Economic and Social History of Medieval Europe

Henri Pirenne

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN: 9780415860161
• eBook ISBN: 9781136788550
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

First published in 2005. This original study the author writing in 1936 has tried to sketch the character and general movement of the economic and social evolution of Western Europe from the end of the Roman Empire to the middle of the fifteenth century.

Chapter I
The Revival of Commerce

I. The Mediterranean¹

THE irruption of Islam into the basin of the Mediterranean in the seventh century closed that sea to the Christians of the West, but not to all Christians. The Tyrrhenian Sea, it is true, became a Moslem lake, but this was not the fate of the waters which bathed Southern Italy, or of the Adriatic or the Aegean Sea. We have already seen that in these latitudes the Byzantine fleets succeeded in repulsing the Arab invasion, and after the check which it experienced at the siege of Constantinople in 719, the Crescent reappeared no more in the Bosphorus. But the struggle between the two warring faiths continued, with alternations of success and reverse. Masters of Africa, the Arabs were bent on seizing Sicily, which they completely dominated after the capture of Syracuse in 878; but that was the limit of their advance. The south Italian towns, Naples, Gaeta, Amalfi, and Salerno in the west, and Bari in the east, continued to recognise the Emperor at Constantinople, and so also did Venice, which, at the head of the Adriatic, never had anything seriously to fear from the Saracen expansion.

The tie which continued to unite these ports to the Byzantine Empire was, it is true, not very strong, and it grew steadily weaker. The establishment of the Normans in Italy and Sicily (1029-91) definitely broke it as regards this region. Venice, over which the Carolingians had been unable to establish their control in the ninth century, had been all the more willing to continue under the authority of the Basileus, because he prudently refrained from exerting it, and allowed the town to be gradually transformed into an independent republic. For the rest, if the political relations of the Empire with its distant Italian annexations were not very active, it made amends by carrying on a very lively trade with them. In this respect, they moved in its orbit and, so to speak, turned their backs on the West and looked towards the East. The business of provisioning Constantinople, whose population numbered about a million inhabitants, kept up their exports, and in return the factories and bazaars of the capital furnished them with silks and spices which they could not do without.

For urban life, with all the luxury demands which it made, had not disappeared in the Byzantine Empire as it had done in that of the Carolingians. To pass from the latter to the former, was to pass into another world. Here, economic evolution had not been rudely interrupted by the advance of Islam, and an important maritime commerce continued to supply towns peopled with artisans and professional merchants. No more striking contrast could be imagined than that between Western Europe, where land was everything and commerce nothing, and Venice, a landless city, living only by trade.

Constantinople and the Christian ports of the East soon ceased to be the sole objective of the navigation of the Byzantine towns of Italy and Venice. The spirit of enterprise and the search for gain were too powerful and too necessary to allow religious scruples to prevent them for very long from renewing their former business relations with Africa and Syria, although these were now in the power of the infidels. From the end of the ninth century connections were formed which grew steadily more active. The religion of their customers mattered little to the Italians, provided that they paid. The love of gain, which the Church condemned and stigmatised by the name of avarice, was manifest here in its most brutal form. The Venetians exported to the harems of Egypt and Syria young Slavs, whom they carried off or bought on the Dalmatian coast, and this traffic in "slaves"¹ unquestionably contributed quite as largely to their growing prosperity as did the slave trade of the eighteenth century to that of so many French and English shippers. To this was added the transport of timber and iron, with which the countries of Islam were unprovided, although there was no room for doubt that the timber would be used to build vessels and the iron to forge weapons which would be employed against Christians, perhaps even against the mariners of Venice. The merchant, here as always, could see nothing beyond his immediate profit, and bringing off a good business deal. It was in vain that the Pope threatened to excommunicate the sellers of Christian slaves, or that the Emperor prohibited the supply to infidels of articles capable of being employed in warfare. Venice, whither merchants in the ninth century had brought back from Alexandria the relics of St. Mark, went her own way, secure in their protection, and considered the steady progress of her wealth as the just reward of the veneration in which she held them.

That progress was, indeed, uninterrupted. By any and every means, the city of the lagoons devoted itself with astonishing energy and activity to advancing that maritime trade, which was the very condition of its existence. The entire population practised and depended on it, as on the Continent men depended on the land. So serfdom, the inevitable consequence of the rural civilisation of the peasants of this time, was unknown in this city of sailors, artisans and merchants. The hazards of fortune alone established between them social differences independent of legal status. From very early times, commercial profits had created a class of rich traders, whose operations already present an incontestably capitalistic character. The commenda appeared in the tenth century, obviously borrowed from the practices of Byzantine customary law.

The use of writing, indispensable to every business movement of any importance, bears indisputable witness to economic progress. A "clerk" formed part of the equipment of every merchant ship sailing abroad and from this we can infer that shipowners themselves had quickly learned to keep accounts and to despatch letters to their correspondents.¹ No reproach, it should be mentioned, was here attached to the business of large-scale commerce. The most important families engaged in it. The doges themselves set the example and were doing so as early as the middle of the ninth century, which seems almost incredible in contemporaries of Lewis the Pious. In 1007, Peter II Orseolo set apart for charitable institutions the profits from a sum of 1,250 livres which he had invested in business. At the end of the eleventh century, the city was full of wealthy patricians, owners of a quantity of shares in ships (sortes), whose shops and landing-places (stationes) stood close together along the rivo-alto and the quays, which stretched further and further along the isles of the lagoon.

Venice was then already a great maritime power. She had succeeded before 1100 in ridding the Adriatic of the Dalmatian pirates who infested it and in establishing her hegemony firmly on the whole of the east coast of that sea. which she considered as her domain and which remained hers for centuries. In order to preserve control over its entrance to the Mediterranean, she had helped the Byzantine fleet in 1002 to expel the Saracens from Bari. Seventy years later, when the Norman State, set up by Robert Guiscard in southern Italy, threatened her with a maritime competition as dangerous to herself as to the Greek Empire, she allied herself once more with the latter to fight and overcome the peril. After the death of Robert (1076) the dream of Mediterranean expansion conceived by this prince of genius was doomed. The war turned out to the advantage of Venice and with the same stroke she rid herself of the rivalry of Naples, Gaeta, Salerno, and, above all, Amalfi. These cities, which had been absorbed by the Norman State, were dragged down with it, and henceforth abandoned the markets of Constantinople and the East to the Venetians.

For that matter they had already enjoyed an indisputable superiority there for a long time. In 992 the doge, Pietro II Orseolo, had obtained a chrysobull from the Emperors Basil and Constantine freeing the Venetian boats from the customs which they had hitherto had to pay at Abydos. Relations were so active between the port of the lagoons and that of the Bosphorus that a Venetian colony was established in the latter, with judicial privileges ratified by the emperors. In the following years, other establishments were founded at Laodicea, Antioch, Mamistra, Adana, Tarsus, Satalia, Ephesus, Chios, Phocaea, Selembria, Heraclea, Rodosto, Andrinople, Salonica, Demetrias, Athens, Thebes, Coron, Modon, and Corfu. At all points of the Empire Venice possessed bases of supplies and penetration, which secured her commercial domination. From the end of the eleventh century she may be said to have held a practical monopoly of transport in all the provinces of Europe and Asia still possessed by the rulers of Constantinople.

Nor did the emperors try to oppose a situation with which it was to their own disadvantage to quarrel. The privilege accorded to the doge in May 1082 by Alexis Comnenus may be regarded as the final consecration of Venetian superiority in the Byzantine empire. Henceforth the Venetians were exempt, throughout the Empire, from every kind of commercial tax, and were thus favoured above the Emperor's own subjects. The stipulation that they should continue to pay duties on foreign merchandise is final proof that thenceforth the whole of the maritime trade of the eastern end of the Mediterranean was in their hands. For, though we are rather badly informed in regard to the progress of their trade with the Moslem lands from the tenth century, everything indicates that it developed in the same way, if not entirely with the same vigour.

II. The North Sea and the Baltic Sea¹

The two inland seas, the North Sea and the Baltic, which bathe the coasts of Northern Europe, as the Mediterranean, to which they form a pendant, bathes its southern coasts, presented, from the middle of the ninth century to the end of the eleventh, a spectacle which, profoundly as it differs from that which we have been describing, resembles it nevertheless in one essential character. For here, too, on the coast and, so to speak, on the very edge of Europe, we find a maritime and commercial activity which is in striking contrast with the agricultural economy of the Continent.

We have already seen that the activity of the ports of Quentovic and Duurstede did not survive the Viking invasion of the ninth century. Lacking a fleet, the Carolingian Empire was unable to defend itself against the Northern barbarians as the Byzantine Empire had defended itself against the Moslems. Its weakness had been only too well exploited by the energetic Scandinavians who, for more than half a century, subjected it to annual raids, not only by way of the estuaries of the northern rivers but also by those of the Atlantic. But the Northmen must not be represented as mere pillagers. Masters of the sea, they could and did combine their aggressions. Their object was not and could not be conquest; though they won a few settlements on the Continent and in the British Isles, that was the most they could do. But the incursions which they pushed so deeply into the mainland were essentially great razzias. Their organisation was obviously carefully planned; they all set off from a fortified camp as centre, where booty collected from neighbouring regions was piled up while awaiting transport to Denmark or Norway. The Vikings, in fact, were pirates, and piracy is the first stage of commerce. So true is this that from the end of the ninth century, when their raids ceased, they simply became merchants.

To understand Scandinavian expansion, however, it must also be remembered that it was not directed exclusively towards the West. While the Danes and the Norwegians threw themselves on the Carolingian Empire, England, Scotland and Ireland, their neighbours, the Swedes, turned to Russia. From our point of view it is immaterial whether they had been asked for assistance by the Slav princes in the valley of the Dnieper in their struggle with the Patzinaks, or whether, in search of gain, they made a spontaneous thrust towards the Byzantine shores of the Black Sea, by the great natural route which from remotest times had been followed by Greek merchants from the Chersonese and the Sea of Azov seeking Baltic amber. It is enough to state that from the middle of the ninth century they established entrenched camps along the Dnieper and its tributaries, similar to those that their Danish and Norwegian brothers were establishing at the same date in the basins of the Scheldt, the Meuse and the Seine. Constructed at so great a distance from their mother country, these enceintes or, to use the Slavonic word, gorods, became permanent fortresses, from which the invaders dominated and exploited the not very warlike people who surrounded them. It was there that they amassed the tribute imposed on the vanquished and the slaves taken from among them, as well as the honey and furs which they obtained from the virgin forests. But before long, the position which they occupied inevitably led them to engage in trade.

Southern Russia, where they had installed themselves, lay, in fact, between two areas of superior civilisation. To the east, beyond the Caspian Sea, stretched the caliphate of Baghdad, to the south, the Black Sea bathed the shores of the Byzantine Empire and led to Constantinople. The Scandinavians in the basin of the Dnieper at once felt this double attraction. The Arab, Jewish and Byzantine merchants, who were already frequenting this region before their arrival, showed them a road which they were more than ready to follow. The country conquered by them put at their disposal products particularly suited for trade with rich empires leading a life of refinement: honey, furs and above all slaves, the demand for whom from Moslem harems, as well as from the great estates, promised the same high profits which tempted the Venetians.

Constantine Porphyrogenitus, in the tenth century, has left us a picture of the Scandinavians, or rather the Russians (to give them the name by which the Slavs knew them), assembling their boats each year at Kiev, after the melting of the ice. The flotilla slowly descended the Dnieper, whose innumerable rapids presented obstacles which had to be got round by towing the barks along the bank.¹ Having reached the sea, it sailed along the coast to Constantinople, the goal of the long and perilous voyage. There the Russians possessed a special quarter, and their trade with the great city was regulated by treaties, of which the oldest dated back to the ninth century. The influence which she soon came to exercise over them is well known. It was from her that they received Christianity (957-1015); it was from her that they borrowed their art, their writing, the use of money and a good part of their organisation. There can be no more striking witness to the importance of the trade they kept up with the Bosphorus. At the same time they were making their way, through the valley of the Volga, to the Caspian Sea and trafficking with the Jewish and Arab merchants who frequented its ports.

But their activity was not confined to this. They exported merchandise of all sorts to the north, spices, wines, silks, goldsmiths' work, etc., which they obtained in exchange for their honey, furs and slaves. The astonishing number of Arab and Byzantine coins discovered in Russia mark, as with the silver point of a compass, the trade routes which crossed it, converging either from the course of the Volga, or from that of the Dnieper to the Dvina and the lakes which are attached to the Gulf of Bothnia. There, the commerce from the Caspian and Black Seas joined the Baltic and continued through it. Across the immense stretches of continental Russia Scandinavian navigation was thus linked with the oriental world.² The island of Gothland, in which there have been dug up even more hoards of Islamic and Greek coins than have been found in Russia, appears to have been the great entrepôt of this traffic and its point of contact with Northern Europe. It is tempting to believe that the booty gathered by the Northmen in England and France was...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Half Title
• Original Title
• Original Copyright
• Contents
• PREFACE TO THE ENGLISH TRANSLATION
• INTRODUCTION
• CHAPTER I THE REVIVAL OF COMMERCE
• CHAPTER II THE TOWNS
• CHAPTER III LAND AND THE RURAL CLASSES
• CHAPTER IV COMMERCE TO THE END OF THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY
• CHAPTER V INTERNATIONAL TRADE TO THE END OF THE THIRTEENTH CENTURY
• CHAPTER VI URBAN ECONOMY AND THE REGULATION OF INDUSTRY
• CHAPTER VII THE ECONOMIC CHANGES OF THE FOURTEENTH AND FIFTEENTH CENTURIES
• GENERAL BIBLIOGRAPHY
• INDEX OF AUTHORS
• GENERAL INDEX