The Routledge Handbook of Maritime Trade around Europe 1300-1600

Commercial Networks and Urban Autonomy

Wim Blockmans, Mikhail Krom, Justyna Wubs-Mrozewicz, Wim Blockmans, Mikhail Krom, Justyna Wubs-Mrozewicz

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780367872946
• eBook ISBN: 9781315278551
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Asian History
• Index: History

The Routledge Handbook of Maritime Trade around Europe 1300-1600 explores the links between maritime trading networks around Europe, from the Mediterranean and the Atlantic to the North and Baltic Seas. Maritime trade routes connected diverse geographical and cultural spheres, contributing to a more integrated Europe in both cultural and material terms. This volume explores networks' economic functions alongside their intercultural exchanges, contacts and practical arrangements in ports on the European coasts.

The collection takes as its central question how shippers and merchants were able to connect regional and interregional trade circuits around and beyond Europe in the late medieval period. It is divided into four parts, with chapters in Part I looking across broad themes such as ships and sailing routes, maritime law, financial linkages and linguistic exchanges. In the following parts - divided into the Mediterranean, the Baltic Sea, and the Atlantic and North Seas - contributors present case studies addressing themes including conflict resolution, relations between different types of main ports and their hinterland, the local institutional arrangements supporting maritime trade, and the advantages and challenges of locations around the continent. The volume concludes with a summary that points to the extraterritorial character of trading systems during this fascinating period of expansion.

Drawing together an international team of contributors, The Routledge Handbook of Maritime Trade around Europe is a vital contribution to the study of maritime history and the history of trade. It is essential reading for students and scholars in these fields.

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MARITIME TRADE AROUND EUROPE 1300–1600

Commercial networks and urban autonomy

Wim Blockmans, Mikhail Krom and Justyna Wubs-Mrozewicz

The integration of European markets was brought about by both overland transport as well as of sea-borne connections. Around 1300, bulk cargoes of consumer goods became increasingly common, not only on the Mediterranean but also along the Atlantic, North Sea and Baltic coasts. The maritime connections around the continent became all-encompassing, more integrated and more relevant in terms of volume and variety. This book aims to get a better understanding of the ways in which obstacles to this extension and intensification of maritime commercial networks could be overcome. It does so by identifying the conditions under which maritime ports could effectively connect major trade routes. Thus, the position of each of them within the market hierarchy has to be related to the characteristics of their location, their hinterland, the dimensions of their connections, their institutional arrangements related to their commercial activities and the ways in which they tried to overcome cultural differences and resolve conflicts. One of the key questions to be raised will thus be the level of autonomy that port cities of a particular type needed to enjoy vis-à-vis other powers in their environment or network. Here, the approach chosen for this volume concentrating on maritime networks will complement the more conventional analysis of the relations between cities and states.¹

For centuries, most historical research and teaching has primarily been framed in territorial units that were created in a top-down manner by aristocratic and monarchical dynasties. Their resources and powers were originally based on landed property, which the most successful contenders for power expanded and consolidated by superior means of physical violence. Matrimonial strategies and military conquest were the most common means of reaching the goal of greater, higher and, if possible, supreme power. The ensuing process of state formation deeply influenced the vision of history as states gradually increased their grasp on more aspects of daily life, tending towards the homogenization of the populations through religion, education and a variety of institutions.² In contrast to the stability of the imperial administration in China, no single power system has ever prevailed in European history: neither the Catholic Church, nor any empire or kingdom. The rivalry among the multiplicity of states continued to strengthen the inward-looking identification of populations and their rulers. On the other hand, economic systems developed along other paths, following different logics, defined by geographical conditions and locational advantages within wider contexts.³

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Until the sixteenth century, apart from certain specific choke points such as straits, no single state had the means to permanently control sea routes. Instead, merchants’ organizations – based on their own local communities and some inter-urban associations – created their own systems to regulate their risky businesses. They negotiated their privileged and protected status in foreign countries with the local authorities and intervened on behalf of their communities in cases of conflict among their fellow-countrymen and between themselves and local people.

In pre-industrial societies, mobility over land has always been slow. Nothing existed comparable to the system of nearly 100,000 kilometres of paved roads with relays in the Roman Empire. Around 1500, couriers bringing letters to Venice needed one week from Genoa and Munich, two weeks from Marseille and Paris, and three from Barcelona and Antwerp. Transportation of goods by carts and four-wheeled wagons drawn by six horses could carry up to 1,500 kg in one day over 30 to 40 kilometres.⁴ Water-borne transport had always been considerably cheaper, safer, and in some cases even faster than overland transport. The growing demand for moving bulk cargoes such as grain, wine, salt, conserved fish and construction materials over ever-longer distances triggered the building of ships with greater capacity. Around 1300, such ships would link the Mediterranean with the Atlantic coasts, the North and Baltic Seas.⁵

These maritime routes connected different geographical and climatic zones, diverse economic systems, religious, linguistic, political and cultural spheres. The shippers needed to gain insight into the geographical and nautical conditions of the distant regions, while the travelling merchants needed to obtain information about the markets at greater distances and be able to negotiate with foreigners. Valuable products as well as common consumables from distant regions became available in greater quantities. The enterprising merchants negotiated and mediated, and used violence only reluctantly, mainly as a defensive device. Their dominant motivation was profit, even though they also ran high risks. They even created their own means of payment – bills of exchange – through which they avoided the risks of robbery, escaped ecclesiastical bans on paying interest on borrowed money and turned the monarchs’ currency manipulations into speculative opportunities. Crossing all boundaries, maritime trade contributed to fostering a more integrated European market as well as a better understanding of otherness, in material as well as in cultural terms.

The term ‘commercial networks’ used in the subtitle of the present volume probably requires some explanation. For more than thirty years, urban researchers have reached some consensus on the use of the term ‘network system’ to describe trading links in which market hierarchies within a region can be combined with non-economic forms of interaction between towns unequal in size, the scope of their functions and the outreach of their connections. As Paul Hohenberg and Lynn Lees formulated it: ‘A city in the Network System functions as a gateway for the towns in its regional hinterland and is linked to the larger network via its foreland.’⁶ Locational advantages, links via roads, rivers, and especially seas, determined the role of gateways that linked regions with different social and economic regimes to each other and made exchanges a productive option. The larger the range of goods and services concentrated in a particular centre the more extended its commercial network could become, and the larger its need for support from a hinterland feeding it constantly with new citizens, food, raw materials and half-finished products to be reworked and marketed. Gateways, along with smaller towns in a descending cascade of markets, redistributed the scarce commodities and specialized services to their hinterland.

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As Tom Scott has recently pointed out, the extensive discussions on the relation between European cities and their hinterlands have revolved around the extent of control, matters of jurisdiction, contrasts between the cities to the north and south of the Alps, and the manner of the acquisition of land by citizens.⁷ In our volume, we move beyond the debates on the conceptual definitions and geographical boundaries of contadi in the south or north. From the maritime and mercantile point of view, the hinterland was a changeable category: it provided a city with the people and goods needed for subsistence, as well as raw materials and half-finished products for trade and manufacturing. It was also a market for its own merchandise. Dominance can take a political shape, but regulation of the markets for labour and goods can be imposed even without that. Superior concentration and accumulation of power – capital and the means of physical violence – ultimately determine this dependency.⁸ We show, however, the economic and political interplay in the relationship between the city and its hinterland. From the maritime and mercantile point of view, the hinterland was a changeable category: it provided the goods needed for trade in a particular time, and for particular customers. Christopher Dyer formulated it nicely: ‘For luxury and semi-luxury goods the whole of England formed London’s hinterland [in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries]. London also had its “Umland” in the sense that the debts reflect the capital’s close connections with its immediately surrounding countryside from which the bulk of its food was carried.’⁹

The overly enthusiastic use of networks as a concept with positive connotations has been exposed, as being part of a network could have disastrous effects in the event of bankruptcy or when associates were untrustworthy or incapable.¹⁰ But in spite of this (or perhaps due to the elasticity of the term), ‘networks’ have won ever-growing popularity with social scientists and historians alike. A recent volume published by Andrea Caracausi and Christof Jeggle specifically explores the applicability of the social network analysis to late medieval and early modern urban and commercial history. Apart from useful theoretical and historiographical overviews,¹¹ this collective work offers case studies of, for example, Italian, Castilian and Portuguese merchants’ networks, and the Armenian diaspora in Venice. Angela Orlandi further developed this analysis mapping a sample of thousands of business letters exchanged with the Iberian associates of the Datini consortium during three years selected between 1396 and 1409. The correspondents were business contacts within as well as outside the enterprise. Nine graphs offer a visualization of the geographical distribution and the intensity of the contacts of the companies based in Barcelona, Mallorca and Valencia. To quote just one example, the most active of these companies was the Barcelonese, which in 1399 received 202 letters from Northern Europe (Bruges, Paris and London), 114 from other Iberian places, 446 from Southern France and 417 from Italy.¹²

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The concept of commercial networks adopted in the present volume differs in several respects from that of Caracausi, Jeggle and their collaborators. First of all, while the latter focus exclusively on networks of merchants as individuals, the authors of this book, while analysing individual networks, pay greater attention to the connections between merchant guilds, towns, harbours, trade routes and to commercial and political alliances (e.g. the Hanse). The concept of networks is also indispensable in dealing with maritime empires that had an overarching political authority, such as those of the Italian and Aragonese cities. Secondly, Caracausi and Jeggle’s volume privileges economic transactions, including a refreshing perspective on production networks. Here, we have chosen a more pluralistic approach, showing how connections on the level of cities were tightly interwoven with the institutional developments within them, and how this was translated into connections of maritime trade and mercantile exchange along the European coasts in terms of shipping, finance, information, law, language and architectural models.

This volume aims at a deeper understanding of the linkages between maritime trade networks around Europe, from the Black Sea to the Gulf of Finland. The central question is how shippers and merchants succeeded in the period from 1300 to 1600 at connecting regional and interregional trade circuits around Europe and beyond. The technical aspects of these contacts are better known than the institutional and cultural requirements that made the exchanges productive and lasting. In each of the regional systems, cer...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• The Routledge Handbook of Maritime Trade Around Europe 1300–1600
• The Routledge History Handbooks
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Figures
• Preface
• Notes on Contributors
• 1 Maritime Trade Around Europe 1300–1600: Commercial Networks and Urban Autonomy
• Part I Thematic Aspects
• Part II The Mediterranean
• Part III The Baltic
• Part IV The Atlantic and the North Sea
• General Bibliography
• Index