The ‘mercantilist’ age was not idly so christened. Everywhere along the western seaboard of Europe and along the coastline of the Mediterranean from Malaga to Venice, in the centuries that stretched from the Renascence to the Enlightenment the merchants were the dynamic element in society. As the volume of trade grew, as the fleet of international shipping expanded, linking places and trades hitherto isolated, the operations of merchants and manufacturers slowly helped to change the face of western European society partly through the goods and manufactures they made available, partly through the social changes they wrought by introducing new or extending existing methods of manufacture, and partly through the influence they exercised directly or indirectly on the policies of Government. On any statistical basis, most men everywhere were still connected with the land in one way or another: but everywhere in the later Middle Ages and early modern age trade and tradesmen were undermining the crumbling walls of custom that surrounded the economic community of the Middle Ages.

It used to be possible for historians to delineate the major features of this emergent economy under the name of capitalism and it became fashionable to bracket capitalism and the Reformation together with the overt proposal that the latter explained, at all events in part, the former. It was assumed that the sixteenth century saw the birth, specifically in northern Europe, of a novel type of economic society based on energies and ambitions which were themselves old as man but were now in some way released for good or ill on society at large: and that Protestantism – and in particular the teaching of Calvin – was a prime mover in the process.

Amid the many motives which led Europeans to take part in the overseas movements of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the need to provide some overspill for redundant population was negligible. Men wished, perhaps, to strike the infidel a blow, to strengthen their native state, to ascertain the shape and the nature of the earth, to gain great wealth or to escape from a humdrum existence—or perhaps a mixture of these things. Seldom was the hope of access to the trade goods, the spices and the silks and cotton of the sophisticated East far from their minds. But they neither wished to settle overseas themselves to earn their livings in alien lands nor to provide opportunity for their compatriots to do so. They were not colonizers, but, usually, traders or would-be traders. The desire to colonize, to settle or even to organize production, came late, and was accepted reluctantly.

Any estimate of the population of Europe as it came into the modern age, still more of the different states of Europe which were becoming increasingly the effective units, must be largely a matter of guesswork in which such data as the number of hearths, of communicants, of shipowners, of serviceable military men or even of corpses, are subjected to multipliers and distributors. Figures got by such processes can be closely related to contemporary estimates, but they remain slightly conjectural, and they are largely irrelevant from the point of view of overseas expansion. The general picture, however, has begun to emerge with reasonable clarity and to gain in significance. It is a picture which starts with a widespread and catastrophic decline in population in the fourteenth century and in which any sustained recovery was delayed by endemic plagues and constant warfare until the last quarter of the fifteenth century.

The Mediterranean Trades

The Mediterranean at the beginning of the sixteenth century was still very much a world of its own. It was still a large world, not yet dwarfed by comparison with the world of great oceans beyond Suez and Gibraltar. A ship – an ordinary merchant ship, with reasonable weather – took up to two months to make the passage, say, from Cartagena or Alicante to Alexandria; perhaps two or three weeks from Messina to Tripoli of Barbary; ten or twelve days from Leghorn to Tunis. There was plenty of space, plenty of elbow room; and the area as a whole was almost self-supporting. The sixty million or so people who inhabited the countries bordering the inland sea produced between them most of the food, many of the raw materials and almost all the manufactured goods which they consumed. They built their own ships and carried their own trade. The richest, liveliest and most varied economic activity of the region was concentrated in the relatively small area of northern Italy comprising Milan, Florence, Genoa, Venice, and their smaller neighbours and satellites. Florence and Milan were primarily manufacturing centres – Florence had little success in developing its own trading fleet, and Milan never possessed one – but Venice and Genoa, both great industrial centres, were also major naval powers and bases of great merchant fleets. Outside Italy, Ragusa specialized in very large ships for carrying bulky goods, grain, salt and wool. France, growing in unity and prosperity, attracted an increasing volume of Mediterranean traffic into the Rhone Valley by way of Marseilles, with its busy fleet of light lateen-rigged craft.

Introduction

Among historians—as distinguished from administrators and writers on political arithmetic, both of whom were concerned with the present rather than the past—interest in demographic data was slow in arising. As late as 1764 Voltaire found it necessary to admonish his fellow-historians to pay more attention to questions of population. ‘On exige’, he wrote in his programmatic article ‘Histoire’ (Dictionnaire philosophique), ‘des historiens modernes plus de détails,…des dates précises,….plus d'attention à la population.’

Few modern historians, presumably, will demur at Voltaire's injunction; but most of us would protest that, in the field of population at least, his demand for ‘détails’ and ‘dates précises’ is difficult to meet. Indeed, the historian who undertakes to trace the demographic development of Europe in the early modern period has more than once occasion to recall Professor Sée's emphatic disclaimer, ‘Nous n'en savons rien et nous n'en pouvons rien savoir.’

Even if he does not fully subscribe to this declaration the historian of early modern population cannot fail to recognize that his task is formidable. Admittedly, the period to be covered is no longer innocent of statistical inquisitiveness. What seems to be the oldest reference to a count of ‘hearths’ (focaticum) dates from 1092; and Italian cities, no less precocious in this respect than in so many others, are known occasionally to have collected quasi-demographic intelligence as early as the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. On the eve of the modern era enumerations of one sort or another had long since ceased to be a novel feature of public administration, though it was only in sixteenth-century Italy (in Venice, on the island of Sicily, and a little later in Tuscany) that census-like data would be gathered as a matter of routine.

The history of prices in Europe from the mid-fifteenth to the mideighteenth century is a very large problem indeed, and not to be undertaken in a single chapter without some trepidation. It is easy enough to outline the framework for such a history, but there is little possibility in the present state of our knowledge of discovering all the facts, or even of interpreting them with confidence. The principal advantage of such an enquiry is to establish once more the validity and basic characteristics of price history.

The first difficulty is that the economy under review is old, and now largely superseded, with structures and rhythms very different from those of industrializing Europe in the nineteenth and even more in the twentieth century. A readjustment of basic concepts is thus required on the part of the reader and of the historian of this economy.

Then again, price history has not yet succeeded in acquiring its own tools of analysis. For better or worse, it must rely on those provided by economists and statisticians. This has meant a constant effort to define terms, and in turn as a result, the methodological refinements have imposed uncertainties and repeated changes of view. It is as though each scholar believed in the persuasive value of a single method – his own – which‘ in the name of Science’ made him free to dispense with, and even reject, the contributions of his predecessors.

It must not be thought that European agriculture, before the great voyages of discovery, was stagnant as regards the introduction of new crops. The conquests of Alexander, the Arab invasions, the Crusades, had in turn familiarized Europeans with many exotic products. Since the beginning of the Christian era, introductions to Europe had included rice, sorghum, sugar-cane, cotton and several citrus fruits; amongst animals, the water buffalo and the silkworm had found an economic niche in southern Europe. Some of these introductions were still quite recent. Rice and cotton only reached Italy from Spain in the fifteenth century, and buckwheat was still spreading in France at the same time; hops, spreading slowly through northern Europe, were not planted in England till the early sixteenth century, when Englishmen first supplemented ‘ale’ with ‘beer’.

The Europeans of the fifteenth century were therefore well aware of the potential value of crop introductions. The group of crops in which their own agriculture was most deficient was the spices, which were in especially heavy demand in northern Europe where dried and salted foods perforce constituted so much of the diet in the winter months. To meet this demand, spices from Asia were imported overland at enormous expense. The conjunction of gold and spices in the quest of the early explorers is more understandable when we find Garcia da Orta recording in 1563 that 100 lb. of Ceylon cinnamon was worth 10 lb. of gold. Vegetable drugs were a subsidiary object of their quest; a medicine so much in esteem as rhubarb, for example, had to be imported from Asia and was quoted in France in 1542 as being ten times the price of cinnamon. Peres, the first Portuguese ambassador selected to go to China, where he arrived in 1517, was an apothecary who seems to have been expected to bring back useful plants.

The Natural Image

It was said at the outset that Platonism and Christianism adopted different attitudes towards corporeal nature, the one regarding it as an obstacle to the soul's perfection, the other as an aid, and itself perfectible. The statement requires modification on both sides. Plato in his later works taught that the sensible world, being a copy of the intelligible, was a guide to the understanding of it, and his successors, under the influence of the Asiatic cults, adopted the same attitude to man-made images; while the early Christians, inheriting the Jewish abhorrence of idolatry, regarded as sacrilegious the representation of spiritual things through the medium of matter. Paganism and Christianism reacted to the same stimulus in contrary ways: the pagan cults which infected Platonism with theurgy stiffened the resistance of the Christians and turned their monotheism, for a time, into iconoclasm.

In the sensible world natural images are distinguished from artificial images by their causes. The causes of the former are the Forms: ‘ The Idea’, says Xenocrates, ‘is the exemplary cause of things which subsist naturally (κατα φυσιν).’ The causes of the latter are concepts in the mind of the artist: ‘Every artist possesses wholly the paradeigma in himself, and confers its shape upon matter.’ But if the Forms are themselves concepts in the Divine Mind, then both kinds of cause are concepts or thoughts, and the difference lies in the thinker, in the one case divine, in the other human.

St Augustine's life spanned almost eighty years of a period during which the ‘decline of the Roman Empire’ passed through its most dramatic, if not its most decisive, phase. Born into the Christian Empire of Constantine's successors, his youth saw the brief pagan reaction under Julian the Apostate, followed by the return to Christianity and the ever closer linking of the Empire to Christianity under the Emperors Gratian and Theodosius I. During the latter part of his life Roman paganism, which had rallied its forces during the last decade of the fourth century, was rapidly becoming a relic of the past, though it remained a force to be reckoned with. He witnessed not only an important phase in the Christianization of the ancient world; he also lived through some of its gravest military and political upheavals: the military disaster of Adrianople (378), the division of the Empire after Theodosius, the irruption of Vandals, Sueves and other barbarians into the western provinces of the Empire (406), the increasing barbarization of the Roman armies and of the imperial court, the sacking of the City of Rome by the Visigoths (410). These are some of the landmarks. The Vandal invaders of his own North Africa had just reached his episcopal city of Hippo as he lay on his deathbed. In an important sense his life may be said to coincide with the transition from antiquity to the Middle Ages. Augustine belonged to both worlds, in many ways, and not least intellectually. He received the kind of education which was typical of late antiquity, characterized by a predominantly literary or rhetorical outlook.

A Christian Platonist may be either a Platonist who requires to substantiate his speculations by a faith which transcends them, or a Christian who thinks of his faith, and desires to expound it, in terms intelligible to Platonists. St Augustine is the outstanding example of the former type, with whom could perhaps be associated from among the Greeks the ps.-Dionysius and Johannes Philoponus if we knew more about their origins. But the thinkers who built up the Greek Christian Platonist tradition and kept it within the bounds of orthodoxy mostly belonged to the latter: the Alexandrians, the Cappadocians, possibly the ps.-Dionysius, certainly St Maximus Confessor. And it was by following in the footsteps of these, but particularly of St Gregory of Nyssa, the ps.-Dionysius and Maximus, that Johannes Scottus Eriugena introduced this form of Christian philosophy to the West.

Three attitudes towards pagan learning were possible for the Christian: uncompromising acceptance, which led to heretical Gnosticism; uncompromising rejection, as shown by the early apologists and ascetics, favoured by the School of Antioch, and surviving into the Iconoclastic movement and into some forms of modern protestantism; and controlled acceptance, the attitude of the Alexandrians and of the writers discussed in this Part, which produced the Christian philosophy, or Christianism. This attitude acknowledges that the current philosophical systems contained elements of truth, a fact taken for granted by the Alexandrians and openly asserted, with particular reference to Platonism, by the Cappadocians, while rejecting what is evidently falsified by the Christian Revelation.

Pseudepigrapha

We know no Platonist later than the Old Academy and earlier than Eudorus who would have been interested in the Two-opposite-principles doctrine and the attendant horizontal stratification as attributed to Plato by Aristotle. Plutarch, who quotes Eudorus in a different context, knows the doctrine but makes very little of it. However, this does not mean that the doctrine was, before Eudorus, forgotten altogether. It rather seems that, while it lost its home in the Academy (or was relegated to some corner there), it was fully appropriated by the authors of post-Platonic Pythagorean writings. However, they often equate the two principles with Aristotle's form and matter, or with the active and passive principles of the Stoa. Syncretism makes its full appearance.

For our purpose it is best to distinguish three classes of these writings. The first consists of pseudepigrapha. Two names are of particular interest in this group: that of Ps.-Archytas and that of Ps.-Brontinus (assuming the passage by the latter as quoted first by Syrianus, and the passage by the former as quoted by Joh. Stobaeus to belong to the pre-Plotinian period).

Speaking of Brontinus, Syrianus assures us that the Pythagoreans were familiar with the doctrine that there is a principle higher than the two opposite principles. To prove it he quotes Philolaus as having said that God brought forth limit and the limitless; and he says that Archaenetus (there is hardly any reason to change this to Archytas) spoke of a cause prior to a cause and that Brontinus said of this cause that it is above intelligence and being (ousia), surpassing it in power and dignity.

The discussion on the character of Boethius: Platonic or Christian philosopher?

The impetus given to speculative thought by the existence of a court interested in intellectual activities petered out with the beginning of the tenth century. The invasions destroyed a good deal of the economic presuppositions on which centres of learning had to rely, and interrupted their lines of communication. There is good reason for the name of the ‘Dark Age’ given to the decades which followed the end of Carolingian civilization. While the importance and influence of the French monarchy was reduced by the rise of feudal principalities, and remained so during this period, after 950 the Ottoman dynasty were capable of re-establishing monarchical power in Germany and of reviving literary activities as the true heirs of Charlemagne. Under their rule Latin writing in prose and verse was cultivated in those Saxon lands where Christianity had been introduced only a few generations earlier. But their court never reached such importance as a forum where speculative questions were debated as had distinguished the circle of scholars round Charlemagne and his grandson. Single centres in West and Central Europe kept up a certain continuity of philosophical learning. In some monasteries and cathedrals the libraries, collected under the impulse of the Carolingian revival, were preserved, and so the tradition of study, linked to the keeping and copying of manuscripts, remained alive. Some of these books, handed on from antiquity, raised disturbing questions about the relationship of rational thought to Christian revelation in the mind of the monk or canon who read them.

Soul and the material world

Soul is, of Plotinus' three hypostases, the most wide-ranging and various in its activities. At the top of its range it lives on the highest level, in the world of Intellect, and with Intellect can rise in self-transcendence to union with the One. At the bottom, it is responsible for the formation of bodies in the visible world. But, however widely Soul may range, Plotinus never allows the distinction between it and Intellect to disappear (though it may in some passages become a little blurred), and he preserves its distinctive Platonic function of being the intermediary between the worlds of intellect and sense-perception, the immediate cause of the latter, and the representative in it of the former. Its proper and most characteristic activity is discursive thinking, reasoning from premises to conclusions; but it possesses the whole range of lower forms of consciousness, with the external activities appropriate to them; and it can and should, and, it seems, while it remains universal always does, rise above its reasoning to share Intellect's life of immediate intuitive thought. The initiative in this self-transcendence, as always in Plotinus, comes from above. It is Intellect which, by illuminating Soul, raises it to its own level. The relationship between the three hypostases in Plotinus is one of hierarchical distinction in unity. They are not cut off from each other. The One and Intellect are always present to Soul and acting on it, and this eternal presence and action is the most important thing which we (who are Soul) discover in philosophical reflection.

Porphyry's philosophical career

Most of the features of Neoplatonism that we have been sketching are evident in the work of Porphyry. So it will avoid repetition to give him more attention than might otherwise have seemed due to him. Porphyry was born in about 232, the year when Plotinus started to study philosophy at Alexandria. His parents were well-to-do Syrians, and he spent most of his boyhood, so far as we know, in the busy Phoenician city of Tyre. Even if he did not travel he had ample opportunity there to make the far from superficial acquaintance with the mystery cults and magical practices of the Middle East and beyond which his writings were to show. He probably knew several languages by the time he came to the West; he continued to read widely; and it was not a conventional compliment that Simplicius paid when he called him the most learned of philosophers. Three later stages of his career have left their mark on his philosophy, his attendance at Longinus' lectures, his friendship with Plotinus and a period away from Plotinus in Sicily.

Like other young foreigners of means but a little older than most, it would seem, Porphyry continued his education at Athens. Here the dominant influence was that of Longinus (who died in 272). The old-fashioned taste of the famous critic no doubt had some part in the clarity of Porphyry's style which was soon contrasted with Plotinus' indirectness. But this ‘living library and walking museum’, as Eunapius called him, lectured on philosophy too; and we have the testimony of both to their friendship.

The part of Porphyry's description of Plotinus at Rome which is most interesting to a historian of philosophy is of course his account of his master's method of teaching and writing, of his knowledge and use of previous philosophers and his relations with the philosophers of his own time. About all this Porphyry tells us a good deal which is helpful to our understanding of the Enneads. The lectures of Plotinus were not the formal, carefully arranged, set speeches developing a theme along lines fixed by established tradition which were customary in the philosophical schools of his time. The procedure in his school was informal, some said disorderly. Plotinus was a systematic and dogmatic philosopher, who had no doubt that he knew the right answers to the great philosophical questions which he treated: but he was not the sort of systematizer and dogmatist who cannot tolerate queries, objections and interruptions. He had a Socratic belief in the value of discussion, and once a discussion had started in his school it had to go on to the end, till the difficulties raised had been properly solved, however long it took. A story which Porphyry tells gives an excellent idea of the spirit in which Plotinus met queries and objections. A man called Thaumasius came into the school one day when Plotinus was arguing with Porphyry about the relationship between soul and body (the argument lasted three days) and demanded a set lecture suitable for writing down; he could not, he said, stand Porphyry's questions and answers. But Plotinus said ‘If we do not solve the difficulties which Porphyry raises in his questions we shall be able to say absolutely nothing suitable for writing down’.