This new edition of the second volume of The Cambridge Economic History of Europe is substantially as it was planned, and as much of its contents had been approved before his death, by the late Sir Michael Postan. His principal object was to fill gaps in the first edition, published in 1952, that were attributable to the circumstances of the war and post-war years during which it was written. The most important gaps were the absence of studies of Eastern European trade, of the Asian and African dimensions of European trade and, among ‘background’ topics, of the money and currencies of medieval Europe. These vacant spaces have now been filled. In only one particular has Sir Michael Postan's plan for the volume not been realised. It had been his intention that it should also include a Chapter dealing with medieval land transport and shipping, a Chapter which he had hoped to write himself. In the event this task was still uncompleted at the time of his death and it did not prove possible to arrange for its completion by another hand within a period that would avoid still further delaying the appearance of a volume which had already been long in preparation. It seemed best, therefore, to abandon this part of the plan for it, the more particularly because much of the evidence for trade routes and transport is reviewed, often in considerable detail, in the Chapters on the main trading regions.

Nature endowed Europe with extraordinarily varied and abundant mineral resources. The conquest of this underground wealth by the western peoples has been inseparable from the unprecedented power obtained by men in recent centuries over the physical world.

This power has come from the solution of technical problems which earlier civilisations had never seriously faced. Many of these problems first became acute in connection with mining metallurgy. Three examples will perhaps suffice. It was the search for adequate means of draining coal pits that led to the practical use of the force contained in jets of steam, to the invention of the steam engine. As the quantities of minerals dug out of the earth increased, their bulky character exerted increasing pressure on men's minds to discover cheaper methods of carrying them over land and water. It was the difficulty of hauling ores and coal in wagons along rough, soggy ground that led to the invention and development of the railway. The demand for larger quantities of metal for use in war as well as in peace pressed men on to discover methods of treating ores which would reduce the labour and the waste involved in separating and obtaining metals. It was the persistence of the western Europeans in exploiting a discovery which probably had been made by many earlier peoples – that iron ore actually melted when the fires were hot enough – which has produced metal in overwhelming quantities from cascades of liquid flame.

Introduction

Distinctive features of trade in the Islamic world

The medieval Islamic world, by comparison with western Europe, constituted a highly urbanised civilisation; and it combined distinctive regional specialities in industrial activity, agricultural production and cultural life. It was a civilisation whose great economic centres were tied together by successful and esteemed merchants, exploiters of the regional variety of the Muslim world; it was a civilisation which drew from the lands beyond its periphery – from Christian Europe, the spice islands and black Africa – many of the essential commodities upon which its wealth was constructed. Indeed, the economic dependence of the Islamic lands on non-Muslim regions helped to generate into life a new species of competitor: the mercantile republics of Italy and southern France, whose naval victories assured Christendom of command over the Mediterranean as early as 1200. The appearance of thriving communities of Christian merchants in western Europe only increased the commercial importance of the Islamic world, as the principal channel for the transmission of African gold and Indonesian spices to new centres of demand in the Latin West. In other words, the history of trade through the lands of Islam, towards Europe, becomes a dominant theme in the development of Muslim trade. In the late Middle Ages Egypt, Anatolia, Iraq all remained important consumers of the luxury articles which western merchants also required; but fluctuations in business, even the organisation of trade, were increasingly responsive to impulses from the West. Thus, a wealthy group of Egyptian spice traders, the ‘Karimi’ merchants, flourished partly in response to western demand for eastern spices on sale in Alexandria and other great ports.

Introduction

It is hardly necessary to point out that what passed for trade and industry in the early Middle Ages bore little resemblance to the complex economic activity of the later Middle Ages and more modern times. The sources available to us and the conceptual apparatus of the historian cannot fully interpret the vaguely perceived forms of economic life during the early centuries of the Middle Ages in Eastern Europe. Such written sources as exist mainly tell us about long-distance trade. Within the last forty years, however, these documents have been reinforced by archaeological excavations which reveal fragmentary glimpses of the daily life of the Slavonic peoples. Typical finds in these excavations have thrown light on the various objects which were produced and consumed and this has helped us to reach certain conclusions of a qualitative, if not a quantitative, nature.

The exchange of goods and handicrafts in that early period is frequently referred to in the literature on the subject, but the dichotomy of a subsistence and an exchange economy in all its social and economic aspects is not a straightforward one, and the terms historians are forced to use when studying those far-off days are not altogether relevant.

Until at least the end of the eleventh century the peoples of the eastern and western Slavonic countries lived in a largely subsistence economy. It was a way of life in which the time and energies of small, widely dispersed groups of people, living in clearings in the huge forests, were devoted to producing goods to be consumed within the group.

Introduction

The antecedents of trade and industry in the European continent extend continuously through time to the activities of the earliest hominids, a million years ago, in a Europe that we would now scarcely recognise; a Europe with an unfamiliar geography, a different climate and an exotic fauna and flora. In Man's own knowledge and continuing experience there have been not one Europe but a succession of Europes through time, each with its own distinctive character. Indeed, the minute penetration of the European environment which mapped the resources of later trade and industry was the cumulative consequence of this successive experience of every aspect of Europe, under every kind of condition, collectively stored in the cultural traditions of its inhabitants. It might almost be said that Man stayed still and let Europe fluctuate about him in its oscillation trajectory. But this, of course, is not true, for Man's ancestors continuously adapted both biologically and culturally in such a way as to intensify his branching penetration deep into the interstices of his environment. In this process Man's cultural adaptations have increasingly insulated his population from environmental fluctuations by means of the increasing regulatory variety of his material and social artefact assemblages.

It at once seems incongruous to take historical concepts of trade and industry back into a series of contexts in which ultimately Man is not even Homo sapiens and in which perhaps formalised speech itself may be doubted. Nevertheless, the most primitive tool-using hominids practised complex economies – elaborate time and role allocation strategies, combining various subsistence methods and extraction processes with which to feed and equip the community and ensure its continuity.

The First Five Hundred Years

The basic trends

In the dim light of its scanty documentation, the first half of the Middle Ages in the European South looks like a multisecular trough of depression between the crest of the Roman prime and the higher crest of the late medieval Commercial Revolution. It started dismally: by 476, when a handful of Barbarians seized the last remnant of the Roman Empire in the West, the native population had been cut down by epidemics, thinned out by genetic infertility and soil exhaustion, oppressed by fiscal and political depotism, demoralised by military defeats and unnerved by prophecies of imminent doom. Commerce had taken crippling losses. Communications were breaking down, coinage was scarce and debased, fewer and fewer agricultural and industrial products were available for sale, the purchasing power of all but the wealthiest individuals had been eroded. The formerly tight network of laborious cities and well-cultivated fields was changing to a sparse pattern of virtually self-sufficient large estates surrounded by no man's land.

The crisis was not restricted to the European South alone – possibly its remotest roots went back to an unfavourable pulsation of climate affecting the whole temperate area of Eurasia ever since the second century of our era – but it was not everywhere irreversible. The eastern provinces of the Roman Empire, whose cities and merchants had long outshone their western counterparts, had a remarkable come-back after 476, as the settling down of a large proportion of the Barbarians in the West relieved pressure on the East.

Introduction

The region under discussion stretches from the Oder and the Bohemian Forest eastwards as far as the Caspian Sea; it is bordered on the north by the Baltic and on the south it extends beyond the Carpathian mountains and Transylvania down to the Black Sea. In the late Middle Ages the various regions making up this territory were not all at the same stage of economic development and there are thus important differences in the timing and pace of the changes which occurred. In common with the rest of Europe at that time the larger economic units had still to make their appearance. Thus, when we wish to find out about the trade of the area, we have to consider disparate regions whose economic contacts were haphazard, for no state in eastern Europe had as yet created a uniform economic organisation even though some such tendencies could already be observed in, e.g. Bohemia and Poland.

The territory can usefully be divided into two main regions – the western, including Bohemia, Poland and the Slovak provinces of Hungary, and the eastern, comprising present-day Russia. The western region had by the thirteenth century already experienced a period of rapid development. In Bohemia this had probably come to an end by the latter part of the fourteenth century, whereas elsewhere it lasted, with some important exceptions, into the following century. On the other hand the Mongol invasion had caused a serious economic setback in a large part of the eastern region during the first half of the thirteenth century.

The Economic Policies and Organisation of the Byzantine Empire

Byzantine economic history shows a marked contrast to the economic history of other medieval states. Its evolution does not correspond with that of the peoples of western Europe with their steady advance towards modern economy, nor does it resemble the story of the Arab Empire, the story of a vast loosely-knit dominion, rich in natural resources of every sort but never fully developing them. Byzantium was a carefully administered state, dominating a large but not naturally very wealthy territory, and aiming at the greatest possible amount of centralisation in its capital, Constantinople, a city whose size and organised activity made it unique in the medieval world.

Byzantine history falls into clearly differentiated periods. The first, from the foundation of Constantinople till the Arab conquests in the seventh century, is a continuation of the history of the Roman Empire. The emperor still possessed all the eastern provinces of the Empire, and his problems were similar to those of his predecessors. There follows a period when the Empire, reduced in size and at first in danger of collapse, gradually adjusts its life to reach a high state of prosperity in the tenth and early eleventh centuries. Then comes a period of new invasions from the East and military and economic aggression from the West, Byzantium apparently recovers, then rapidly declines, till the capture of Constantinople by the Crusaders in 1204. The Empire of Nicaea and the recovery of Constantinople in 1261 again suggest a revival; but the last two centuries of the Empire tell a story of impoverishment and decay.

Roman–Barbarian Discontinuity

The collapse of the Roman Empire in the West was so prolonged a process that to expect to find any cataclysmic change in the coinage would be unreasonable. No such violent change or lengthy cessation of coinage occurred except in Britain. After the departure of the army and the breakdown of administrative contacts with the rest of the Empire, no further coin entered Britain, and, within a generation, by about A.D. 435, coin ceased to be used there as a medium of exchange. Not until the latter part of the seventh century were coins again used in Britain as money, although many survived as jewellery or were used for gifts or for compensation. Everywhere else in the area of the western Empire the use of money was maintained.

The coinage of the late Roman Empire reflected its economic decrepitude. On the one hand there was highly valued gold coins, the pure gold solidus, introduced by Constantine in 309, together with its half, the semissis, and its third, the tremissis or triens. The solidus weighed 24 carob seeds or carats, about 4.48 grams in modern terms. On the other hand there was the heavy copper follis, revived by Anastasius I in 498 as a coin of forty nummi, and its poor relations down to the nummus. In between came the sparsely issued silver coins, conventionally termed siliquae by numismatists. As units of account 24 siliquae were worth a solidus. The gold coinage was used for imperial gifts and the payment of subsidies to imperial ‘allies’, like the 50,000 solidi paid by Maurice Tiberius to Chilperic in 584.

In the year of our Lord 301, ‘aroused justly and rightfully by the abuse of immoderate prices and an uncurbed passion for gain, which is lessened neither by abundant supplies nor by fruitful years’, the Emperor Diocletian issued an edict in which, after analysing the evils of the times (in curiously pompous and tortuous Latin), he laid down for their improvement a tariff of maximum prices, to be observed on pain of death throughout the whole Empire. This edict is significant not so much for its results (which were trivial), but as a symbol of the change that had come over the life of the Mediterranean world since the setting up of the principate by Augustus three hundred years earlier. A world of free, private economic activity had given place to one of state control. Machinery had been devised for the organisation of production and trade. Forms of free association had been transmuted into organs of rigid regimentation. The imperial authorities, once content merely to provide facilities for the trader, to act as ‘night–watchman for the business–man’, now sought to direct his whole life and his very movements from place to place.

The process of this transformation was involved. It had its ramifications in every branch of social and economic life; and it embraced the provinces no less than Italy, the original core of the Empire. Its beginnings can be traced in the earliest period of the principate; but unfortunately the critical time when the new outlines were solidifying is one of the most obscure in the whole history of Rome.

In the years which have gone by since Werner Sombart called attention to the desirability of investigating the economic history of building, relatively little has been done in that direction with regard to medieval Europe as a whole though some notable contributions have been made in regard to particular buildings and countries. A major difficulty is the scarcity, especially for the earlier Middle Ages, of the kind of record which is essential. Archaeological and literary evidences, though useful, cannot by themselves do much more than indicate the kind of question which the inquirer must ask; for the answers there are needed accounts of the expenditure on building operations. Unfortunately, those relating to important buildings, such as large royal and ecclesiastical works in France during the early fourteenth century, have in many cases been lost. Large numbers, relating to buildings of various kinds in different countries, have survived sporadically; but probably the fullest series in existence is that relating to works carried out for the crown in England. This is the more valuable because it includes not merely summarised accounts, from which relatively little can be learned, but particulars, in some instances even weekly statements, giving the names of workmen with the amounts paid to them and similarly full detail relating to purchases. The ideal collection, which is rare, is that of which the London Bridge Accounts are a sample; these are particulars, extending from week to week or month to month over several centuries, an invaluable record of changes in wages and prices paid at the same undertaking.

The Trade in General

Commodities

The international and inter-regional trade of northern Europe and its principal industries bear little resemblance to the conventional image of medieval economy. The traffic across the continent of western Europe, or between the European mainland and the lands immediately to the north and to the north-east, evokes in a modern reader none of that romance which clings to the trade of southern Europe. The latter brought to western Europe exotic goods of every kind: pepper, ginger and other spices of the East Indies, silks, brocades and tapestries, sweet wines, oranges, raisins, figs and almonds. It enticed the merchant into the mysterious lands of the Near and Middle East, to Byzantium and Syria, often to Africa, and sometimes even to China. It was also the trade of the caravans, the galleys, the junks; and of the Venetian, Genoese and Florentine adventurers and merchant princes. This was the medieval trade as popular writers know it, and this is the trade which some serious writers have in mind when they insist on the luxury character of medieval commerce.

The trade of northern Europe was quite different. It was not greatly concerned with oriental and Mediterranean commodities. At various times between the sixth century and the tenth, traders and warriors brought goods from the extreme north of Europe to Byzantium and re-imported Byzantine goods into northern Europe. Much more frequently the Italian merchants of the later centuries sailed into the harbours of England and Flanders, bringing with them all the infinite variety of Levantine and oriental products.

Europe was as renowned for its textiles in the Middle Ages as today. Many and various fabrics were produced, whether from indigenous fibres such as wool, flax and hemp, from fibres primarily imported such as silk and cotton, or from mixtures of both such as that of cotton with wool or flax. But of all its textiles woollens may well take pride of place. Not only were they manufactured in all parts of the continent and worn by all classes of the community, from the humblest rustic in his coarse burel to the man of rank and fashion dressed in cloth so fine that it was almost like silk. But they were one of the chief articles of exchange within Europe itself, and they were Europe's principal export to the continents of Asia, Africa and, for a short space, America. The Vikings, venturing westwards across the Atlantic in the eleventh century, carried cloth to barter with the North Americans for furs; so too the Italians, traversing Asia to the court of the Great Khan in the thirteenth century, took with them presents of cloth, and to the end of the Middle Ages Europe's woollens were marketed in bulk at the Mediterranean gateways of Asia and Africa. Widely dispersed as the industry was, three regions became pre-eminent above all others for the large-scale manufacture of woollens – Italy, England, and what may best be described by the Latin term Belgica, that is to say the land between the Somme and the Moselle.