How the West Won: The Neglected Story of the Triumph of Modernity (22 page)

But exceptions remained, all of them involving extensive interaction with Islam. In Spain, Christian and Muslim armies continued to enslave one another’s captives taken in battle, and slave trading involving northern Italian export firms and Muslim buyers persisted into the fifteenth century, in defiance of the Church. The number of slaves involved in this trade was small. They were purchased from Slavic tribes in the Caucasus (the word
slave
is a corruption of
Slav
). A few were kept as a form of luxury goods by wealthy Italians such as the Medici, but most were exported to Islamic lands—white slaves being “more precious than gold in trading with Egypt,” in Lopez’s words.
²⁶

Although this residual slave trade withered away, slavery reappeared with a vengeance in the New World. The Church responded vigorously, with sixteenth-century popes issuing a series of angry bulls against New World slavery. But the popes had no serious temporal power in this era, and their vigorous opposition was to no avail.
²⁷

The theological conclusion that slavery is sinful has been unique to Christianity (although there are antislave passages in the Torah and several early Jewish sects rejected slavery).
²⁸
In part this reflects the fact that it is possible for Christian theologians to propose new interpretations without engendering charges of heresy. So, for example, they could plausibly “correct” Saint Paul’s understanding of God’s will concerning slavery. By contrast, Buddhists, Confucianists, Hindus, and even Muslims reject the idea that sages or saints in times past may have had an imperfect understanding of religious truths. A second factor is that, of the major world faiths, only Judaism and Christianity have devoted serious and sustained attention to human rights, as opposed to human duties. Put another way, the other great faiths minimize individualism and stress collective obligations. They are, as the anthropologist Ruth Benedict so aptly put it, cultures of shame rather than cultures of guilt.
²⁹
There is not even a word for freedom in the languages in which their scriptures are written.
³⁰

As for Islam, there is an insuperable barrier to theological condemnations of slavery: Muhammad bought, sold, captured, and owned slaves.
³¹
The Prophet did advise that slaves should be treated well: “Feed them what you eat yourself and clothe them with what you wear.… They are God’s people like unto you and be kind unto them.”
³²
Muhammad also freed several of his slaves, adopted one as his son, and married another. In addition, the Qur’an teaches that it is wrong to “compel your slave girls to
prostitution” (24:33) and that one can gain forgiveness for killing a fellow believer by freeing a slave (4:92). But the fundamental morality of the institution of slavery was not in doubt—and widespread slavery continues in many Islamic nations.

New Democracies

Christian theology also provided the moral basis for the establishment of responsive regimes. But political freedom did not emerge throughout Christendom. Rather, it appeared first in a number of Italian city-states. Why? Because as these city-states expanded foreign trade, they dispersed political power among a set of well-matched interest groups: not only the aristocracy, the military, and the clergy but also merchants, bankers, manufacturers, and the workers’ guilds. Dozens of city-states in northern Italy separated power in this way. Let’s look at two case studies: Venice and Genoa.
³³

Venice

Shielded by remarkable natural barriers and with unimpeded access to the sea, Venice fended off all Lombard efforts to subordinate it and instead became a province of the Byzantine Empire. This gave the growing city many commercial advantages, such as being free from Byzantine tolls or customs in its trade with the East. That commerce became increasingly important as Islam developed a trading network throughout the region, including Spain, Sicily, the toe of Italy, and North Africa. In fact, Venice probably was the first society to live by trade alone.
³⁴

It also was a pioneer in the return of democracy. Distance, and growing Venetian sea power, made Byzantium’s sovereignty over Venice nominal at best. As far back as records go, Venice had been recognized as a dukedom and was administered by a duke, known as the
doge
. But Venice was unlike most other dukedoms in several ways. For one thing, the doge was not sustained by taxes or rents but owed his wealth to his active participation in commerce. The earliest known medieval reference to a monetary investment was in the will of Doge Giustiniano Partecipazio. When he died in 829, his estate included 1,200 pounds of “working
solidi
, if they come back safely from sea.”
³⁵
Second, the position of doge was not hereditary (although sons sometimes followed their fathers). According
to Venetian tradition, even the very first doge was chosen by the “people,” and Venetians enjoyed substantial political freedom from earliest days. If the “people” did not include all inhabitants of Venice, they did make up a substantial number—all those having wealth, military responsibilities, or business establishments, or who were members of the clergy. And as time passed, the “people” became an increasingly inclusive group. Meanwhile, the power of the doge was gradually reduced as elected councils took greater authority, leading to what came to be known as the
commune
—made up of the body of citizens with voting rights and the executives and legislators elected by them.

Venice was not the first Italian city-state to develop a commune; that honor may belong to Pisa.
³⁶
But by the middle of the twelfth century, Venice’s commune was in full operation, with five layers of government.
³⁷
At the apex of this pyramid was the doge—a chief executive elected for life, but without regal pretensions, his powers being carefully limited by his oath of office. Below the doge was the Ducal Council, made up of six members, each representing a geographical area of Venice. Councilors were elected to serve a one-year term and could not be reelected until they had been out of office for two years. The councilors worked closely with the doge, who was required to gain their assent for major decisions. Beneath the council were the Forty and the Senate. The Forty were akin to a court of appeals, while the Senate consisted of sixty men who were particularly concerned with issues of commerce and foreign policy. The Forty and the Senate were selected from the Great Council (sometimes by election, sometimes by drawing lots), which also elected fleet commanders. Members of the Great Council, which often numbered more than a thousand, were selected from the General Assembly, which consisted of the thousands of voting Venetians. The General Assembly met irregularly, being summoned to ratify basic legislation and the choice of a new doge.

In early days, participation in Venetian politics was limited to various elites, but as time passed, and especially as Venice became a major manufacturing center as well as a trading port, the franchise was extended. The principal mechanism by which this was accomplished was by the organization of guilds—associations of persons engaged in a specific craft or trade. Guilds represented lawyers, physicians, glassblowers, apothecaries, jewelers, tailors, furriers, butchers, bakers, barbers, sailmakers, shopkeepers, and many others. Well organized and possessed of financial
resources, the guilds became such a significant political force that they were assigned representation in the councils, thus giving the masses a significant voice in government. To this was added the influence of religious confraternities—lay fellowships that featured religious devotions but that also provided for mutual aid, rather like a modern fraternal lodge.

Venice and the other leading medieval Italian city-states were by modern standards medium-sized towns—in the year 1000, Venice had a population of about thirty thousand, and most of the other city-states were considerably smaller.
³⁸
Everyone knew everyone else, current public opinion was transparent, and consensus often was easily achieved. This, combined with relatively open political institutions, allowed Venice to sustain a substantial degree of freedom and responsive governance.

Genoa

Situated on the western side of Italy at the head of the Ligurian Sea, Genoa occupied a strategically important coastal strip of land, where the best land route from Rome to France and on to Spain passed. This location helped make Genoa the dominant port in the western Mediterranean (a position solidified when the city-state defeated Pisa in a huge sea battle in 1284).

Unlike Venice, which was essentially independent from the start, Genoa had been dominated by the Lombards and then sacked by Muslim raiders in 934–35.
³⁹
But by the end of the eleventh century it had established itself as an independent city-state.

Initially, Genoa was ruled by a council of nobles in the tradition of the Roman Senate. But, as happened in Rome, an autocratic coalition took over. This resulted in two civil wars, from 1164 to 1169 and again from 1189 to 1194. Neither war produced a winner, but the immense costs of these conflicts—which disrupted commerce and led to the loss of overseas colonies—made it evident that both sides would benefit by finding a lasting political solution.
⁴⁰
Although the political system Genoa adopted seems bizarre, it was fully in accord with modern game theory—and it worked.

Called the
podesteria
, the setup involved a sort of city manager—a non-Genoese
podestá
hired each year to be military commander, chief judge, and political administrator.
⁴¹
Although an elected council of nobles selected the
podestá
and set policies and goals, during his one-year term the
podestà
had supreme authority and brought with him a com
pany of soldiers and a set of judges. Neither the
podestà
nor his troops or judges were permitted to marry Genoans, to buy local property, or to engage in any commercial transactions, and at the end of the year he was required to leave and not return for several years. The system worked because the
podestà
had enough troops of his own so that combined with either Genoan faction he could defeat the other faction; at the same time, the
podestà
lacked sufficient troops to defeat either faction alone, preventing a dictatorship. This system worked so well that many other Italian communes adopted it.
⁴²

The Genoan system of government became more democratic in 1257 after a rebellion by guilds and confraternities. The council was expanded to thirty-two members, four elected from each of the city’s wards, each set of four being divided equally between the nobility and the people. In place of an outside
podestà
serving for a year, the council elected a “captain” to administer the commune for a ten-year term. The fact that the first man elected captain, Guglielmo Boccanegra, was a rich commoner suggests that the real basis for the creation of a more democratic regime was Genoa’s booming commercial economy. From a tiny town having perhaps ten thousand residents in 1100, by 1250 Genoa had a population of about fifty thousand, making it one of the largest cities in Europe.
⁴³

It needs to be emphasized that the Church vigorously advocated and defended democracy in northern Italy. Not only did the Church unequivocally assert moral equality, but it also ventured into the political arena, with bishops and cardinals playing a leading role on behalf of expanding the franchise.

Inventing Capitalism

Probably every leading textbook in introductory sociology gives substantial, positive coverage to Max Weber’s famous thesis that Protestants invented capitalism, as he claimed in his
Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism
(1904–5). But it isn’t so! The rise of capitalism in Europe
preceded
the Reformation by centuries. In the 1970s the celebrated Fernand Braudel complained that Weber’s “tenuous theory” had endured for decades even though “all historians have opposed” it and, more to the point, “it is clearly false.” Braudel added, “The northern countries took over the place that earlier had so long and so brilliantly been occupied by
the old capitalist centers of the Mediterranean. They invented nothing, either in technology or in business management.”
⁴⁴
Even these northern centers of capitalism were Catholic, not Protestant, during their critical period of economic development—the Reformation still lay well into the future.

Why my fellow sociologists persist in embracing Weber’s thesis can only be attributed to historical ignorance. But historians’ common objections to Weber’s thesis also need correction. Capitalism was not invented in the Italian city-states, for all that they were fully developed capitalist centers by the end of the eleventh century. Weber was correct in asserting that capitalism had religious roots. It was not, however, originated by Protestants: capitalism first appeared in the great Catholic monastic estates back in the ninth century.

On Capitalism

What
is
capitalism? Several thousand books have been written on the subject, but very few authors explain what they mean by the term
capitalism.
⁴⁵
This is not because no definition is needed;
⁴⁶
it is because capitalism is difficult to define, having originated not as an economic concept but as a pejorative term used by nineteenth-century leftists to condemn wealth and privilege. To adapt the term for serious analysis is a bit like trying to make a social-scientific concept out of a
reactionary pig.
⁴⁷
Although it might be good strategy to let readers supply their own meaning of capitalism, it seems irresponsible to base any analysis on an undefined term. Therefore:
Capitalism is an economic system wherein privately owned, relatively well-organized, and stable firms pursue complex commercial activities within a relatively free (unregulated) market, taking a systematic, long-term approach to investing and reinvesting wealth (directly or indirectly) in productive activities involving a hired workforce and guided by anticipated and actual returns.
⁴⁸