The New Penguin History of the World (98 page)

More cash crops for growing markets gradually changed the self-sufficient manor into a unit producing for sale. Its markets were to be found in towns which grew steadily between 1100 and 1300; urban population increased faster than rural. This is a complicated phenomenon. The new town life was in part a revival going hand in hand with the revival of trade, in part a reflection of growing population. It is a chicken-and-egg business to decide which came first. A few new towns grew up around a castle or a monastery. Sometimes this led to the establishment of a market. Many new towns, especially in Germany, were deliberately settled as colonies. On the whole, long-established towns grew bigger – Paris may
have had about 80,000 inhabitants in 1340 and Venice, Florence and Genoa were probably comparable – but few were so big. Fourteenth-century Germany had only fifteen towns of more than 10,000 inhabitants, and London, with about 35,000 was then by far the biggest English city. Of the great medieval towns, only those in the south had been important Roman centres (though many in the north, of course, had like London, Roman nuclei). New cities tended to be linked distinctively to economic possibilities. They were markets, or lay on great trade routes such as the Meuse and Rhine, or were grouped in an area of specialized production such as Flanders, where already in the late twelfth century Ypres, Arras and Ghent were famous as textile towns, or Tuscany, another cloth-producing, cloth-finishing region. Wine was one of the first agricultural commodities to loom large in international trade and this underpinned the early growth of Bordeaux. Ports often became the metropolitan centres of maritime regions, as did Genoa and Bruges.

The commercial revival was most conspicuous in Italy, where trade with the outside world was resumed, above all, by Venice. In that great commercial centre banking for the first time separated itself from the changing of money. By the middle of the twelfth century, whatever the current state of politics, Europeans enjoyed continuing trade not only with Byzantium but with the Arab Mediterranean. Beyond those limits, an even wider world was involved. In the early fourteenth century trans-Saharan gold from Mali relieved a bullion shortage in Europe. By then, Italian merchants had long been at work in central Asia and China. They sold slaves from Germany and central Europe to the Arabs of Africa and the Levant. They bought Flemish and English cloth and took it to Constantinople and the Black Sea. In the thirteenth century the first voyage was made from Italy to Bruges; before this the Rhine, Rhône and overland routes had been used. Roads were built across Alpine passes. Trade fed on trade and the northern European fairs drew other merchants from the north-east. The German towns of the Hanse, the league which controlled the Baltic, provided a new outlet for the textiles of the West and the spices of the East. But transport costs on land were always high; to move goods from Cracow to Venice quadroupled their price.

In such ways, European economic geography was revolutionized. In Flanders and the Low Countries economic revival soon began to generate a population big enough to stimulate new agricultural innovation. Everywhere, towns which could escape from the cramping monopolies of the earliest manufacturing centres enjoyed the most rapid new prosperity. One visible result was a great wave of building. It was not only a matter of the houses and guildhalls of newly prosperous cities; it left a glorious legacy
in Europe’s churches, not just in the great cathedrals, but in scores of magnificent parish churches of little English towns.

Building was a major expression of medieval technology. The architecture of a cathedral posed engineering problems as complex as those of a Roman aqueduct; in solving them, the engineer was slowly to emerge from the medieval craftsman. Medieval technology was not in a modern sense science-based, but achieved much by the accumulation of experience and reflection on it. Possibly its most important achievement was the harnessing of other forms of energy to do the work of muscles and, therefore, to deploy muscle-power more effectively and productively. Winches, pulleys and inclined planes thus eased the shifting of heavy loads, but change was most obvious in agriculture, where metal tools had been becoming more common since the tenth century. The iron plough had made available the heavier soils of valley lands; since it required oxen to pull it the evolution of a more efficient yoke followed and with it more efficient traction. The whipple-tree and the shoulder collar for the horse also made possible bigger loads. There were not many such innovations, but they were sufficient to effect a considerable increase in the cultivators’ control of the land. They also imposed new demands. Using horses meant that more grain had to be grown to feed them, and this led to new crop rotations.

Another innovation was the spread of milling; both windmills and watermills, first known in Asia, were widely spread in Europe even by 1000. In the centuries to come they were put to more and more uses. Wind often replaced muscle-power in milling foodstuffs, as it had already done in the evolution of better ships; water was used when possible to provide power for other industrial operations. It drove hammers both for cloth-fulling and for forging (here the invention of the crank was of the greatest importance), an essential element in a great expansion of Europe’s metallurgical industry in the fifteenth century, and one closely connected with rising demand for an earlier technological innovation of the previous century, artillery. Water-driven hammers were also used in paper-making. The invention of printing soon gave this industry an importance which may even have surpassed that of the new metal-working of Germany and Flanders. Print and paper had their own revolutionary potential for technology, too, because books made the diffusion of techniques faster and easier in the growing pool of craftsmen and artificers able to use such knowledge. Some innovations were simply taken over from other cultures; the spinning-wheel came to medieval Europe from India (though the application of a treadle to it to provide drive with the foot seems to have been a European invention of the sixteenth century).

Whatever qualifications are needed, it is clear that by 1500 a technology
was available which was already embodied in a large capital investment. It was making the accumulation of further capital for manufacturing enterprises easier than ever before. The availability of this capital must have been greater, moreover, as new devices eased business. Medieval Italians invented much of modern accountancy as well as new credit instruments for the financing of international trade. The bill of exchange appears in the thirteenth century and with it and the first true bankers we are at the edge of modern capitalism. Limited liability appears at Florence in 1408. Yet though such a change from the past was by implication colossal, it is easy to get it out of proportion if we do not recall its scale. For all the magnificence of its palaces, the goods shipped by medieval Venice in a year could all have fitted comfortably into one large modern ship.

None the less the ground won over long, slow improvement and growth was precarious. For centuries, economic life was fragile, never far from the edge of collapse. Medieval agriculture, in spite of such progress as had been made, was appallingly inefficient. It abused the land and exhausted it. Little was consciously put back into it except manure. As population rose and new land became harder to find, family holdings got smaller; probably most European households farmed less than eight acres in 1300. Only in a few places (the Po valley was one) were there big investments in collective irrigation or improvement. Above all, agriculture was vulnerable to weather; two successive bad harvests in the early fourteenth century reduced the population of Ypres by a tenth. Local famine could rarely be offset by imports. Roads had broken down since Roman times, carts were crude and for the most part goods had to be carried by packhorse or mule. Water transport was cheaper and swifter, but could rarely meet the need. Commerce could have its political difficulties, too; the Ottoman onslaught brought a gradual recession in eastern trade in the fifteenth century. Demand was small enough for a very little change to determine the fate of cities; cloth production at Florence and Ypres fell by two-thirds in the fourteenth century.

It is very difficult to generalize but about one thing there is no doubt: a great and cumulative setback occurred at that time. There was a sudden rise in mortality, not occurring everywhere at the same time, but notable in many places after a series of bad harvests around 1320. This started a slow decline of population which suddenly became a disaster with the onset of attacks of epidemic disease. These are often called by the name of one of them, the ‘Black Death’ of 1348–50 and the worst single attack. It was of bubonic plague, but no doubt it masked many other killing diseases which swept Europe with it and in its wake. Europeans died of typhus, influenza and smallpox, too; all contributed to a great demographic
disaster. In some areas a half or a third of the population may have died; over Europe as a whole the total loss has been calculated as a quarter. A papal enquiry put the figure at more than forty million. Toulouse was a city of 30,000 in 1335 and a century later only 8000 lived there; 1400 died in three days at Avignon.

There was no universal pattern, but all Europe shuddered under these blows. In extreme cases a kind of collective madness broke out. Pogroms of Jews were a common expression of a search for scapegoats or those guilty of spreading the plague; the burning of witches and heretics was another. The European psyche bore a scar for the rest of the Middle Ages, which were haunted by the imagery of death and damnation in painting, carving and literature. The fragility of settled order illustrated the precariousness of the balance of food and population. When disease killed enough people, agricultural production would collapse; then the inhabitants of the towns would die of famine if they were not already dying of plague. Probably a plateau of productivity had already been reached by about 1300. Both available techniques and easily accessible new land for cultivation had reached a limit and some have seen signs of population pressure treading close upon resources even by that date. From this flowed the huge setback of the fourteenth century and then the slow recovery in the fifteenth.

It is scarcely surprising that an age of such colossal dislocations and disasters should have been marked by violent social conflicts. Everywhere in Europe the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries brought peasant risings. The French
jacquerie
of 1358 which led to over 30,000 deaths and the English Peasants’ Revolt of 1381, which for a time captured London, were especially notable. The roots of rebellion lay in the ways in which landlords had increased their demands under the spur of necessity and in the new demands of royal tax collectors. Combined with famine, plague and war they made an always miserable existence intolerable. ‘We are made men in the likeness of Christ, but you treat us like savage beasts,’ was the complaint of English peasants who rebelled in 1381. Significantly, they appealed to the Christian standards of their civilization; the demands of medieval peasants were often well formulated and effective but it is anachronistic to see in them a nascent socialism.

Demographic disaster on such a scale paradoxically made things better for some poor men. One obvious and immediate result was a severe shortage of labour; the pool of permanently underemployed had been brutally dried up. A rise in real wages followed. Once the immediate impact of the fourteenth-century disasters had been absorbed the standard of living of the poor may have risen slightly, for the price of cereals tended to fall. The tendency for the economy, even in the countryside, to move on to a
money basis was speeded up by the labour shortage. By the sixteenth century, serf labour and servile status had both receded a long way in western Europe, particularly in England. This weakened the manorial structure and the feudal relationships clustered about it. Landlords were also suddenly confronted with a drop in their rent incomes. In the previous two centuries the habits of consumption of the better-off had become more expensive. Now property-owners suddenly ceased to grow more prosperous. Some landlords could adapt. They could, for example, switch from cultivation, which required much labour, to sheep-running which required little. In Spain there were still even possibilities of taking in more land and living directly off it. Moorish estates were the reward of the soldier of the Reconquest. Elsewhere, many landlords simply let their poorer land go out of cultivation.

The results are very hard to pin down, but they were bound to stimulate further and faster social change. Medieval society changed dramatically, and sometimes in oddly assorted ways, between the tenth century and the sixteenth. Even at the end of that age, though, it seems still almost unimaginably remote. Its obsession with status and hierarchy is one index of this. Medieval European man was defined by his legal status. Instead of being an individual social atom, so to speak, he was the point at which a number of coordinates met. Some of them were set by birth and the most obvious expression of this was the idea of nobility. The noble society, which was to remain a reality in some places until the twentieth century, was already present in its essentials in the thirteenth. Gradually, warriors had turned into landowners. Descent then became important because there were inheritances to argue about. One indicator was the rise of the sciences of heraldry and genealogy, which have since had a profitable life right down to our own day. The first English duke was created in 1337, an expression of the tendency to find ways of singling out the greater magnates from among their peers. Symbolic questions of precedence became of intense interest; rank was at stake. From this rose the dread of disparagement, the loss of status which might follow for a woman from an unequal marriage or for a man from contamination by a lowly occupation. For centuries most noblemen in northern Europe took it for granted that only arms, the Church or the management of their own estates were fit occupations for their like. Trade, above all, was closed to them except through agents. Even when, centuries later, this barrier gave way, hostility to retail trade was the last thing to be abandoned by those who cared about these things. When a sixteenth-century French king called his Portuguese cousin ‘the grocer king’ he was being rude as well as witty and no doubt his courtiers laughed at the sneer.