famines on a smaller scale studded the next decades too, including in Italy by now. It was here that demographic expansion came to a halt, and peasant populations had to face how to limit births more radically than they had managed before. This can be seen in very catastrophist terms, and indeed used to be, when the whole of the late middle ages was seen as a period of depression and crisis. Interpretations are more nuanced now, and the post-Black Death period can be seen as one of increasingly capillary commercialisation. This interpretation is by now often extended to the period 1300–50 as well, with a steadily rising curve of economic integration proposed. But it would be hard not to say that the decades just before 1350 were tough for Europe’s peasants, at least in regions where there was little room by now to expand, Italy, northern France, the Low Countries, much of England. For them, however brutal it is to say it, the plague brought some relief. But we shall look at this in greater detail later.
[CONCLUDE]
What, finally, did the long boom bring to Europe’s social and political frameworks which was not available before? A sense of movement, for sure. It had never been impossible to get about in Europe; but with Flemings in England, Italians in Flanders, the French in Italy, for trading purposes, but also increasingly, on the back of trade routes, for education or political career paths, links were created which could be complex – even if they were never fast, for it was no quicker to get from England to Italy in 1300 and indeed in 1500 than it had been in 800.
Social mobility was also on the rise; urban expansion achieved this on its own, for life in towns was very unlike that in villages, and a small percentage of the lucky could prosper in this new world – even if it was mostly rural élites who made it in the urban environment, and not the poorest of all. Inside villages, too, economic opportunities meant that richer peasants prospered more than their poorer neighbours, whom they sometimes, by now, employed as part-time wage labourers: social mobility thus also increased social differentiation.
Expertise was more accessible; with the new craft foci developing in Europe’s towns, it was easier than it had been before to get state-of-the-art knowledge if one had enough money. The multilingual cathedral construction sites of Europe, together with the steady spread of expertise in the new Gothic building techniques from northern France to England, Germany, southern Spain, Italy, Bohemia, were a sign of this everywhere in the thirteenth century. For rulers, the wider availability of money, and the general (if harder to pin down) extension of prosperity at all levels, gave opportunities for taxation, which was already important for John in England and Philip II in France in the 1200s, but which their late-thirteenth-century successors, Edward I and Philip IV, took even fuller advantage of, as we shall see in the next chapter. That in itself allowed them to create more ambitious state structures, which had their own effects on social mobility (new strata of officials, in particular, with their own training and expertise) and social constraints. It also allowed them to fight bigger wars, which introduced an element of adventurism into fourteenth-century European politics that had not been seen to such an extent before; the greater social and political flexibility created by the long boom was not all positive, that is to say. Overall, however, even if one is not romantic about the centuries of expansion, one can at least see that they had major effects on European practices, at every social level. When set against the effects of the localisation of politics described in the last chapter, they underpinned most of the developments analysed in the rest of this book.
The Source:
Chris Wickham*, Medieval Europe, Yale University Press 2016
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