How the West Won: The Neglected Story of the Triumph of Modernity (24 page)

Aquinas was less clear about interest on loans. In some writings he condemned all interest as the sin of usury; in other passages he accepted that lenders deserved compensation, although he was fuzzy as to how much and why.
⁷⁶
But many of Aquinas’s contemporaries, especially the Canonists, were not so cautious. With the commercial economy rapidly expanding, they began detailing exceptions wherein interest charges were not usurious.
⁷⁷
For example, if a productive property such as an estate was given as security for a loan, the lender could take all the production during the period of the loan and not deduct it from the amount owed.
⁷⁸
Also, a lender could be compensated for the opportunity cost of not having the money available for other commercial opportunities.
⁷⁹
In this same spirit it was deemed proper to charge interest for goods bought on credit.
⁸⁰
Banks could not make straight loans at a fixed rate of interest
because such deals would involve no “adventure of the principal.” But it took little finesse for bankers to evade this prohibition by trading notes, bills of exchange, or currencies in ways that seemed adventuresome but that in fact had predictable returns.
⁸¹
In short,
usury
had become essentially an empty term.

Thus, by no later than the thirteenth century the leading Christian theologians had fully debated the primary aspects of emerging capitalism—profits, property rights, credit, lending, and the like. As the historian Lester K. Little summed up: “In each case they came up with generally favorable, approving views, in sharp contrast to the attitudes that had prevailed for six or seven centuries right up to the previous generation.”
⁸²
Capitalism was freed from all fetters of faith.
⁸³

It was a remarkable shift. After all, most of these theologians had taken vows of poverty, and most of their predecessors had held merchants and commercial activities in contempt. Other religions, too, condemned paying interest on loans, and they did not so dramatically revise their positions. In Islam, for example, the Qur’an (2:275) condemns all interest (
riba
) on borrowed money. Although medieval Muslims often ignored prohibitions on lending money at interest, this was almost exclusively to fund consumption, not for investment.
⁸⁴
Religious opposition to interest, combined with the avarice of repressive regimes, prevented capitalism from arising in Islam—and still does.
⁸⁵

So what accounts for the theological revolution in Christianity? The shift occurred because the great monastic orders had begun actively participating in free markets. This direct experience caused monastic theologians to reconsider the morality of commerce. Of course, officials in the church hierarchy were far worldlier than those in religious orders. Few holding higher church positions had taken vows of poverty, and many displayed a taste for profligate living. As we saw in chapter 5, many church officials purchased their positions—sometimes before being ordained or even baptized!
⁸⁶
The worldly aspects of the medieval Church were an endless source of scandal and conflict, culminating in the Reformation. But they paid serious dividends in the development of capitalism. The Church didn’t stand in the way; in fact, it justified and even played an active role in the commercial revolution of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries.
⁸⁷
Had this not occurred, the West may have ended up like the nations of Islam.

Capitalist City-States

Although capitalism developed in the great monastic estates, it soon found a receptive setting in the newly democratic Italian city-states. In the tenth century these city-states emerged as the banking and trading centers of Europe. Subsequently they industrialized and began producing a large volume of manufactured goods for export across the Mediterranean and to northern Europe and the British Isles. For example, eyeglasses (for nearsightedness as well as farsightedness) were mass-produced by plants in both Florence and Venice, and tens of thousands of pairs were exported annually.

Perhaps the most striking aspect of Italian capitalism was the rapid perfection of banking. The Italian bankers quickly developed and adopted double-entry bookkeeping. To facilitate trade, they invented bills of exchange, making it possible to transfer funds on paper rather than transporting coins or precious metal over long distances, which was both difficult and dangerous. Italian bankers also initiated insurance to guard against loss of long-distance shipments by land or sea. Perhaps the most important of all the Italian banking innovations was the perfection of modern arithmetic, based on the adoption of Hindu-Arabic numerals and the concept of zero. Even addition and subtraction were daunting chores for Romans, given their cumbersome numeral system. The new system was revolutionary in terms of its ease and accuracy. Arithmetic schools sprang up in all the leading northern Italian city-states, eventually enrolling students from as far away as northern Europe.
⁸⁸

Banks proliferated. By the thirteenth century there were 38 independent banks in Florence, 34 in Pisa, 27 in Genoa, 18 in Venice—a combined total of 173 in the leading Italian city-states.
⁸⁹
Most of these Italian banks had foreign branches, too. In 1231 there were 69 Italian banking branches operating in England and nearly as many in Ireland. In fact, until well into the fifteenth century every bank in western Europe was either in Italy or was a branch of an Italian bank.
⁹⁰

The proximate cause of the rise of Italian capitalism was freedom from the rapacious rulers who repressed and consumed economic progress in most of the world, including most of Europe. Although their political life often was turbulent, these city-states were true republics able to sustain the freedom capitalism requires. Second, centuries of technological progress had laid the necessary foundations for the rise of capitalism,
especially the agricultural surpluses needed to sustain cities and to permit specialization. In addition, Christian theology encouraged the idea of progress, which justified long-term investment strategies, and provided moral justifications for the business practices fundamental to capitalism.

The Freedom Factor

If there is a single factor responsible for the rise of the West, it is freedom. Freedom to hope. Freedom to act. Freedom to invest. Freedom to enjoy the fruits of one’s dreams as well as one’s labor.

So much of that freedom emerged during the so-called Dark Ages. The ramifications would be felt for centuries to come.

Part III

Medieval Transformations (1200–1500)

7

Climate, Plague, and Social Change

I
f historians have been rather inattentive to matters of geography, they have been even less attuned to the implications of climate and disease. Of course, the obvious effects of climate—that Eskimos use sleds and Bedouins do not—have always been noted. What has been given little attention are significant climatic
changes
. In part this is because until Hubert Lamb wrote about them in 1965,
¹
it was not widely recognized that there had been any substantial climatic changes since the end of the Ice Age, twenty thousand years ago, despite the fact that the history of medieval Europe hinges on two major shifts in climate. By the same token, although the conquest of many chronic diseases is regarded as an essential feature of the rise of modernity, historians have largely ignored epidemics, which have had far more dramatic effects on the course of history. Incredibly, generations of historians dismissed the death of nearly half the world’s population from the Black Death (1346–1351) as of little significance compared with, say, the Hundred Years’ War (1337–1453). Serious historical studies of the Black Death did not begin until well into the twentieth century,
²
and even now these studies are pursued as an isolated subject matter.

For example, in his well-received
Civilization: A New History of the Western World
(2006), Roger Osborne devoted one sentence to the Black Death and none to plagues; he gave two sentences to the Ice Age and made no mention of more recent climate changes. In his huge and celebrated
Europe: A History
(1996), Norman Davies gave nearly three pages
(out of 1,365) to the Black Death, but like so many other historians, he treated it as a self-contained event, writing only two paragraphs on any social effects. Davies also gave one page to climate, but mostly to discredit it as being of historical significance.

Breaking with tradition, this chapter is focused on two extraordinary developments in the middle of the fourteenth century: the Black Death and the so-called Little Ice Age, when the weather turned bitterly cold. Ironically, these twin catastrophes seem to have made several important positive contributions to the rise of modernity.

Medieval Climates

Amid the bitter contemporary conflicts over whether the climate is getting warmer, and if so why, the most basic fact about earth’s climate has been nearly forgotten: that warming and cooling trends are quite common. Because substantial changes in the climate occur very slowly, people tend to regard their current climatic conditions as normal. Not so. For example, beginning sometime in the eighth century, the earth began to heat up, producing what now is known as the Medieval Warm Period, which lasted from about 800 to about 1250. As temperatures rose, the growing period lengthened all across northern Europe; the Arctic ice pack receded, making it much safer to sail in the North Atlantic; and it became possible to farm successfully as far north as Greenland. Then temperatures began to drop until early in the fourteenth century, when the Little Ice Age dawned; this era of very cold winters and short summers lasted until about 1850. During the coldest decades of the Little Ice Age, in the seventeenth century, the Baltic Sea froze over, making possible sleigh rides from Poland to Sweden; the Thames River froze in London, as did all the Atlantic harbors in Europe.
³

To make matters more confusing, both eras saw considerable variation from year to year—unusually cold years during the Medieval Warm Period and unusually warm years during the Little Ice Age. In fact, such abnormal conditions could sometimes last for a decade. But the important point is that both eras had substantial influence on the course of history.

The question arises, how do we know that these climatic periods took place? Until recent times our only sources were literary—as when
a medieval diarist noted that “this was a year without summer” or an English pastor wrote to a friend about ice skating on the Thames. Then came archaeological evidence, such as analysis of skeletons showing how the Viking colony on Greenland slowly died out from malnutrition. But we now have a far more general, accurate, and sensitive database on the climate obtained from tree rings and from ice cores drilled in glaciers in many parts of the earth. Ice cores have annual layers similar to tree rings. Chemical and isotopic analyses of ice cores reveal many aspects of climate, including temperature ranges, ocean volume, precipitation, chemistry of the lower atmosphere, volcanic eruptions, solar variability, and even the prevalence of forest fires. Because of the great depth of some glaciers, it has been possible to reconstruct the climate for a period stretching back several hundred thousand years.
⁴
Of course, a recent scandal concerned the falsification of these data on behalf of the man-made global warming thesis, a fraud that involved minimizing the warmth of the Medieval Warm Period and maximizing the temperatures of the Little Ice Age to create the so-called hockey stick graph of temperatures for the past millennium. Now that this fraud has been detected, there can be no doubt that such warm and cold periods occurred and that they greatly influenced human events.