Markets and their Actors in the Late Middle Ages

Tanja Skambraks, Julia Bruch, Ulla Kypta, Tanja Skambraks, Julia Bruch, Ulla Kypta

• Publisher: De Gruyter
• Year: 2020
• eBook ISBN: 9783110642421
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Economic History
• Index: History

Markets feature prominently in recent research of premodern historians as well as economists. Discussions cover the questions, for example, how a market can be grasp as a place, an event or a mechanism of exchange, or whether premodern economies have just hosted markets or if some of them can even be regarded as market economies.

The proposed volume will now turn to the agents who forged and connected markets. Exchange was done between persons and with the help of persons: Artisans, retailers and poor people tried to better their living conditions by engaging on the market, merchants interconnected different markets, urban personnel (such as brokers, men working at the public scales, or the town council as a whole) regulated and facilitated exchange.

By focusing on economic practices and the agents who performed them, the volume aims at analyzing the specific characteristics of premodern markets, the reasons why people became active on the market and the institutions which formed exchange processes and were in turn shaped by them.

Towards a Different Type of Market Exchange in the Early Middle Ages: The Sacrum Commercium and its Agents

Franziska Quaas

Although hardly any other topic of medieval economic history has received as much attention as the phenomenon of the market, there is still no certainty as to what is actually meant by the term “market”. One of the key challenges we face is the often rather imprecise use of the term in research, which seems to be especially problematic given the many meanings of the term. It is used both to refer to the specific venue of the marketplace, where buyers and sellers meet in order to exchange goods, and in relation to the abstract concept of market economy in modern economic theory. These different meanings of the term are often used simultaneously and imprecisely, and only rarely is a differentiation made between the distinct tiers of reference, a circumstance that impairs the scholarly discourse. If the reference dimension that the user intended is not clearly indicated, misunderstandings necessarily arise,¹ which in turn inhibits the generation of intersubjectively verifiable results and thus a productive discussion of new hypotheses.

Even though the problems associated with the term “market” have already been repeatedly pointed out (Jeggle 2015, 574 – 584; Möller 2004, 25; Morley 2013, 109 – 111), there is still a low level of critical reflection concerning concepts of the market. This is all the more surprising not only because various sociological market concepts, which can also refer to non-economic markets, have emerged,² but also, and more importantly, because there is still no sensitivity when dealing with the understanding of “market” in eras of the distant past. So far, it is not only the vague use of the term “market” in research that poses a challenge, but also the fact that the true meaning of the term in different times, regions, and historical contexts remains completely unclear. However, the question of this contemporary understanding of the “market” has seldom been asked, which is primarily due to the widespread assumption that there was no abstract understanding of the market in premodern times (Polanyi 1980, 78). This is also true for the early Middle Ages. The term “market” is thus supposed to have referred only to the marketplace (Fellmeth 2008, 183; Fiebiger Bang 2008, 140; Hägermann 1990, 22; Morley 2007, 140; Pitz 1979, 28).

The implementation of this “one-sided” approach³ to early medieval markets was influenced by developments in the conceptual history and epistemological philosophy of the 1930s, which promoted the tendency to create new concepts instead of asking about their meaning in past epochs (Oexle 2011, 19 – 22). Rather than considering the problem of the historical conditionality of terms and concepts (Cassirer 2000, 22; Weber 1985, 206 – 209; 2006, 323 – 324), undertaking a differentiation between the different epochs and taking seriously warnings against transferring modern ideas to past epochs (Blümle and Goldschmidt 2007, 454; Fenske 2006, 9; Finley 1977; Funk 1869, 125; Kloft 2002, 80; Weber 2006, 331), scholars still sometimes back-transpose modern theorems and concepts such as the market economy to the early Middle Ages (Bandow 2013, 30; Carrié 1994, 175; Meyer 1910, 125; Temin 2001; Temin 2006) on the basis of the assumption that the same phenomena can be observed at different times (Reinhard 2007, 7 – 8; Whittow 2013, 145).

These methodological approaches have central shortcomings insofar as either artificial definitions of the term “market” are utilized or a problematic transfer of modern concepts to bygone eras is made.

The question arises, then, of whether precisely the opposite path, in which the discourse would no longer be thought from its end but an attempt would be made to reconstruct the historical concepts and to investigate the historical lexemes,⁴ could enable us to better understand the “market” of the early Middle Ages. In this way, the problems of previous methodological approaches could be overcome by considering what dimensions of meaning the term “market” actually implied to people living in the Middle Ages. This question is not about understanding what a “market” might have been in the early Middle Ages but about reconstructing what contemporary users of the term might have understood by it, comprehending what contemporaries were speaking about when they used it, in the broadest sense grasping the usage of the word “market”. Based on the assumption that terms such as “market” should be understood no longer as isolated words but as semantic units (Dierse 2011, 58 – 59; Schulze 1978, 243; Trier 1973, 1), such a study can be carried out using techniques of distributive or collocative semantics, meaning the identification and examination of frequent word neighbourhoods around a keyword. Such an approach will examine whether, and if so what, collocations occur in the immediate vicinity of selected core terms in the sources under consideration. Bernhard Jussen was one of the first to warn about the risk of any anachronistic transfer of modern theories to earlier times and apply this methodology to macro-historical questions of medieval studies, reconstructing cultural semantics with the aim of demonstrating the conditions under which meaning is produced and recorded, hoping to reveal the self-understandings of a culture (2000, 9 – 11, 24 – 25); Giacomo Todeschini identified the implementation of historical semantics as a viable approach for investigations into the early medieval economy (1994, 15).

However, although more detailed examinations of certain concepts within semantic fields has now been recognized as a way out of the earlier research problems (Kuchenbuch and Kleine 2006, 11), and even though systematic studies using semantic approaches are becoming increasingly popular,⁵ this methodology has not yet been applied to the question of what medieval contemporaries might have understood by the term “market”. An investigation of contemporary lexemes is not only capable of countering the danger of transferring modern circumstances onto past ones. It can also help to develop a double perspective that takes into account not only the economic meanings of the term “market” but also philosophical, theological, or political meanings of the concept that existed in early medieval understandings (Toneatto 2010, 78). Such a method can be used for analysing the kinds of actions that were considered to be market exchange in the early Middle Ages: only if we figure out what contemporaries actually meant when they used the term “market” will we be able to ascertain who can be classified as an agent of this market at all. This can be achieved by going back to the sources. Former assumptions of an ostensible paucity of sources for research on the early medieval economy (Claude 1985, 9 – 10) are countered here by the observation that new insights can indeed be gained by returning to these sources in a new way. Instead of a consideration focused solely on selectively chosen types of sources,⁶ the aim has to be to uncover contemporary understandings of “market” based on a more comprehensive and representative source basis and on an investigation of the collocations of the Latin terms mercatus, forum, and nundinae⁷ that emerge and that can be identified as characteristic. In this way, it will be possible to acquire a closer insight into the intellectual traditions of this time. The analysis of the market terminology in a broad variety of sources such as charters and letters, capitularies and leges, but also historiographical, hagiographical, theological, and philosophical writings, as well as poetry and epitaphs, is indispensable for such a study; only in this way can a more precise approach to contemporary understandings of “market” be achieved. In the following sections, the various dimensions of meaning of “market” that can be traced in the sources through the application of collocational semantics a...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Introduction
• How to Study the Premodern Market: The Concept of Market Exchange
• Towards a Different Type of Market Exchange in the Early Middle Ages: The Sacrum Commercium and its Agents
• Imagined Investors: Markets, Agents, and the Saxon Mining Administration
• The “destroyers of trade”, “our good and dear Inhabitants”, and “all persons of what quality or nation however they may be”: Early Modern Colonial Market Culture
• Markets and their Agents in History: Some Theoretical Reflections
• List of authors
• Index of names
• Index of places