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Title: Medieval cities
Their origins and the revival of trade
Author: Henri Pirenne
Translator: Frank D. Halsey
Release date: October 10, 2026 [eBook #79759]
Language: English
Original publication: Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1925
Other information and formats: www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/79759
Credits: Chuck Greif, @parchmentglow and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at https://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)
*** START OF THE PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK MEDIEVAL CITIES ***
MEDIEVAL CITIES:
THEIR ORIGINS AND THE
REVIVAL OF TRADE
LONDON: HUMPHREY MILFORD
OXFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS
MEDIEVAL CITIES
THEIR ORIGINS AND THE REVIVAL OF TRADE
BY HENRI PIRENNE
_of the University of Ghent_
TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH
BY FRANK D. HALSEY
PRINCETON
PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS
1925
_Copyrighted 1925 Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J._
SECOND PRINTING, 1934
_Printed at Princeton University Press, Princeton, N.J., U.S.A._
TO PRINCETON UNIVERSITY
_Preface_
This _little volume contains the substance of lectures which I delivered
from October to December 1922 in several American universities. It is an
attempt to expound, in a general way, the economic awakening and the
birth of urban civilization in Western Europe during the Middle Ages._
_The bibliography placed at the end of the volume will permit the
reader, who may be interested in the subject discussed herein, to inform
himself more precisely of the details and to verify my assertions. It
would be obviously impossible, in a general outline such as this, to go
into particulars or take up exceptions and anomalies, and still more so
to give way to controversy. Here, then, will be found only a synthesis,
the result of long years of study and research._
_It is particularly gratifying to me to see this book published by the
Press of a University which showed me so cordial a sympathy during the
war, and to which I am very happy to dedicate the work as a mark of my
profound gratitude._
_Contents_
I. THE MEDITERRANEAN 1
II. THE NINTH CENTURY 25
III. CITY ORIGINS 56
IV. THE REVIVAL OF COMMERCE 78
V. THE MERCHANT CLASS 109
VI. THE MIDDLE CLASS 135
VII. MUNICIPAL INSTITUTIONS 174
VIII. CITIES AND EUROPEAN CIVILIZATION 221
BIBLIOGRAPHY 245
MEDIEVAL CITIES
_Chapter I_
The Mediterranean
The Roman Empire, at the end of the third century, had one outstanding
general characteristic: it was an essentially Mediterranean
commonwealth. Virtually all of its territory lay within the watershed of
that great land-locked sea; the distant frontiers of the Rhine, the
Danube, the Euphrates and the Sahara, may be regarded merely as an
advanced circle of outer defences protecting the approaches.
The Mediterranean was, without question, the bulwark of both its
political and economic unity. Its very existence depended on sea
mastery. Without that great trade route, neither the government, nor the
defence, nor the administration of the _orbis romanus_ would have been
possible.
As the Empire grew old this fundamentally maritime character was,
interestingly enough, not only preserved but was still more sharply
defined. When the former inland capital, Rome, was abandoned, its place
was taken by a city which not only served as a capital but which was at
the same time an admirable port--Constantinople.
The Empire’s cultural development, to be sure, had clearly passed its
peak. Population decreased, the spirit of enterprise waned, barbarian
hordes commenced to threaten the frontiers, and the increasing expenses
of the government, fighting for its very life, brought in their train a
fiscal system which more and more enslaved men to the State.
Nevertheless this general deterioration does not seem to have
appreciably affected the shipping of the Mediterranean. It continued to
be active and well-sustained, in marked contrast with the growing apathy
that characterized the continental provinces. Trade continued to keep
the East and the West in close contact with each other. There was no
interruption to the intimate commercial relations between those diverse
climes bathed by one and the same sea. Both manufactured and natural
products were still extensively dealt in: textiles from Constantinople,
Edessa, Antioch, and Alexandria; wines, oils and spices from Syria;
papyrus from Egypt; wheat from Egypt, Africa, and Spain; and wines from
Gaul and Italy. There was even a reform of the monetary system based on
the gold _solidus_, which served materially to encourage commercial
operations by giving them the benefit of an excellent currency,
universally adopted as an instrument of exchange and as a means of
quoting prices.
Of the two great regions of the Empire, the East and the West, the first
far surpassed the second, both in superiority of civilization and in a
much higher level of economic development. At the beginning of the
fourth century there were no longer any really great cities save in the
East. The center of the export trade was in Syria and in Asia Minor, and
here also was concentrated, in particular, the textile industry for
which the whole Roman world was the market and for which Syrian ships
were the carriers.
The commercial prominence of the Syrians is one of the most interesting
facts in the history of the Lower Empire.[1] It undoubtedly contributed
largely to that progressive orientalization of society which was due
eventually to end in Byzantinism. And this orientalization, of which the
sea was the vehicle, is clear proof of the increasing importance which
the Mediterranean acquired as the ageing Empire grew weak, gave way in
the North beneath the pressure of the barbarians, and contracted more
and more about the shores of this inland sea.
The persistence of the Germanic tribes in striving, from the very
beginning of the period of the invasions, to reach these same shores and
to settle there is worth special notice. When, in the course of the
fourth century, the frontiers gave way for the first time under their
blows, they poured southward in a living flood. The Quadi and the
Marcomanni invaded Italy; the Goths marched on the Bosphorus; the
Franks, the Suevi, and the Vandals, who had crossed the Rhine, pushed on
unhesitatingly towards Aquitaine and Spain. They had no thought of
merely colonizing the provinces they coveted. Their dream was rather to
settle down, themselves, in those happy regions where the mildness of
the climate and the fertility of the soil were matched by the charms and
the wealth of civilization.
This initial attempt produced nothing more permanent than the ruins
which remained as its result. Rome was still strong enough to drive the
invaders back beyond the Rhine and the Danube. For a century and a half
she succeeded in restraining them, but at the cost of exhausting her
armies and her finances.
More and more unequal became the balance of power. The assaults of the
barbarians grew more relentless as their increasing numbers made the
acquisition of new territory more imperative, while the decreasing
population of the Empire made a successful resistance constantly less
possible. Despite the extraordinary skill and determination with which
the Empire sought to stave off disaster, the outcome was inevitable.
At the beginning of the fifth century, all was over. The whole West was
invaded. Roman provinces were transformed into Germanic kingdoms. The
Vandals were installed in Africa, the Visigoths in Aquitaine and in
Spain, the Burgundians in the Valley of the Rhône, the Ostrogoths in
Italy.
This nomenclature is significant. It includes only Mediterranean
countries, and little more is needed to show that the objective of the
conquerors, free at last to settle down where they pleased, was the
sea,--that sea which for so long a time the Romans had called, with as
much affection as pride, _mare nostrum_. Towards the sea, as of one
accord, they all turned their steps, impatient to settle along its
shores and to enjoy its beauty.
If the Franks did not reach the Mediterranean at their first attempt, it
is because, having come too late, they found the ground already
occupied. But they too persisted in striving for a foothold there. One
of Clovis’s earliest ambitions was to conquer Provence, and only the
intervention of Theodoric kept him from extending the frontiers of his
kingdom as far as the Côte d’Azur. Yet this first lack of success was
not due to discourage his successors. A quarter of a century later, in
536, the Franks made good use of Justinian’s offensive against the
Ostrogoths and wrung from their hard-pressed rivals the grant of the
coveted territory. It is interesting to see how consistently the
Merovingian dynasty tended, from that date on, to become in its turn a
Mediterranean power.
Childebert and Clotaire, for example, ventured upon an expedition beyond
the Pyrenees in 542, which, however, proved to be ill-starred. But it
was Italy in particular that aroused the cupidity of the Frankish kings.
They formed an alliance, first with the Byzantines and then with the
Lombards, in the hope of setting foot south of the Alps. Repeatedly
thwarted, they persisted in fresh attempts. By 539, Theudebert had
crossed the Alps, and the territories which he had occupied were
reconquered by Narses in 553. Numerous efforts were made in 584-585 and
from 588 to 590 to get possession anew.
The appearance of the Germanic tribes on the shore of the Mediterranean
was by no means a critical point marking the advent of a new era in the
history of Europe. Great as were the consequences which it entailed, it
did not sweep the boards clean nor even break the tradition. The aim of
the invaders was not to destroy the Roman Empire but to settle there and
enjoy it. By and large, what they preserved far exceeded what they
destroyed and what they brought that was new. It is true that the
kingdoms they established on the soil of the Empire made an end of the
latter in so far as being a _State_ in Western Europe. From a political
point of view the _orbis romanus_, now strictly localized in the East,
lost that ecumenical character which had made its frontiers coincide
with the frontiers of Christianity. The Empire, however, was far from
being estranged to the lost provinces. Its civilization there outlived
its authority. By the Church, by language, by a superiority of
institutions and law, it prevailed over the conquerors. In the midst of
the troubles, the insecurity, the misery and the anarchy which
accompanied the invasions there was naturally a certain decline, but
even in that decline there was preserved a physiognomy still distinctly
Roman. The Germanic tribes were unable, and in fact did not want, to do
without it. They barbarised, but they did not consciously germanise.
Nothing is better proof of this assertion than the persistence in the
last days of the Empire--from the fifth to the eighth century--of that
maritime character pointed out above. The importance of the
Mediterranean did not grow less after the period of the invasions. The
sea remained for the Germanic tribes what it had been before their
arrival--the very center of Europe, the _mare nostrum_. The sea had had
such great importance in the political order that the deposing of the
last Roman Emperor in the West (476) was not enough in itself to turn
historical evolution from its time-honored direction. It continued, on
the contrary, to develop in the same theater and under the same
influences. No indication yet gave warning of the end of the
commonwealth of civilization created by the Empire from the Pillars of
Hercules to the Aegean Sea, from the coasts of Egypt and Africa to the
shores of Gaul, Italy and Spain. In spite of the invasion of the
barbarians the new world conserved, in all essential characteristics,
the physiognomy of the old. To follow the course of events from Romulus
Augustulus to Charlemagne it is necessary to keep the Mediterranean
constantly in view.[2]
All the great events in political history are unfolded on its shores.
From 493 to 526 Italy, governed by Theodoric, maintained a hegemony over
all the Germanic kingdoms, a hegemony through which the power of the
Roman tradition was perpetuated and assured. After Theodoric, this power
was still more clearly shown. Justinian failed by but little of
restoring imperial unity (527-565). Africa, Spain, and Italy were
reconquered. The Mediterranean became again a Roman lake. Byzantium, it
is true, weakened by the immense effort she had just put forth, could
neither finish nor even preserve intact the astonishing work which she
had accomplished. The Lombards took Northern Italy away from her (568);
the Visigoths freed themselves from her yoke. Nevertheless she did not
abandon her ambitions. She retained, for a long time to come, Africa,
Sicily, Southern Italy. Nor did she loose her grip on the West--thanks
to the sea, the mastery of which her fleets so securely held that the
fate of Europe rested at that moment, more than ever, on the waves of
the Mediterranean.
What was true of the political situation held equally well for
civilization. It seems hardly necessary to recall that Boëthius
(480-525) and Cassiodorus (477-_c._ 562) were Italians as were St.
Benedict (480-534) and Gregory the Great (590-604), and that Isidorus
of Seville (570-636) was a Spaniard. It was Italy that maintained the
last schools at the same time that she was fostering the spread of
monachism north of the Alps. It was in Italy, also, that what was left
of the ancient culture flourished side by side with what was brought
forth anew in the bosom of the Church. All the strength and vigor that
the Church possessed was concentrated in the region of the
Mediterranean. There alone she gave evidence of an organization and
spirit capable of initiating great enterprises. An interesting example
of this is the fact that Christianity was brought to the Anglo-Saxons
(596) from the distant shores of Italy, not from the neighboring shores
of Gaul. The mission of St. Augustine is therefore an illuminating
sidelight on the historic influence retained by the Mediterranean. And
it seems more significant still when we recall that the evangelization
of Ireland was due to missionaries sent out from Marseilles, and that
the apostles of Belgium, St. Amand (689-693) and St. Remade (_c._ 668),
were Aquitanians.
A brief survey of the economic development of Europe will give the
finishing touch to the substantiation of the theory which has here been
put forward. That development is, obviously, a clear-cut, direct
continuation of the economy of the Roman Empire. In it are rediscovered
all the latter’s principal traits and, above all, that Mediterranean
character which here is unmistakable. To be sure, a general let-down in
social activity was apparent in this region as in all others. By the
last days of the Empire there was a clearly marked decline which the
catastrophe of the invasions naturally helped accentuate. But it would
be a decided mistake to imagine that the arrival of the Germanic tribes
had as a result the substitution of a purely agricultural economy and a
general stagnation in trade for urban life and commercial activity.[3]
The supposed dislike of the barbarians for towns is an admitted fable to
which reality has given the lie. If, on the extreme frontiers of the
Empire, certain towns were put to the torch, destroyed and pillaged, it
is none the less true that the immense majority survived the invasions.
A statistical survey of cities in existence at the present day in
France, in Italy and even on the banks of the Rhine and the Danube,
gives proof that, for the most part, these cities now stand on the sites
where rose the Roman cities, and that their very names are often but a
transformation of Roman names.
The Church had of course closely patterned the religious districts after
the administrative districts of the Empire. As a general rule, each
diocese corresponded to a _civitas_. Since the ecclesiastical
organization suffered no change during the era of the Germanic
invasions, the result was that in the new kingdoms founded by the
conquerors it preserved intact this characteristic feature. In fact,
from the beginning of the sixth century the word _civitas_ took the
special meaning of “episcopal city,” the center of the diocese. In
surviving the Empire on which it was based, the Church therefore
contributed very largely to the safeguarding of the existence of the
Roman cities.
But it must not be overlooked, on the other hand, that these cities in
themselves long retained a considerable importance. Their municipal
institutions did not suddenly disappear upon the arrival of the Germanic
tribes. Not only in Italy, but also in Spain and even in Gaul, they kept
their _decuriones_--a corps of magistrates provided with a judicial and
administrative authority, the details of which are not clear but whose
existence and Roman origin is a matter of record.[4] They continued,
likewise, the office of the _defensor civitatis_, and the practice of
committing to writing the authentic laws found in the _gesta
municipalia_.
It is also well established that these cities were the centers of an
economic activity which itself was a survival of the preceding
civilization. Each city was the market for the surrounding countryside,
the winter home of the great landed proprietors of the neighborhood and,
if favorably situated, the center of a commerce the more highly
developed in proportion to its nearness to the shores of the
Mediterranean. A perusal of Gregory of Tours gives ample proof that in
the Gaul of his time there was still a professional merchant class
residing in the towns. He cites, in some thoroughly characteristic
passages, those of Verdun, Paris, Orleans, Clermont-Ferrand, Marseilles,
Nimes, and Bordeaux, and the information which he supplies concerning
them is all the more significant in that it is brought into his
narrative only incidentally.[5] Care should of course be taken not to
exaggerate its value. An equally great fault would be to undervalue it.
Certainly the economic order of Merovingian Gaul was founded on
agriculture rather than on any other form of activity. More certainly
still this had already been the case under the Roman Empire.
But this does not preclude the fact that inland traffic, the import and
export of goods and merchandise, was carried on to a considerable
extent. It was an important factor in the maintenance of society. An
indirect proof of this is furnished by the institution of market-tolls
(_teloneum_). Thus were called the tolls set up by the Roman
administration along the roads, in the ports, at bridge crossings, and
elsewhere. The Frankish kings let them all stay in force and drew from
them such copious revenues that the collectors of this class of taxes
(_telonearii_) figured among the number of their most useful
functionaires.
The continued commercial activity after the disappearance of the Empire
and, likewise, the survival of the towns that were the centers thereof
and the merchants who were the instruments, is explained by the
continuation of Mediterranean trade. In all the chief characteristics it
was the same, from the fifth to the eighth centuries, as it had been
just after Constantine. If, as is probable, the decline was the more
rapid after the Germanic invasions, it remains none the less true that
there is presented a picture of uninterrupted intercourse between the
Byzantine East and the West dominated by the barbarians. By means of the
shipping which was carried on from the coasts of Spain and Gaul to
those of Syria and Asia Minor, the basin of the Mediterranean did not
cease, despite the political subdivisions which it had seen take place,
to consolidate the economic unity which it had shaped for centuries
under the imperial commonwealth. Because of this fact, the economic
organization of the world lived on after the political transformation.
In lack of other proofs, the monetary system of the Frankish kings would
alone establish this truth convincingly. This system, as is too well
known to make necessary any lengthy consideration here, was purely Roman
or, strictly speaking, Romano-Byzantine. This is shown by the coins that
were minted: the _solidus_, the _triens_, and the _denarius_--that is to
say, the _sou_, the _third-sou_ and the _denier_. It is shown further by
the metal which was employed: gold, used for the coinage of the
_solidus_ and the _triens_. It is also shown by the weight which was
given to specie. It is shown, finally, by the effigies which were minted
on the coins. In this connection it is worth noting that the mints
continued for a long time, under the Merovingian kings, the custom of
representing the bust of the Emperor on the coins and of showing on the
reverse of the pieces the _Victoria Augusti_ and that, carrying this
imitation to the extreme, when the Byzantines substituted the cross for
the symbol of that victory they went and did the same. Such extreme
servility can be explained only by the continuing influence of the
Empire. The obvious reason was the necessity of preserving, between the
local currency and the imperial currency, a conformity which would be
purposeless if the most intimate relations had not existed between
Merovingian commerce and the general commerce of the Mediterranean. In
other words, this commerce continued to be closely bound up with the
commerce of the Byzantine Empire. Of such ties, moreover, there are
abundant proofs and it will suffice to mention merely a few of the most
significant.[6]
It should be borne in mind, first of all, that at the start of the
eighth century Marseilles was still the great port of Gaul. The terms
employed by Gregory of Tours, in the numerous anecdotes in which he
happens to speak of that city, make it seem a singularly animated
economic center.[7] A very active shipping bound it to Constantinople,
to Syria, Africa, Egypt, Spain and Italy. The products of the
East--papyrus, spices, costly textiles, wine and oil--were the basis of
a regular import trade. Foreign merchants, Jews and Syrians for the most
part, had their residence there, and their nationality is itself an
indication of the close relations kept up by Marseilles with Byzantium.
Finally, the extraordinary quantity of coins which were struck there
during the Merovingian era gives material proof of the activity of its
commerce.[8] The population of the city must have comprised, aside from
the merchants, a rather numerous class of artisans.[9] In every respect
it seems, then, to have accurately preserved, under the government of
the Frankish kings, the clearly municipal character of Roman cities.
The economic development of Marseilles naturally made itself felt in the
_hinterland_ of the port. Under its attraction, all the commerce of Gaul
was oriented toward the Mediterranean. The most important market-tolls
of the Frankish kingdom were situated in the neighborhood of the town at
Fos, at Arles, at Toulon, at Sorgues, at Valence, at Vienne, and at
Avignon[10]. Here is clear proof that merchandise landed in the city was
expedited to the interior. By the course of the Rhône and of the Saone,
as well as by the Roman roads, it reached the North of the country. The
charters are still in existence by which the Abbey of Corbie (Department
of Pas-de-Calais) obtained from the kings an exemption from tolls at Fos
on a number of commodities, among which may be remarked a surprising
variety of spices of eastern origin, as well as papyrus.[11] In these
circumstances it does not seem unwarranted to assume that the commercial
activity of the ports of Rouen and Nantes, on the shores of the Atlantic
Ocean, as well as of Quentovic and Duurstede, on the shores of the North
Sea, was sustained by the ramifications of the export traffic from
far-off Marseilles.
But it was in the South of the country that this effect was the most
appreciable. All the largest cities of Merovingian Gaul were still to be
found, as in the days of the Roman Empire, south of the Loire. The
details which Gregory of Tours supplies concerning Clermont-Ferrand and
Orleans show that they had within their walls veritable colonies of
Jews and Syrians, and if it was so with those towns which there is no
reason for believing enjoyed a privileged status, it must have been so
also with the much more important centers such as Bordeaux or Lyons. It
is an established fact, moreover, that Lyons still had at the
Carolingian era a quite numerous Jewish population.[12]
Here, then, is quite enough to support the conclusion that Merovingian
times knew, thanks to the continuance of Mediterranean shipping and the
intermediary of Marseilles, what we may safely call a great commerce. It
would certainly be an error to assume that the dealings of the oriental
merchants of Gaul were restricted solely to articles of luxury. Probably
the sale of jewelry, enamels and silk stuffs resulted in handsome
profits, but this would not be enough to explain their number and their
extraordinary diffusion throughout all the country. The traffic of
Marseilles was, above all else, supported by goods for general
consumption such as wine and oil, spices and papyrus. These commodities,
as has already been pointed out, were regularly exported to the North.
The oriental merchants of the Frankish Empire were virtually engaged in
wholesale trade. Their boats, after being discharged on the quays of
Marseilles, certainly carried back, on leaving the shores of Provence,
not only passengers but return freight. Our sources of information, to
be sure, do not tell much about the nature of this freight. Among the
possible conjectures, one of the most likely is that it probably
consisted, at least for a good part, in human chattels--that is to say,
in slaves. Traffic in slaves did not cease to be carried on in the
Frankish Empire until the end of the ninth century. The wars waged
against the barbarians of Saxony, Thuringia and the Slavic regions
provided a source of supply which seems to have been abundant enough.
Gregory of Tours speaks of Saxon slaves belonging to a merchant of
Orleans,[13] and it is a good guess that this Samo, who departed in the
first half of the seventh century with a band of companions for the
country of Wends, whose king he eventually became, was very probably
nothing more than an adventurer trafficking in slaves.[14] And it is of
course obvious that the slave trade, to which the Jews still assiduously
applied themselves in the ninth century, must have had its origin in an
earlier era.
If the bulk of the commerce in Merovingian Gaul was to be found in the
hands of oriental merchants, their influence, however, should not be
exaggerated. Side by side with them, and according to all indications in
constant relations with them, are mentioned indigenous merchants.
Gregory of Tours does not fail to supply information concerning them,
which would evidently be more voluminous if it had not been brought into
his narrative only incidentally. He shows the King consenting to a loan
to the merchants of Verdun, whose business prospers so well that they
soon find themselves in a position to reimburse him.[15] He mentions the
existence in Paris of a _domus negotiantum_--that is to say, apparently,
of a sort of market or bazaar.[16] He speaks of a merchant profiteering
during the great famine of 585 and getting rich.[17] And in all these
anecdotes he is dealing, without the least doubt, with professionals and
not with merely casual buyers or sellers.
The picture which the commerce of Merovingian Gaul presents is repeated,
naturally, in the other riparian Germanic kingdoms of the
Mediterranean--among the Ostrogoths of Italy, among the Vandals of
Africa, among the Visigoths of Spain. The Edict of Theodoric contained a
quantity of stipulations relative to merchants. Carthage continued to be
an important port in close relations with Spain, and her ships,
apparently, went up the coast as far as Bordeaux. The laws of the
Visigoths mentioned merchants from overseas.[18]
In all of this is clearly manifest the vigorous continuity of the
commercial development of the Roman Empire after the Germanic invasions.
They did not put an end to the economic unity of antiquity. By means of
the Mediterranean and the relations kept up thereby between the West and
the East, this unity, on the contrary, was preserved with a remarkable
distinctiveness. The great inland sea of Europe no longer belonged, as
before, to a single State. But nothing yet gave reason to predict that
it would soon cease to have its time-honored importance. Despite the
transformations which it had undergone, the new world had not lost the
Mediterranean character of the old. On the shores of the sea was still
concentrated the better part of its activities. No indication yet gave
warning of the end of the commonwealth of civilization, created by the
Roman Empire from the Pillars of Hercules to the Aegean Sea. At the
beginning of the seventh century, anyone who sought to look into the
future would have been unable to discern any reason for not believing in
the continuance of the old tradition.
Yet what was then natural and reasonable to predict was not to be
realized. The world-order which had survived the Germanic invasions was
not able to survive the invasion of Islam.
It is thrown across the path of history with the elemental force of a
cosmic cataclysm. Even in the lifetime of Mahomet (571-632) no one could
have imagined the consequences or prepared for them. Yet the movement
took no more than fifty years to spread from the China Sea to the
Atlantic Ocean. Nothing was able to withstand it. At the first blow, it
overthrew the Persian Empire (637-644). It took from the Byzantine
Empire, in quick succession, Syria (634-636), Egypt (640-642), Africa
(698). It reached into Spain (711). The resistless advance was not to
slow down until the start of the eighth century, when the walls of
Constantinople on the one side (713) and the soldiers of Charles Martel
on the other (732) broke that great enveloping offensive against the two
flanks of Christianity.
But if its force of expansion was exhausted, it had none the less
changed the face of the world. Its sudden thrust had destroyed ancient
Europe. It had put an end to the Mediterranean commonwealth in which it
had gathered its strength.
The familiar and almost “family” sea which once united all the parts of
this commonwealth was to become a barrier between them. On all its
shores, for centuries, social life, in its fundamental characteristics,
had been the same; religion, the same; customs and ideas, the same or
very nearly so. The invasion of the barbarians from the North had
modified nothing essential in that situation.
But now, all of a sudden, the very lands where civilization had been
born were torn away; the Cult of the Prophet was substituted for the
Christian Faith, Moslem law for Roman law, the Arab tongue for the Greek
and the Latin tongue.
The Mediterranean had been a Roman lake; it now became, for the most
part, a Moslem lake. From this time on it separated, instead of uniting,
the East and the West of Europe. The tie which was still binding the
Byzantine Empire to the Germanic kingdoms of the West was broken.
_Chapter II_
The Ninth Century
The tremendous effect the invasion of Islam had upon Western Europe has
not, perhaps, been fully appreciated.
Out of it arose a new and unparalleled situation, unlike anything that
had gone before. Through the Phoenicians, the Greeks, and finally the
Romans, Western Europe had always received the cultural stamp of the
East. It had lived, as it were, by virtue of the Mediterranean; now for
the first time it was forced to live by its own resources. The center of
gravity, heretofore on the shore of the Mediterranean, was shifted to
the North. As a result the Frankish Empire, which had so far been
playing only a minor rôle in the history of Europe, was to become the
arbiter of Europe’s destinies.
There is obviously more than mere coincidence in the simultaneity of the
closing of the Mediterranean by Islam and the entry of the Carolingians
on the scene. There is the distinct relation of cause and effect between
the two. The Frankish Empire was fated to lay the foundations of the
Europe of the Middle Ages. But the mission which it fulfilled had as an
essential prior condition the overthrow of the traditional world-order.
The Carolingians would never have been called upon to play the part they
did if historical evolution had not been turned aside from its course
and, so to speak, “de-Saxoned” by the Moslem invasion. Without Islam,
the Frankish Empire would probably never have existed and Charlemagne,
without Mahomet, would be inconceivable.[19]
This is made plain enough by the many contrasts between the Merovingian
era, during which the Mediterranean retained its time-honored historical
importance, and the Carolingian era, when that influence ceased to make
itself felt. These contrasts were in evidence everywhere: in religious
sentiment, in political and social institutions, in literature, in
language and even in handwriting. From whatever standpoint it is
studied, the civilization of the ninth century shows a distinct break
with the civilization of antiquity. Nothing would be more fallacious
than to see therein a simple continuation of the preceding centuries.
The _coup d’état_ of Pepin le Bref was considerably more than the
substitution of one dynasty for another. It marked a new orientation of
the course hitherto followed by history. At first glance there seems
reason to believe that Charlemagne, in assuming the title of Roman
Emperor and Augustus, wished to restore the ancient tradition. In
reality, in setting himself up against the Emperor of Constantinople, he
broke that tradition. His Empire was Roman only insofar as the Catholic
Church was Roman. For it was from the Church, and the Church alone, that
came its inspiration. The forces which he placed at her service were,
moreover, forces of the North. His principal collaborators, in religious
and cultural matters, were no longer, as they had previously been,
Italians, Aquitanians, or Spaniards; they were Anglo-Saxons--a St.
Boniface or an Alcuin--or they were Swabians, like Einhard. In the
affairs of the State, which was now cut off from the Mediterranean,
southerners played scarcely any rôle. The Germanic influence commenced
to dominate at the very moment when the Frankish Empire, forced to turn
away from the Mediterranean, spread over northern Europe and pushed its
frontiers as far as the Elbe and the mountains of Bohemia.[20]
In the field of economics the contrast, which the Carolingian period
shows to Merovingian times, is especially striking.[21] In the days of
the Merovingians, Gaul was still a maritime country and trade and
traffic flourished because of that fact. The Empire of Charlemagne, on
the contrary, was essentially an inland one. No longer was there any
communication with the exterior; it was a closed State, a State without
foreign markets, living in a condition of almost complete isolation.
To be sure, the transition from one era to the other was not clear-cut.
The trade of Marseilles did not suddenly cease but, from the middle of
the seventh century, waned gradually as the Moslems advanced in the
Mediterranean. Syria, conquered by them in 633-638, no longer kept it
thriving with her ships and her merchandise. Shortly afterwards, Egypt
passed in her turn under the yoke of Islam (638-640), and papyrus no
longer came to Gaul. A characteristic consequence is that, after 677,
the royal chancellory stopped using papyrus.[22] The importation of
spices kept up for a while, for the monks of Corbie, in 716, believed it
useful to have ratified for the last time their privileges of the
_tonlieu_ of Fos.[23] A half century later, solitude reigned in the port
of Marseilles. Her foster-mother, the sea, was shut off from her and the
economic life of the inland regions which had been nourished through her
intermediary was definitely extinguished. By the ninth century Provence,
once the richest country of Gaul, had become the poorest.[24]
More and more, the Moslems consolidated their domination over the sea.
In the course of the ninth century they seized the Balearic Isles,
Corsica, Sardinia, Sicily. On the coasts of Africa they founded new
ports: Tunis (698-703); later on, Mehdia to the south of this city; then
Cairo, in 973. Palermo, where stood a great arsenal, became their
principal base in the Tyrrhenian Sea. Their fleets sailed it in complete
mastery; commercial flotillas transported the products of the West to
Cairo, whence they were redispatched to Bagdad, or pirate fleets
devastated the coasts of Provence and Italy and put towns to the torch
after they had been pillaged and their inhabitants captured to be sold
as slaves. In 889 a band of these plunderers even laid hold of
Fraxinetum (the present Garde-Frainet, in the Department of the Var) not
far from Nice, the garrison of which, for nearly a century, had
subjected the neighboring populace to continual raids and menaced the
roads which led across the Alps from France to Italy.[25]
The efforts of Charlemagne and his successors to protect the coasts from
Saracen raiders were as impotent as their attempts to oppose the
invasions of the Norsemen in the North and West. The hardihood and
seamanship of the Danes and Norwegians made it easy for them to plunder
the coasts of the Carolingian Empire during the whole of the eleventh
century. They conducted their raids not only from the North Sea, the
Channel, and the Gulf of Gascony, but at times even from the
Mediterranean. Every river which emptied into these seas was, at one
time or another, ascended by their skilfully constructed barks, splendid
specimens whereof, brought to light by recent excavations, are now
preserved at Christiania. Periodically the valleys of the Rhine, the
Meuse, the Scheldt, the Seine, the Loire, the Garonne and the Rhône were
the scene of systematic and persistent pillaging.[26] The devastation
was so complete that, in many cases indeed, the population itself
disappeared. And nothing is a better illustration of the essentially
inland character of the Frankish Empire than its inability to organize
the defence of its coasts, against either Saracens or Norsemen. For that
defence, to be effective, should have been a naval defence, and the
Empire had no fleets, or hastily improvised ones at best.[27]
Such conditions were incompatible with the existence of a commerce of
first rate importance. The historical literature of the ninth century
contains, it is true, certain references to merchants (_mercatores_,
_negociatores_),[28] but no illusion should be cherished as to their
importance. Compared to the number of texts which have been preserved
from that era, these references are extremely rare. The capitularies,
those regulations touching upon every phase of social life, are
remarkably meagre in so far as applies to commerce. From this it may be
assumed that the latter played a rôle of only secondary, negligible
importance. It was only in the North of Gaul that, during the first half
of the ninth century, trade showed any signs of activity.
The ports of Quentovic (a place now vanished, near Etaples in the
Department of Pas-de-Calais) and Duurstede (on the Rhine, southwest of
Utrecht) which under the Merovingian Monarchy were already trading with
England and Denmark, seem to have been centers of a widely extended
shipping. It is a safe conjecture that because of them the river
transport of the Friesians along the Rhine, the Scheldt and the Meuse
enjoyed an importance that was matched by no other region during the
reigns of Charlemagne and his successors. The cloths woven by the
peasants of Flanders, and which contemporary texts designate by the name
of Friesian cloaks (_pallia fresonica_),[29] together with the wines of
Rhenish Germany, supplied to that river traffic the substance of an
export trade which seems to have been fairly regular up to the day when
the Norsemen took possession of the ports in question. It is known,
moreover, that the _deniers_ coined at Duurstede had a very extensive
circulation. They served as prototypes for the oldest coins of Sweden
and Poland,[30] evident proof that they early penetrated, no doubt at
the hands of the Norsemen, as far as the Baltic Sea. Attention may also
be called, as having been the substance of a rather extensive trade, to
the salt industry of Noirmoutier, where Irish ships were to be seen.[31]
Salzburg salt, on the other hand, was shipped along the Danube and its
affluents to the interior of the Empire.[32] The sale of slaves, despite
the prohibitions that were laid down by the sovereigns, was carried on
along the western frontiers, where the prisoners of war taken from among
the pagan Slavs found numerous purchasers.
The Jews seem to have applied themselves particularly to this sort of
traffic. They were still numerous, and were found in every part of
Francia. Those in the South of Gaul were in close relations with their
coreligionists of Moslem Spain, to whom they are accused of having sold
Christian children.[33]
It was probably from Spain, or perhaps also from Venice, that these Jews
obtained the spices and the valuable textiles in which they dealt.
However, the obligation to which they were subjected of having their
children baptised must have caused a great number of them to emigrate
south of the Pyrenees at an early date, and their commercial importance
steadily declined in the course of the ninth century. As for the
Syrians, they were no longer of importance at this era.[34]
It is, then, most likely that the commerce of Carolingian times was very
much reduced. Except in the neighborhood of Quentovic and Duurstede, it
consisted only in the transport of indispensable commodities, such as
wine and salt, in the prohibited traffic of a few slaves, and in the
barter, through the intermediary of the Jews, of a small number of
products from the East.
Of a regular and normal commercial activity, of steady trading carried
on by a class of professional merchants, in short, of all that
constitutes the very essence of an economy of exchange worthy of the
name, no traces are to be found after the closing off of the
Mediterranean by the Islamic invasion. The great number of markets
(_mercatus_), which were to be found in the ninth century, in no way
contradicts this assertion. They were, as a matter of fact, only small
local market-places, instituted for the weekly provisioning of the
populace by means of the retail sale of foodstuffs from the country. As
a proof of the commercial activity of the Carolingian era, it would be
equally beside the point to speak of the existence of the street
occupied by merchants (_vicus mercatorum_)[35] at Aix-la-Chapelle near
the palace of Charlemagne, or of similar streets near certain great
abbeys such as, for example, that of St. Riquier. The merchants with
whom we have to do here were not, in fact, professional merchants but
servitors charged with the duty of supplying the Court or the monks.
They were, so to speak, employees of the seignorial household staff and
were in no respect merchants.
There is, moreover, material proof of the economic decline which
affected Western Europe from the day when she ceased to belong to the
Mediterranean commonwealth. It is furnished by the reform of the
monetary system, initiated by Pepin le Bref and completed by
Charlemagne. That reform abandoned gold coinage and substituted silver
in its place. The _solidus_ which had heretofore, conforming to the
Roman tradition, constituted the basic monetary unit, was now only
nominal money. The only real coins from this time on were the silver
_deniers_, weighing about two grams, the metallic value of which,
compared to that of the dollar, was approximately eight and one-half
cents.[36] The metallic value of the Merovingian gold _solidus_ being
nearly three dollars, the importance of the reform can be readily
appreciated. Undoubtedly it is to be explained only by a prodigious
falling off of both trading and wealth.
If it is admitted, and it must be admitted, that the reappearance of
gold coinage, with the florins of Florence and the ducats of Venice in
the thirteenth century, characterised the economic renaissance of
Europe, the inverse is also true: the abandoning of gold coinage in the
eighth century was the manifestation of a profound decline. It is not
enough to say that Pepin and Charlemagne wished to remedy the monetary
disorder of the last days of the Merovingian era. It would have been
quite possible for them to find a remedy without giving up the gold
standard. They gave up the standard, obviously, from necessity--that is
to say, as a result of the disappearance of the yellow metal in Gaul.
And this disappearance had no other cause than the interruption of the
commerce of the Mediterranean. The proof of this is given by the fact
that Southern Italy, remaining in contact with Constantinople, retained
like the latter a gold standard, for which the Carolingian sovereigns
were forced to substitute a silver standard. The very light weight of
their _deniers_, moreover, testifies to the economic isolation of their
Empire. It is inconceivable that they would have reduced the monetary
unit to a thirtieth of its former value if there had been preserved the
slightest bond between their States and the Mediterranean regions where
the gold _solidus_ continued to circulate.
But this is not all. The monetary reform of the ninth century not only
was in keeping with the general impoverishment of the era in which it
took place, but with the circulation of money which was noteworthy for
both lightness and inadequacy. In the absence of centers of attraction
sufficiently powerful to draw money from afar, it remained, so to
speak, stagnant. Charlemagne and his successors in vain ordered that
_deniers_ should be coined only in the royal mints. Under the reign of
Louis the Pious, it was necessary to give to certain churches
authorization to coin money, in view of the difficulties, under which
they labored, of obtaining cash. From the second half of the ninth
century on, the authorization to establish a market was almost always
accompanied by the authorization to establish a mint in the same
place.[37] The State could not retain the monopoly of minting coins. It
was consistently frittered away. And that is again a manifestation, by
no means equivocal, of the economic decline. History shows that the
better commerce is sustained, the more the monetary system is
centralized and simplified. The dispersion, the variety, and in fact the
anarchy which it manifests as we follow the course of the ninth century,
ends by giving striking confirmation to the general theory here put
forward.
There have been some attempts to attribute to Charlemagne a farseeing
political economy. This is to lend him ideas which, however great we
suppose his genius to have been, it is impossible for him to have had.
No one can submit with any likelihood of truth that the works which he
commenced in 793, to join the Rednitz to the Altmühl and so establish
communication between the Rhine and the Danube, could have had any other
purpose than the transport of troops, or that the wars against the Avars
were provoked by the desire to open up a commercial route to
Constantinople. The stipulations, in other respects inoperative, of the
capitularies regarding coinages, weights and measures, the market-tolls
and the markets, were intimately bound up with the general system of
regulation and control which was typical of Carolingian legislation. The
same is true regarding the measures taken against usury and the
prohibition enjoining members of the clergy from engaging in business.
Their purpose was to combat fraud, disorder and indiscipline and to
impose a Christian morality on the people. Only a prejudiced point of
view can see in them an attempt to stimulate the economic development of
the Empire.
We are so accustomed to consider the reign of Charlemagne as an era of
revival that we are unconsciously led to imagine an identical progress
in all fields. Unfortunately, what is true of literary culture, of the
religious State, of customs, institutions and statecraft is not true of
communications and commerce. Every great thing that Charlemagne
accomplished was accomplished either by his military strength or by his
alliance with the Church. For that matter, neither the Church nor arms
could overcome the circumstances in virtue of which the Frankish Empire
found itself deprived of foreign markets. It was forced, in fact, to
accommodate itself to a situation which was inevitably prescribed.
History is obliged to recognize that, however brilliant it seems in
other respects, the cycle of Charlemagne, considered from an economic
viewpoint, is a cycle of regression.
The financial organization of the Frankish Empire makes this plain. It
was, indeed, as rudimentary as could be. The poll tax, which the
Merovingians had preserved in imitation of Rome, no longer existed.[38]
The resources of the sovereign consisted only in the revenue from his
demesnes, in the tributes levied on conquered tribes and in the booty
got by war. The market-tolls no longer contributed to the replenishment
of the treasury, thus attesting to the commercial decline of the period.
They were nothing more than a simple extortion brutally levied in kind
on the infrequent merchandise transported by the rivers or along the
roads.[39] The sorry proceeds, which should have served to keep up the
bridges, the docks and the highways, were swallowed up by the
functionaries who collected them. The _missi dominici_, created to
supervise their administration, were impotent in abolishing the abuses
which they proved to exist because the State, unable to pay its agents,
was likewise unable to impose its authority on them. It was obliged to
call on the aristocracy which, thanks to their social status, alone
could give free services. But in so doing it was constrained, for lack
of money, to chose the instruments of power from among the midst of a
group of men whose most evident interest was to diminish that power. The
recruiting of the functionaries from among the aristocracy was the
fundamental vice of the Frankish Empire and the essential cause of its
dissolution, which became so rapid after the death of Charlemagne.
Surely, nothing is more fragile than that State the sovereign of which,
all-powerful in theory, is dependent in fact upon the fidelity of his
independent agents.
The feudal system was in embryo in this contradictory situation. The
Carolingian Empire would have been able to keep going only if it had
possessed, like the Byzantine Empire or the Empire of the Caliphs, a tax
system, a financial control, a fiscal centralization and a treasury
providing for the salary of functionaries, for public works, and for
the maintenance of the army and the navy. The financial impotence which
caused its downfall was a clear demonstration of the impossibility it
encountered of maintaining a political structure on an economic base
which was no longer able to support the load.
That economic base of the State, as of society, was from this time on
the landed proprietor. Just as the Carolingian Empire was an inland
State without foreign markets, so also was it an essentially
agricultural State. The traces of commerce which were still to be found
there were negligible. There was no other property than landed property,
and no other work than rural work. As has already been stated above,
this predominance of agriculture was no new fact. It existed in a very
distinct form in the Roman era and it continued with increasing strength
in the Merovingian era. As early as the close of antiquity, all the West
of Europe was covered with great demesnes belonging to an aristocracy
the members of which bore the title of senators (_senatores_). More and
more, property was disappearing in a transformation into hereditary
tenures, while the old free farmers were themselves undergoing a
transformation into “cultivators” (_coloni_) attached to the soil from
father to son. The Germanic invasions did not noticeably alter this
state of things. We have definitely given up the notion of imagining the
Germanic tribes in the light of a democracy of peasants, all on an equal
footing. Social distinctions were very great among them when they
invaded the Empire. They comprised a minority of the wealthy and a
majority of the poor. The number of slaves and half-free (_liti_) was
considerable.[40]
The arrival of the invaders in the Roman provinces brought with it,
then, no overthrow of the existing order. The newcomers preserved, in
adapting themselves thereto, the status which they found to exist. Many
of the invaders received from the King or acquired by violence or by
marriage, or otherwise, great demesnes which made them the equals of the
“senators.” The landed aristocracy, far from disappearing, was on the
contrary invigorated by new elements.
The disappearance of the small free proprietors continued. It seems, in
fact, that as early as the start of the Carolingian period only a very
small number of them still existed in Gaul. Charlemagne in vain took
measures to safeguard those who were left.[41] The need of protection
inevitably made them turn to the more powerful individuals to whose
patronage they subordinated their persons and their possessions.
Large estates, then, kept on being more and more generally in evidence
after the period of the invasions. The favor which the kings showed the
Church was an additional factor in this development, and the religious
fervor of the aristocracy had the same effect. Monasteries, whose number
multiplied with such remarkable rapidity after the seventh century, were
receiving bountiful gifts of land. Everywhere ecclesiastical demesnes
and lay demesnes were mixed up together, uniting not only cultivated
ground, but woods, heaths and waste-lands.
The organization of these demesnes remained in conformity, in Frankish
Gaul, with what it had been in Roman Gaul. It is clear that this could
not have been otherwise. The Germanic tribes had no motive for, and
were, furthermore, incapable of, substituting a different organization.
It consisted, in its essentials, of classifying all the land in two
groups, subject to two distinct forms of government. The first, the less
extensive, was directly exploited by the proprietor; the second was
divided, under deeds of tenure, among the peasants. Each of the _villae_
of which a demesne was composed comprised both seignorial land (_terra
dominicata_) and censal land, divided in units of cultivation (_mansus_)
held by hereditary right by manants or villeins (_manentes_, _villani_)
in return for the prestation of rents, in money or in kind, and
statute-labor.[42]
As long as urban life and commerce flourished, the great demesnes had a
market for the disposal of their produce. There is no room for doubt
that during all the Merovingian era it was through them that the city
groups were provisioned and that the merchants were supplied. But it
could not help be otherwise when trade disappeared and therewith the
merchant class and the municipal population. The great estates suffered
the same fate as the Frankish Empire. Like it, they lost their markets.
The possibility of selling abroad existed no longer because of the lack
of buyers, and it became useless to continue to produce more than the
indispensable minimum for the subsistence of the men, proprietors or
tenants, living on the estate.
For an economy of exchange was substituted an economy of consumption.
Each demesne, in place of continuing to deal with the outside,
constituted from this time on a little world of its own. It lived by
itself and for itself, in the traditional immobility of a patriarchal
form of government. The ninth century is the golden age of what we have
called the closed domestic economy and which we might call, with more
exactitude, the economy of no markets.[43]
This economy, in which production had no other aim than the sustenance
of the demesnial group and which in consequence was absolutely foreign
to the idea of profit, can not be considered as a natural and
spontaneous phenomenon. It was, on the contrary, merely the result of an
evolution which forced it to take this characteristic form. The great
proprietors did not give up selling the products of their lands of
their own free will; they stopped because they could not do otherwise.
Certainly if commerce had continued to supply them regularly with the
means of disposing of these products abroad, they would not have
neglected to profit thereby. They did not sell because they could not
sell, and they could not sell because markets were wanting. The closed
demesnial organization, which made its appearance at the beginning of
the ninth century, was a phenomenon due to compulsion. That is merely to
say that it was an abnormal phenomenon.
This can be most effectively shown by comparing the picture, which
Carolingian Europe presents, with that of Southern Russia at the same
era.[44]
We know that bands of sea-faring Norsemen, that is to say of
Scandinavians originally from Sweden, established their domination over
the Slavs of the watershed of the Dnieper during the course of the ninth
century. These conquerors, whom the conquered designated by the name of
Russians, naturally had to congregate in groups in order to insure
their safety in the midst of the populations they had subjected.
For this purpose they built fortified inclosures, called _gorods_ in the
Slavic tongue, where they settled with their princes and the images of
their gods. The most ancient Russian cities owe their origin to these
entrenched camps. There were such camps at Smolensk, Suzdal and
Novgorod; the most important and the most civilized was at Kiev, the
prince of which ranked above all the other princes. The subsistence of
the invaders was assured by tributes levied on the native population.
It was therefore possible for the Russians to live off the land, without
seeking abroad to supplement the resources which the country gave them
in abundance. They would have done so, without doubt, and been content
to use the prestations of their subjects if they had found it
impossible, like their contemporaries in Western Europe, to communicate
with the exterior. But the position which they occupied must have early
led them to practise an economy of exchange.
Southern Russia was placed, as a matter of fact, between two regions of
a superior civilization. To the east, beyond the Caspian Sea, extended
the Caliphate of Bagdad; to the south, the Black Sea bathed the coasts
of the Byzantine Empire and pointed the way towards Constantinople. The
barbarians felt at once the effect of these two strong centers of
attraction. To be sure they were in the highest degree energetic,
enterprising and adventurous, but their native qualities only served to
turn circumstances to the best account. Arab merchants, Jews, and
Byzantines were already frequenting the Slavic regions when they took
possession, and showed them the route to follow. They themselves did not
hesitate to plunge along it under the spur of the love of gain, quite as
natural to primitive man as to civilized.
The country they occupied placed at their disposal products particularly
well suited for trade with rich empires accustomed to the refinements of
life. Its immense forests furnished them with a quantity of honey,
precious in those days when sugar was still unknown, and furs,
sumptuousness in which was a requisite, even in southern climes, of
luxurious dress and equipment.
Slaves were easier still to procure and, thanks to the Moslem harems and
the great houses or Byzantine workshops, had a sale as sure as it was
remunerative. Thus as early as the ninth century, while the Empire of
Charlemagne was kept in isolation after the closing of the
Mediterranean, Southern Russia on the contrary was induced to sell her
products in the two great markets which exercised their attraction on
her. The paganism of the Scandinavians of the Dnieper left them free of
the religious scruples which prevented the Christians of the West from
having dealings with the Moslems. Belonging neither to the faith of
Christ nor to that of Mahomet, they only asked to get rich, in dealing
impartially with the adepts of the one or the other.
The importance of the trade which they kept up as much with the Moslem
Empire as with the Greek, is made clear by the extraordinary number of
Arab and Byzantine coins discovered in Russia and which mark, like a
golden compass needle, the direction of the commercial routes.
In the region of Kiev they followed to the south the course of the
Dnieper, to the east the Volga, and to the north the direction marked by
the Western Dvina or the lakes which abut the Gulf of Bothnia.
Information from Jewish or Arab travellers and from Byzantine writers
fortunately supplements the data from archaeological records. It will
suffice here to give a brief résumé of what Constantine Porphyrogenetus
reports in the ninth century.[45] He shows the Russians assembling
their boats at Kiev each year after the ice melts. Their flotilla slowly
descends the Dnieper, whose numerous cataracts present obstacles that
have to be avoided by dragging the barks along the banks. The sea once
reached, they sail before the wind along the coasts towards
Constantinople, the supreme goal of their long and perilous voyage.
There the Russian merchants had a special quarter and made commercial
treaties, the oldest of which dates back to the ninth century,
regulating their relations with the population. Many of them, seduced by
its attractions, settled down there and took service in the Imperial
Guard, as had done, before that time, the Germans in the legions of
Rome.
The City of the Emperors (_Czarograd_) had for the Russians a
fascination the influence of which has lasted across the centuries. It
was from her that they received Christianity (957-1015); it was from her
that they borrowed their art, their writing, the use of money and a good
part of their administrative organization. Nothing more is needed to
demonstrate the rôle played by Byzantine commerce in their social life.
It occupied so essential a place therein that without it their
civilization would remain inexplicable. To be sure, the forms in which
it is found are very primitive, but the important thing is not the forms
of this traffic; it is the effect it had.
Among the Russians of the late Middle Ages it actually determined the
constitution of society. By striking contrast with what has been shown
to be the case with their contemporaries of Carolingian Europe, not only
the importance but the very idea of real estate was unknown to them.
Their notion of wealth comprised only personal property, of which slaves
were the most valuable. They were not interested in land except in so
far as, by their control of it, they were able to appropriate its
products. And if this conception was that of a class of
warrior-conquerors, there is but little doubt that it was held for so
long because these warriors were, at the same time, merchants. We might,
incidentally, add that the concentration of the Russians in the
_gorods_, motivated in the beginning by military necessity, is itself
found to fit in admirably with commercial needs. An organization created
by barbarians for the purpose of keeping conquered populations under the
yoke was well adapted to the sort of life which theirs became after they
gave heed to the economic attraction of Byzantium and Bagdad. Their
example shows that a society does not necessarily have to pass through
an agricultural stage before giving itself over to commerce. Here
commerce appears as an original phenomenon. And if this is so, it is
because the Russians instead of finding themselves isolated from the
outside world like Western Europe were on the contrary pushed or, to use
a better word, _drawn_ into contact with it from the beginning. Out of
this derive the violent contrasts which are disclosed in comparing their
social state with that of the Carolingian Empire: in place of a
demesnial aristocracy, a commercial aristocracy; in place of serfs
attached to the soil, slaves considered as instruments of work; in place
of a population living in the country, a population gathered together in
towns; in place, finally, of a simple economy of consumption, an economy
of exchange and a regular and permanent commercial activity.
That these outstanding contrasts were the result of circumstances which
gave Russia markets while depriving the Carolingian Empire of them,
history clearly demonstrates. The activity of Russian trade was
maintained, indeed, only as long as the routes to Constantinople and
Bagdad remained open before it. It was not fated to withstand the
crisis which the Petchenegs brought about in the eleventh century. The
invasion of these barbarians along the shores of the Caspian and the
Black Seas brought in their train consequences identical to those which
the invasion of Islam in the Mediterranean had had for Western Europe in
the eighth century.
Just as the latter cut the communications between Gaul and the East, the
former cut the communications between Russia and her foreign markets.
And in both quarters, the results of this interruption coincide with a
singular exactitude. In Russia as in Gaul, when means of communication
disappeared and towns were depopulated and the populace forced to find
on the ground the means of their subsistence, a period of agricultural
economy was substituted for a period of commercial economy. Despite the
differences in details, it was the same picture in both cases. The
regions of the South, ruined and troubled by the barbarians, gave way in
importance to the regions of the North. Kiev fell into a decline as
Marseilles had fallen, and the center of the Russian State was removed
to Moscow just as the center of the Frankish State, with the Carolingian
dynasty, had been removed to the watershed of the Rhine. And to end by
making the parallel still more conclusive, there arose, in Russia as in
Gaul, a landed aristocracy, and a demesnial system was organized in
which the impossibility of exporting or of selling forced production to
be limited to the needs of the proprietor and his peasants.
So, in both cases, the same causes produced the same effects. But they
did not produce them at the same date. Russia was living by trade at an
era when the Carolingian Empire knew only the demesnial régime, and she
in turn inaugurated this form of government at the very moment when
Western Europe, having found new markets, broke away from it. We shall
examine further how this break was accomplished. It will suffice for the
moment to have proved, by the example of Russia, the theory that the
economy of the Carolingian era was not the result of an internal
evolution but must be attributed to the closing of the Mediterranean by
Islam.
_Chapter III_
City Origins
An interesting question is whether or not cities existed in the midst of
that essentially agricultural civilization into which Western Europe had
developed in the course of the ninth century. The answer depends on the
meaning given to the word “city.” If by it is meant a locality the
population of which, instead of living by working the soil, devotes
itself to commercial activity, the answer will have to be “No.” The
answer will also be in the negative if we understand by “city” a
community endowed with legal personality and possessing laws and
institutions peculiar to itself. On the other hand, if we think of a
city as a center of administration and as a fortress, it is clear that
the Carolingian period knew nearly as many cities as the centuries which
followed it must have known. That is merely another way of saying that
the cities which were then to be found were without two of the
fundamental attributes of the cities of the Middle Ages and of modern
times--a middle-class population and a communal organization.
Primitive though it may be, every stable society feels the need of
providing its members with centers of assembly, or meeting places.
Observance of religious rites, maintenance of markets, and political and
judicial gatherings necessarily bring about the designation of
localities intended for the assembly of those who wish to or who must
participate therein.
Military needs have a still more positive effect. Populations have to
prepare refuges where will be found momentary protection from the enemy
in case of invasion. War is as old as humanity, and the construction of
fortresses almost as old as war. The first buildings erected by man
seem, indeed, to have been protecting walls. Even today, there is hardly
a barbaric race among whom this tendency is not found and, as far back
as we may go in the past, the situation remains the same. The
_acropoles_ of the Greeks, the _oppida_ of the Etruscans, the Latins,
and the Gauls, the _burgen_ of the Germans, the _gorods_ of the Slavs,
like the _kraals_ of the Negroes of South Africa, were in the beginning
no more than places of assembly and, especially, shelters. Their plan
and their construction depended naturally upon the conformation of the
terrain and upon the building materials at hand. But the general
arrangement of them was everywhere the same. It consisted of a space,
square or circular in shape, surrounded by ramparts made of trunks of
trees, or mud or blocks of stone, protected by a moat and entered by
gates. In short, it was an enclosure. And it is an interesting fact that
the words which in modern English and in modern Russian (_town_ and
_gorod_) designate a city, originally designated an enclosure.
In ordinary times, these enclosures remained empty. The people resorted
to them only on the occasion of religious or civic ceremonies, or when
war constrained them to seek refuge there with their herds. But, little
by little with the march of civilization, their intermittent animation
became a continuous animation. Temples arose; magistrates or chieftains
established their residence; merchants and artisans came to settle. What
first had been only an occasional center of assembly became a city, the
administrative, religious, political and economic center of all the
territory of the tribe whose name it customarily took.
This explains why, in many societies and particularly in classic
antiquity, the political life of the cities was not restricted to the
circumference of their walls. The city, indeed, had been built for the
tribe, and every man in it, whether dwelling within or without the
walls, was equally a citizen thereof. Neither Greece nor Rome knew
anything analogous to the strictly local and particularist bourgeoisie
of the Middle Ages. The life of the city was blended with the national
life. The law of the city was, like the religion itself of the city,
common to all the people whose capital it was and who constituted with
it a single autonomous republic.
The municipal system, then, was identified in antiquity with the
constitutional system. And when Rome extended her dominion over all the
Mediterranean world, she made it the basis of the administrative system
of her Empire. This system withstood, in Western Europe, the Germanic
invasions.[46] Vestigial but thoroughly definite relics of it were still
to be found in Gaul, in Spain, in Africa, and in Italy, long after the
fifth century. Little by little, however, the increasing weakness of
social organization did away with most of its characteristic features.
By the eighth century, neither the _decuriones_, nor the _gesta
municipalia_ nor the _defensor civitatis_ were longer in existence. At
the same time the thrust of Islam in the Mediterranean, in making
impossible the commerce which up to now had still sustained a certain
activity in the cities, condemned them to an inevitable decline. But it
did not condemn them to death. Curtailed and weakened though they were,
they survived. Their social function did not altogether disappear. In
the agricultural social order of the time, they retained in spite of
everything a fundamental importance. It is necessary to take full count
of the rôle they played, in order to understand what was to befall them
later.
As has been stated above, the Church had based its diocesan boundaries
on the boundaries of the Roman cities.[47] Held in respect by the
barbarians, it therefore continued to maintain, after their occupation
of the provinces of the Empire, the municipal system upon which it had
been based. The dying out of trade and the exodus of foreign merchants
had no influence on the ecclesiastical organization. The cities where
the bishops resided became poorer and less populous without the bishops
themselves feeling the effects. On the contrary, the more that general
prosperity declined, the more their power and their influence had a
chance to assert itself. Endowed with a prestige which was the greater
because the State had disappeared, sustained by donations from their
congregations, and partners with the Carolingians in the governing of
society, they were in a commanding position by virtue of, at one and the
same time, their moral authority, their economic power, and their
political activity.
When the Empire of Charlemagne foundered, their status, far from being
adversely affected, was made still more secure. The feudal princes, who
had ruined the power of the Monarchy, did not touch that of the Church,
for its divine origin protected it from their attacks. They feared the
bishops who could fling at them the terrible weapon of excommunication.
They revered them as the supernatural guardians of order and justice. In
the midst of the anarchy of the tenth and eleventh centuries the
ascendancy of the Church remained, therefore, unimpaired, and it
appeared to merit that good fortune. To combat the plague of the private
wars which the Crown was now incapable of repressing the bishops
organized in their dioceses the institution of the “Truce of God.”[48]
This prestige of the bishops naturally lent to their places of
residence--that is to say, to the old Roman cities--considerable
importance. It is highly probable that this was what saved them. In the
economy of the ninth century they no longer had any excuse for
existence. In ceasing to be commercial centers they must have lost,
quite evidently, the greatest part of their population. The merchants
who once frequented them, or dwelt there, disappeared and with them
disappeared the urban character which they had still preserved during
the Merovingian era. Lay society no longer had the least use for them.
Round about them the great demesnes lived their own life. There is no
evidence that the State, itself constituted on a purely agricultural
basis, had any cause to be interested in their fate. It is quite
characteristic, and quite illuminating, that the palaces (_palatia_) of
the Carolingian princes were not located in the towns. They were,
without exception, in the country, in the demesnes of the dynasty: at
Herstal, at Jupille, at Meersen in the valley of the Meuse; at Ingelheim
in that of the Rhine; at Attigny in that of the Seine; and so on.
The fame of Aix-la-Chapelle should not lead to any illusion as to the
character of that locality. The resplendency in which it temporarily
gloried under Charlemagne was due only to its fortune in being the
favorite residence of the Emperor. After the reign of Louis the Pious,
it fell back into insignificance. It was to become a real city only four
centuries later.
The State, on its part, in exercising administrative powers could
contribute in no way to the continued existence of the Roman cities.
The countries which formed the political districts of the Empire were
without their chief-towns, just as the Empire itself was without a
capital. The counts, to whom the supervision of them was entrusted, did
not settle down in any fixed spot. They were constantly travelling about
their districts in order to preside over judicial assemblies, to levy
taxes, and to raise troops. The centers of their administrations were
not their places of residence but their persons. It was therefore of
little importance whether they had or did not have their domicile in a
town. Recruited from among the great proprietors of the region, they
were, after all, most accustomed to live on their estates. Their
châteaux, like the palaces of the Emperors, were customarily in the
country.[49]
On the contrary, the immobility which ecclesiastical discipline enforced
upon a bishop permanently held him to the city where was established the
see of his particular diocese. Though they had lost their function in
civil administration, the cities therefore continued to serve as the key
points in religious administration. Each diocese comprised the territory
about the city which contained its cathedral, and kept in constant
touch with it. The change in meaning of the word _civitas_ from the
beginning of the ninth century throws interesting light on this point.
It became synonymous with the bishopric and the episcopal city. The
phrase _civitas Parisiensis_ was used to designate the diocese of Paris
as well as the city of Paris itself, where the bishop had his residence.
Thus under this double connotation was preserved the memory of the
ancient municipal system adopted by the Church for her own ends.
In short, what happened in the empoverished and depopulated Carolingian
towns is a striking parallel of what, in a rather more important
theater, happened at Rome itself when, in the course of the fourth
century, the Eternal City had ceased to be the capital of the world. In
leaving it for Ravenna and then for Constantinople, the emperors
abandoned it to the Pope. What it no longer was in the government of the
State, it continued to be in the government of the Church.
The imperial city became the pontifical city. Its historical prestige
enhanced that of the successor of St. Peter. Isolated, he seemed the
greater, and he became at the same time more powerful. Men now saw only
him; in the absence of the old rulers, men now obeyed only him. By
continuing to dwell in Rome, he made it _his_ Rome, just as each bishop
made the city where he dwelt _his_ city.
During the last days of the Lower Empire, and still more during the
Merovingian era, the power of the bishops over the city populace
consistently increased. They had profited by the growing disorganization
of civil society to accept, or to arrogate to themselves, an authority
which the inhabitants did not take pains to dispute with them, and which
the State had no interest in and, moreover, no means of denying them.
The privileges which the clergy began to enjoy after the fourth century,
in the matters of jurisdiction and taxes, enhanced still further their
status. It became more conspicuous through the granting of charters of
immunity which the Frankish kings issued in their favor. By virtue of
these the bishops were freed from the interference of the counts in
their ecclesiastical demesnes. They were invested from that time on--the
eighth century--with a complete seigniory over their people and their
lands. To the ecclesiastical jurisdiction over the clergy which they
already had was added lay jurisdiction, entrusted to a tribunal, created
by them, whose principal seat was fixed, naturally, in the town where
they had their residence.
When the disappearance of trade, in the ninth century, annihilated the
last vestiges of city life and put an end to what still remained of a
municipal population, the influence of the bishops, already so
extensive, became unrivalled. Henceforward the towns were entirely under
their control. In them were to be found, in fact, practically only
inhabitants dependent more or less directly upon the Church.
Though no precise information is available, it is, nevertheless,
possible to conjecture as to the nature of this population. It was
composed of the clerics of the cathedral church and of the other
churches grouped nearby; of the monks of the monasteries which,
especially after the ninth century, came to be established, sometimes in
great numbers, in the see of the diocese; of the teachers and the
students of the ecclesiastical schools; and finally, of servitors and
artisans, free or serf, who were indispensable to the needs of the
religious group and to the daily existence of the clerical
agglomeration.
Almost always there was to be found in the town a weekly market whither
the peasants from roundabout brought their produce. Sometimes, even, an
annual fair was held there. At the gates a market toll was levied on
everything that came in or went out. A mint was in operation within the
walls. There were also to be found there a number of keeps occupied by
vassals of the bishop, by his advocate or by his castellan. To all of
this must be added, finally, the granaries and the storehouses where
were stored the harvests from the monastical demesnes brought in, at
stated periods, by the tenant-farmers. At the great yearly festivals the
congregation of the diocese poured into the town and gave it, for
several days, the animation of unaccustomed bustle and stir.[50]
All this little world accepted the bishop as both its spiritual and
temporal head. Religious and secular authority were united or, to put it
better, were blended in his person. Aided by a Council formed of priests
and canons, he administered the city and the diocese in conformity with
the precepts of Christian morality. His ecclesiastical tribune, presided
over by the archdeacon, had singularly enlarged its sphere, thanks to
the impotency, and still more to the favor, of the State. Not only were
all the clerics subject to it in every particular, but to it also
pertained jurisdiction over a number of matters affecting the laity:
matters of marriage, of wills, of civil position, etc. The province of
the lay court, which was presided over either by the castellan or the
advocate, had profited by a similar increase in scope. After the reign
of Louis the Pious its jurisdiction had been enlarged by gradual
infringements which the more and more flagrant disorders of the public
administration explain and justify. Those affected by the charters of
immunity were not the only ones subject thereto. It seems quite certain
that, at least within the actual limits of the town, everybody came
under its jurisdiction and that it had been substituted, _in fact_, for
the jurisdiction which the count still possessed, _in theory_, over the
freemen.[51] In addition, the bishop enjoyed very loosely defined police
powers, under which he supervised the markets, regulated the levying of
tolls, took care of the bridges and the ramparts. In short, there was no
longer any field in the administration of the town wherein, whether by
law or by prerogative, he did not intervene as the guardian of order,
peace, and the common weal. A theocratic form of government had
completely replaced the municipal regimen of antiquity. The populace
was governed by its bishop and no longer asked to have even the least
share in that government. True, it sometimes happened that a disturbance
broke out in the town. Bishops were assailed in their palaces and
sometimes even obliged to flee. But it is stretching a point to find in
these events the least trace of a municipal spirit. They are rather to
be explained by intrigues or personal rivalries.
It would be thoroughly fallacious to consider them the precursors of the
communal movement of the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Moreover, they
were very rare. Everything indicates that the episcopal administration
was in general beneficent and popular.
This administration, as pointed out above, was not confined to the
limits of the town. It extended throughout the bishopric. The town was
its center, but the diocese was its sphere. Under it the urban
population enjoyed in no particular a privileged status. The regimen
under which it lived was the regimen of the common law. The knights, the
serfs, and the freemen whom it contained were distinguished from their
congeners outside only by being grouped in one locality. Of the special
laws and the autonomy which the bourgeoisie of the Middle Ages was to
enjoy, there was not yet a single trace to be discovered. The word
_civis_ (citizen) by which contemporary texts designated the inhabitant
of the town was only a simple topographical appellation; it did not yet
have legal significance.[52]
These towns were fortresses as well as episcopal residences. In the last
days of the Roman Empire they had been enclosed by walls as a protection
against the barbarians. These walls were still in existence almost
everywhere and the bishops busied themselves with keeping them up or
with restoring them with the greater zeal in that the incursions of the
Saracens and the Norsemen had given increasingly impressive proof,
during the ninth century, of the need of protection. The old Roman
enceintes continued, therefore, to protect the towns against new perils.
Their form remained, under Charlemagne, what it had been under
Constantine. As a general rule, it took the shape of a rectangle
surrounded by ramparts flanked by towers and communicating with the
outside by gates, customarily to the number of four. The space so
enclosed was very restricted and the length of its sides rarely exceeded
four to five hundred yards.[53] Moreover, it was far from being
entirely built up; between the houses cultivated fields and gardens were
to be found. The outskirts (_suburbium_), which in the Merovingian era
still extended beyond the walls, had disappeared.[54] Thanks to their
defences, the towns could almost always victoriously oppose the assaults
of the invaders from the north and the south. It will suffice here to
recall the famous siege of Paris by the Norsemen in 885.
The episcopal cities naturally served as a refuge for the populations of
their neighborhood upon the approach of the barbarians. There monks
came, even from very far away, to seek an asylum, as did, for example,
those from St. Vaast in 887 at Beauvais and those from St. Quentin at
Laon.[55]
In the midst of the insecurity and the disorders which imparted so
lugubrious a character to the second half of the ninth century, it
therefore fell to the towns to fulfill a true mission of protection.
They were, in every sense of the word, the ramparts of a society
invaded, under tribute, and terrorized. Soon, from another cause, they
were not to be alone in filling that rôle.
It is obvious that the anarchy of the ninth century hastened the
inevitable decomposition of the Frankish State. The counts, who were the
biggest proprietors of their districts, profited by existing conditions
to arrogate to themselves a complete autonomy, to make of their office
an hereditary estate, to combine in their hands, with the private powers
they exercised over their own demesnes, the public powers which were
delegated to them, and finally to amalgamate under their domination, in
a single principality, all the counties they could lay hold of. The
Carolingian Empire was thus parcelled out, after the middle of the ninth
century, into a number of territories subject to as many local
dynasties, and attached to the Crown only by the fragile bond of feudal
homage. The State was too feeble to resist this disintegration. It was
accomplished, unquestionably, by means of violence and abominable
perfidies. Nevertheless it was, on the whole, beneficial for society. In
seizing power, the princes forthwith accepted the obligations it
imposed. Their most evident interest was to defend and protect the lands
and the people who had become _their_ lands and _their_ people. They did
not fail in a task which a purely selfish concern for personal power had
imposed upon them. As their power grew and was consolidated, they became
more and more preoccupied with giving their principalities an
organization capable of guaranteeing public order and peace.
The first need which was manifest was that of defence, as much against
the Saracens or the Norsemen as against the neighboring princes.
Fortresses, therefore, sprang up everywhere at the beginning of the
ninth century.[56] Contemporary texts give them the most diverse names:
_castellum_, _castrum_, _oppidum_, _urbs_, _municipium_; the most usual
and in any case the most technical of these appellations is that of
_burgus_, a word borrowed from the German by the Latin of the Lower
Empire and which is preserved in all the modern languages: _burg_,
_borough_, _bourg_, _borgo_.[57]
Of these burgs of the late Middle Ages no trace remains in our day. The
sources of information, however, fortunately make it possible to form a
fairly accurate picture of them. They were walled enclosures of somewhat
restricted perimeter, customarily circular in form and surrounded by a
moat. In the center was to be found a strong-tower and a keep, the last
redoubt of defence in case of attack. A permanent garrison of knights
(_milites castrenses_) was kept stationed there. This was placed under
the orders of a castellan (_castellanus_). The prince had a home
(_domus_) in each of the burgs of his territory where he stayed with his
retinue in the course of the continual changes of residence which war or
administerial duties forced upon him. Very often a chapel, or a church
flanked by the buildings necessary to house the clergy, raised its
belfry above the battlements of the rampart. Sometimes there were also
to be found by the side of it quarters intended for the judicial
assemblies whose members came, at fixed periods, from outside to
assemble in the burg. Finally, what was never lacking were a granary and
cellars where was kept, to supply the necessities of a siege should the
case arise and to furnish subsistence to the prince during his stays,
the produce of the neighboring demesnes which he held. Prestations in
kind levied on the peasants of the district assured the subsistence of
the garrison, on its part. The upkeep of the walls devolved upon these
same peasants who were compelled to do the work by statute labor.[58]
Although from country to country the picture, which has just been
drawn, naturally differed in details, the same essential traits were to
be found everywhere. The similarity between the _bourgs_ of Flanders and
the _boroughs_ of Anglo-Saxon England is a striking one.[59] And this
similarity unquestionably proves that the same needs brought in their
train like results everywhere.
As can be easily seen, the burgs were, above all, military
establishments. But to this original function was early added that of
being administrative centers. The castellan ceased to be solely the
commandant of the knights of the castral garrison. The prince delegated
to him financial and juridical authority over a more or less extensive
district round about the walls of the burg and which took, by the tenth
century, the name of castellany. The castellany was related to the burg
as the bishopric was related to the town. In case of war, its
inhabitants found there a refuge; in time of peace, there they repaired
to take part in the assemblies of justice or to pay off the prestations
to which they were subject. Nevertheless the burg did not show the
slightest urban character. Its population comprised, aside from the
knights and the clerics who made up its essential part, only men
employed in their service and whose number was certainly of very little
importance. It was a fortress population; it was not a city population.
Neither commerce nor industry was possible or even conceivable in such
an environment. It produced nothing of itself, lived by revenues from
the surrounding country, and had no other economic rôle than that of a
simple consumer.
It is therefore a safe conclusion that the period which opened with the
Carolingian era knew cities neither in the social sense, nor in the
economic sense, nor in the legal sense of that word. The towns and the
burgs were merely fortified places and headquarters of administration.
Their inhabitants enjoyed neither special laws nor institutions of their
own, and their manner of living did not distinguish them in any way from
the rest of society.
Commercial and industrial activity were completely foreign to them. In
no respect were they out of key with the agricultural civilization of
their times. The groups they formed were, after all, of trifling
importance. It is not possible, in the lack of reliable information, to
give an exact figure, but everything indicates that the population of
the burgs never consisted of more than a few hundred men and that that
of the towns probably did not pass the figure of two to three thousand
souls.
The towns and the burgs played, however, an essential rôle in the
history of cities. They were, so to speak, the stepping-stones thereto.
Round about their walls cities were to take shape after the economic
renaissance, whose first symptoms appeared in the course of the tenth
century, had made itself manifest.
_Chapter IV_
The Revival of Commerce
The end of the ninth century was the moment when the economic
development of Western Europe that followed the closing of the
Mediterranean was at its lowest ebb. It was also the moment when the
social disorganization caused by the raids of the barbarians and the
accompanying political anarchy reached a maximum.
The tenth century, if not an era of recovery, was at least an era of
stabilization and relative peace. The surrender of Normandy to Rollo
(912) marked in the West the end of the great Scandinavian invasions,
while in the East Henry the Fowler and Otto I checked and held the Slavs
along the Elbe and the Hungarians in the valley of the Danube (934,
955). At the same time the feudal system, which had definitely displaced
the monarchy, was established in France on the débris of the old
Carolingian order. In Germany, on the contrary, the somewhat later
development of society enabled the princes of the House of Saxony to
resist the encroachments of the lay aristocracy. On their side they had
the powerful influence of the bishops and used it to restore the
ascendancy of the Monarchy. In assuming the title of Roman Emperor,
they laid claim to the universal authority which Charlemagne had
exercised.
If all this was not accomplished without bitter conflicts, nevertheless
it was decidedly productive of good. Europe ceased to be overrun by
ruthless hordes. She recovered confidence in the future, and, with that
confidence, courage and ambition. The date of the renewal of a
cooperative activity on the part of the people might well be ascribed to
the tenth century. At that date, likewise, the social authorities began
once more to acquit themselves in the rôle which it was their place to
play. From now on, in feudal as well as in episcopal principalities, the
first traces could be seen of an organized effort to better the
condition of the people. The prime need of that era, hardly rising above
anarchy, was the need of peace, the most fundamental and the most
essential of all the needs of society.
The first Truce of God was proclaimed in 989. Private wars, the greatest
of the plagues that harassed those troubled times, were energetically
combated by the territorial counts in France and by the prelates of the
imperial Church in Germany.
Dark though the prospect still was, the tenth century nevertheless saw
in outline the picture which the eleventh century presents. The famous
legend of the terrors of the year 1000 is not devoid, in this respect,
of symbolic significance. It is doubtless untrue that men expected the
end of the world in the year 1000. Yet the century which came in at that
date is characterized, in contrast with the preceding one, by a
recrudescence of activity so marked that it could pass for the vigorous
and joyful awakening of a society long oppressed by a nightmare of
anguish. In every demesne was to be seen the same burst of energy and,
for that matter, of optimism. The Church, revivified by the Clunisian
reform, undertook to purify herself of the abuses which had crept into
her discipline and to shake off the bondage in which the Emperors held
her. A mystic enthusiasm, of which she was the inspiration, animated her
congregations and launched them upon the heroic and grandiose enterprise
of the Crusades which brought Western Christianity to grips with Islam.
The military spirit of feudalism led her to initiate and to succeed in
epic undertakings. Norman knights went to battle with Byzantines and
Moslems in Southern Italy, and founded there the principalities out of
which was later to arise the Kingdom of Sicily; other Normans, with whom
were associated Flemings and Frenchmen from the North, conquered
England under the leadership of Duke William. South of the Pyrenees the
Christians drove before them the Saracens of Spain; Toledo and Valencia
fell to their hands (1072-1109).
Such undertakings testify not only to energy and vigor of spirit; they
testify also to the health of society. They would have obviously been
impossible without that native strength which is one of the
characteristics of the eleventh century. The fecundity of families
seemed, at this date, to be as general among the nobility as among the
peasants. Younger sons abounded everywhere, feeling themselves crowded
for room on their natal soil and eager to try their fortunes abroad.
Everywhere were to be met adventurers in search of gain or work. The
armies were full of mercenaries, “Coterelli” or “Brabantiones,” letting
their services to whoever wished to employ them. From Flanders and
Holland bands of peasants were setting out, by the beginning of the
twelfth century, to drain the _Mooren_ on the banks of the Elbe. In
every part of Europe arms were offered in superabundant quantity and
this is undoubtedly the explanation of the increasing number, from then
on, of great reclamation projects in clearing land and diking streams.
It does not appear that, from the Roman era to the eleventh century,
the area of cultivated land had been perceptibly increased. Save in the
Germanic countries, the monasteries had hardly altered, in this respect,
the existing situation. They were almost always established on old
estates and did nothing to decrease the extent of the woods, the heaths
and the marshes contained within their demesnes. But it was quite a
different matter when once the increase of population permitted these
unproductive terrains to be put to good use. Just about the year 1000
there began a period of reclamation which was to continue, with steady
increase, up to the end of the twelfth century. Europe “colonized”
herself, thanks to the increase of her inhabitants. The princes and the
great proprietors turned to the founding of new towns, where flocked the
“younger sons” in quest of lands to cultivate.[60] The great forests
began to be cleared. In Flanders appeared, about 1150, the first
_polders_.[61] (A “polder” is diked land, reclaimed from the sea.) The
Order of the Cistercians, founded in 1098, gave itself over at once to
reclamation projects and the clearing of the land.
It is easy to see that the increase in population and the burst of
renewed general activity of which it was both cause and effect, operated
from the very first to the benefit of an agricultural economy. But this
condition should, before long, have had its effect upon trade as well.
The eleventh century, in fact, brings us face to face with a real
commercial revival. This revival received its impetus from two centers
of activity, one located in the south and the other in the north: Venice
on one side and the Flemish Coast on the other. And this is merely
another way of saying that it was the result of an external stimulus.
The contact with foreign trade, maintained at these two points, first
caused it to appear and spread. Quite likely it could have come about in
some other way. Commercial activity might have been revived by virtue of
the trend of general economic life. The fact is, however, that this
wasn’t the case. Just as the trade of the West disappeared with the
shutting off of its foreign markets, just so it was renewed when these
markets were reopened.
Venice, whose effect was felt from the very first, has a well-recognized
and singular place in the economic history of Europe. Like Tyre, Venice
shows an exclusively commercial character. Her first inhabitants,
fleeing before the approach of the Huns, the Goths and the Lombards,
had sought (in the fifth and sixth centuries) a refuge on the barren
islets of the lagoons at Rialto, at Olivolo, at Spinalunga, at
Dorsoduro.[62] To exist in these marshes they had to tax their ingenuity
and to fight against Nature herself. Everything was wanting: even
drinking water was lacking. But the sea was enough for the existence of
a folk who knew how to manage things. Fishing and the preparation of
salt supplied an immediate means of livelihood to the Venetians. They
were able to procure wheat by exchanging their products with the
inhabitants of the neighboring shores.
Trade was thus forced upon them by the very conditions under which they
lived. And they had the energy and the genius to turn to profit the
unlimited possibilities which trade offered them. By the eighth century
the group of islets they occupied was already thickly populated enough
to become the see of a special diocese.
At the date when the city was founded, all Italy still belonged to the
Byzantine Empire. Thanks to her insular situation, the conquerors who
successively overran the Peninsula--first the Lombards, then
Charlemagne, and finally, still later, the German emperors--were not
successful in their attempts to gain possession. She remained,
therefore, under the sovereignty of Constantinople, thus forming at the
upper end of the Adriatic and at the foot of the Alps an isolated
outpost of Byzantine civilization. While Western Europe was detaching
herself from the East, she continued to be part of it. And this
circumstance is of capital importance. The consequence was that Venice
did not cease to gravitate in the orbit of Constantinople. Across the
waters, she was subject to the attraction of that great city and herself
grew great under its influence.
Constantinople, even in the eleventh century, appears not only as a
great city, but as the greatest city of the whole Mediterranean basin.
Her population was not far from reaching the figure of a million
inhabitants, and that population was singularly active.[63] She was not
content, as had been the population of Rome under the Republic and the
Empire, to consume without producing. She gave herself over, with a zeal
which the fiscal system shackled but did not choke, not only to trading
but to industry. For Constantinople was a great port and a first-rate
manufacturing center as well as a political capital. Here were to be
found every manner of life and every form of social activity. Alone, in
the Christian world, she presented a picture analogous to that of great
modern cities with all the complexities, all the defects but also with
all the refinements of an essentially urban civilization. An
uninterrupted shipping kept her in touch with the coasts of the Black
Sea, Asia Minor, Southern Italy, and the shores of the Adriatic. Her
fleets of war secured to her the mastery of the sea, without which she
would not have been able to live. As long as she remained powerful, she
was able to maintain, in the face of Islam, her dominion over all the
waters of the Eastern Mediterranean.
It is easy to understand how Venice profited by her alliance with a
world so different from the European West. To it she not only owed the
prosperity of her commerce, but from it she first learned those higher
forms of civilization, that perfected technique, that business
enterprise, and that political and administrative organization which
gave her a place apart in the Europe of the Middle Ages. By the eighth
century she was devoting herself with greater and greater success to
the provisioning of Constantinople. Her ships transported thither the
products of the countries which were contiguous to her on the east and
the west: wheat and wine from Italy, wood from Dalmatia, salt from the
lagoons, and, in spite of the prohibitions of the Pope and the Emperor
himself, slaves which she easily secured among the Slavic peoples of the
shores of the Adriatic. Thence they brought back, in return, the
precious fabrics of Byzantine manufacture, as well as spices which Asia
furnished to Constantinople. By the tenth century the activity of the
port had already attained extraordinary proportions.[64] And with the
extension of trade, the love of gain became irresistible. No scruple had
any weight with the Venetians. Their religion was a religion of business
men. It mattered little to them that the Moslems were the enemies of
Christ, if business with them was profitable. After the ninth century
they began more and more to frequent Aleppo, Cairo, Damascus, Kairwan,
Palermo. Treaties of commerce assured their merchants a privileged
status in the markets of Islam.
By the start of the eleventh century, the power of Venice was making as
marvellous progress as her wealth. Under the Doge Pietro II Orseolo,
she cleared the Adriatic of the Slavic pirates, subjected Istria and had
at Zara, Veglia, Arbe, Trau, Spalato, Curzola, and Lagosta settlements
or military establishments. John the Deacon extols the splendor and the
glory of _Venetia Aurea_, and Guglielmo of Apuleia vaunts the city “rich
in money, rich in men,” and declares that “no people in the world are
more valorous in naval warfare, more skilful in the art of guiding ships
on the sea.”
It was inevitable that the powerful economic movement, of which Venice
was the center, should be communicated to the countries of Italy from
which she was separated only by the lagoons. There she obtained the
wheat and wine which she either consumed herself or exported, and she
naturally sought to create there a market for the eastern merchandise
which her mariners unloaded in greater and greater quantity on the quays
by the Po. She entered into relations with Pavia, which was not long in
being animated by her infectious activity.[65] She obtained from the
German emperors the right to trade freely first with the nearby cities
and then with all Italy, as well as the shipping monopoly for all goods
arriving in her port.
In the course of the tenth century Lombardy was inspired, by her
example, with commercial life. Trade rapidly spread from Pavia to the
neighboring cities. All of them made haste to share in the traffic of
which Venice had given them the outstanding example and which it was to
her interest to stimulate among them. The spirit of enterprise developed
in one place after another.
It was not only products of the soil which kept the commercial relations
with Venice flourishing. Industry was already commencing to appear.
Early in the eleventh century, for example, Lucca turned to the
manufacture of cloths and kept at it until much later. Probably a great
many more details would be known about the beginnings of this economic
revival in Lombardy if our sources of information were not so deplorably
meagre.[66]
Preponderant as the Venetian influence had been in Italy, it did not
make itself felt there exclusively. The South of the Peninsula beyond
Spoleto and Benevento was still, and so remained until the arrival of
the Normans in the eleventh century, under the power of the Byzantine
Empire. Bari, Tarentum, Naples and above all Amalfi, kept up relations
with Constantinople similar to those of Venice. They were very active
centers of trade and, no more than Venice, did not hesitate to traffic
with Moslem ports.[67]
Their shipping was, naturally, fated to find competitors sooner or later
among the inhabitants of the coastal towns situated further to the
north. And, in fact, after the beginning of the eleventh century we see
first Genoa, then Pisa soon after, turning their attention to the sea.
In 935 the Saracen pirates had again pillaged Genoa. But the moment was
approaching when she was in her turn to take the offensive. There could
be no question of her concluding commercial arrangements, as had Venice
or Amalfi, with the enemies of her Faith. The mystic, excessive
scrupulousness of the West in religious matters did not permit it, and
too many hates had accumulated in the course of the centuries. The sea
could be opened up only by force of arms.
In 1015-16 an expedition was undertaken by Genoa, in cooperation with
Pisa, against Sardinia. Twenty years later, in 1034, they got possession
for a time of Bona on the coast of Africa; the Pisans, on their part,
victoriously entered the port of Palermo in 1062 and destroyed its
arsenal.
In 1087 the fleets of the two cities, encouraged by Pope Victor III,
attacked Mehdia.[68] All these expeditions were due as much to religious
enthusiasm as to the spirit of adventure. With a quite different
viewpoint from that of the Venetians, the Genoese and the Pisans
considered themselves soldiers of Christ and of the Church, opponents of
Islam. They believed they saw the Archangel Gabriel and St. Peter
leading them into battle with the Infidels, and it was only after having
massacred the “priests of Mahomet” and pillaged the mosque of Mehdia
that they signed an advantageous treaty of commerce. The Cathedral of
Pisa, built after this triumph, admirably symbolized both the mysticism
of the conquerors and the wealth which their shipping was beginning to
bring to them. Pillars and precious marble brought from Africa served to
decorate it--it seems as if they had wished to attest by its splendor
the revenge of Christianity upon the Saracens whose opulence was a thing
of scandal and of envy. Those, at least, are the sentiments which an
enthusiastic contemporary poem expresses:[69]
_Unde tua in aeternum splendebit ecclesia_
_Auro, gemnis, margaritis et palliis splendida_[A]
[A]“Thy church will be resplendent for eternity,
Dazzling with gold, with gems, with pearls and precious cloths.”
Before the counterattack of Christianity, Islam thus gave way little by
little. The launching of the first Crusade (1096) marked its definite
recoil. In 1097 a Genoese fleet sailed towards Antioch, bringing to the
Crusaders reinforcements and supplies. Two years later Pisa sent out
vessels “under the orders of the Pope” to deliver Jerusalem. From that
time on the whole Mediterranean was opened, or rather reopened, to
western shipping. As in the Roman era, communications were
re-established from one end to the other of that essentially European
sea.
The Empire of Islam, insofar as the sea was concerned, came to an end.
To be sure, the political and religious results of the Crusade were
ephemeral. The kingdom of Jerusalem and the principalities of Edessa and
Antioch were reconquered by the Moslems in the twelfth century. But the
sea remained in the hands of the Christians. They were the ones who held
undisputed economic mastery over it. All the shipping in the ports of
the Levant came gradually under their control. Their commercial
establishments multiplied with surprising rapidity in the ports of
Syria, Egypt and the isles of the Ionian Sea. The conquest of Corsica
(1091), of Sardinia (1022) and of Sicily (1058-1090) took away from the
Saracens the bases of operations which, since the ninth century, had
enabled them to keep the West in a state of blockade. The ships of Genoa
and Pisa kept the sea routes open. They patronized the markets of the
East, whither came the products of Asia, both by caravan and by the
ships of the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, and frequented in their turn
the great port of Byzantium. The capture of Amalfi by the Normans
(1073), in putting an end to the commerce of that city, freed them from
her rivalry.
But their progress immediately aroused the jealousy of Venice. She could
not bear to share with these newcomers a trade in which she laid claim
to a monopoly. It was of no moment that she professed the same Faith,
belonged to the same people and spoke the same language; since they had
become rivals she saw in them only enemies. In the spring of the year
1100 a Venetian squadron, lying in wait before Rhodes for the return of
the fleet which Pisa had sent to Jerusalem, fell upon it unawares and
sank without pity a large number of vessels.[70] So began between the
maritime cities a conflict which was to last as long as their
prosperity. The Mediterranean was no more to know that Roman peace which
the Empire of the Caesars had once enjoined upon her. The divergence of
interests was hereafter to sustain on the sea a hostility, sometimes
secret and sometimes openly declared, between the rivals who contested
for supremacy. The quarrels of the Italian republics of the Middle Ages
are still duplicated in modern times by the continued wrangling of the
States whose coasts the Mediterranean washes.
In developing, maritime commerce must naturally have become more
generalized. By the beginning of the twelfth century it had reached the
shores of France and Spain. After the long stagnation into which the
city had fallen at the end of the Merovingian period, the old port of
Marseilles took on new life. In Catalonia, Barcelona, out of which the
kings of Aragon had driven the Moslems, profited in turn by the opening
up of the sea. However, Italy undoubtedly kept the upper hand in that
first economic revival. Lombardy, where from Venice on the east and Pisa
and Genoa on the west, all the commercial movements of the Mediterranean
flowed and were blended into one, flourished with an extraordinary
exuberance. On that wonderful plain cities bloomed with the same vigor
as the harvests. The fertility of the soil made possible for them an
unlimited expansion, and at the same time the ease of obtaining markets
favored both the importation of raw materials and the exportation of
manufactured products. There, commerce gave rise to industry, and as it
developed, Bergamo, Cremona, Lodi, Verona, and all the old towns, all
the old Roman _municipia_, took on new life, far more vigorous than that
which had animated them in antiquity. Soon their surplus production and
their fresh energy were seeking to expand abroad. In the south Tuscany
was won. In the north new routes were laid out across the Alps. By the
passes of the Splügen, St. Bernard and the Brenner, their merchants were
to bring to the continent of Europe that same healthy stimulus which had
come to them from the sea.[71] They followed those natural routes marked
by river courses--the Danube to the east, the Rhine to the north, and
the Rhône to the west. In 1074 Italian merchants, undoubtedly Lombards,
are made mention of at Paris;[72] and at the beginning of the twelfth
century the fairs of Flanders were already drawing a considerable
number of their compatriots.[73]
Nothing could be more natural than this appearance of southerners on the
Flemish coast. It was a consequence of the attraction which trade
spontaneously exerts upon trade.
It has already been shown that, during the Carolingian era, the
Netherlands had given evidence of a commercial activity not to be found
anywhere else.[74] This is easily explained by the great number of
rivers which flow through that country and which there unite their
waters before emptying into the sea: the Rhine, the Meuse and the
Scheldt. England and the Scandinavian countries were so near that land
of large and deep estuaries that their mariners naturally frequented it
at an early date. It was to them, as we have seen above, that the ports
of Duurstede and Quentovic owed their importance. But this importance
was ephemeral. It could not survive the period of the Norseman
invasions. The easier access was to a country, the more it lured the
invaders and the more it had to suffer from their devastations. The
geographical situation which, at Venice, had safeguarded commercial
prosperity was, here, naturally due to contribute to its destruction.
The invasions of the Norsemen had been only the first manifestation of
the need of expansion felt by the Scandinavian peoples. Their
overflowing energy had driven them forth, towards Western Europe and
Russia simultaneously, upon adventures of pillage and conquest. They
were not mere pirates. They aspired, as had the Germanic tribes before
them with regard to the Roman Empire, to settle in countries more rich
and fertile than was their homeland, and there to create colonies for
the surplus population which their own country could no longer support.
In this undertaking they eventually succeeded. To the east, the Swedes
set foot along those natural routes which led from the Baltic to the
Black Sea by way of the Neva, Lake Ladoga, the Lovat, the Volchof, the
Dvina and the Dnieper. To the west, the Danes and the Norwegians
colonized the Anglo-Saxon kingdoms north of the Humber. In France, they
had ceded to them by Charles the Simple the country on the Channel which
took from them the name of Normandy.
These successes had for their result the orientation in a new direction
of the activity of the Scandinavians. Starting at the beginning of the
tenth century, they turned away from war to devote themselves to
trade.[75] Their ships plowed all the seas of the North and they had
nothing to fear from rivals since they alone, among the peoples whose
shores those seas bathed, were navigators. It is enough to peruse the
delightful tales of the _Sagas_ to get an idea of the hardihood and the
skill of the barbarian mariners whose adventures and exploits they
recount.
Each spring, once the water was open, they put out to sea. They were to
be met in Iceland, in Ireland, in England, in Flanders, at the mouths of
the Elbe, the Weser, and the Vistula, on the islands of the Baltic Sea,
at the foot of the Gulf of Bothnia and the Gulf of Finland. They had
settlements at Dublin, at Hamburg, at Schwerin, on the island of
Gotland; thanks to them, the current of trade, which starting from
Byzantium and Bagdad crossed Russia by way of Kiev and Novgorod, was
extended up to the shores of the North Sea and there made felt its
beneficent influence. In all history there is hardly a more curious
phenomenon than that effect wrought on Northern Europe by the superior
civilizations of the Greek and Arab Empires, and of which the
Scandinavians were the intermediaries. In this respect their rôle,
despite the differences of climate, society and culture, seems quite
analogous to that which Venice played in the South of Europe. Like her,
they renewed the contact between the East and the West. And just as the
commercial activity of Venice did not long delay in involving Lombardy
in the movement, so likewise Scandinavian shipping brought about the
economic awakening of the coast of Flanders.
The geographical situation of Flanders, indeed, put her in a splendid
position to become the western focus for the commerce of the seas of the
north. It formed the natural terminus of the voyage for ships arriving
from Northern England or which, having crossed the Sound after coming
out of the Baltic, were on their way to the south. As has already been
stated, the ports of Quentovic and Duurstede had been frequented by the
Norsemen before the period of the invasions. First one and then the
other disappeared before the storm. Quentovic did not rise again from
her ruins and it was Bruges, whose situation at the head of the Gulf of
Zwin was the better one, that became her heritor. As for Duurstede,
Scandinavian mariners reappeared there at the beginning of the tenth
century. Yet her prosperity did not last very long. As commerce
flourished it was concentrated more and more about Bruges, nearer to
France and kept in a more stable condition of peace by the Counts of
Flanders, whereas the neighborhood of Duurstede was too exposed to the
incursions of the still half-barbaric Friesians to enjoy security. Be
that as it may, it is certain that Bruges attracted to her port, more
and more, the trade of the North, and that the disappearance of
Duurstede, in the course of the eleventh century, definitely assured her
future. The fact that coins of the Counts of Flanders, Arnold II and
Baldwin IV (956-1035), have been discovered in considerable numbers in
Denmark, in Prussia, and even in Russia, would attest, in the lack of
written information, to the relations with those countries which
Flanders kept up after this date with the help of Scandinavian
mariners.[76]
Communication with the nearby English coast was to become still more
active. It was at Bruges, for example, that the Anglo-Saxon queen Emma,
expelled from England, settled about 1030. In 991-1002 the list of
market tolls at London makes mention of the Flemings as if they were the
most important group of foreigners carrying on business in that
city.[77]
Among the causes of the commercial importance which so early
characterised Flanders, should be pointed out the existence in that
country of an indigenous industry able to supply the vessels that landed
there with a valuable return cargo. From the Roman era and probably even
before that, the Morini and the Menapii had been making woollen cloths.
This primitive industry was due to be perfected under the influence of
the technical improvements introduced by the Roman conquest. The
peculiar fineness of the fleece of the sheep raised on the humid meadows
of the coast was the final factor needed to insure success. The tunics
(_saga_) and the cloaks (_birri_) which it produced were exported as far
as beyond the Alps and there even was at Tournai, in the last days of
the Empire, a factory for military clothing. The Germanic invasion did
not put an end to this industry. The Franks who invaded Flanders in the
fifth century continued to carry it on as had the older inhabitants
before them--there is no doubt but that the Friesian cloaks of which the
ninth century historiographer speaks were made in Flanders.[78] They
seem to be the only manufactured products which furnished, in the
Carolingian era, the substance of a regular trade. The Friesians
transported them along the Scheldt, the Meuse and the Rhine, and when
Charlemagne wanted to reply with gifts to the compliments of the Caliph
Harun-al-Rashid, he found nothing better to offer him than “_pallia
fresonica_.” It is to be supposed that these cloths, as remarkable for
their beautiful colors as for their softness, must have immediately
attracted the attention of the Scandinavian navigators of the tenth
century.
Nowhere, in the North of Europe, were found more valuable products, and
they undoubtedly had a place, side by side with the furs of the North
and the Arab and Byzantine silk fabrics, among the most sought-after
export goods. According to every indication, the cloths which were made
mention of in the London market about the year 1000 were cloths from
Flanders. And the new markets which shipping was now offering to them
could not have failed to give a fresh impulse to their manufacture.
Thus commerce and industry, the latter carried on on the spot and the
former originating abroad, joined in giving Flanders, after the tenth
century, an economic activity that was to continue developing. In the
eleventh century the advances made were already surprising. Thenceforth
Flanders traded with the North of France, the wines of which she
exchanged for her cloths. The conquest of England by William of Normandy
bound to the Continent that country which heretofore had gravitated in
the orbit of Denmark, and multiplied the relations which Bruges had
already been maintaining with London. By the side of Bruges, other
mercantile centers appeared: Ghent, Ypres, Lille, Douai, Arras, Tournai.
Fairs were instituted by the Counts of Thourout at Messines, Lille and
Ypres.
Flanders was not alone in experiencing the salutary effects of the
shipping of the North. The repercussion made itself felt along the
rivers which end in the Netherlands. Cambrai and Valenciennes on the
Scheldt, Liège, Huy and Dinant on the Meuse had already, in the tenth
century, been mentioned as centers of trade. This was true also of
Cologne and Mainz, on the Rhine. The shores of the Channel and of the
Atlantic, further removed from the seat of activity of the North Sea,
do not seem to have had the same importance. Hardly any mention was made
of them, with the exception of Rouen, naturally in close contact with
England, and, further south, Bordeaux and Bayonne whose development was
much slower. As for the interior of France and Germany, they were
affected only very slightly by the economic movement which little by
little spread in that direction, either coming up from Italy or coming
down from the Netherlands.
It was only in the twelfth century that, gradually but definitely,
Western Europe was transformed. The economic development freed her from
the traditional immobility to which a social organization, depending
solely on the relations of man to the soil, had condemned her. Commerce
and industry did not merely find a place alongside of agriculture; they
reacted upon it. Its products no longer served solely for the
consumption of the landed proprietors and the tillers of the soil; they
were brought into general circulation, as objects of barter or as raw
material. The rigid confines of the demesnial system, which had up to
now hemmed in all economic activity, were broken down and the whole
social order was patterned along more flexible, more active and more
varied lines. As in antiquity, the country oriented itself afresh on
the city. Under the influence of trade the old Roman cities took on new
life and were repopulated, or mercantile groups formed round about the
military burgs and established themselves along the sea coasts, on river
banks, at confluences, at the junction points of the natural routes of
communication. Each of them constituted a market which exercised an
attraction, proportionate to its importance, on the surrounding country
or made itself felt afar.
Large or small, they were to be met everywhere; one was to be found, on
the average, in every five leagues square of land. They had, in fact,
become indispensable to society. They had introduced into it a division
of labor which it could no longer do without. Between them and the
country was established a reciprocal exchange of services. An
increasingly intimate solidarity bound them together, the country
attending to the provisioning of the towns, and the towns supplying, in
return, articles of commerce and manufactured goods. The physical life
of the burgher depended upon the peasant, but the social life of the
peasant depended upon the burgher. For the burgher revealed to him a
more comfortable sort of existence, a more refined sort, and one which,
in arousing his desires, multiplied his needs and raised his standard of
living. And it was not only in this respect that the rise of cities
strongly stimulated social progress. It made no less a contribution in
spreading throughout the world a new conception of labor. Before this it
had been serf; now it became free, and the consequences of this fact, to
which we shall return, were incalculable. Let it be added, finally, that
the economic revival of which the twelfth century saw the flowering
revealed the power of capital, and enough will have been said to show
that possibly no period in all history had a more profound effect upon
humanity.
Invigorated, transformed and launched upon the route of progress, the
new Europe resembled, in short, more the ancient Europe than the Europe
of Carolingian times. For it was out of antiquity that she regained that
essential characteristic of being a region of cities. And if, in the
political organization, the rôle of cities had been greater in antiquity
than it was in the Middle Ages, in return their economic influence in
the latter era greatly exceeded what it had ever been before. Generally
speaking, great mercantile cities were relatively rare in the western
provinces of the Roman Empire. Aside from Rome herself, there were
scarcely any at all except Naples, Milan, Marseilles and Lyons. Nothing
of the sort was then in existence which might be comparable to what
were, at the beginning of the tenth century, ports like Venice, Pisa,
Genoa or Bruges, or centers of industry such as Milan, Florence, Ypres,
and Ghent. In Gaul, in fact, the important place held in the twelfth
century by ancient cities such as Orleans, Bordeaux, Cologne, Nantes,
Rouen, and others, was much superior to what they had enjoyed under the
Emperors. Finally, the extension of the economic development of medieval
Europe went well beyond the limits it had reached in Roman Europe.
Instead of halting along the Rhine and the Danube, it overflowed widely
in Germany and reached as far as the Vistula. Regions which had been
travelled over, at the beginning of the Christian era, only by
infrequent traders in amber and furs and which seemed as inhospitable as
the heart of Africa might have seemed to our ancestors, now burgeoned
with cities. The Sound, which no Roman trading vessel had ever crossed,
was animated by the continual passage of ships. They sailed the Baltic
and the North Sea as they had sailed the Mediterranean. There were
almost as many ports on the shores of the one as on the shores of the
other.
From two quarters, trade made use of the resources which Nature had
placed at its disposal. It dominated the two inland seas which between
them bounded the admirably indented coast line of the continent of
Europe. Just as the Italian cities had driven back the Moslems from the
Mediterranean, so in the course of the twelfth century the German cities
drove back the Scandinavians from the North Sea and the Baltic, on which
hereafter were spread the sails of the Hanse Towns.
Thus the commercial expansion which first made its appearance at the two
points at which Europe came in contact with it--by Venice with the world
of the East, by Flanders with the Russo-Scandinavian world--spread like
a beneficent epidemic over the whole Continent. In reaching inland, the
movement from the North and the movement from the South finally met each
other. The contact between them was effected at the mid-point of the
natural route which led from Bruges to Venice--on the plain of
Champagne, where in the twelfth century were instituted the famous fairs
of Troyes, Lagny, Provins and Bar-sur-Aube, which up to the end of the
thirteenth century fulfilled, in medieval Europe, the functions of an
exchange and of a clearing house.
_Chapter V_
The Merchant Class
Almost always, in questions of origin, the amount of information
available is far from satisfactory. It is therefore impossible to
reconstruct an exact picture of the rise of the merchant class which
inspired the commercial movement and caused it to spread over all
Europe.
In certain countries, trade appears as an original and spontaneous
phenomenon. This was the case, for example, at the dawn of history in
Greece and Scandinavia. There, navigation was at least as old as
agriculture. Everything led men to engage in it: the deep conformation
of the coast-lines, the abundance of harbors, and the subtle attraction
of those islands and low-lying shores which were visible on the horizon
and which made a sea-faring life seem the more tempting because there
was so little to be hoped for from a soil as sterile as was that of the
homeland. The proximity of older and poorly defended civilizations held
out, in addition, the lure of rich plunder. Piracy was the initiator of
maritime trade among the Greeks of the Homeric era, as among the Norse
Vikings; for a long time the two vocations developed in concert.
Nothing of the sort, however, was to be found in the Middle Ages. There
was no sign of that heroic and barbarian occupation. The Germanic tribes
that invaded the Roman provinces in the fifth century were complete
strangers to a maritime life. They contented themselves with
appropriating the soil, and the shipping of the Mediterranean continued,
as in the past, to fill the peaceful rôle which had fallen to it under
the Empire.
The Moslem invasion which caused its ruin and closed the sea provoked no
reaction. The situation was taken for granted, and the continent of
Europe, deprived of its traditional markets, remained an essentially
rural civilization. The sporadic trade which Jews, pedlers and
occasional merchants still carried on during the Carolingian era was too
feeble and was too effectively discouraged by the invasions of the
Norsemen and Saracens to lend support to the belief that it was the
precursor of the commercial revival whose first symptoms were visible in
the tenth century.
It would seem natural to suppose, at first glance, that a merchant class
grew up little by little in the midst of the agricultural masses.
Nothing, however, gives credence to that theory. In the social
organization of the late Middle Ages, where each family was attached to
the soil from father to son, it is hard to see what possibly could have
induced men to exchange, for a livelihood made sure by the possession of
the soil, the aleatory and precarious livelihood of the trader. The love
of gain and the desire to ameliorate one’s condition must have carried,
at best, very little weight with a population accustomed to a
traditional way of living, having no contact with the outside world, in
which no novelty, no curiosity stirred the imagination, and in which the
spirit of initiative was probably completely lacking. Though they
frequented the small local markets the peasants never made enough money
out of them to be inspired with the desire for, or even to be inclined
to envisage the possibility of, a manner of life based on trade. Theirs
must have seemed to them merely a normal and customary occupation. The
idea of selling one’s land in order to procure liquid assets certainly
did not occur to any of them. The state of society and the general
outlook on life was entirely opposed to it. There is not the slightest
proof that anybody had ever dreamed of a transaction so bizarre and so
hazardous.
Certain historians have sought to set up as the forerunners of the
merchants of the Middle Ages those servitors whom the great abbeys
charged with procuring, from without, the indispensable commodities for
their subsistence and to whom they sometimes entrusted the selling, in
the neighboring markets, of the surplus of their own harvests and
vintages. This hypothesis, ingenious as it is, does not stand up under
examination. In the first place, the “abbey-merchants” were too few in
number to have an influence of any great moment. In the second place,
they were not free agents, but employees exclusively in the service of
their masters. It is not apparent that any of them ever carried on
business on his own account. No attempt has been successful, and none,
certainly, ever will be successful, to establish a connecting link
between them and the merchant class whose origins we are looking for
here.
All that can be asserted with certainty is that the commercial
_profession_ appeared in Venice at a period when nothing yet gave reason
to expect its spread in Western Europe. Cassiodorus, in the sixth
century, describes the Venetians as even then a sailor-and
merchant-folk. It is an established fact that in the ninth century some
very great fortunes were founded in the city. The treaties of commerce
which Venice later concluded with the Carolingian emperors or with those
of Byzantium, furthermore, leave no room for doubt as to the nature of
the life of her inhabitants. Unfortunately there are no existing data on
the manner in which their capital was accumulated and their business
carried on. It is more than probable that salt, prepared on the islets
of the lagoons, formed at an early date the substance of a lucrative
export trade. The coastal trade along the shores of the Adriatic and
especially the relations of the city with Constantinople resulted in
still greater profits. The extent to which the technique of Venetian
commerce had already been perfected by the tenth century is
extraordinary.[79]
At a period when everywhere else in Europe instruction was the exclusive
monopoly of the clergy, the ability to write was widespread in Venice.
It is perfectly obvious that there was a close relation between this
curious phenomenon and the development of trade.
It was the credit system, which, with the greatest probability, helped
commerce to reach at an early date the point it had attained. To be
sure, there are no records bearing on the matter, earlier than the first
part of the eleventh century. But the custom of maritime loans seems to
have already been so highly developed at this period that their origin
must necessarily be dated much earlier.
The Venetian merchant was in the habit of borrowing from a capitalist
the money necessary for financing a cargo, at a rate of interest which
averaged in general about twenty per cent. A ship was loaded by several
merchants acting in common, and the perils of navigation led maritime
expeditions to be made up of flotillas comprising several vessels manned
by large and carefully armed crews.[80] Everything tends to show that
the profits were extremely high. If, in this respect, Venetian documents
hardly give precise information, we can compensate for their silence by
means of Genoese sources. In the twelfth century maritime loans, the
equipments of ships, and business methods were alike in both cities.[81]
What we know about the enormous profits realized by Genoese mariners
must then hold equally true for their precursors of Venice. And we know
enough about it to be able to state that trade and trade alone, in the
one quarter as in the other, could have enabled those whose fortunes
energy and intelligence favored to acquire abundant capital.[82]
But the secret of the rapid and early fortunes of the Venetian merchants
is undoubtedly to be found in the close relationship which bound their
commercial organization to that of Byzantium, and through Byzantium to
the commercial organization of antiquity. In reality Venice belonged to
the West only by her geographical location; in the life that animated
her and the spirit that inspired her, she was foreign to it. The first
colonists of the lagoons, fugitives from Aquileia and neighboring
cities, brought there the economic technique and tools of the Roman
world. The constant and increasingly active relations which, from then
on, continued to bind the city to Byzantine Italy and Constantinople,
protected and developed that important commercial center. In short,
between Venice and the East, where was preserved the thousand-year-old
tradition of civilization, contact was never lost. Venetian navigators
may be considered as the successor of those Syrian mariners who were so
active, up to the time of the Moslem invasion, in the port of Marseilles
and the Tyrrhenian Sea. They had no need of a long and painful
apprenticeship to fit them for a great commerce. The tradition of it
had, with them, never been lost, and that is enough to explain the
peculiar place they occupy in the economic history of Western Europe. It
is impossible to gainsay that the commercial law and customs of
antiquity were the cause of the superiority which they showed and which
they held from the start. Thorough research will, some day, doubtless
supply definite proof of what is here merely asserted. There is no
doubt, meanwhile, but that the Byzantine influence, so characteristic of
the political constitution of Venice during the early centuries, had
also impregnated its economic constitution. In the rest of Europe the
commercial profession was tardily evolved from a civilization in which
every former trace of it had long since been lost. In Venice it appeared
at the same time as the city itself; there it was a survival from the
Roman world.
Venice naturally exercised a profound effect upon the other maritime
cities which, in the course of the eleventh century, commenced to
appear: Pisa and Genoa first, later Marseilles and Barcelona. But she
does not seem to have contributed to the formation of the merchant class
by virtue of which commercial activity spread little by little from the
shores of the sea towards the interior of the Continent. Here we find
ourselves in the presence of a quite different phenomenon, one which
there are no grounds for believing was connected with the economic
organization of antiquity. To be sure, Venetian merchants were to be met
with at an early date in Lombardy and north of the Alps. But it is not
apparent that they founded colonies anywhere. The conditions underlying
commerce on the land were, after all, too different from those of
commerce on the sea to make it likely that they had an influence of
which, furthermore, no existing records give indication.
It was in the course of the tenth century that there reappeared in
continental Europe a class of professional merchants whose progress,
very slow at first, gathered speed as the following century moved
forward.[83] The increase in population, which began to be manifest at
the same era, is certainly in direct relation to this phenomenon. It had
as a result the detaching from the land an increasingly important number
of individuals and committing them to that roving and hazardous
existence which, in every agricultural civilization, is the lot of
those who no longer find themselves with their roots in the soil. It
multiplied the crowd of vagabonds drifting about all through society,
living from day to day by alms from the monasteries, hiring themselves
out at harvest-time, enlisting in the armies in time of war and holding
back from neither rapine nor pillage when occasion presented. It is
among this crowd of foot-loose adventurers that the first adepts of
trade must, without any doubt, be looked for.
Their manner of life naturally drove them towards all those localities
where the affluence of the inhabitants gave them the hope of gain or of
some fortunate opening. If they assiduously took part in pilgrimages,
they were certainly no less drawn by the ports, the markets, and the
fairs. There they hired themselves out as sailors, as boatmen, as
dockmen or porters. Energetic characters, tempered by the experience of
a life full of the unexpected, must have abounded among them. Many knew
foreign languages and were conversant with the customs and needs of
divers lands.[84] Let a lucky chance present itself--and heaven knows
that chances are numerous in the life of a vagabond--they were
remarkably well equipped to profit thereby. And a small profit, with
skill and intelligence, can always be turned into a big profit. This
must have been particularly true in an era when the insufficiency of
communications and the relative rarity of merchandise offered for sale
must have naturally kept prices at a very high level. Famines were
multiplied throughout Europe, sometimes in one province and sometimes in
another, by that inadequate system of communications, and increased
still more the opportunities, for those who knew how to make use of
them, of getting rich.[85] A few sacks of wheat, seasonably transported
to the right spot, sufficed for the realizing of huge profits. For a
man, adroit and sparing no pains, Fortune then held out the prospect of
fruitful operations. It was certainly not long before nouveaux riches
made their appearance in the midst of this miserable crowd of
impoverished, bare-foot wanderers in the world.
Fortunately there happen to be sources of information which supply proof
that this was in fact the case. It will suffice to cite here the most
characteristic of them, the Biography of St. Godric of Finchale.[86]
He was born towards the end of the eleventh century in Lincolnshire, of
poor peasant stock, and he must have been put to it from early childhood
to find a means of living. Like many other unfortunates in every age, he
was a beachcomber, on the lookout for wreckage cast up by the waves.
Next, perhaps following some lucky find, he played the rôle of peddler
and went about the country with a pack on his back. Eventually he picked
up a little change and, one fine day, he joined a band of merchants met
in the course of his peregrinations. With them he went from market to
market, from fair to fair, from town to town. Thus become a merchant by
profession, he rapidly realized profits big enough to enable him to form
an association with his fellows, to load a ship in common with them and
to engage in coastal trade along the shores of England, Scotland,
Denmark and Flanders. The company prospered to the fullest. Its
operations consisted in shipping abroad goods which were known to be
scarce, and there picking up in return merchandise which it took care
to dispose of in places where the demand was the greatest and where
might be realized, in consequence, the largest profits. At the end of
several years this prudent custom of buying cheap and selling dear made
of Godric a very rich man. It was then that, moved by grace, he suddenly
renounced the life he had led until then, turned over his possessions to
the poor, and became a hermit.
The story of St. Godric, if we eliminate from it the mystic ending, was
that of a great many others. It shows, with the utmost clearness, how a
man, starting with nothing, was able in a relatively short time to amass
considerable capital. Circumstances and luck probably contributed
largely to the making of his fortune. But the essential cause of his
success, and the contemporary biography to which we owe the account lays
abundant stress thereon, was intelligence, or rather business sense.[87]
Godric seems to have been a shrewd calculator gifted with that
commercial instinct which it is not altogether rare to meet, in every
age, among enterprising natures. The quest of profit guided all his
actions and in him can be easily recognized that famous “capitalistic
spirit” (_spiritus capitalisticus_) which some would have us believe
dates only from the Renaissance. It is preposterous to submit that
Godric carried on his business only to provide for his daily needs. In
place of hoarding in the bottom of some chest the money he gained, he
used it only to maintain and extend his trading. It is not employing too
modern an expression to say that the profits he realized were put to
work as fast as possible to augment his revolving capital. For that
matter, it is somewhat surprising to observe that the conscience of this
future monk was completely free of all religious scruple. His zeal in
searching out for every commodity the market where it would produce the
maximum profit was in flagrant opposition to the disapproval with which
the Church looked upon every kind of speculation, and to the economic
doctrine of “fair price.”[88]
The fortune of Godric is not to be explained merely by business
ability. In a society still as crude as that of the eleventh century,
private initiative could succeed only by having recourse to association.
Too many perils threatened the wandering existence of the merchant not
to impose on him first of all the fundamental necessity of forming in
groups for the sake of common defence. Still other motives impelled him
to unite with his fellows. At fairs and markets, should a dispute arise,
he found in them favorable witnesses, or bondsmen who would be security
for him in a court of justice. In common with them he was able to buy at
wholesale merchandise which, left to his own resources, he would have
been unable to get. His credit was increased by the collective credit of
which he supplied a part, and thanks thereto he was able more easily to
come out on top in competition with his rivals. The biography of Godric
informs us in its own very words that from the day when its hero
associated himself with a band of merchants his fortunes took their
upward turn. In taking this step he merely conformed to custom. Trade in
the late Middle Ages was known only in that primitive form of which the
caravan is the characteristic manifestation. Maritime or land trade was
possible only by grace of the mutual assurance an association inspired
in its members, of the discipline which it imposed upon them, of the
regulations to which it subjected them. And this feature was always in
evidence. Boats sailed only when assembled in flotillas, just as
merchants travelled the country only in bands. Security existed for them
only if guaranteed by force, and force was the consequence of
collectivity.
It would be a complete mistake to see in the merchant associations, of
which traces may be found in the tenth century, a peculiarly German
phenomenon. It is true that the terms which were used to designate them
in the north of Europe--_gild_ and _hanse_--came originally from
Germany. But this habit of cooperating is to be found everywhere in
economic life and, whatever may have been the differences in the
details, in what was essential it was everywhere the same, because
everywhere there were the same conditions which made it indispensable.
In Italy as in the Netherlands, trade was able to expand only by
cooperation. The _frairies_, the _charités_, the merchant _compagnies_
of the countries of the Roman tongue were exactly analogous to the
_gilds_ and _hanses_ of the German territories.[89] What determined the
economic organization was not “national genius,” but social necessity.
The primitive institutions of trade were as cosmopolitan as those of the
feudal system.
The sources of information make it possible to obtain an excellent idea
of the merchant troops which, beginning with the tenth century, were to
be found in greater and greater numbers in Western Europe.[90] They
should be pictured as armed bands, the members of which, equipped with
bows and swords, encircled the horses and wagons loaded with bags, packs
and casks. At the head of the caravan marched a standard-bearer. A
chief, the _Hansgraf_ or the _Doyen_, exercised his authority over the
company. This latter was composed of “brothers,” bound together by an
oath of fidelity. A spirit of close solidarity animated the whole group.
The merchandise, apparently, was bought and sold in common and the
profits divided pro rata, according to the share of each one in the
association.
It seems that these companies, as a general rule, made very long
journeys. It would be a decided mistake to conceive of the commerce of
this era as a local commerce, strictly confined within the orbit of a
regional market. It has already been seen that Italian traders went as
far as Paris and Flanders. At the end of the tenth century the port of
London was regularly frequented by merchants from Cologne, Huy, Dinant,
Flanders and Rouen. A contemporary text speaks of men from Verdun
trading with Spain.[91] In the valley of the Seine, the Parisian hanse
of river merchants was in constant relations with Rouen. The biography
of Godric, in chronicling his distant expeditions in the Baltic and the
North Sea, at the same time throws light on those of his fellows.
It was therefore trade on a big scale or, if you prefer a more precise
term, trade over long distances, that was characteristic of the economic
revival of the Middle Ages. Just as the shipping of Venice and Amalfi
and later that of Pisa and Genoa launched forth from the very beginning
on long sea voyages, so did the merchants of the Continent lead their
vagabond life over wide territories.[92] It is quite clear that this was
for them the sole means of realizing big profits. To get high prices it
was necessary to seek afar the products which were there found in
abundance, in order to be able to resell them later at a profit in
places where their rarity increased their value. The more distant the
journey of the merchant, the more profitable was it for him. And it is
easily appreciated how the desire for gain was strong enough to
counterbalance the hardships, the risks and the dangers of a wandering
existence open to every hazard. Except during the winter, the merchant
of the Middle Ages was continually on the road. English texts of the
twelfth century picturesquely designated him under the name of
_piepowdrous_--“dusty-foot.”[93]
This rover, this vagabond of trade, by the strangeness of his manner of
life must have, from the very first, astonished the agricultural society
all of the customs of which he went counter to and in which no place was
set aside for him. He brought mobility to the midst of people attached
to the soil; he revealed, to a world faithful to tradition and
respectful of a hierarchy which fixed the rôle and the rank of each
class, a shrewd and rationalist activity in which fortune, instead of
being measured by social status, depended only on intelligence and
energy. And so it is not surprising that he gave offense. The nobility
never had anything but disdain for these upstarts come from no one knew
where, and whose insolent good fortune they could not bear. They were
enraged to see them better supplied with money than themselves; they
were humiliated by being obliged to have recourse, in time of trouble,
to the purse of these newly rich. Save in Italy, where aristocratic
families did not hesitate to augment their fortunes by having an
interest in commercial operations in the capacity of money-lender, the
prejudice that it was degrading to engage in business remained
deep-rooted in the heart of the feudal caste up to the time of the
French Revolution.
As to the clergy, their attitude in regard to merchants was still more
unfavorable. In the eyes of the Church, commercial life was dangerous to
the safety of the soul. “The merchant,” says a text attributed to St.
Jerome “can please God only with difficulty.” Trade seemed to the
canonists to be form of usury. They condemned profit-seeking, which they
confounded with avarice. Their doctrine of “fair price” was meant to
impose a renouncement of economic life and, in short, an asceticism
incompatible with the natural development of the latter. Every form of
speculation seemed to them a sin. And this severity was not entirely
caused by the strict interpretation of Christian morality. Very likely,
it should also be attributed to the conditions under which the Church
existed. The subsistence of the Church, in fact, depended exclusively on
that demesnial organization which, as has been seen above, was so
foreign to the idea of enterprise and profit. If to this be added the
ideal of poverty which Clunisian mysticism gave to religious fervor, it
can be readily understood why the Church took a defiant and hostile
attitude toward the commercial revival which must, from the very first,
have seemed to it a thing for shame and a cause of anxiety.[94]
We must admit, however, that this attitude was not without its benefits.
It certainly resulted in preventing the passion for gain from spreading
without limit; it protected, in a certain measure, the poor from the
rich, debtors from creditors. The scourge of debts, which in Greek and
Roman antiquity so sorely afflicted the people, was spared the social
order of the Middle Ages, and it may well be that the Church contributed
largely to that happy result. The universal prestige it enjoyed served
as a moral check-rein. If it was not strong enough to subject the
traders to the doctrine of “fair price,” it was strong enough to
restrain them from giving way entirely to greediness for profits. They
were certainly very uneasy over the peril to which their way of living
exposed their eternal salvation. The fear of the future life tormented
their conscience. Many there were who, on their death beds, founded by
their wills charitable institutions or appropriated a part of their
wealth to reimburse sums unjustly acquired. The edifying end of Godric
testifies to the inner conflict which must often have been waged in
their souls, torn between the irresistible seductions of wealth and the
austere prescriptions of religious morality which their profession
obliged them, in spite of their veneration, to violate unceasingly.[95]
The legal status of the merchants eventually gave them a thoroughly
singular place in that society which they astonished in so many
respects. By virtue of the wandering existence they led, they were
everywhere regarded as foreigners. No one knew the origins of these
eternal travellers. Certainly the majority among them were born of
nonfree parents, from whom they had early taken leave in order to
launch upon adventures. But serfdom was not to be presumed: it had to be
proven. The law necessarily treated as a free man one who could not be
ascribed to a master. It therefore came about that it was necessary to
treat the merchants, most of whom were without doubt the sons of serfs,
as if they had always enjoyed freedom. In detaching themselves from
their natal soil they had freed themselves in fact. In the midst of a
social organization where the populace was attached to the land and
where everyone was dependent upon a liege lord, they presented the
strange picture of circulating everywhere without being claimed by
anyone. They did not demand freedom; it was conceded to them because no
one could prove that they did not already enjoy it. They acquired it, so
to speak, by usage and limitation. In short, just as agrarian
civilization had made of the peasant a man whose normal state was
servitude, trade made of the merchant a man whose normal condition was
liberty. From that time on, in place of being subject to seignorial and
demesnial jurisdiction, he was answerable only to public jurisdiction.
Alone competent to try him were the tribunals which still kept, above
the multitude of private courts, the old framework of the judicial
constitution of the Frankish State.[96]
Public authority at the same time took him under its protection. The
local princes whose task it was to preserve, in their counties, peace
and public order--to which pertained the policing of the highways and
the safeguarding of travellers--extended their tutelage over the
merchants. In doing so they did nothing more than to continue the
tradition of the State, the powers of which they had usurped. In that
agricultural empire of his, Charlemagne himself had given careful
attention to the maintenance of the freedom of circulation. He had
issued edicts in favor of pilgrims and traders, Jew or Christian, and
the capitularies of his successors attest to the fact that they remained
faithful to that policy. The emperors of the House of Saxony followed
suit in Germany, and the kings of France, after they came into power,
did likewise. The princes had, furthermore, every interest in attracting
numerous merchants to their countries, whither they brought a new
animation and where they augmented bountifully the revenues from the
market tolls. The counts early took active measures against highwaymen,
watching over the good conduct of the fairs and the security of the
routes of communication. In the eleventh century great progress had been
made and the chroniclers state that there were regions where one could
travel with a sack full of gold without running the risk of being
despoiled. On its part, the Church punished highwaymen with
excommunication, and the Truces of God, in which it took the initiative
in the tenth century, protected the merchants in particular.
But it was not enough that merchants be placed under the safeguard and
the jurisdiction of the public authority. The novelty of their
profession had further consequences. It forced a law made for a
civilization based on agriculture to become more flexible and to lend
itself to the fundamental needs which were imposed upon it. Judicial
procedure, with its rigid and traditional formalism, with its delays,
with its methods of proof as primitive as the duel, with its abuse of
the absolutory oath, with its “ordeals” which left to chance the outcome
of a trial, was for the merchants a perpetual nuisance. They needed a
simpler legal system, more expeditious and more equitable. At the fairs
and markets they elaborated among themselves a commercial code (_jus
mercatorum_) of which the oldest traces may be noted by the beginning of
the eleventh century.[97] Most probably it was introduced very early
into the legal practice, at least for suits between merchants. It must
have constituted for them a sort of personal law, the benefits of which
the judges had no motive for refusing them.[98] The contemporary texts
which make allusion to it unfortunately do not make clear its terms.
There is, however, no doubt but that it was a collection of usages born
of business experience and which spread from place to place
commensurately with the spread of trade itself. The great fairs whither
came, periodically, merchants from divers countries and which had a
special tribunal charged with the rendering of speedy justice, must have
seen from the very first the elaboration of a sort of commercial
jurisprudence, the same everywhere despite the differences in country,
language, and national laws.
The merchant thus seems to have been not only a free man but a
privileged man to boot. Like the cleric and the noble, he enjoyed a law
of exception. Like them, he escaped the demesnial and seignorial
authority which continued to bear down upon the peasants.
_Chapter VI_
The Middle Class
In no civilization is city life evolved independently of commerce and
industry. Neither antiquity nor modern times show any exception to this
rule. Diversity of climates, peoples or religions is as immaterial as
diversity of eras. It is a rule which held true, in the past, in the
cities of Egypt, Babylonia, Greece, and the Roman and Arab Empires, just
as in our day it has held true in the cities of Europe, America, India,
Japan, and China.
Its universality is explained by exigence. A city group, in fact, can
live only by importing its food-supply from outside. But with this
importation must correspond, on the other hand, an exportation of
manufactured products constituting a counterpart or countervalue. Thus
is established, between the city and the surrounding country, a close
interrelation of services. Commerce and industry are indispensable to
the maintenance of this reciprocal dependence; without the first, to
assure a steady traffic, without the second, to furnish goods for
exchange, the city would perish.[99]
This condition is obviously subject to any quantity of variations.
Depending on time and place, sometimes commercial activity and sometimes
industrial activity is the dominant characteristic of a city population.
In antiquity, of course, a considerable section of the city population
was made up of landed proprietors, living either by the working of or by
the revenue from the lands which they owned outside. But it remains none
the less true that commensurately with the development of cities,
artisans and traders became more and more numerous. The rural economy,
older than the urban economy, continued to exist side by side with the
latter; the one did not prevent the other from developing.
The cities of the Middle Ages show a very different picture. Commerce
and industry made them what they were. They did not cease to grow under
that influence. At no era in history is there so marked a contrast as
that which their social and economic organization presented to the
social and economic organization of the country. Never before had there
existed, it seems, a class of men so specifically and strictly urban as
was the medieval bourgeoisie.[100]
That the origin of these cities is directly related, as an effect to its
cause, to the commercial revival of which we have spoken in the
preceding chapters, it is impossible to doubt. The proof is to be found
in the striking correspondence which is to be noted between the
expansion of trade and the rise of cities. Italy and the Netherlands,
where commerce first showed itself, are precisely the countries where
cities made their first appearance and where they developed most rapidly
and vigorously. It is easy to mark how, in step with the progress of
trade, towns multiplied. They appeared along all the natural routes by
which trade spread. They were born, so to speak, under its footsteps.
They are found, at first, only along sea coasts and rivers. Then, as the
commercial penetration spread, others were founded along the transverse
roads which connected these first centers of activity with each other.
The case of the Netherlands is quite typical. In the tenth century the
earlier towns were founded on the shore of the sea or on the banks of
the Meuse and the Scheldt; the intermediate region, Brabant, did not yet
know them. We must wait until the twelfth century before they make their
appearance on the route which lay between those two great rivers.
Similar observations may be made anywhere. A map of Europe on which was
marked the relative importance of the commercial highways would coincide
very closely with an abstract of the relative importance of the city
groups.
The towns of the Middle Ages showed an extraordinary variety in type.
Each had a distinctive physiognomy and particular characteristics. Every
one of them differed from the others just as men differ among
themselves. They can, however, be classified according to certain
general types. And these types themselves resemble one another in their
essential traits. It is therefore not a hopeless task to try to depict,
as we shall endeavor to do here, the evolution of city life in the West
of Europe. Doubtless the picture will necessarily be a little too
schematic, not fitting exactly any one particular case but rather being
the description of what is common to a whole species, an abstract of
individual characteristics. Only the general outlines will appear, as
in a landscape viewed from a mountain top.
The subject, however, is less complicated than would appear at first
glance. It is futile, indeed, in an outline of the origin of European
cities, to take count of the infinite complexity which they manifested.
City life was developed first of all in only a quite restricted number
of localities in Northern Italy, in the Netherlands, and in neighboring
regions. It will be enough if we confine ourselves to these latter,
neglecting the later developments which, whatever might be of interest
in them, were actually only duplicate phenomena.[101] Yet in the
following pages a privileged place will be accorded to the Netherlands.
This is because that country supplies the historian with more abundant
illumination on the early days of city evolution than any other region
of Western Europe.
The organization of commerce in the Middle Ages, as it has been
described in the preceding chapter, obliged the peripatetic merchants or
“merchant adventurers,” on whom it relied, to settle at fixed points.
In the interval between their trips and especially during the bad season
which made the sea, the rivers and the roads impassable, they
necessarily had to gather at certain places in the region. It was
naturally in localities of which the site, by its facilities in the
matter of communications, lent itself best to the exigencies of trade
and where they could at the same time place their money and goods in
security, that the merchants established their residence. They therefore
repaired to the towns and burgs which best met these conditions.
The number of them was considerable. The site of the towns had been
determined by the conformation of the terrain or the direction of the
river courses--in short, by conditions of nature, which were precisely
what determined the direction of trade and so steered the merchants
towards them. In the same way the burgs, which had been designed to
resist enemies or furnish a shelter to the population, were naturally
built in localities particularly easy of access. It was by the same
routes the invaders passed that the merchants travelled, and the result
was that fortresses erected against the former were excellently situated
for attracting the latter to their walls. Thus it came about that the
first commercial groups were formed in neighborhoods which Nature had
predisposed to become--or to become again--the focal points of economic
circulation.[102]
There are apparent grounds for belief, and certain historians in fact
have believed, that these first agglomerations were due to the markets
established in such great number beginning with the ninth century.
Inviting as it seems at first glance, this opinion does not bear
scrutiny. The markets of the Carolingian era were simple local markets,
frequented by peasants from roundabout, and by a few pedlers. They had
as their sole aim the provisioning of the towns and burgs. They were not
held more than once a week and their operations were limited by the
household needs of the inhabitants, very few in number, for whose
benefit they had been instituted. Markets of this sort have always
existed and still exist in our own day in thousands of little towns and
villages. Their attraction was not strong enough nor widespread enough
to draw and hold a mercantile population. We know, moreover, of any
number of places which, although equipped with markets of this sort,
never rose to the rank of cities. Such, for example, was the case with
those which the Bishop of Cambrai and the Abbot of Reichenau
established, the one in 1001 at Cateau-Cambrésis and the other in 1100
at Radolfzell. Yet Cateau and Radolfzell never were anything but
insignificant localities from an economic viewpoint, and the failure of
the attempts of which they were the object clearly shows that these
markets were wanting in that influence which one is sometimes minded to
accord them.[103]
As much might be said of the fairs (_fora_), and yet the fairs in
contrast to the markets do not show a strictly local character; they
were instituted to serve as a periodic meeting place for the
professional merchants, to put them in touch with each other, and to get
them to gather there at fixed seasons. In fact, the importance of many
of these fairs was very great. In Flanders those of Thourout and
Messines and in France those of Bar-sur-Aube and Lagny figured among the
principal centers of medieval trade up to near the end of the twelfth
century. It may therefore seem strange that none of these localities
became a city worthy of the name. This is because whatever activity
they showed was lacking in that permanent character which is necessary
for the fixation of trade. Merchants directed their steps toward them
because they were situated on the great route of travel running from the
North Sea to Lombardy, and because they enjoyed special franchises and
privileges there. They were points of assembly and places of exchange
where buyers and sellers from the north and south were to be
encountered. After a few weeks their exotic clientèle dispersed, not to
return before the following year.
It probably happened--and it very often did happen, as a matter of
fact--that a fair was located at the spot where already existed a
mercantile group. The one may have assisted the development of the
other. But it is impossible to hold that this was the real cause of its
existence. Several great cities can be named, which never had a
privileged market or which did not have one until very late. Worms,
Speyer, or Mainz never was the seat of a fair; Tournai had one only in
1284, Leyden in 1304, and Ghent in the fifteenth century only.[104] The
fact therefore remains that geographical location joined to the presence
of a town or a fortified burg seems the essential and necessary
condition for a colony of merchants.
Nothing is less artificial than the development of a colony of this
sort. The fundamental needs of commerce--ease of communication and
security--account for it in the most natural way. In a more advanced
era, when better methods would permit man to conquer Nature and to force
his presence upon her despite handicaps of climate or of soil, it would
doubtless have been possible to build towns anywhere the spirit of
enterprise and the quest of gain might chose a site. But it was quite
another matter in a period when society had not yet acquired enough
vigor to rise above the physical conditions in the midst of which it
developed. It naturally adapted itself to them and in accordance with
them its life was regulated. In short, the towns of the Middle Ages were
a phenomenon determined as much by physical surroundings as the course
of rivers is determined by the conformation of the mountains and the
direction of the valleys.
As the commercial revival in Europe gained headway after the tenth
century, the merchant colonies established in the towns or at the foot
of the burgs enjoyed an uninterrupted growth. Their population increased
through the action of economic vitality. Up to the end of the thirteenth
century, the progress which had been manifest from the start continued
steadily. No other course was open. Each of the focal points of
international traffic naturally shared in this activity, and the
multiplication of merchants naturally resulted in an increase of their
number in all the spots where they had first settled, for these spots
were exactly the ones most favorable to commercial life. If they had
attracted the traders sooner than others did, it is because they, better
than the others, satisfied their professional requirements. Here,
therefore, is a thoroughly satisfactory explanation of the fact that, as
a general rule, the greatest commercial cities in a region were also the
oldest.
There is by no means enough information to satisfy our curiosity
concerning these primitive mercantile groups. The historiography of the
tenth and eleventh centuries is completely unconcerned with social and
economic phenomena. Written exclusively by clerics or by monks, it
naturally measured the importance and the value of events according to
how they affected the Church. Lay society did not claim their attention
save insofar as it related to religious society. They could not neglect
the recital of the wars and political conflicts which reacted on the
Church, but there was no reason for them to have taken pains to note the
beginnings of city life, for which they were lacking in comprehension
no less than in sympathy.[105] A few allusions made incidentally, a few
fragmentary annotations upon the occasion of a disorder or an
uprising--this is what the historian is obliged to content himself with.
We must go to the twelfth century to get, here and there from some rare
layman dabbling in writing, a little more substantial prize. Maps and
records supplement this poverty to a certain extent. Yet they are rare
indeed for the period of origins. It is only by the end of the eleventh
century that they begin to throw a little more abundant illumination. As
for first-hand sources--that is to say, written and compiled by
townsmen--there are none in existence earlier than the end of the
twelfth century. It is therefore necessary, although there are a few, to
ignore them and to have recourse, too often, to inference and hypothesis
in this study of origins.
Details are lacking concerning the gradual peopling of the towns. It is
not known how the first traders, who came to locate there, settled in
the midst of the pre-existing population. The towns, whose precincts
frequently included empty spaces occupied by fields and gardens, must
have furnished them at the start with a place which soon became too
restricted. It is certain that in many of them, from the tenth century
on, they were forced to locate outside the walls. At Verdun they built a
fortified enclosure (_negotiatorum claustrum_), joined to the city by
two bridges.[106] At Ratisbonne the “city of merchants” (_urbs
mercatorum_) arose beside the episcopal city, and the same thing is to
be seen at Strasbourg and elsewhere.[107] At Cambrai the newcomers
surrounded themselves with a palisade of wood which a little later was
replaced by a stone rampart.[108] At Marseilles the circuit of the city
must have been enlarged at the beginning of the eleventh century.[109]
It would be easy to multiply these examples. They establish beyond
question the rapid extensions undergone by the old cities which had not
hitherto witnessed any growth since the Roman era.
The peopling of the burgs was due to the same causes as that of the
towns, but it worked out under quite different conditions. Here, in
fact, available space was not to be had by the new arrivals. The burgs
were merely fortresses whose walls enclosed a strictly limited area. The
result was that, at the start, the merchants were driven to settle
outside this area because there was no other place for them. They built
beside the burgs an “outside burg”--that is to say, a “faubourg”
(_forisburgus_, _suburbium_). This suburb was called, by contemporary
texts, the “new burg” (_novus burgus_), in contrast to the feudal burg
or “old burg” (_vetus burgus_) to which it was joined. In the
Netherlands and in England there was a word used to designate it which
corresponded admirably to its nature--_portus_.
In the administrative terminology of the Roman Empire, not a sea port,
but an enclosed place serving as storehouse or transfer point for
merchandise was called a _portus_.[110] The expression was passed on,
with hardly any change, to the Merovingian and Carolingian eras. It is
obvious that all the places to which it was applied were situated on
watercourses and that market-tolls were collected in them. They were,
therefore, landing places where was accumulated in the natural course of
trading operations merchandise destined to be shipped further.[111]
Between a _portus_ and a market or a fair the distinction is very clear.
While the latter were periodic meeting places of buyers and sellers, the
former was a permanent place of trade, a center of uninterrupted
traffic. After the seventh century Dinant, Huy, Valenciennes and Cambrai
were places with a _portus_, and in consequence transfer points.[112]
The economic slump of the eighth century and the Norseman invasions
naturally ruined their business. It was not until the tenth century that
the old _porti_ took on new life or new ones were established, as at
Bruges, Ghent, Ypres, St. Omer, and elsewhere. At the same date there
appears in Anglo-Saxon texts the word “port,” employed as a synonym for
the Latin words _urbs_ and _civitas_, and even at the present day the
term “port” is commonly met with in the names of cities of every land of
English speech.[113]
Nothing shows more clearly the close connection that existed between the
economic revival of the Middle Ages and the beginnings of city life.
They were so intimately related that the same word which designated a
commercial settlement served in one of the great idioms of Europe to
designate the town itself. Old Dutch supplies a similar instance. In it
the word _poort_ and the word _poorter_ are both employed, the first
with the meaning of “town” and the second with that of “townsman.”
It can be definitely assumed that the _porti_, so frequently spoken of
during the tenth and eleventh centuries, at the foot of the burgs of
Flanders and nearby regions, were made up of merchant groups. Several
passages in the chronicles or lives of the saints which deal with the
subject, though in scant detail, leave no room for doubt on this point.
It will be enough to cite here the curious narrative of the _Miracula
St. Womari_, written about 1060 by a monk who was an eye-witness of the
events he reported. Here we have to do with a troop of friars arriving
in procession at Ghent. The inhabitants go out to meet them, “like a
swarm of bees.” They conduct their pious visitors first to the Church of
St. Pharaïlde, situated within the limits of the burg. The next day they
leave the latter to repair to the Church of St. John the Baptist,
recently erected in the _portus_.[114] It therefore seems that here is
a case of the juxtaposition of two residential centers of different
origin and nature. The one, the older, is a fortress and the other, the
more recent, is a place of trade. And it is from the gradual fusion of
these two elements, of which the first is absorbed little by little by
the second, that the city is born.[115]
It will be well to take note, before going further, of the fate of those
towns and burgs whose location did not favor their becoming commercial
centers. Typical examples, without going outside the Netherlands, were
Térouanne or the burgs built about the monasteries of Stavelot, Malmédy,
Lobbes, etc. In the agricultural and demesnial civilization of the
Middle Ages, all these places were notable for their wealth and their
influence. But, situated too far from the great highways of
communication, they were not affected by the economic revival nor, so to
speak, fecondated thereby. In the midst of the flowering which it
inspired, they remained sterile, like seed fallen upon stony ground.
None of them rose above the rank of mere half-rural market-towns[116].
And it is not to the point, furthermore, to show that in the evolution
of the city, the towns and the burgs had on the whole only an auxiliary
function. Adapted to a social order very different from that which
witnessed the birth of cities, they could not have been able to give
birth to the latter by their own force. They were, so to speak, the
crystallization points of commercial activity. It did not arise from
them--it came to them from without, when favorable conditions of site
brought it their way. Their rôle was essentially a passive rôle. In the
history of the development of cities, the commercial suburb was
considerably more important than the feudal burg. It was the suburb that
was the active element, and, as will be seen later, therein lies the
explanation of that renewal of municipal life which was merely the
consequence of the economic revival.[117]
A striking characteristic of the merchant groups was their uninterrupted
growth, beginning with the tenth century. Therein they show the most
violent contrast to the immobility in which the towns and the burgs, at
the feet of which they were located, persisted. They continually drew to
themselves new inhabitants. They expanded steadily, covering a larger
and larger area, so much so that in many places they had, by the start
of the twelfth century, already surrounded on all sides the original
fortresses about which their houses pressed. After the beginning of the
twelfth century, it became necessary to create new parishes for them. At
Ghent, at Bruges, at St. Omer, and in many other places, contemporary
texts remark the construction of these churches, due often to the
initiative of wealthy merchants.[118]
Only a general idea can be formed of the arrangement and disposition of
the suburb, for exact details are lacking. The original type, however,
was universally very simple. There was, of course, a market, always
established on the bank of the stream which passed by the locality. This
was the junction point of the streets (_plateae_) leading from it
towards the gates giving access to the open country. For the merchant
suburb was surrounded by defence works, one of its most important
features.[119]
These defence works were, of course, absolutely necessary in a society
where, despite the efforts of the princes and the Church, violence and
japine continued to be in universal evidence. Before the dissolution of
the Carolingian Empire and the Norseman invasions, the Monarchy had
succeeded fairly well in guaranteeing public security, and as a result
the _porti_ of that time, or at least the greater number of them,
remained unfortified. But by the second half of the ninth century there
no longer existed any guarantee for the safety of personal property,
other than the protection of ramparts. A capitulary of 845-856 clearly
indicates that the rich men and the few merchants who still were left
sought refuge in the towns.[120] The new prosperity of trade attracted
the attention of highwaymen of all sorts to such an extent that
mercantile centers felt a pressing need for adequate protection against
them. Just as merchants did not venture on the highways unless armed, so
also they made of their collective residences a sort of stronghold. The
settlements which they founded at the foot of the towns or burgs bring
to mind the close parallel existing in the forts and the blockhouses
built by the European immigrants in the seventeenth and eighteenth
centuries in the colonies of America and Canada. Like the latter, they
were customarily defended merely by a solid palisade of wood pierced
with gates and surrounded by a moat. An interesting souvenir of these
first urban fortifications survives in the custom, long preserved in
heraldry, of symbolising a city by a sort of circular hedge.
It is certain that this rude enclosure of timber had no other purpose
than the parrying of unexpected attacks. It constituted a security
against bandits; it would not have been able to withstand a regular
siege.[121] In case of war it had to be abandoned and put to the torch
in order to prevent the enemy from turning it to his own ends, while
refuge was sought in the stronger citadel of a town or burg. It was not
until about the beginning of the twelfth century that the growing
prosperity of the merchant colonies enabled them to make their security
somewhat more certain by building solid ramparts of stone, flanked by
towers, and capable of facing a serious attack. Thereafter they became
fortresses in themselves. The old feudal or episcopal enceinte which
continued to stand in their center thus lost all reason for existence.
Little by little their useless walls were allowed to fall in ruin.
Houses leaned up against them, and they were broken open to make way for
new streets. Very often it happened that the towns bought them back from
the count or the bishop, for whom they no longer represented anything
but idle capital, demolished them and transferred the ground they had
covered into building lots.
In the need of security which the merchants felt there lies, therefore,
the explanation of the fundamental characteristic of the towns of the
Middle Ages. They were strongholds. It is impossible to imagine a town
existing at that era without walls. It was an attribute by which towns
were distinguished from villages. It was a right, or to use the
expression of that time, it was a _privilege_ which none of them lacked.
Here again heraldry conforms very exactly to reality, in surmounting the
crests of cities by a walled crown.
But the rampart was not only the symbol of the city; it was from it also
that came the name which served and which still serves to designate the
population. Because of the very fact that it was a fortified place, the
town became a burg. The mercantile center, as has been shown above, was
designated by the name of “new burg” to distinguish it from the original
“old burg.” And hence its inhabitants, at the beginning of the eleventh
century at the latest, received the name of “burghers” (_burgenses_).
The first known mention of this word occurs in France in 1007. It
appears again in Flanders, at St. Omer, in 1056; then it passes into the
Empire by the intermediary of the region of the Moselle, where it crops
up at Huy in 1066. It was therefore the inhabitants of the “new burg,”
that is to say of the merchant burg, who received, or more probably who
created it to describe themselves, the appellation of “burghers.” It is
curious to see that it was never applied to those of the “old burg.”
These latter were known as _castellani_ or _castrenses_. And this is
further, and particularly significant, proof that the origins of city
populations should be sought not in the older population of the early
fortresses but in the immigrant population which trade brought to them
and which, in the eleventh century, began to absorb them.
The appellation of “burgher” did not immediately come into universal
use. Along with it, that of _cives_ (citizen) was still employed, in
conformity with the ancient tradition. In England and Flanders there
are also found the words _poortmanni_ and _poorters_, both of which fell
into disuse about the end of the Middle Ages but confirm in the happiest
manner the identity, which has elsewhere been established, between the
_portus_ and the “new burg.” Strictly speaking, they were really one and
the same thing, and the synonymity which language shows between the
_poortmannus_ and the _burgensis_ would be enough to attest to it even
if sufficient proof had not been already adduced.
It is somewhat difficult to define this original middle class of the
commercial centers. Evidently it was not composed exclusively of those
wide-travelled merchants spoken of in the preceding chapter. It must
have comprised, besides them, a more or less important number of men
engaged in the unloading and the transporting of merchandise, in the
rigging and the equipping of the boats, in the manufacture of carts,
casks, chests or, in a word, of all the necessary accessories for
carrying on business. As a result, men from the whole neighboring
territory were drawn to the nascent city in search of a profession. A
definite and positive attraction by the urban population for the rural
population is clearly manifest by the beginning of the eleventh century.
The greater the concentration of population, the greater the effect it
had roundabout. It needed, for its daily existence, not only a quantity
but also an increasing variety of skilled workmen. The few artisans who
heretofore had sufficed for the limited needs of the towns and the burgs
evidently could not satisfy the multiplied exigencies of the newcomers.
Members of the most indispensable profession therefore had to come from
outside--bakers, brewers, butchers, smiths, and so on.
But trade itself stimulated industry. In every region where industry was
carried on in the country, trade made a successful effort first to lure
it to the city and then to concentrate it there.
Flanders supplies one of the most instructive examples in this respect.
It has already been shown that ever since the Celtic era the trade of
cloth-making was widely carried on in the country. The peasants, thanks
to the preservation of processes and of Roman methods, there
manufactured cloth capable of supplying the basis of a regular and
profitable export trade. The merchants of the towns did not fail to take
advantage thereof. By the end of the tenth century they were shipping
cloth to England.[122] They soon learned to know the excellent quality
of the native wool and sought to introduce it into Flanders, where they
could have it worked up under their supervision. Thus they made
themselves givers of work and naturally attracted to the cities the
weavers of the country.[123] These weavers thereafter lost their rural
character and became simple employees in the service of the merchants.
The increase of the population naturally favored industrial
concentration. Numbers of the poor poured into the towns where
cloth-making, the activity of which trade grew proportionately with the
development of commerce, guaranteed them their daily bread. Their
condition there, however, seems to have been very miserable. The
competition which they maintained with each other in the labor market
allowed the merchants to pay them a very low wage. Existing information,
of which the earliest dates back to the eleventh century, shows them to
have been a brutish lower class, uneducated and discontented.[124] The
social conflicts which industrial life must have fomented, and which
were so terrible in the Flanders of the thirteenth and fourteenth
centuries, were already in embryo in the very period of city evolution.
The antagonism between capital and labor is thereby revealed to be as
old as the middle class.
The old rural industry very quickly disappeared. It could not compete
with that of the town, abundantly supplied with the raw material of
commerce, operating at lower prices, and enjoying more advanced methods.
For the merchants, with an eye to selling, did not fail to improve the
quality of the cloths they exported. They organized and themselves
directed the workshops where they were milled and dyed. In the twelfth
century they had come to be without rivals, in the markets of Europe,
for the fineness of their weaves and the beauty of their colors. They
increased the dimensions also. The old square “cloaks” (_pallia_) which
the weavers of the country districts had formerly made, were replaced by
pieces of cloth thirty to sixty ells in length, more economical to make
and easier to ship.
The cloths of Flanders thus became one of the most sought-after general
articles of merchandise. The concentration of this industry in the towns
remained, until the end of the Middle Ages, the chief source of their
prosperity and helped to make them virtually great manufacturing
centers, of which Douai, Ghent and Ypres were distinctive types.
Although cloth-making was the dominant industry in Flanders it was,
naturally, far from being restricted to that country alone. Many of the
towns of the North and the South of France, of Italy and Rhenish
Germany, were also successfully engaged in it. Cloth, more than any
other manufactured product, was the basis of the commerce of the Middle
Ages. Metallurgy enjoyed far less importance. It was confined almost
entirely to brass-working, to which certain cities, and particularly
Dinant in Belgium, owe their fortune. But whatever might be the nature
of industry in other respects, everywhere it obeyed that law of
concentration which was operative at such an early date in Flanders.
Everywhere the city groups, thanks to commerce, drew rural industry to
them.[125]
In the era of demesnial economy, each agricultural center, big or
little, supplied in the largest measure possible its own wants. The
great proprietor maintained in his “court” artisan-serfs, just as each
peasant built his own house or made with his own hands the furniture or
the utensils he needed. The pedlers, the Jews, the infrequent merchants
who passed through the markets at great intervals supplied the rest.
They lived under conditions very similar to those which still exist in
many regions of Russia. All of that was changed when the towns began to
offer to the rural population industrial products of every sort. It
resulted in an exchange of commodities between the middle classes and
the rural population, as has been pointed out above. The artisans who
supplied the town people found in the rural classes another assured
clientèle. There came about a sharp division of labor between town and
country. The latter gave itself over to agriculture exclusively, the
former to industry and commerce, and this state of things was to endure
as long as the social order of the Middle Ages. It was, incidentally,
much more advantageous to the middle classes than to the peasants.
The towns, therefore, energetically bent their efforts to safeguard it.
They never failed to oppose every attempt to introduce industry into the
country districts. They jealously watched over the monopoly which
guaranteed their existence. It was not until the dawn of the modern era
that they were willing to give up an exclusivism no longer compatible
with economic progress.[126]
The middle classes whose double activity--commercial and
industrial--has just been outlined, were faced by innumerable
difficulties which they overcame only as time went on. No provision had
been made for their reception in the towns and burgs where they settled
down. There they were a cause of perturbation at first, and probably
they were very often greeted as undesirables. First of all they had to
come to terms with the proprietors of the soil. Sometimes it was the
bishop, sometimes a monastery, sometimes a count or a seigneur who owned
the land and there administered justice. Frequently it even happened
that the space occupied by the _portus_ or the “new burg” was amenable
to the jurisdiction of several tribunals and of several demesnes. It was
intended for agriculture, and the immigration of the newcomers changed
it all at once into ground for building. A certain time was needed
before the owners perceived the profit they could make out of it. At
first they particularly resented the inconvenience caused by the
appearance of these colonies given over to a sort of life which went
counter to custom or which shocked traditional ideas.
Conflicts immediately arose. They were inevitable, in view of the fact
that the newcomers, who were strangers, were hardly inclined to value
the interests, rights and customs which inconvenienced them. Room had
to be made for them as best as could be done, and as their numbers
increased their encroachments became more and more bold.
In 1099, at Beauvais, the chapter was obliged to bring action against
the dyers who had so obstructed the course of the river that its mills
could no longer function.[127] Elsewhere, from time to time, a bishop or
a monastery disputed with the burghers the lands they occupied. But
whether they willed or not, they had to come to terms. At Arras the
abbey of St. Vaast ended by parting with its tillages and parcelling
them out. Similar cases occurred at Ghent and Douai. Despite the penury
of existing information, it must be assumed that arrangements of this
sort were very common. Even at the present day the names of streets
recall, in many cities, the agricultural character which was theirs at
the beginning. At Ghent, for example, one of the principal arteries is
still designated under the name of “Field Street” (_Veldstraat_) and
near it is to be found “Husbandry Square” (_place du Kouter_).[128]
To the multiplicity of proprietors corresponded the multiplicity of
forms of government to which the lands were subject. Some were subject
to land-taxes and statute-labor, others to prestations destined for the
maintenance of the knights who formed the permanent garrison of the “old
burg;” still others to dues collected by the castellan or by the bishop
or by the solicitor with the title of Chief Justiciary. All, in short,
bore the stamp of an era in which economic organization, like political
organization, had been based entirely on possession of the soil. To that
were added the formalities and the taxes customarily levied at the time
of the transfer of real estate, and which singularly complicated, if
they did not actually make impossible, purchase and sale.
Under such conditions the land, burdened by the accumulated vested
interests which weighed heavily upon it, could not play any part in
business operations, acquire a market value, or serve as a basis of
credit.
The multiplicity of jurisdictions complicated still more a situation
already so intricate. It was rare indeed that the land occupied by the
burghers belonged to only a single seigneur. Each of the proprietors,
among whom it was shared, had his demesnial court which alone was
competent in matters of real estate. Some of these courts administered,
in addition, either high justice or low justice. The confusion of
competencies aggravated still further the confusion of jurisdictions.
The result was that the same man was dependent at the same time on
several tribunals, according to whether it was a question of debts, of
crimes, or simply of the possession of the land. The difficulties which
resulted therefrom were the greater in that these tribunals were not all
held in the town, and it was sometimes necessary to travel a long
distance to plead before them. Furthermore, they differed among
themselves, in their composition as well as in the law they
administered. Side by side with the demesnial courts there existed
almost always an older tribunal of aldermen set up, it might be, either
in the town or in the burg. The ecclesiastical court of the diocese drew
to it not only matters relevant to canonical law, but even all those in
which a member of the clergy was interested, without taking count of the
number of questions of successions, civil status, marriage, etc.
A glance at the condition of individuals, makes the complexity seem
greater yet. As the composition of the city took form, every contrast
and every gradation in the status of individuals was to be found.
Nothing could be more bizarre, in fact, than this nascent middle class.
The merchants, as has been seen above, were _de facto_ free men. But
this was not the case with a very great number of the immigrants who,
lured by the hope of finding work, flocked to the towns. They were
almost always natives of the nearby countryside and so could not
dissemble their civil status. The seigneur of the demesne from which
they had escaped could easily seek them out and identify them; people
from their own village ran into them when they came to town. Their
parents were known, and it was therefore evident that they had been born
into serfdom, since serfdom was the general status of the rural class.
It was therefore impossible for them to claim, like the merchants, a
freedom which these latter enjoyed only because their true civil status
was unknown. Thus the majority of artisans kept, in the town, the status
of serfdom in which they had been born. There was, to be sure, an
incompatibility between their new social status and their traditional
legal status. They had ceased to be peasants but they were not able to
efface the original stain with which serfdom had marked the rural class.
If they sought to dissemble it they did not fail to be rudely recalled
to reality. It sufficed for their seigneur to claim them; they were
obliged to follow him and be returned to the demesne whence they had
fled.
The merchants themselves indirectly resented the wrongs of serfdom. If
they wished to marry, the woman they chose belonged almost always to the
serf class. Only the richest among them could aspire to the honor of
espousing the daughter of some knight whose debts he had paid. For the
others, their union with a serf would have for its consequence the
serfdom of their children. Common law ascribed to children, in fact, the
legal status of their mother by virtue of the adage _partus ventrem
sequitur_, and it is easy to imagine the absurd consequences which arose
out of this principle for families. Marriage caused serfdom to reappear
in the household. Rancors and conflicts were inevitably born of so
contradictory a situation. The ancient law, in seeking to impose itself
upon a social order for which it was not adapted, ended in manifest
absurdities and injustices which called irresistibly for reform.
On the other hand, while the middle class grew larger and with its
numbers acquired power, the nobility little by little retreated and gave
way before it. The knights who were settled in the town or in the burg
no longer had any reason for living there after the military importance
of these old fortresses had disappeared. There was a distinct tendency,
at least in the North of Europe, to retire to the country and to leave
the towns. Only in Italy and in the South of France did the nobles
continue to have their residences in the town.
This fact must be attributed to the preservation, in those countries, of
the traditions and, in a certain measure, of the municipal organization
of the Roman Empire. The cities of Italy and Provence had been too
intimately a part of the territories of which they were the
administrative centers not to have preserved, at the time of the
economic decline of the eighth and ninth centuries, closer relations
with it than anywhere else. The nobility, whose fiefs were scattered all
over the country, did not acquire that rural character which typified
the nobility of France, Germany or England. They stayed in the towns,
where they lived on the revenues from their lands. There they built, in
the late Middle Ages, those towers which today give so picturesque an
aspect to so many of the old cities of Tuscany. They did not divest
themselves of the urban stamp with which ancient society had been so
strongly marked. The contrast between the nobility and the middle class,
therefore, appears less striking in Italy than in the rest of Europe. At
the era of the commercial revival, the nobles of the cities of Lombardy
even interested themselves in the business of the merchants and put some
of their income into business enterprises. It is in this way, perhaps,
that the development of Italian cities differs most profoundly from
that of the cities of the North.
In these last it is only in a quite exceptional case that we find here
and there, as if gone astray in the midst of middle class society, a
family of knights. In the twelfth century the exodus of the nobility to
the country was completed almost everywhere. This is a development,
however, which is still very little understood, and it is to be hoped
that further researches will throw greater light upon it. Meanwhile it
may be assumed that the economic crisis, to which the nobility were prey
following the diminution of their revenues in the thirteenth century,
was not without its influence in their disappearance from the towns.
They must have found it advantageous to sell to the burghers the lands
they owned, the altering of which into ground for building had
enormously augmented their value.
The status of the clergy was not sensibly modified by the influx of the
middle class to the towns and burgs. Out of it arose a few
inconveniences for them, but also a few advantages. The bishops had to
battle to maintain intact, in the presence of the newcomers, their
rights of justice and their rights of demesne; the monasteries and the
chapters saw themselves forced to permit houses to be built on their
fields or on their tillages. The patriarchal and demesnial form of
government to which the Church had been accustomed suddenly found itself
at grips with unexpected claims and needs, out of which was to result,
at the start, a period of uneasiness and insecurity.
On the other hand, however, compensations were not lacking. The rental
or tribute levied on the lots of land given over to the burghers formed
an increasingly fruitful source of revenue. The increase in population
brought with it a corresponding increase in the perquisites supplied by
baptisms, marriages and deaths; the yield from offerings went on
increasing without let-up; merchants and artisans formed pious
confraternities affiliated to a church or to a monastery in return for
annual dues. The creation of new parishes, proportionately as the number
of inhabitants mounted, multiplied the numbers and the resources of the
secular clergy. After the beginning of the eleventh century abbeys, on
the contrary, were founded in towns only in very exceptional cases. They
were not able to accustom themselves to that life, too blustering and
busy, and in addition it was no longer possible to find the room
necessary for a great religious house with the accessory services it
required. The Cistercian Order, which spread so widely through Europe
in the course of the twelfth century, organized only in the country.
It was only in the following century that the monks were to come back to
the towns again. The mendicant friars, Franciscans and Dominicans, who
were to come and settle there, were not merely a normal development
arising from the new orientation which religious fervor took. The
principle of poverty which they professed made them break with the
demesnial organization, heretofore the support of monastic life. By them
monasticism was found to be wonderfully well adapted to a city
atmosphere. They asked no more of the burghers than their alms. In place
of isolating themselves in the center of vast, silent enclosures, they
built their convents along the streets. They took part in all the
agitations, all the miseries as well, and understood all the aspirations
of the artisans, whose spiritual directors they well deserved to
become.
_Chapter VII_
Municipal Institutions
Cities, in their formative period, found themselves in a singularly
complicated situation. They were faced with problems of all sorts. In
them there existed side by side two populations which did not mix, and
which presented all the contrasts of two distinct worlds. The old
demesnial organization with all the traditions, all the opinions, all
the ideas which may not have been born of it but which received from it
their particular stamp, came to grips with wants and aspirations which
had taken it by surprise, which went counter to its interests, to which
it was not adapted and which, from the very first, it opposed. If it
gave ground, that was in spite of itself and because the new conditions
which had to be faced were due to causes too profound and irresistible
for their effect not to be felt.
The consequences of facts which are so little affected by human wishes
as the increase of population and the expansion of trade could not be
avoided. Probably those in positions of authority in the social order
were not able to appreciate the import of the changes that were taking
place about them. The old order of things sought, at first, to maintain
its position. Only later, and usually too late, did it try to adapt
itself. As always happens, the change did not come about all at once.
And it would be improper to attribute, as has frequently been done, to
“feudal tyranny” or to “sacerdotal arrogance” an opposition which is to
be explained by more natural incentives. There happened in the Middle
Ages what has happened so often since then. Those who were the
beneficiaries of the established order were bent upon defending it, not
so much, perhaps, because it guaranteed their interests, as because it
seemed to them indispensable to the preservation of society.
It should be borne in mind, moreover, that this social order the middle
classes accepted. Their demands and what might be called their
“political programme” did not aim in any way at its overthrow; they took
for granted the privileges and the authority of the princes, the clergy,
and the nobility. They merely wished to obtain, because it was necessary
to their existence, not an overthrow of the existing order but simple
concessions. And these concessions were limited to their own needs. They
were completely uninterested in those of the rural population from which
they had sprung. In short, they only asked of society to make for them
a place compatible with the sort of life they were leading. They were
not revolutionary, and if they happened to turn to violence it was not
through hate against the government but quite simply to force
concessions.
A brief review of the principal points in their programme will be enough
to show that they did not go beyond an indispensable minimum. What they
wanted, first of all, was personal liberty, which would assure to the
merchant or the artisan the possibility of going and coming, of living
where he wished and of putting his own person as well as that of his
children under the protection of the seigniorial power. Next came the
creation of a special tribunal by means of which the burgher would at
one stroke escape the multiplicity of jurisdictions to which he was
amenable and the inconveniences which the formalistic procedure of
ancient law imposed upon his social and economic activity. Then came the
instituting in the city of a “peace”--that is to say, of a penal
code--which would guarantee security. And then came the abolition of
those prestations most incompatible with the carrying on of trade and
industry, and with the possession and acquisition of land. What they
wanted, in fine, was a more or less extensive degree of political
autonomy and local self-government.
All of this was very far from forming a coherent whole and being
justified on theoretical principles. Nothing was further from the mind
of the original middle classes than any conception of the rights of man
and citizen. Personal liberty itself was not claimed as a natural right.
It was sought only for the advantages it conferred. This is so true that
at Arras, for example, the merchants tried to have themselves classed as
serfs of the Monastery of St. Vast in order to enjoy the exemption from
the market-tolls which had been accorded to the latter.[129]
It was not until the beginning of the eleventh century that the first
direct action was taken by the middle classes against the order of
things they suffered from. Their efforts thereafter never halted.
Despite vicissitudes and reverses, the movement of reform advanced
unhesitatingly towards its goal, broke by main force, if necessary, the
opposition that stood in the way and ended, in the course of the twelfth
century, by giving the towns those essentially municipal institutions
which were to be the basis of their constitutions.
Everywhere it was the merchants who took the initiative and directed
events. Nothing was more natural than that. They were the most active,
the richest, the most influential element in the city population and
they endured with so much the more impatience a situation which clashed
with their interests and belittled their confidence in themselves.[130]
The rôle they then played, despite the enormous difference in time and
conditions, may fittingly be compared with that which the capitalistic
middle class assumed after the end of the eighteenth century in the
political revolution which put an end to the old order of things. In the
one case as in the other, the social group which was the most directly
interested in the change assumed the leadership of the opposition, and
was followed by the masses. Democracy in the Middle Ages, as in modern
times, got its start under the guidance of a select few who foisted
their programme upon the confused aspirations of the people.
The episcopal cities were the first to be the scene of combat. It would
be a decided mistake to attribute this fact to the personality of the
bishops. A great number of them distinguished themselves, on the
contrary, by their manifest solicitude for the public weal. Excellent
administrators, whose memory has remained with the people throughout
the centuries, were by no means rare among them. At Liège, for example,
Notger (972-1018) attacked the castles of the robber barons who infested
the neighborhood, and turned from its course a branch of the Meuse to
make the city more healthy and to strengthen its fortifications.[131]
Similar examples could easily be cited in the case of Cambrai, Utrecht,
Cologne, Worms, Mainz and a number of cities of Germany where the
emperors strove, up to the time of the investiture struggle, to name
prelates notable equally for their intelligence and their energy.
But the more the bishops were conscious of their duties, the more also
they had to defend their government against the demands of their
subjects and endeavor to keep them under an authoritative, patriarchal
regimen. The confusion of spiritual power and temporal power in their
hands, moreover, caused every concession to seem to them to be a peril
to the Church. It must also not be forgotten that their functions
obliged them to reside permanently in their cities and that they feared,
with good reason, the difficulties which would be caused them by the
autonomy of the burghers in whose midst they lived. Finally, it has
already been seen that the Church had little sympathy with trade. This
unsympathetic attitude must naturally have made the Church deaf to the
wishes of the merchants and of the people who were grouped behind them,
have prevented an understanding of their wants, and given a false
impression of their real power. Out of this came misunderstandings,
clashes, and soon an open hostility which, after the beginning of the
eleventh century, was to end in the inevitable.[132]
The movement began in Northern Italy. There, commercial life was older
and there the political consequences of it were likewise earlier.
Unfortunately very few details are known concerning these events. It is
certain that the troubles to which the Church was then prey could hardly
have delayed their precipitation. The inhabitants of the towns sided
passionately with the monks and the priests who were waging a campaign
against the evil customs of the clergy, attacking simony and the
marriage of priests, and condemning the intervention of lay authority in
the administration of the Church, to the profit of the Papacy. The
bishops, named by the Emperor and compromised by that fact in itself,
thus found themselves face to face with an opposition in which
mysticism, the claims of the merchants and the discontent caused by the
misery of the industrial workers were allied and mutually strengthened.
It is certain that the nobles took part in the agitation, for it gave
them the opportunity to shake off episcopal suzerainty, and made common
cause with the burghers and the Patarenes--the name by which the
conservatives contemptuously designated their adversaries.
In 1057 Milan, even then the queen of the cities of Lombardy, was in
open revolt against the archbishop.[133] The vicissitudes of the
investiture struggle naturally spread the disturbances and gave them a
turning more and more favorable to the insurgents, proportionately as
the cause of the Pope got the better of that of the Emperor. There were
instituted, either by the consent of the bishops or by violence,
magistrates with the title of “consuls” and charged with the
administration of the towns.[134] The first of these consuls to be
mentioned, but probably not the first to exist, appear at Lucca in
1080. There is a record as early as 1068 of a “communal court” in that
city, a characteristic feature of city autonomy which surely must have
existed at the same date in plenty of other places.[135] The Consuls of
Milan are not cited before 1107, but they were surely much earlier in
origin than that. From the time they are first mentioned, they show the
distinctive physiognomy of communal magistrates. They were recruited
among divers social classes,--among the _capitanei_, the _valvassores_,
and the _cives_--and represented the _communio civitatis_.
The most typical feature of this magistracy was its yearly character,
wherein it was in distinct contrast to the offices for life which alone
the feudal régime knew. This yearly feature of the offices was the
consequence of their elective nature. In laying hold of power, the city
population entrusted it to delegates named by itself. Thus was affirmed
the principle of control at the same time as that of election. Municipal
democracy, from its first attempts at organization, created the
instruments necessary to its proper functioning and unhesitatingly set
foot on the path which has been followed ever since.
From Italy, the “consulate” soon spread to the cities of Provence,
evident proof of its perfect adaptation to the needs which were felt by
the middle class. Marseilles had consuls at the start of the twelfth
century, or at the latest by 1128;[136] we find them next at Arles and
at Nimes, until little by little they spread in the South of France as
commerce made headway from place to place, and with it, the political
transformation which it brought in tow.
Nearly at the same time as in Italy, municipal institutions arose in the
region of Flanders and the North of France. There is nothing surprising
in this, since that country, like Lombardy, had been the scene of
vigorous commercial activity. Fortunately the sources of information
here are more abundant and more precise. They make it possible to follow
fairly accurately the march of events.
It is not the episcopal cities alone which here hold the stage. Side by
side with them are to be observed other centers of activity, though it
is within their walls that were formed those communes whose nature it is
most important to consider. The oldest, and fortunately also the best
known, is that of Cambrai.
During the eleventh century the prosperity of this city was well
advanced. At the foot of the original town clustered a commercial
suburb, which had been surrounded in 1070 by a wall. The population of
this suburb endured with scant patience the authority of the bishop and
his castellan. It prepared in secret for revolt when, in 1077, Bishop
Gerard II had to absent himself to go receive in Germany the investiture
at the hands of the Emperor. He was hardly en route before, under the
direction of the richest merchants of the town, the people arose, took
possession of the gates and proclaimed a commune. The poor, the
artisans, and the weavers, in particular, launched themselves still more
passionately into the fray when a reformer-priest called Ramihrdus
denounced to them the bishop as a simoniac and inspired in the depths of
their hearts the mysticism which, at that same era, was arousing the
Lombard Patarenes. As in Italy, religious fervor lent its strength to
the political demands and the commune was sworn in the midst of general
enthusiasm.[137]
This commune of Cambrai was the oldest of all that are known north of
the Alps. It seems to have been both a fighting organization and an
instrument of public safety. It was necessary, in fact, to await the
return of the bishop and to prepare to cope with him. The need of
unanimous action was imperative. An oath was exacted from all,
establishing among them the necessary solidarity, and it was this
association, sworn to by the burghers on the eve of battle, which was
the essential characteristic of that first commune.
Its success, however, was only ephemeral. The bishop, upon receiving the
news, hastened back and succeeded in restoring his authority for the
time being. But the experiment of the Cambresians was not long in being
imitated. The following years were marked by the establishment of
communes in the majority of the towns of Northern France; at St. Quentin
about 1080, at Beauvais about 1099, at Noyon in 1108-1109, at Laon in
1115. During the initial period the middle class and the bishops lived
in a state of permanent hostility and, as it were, on the point of open
war. Force alone was able to prevail between such adversaries, equally
convinced of their due rights. Ives of Chartres exhorted the bishops not
to give ground and to consider as void the promises which, under the
threat of violence, they had happened to make to the burghers.[138]
Guibert of Nogent, on his part, spoke with mingled contempt and fear of
those “pestilential communes” which the serfs had set up against their
lords, to escape authority and to do away with the most legitimate
rights.[139]
In spite of all, however, the communes prevailed. Not only did they have
the strength that numbers give, but the Monarchy which in France,
starting with the reign of Louis VI, was beginning to regain lost
ground, interested itself in their cause. Just as the popes, in their
conflict with the German emperors, had relied upon the Patarenes of
Lombardy, so the Capetian monarchs of the twelfth century favored the
efforts of the middle classes.
There can probably be no question of ascribing to them a political
principle. At first glance their conduct seems full of contradictions.
Yet it is none the less true that they evinced a general tendency to
take the part of the towns. The clear interest of the Monarchy was to
support the adversaries of high feudalism. Naturally, help was given
whenever it was possible to do so without becoming obligated to these
middle classes who in arising against their lords fought, to all intents
and purposes, in the interests of royal prerogatives. To accept the King
as arbitrator of their quarrel was, for the parties in conflict, to
recognize his sovereignty. The entry of the burghers upon the political
scene had as a consequence the weakening of the contractual principle of
the Feudal State to the advantage of the principle of the authority of
the Monarchial State. It was impossible that royalty should not take
count of this and seize every chance to show its good will to the
communes which, without intending to do so, labored so usefully for it.
In specially designating by the name of “communes” those episcopal
cities of the North of France where municipal institutions were the
result of insurrection, it is well to exaggerate neither their
importance nor their originality. There is no reason for claiming that
there was any essential difference between commune-cities and other
cities. They were distinguished from one another only by incidental
characteristics. At bottom their nature was the same, and in reality all
were equally communes. In all of them, in fact, the burghers formed a
corps, a _universitas_, a _communitas_, a _communio_, all the members of
which, conjointly answerable to one another, constituted the inseparable
parts. Whatever might be the origin of its enfranchisement, the city of
the Middle Ages did not consist in a simple collection of individuals;
it was itself an individual, but a collective individual, a legal
person. All that can be claimed in favor of the communes _stricto
sensu_ is a particular distinctiveness of institutions, a clearly
established separation of the rights of the bishop and those of the
burghers, and a manifest preoccupation to safeguard the rights of the
latter by a powerful corporate organization. But all of that derived
from the circumstances which presided over the birth of the communes.
Although they preserved the traces of their insurrectionary composition,
it does not necessarily follow that they should be assigned, for that
reason, a special place in the ensemble of cities. It can even be
observed that certain ones among them enjoyed prerogatives less
extensive, a jurisdiction and an autonomy less complete, than those of
localities in which the commune was only the mark of the advent of a
peaceful evolution. It is a manifest error to reserve for them, as is
sometimes, done, the name of “collective seigniories.” We shall see
later that all fully developed cities were such seigniories.
Violence, therefore, was far from being an essential factor in the
creation of municipal institutions. In the majority of towns subject to
the power of a lay prince, their growth was accomplished, in general,
without need of recourse to force. And it is not necessary to attribute
this situation to the particular good-will which the lay princes had
shown towards political liberty. On the other hand all the incentives
which inspired the bishop to oppose the burghers carried no weight with
the princes. They professed no hostility in regard to trade; on the
contrary, they were experiencing its good effects. It increased traffic
in their territories, and by that very fact augmented the revenues from
their tolls and the activity of their mints which were forced to meet an
increasing demand for currency. Having no spot as capital and
incessantly travelling about their demesnes, they lived in their towns
only at rare intervals and therefore had no reason for quarelling with
the burghers over the administration of them. It is quite characteristic
that Paris, the only city which before the end of the twelfth century
could be considered a real capital, did not succeed in obtaining an
autonomous municipal constitution. But the interest which impelled the
King of France to keep control of his customary residence was completely
lacking with the dukes and counts, as peripatetic as the King was
sedentary. Lastly, they did not view altogether with displeasure the act
of the burghers in seizing the power from the castellans who had become
an hereditary class and whose strength was a cause of uneasiness to
them. They had, in short, the same incentives as the King of France for
looking with favor upon these tendencies, since they weakened the
status of their vassals. It is not on record, however, that they
systematically lent them their aid. They confined themselves, in
general, to letting them alone and their attitude was almost always one
of benevolent neutrality.
No region offers a better chance for studying municipal origins in a
purely lay environment than does Flanders. In this great country, which
stretched from the shores of the North Sea and the Zealand Islands to
the frontiers of Normandy, the episcopal cities never rivalled in
importance and wealth the commercial and industrial cities. Térouanne,
the diocese of which comprised the watershed of the Yser, was and always
remained a half-rural hamlet. Arras and Tournai, which extended their
spiritual jurisdiction over the rest of the territory, developed to an
appreciable extent only in the course of the twelfth century. On the
contrary, Ghent, Bruges, Ypres, St. Omer, Lille and Douai, where were
gathered together in the course of the tenth century active merchant
colonies, give an unusually clear picture of the birth of municipal
institutions. They lend themselves to this so much the better in that,
all being organized in the same way and showing the same
characteristics, the information of which each gives us its share can
be safely combined into one general picture.[140]
All these cities show, first, the characteristic feature of having been
organized around a central burg which was, so to speak, their nucleus.
At the foot of this burg was grouped a _portus_, or “new burg,”
populated by merchants to whose numbers were soon added artisans, either
free or serf, and where, after the eleventh century, the textile
industry came to be concentrated. Over the burg as over the _portus_
extended the authority of the castellan. More or less important parcels
of land occupied by the immigrant population belonged to the abbeys,
others to the Count of Flanders. A tribunal of aldermen had its seat in
the burg under the presidency of the castellan. This tribunal had in
other respects no competency relative to the city. Its jurisdiction
extended over all the castellany of which the burg was the center, and
the members who composed it resided in that same castellany and came to
the burg only on the days of hearings. For ecclesiastical jurisdiction,
to which were amenable a number of matters, it was necessary to go to
the episcopal court of the diocese.
A variety of obligations weighed upon the land and the inhabitants,
whether of the burg or of the _portus_: ground rents, prestations in
money or in kind destined for the upkeep of the knights charged with the
defence of the burg, and tolls levied on all merchandise brought by land
or water.
All this was of long standing, created at the height of the demesnial
and feudal régime, and was in no way adapted to the new needs of the
merchant population. Not being made for it, the organization which had
its seat in the burg not only rendered no service but on the contrary
interfered with activities. The survivals of the past bore down with all
their weight upon the needs of the present. Obviously, for reasons which
have been given above and to which it is unnecessary to return, the
middle class felt far from content and exacted the reforms necessary to
their free expansion.
In these reforms it devolved upon them to take the initiative, for they
could not rely on either the castellans, the monasteries, or the barons
whose lands they occupied, to bring them about. But it was also
necessary, in the midst of a population so heterogeneous as that of the
_portus_, for a group of men to take control of the mass and to have
enough power and prestige to give it direction. The merchants, in the
first half of the eleventh century, resolutely assumed this rôle. Not
only did they constitute the wealthiest element in each town, the most
active and the most desirous of change, but they had in addition the
strength that union gives. The needs of commerce early impelled them, as
has been seen above, to organize in confraternities called gilds or
hanses--autonomous corporations independent of all authority and in
which their will alone made the law. Freely elected chiefs, “deans” or
“counts of the hanse” (_Dekanen_, _Hansgrafen_), supervised the
maintenance of a voluntarily accepted discipline. At regular intervals
the colleagues assembled to drink and deliberate over their interests; a
treasury, supported by their contributions, provided for the needs of
the society; a community house (_Gildhalle_) served as the place of
their meetings. Such was the Gild of St. Omer, about 1050, and it may be
assumed from this instance that very probably similar associations
existed at the same period in all the merchant colonies of
Flanders.[141]
The prosperity of trade was so intimately bound up with the organization
of the towns in which it had located that the members of the gild were
almost automatically charged with making provision for the needs that
were most pressing. The castellans had no reason to restrain them from
meeting, through their own resources, those emergencies that were
clearly apparent. They permitted them to “extemporize,” as it were, in
official communal administration. At St. Omer an arrangement made
between the gild and the castellan, Wulfric Rabel (1072-1083), permitted
the former to attend to the cases of the burghers. Thus, without having
any legal warrant therefor, the merchant association devoted itself of
its own accord to the organization and the management of the nascent
city. It made up for the impotence of public power. At St. Omer the gild
devoted a part of its revenues to the construction of defence works and
to the maintenance of the streets. There is no doubt but that other
Flemish towns, its neighbors, did the same. The name of “counts of the
Hanse” which the treasurers of the city of Lille kept all through the
Middle Ages is sufficient proof, in the absence of other records, that
there also the chiefs of the voluntary corporation of merchants drew
upon the treasury of the gild for the benefit of their fellow citizens.
At Audenarde the name of _Hansgraf_ was borne up to the fourteenth
century by a magistrate of the commune. At Tournai, as late as the
thirteenth century, city finances were placed under the control of the
_Charité St. Christophe_, that is to say of the merchant gild. At Bruges
the contributions of the “brothers of the hanse” supported the municipal
treasury up until its disappearance at the time of the democratic
revolution of the fourteenth century.
The result of all this, manifestly, was that the gilds were, in the
region of Flanders, the initiators of city autonomy. Of their own accord
they charged themselves with a task which no one else had been able to
carry out. Officially they had no right to act as they did; their
intervention is to be explained solely by the cohesion which existed
among their members, by the influence their group enjoyed, by the
resources they disbursed, and finally by the understanding they had of
the collective needs of the middle-class population. It can be stated,
without exaggerating, that in the course of the eleventh century the
chiefs of the gild performed, _de facto_, the functions of communal
magistrates in every town.
They were doubtless the ones, also, who led the Counts of Flanders to
take an interest in the development and the prosperity of the towns. In
1043 Baldwin IV obtained from the monks of St. Omer the concession on
the basis of which the burghers built their church. At the beginning of
the reign of Robert the Friesian (1071-1093), exemptions from tolls,
grants of land, privileges limiting the episcopal jurisdiction or the
requirements of military service were granted in considerable number to
the cities then in process of formation. Robert of Jerusalem favored the
city of Aire with “liberties” and exempted, in 1111, the burghers of
Ypres from the judiciary duel.
The result of all this was that little by little the middle class stood
out as a distinct and privileged group in the midst of the population of
the country. From a simple social group given over to the carrying on of
commerce and industry, it was transformed into a legal group, recognized
as such by the princely power. And out of that legal status itself was
to come, necessarily, the granting of an independent legal organization.
The new law needed as its organ a new tribunal. The old aldermanic
district courts, sitting in the burgs and administering justice in
accordance with a custom that had become archaic and incapable of
accommodating its rigid formalism to the needs of a community for which
it had not been created, had to give way to courts whose members,
recruited from among the burghers, were able to render them a justice
adequate to their desires and conforming to their aspirations--a
justice, in fine, which was _their_ justice. It is impossible to say
exactly when this important development took place. The oldest reference
in Flanders to an aldermanic court,--that is to say of such a court
peculiar to one city,--dates back to the year 1111 and has to do with
Arras. But there is nothing to prevent the assumption that aldermanic
courts of this kind must have already existed at the same period in the
more important localities such as Ghent, Bruges or Ypres. Whatever may
have been the case elsewhere, the beginning of the twelfth century saw
this decided innovation come to pass in all the cities of Flanders. The
disturbances which followed the assassination of Count Charles the Good,
in 1127, permitted the burghers to realize in full their political
programme. The pretenders to the county, William of Normandy, and later
Thierry of Alsace, in order to rally them to their cause conceded to
them the demands they addressed.
The charter granted to St. Omer in 1127 may be considered as the point
of departure of the political programme of the burghers of
Flanders.[142] It recognized the city as a distinct legal territory,
provided with a special law common to all inhabitants, with special
aldermanic courts and a full communal autonomy. Other charters in the
course of the twelfth century ratified similar grants to all the
principal cities of the county. Their status was thereafter secured and
sanctioned by written warrants.
On the other hand care must be taken not to attribute to the city
charters an exaggerated importance.[143] Neither in Flanders nor in any
other region of Europe did they embrace the whole of the city law. They
limited themselves to fixing the principal outlines, to formulating some
of the essential principles, to settling a few particularly important
conflicts. Most of the time they were the product of special
circumstances and they took count only of matters which were under
debate at the time they were drawn up. They cannot be considered as the
result of systematic planning and legislative deliberation similar to
that out of which are born, for example, modern constitutions. If the
middle classes have kept watch over them throughout the centuries, with
an extraordinary solicitude, preserving them under triple lock in chests
of iron and surrounding them with a quasi-superstitious respect, it is
because they considered them as the palladium of their liberty. It is
because they permitted them, in case of violation, to justify their
rebellion, but it is not because they included the whole of their
rights. They were not, so to speak, more than the framework of the
latter. Round about their stipulations existed and continued unceasingly
to develop a thick vegetation of rights, usages, and unwritten but none
the less indispensable privileges. This is so true that a number of
charters themselves foresaw and recognized in advance the further
development of city law. The chronicler Galbert informs us that the
Count of Flanders accorded to the burghers of St. Omer in 1127: “_ut die
in diem consuetudinarias leges suas corrigerent_,”--that is to say, the
power of correcting from day to day their municipal laws.[144] There
was, therefore, more in the law of the city than what was contained in
the terms of the charters. They specified merely fragments of it. They
were full of gaps; they were concerned with neither order nor system. We
need not expect to find in them the fundamental principles out of which
came later evolutions, as for example, Roman law evolved from the law of
the Twelve Tables.
It is possible, however, in examining their principles and supplementing
one by another, to characterise in its general traits the city law of
the Middle Ages as it developed in the course of the twelfth century in
the different regions of Western Europe. There is no need to take
account, since we are seeking only to trace the general outline, either
of the difference in States or even in nations. City law was a
phenomenon of the same nature as, for example, that of feudalism. It was
the consequence of a social and economic situation common to all
peoples. Taking it by regions, there are of course numerous differences
in detail. But at bottom it was everywhere the same and it is solely
concerning this permanent basis that we shall deal in the following
paragraphs.
The first thing which should be considered is the status of the
individual as it was when city law was definitely evolved. That status
was one of freedom. It is a necessary and universal attribute of the
middle class. Each city established a “franchise” in this respect. Every
vestige of rural serfdom disappeared within its walls. Whatever might be
the differences and even the contrasts which wealth set up between men,
all were equal as far as civil status was concerned. “The air of the
city makes free,” says the German proverb (_Die Stadtluft macht frei_),
and this truth held good in every clime. Freedom, of old, used to be the
monopoly of a privileged class. By means of the cities it again took its
place in society as a natural attribute of the citizen. Hereafter it was
enough to reside on city soil to acquire it. Every serf who had lived
for a year and a day within the city limits had it by definite right:
the statute of limitations abolished all rights which his lord exercised
over his person and chattels. Birth meant little. Whatever might be the
mark with which it had stigmatized the infant in his cradle, it vanished
in the atmosphere of the city. This freedom, which at the beginning only
merchants had enjoyed _de facto_, was now the common right of all the
burghers _de jure_.
If there could still exist, here and there among them, a few serfs,
these latter were not members of the city population. They were
hereditary servitors of the abbeys or of the seigniories which retained
in the cities bits of land not subject to city law and where the old
state of things was prolonged. Burgher and freeman had become synonymous
terms. Freedom, in the Middle Ages, was an attribute as inseparable from
the rank of citizen of a city as it is in our day of that of the
citizen of a State.
With freedom of person there went on equal footing, in the city, the
freedom of the land. In a merchant community, land, in fact, could not
remain immobile and be kept out of commerce by unwieldy and diverse laws
that prevented its free conveyance and kept it from serving as a means
of credit and acquiring capital value. This was the more inevitable in
that land, within the city, changed its nature--it became ground for
building. It was rapidly covered with houses, crowded one against the
other, and increased in value in proportion as they multiplied. Thus it
automatically came about that the owner of a house acquired in the
course of time the ownership, or at the least possession, of the soil
upon which it was built. Everywhere the old demesnial land was
transformed into “censal estate,” or “censal allodium.” City hold thus
became free hold. He who occupied it was not bound by more than the land
taxes due to the owner of the land, when he did not happen to be himself
the owner. He could freely transfer it, convey it, mortgage it and make
it serve as security for capital he might borrow. In selling a mortgage
on his house, the burgher procured the liquid capital he needed; in
buying a mortgage on the house of another, he assured himself of an
income proportionate to the sum expended. He placed, as we would say
today, his money out at interest. Compared to the old feudal or
demesnial tenures, tenure in city law--tenure in _Weichbild_ or
_Burgrecht_ as they called it in Germany, or _bourgage_ in France--thus
showed a well-marked individuality.
Subject to new economic conditions, city land ended by acquiring a new
law, suited to its nature. The old land-courts probably did not abruptly
disappear. The enfranchisement of the soil did not have as consequence
the spoliation of the old proprietors. Very often they kept, when it was
not bought back from them, portions of the land of which they had been
lords. But the seigniory which they still exercised over them no longer
carried with it the personal dependence of the tenants.
City law not only did away with personal servitude and restrictions on
land, but also caused the disappearance of the seigniorial rights and
fiscal claims which interfered with the activity of commerce and
industry. The market-tolls (_teloneum_) which were such a handicap to
the free circulation of goods were particularly odious to the burghers,
and they early made the effort to get rid of them. The chronicler
Galbert shows that this was, in Flanders in 1127, one of their chief
preoccupations. It was because the pretender, William of Normandy, did
not keep his promise in this particular that they rose against him and
called Thierry of Alsace. In the course of the twelfth century,
everywhere, voluntarily or under compulsion, the market-tolls were
modified. Here, they were bought off by means of an annual fee; there,
the manner of levying them was changed. In almost every case they were
placed under the supervision, and subject to the jurisdiction, of the
city authorities. It was the city’s magistrates who henceforth took
charge of supervising trade and who took the place of the castellans and
the old demesnial functionaries in the standardization of weights and
measures and in the judicial administration of markets and industry
generally.
If the market-tolls were modified in passing under the authority of the
city, it was otherwise with the other seigniorial rights which,
incompatible with the free functioning of the life of the city, were
inevitably condemned to disappear altogether. Mention might be made of
the surviving characteristics of the agricultural era which had been
left impressed on the physiognomy of the city: common ovens and mills,
at which the seigneur compelled the inhabitants to grind their wheat
and bake their bread; monopolies of every sort, by virtue of which he
enjoyed the privilege of selling at certain periods, without
competition, the wine from his vineyards or the meat from his cattle;
the right of shelter, which imposed upon the burghers the obligation of
furnishing him lodging and subsistence during his stays in the city; the
right of requisition, by which he appropriated to his service the boats
or the horses of the inhabitants; the right of summons to arms, imposing
the obligation of following him to war; customs of every sort and every
origin which had become oppressive and vexatious because they had long
since become useless, such as that which forbade the building of bridges
over the water courses or that which compelled the inhabitants to assist
in the maintenance of the knights composing the garrison of the “old
burg.” Of all this there remained, at the end of the twelfth century,
hardly more than the memory. The lords, after having tried resistance,
finished by giving way. They realized, in the course of time, that their
manifest interest commanded them not to hinder the development of the
cities, in order to preserve a few meagre revenues, but to favor it by
doing away with the obstacles that stood in its path. They began by
taking count of the incompatibility of these old prestations with the
new state of things, and they ended by themselves qualifying them as
“plunderings and extortions.”
Like the status of individuals, the governing of the land, and the
fiscal system, the fundamental character of the law itself underwent a
transformation in the cities. The complicated and formalistic procedure,
the compurgations, the ordeals, the judiciary duel--all these crude
methods of proof which too often let chance or sheer luck decide the
issue of a trial, were not long, in their turn, in adapting themselves
to the new conditions of a city environment. The old rigid forms of
contract, which custom had established, disappeared as rapidly as
economic life became more complicated and active. The judiciary duel
evidently could not be long retained in the midst of a population of
merchants and artisans. Proof through witnesses was likewise early
substituted in place of proof through compurgators, before the city
magistracy bench. The _Wergild_, the old blood-price, gave way to a
system of fines and corporal punishments. Finally, legal delays,
originally so long, were considerably reduced.
It was not only procedure that was modified. The very content of the law
evolved in parallel fashion. In questions of marriage, succession,
liens, debts, mortgages, and particularly in questions of business law,
a whole new body of legislation was coming into being in the cities, and
the jurisprudence of their tribunals created a civil practice,
increasingly amplified and exact.
City law was characterised no less from the criminal point of view than
from the civil. In such aggregations as the cities were, of men from
every station in life, in this environment where abounded wanderers,
vagabonds and adventurers, a rigorous discipline was necessary to the
maintenance of security. It was equally necessary for intimidating the
thieves and bandits who, in every civilization, are drawn towards
commercial centers. This is so true that as early as the Carolingian era
the towns, within the walls of which the wealthy class sought shelter,
seemed to enjoy a special “peace.”[145] This is that same word “peace”
which was used in the twelfth century to designate the criminal law of
the city.
This city peace was a law of exception, more severe, more harsh, than
that of the country districts. It was prodigal of corporal punishments:
hanging, decapitation, castration, amputation of limbs. It applied in
all its rigor the _lex talionis_: an eye for an eye, a tooth for a
tooth. Its evident purpose was to repress derelictions, through terror.
All who entered the gates of the city, whether nobles, freemen or
burghers, were equally subject to it. Under it the city was, so to
speak, in a permanent state of siege. But in it the city found a potent
instrument of unification, because it was superimposed upon the
jurisdictions and seigniories which shared the soil; it forced its
pitiless regulation on all. More than community of interests and
residence, it contributed to make uniform the status of all the
inhabitants located within the city walls and to create the middle
class. The burghers were essentially a group of _homines pacis_--men of
the peace. The peace of the city (_pax villae_) was at the same time the
law of the city (_lex villae_). The emblems which symbolized the
jurisdiction and the autonomy of the city were above all emblems of
peace: such as were, for example, the cross or the symbolic set of stone
steps in the market-place, the belfries (_Bergfried_), the towers of
which arose from the heart of the cities of the Netherlands and Northern
France, and the statues of Roland, which were so numerous in Northern
Germany.
By virtue of the peace with which it was endowed, the city formed a
distinct legal district. The legal principle of territoriality carried
with it that of personality. Equally subject to the same penal law, the
burghers inevitably shared, sooner or later, in the same civil law. The
practice of the city was extended up to the limits of the peace and the
city formed, within the circumference of its ramparts, a community of
law.
The peace, on the other hand, contributed largely in making the city a
commune. It had, in effect, the oath as its sanction. It supposed a
_conjuratio_ of all the city population. And the oath taken by the
burgher was not confined to a simple promise of obedience to municipal
authority. It involved strict obligations and imposed a strict duty to
maintain and respect the peace. Every _juratus_--that is to say, every
burgher sworn--was obliged to lend a helping hand to any burgher calling
for help. Thus the peace created, among all its members, a permanent
solidarity. Hence the term “brothers” by which they were sometimes
designated, or the word _amicitia_ used at Lille, for example, as
synonym for _pax_. And since the peace covered the whole city
population, the latter, therefore, was a commune. The very names which
the municipal magistrates bore in a number of places,--“warders of the
peace” at Verdun, “safeguard of friendship” at Lille, “jurors of the
peace” at Valenciennes, Cambrai and many other cities,--make it easy to
see the close relationship between the peace and the commune.
Other causes naturally contributed to the birth of city communes. The
most potent among them was the need, early felt by the burghers, of a
tax system. Funds were necessary for public works of the most pressing
nature, and, above all, for the construction of the city wall.
Everywhere the need of building this protecting rampart was the point of
departure for city finances. In the cities of the region of Liège the
communal tax bore the characteristic name of _firmitas_ (“firmness”). At
Angers the oldest municipal accounts were those of the “_clouaison,
fortiffication et emparement_” of the city. Elsewhere part of the fines
were appropriated _ad opus castri_,--for the improvement of the
fortifications.
Taxes, naturally, provided the means of securing the needed resources.
To subject the taxpayers thereto, recourse had to be had to compulsion.
Everyone was obliged to participate according to his means, in the
expenses incurred in the interests of all. Whoever refused to support
the charges which they involved was barred from the city. The latter was
therefore a commune, an obligatory association, a moral personality.
According to the phrase of Beaumanoir, it formed a “_compaignie,
laquelle ne pot partir ne deseurer, ançois convient qu’elle tiègne,
voillent les parties ou non qui en la Compaignie sont_.” That is to
say, a society which could not be dissolved, but which must needs exist
independently of the wishes of its members.[146]
Thus the city of the Middle Ages was simultaneously a legal district and
a commune.
There remain to be examined the agencies by which were met the demands
its nature imposed.
First of all, inasmuch as it was an independent legal district, it by
all means had to have its own jurisdiction. City law being bounded by
the city walls, in contrast to the regional law, the law of without, a
special tribunal had to be charged with applying it and the burghers had
to have, in consequence, the assurance of their privileged status. This
is a clause which is lacking in hardly any municipal charter: that the
burghers could be tried only by their own magistrates. The latter, as a
necessary consequence, were recruited from their midst. It was essential
that they be members of the commune and naturally the latter, to a
greater or less degree, took part in their nomination. Here, it had the
right of designating them to the seigneur; there, the more liberal
system of election was applied; still elsewhere, recourse was had to
complicated formalities: elections in several steps, drawing by lot,
and so on, which manifestly had for their purpose the obviating of
bribery and corruption. Most often, the president of the tribunal
(mayor, bailiff, etc.) was an officer of the seigneur’s. It happened,
nevertheless, that the city had something to say in his choosing. It had
in every case an assurance, in the oath which he must take to respect
and defend its privileges.
By the beginning of the twelfth century, and in some cases even by the
end of the eleventh, a few cities were already in possession of their
special tribunal. In Italy, in the South of France, in several parts of
Germany, its members bore the name of “consuls.” In the Netherlands and
in Northern France they were called _échevins_, or aldermen. In still
other places they were designated as _jures_, or jurors. In accordance
with the locality, the extent of the jurisdiction they exercised also
varied quite noticeably. They did not have it everywhere in its
entirety. It frequently happened that the seigneur reserved to himself
certain special cases. But these local differences are of little
importance. The essential thing is that every city, by the very fact
that it was recognized as a legal district, had its own judges. Their
competency was set by the law of the city and limited to the territory
in which it applied. Sometimes in place of a single body of magistrates
there were several of them, each having its own special attributes. In
many cities, and particularly in the episcopal cities where municipal
institutions were the result of insurrection, were to be seen, side by
side with the aldermen over whom the seigneur had more or less
influence, a body of jurors presiding over matters of peace and
specially competent in cases arising out of the communal statutes. But
it is impossible to go into details here; it will suffice to have
indicated the general evolution, without regard to its innumerable
modifications.
In its status as a commune, the city was administered by a council
(_consilium_, _curia_, etc.). This council sometimes coincided with the
tribunal, and the same individuals were at once both judges and
administrators for the middle class. Most often, however, it had its own
individuality. Its members received their authority from the commune.
They were its delegates, but it did not abdicate entirely in their
favor. Nominated for a very short time, they could not usurp the power
that was entrusted to them. Not until later, when the constitution of
the city had been developed and when administration had become
complicated, did they form a real assembly upon which the influence of
the people made itself felt but feebly. At the start it was quite
otherwise. The original jurors, charged with watching over the public
weal, were only representatives very similar to the selectmen of New
England towns, mere executors of the collective will. The proof of this
lies in the fact that at first they lacked one of the fundamental
characteristics of every organized body--a central authority, a
president. The “burgomasters” and the “mayors” of the communes were, in
fact, of relatively recent creation. They did not exist much before the
thirteenth century. They belong to an era in which the character of
institutions was tending to be modified, and in which the need of a
greater centralization and a more independent power was being felt.
The council carried on the routine administration. It had charge of
finances, commerce, and industry. It ordered and supervised public
works, organized the provisioning of the city, regulated the equipment
and the deportment of the communal army, founded schools for children,
provided for the upkeep of almshouses for the old and the poor. The
statutes it decreed formed a genuine body of municipal legislation of
which there existed, north of the Alps, scarcely any prior to the
thirteenth century. But a close study of these statutes leads to the
conviction that they merely developed and clarified an older form of
government.
Nowhere, perhaps, was the spirit of innovation and the practical
judgment of the middle class more highly manifest than in the realm of
administration.[147] The work done there seems the more noteworthy in
that it was an original creation. Nothing in the prior state of things
could have served as a model for it, since the needs for which it
provided were new needs. This is made clear by a comparison, for
example, of the financial system of the feudal era with that which the
city communes instituted. In the first, taxes were merely a fiscal
prestation, an established and perpetual obligation taking no count of
the means of the taxpayer, bearing down only on the people, and the
proceeds of which were added to the demesnial resources of the prince or
seigneur who collected them, without any part of them being directly
appropriated for the public interest. The second, on the contrary,
recognized neither exceptions nor privileges. All burghers, enjoying
equally the advantages of the commune, were equally obligated to
contribute towards the expenses. The quota of each was in proportion to
his means. At the start it was generally calculated on the basis of
income. Many cities kept consistently to this practice up to the end of
the Middle Ages. Others substituted for it the excise,--that is to say,
the indirect tax levied on articles of consumption and especially on
foodstuffs,--in such a way that the rich and the poor were taxed
according to their expenditures. But this city-excise was in no way
connected with the old market-tolls. It was as flexible as the latter
were strict, as variable in accordance with the circumstances or the
needs of the public as the latter were immutable. But whatever might be
the form they took, the proceeds of these taxes were entirely devoted to
the needs of the commune. By the end of the twelfth century, a fiscal
system had been developed and at this era can be discovered the first
traces of municipal accounts.
The provisioning of the city and the regulating of commerce and industry
testify more clearly still to the burghers’ aptitude for solving the
social and economic problems which their conditions of existence put up
to them. They had to provide for the subsistence of a sizeable
population, obliged to get its food-supply from without; to protect
their workmen from foreign competition; to make certain of their supply
of raw materials and to insure the exporting of their manufactures.
They accomplished it by a system of regulation so marvellously adapted
to its purpose that it may be considered a masterpiece of its kind. The
city economy was worthy of the Gothic architecture with which it was
contemporary. It created with complete thoroughness--and, it may well be
said, it created _ex nihilo_--a social legislation more complete than
that of any other period in history, including our own. In doing away
with the middlemen between buyer and seller, it assured to the burgher
the benefit of a low cost of living; it ruthlessly pursued fraud,
protected the worker from competition and exploitation, regulated his
labor and his wage, watched over his health, provided for
apprenticeship, forbade woman-and child-labor, and at the same time
succeeded in keeping in its own hands the monopoly of furnishing the
neighboring country with its products and in opening up distant markets
for its trade.
All this would have been impossible if the civic spirit of the burghers
had not been equal to the tasks that were laid upon them. It is
necessary, in fact, to go back to antiquity to find as much devotion to
the public good as that of which they had given proof. _Unus subveniet
alteri tamquam fratri suo_--“let each help the other like a
brother”--says a Flemish charter of the twelfth century,[148] and these
words were actually a reality. As early as the twelfth century the
merchants were expending a good part of their profits for the benefit of
their fellow citizens,--building churches, founding hospitals, buying
off the market-tolls. The love of gain was allied, in them, with local
patriotism. Every man was proud of his city and spontaneously devoted
himself to its prosperity. This was because, in reality, each individual
life depended directly upon the collective life of the municipal
association. The commune of the Middle Ages had, in fact, all the
essential attributes which the State exercises today. It guaranteed to
all its members the security of his person and of his chattels. Outside
of it he was in a hostile world, surrounded by perils and exposed to
every risk. In it alone did he have a shelter, and for it he felt a
gratitude which bordered upon love. He was ready to devote himself to
its defence, just as he was always ready to bedeck it and make it more
beautiful than its neighbors. Those magnificent cathedrals which the
thirteenth century saw erected would not have been conceivable without
the joyous alacrity with which the burghers contributed, by gifts, to
their construction. They not only were houses of God; they also
glorified the city of which they were the greatest ornament and which
their majestic towers advertised afar. They were for the cities of the
Middle Ages what temples were for those of antiquity.
To the ardor of local patriotism corresponded its exclusivism. From the
very fact that each city constituted a State, cities saw in one another
only rivals or enemies. They could not rise above the sphere of their
own interests. They were self-centered, and the feeling which they bore
for their neighbors resembles very closely, within narrower limits, the
nationalism of our day. The civic spirit which animated them was
singularly egoistic. They jealously reserved to themselves the liberties
they enjoyed within their walls. The peasants who dwelt round about them
did not seem to them to be compatriots at all. They thought only of
profitably exploiting them. With all their might they stood on guard to
prevent the peasants from freeing themselves from the industrial system
of which the cities had a monopoly. The task of provisioning these
cities was likewise imposed upon the peasants, who were subjected to a
tyrannical protectorate whenever it was possible to do so, as in
Tuscany, for example, where Florence subjected to its yoke all the
surrounding countryside.
We are, however, touching here upon events which were not manifest with
all their consequences until the beginning of the thirteenth century. It
will suffice to have briefly sketched a tendency which, in the period of
origins, was hardly more than a suggestion of what was to come. Our
intention has been merely to define the city of the Middle Ages after
having depicted its origin. Furthermore, it has been possible to note
only its principal traits. The physiognomy which has been outlined
resembles those countenances obtained by photographing portraits
superimposed one on the other. The contours of it give a countenance
common to all and belonging to none of them.
If we wished, in ending this too-long chapter, to sum up its essential
points in one phrase, perhaps it would be possible to say that the city
of the Middle Ages, as it existed in the twelfth century, was a
commercial and industrial commune living in the shelter of a fortified
enceinte and enjoying a law, an administration and a jurisprudence of
exception which made of it a collective, privileged personality.
_Chapter VIII_
Cities and European Civilization
The birth of cities marked the beginning of a new era in the internal
history of Western Europe. Until then, society had recognized only two
active orders: the clergy and the nobility. In taking its place beside
them, the middle class rounded the social order out or, rather, gave the
finishing touch thereto. Thenceforth its composition was not to change;
it had all its constituent elements, and the modifications which it was
to undergo in the course of centuries were, strictly speaking, nothing
more than different combinations in the alloy.
Like the clergy and like the nobility, the middle class was itself a
privileged order. It formed a distinct legal group and the special law
it enjoyed isolated it from the mass of the rural inhabitants which
continued to make up the immense majority of the population. Indeed, as
has already been seen, it was obliged to preserve intact its exceptional
status and to reserve to itself the benefits arising therefrom. Freedom,
as the middle class conceived it, was a monopoly. Nothing was less
liberal than the caste idea which was the cause of its strength until
it became, at the end of the Middle Ages, a cause of weakness.
Nevertheless to that middle class was reserved the mission of spreading
the idea of liberty far and wide and of becoming, without having
consciously desired to be, the means of the gradual enfranchisement of
the rural classes. The sole fact of its existence was due, indeed, to
have an immediate effect upon these latter and, little by little, to
attenuate the contrast which at the start separated them from it. In
vain it strove to keep them under its influence, to refuse them a share
in its privileges, to exclude them from engaging in trade and industry.
It had not the power to arrest an evolution of which it was the cause
and which it could not suppress save by itself vanishing.
For the formation of the city groups disturbed at once the economic
organization of the country districts. Production, as it was there
carried on, had served until then merely to support the life of the
peasant and supply the prestations due to his seigneur. Upon the
suspension of commerce, nothing impelled him to ask of the soil a
surplus which it would have been impossible for him to get rid of, since
he no longer had outside markets to call upon. He was content to provide
for his daily bread, certain of the morrow and longing for no
amelioration of his lot, since he could not conceive the possibility of
it. The small markets of the towns and the burgs were too insignificant
and their demand was too regular to rouse him enough to get out of his
rut and intensify his labor. But suddenly these markets sprang into new
life. The number of buyers was multiplied, and all at once he had the
assurance of being able to sell the produce he brought to them. It was
only natural for him to have profited from an opportunity as favorable
as this. It depended on himself alone to sell, if he produced enough,
and forthwith he began to till the lands which hitherto he had let lie
fallow. His work took on a new significance; it brought him profits, the
chance of thrift and of an existence which became more comfortable as it
became more active. The situation was still more favorable in that the
surplus revenues from the soil belonged to him in his own right. The
claims of the seigneur were fixed by demesnial custom at an immutable
rate, so that the increase in the income from the land benefited only
the tenant.
But the seigneur himself had a chance to profit from the new situation
wherein the development of the cities placed the country districts. He
had enormous reserves of uncultivated land, woods, heaths, marshes and
fens. Nothing could be simpler than to put them under cultivation and
through them to profit from these new outlets which were becoming more
and more exigent and remunerative as the towns grew in size and
multiplied in number. The increase in population would furnish the
necessary hands for the work of clearing and draining. It was enough to
call for men; they would not fail to show up.
By the end of the eleventh century the movement was already manifest in
its full force. Monasteries and local princes thenceforth were busy
transforming the sterile parts of their demesnes into revenue-producing
land. The area of cultivated land which, since the end of the Roman
Empire, had not been increased, kept growing continually greater.
Forests were cleared. The Cistercian Order, founded in 1098, followed
this new path from its very origin. Instead of adopting for its lands
the old demesnial organization, it intelligently adapted itself to the
new order of things. It adopted the principle of farming on a big scale
and, depending upon the region, gave itself over to the most
remunerative form of production. In Flanders, where the needs of the
towns were greater since they themselves were richer, it engaged in
raising cattle. In England, it devoted itself particularly to the sale
of wool, which the same cities of Flanders consumed in greater and
greater quantity.
Meanwhile, on all sides, the seigneurs, both lay and ecclesiastic, were
founding “new” towns. So was called a village established on virgin
soil, the occupants of which received plots of land in return for an
annual rental. But these new towns, the number of which continued to
grow in the course of the twelfth century, were at the same time _free_
towns. For in order to attract the farmers the seigneur promised them
exemption from the taxes which bore down upon the serfs. In general, he
reserved to himself only jurisdiction over them; he abolished in their
favor the old claims which still existed in the demesnial organization.
The charter of Lorris (1155) in the Gatinais, that of Beaumont in
Champagne (1182), that of Priches in the Hainault (1158) present
particularly interesting types of charters of the new towns, which were
also to be found everywhere in neighboring countries. That of Breteuil
in Normandy, which was taken over in the course of the twelfth century
by a number of localities in England, Wales, and even Ireland, was of
the same nature.
Thus a new type of peasant appeared, quite different from the old. The
latter had serfdom as a characteristic; the former enjoyed freedom. And
this freedom, the cause of which was the economic disturbance
communicated by the towns to the organization of the country districts,
was itself copied after that of the cities. The inhabitants of the new
towns were, strictly speaking, rural burghers. They even bore, in a good
number of charters, the name of _burgenses_. They received a legal
constitution and a local autonomy which was manifestly borrowed from
city institutions, so much so that it may be said that the latter went
beyond the circumference of their walls in order to reach the country
districts and acquaint them with liberty.
And this new freedom, as it progressed, was not long in making headway
even in the old demesnes, whose archaic constitution could not be
maintained in the midst of a reorganized social order. Either by
voluntary emancipation, or by prescription or usurpation, the seigneurs
permitted it to be gradually substituted for the serfdom which had so
long been the normal condition of their tenants. The form of government
of the people was there changed at the same time as the form of
government of the land, since both were consequences of an economic
situation on the way to disappear. Commerce now supplied all the
necessaries which the demesnes had hitherto been obliged to obtain by
their own efforts. It was no longer essential for each of them to
produce all the commodities for which it had use. It sufficed to go get
them at some nearby city. The abbeys of the Netherlands, which had been
endowed by their benefactors with vineyards situated either in France or
on the banks of the Rhine and the Moselle where they produced the wine
needed for their consumption, began, at about the start of the
thirteenth century, to sell these properties which had now become
useless and whose working and upkeep henceforth cost more than they
brought in.[149]
No example better illustrates the inevitable disappearance of the old
demesnial system in an era transformed by commerce and the new city
economy. Trade, which was becoming more and more active, necessarily
favored agricultural production, broke down the limits which had
hitherto bounded it, drew it towards the towns, modernised it, and at
the same time set it free. Man was therefore detached from the soil to
which he had so long been enthralled, and free labor was substituted
more and more generally for serf labor. It was only in regions remote
from commercial highways that there was still perpetuated in its
primitive rigor the old personal serfdom and therewith the old forms of
demesnial property. Everywhere else it disappeared, the more rapidly
especially where towns were more numerous. In Flanders, for example, it
hardly existed at all after the beginning of the thirteenth century,
although, to be sure, a few traces were still preserved. Up to the end
of the old order there were still to be found, here and there, men bound
by the right of mortemain or subject to forced labor, and lands
encumbered by various seigniorial rights. But these survivals of the
past were almost always simple taxes and he who paid them had, for all
of that, full personal liberty.
The emancipation of the rural classes was only one of the consequences
provoked by the economic revival of which the towns were both the result
and the instrument. It coincided with the increasing importance of
liquid capital. During the demesnial era of the Middle Ages, there was
no other form of wealth than that which lay in real estate. It ensured
to the holder both personal liberty and social prestige. It was the
guaranty of the privileged status of the clergy and the nobility.
Exclusive holders of the land, they lived by the labor of their tenants
whom they protected and whom they ruled. The serfdom of the masses was
the necessary consequence of such a social organization. There was no
alternative save to own the land and be a lord, or to till it for
another and be a serf.
But with the origin of the middle class there took its place in the sun
a class of men whose existence was in flagrant contradiction to this
traditional order of things. The land upon which they settled they not
only did not cultivate but did not even own. They demonstrated and made
increasingly clear the possibility of living and growing rich by the
sole act of selling, or producing exchange values.
Landed capital had been everything, and now by the side of it was made
plain the power of liquid capital. Heretofore money had been sterile.
The great lay or ecclesiastic proprietors in whose hands was
concentrated the very scant stock of currency in circulation, by means
of either the land taxes which they levied upon their tenants or the
alms which the congregations brought to the churches, normally had no
way of making it bear fruit. To be sure, it was often the case that
monasteries, in time of famine, would agree to usurious loans to nobles
in distress who would offer their lands as security. But these
transactions, forbidden otherwise by canonical law, were only temporary
expedients.[150] As a general rule cash was hoarded by its possessors
and most often changed into vessels or ornaments for the Church, which
might be melted down in case of need. Trade, naturally, released this
captive money and restored its proper function. Thanks to this, it
became again the instrument of exchange and the measure of values, and
since the towns were the centers of trade it necessarily flowed towards
them. In circulating, its power was multiplied by the number of
transactions in which it served. Its use, at the same time, became more
general; payments in kind gave way more and more to payments in money.
A new motion of wealth made its appearance: that of mercantile wealth,
consisting no longer in land but in money or commodities of trade
measurable in money. During the course of the eleventh century, true
capitalists already existed in a number of cities; several examples have
been cited above, to which it is unnecessary to refer again here. These
city capitalists soon formed the habit of putting a part of their
profits into land.[151] The best means of consolidating their fortune
and their credit was, in fact, the buying up of land. They devoted a
part of their gains to the purchase of real estate, first of all in the
same town where they dwelt and later in the country. But they changed
themselves, especially, into money-lenders. The economic crisis provoked
by the irruption of trade into the life of society had caused the ruin
of, or at least trouble to, the landed proprietors who had not been able
to adapt themselves to it. For in speeding up the circulation of money a
natural result was the decreasing of its value and by that very fact the
raising of all prices. The period contemporary with the formation of the
cities was a period of high cost of living, as favorable to the business
men and artisans of the middle class as it was painful to the holders of
the land who did not succeed in increasing their revenues. By the end of
the eleventh century many of them were obliged to have recourse to the
capital of the merchants in order to keep going. In 1127 the charter of
St. Omer mentioned, as a current practice, the loans contracted among
the burghers of the town by the knights of the neighborhood.
But more important operations were already current at this era. There
was no lack of merchants rich enough to agree to loans of considerable
amount. About 1082 some merchants of Liège lent money to the abbot of
St. Hubert to permit him to buy the territory of Chavigny, and a few
years later advanced to the bishop Otbert the sums necessary to acquire
from Duke Godfrey, on the point of departing for the Crusades, his
château of Bouillon.[152] The kings themselves had recourse, in the
course of the twelfth century, to the good services of the city
financiers. William Cade was the money-lender to the King of
England.[153] In Flanders, at the beginning of the reign of Philip
Augustus, Arras had become preeminently a city of bankers. William the
Breton describes it as full of riches, avid of lucre and glutted with
usurers:
_Ahrabatum ... potens urbs ... plena_
_Divitiis, inhians lucris et foenore gaudens._[154]
The cities of Lombardy and, following their example, those of Tuscany
and Provence, went much further in carrying on that commerce which the
Church vainly sought to oppose. By the beginning of the thirteenth
century, Italian bankers had already extended their operations north of
the Alps and their progress there was so rapid that a half century
later, thanks to the abundance of their capital and the more advanced
technique of their procedure, they had everywhere taken the place of the
local lenders.
The power of liquid capital, concentrated in the cities, not only gave
them an economic ascendancy but contributed also towards making them
take part in political life. For as long as society had known no other
power than that which derived from the possession of the land, the
clergy and the nobility alone had had a share in the government. The
feudal hierarchy was made up entirely on the basis of landed property.
The fief, in reality, was only a tenure and the relations which it
created between the vassal and his liege lord were only a particular
modality of the relations which existed between a proprietor and a
tenant. The only difference was that the services due from the first to
the second, in place of being of an economic nature, were of a military
and political nature. Just as each local prince required the help and
counsel of his vassals so, being himself a vassal of the King, was he
held on his part to similar obligations. Thus only those who held land
entered into the direction of public affairs. They entered into them,
moreover, only in paying through their own person; that is to say, using
the appropriate expression: _consilio et auxilio_--by their counsel and
help. Of a pecuniary contribution towards the needs of their sovereign
there could be no question at an epoch when capital, in the form of real
estate alone, served merely for the maintenance of its possessors.
Perhaps the most striking character of the feudal State was its almost
absolute lack of finances. In it, money played no rôle. The demesnial
revenues of the prince replenished only his privy purse. It was
impossible for him to increase his resources by taxes, and his financial
indigence prevented him from taking into his service revocable and
salaried agents. Instead of functionaries, he had only hereditary
vassals, and his authority over them was limited to the oath of fidelity
they gave him.
But as soon as the economic revival enabled him to augment his revenues,
and cash, thanks to it, began to flow to his coffers, he took immediate
advantage of circumstances. The appearance of bailiffs, in the course of
the thirteenth century, was the first symptom of the political progress
which was going to make it possible for a prince to develop a true
public administration and to change his suzerainty little by little into
sovereignty. For the bailiff was, in every sense of the term, a
functionary. With these revocable office-holders, remunerated not by
grants of land but by stewardships, there was evinced a new type of
government. The bailiff, indeed, had a place outside the feudal
hierarchy. His nature was quite different from that of the old justices,
mayors, or castellans who carried on their functions under an hereditary
title. Between them and him there was the same difference that there was
between the old serfholds and the new freeholds. Identical economic
causes had changed simultaneously the organization of the land and the
governing of the people. Just as they enabled the peasants to free
themselves, and the proprietors to substitute the quit-rent for the
demesnial _mansus_, so they enabled the princes, thanks to their
salaried agents, to lay hold of the direct government of their
territories. This political innovation, like the social innovations with
which it was contemporary, implied the diffusion of ready cash and the
circulation of money. This is quite clearly shown to be the case by the
fact that Flanders, where commercial life and city life were developed
sooner than in the other regions of the Netherlands, knew considerably
in advance of these latter the institution of bailiffs.
The connections which were necessarily established between the princes
and the burghers also had political consequences of the greatest import.
It was necessary to take heed of those cities whose increasing wealth
gave them a steadily increasing importance, and which could put on the
field, in case of need, thousands of well equipped men. The feudal
conservatives had at first only contempt for the presumption of the city
militia. Otto of Freisingen was indignant when he saw the communes of
Lombardy wearing the helmet and cuirass and permitting themselves to
cope with the noble knights of Frederick Barbarossa. But the outstanding
victory won by these clodhoppers at Legnano (1176) over the troops of
the Emperor soon demonstrated what they were capable of. In France, the
kings did not neglect to have recourse to their services and to ally
them to their own interests. They set themselves up as the protectors of
the communes, as the guardians of their liberties, and made the cause of
the Crown seem to them to be solidary with the city franchises. Philip
Augustus must have garnered the fruits of such a skilful policy. The
Battle of Bouvines (1214), which definitely established the sway of the
Monarchy in the interior of France and caused its prestige to radiate
over all Europe, was due in great part to military contingents from the
cities.
The influence of the cities was not less important in England at the
same era, although it was manifest in a quite different way. Here,
instead of supporting the monarchy, they rose against it by the side of
the barons. They helped, likewise, in the creation of parliamentary
government, the distant origins of which may be dated back to the Magna
Charta (1215).
It was not only in England, furthermore, that the cities claimed and
obtained a more or less large share in the government. Their natural
tendency led them to become municipal republics. There is but little
doubt but that, if they had had the power, they would have everywhere
become States within the State. But they did not succeed in realizing
this ideal save where the power of the State was impotent to
counterbalance their efforts.
This was the case with Italy, in the twelfth century, and later, after
the definite decline of the imperial power, with Germany. Everywhere
else they had not succeeded in throwing off the superior authority of
the princes, whether, as in Germany and France, the Monarchy was too
powerful to have to capitulate before them, or whether, as in the
Netherlands, their particularism kept them from combining their efforts
in order to attain an independence which immediately put them at grips
with one another. They remained as a general rule, then, subject to the
territorial government.
But this latter did not treat them as mere subjects. It had too much
need of them not to have regard for their interests. Its finances rested
in great part upon them, and to the extent that they augmented the power
of the State and therewith its expenses, it felt more and more
frequently the need of going to the pocketbooks of the burghers. It has
already been stated that in the twelfth century it borrowed their money.
And this money the cities did not grant without security. They well knew
that they ran great risks of never being reimbursed, and they exacted
new franchises in return for the sums which they consented to loan.
Feudal law permitted the suzerain to exact of his vassals only certain
well-defined dues which were restricted to particular cases always
identical in character. It was therefore impossible for him to subject
them arbitrarily to a poll-tax and to extort from them supplies, however
badly needed. In this respect the charters of the cities granted them
the most solemn guarantees. It was, then, imperative to come to terms
with them. Little by little the princes formed the habit of calling the
burghers into the councils of prelates and nobles with whom they
conferred upon their affairs. The instances of such convocations were
still rare in the twelfth century; they multiplied in the thirteenth;
and in the fourteenth century the custom was definitely legalised by
the institution of the Estates in which the cities obtained, after the
clergy and the nobility, a place which soon became, although the third
in dignity, the first in importance.
Although the middle classes, as we have just seen, had an influence of
very vast import upon the social, economic and political changes which
were manifest in Western Europe in the course of the twelfth century, it
does not seem at first glance that they played much of a rôle in the
intellectual movement. It was not, in fact, until the fourteenth century
that a literature and an art was brought forth from the bosom of the
middle classes, animated with their spirit. Until then, science remained
the exclusive monopoly of the clergy and employed no other tongue than
the Latin. What literature was written in the vernacular had to do
solely with the nobility, or at least expressed only the ideas and the
sentiments which pertained to the nobility as a class. Architecture and
sculpture produced their masterpieces only in the construction and
ornamentation of the churches. The markets and belfries, of which the
oldest specimens date back to the beginning of the thirteenth
century--as for example the admirable Cloth Hall of Ypres, destroyed
during the Great War--remained still faithful to the architectural style
of the great religious edifices.
Upon closer inspection, however, it does not take long to discover that
city life really did make its own contribution to the moral capital of
the Middle Ages. To be sure, its intellectual culture was dominated by
practical considerations which, before the period of the Renaissance,
kept it from putting forth any independent effort. But from the very
first it showed that characteristic of being an exclusively lay culture.
By the middle of the twelfth century the municipal councils were busy
founding schools for the children of the burghers, which were the first
lay schools since the end of antiquity. By means of them, instruction
ceased to be furnished exclusively for the benefit of the novices of the
monasteries and the future parish priests. Knowledge of reading and
writing, being indispensable to the practice of commerce, ceased to be
reserved for the members of the clergy alone. The burgher was initiated
into them long before the noble, because what was for the noble only an
intellectual luxury was for him a daily need. Naturally, the Church
immediately claimed supervision over the municipal schools, which gave
rise to a number of conflicts between it and the city authorities. The
question of religion was naturally completely foreign to these debates.
They had no other cause than the desire of the cities to control the
schools created by them and the direction of which they themselves
intended to keep.
However, the teaching in these communal schools was limited, until the
period of the Renaissance, to elementary instruction. All who wished to
have more were obliged to turn to the clerical establishments. It was
from these latter that came the “clerks” who, starting at the end of the
twelfth century, were charged with the correspondence and the accounts
of the city, as well as the publication of the manifold Acts
necessitated by commercial life. All these “clerks” were, furthermore,
laymen, the cities having never taken into their service, in
contradistinction to the princes, members of the clergy who by virtue of
the privileges they enjoyed would have escaped their jurisdiction.
The language which the municipal scribes employed was naturally, at
first, Latin. But after the first years of the thirteenth century they
adopted more and more generally the use of national idioms. It was by
the cities that the common tongue was introduced for the first time into
administrative usage. Thereby they showed an initiative which
corresponded perfectly to that lay spirit of which they were the
preeminent representatives in the civilization of the Middle Ages.
This lay spirit, moreover, was allied with the most intense religious
fervor. If the burghers were very frequently in conflict with the
ecclesiastic authorities, if the bishops thundered fulsomely against
them with sentences of excommunication, and if, by way of counterattack,
they sometimes gave way to decidedly pronounced anti-clerical
tendencies, they were, for all of that, none the less animated by a
profound and ardent faith. For proof of this is needed only the
innumerable religious foundations with which the cities abounded, the
pious and charitable confraternities which were so numerous there. Their
piety showed itself with a naïveté, a sincerity and a fearlessness which
easily led it beyond the bounds of strict orthodoxy. At all times, they
were distinguished above everything else by the exuberance of their
mysticism. It was this which, in the eleventh century, led them to side
passionately with the religious reformers who were fighting simony and
the marriage of priests; which, in the twelfth century, spread the
contemplative asceticism of the Beguines and the Bégards; which, in the
thirteenth century, explained the enthusiastic reception which the
Franciscans and the Dominicans received. But it was this also which
assured the success of all the novelties, all the exaggerations and all
the deformations of religious thought. After the twelfth century no
heresy cropped out which did not immediately find some adepts. It is
enough to recall here the rapidity and the energy with which the sect of
the Albigenses spread.
Both lay and mystic at the same time, the burghers of the Middle Ages
were thus singularly well prepared for the rôle which they were to play
in the two great future movements of ideas: the Renaissance, the child
of the lay mind, and the Reformation, towards which religious mysticism
was leading.
_Bibliography_
Sources
In no country does there exist a complete collection devoted to the
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2 vols., Breslau, 1851
GENGLER, H. G., _Deutsche Stadtrechte des Mittelalters_
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Paris, 1885
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It is useless to mention, despite the importance which they had in their
own times, a number of works which have become antiquated today. The
chief characteristics of the most important among them will be found in
H. Pirenne, “L’origine des constitutions urbaines au Moyen-âge,” _Revue
historique_, Vol. LIII, 1893. For England, see J. Tait, “The Study of
Early Municipal History in England,” _Proceedings of the British
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ASHLEY, W. J., “The Beginnings of Town Life in the Middle Ages,”
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_Die Entstehung der deutschen Stadtgemeinde_
Düsseldorf, 1889
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Düsseldorf, 1892
BLANCHET, A., _Les enceintes romaines de la Gaule_
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jusqu’au XIVᵉ siècle_
Paris, 1877
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2 vols., Paris, 1883-1885
GROSS, C., _The Gild Merchant_
2 vols., Oxford, 1890
HEGEL, K., _Die Entstehung des deutschen Städtewesens_
Leipzig, 1898
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HEMMEON, M. DEW. “Burgage Tenure in Medieval England,” _Harvard
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Stadtverfassung_
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directs_, new edition, with introduction by L. Halphen
Paris, 1911
MAITLAND, F. W., _Township and Borough_
Cambridge, 1898
OTTOKAR, N., _Opiti po istorii franzoukish gorodov_
Perm, 1919
PETIT-DUTAILLIS, C. E., _L’origine des villes en Angleterre_, Vol. I of
the French translation of Stubbs’ _Constitutional History_
PIRENNE, H., “L’origine des constitutions urbaines au Moyen-âge,” _Revue
historique_, Vols. LIII, LVII, 1893, 1895
“Villes, marchés et marchands au Moyen-âge,” _Revue historique_,
Vol. LXVII, 1898
“La hanse flamande de Londres,” _Bulletin de l’Academie de
Belgique_, Classe des lettres, 1899
“Les villes flamandes avant le XIIᵉ siècle,” _Annales de l’Est et
du Nord_, Vol. I, 1905
_Belgian Democracy--Its Early History_
Manchester, 1915
PROU, M., _Les coutumes de Lorris_
Paris, 1884
RIETSCHEL, S., _Markt und Stadt in ihrem rechtlichen Verhältniss_
Leipzig, 1897
_Das Burggrafenamt_
Leipzig, 1905
_Die civitas auf deutschem Boden_
Leipzig, 1894
ROUND, J. H., “The Castles of the Norman Conquest,” _Archaeologia_, Vol.
LVIII, 1903
SOHM, R., _Die Entstehung des deutschen Städtewesens_
Leipzig, 1890
VANDERKINDERE, L., “La première phase de l’évolution constitutionelle
des villes flamandes,” _Annales de l’Est et du Nord_, Vol. I, 1905
“La notion juridique de la commune,” _Bulletin de l’Academie de
Belgique_, Classe des lettres, 1906
VANDER LINDEN, H., _Les gildes marchandes dans les Pays-Bas au
Moyen-âge_
Ghent, 1896
WAUTERS, A., _De l’origine des premiers développements des libertés
communales en Belgique_
Brussels, 1869
The numerous monographs devoted, in each country, to the particular
history of a city must of course also be consulted. A list of them can
be found in the national bibliographies and especially, for England, in
the _Bibliography of British Municipal History_ of Charles Gross.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] P. Scheffer-Boichorst, “Zur Geschichte der Syrer im Abendlande,”
_Mittheilungen des Instituts für Oestereichische Geschichtsforschung_,
1885, Vol. VI, p. 521; L. Bréhier, “Les colonies d’Orientaux en
Occident au commencement du Moyen-âge,” _Byzantinische Zeitschrift_,
1903, Vol. XII.
[2] H. Pirenne, “Mahomet et Charlemagne,” _Revue belge de philologie et
d’histoire_, 1922, Vol. I, p. 77.
[3] A. Dopsch, _Wirtschaftliche und soziale Grundlagen der europäischen
Kulturentwicklung_, Vienna, 1920, Vol. II, p. 527, takes issue strongly
with the opinion that the Germanic invasions put an end to Roman
civilization.
[4] N. D. Fustel de Coulanges, _La monarchie franque_, p. 236;
A. Dopsch, _op. cit._, Vol. II, p. 342; E. Mayer, _Deutsche und
französische Verfassungsgeschichte_, Leipzig, 1899, Vol. I, p. 296.
[5] See _Historia Francorum_, edit. B. Krusch, Book IV, sec. 43; Book
VI, sec. 45; Book VIII, secs. 1, 33; Book III, sec. 34.
[6] M. Prou, “Catalogue des monnaies mérovingiennes de la Bibliothèque
Nationale de Paris,” with an Introduction by H. Pirenne, “Un contraste
économique. Mérovingiens et Carolingiens,” _Revue belge de philologie
et d’histoire_, 1923, Vol. II, p. 225.
[7] _Historia Francorum_, edit. B. Krusch, Book IV, sec. 43; Book V,
sec. 5; Book VI, secs. 17, 24; Book IX, sec. 22. See also Gregory the
Great, _Epistolae_, I, 45.
[8] M. Prou, _op. cit._, p. 300.
[9] It is impossible, in fact, not to infer that at Marseilles there
was a class of artisans at least as important as that which still
existed at Arles in the middle of the sixth century. See F. Kiener,
_Verfassungsgeschichte der Provence_, Leipzig, 1900, p. 29.
[10] _Marcuffi Formulae_, edit. K. Zeumer, No. I, p. 102.
[11] L. Levillain, _Examen critique des chartes mérovingiennes et
carolingiennes de l’abbaye de Corbie_, Paris, 1902, pp. 220, 231, 235.
This treats of the market-tolls of Fos, near Aix-en-Provence.
[12] See the letters of Agobard in _Monumenta Germaniae historica_,
Vol. V, p. 184.
[13] _Historia Francorum_, edit. B. Krusch, Book III, sec. 46.
[14] I. Goll, “Samo und die karantanischen Slaven,” _Mittheilungen des
Instituts für Oesterreichische Geschichtsforschung_, Vol. XI, p. 443.
[15] _Historia Francorum_, edit. B. Krusch, Book III, sec. 34.
[16] _Ibid._, Book VIII, sec. 33.
[17] _Ibid._, Book VI, sec. 45.
[18] A. Dopsch, _Wirtschaftliche und soziale Grundlagen der
europäischen Kulturentwicklung_, Vol. II, p. 432; F. Dahn, _Über Handel
und Handelsrecht der Westgothen Bausteine_, Berlin, 1880, Vol. II, p.
301.
[19] H. Pirenne, “Mahomet et Charlemagne,” _Revue belge de philologie
et d’histoire_, 1922, Vol. I, p. 86.
[20] The objection may be raised that Charlemagne conquered in Italy
the kingdom of the Lombards and in Spain the region included between
the Pyrenees and the Ebro. But these thrusts towards the south are by
no means to be explained by a desire to dominate the shores of the
Mediterranean. The expeditions against the Lombards were provoked by
political causes and especially by the alliance with the Papacy. The
expedition in Spain had no other aim than the establishing of a solid
frontier against the Moslems.
[21] H. Pirenne, “Un contraste économique. Mérovingiens et
Carolingiens,” _Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire_, 1923, Vol.
II, p. 223.
[22] Imports, however, had not completely ceased at that date. The
last reference we know to the use of papyrus in Gaul is in 737; see
M. Prou, _Manuel de paléographie_, 3rd edit., p. 17. In Italy, it was
continued to be used up to the eleventh century; see A. Giry, _Manuel
de diplomatique_, p. 494. It was imported there either from Egypt
or, more probably, from Sicily (where the Arabs had introduced its
manufacture) by the shipping of the Byzantine cities of the South of
the Peninsular, or by that of Venice, which will be discussed in chap.
III.
[23] See chap. I, Note 11.
[24] F. Kiener, _Verfassungsgeschichte der Provence_, p. 31.
[25] A. Schulte, _Geschichte des mittelalterlichen Handels und Verkehrs
zwischen Westdeutschland und Italien_, Leipzig, 1900, Vol. II, p. 59.
[26] W. Vogel, _Die Normannen und das fränkische Reich_, Heidelberg,
1906.
[27] Charles de la Roncière, “Charlemagne et la civilisation maritime
au IXᵉ siècle,” _Le Moyen-âge_, 1897, Vol. X, p. 201.
[28] A. Dopsch, _Die Wirtschaftsentwicklung der Karolingerzeit_, Vol.
II, pp. 180 _ff._, has, with very great erudition, cited a number of
them. We must, however, bear in mind that many among them belong to
the Merovingian period and that many others are far from having the
significance which he attributes to them. See also J. W. Thompson, “The
Commerce of France in the Ninth Century,” _The Journal of Political
Economy_, 1915, Vol. XXIII, p. 857.
[29] H. Pirenne, “Draps de Frise ou draps de Flandre?”
_Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial-und Wirtschaftsgeschichte_, 1909, Vol.
VII, p. 308.
[30] M. Prou, _Catalogue des monnaies carolingiennes de la Bibliothèque
Nationale_, p. 10.
[31] W. Vogel, _Die Normannen und das fränkische Reich_, p. 62.
[32] _Capitularia regum Francorum_, edit. A. Boretius, Vol. II, p. 250.
[33] See the letter of Agobard, cited chap. I, Note 12.
[34] The ingenious demonstration of Mr. J. W. Thompson to prove the
contrary, in his work cited in Note 10 above, raises philological
difficulties which prevent our adopting it. The Greek origin of the
work _Cappi_, upon which it is based, cannot be accepted.
[35] Imbart de la Tour, “Des immunités commerciales accordées aux
églises du VIIIᵉ au IXᵉ siècle,” _Études d’histoire du Moyen-âge,
dediées à Gabriel Monod_, Paris, 1896, p. 71.
[36] M. Prou, _Catalogue des monnaies carolingiennes de la Bibliothèque
Nationale_, p. xlv.
[37] M. Prou, _Catalogue des monnaies carolingiennes de la Bibliothèque
Nationale_, p. lxi.
[38] G. Waitz, _Deutsche Verfassungsgeschichte_, 2nd edit., 1885, Vol.
IV, p. 112.
[39] _Ibid._, p. 54.
[40] W. Wittich, _Die Grundherrschaft in Nordwestdeutschland_, Leipzig,
1896; H. Pirenne, “Liberté et proprieté en Flandre du IXᵉ au XIIᵉ
siècle,” _Bulletin de l’Académie Royale de Belgique_, Classe des
lettres, 1906; H. Van Werveke, “Grands propriétaires en Flandre au VIIᵉ
et au VIIIᵉ siècle,” _Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire_, 1923,
Vol. II, p. 321.
[41] _Capitularia regum Francorum_, edit. A. Boretius, Vol. I, p. 125.
[42] The registry of rents of the Abbot Irminon is the principal source
of knowledge of this organization. The prolegomena of Guérard in the
edition which he issued in 1844, should, however, be read. One should
also consult, on this point, the famous _Capitulare de Villis_. K.
Gareis has issued a good commentary: _Die Landguterordnung Karls des
Grossen_, Berlin, 1895. On the recent controversies over the import and
the date of the _Capitulare_, see M. Bloch, “L’origine et la date du
Capitulare de Villis,” _Revue Historique_, 1923, Vol. CXLIII, p. 40.
[43] Certain authors have believed that demesnial products were
destined for sale. See, for example, F. Keutgen, _Ämter und Zünfte_,
Jena, 1903, p. 58. It is a fact that in certain exceptional cases and,
for example, in times of famine, selling took place. But as a general
rule there was certainly no selling. The texts alleged to prove the
contrary are too few in number and too ambiguous to carry conviction.
It is evident that the whole economy of the demesnial system of the
late Middle Ages is in flagrant opposition to this idea of profit.
[44] For what follows, consult: N. Rostovtzeff, _Iranians and Greeks in
South Russia_, Oxford, 1922; V. L. P. Thomsen, _The Relations between
Ancient Russia and Scandinavia and the Origin of the Russian State_,
Oxford, 1877; V. O. Kluchevsky, _A History of Russia_, New York, 1911,
Vol. I, p. 77; I. M. Kulischer, _Istoria Russkoi torgovli_, Petrograd,
1923, p. 5.
[45] _De administrando imperio_ (written about 950). For this text
the excellent commentary of V. L. P. Thomsen, _op. cit._, should be
consulted.
[46] See above, chap. I.
[47] See above, chap. I.
[48] On this institution, see L. Huberti, _Studien zur Rechtsgeschichte
der Gottesfrieden und Landfrieden_, Ansbach, 1892.
[49] This is particularly true for Northern Europe. In Southern France
and in Italy, on the contrary, where the Roman municipal organization
had less completely disappeared, the counts ordinarily lived in the
towns.
[50] The towns of the ninth and tenth centuries have not yet been
adequately studied. What is said of them here, and later, is borrowed
from various passages in the capitularies as well as from certain
scattered texts in the chronicles and the lives of the Saints. For the
towns of Germany, unfortunately much less numerous and less important
than those of Gaul, the reader should consult the interesting work of
S. Rietschel, _Die Civitas auf deutschem Boden bis zum Ausgange der
Karolingerzeit_, Leipzig, 1894.
[51] I am seeking, naturally, to characterize only the general
situation. I am aware that numerous exceptions must be made; but they
cannot modify the general impression which comes from an examination of
the data available.
[52] S. Rietschel, _Die Civitas auf deutschem Boden bis zum Ausgange
der Karolingerzeit_, p. 93.
[53] A. Blanchet, _Les enceintes romaines de la Gaule_, Paris, 1907.
[54] L. Halphen, _Paris sous les premiers Capétiens_, Paris, 1909, p. 5.
[55] L. H. Labande, _Histoire de Beauvais et de ses institutions
communales_, Paris, 1892, p. 7; W. Vogel, _Die Normannen und das
fränkische Reich_, Heidelberg, 1906, p. 271.
[56] Before the arrival of the Norsemen, there were not any, or hardly
any, fortified localities outside of the episcopal cities. Hariulphe,
_Chronique de l’abbaye de Saint-Riquier_, edit. F. Lot, Paris, 1894, p.
118.
[57] On the meaning of these words, see K. Hegel, _Neues Archiv der
Gesellschaft für ältere deutsche Geschichtskunde_, 1892, Vol. XVIII,
and G. Des Marez, “Le sens juridique du mot oppidum,” _Festschrift für
H. Brunner_, Berlin, 1910.
[58] H. Pirenne, “Les villes flamandes avant le XIIᵉ siècle,” _Annales
de l’Est et du Nord_, 1905, Vol. I, p. 12.
[59] F. W. Maitland, _Township and Borough_, 1898. The reader should
also compare the burgs of the West with those built in the tenth
century as a defence against the Slavs, along the Elbe and the Saale,
by Henry the Fowler. D. Schäfer, “Die Milites agrarii des Witukinds,”
_Abhandlungen der Berliner Akademie_, 1905, p. 572. For the social
rôle of the burgs, we restrict ourselves to citing the following text
which seems to be thoroughly characteristic; it had to do with the
founding in 996 of Cateau-Cambrésis: “_ut esset obstaculum latronibus
praesidiumque libertatis circum et circa rusticanis cultoribus_.”
“Gesta episcoporum Cameracensium,” _Monumenta Germaniae historica_,
Vol. VII, p. 450.
[60] On the increase in population during the eleventh century, see
Lambert de Hersfeld, _Annales_, edit. O. Holder-Egger, Hanover, 1894,
p. 121; “Suger,” _Recueil des Historiens de la France_, Vol. XII, p.
54; Herman de Tournai, _Monumenta Germaniae historica_, Vol. XIV, p.
344.
[61] H. Pirenne, _Histoire de Belgique_, Vol. I, 4th edit., pp. 148,
300.
[62] L. M. Hartmann, “Die wirtschaftlichen Anfänge Venedigs,”
_Vierteljahrschrift für Social-und Wirtschaftsgeshichte_. 1904, Vol. II.
[63] A. Andréadès, _De la population de Constantinople sous
les empereurs byzantins_, Rovigo, 1920. An economic history of
Constantinople is still lacking. For want of something better, L.
Brentano, _Die byzantinische Volkswirtschaft_, Leipzig, 1917, may be
consulted.
[64] R. Heynen, _Zur Entstehung des Kapitalismus in Venedig_,
Stuttgart, 1905, p. 15.
[65] R. Heynen, _op. cit._, p. 23.
[66] K. Schaube, _Handelsgeschichte der romanischen Völker_, p. 61.
[67] W. von Heyd, _Histoire du commerce du Levant au Moyen-âge_, Vol.
I, p. 98.
[68] W. von Heyd, _op. cit._, p. 121; K. Schaube, _op. cit._, p. 49.
[69] E. Du Méril, _Poésies populaires latines du Moyen-âge_, Paris,
1847, p. 239.
[70] K. Schaube, _op. cit._, p. 125.
[71] A. Schulte, _Geschichte der Handelsbeziehungen zwischen
Westdeutschland und Italien_, Leipzig, 1900, Vol. I, p. 80.
[72] K. Schaube, _op. cit._, p. 90.
[73] Galbert de Bruges, _Histoire du meurtre de Charles le Bon, Comte
de Flandre_, edit. H. Pirenne, Paris, 1891, p. 28.
[74] See above, chap. II.
[75] W. Vogel, “Zur nord-und westeuropäischen Seeschiffahrt im früheren
Mittelalter,” _Hansische Geschichtsblätter_, 1907, Vol. XIII, p. 170;
A. Bugge, “Die nordeuropäischen Verkehrswege im frühen Mittelalter,”
_Vierteljahrschrift für Social-und Wirtschaftsgeschichte_, 1906, Vol.
IV p. 227.
[76] Engel and Serrure, _Manuel de numismatique du Moyen-âge_, Vol. II,
p. 505.
[77] F. Lieberman, _Die Gesetze der Angelsachsen_, Vol. I, p. 233.
[78] H. Pirenne, “Draps de Frise ou draps de Flandre?,”
_Vierteljahrschrift für Social-und Wirtschaftsgeschichte_, 1909, Vol.
VII, p. 308.
[79] R. Heynen, _Zur Entstehung des Kapitalismus in Venedig_, p. 81.
[80] R. Heynen, _Zur Entstehung des Kapitalismus in Venedig_, p. 65.
[81] Eugene H. Byrne, “Commercial Contracts of the Genoese in the
Syrian Trade of the Twelfth Century,” _The Quarterly Journal of
Economics_, 1916, p. 128; “Genoese Trade with Syria in the Twelfth
Century,” _American Historical Review_, 1920, p. 191.
[82] R. Heynen, _Zur Entstehung des Kapitalismus in Venedig_, p. 18;
H. Sieveking, “Die kapitalistische Entwicklung in den italienischen
Städten des Mittelalters,” _Vierteljahrschrift für Social- und
Wirtschaftsgeschichte_, 1909, p. 64.
[83] H. Pirenne, “The Stages in the Social History of Capitalism,”
_American Historical Review_, 1914; “Les périodes de l’histoire sociale
du capitalisme,” _Bulletin de l’Academie Royale de Belgique_, Classe
des lettres, 1914, p. 258.
[84] The _Liber Miraculorum Sancte Fidis_, edit. A. Bouillet, p. 63,
says with reference to a merchant: “_et sicut negotiatori diversas
orbis partes discurrenti, erant ei terra marisque nota itinera, ac vie
publice diverticula, semite, leges moresque gentium ac lingue_.”
[85] F. Kurschmann, _Hungersnöte im Mittelalter_, Leipzig, 1909.
[86] _Libellus de vita et miraculis S. Godrici, heremitae de Finchale,
auctore Reginaldo monacho Dunelmensi_, edit. Stevenson, London,
1847. The importance of this text for economic history has been very
well demonstrated by W. Vogel, “Ein seefahrender Kaufman um 1100,”
_Hansische Geschichtsblätter_, 1912, p. 239.
[87] “_Sic itaque puerilibus annis simpliciter domi transactis, caepit
adolescentior prudentiores vitae vias excolere et documenta secularis
providentiae sollicite et exercitate perdicere._ Unde non agriculturae
delegit exercitia colere, sed potius quae sagacioris animi sunt
rudimenta studuit, arripiendo exercere. _Hinc est quod mercatoris
aemulatus studium, coepit mercimonii frequentare negotium, et primitus
in minoribus quidem et rebus pretii inferioris, coepit lucrandi
officia discere; postmodum vero paulatim ad majoris pretii emolumenta
adolescentiae suae ingenia promovere._” _Libellus de Vita S. Godrici_,
p. 25.
[88] “_Qui comparat rem ut illam ipsam integram et immutatam dando
lucretur, ille est mercator qui de templo Dei ejicitur._” _Decretum_ I,
dist. 88, c. 11. For the viewpoint of the Church in matters of trade,
see F. Schaube, _Der Kampf gegen den Zinswucher, ungerechten Preis und
unlauteren Handel im Mittelalter_, Freiburg-im-Breisgau, 1905.
[89] We even find a similar organization in Dalmatia. See C. Jirecek,
“Die Bedeutung von Raguza in der Handelsgeschichte des Mittelalters,”
_Almanak der Akademie der Wissenschaften, in Wien_, 1899, p. 382.
[90] W. Stein, “Hansa,” _Hansische Geschichtsblätter_, 1909, p. 53; H.
Pirenne, “La hanse flamande de Londres,” _Bulletin de l’Academie Royale
de Belgique_, Classe des lettres, 1899, p. 80.
[91] H. Pigeonneau, _Histoire du commerce de la France_, Vol. I, p. 104.
[92] See the text cited in Note 6 and add this passage from Galbert
de Bruges, _Histoire du meurtre de Charles le Bon_, edit. H. Pirenne,
p. 152, stating the grievances of the burghers against Count William
of Normandy: “_Nos in terra hac clausit ne negociari possemus, imo
quicquid hactenus possedimus, sine lucro sine negotiatione, sine
acquisitione rerum consumpsimus._”
[93] Charles Gross, “The Court of Piepowder,” _The Quarterly Journal
of Economics_, 1906, p. 231. Here we have to do with the “_extraneus
mercator vel aliquis transiens per regnum, non habens certam mansionem
infra vicecomitatum sed vagans, qui vocatur piepowdrous_.”
[94] “The Life of Saint Guidon of Anderlecht,” _Acta Sanctorum_, Vol.
IV, p. 42, speaks of the “_ignobilis mercatura_” and calls a merchant
who advised the saint to apply himself to it a “_diaboli minister_.”
[95] An example of the conversion of a merchant quite analogous to
that of Godric and at the same epoch is given by the “Vita Theogeri,”
_Monumenta Germaniae historica_, Vol. XII, p. 457.
[96] H. Pirenne, “L’origine des constitutions urbaines au Moyen-âge,”
_Revue Historique_, 1895, Vol. LVII, p. 18.
[97] _Ibid._, p. 30; Goldschmidt, _Universalgeschichte des
Handelsrechts_, p. 125.
[98] Alpert, “De diversitate temporum,” _Monumenta Germaniae
historica_, Vol. IV, p. 718, speaks of merchants of Tiel “_judicia non
secundum legem sed secundum voluntatem decernentes_.”
[99] This is true, naturally, only for towns placed under normal
conditions. The State has often had to maintain city populations much
too numerous to be able to take care of their own subsistence. This,
for example, was the case with Rome at the end of the Republic. But the
increase of the population in Rome was the result of political, not
economic, causes.
[100] There were certainly in the Middle Ages numbers of localities
bearing the title “city” and endowed with city franchises, of which the
inhabitants were much more occupied with agriculture than with commerce
or industry. But in this case they were the product of a later era. We
are alluding here to the middle class as it was first constituted and
as it continued to exist in the characteristic centers of city life.
[101] The most important towns for the study of the origins of city
institutions are evidently the oldest; it is there that the middle
class arose. It is a faulty method to seek to explain the latter by
relying on towns of later and tardy development, such as those of
Germany beyond the Rhine.
[102] H. Pirenne, “L’origine des constitutions urbaines au Moyen-âge,”
_Revue Historique_, 1895, Vol. LVII, p. 68.
[103] H. Pirenne, “Villes, marchés et marchands au Moyen-âge,” _Revue
Historique_, 1898, Vol. LXVII, p. 59; F. Keutgen, _Untersuchungen
über den Ursprung der deutschen Stadtverfassung_, Leipzig, 1895; S.
Rietschel, _Markt und Stadt in ihrem rechtlichen Verhältniss_, Leipzig,
1897.
[104] H. Pirenne, “L’origine des constitutions urbaines au Moyen-âge,
_Revue Historique_, 1895, Vol. LVII, p. 66.
[105] The chronicler Gilles d’Orval, for example, speaking of the
franchises granted the town of Huy by the Bishop of Liège in 1066,
mentions a few points and passes over the rest in silence “in order not
to bore the reader.” He is evidently thinking of the ecclesiastical
public for which he is writing.
[106] Richer, _Historiae_, Book III, par. 103, “_negotiatorum claustrum
muro instar oppidi extructum, ab urbe quidem Mosa interfluente
sejundum, sed pontibus duobus interstratis ei annexum_.”
[107] In the old municipal laws of Strasbourg, the new agglomeration is
called “_urbs exterior_.”
[108] “Gesta episcoporum Cameracensium,” _Monumenta Germaniae
historica_, Vol. VII, p. 499.
[109] F. Kiener, _Verfassungsgeschichte der Provence_, p. 212.
[110] _Digeste_, L, 16. 59: “_Portus appellatus est conclusus locus
quo importantur merces et inde exportantur_”; Isidorus of Seville,
_Etymologiae_, Book XIV, chap. VIII, pars, 39, 40:
“_Portus dictus a deportandis commerciis_.”
[111] In the twelfth century the word still retained its original
meaning of landing place: “_Infra burgum Brisach et Argentinensem
civitatem, nullus erit portus_, qui vulgo dicitur Ladstadt, _nisi apud
Brisach_,” H. G. Gengler, _Stadtrechtsaltertümer_, p. 44.
[112] H. Pirenne, “L’origine des constitutions urbaines au Moyen-âge,”
_Revue Historique_, Vol. LVII, p. 12.
[113] Murray, _New English Dictionary_, Vol. VII, 2nd part, p. 1136.
[114] “Miracula S. Womari,” _Monumenta Germaniae historica_, Vol. XV,
p. 841.
[115] H. Pirenne, “Les villes flamandes avant le XIIᵉ siècle,” _Annales
de l’Est et du Nord_, Vol. I, p. 22.
[116] We may make the same observation concerning the towns of Bavai
and Tongres, which had been important administrative centers in
the North of Gaul during the Roman era. Not being situated on any
watercourse, they did not profit by the commercial revival. Bavai
disappeared in the ninth century; Tongres has remained without any
importance up to our own day.
[117] Naturally, no claim is made that the evolution took place
in exactly the same way in every city. The merchant suburb is not
everywhere so clearly distinguished from the original burg as it is,
for instance, in Flemish cities. According to local conditions, the
immigrant merchants and artisans formed their colonies in divers ways.
Here merely the main outlines of the subject can be indicated. See
on this point the observations of N. P. Ottokar. _Opiti po istorii
franzouskich gorodov_, Perm, 1919, p. 244.
[118] In 1042 the church of the burghers at St. Omer was built at the
expense of a certain Lambert who was most probably himself a burgher.
A. Giry, _Histoire de St. Omer_, Paris, 1877, p. 369.
[119] See the map of Bruges at the beginning of the twelfth century in
Galbert de Bruges, _Histoire du meurtre de Charles le Bon, Comte de
Flandre_, edit. H. Pirenne, Paris, 1891.
[120] Boretius, _Capitularia regum francorum_, Vol. II, p. 405.
[121] See above (chap. III, Note 14), the text cited for
Cambrai. At Bruges, at the beginning of the twelfth century, the town
was still defended only by wooden palisades.
[122] See above, chap. IV.
[123] Ghent must have already been an important weaving center in
the eleventh century, since the “Vita Macarii,” _Monumenta Germaniae
historica_, Vol. XV, p. 616, speaks of the proprietors of the
neighborhood bringing their wool thither.
[124] On this point see the “Chronicon S. Andreae Castri-Cameracensii,”
_Monumenta Germaniae historica_, Vol. VII, p. 540, and the “Gesta
abbatum Trudonensium,” _ibid._, Vol. X, p. 310.
[125] In the eleventh century the “Miracula Sancti Bavonis,” _Monumenta
Germaniae historica_, Vol. XV, p. 594, mentioned at Ghent the “_laici
qui ex officio agnominabantur coriarii_.” There is no doubt but that
these artisans had come there from without.
[126] H. Pirenne, _Belgian Democracy--Its Early History_, Manchester,
1915, p. 201.
[127] H. L. Labande, _Histoire de Beauvais_, Paris, 1892, p. 55.
[128] For the status of real estate in the towns, see G. Des Marez,
_Étude sur la propriété foncière dans les villes du Moyen-âge et
spécialement en Flandre_, Ghent, 1898. The oldest known reference to
the enfranchisement of city land dates back to the beginning of the
eleventh century.
[129] H. Pirenne, “L’origine des constitutions urbaines au Moyen-âge,”
_Revue Historique_, Vol. LVII, pp. 25, 34.
[130] H. Pirenne, “L’origine des constitutions urbaines au Moyen-âge,”
_Revue Historique_, Vol. LVII, pp. 25, 34.
[131] G. Kurth, _Notger de Liège et la civilisation au Xᵉ siècle_,
Brussels, 1905.
[132] H. Pirenne, _Belgian Democracy_, p. 27. F. Keutgen, _Ämter und
Zünfte_, Jena, 1903, p. 75. We find in the English clergy the same
hostility towards the middle class, as in the German and French clergy.
K. Hegel, _Städte und Gilden der germanischen Völker_, Leipzig, 1891,
Vol. I, p. 73.
[133] A. Hauck, _Kirchengeschichte Deutschlands_, Vol. III, p. 692.
[134] K. Hegel, _Geschichte der Städteverfassung von Italien_, Leipzig,
1847, Vol. II, p. 137.
[135] R. Davidsohn, _Geschichte von Florenz_, Berlin, 1896-1908, Vol.
I, pp. 345, 350.
[136] F. Kiener, _Verfassungsgeschichte der Provence_, p. 164.
[137] W. Reinecke, _Geschichte der Stadt Cambrai_, Marburg, 1896.
[138] H. L. Labande, _Histoire de Beauvais_, p. 55.
[139] Guibert de Nogent, _De vita sua_, edit. G. Bourgin, p. 156.
[140] H. Pirenne, “Les villes flamandes avant le XIIᵉ siècle,” _Revue
de l’Est et du Nord_, 1905, Vol. I, p. 9; _Belgian Democracy_, p. 64;
_Histoire de Belgique_, 4th edit., Vol. I, p. 170.
[141] G. Espinas and H. Pirenne, “Les coutumes de la gilde marchande
de Saint Omer,” _Le Moyen-âge_, 1901, p. 196; H. Pirenne, “La hanse
flamande de Londres,” _Bulletin de l’Academie Royale de Belgique_,
Classe des lettres, 1899, p. 65. For the rôle played by the gilds
in England, see the fundamental work of Charles Gross, _The Gild
Merchant_, Oxford 1890. See also K. Hegel, _Städte und Gilden der
germanischen Völker_, Leipzig, 1891; H. Van der Linden, _Les gildes
marchandes dans les Pays-Bas au Moyen-âge_, Ghent, 1890; C. Koehne,
_Das Hansgrafenamt_, Berlin, 1893.
[142] A. Giry, _Histoire de la ville de St. Omer_, Paris, 1877, p. 371.
[143] N. P. Ottokar, _Opiti po istorii franzouskich gorodov_, Perm,
1919.
[144] Galbert de Bruges, _Histoire du meurtre de Charles le Bon, Comte
de Flandre_, edit. H. Pirenne, Paris, 1891, p. 87.
[145] _Capitularia regum Francorum_, edit. Boretius, Vol. II, p. 405.
[146] Beaumanoir, _Coutumes de Beauvaisis_, edit. Salmon, Vol. I.
[147] The monumental work of G. Espinas, _La vie urbaine de Douai au
Moyen-âge_, Paris, 1913, 4 vols., should be consulted to get an idea of
the wealth of city regulation in this respect.
[148] Map of the city of Aire in 1188, in L. A. Warnkoenig,
_Flandrische Staats-und Rechtsgeschichte_, Tübingen, 1842, Vol. III,
appendix, p. 22.
[149] H. Van Werveke, “Comment les établissements religieux belges se
procuraient-ils du vin au haut Moyen-âge?,” _Revue belge de philologie
et d’histoire_, 1923, Vol. II, p. 643.
[150] R. Génestal, _Rôle des monastères comme établissements de
crédit_, Paris, 1901.
[151] H. Pirenne, “Les périodes de l’histoire sociale du capitalisme,”
_Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire_, 1923, Vol. II, p. 269.
[152] H. Pirenne, “Les périodes de l’histoire sociale du capitalisme,”
_Revue belge de philologie et d’histoire_, 1923, Vol. II, p. 281.
[153] M. T. Stead, “William Cade, a Financier of the Twelfth Century,”
_English Historical Review_, 1913, p. 209.
[154] Guillaume le Breton, “Philipidis,” _Monumenta Germaniae
historica_, Vol. XXVI, p. 321.
Typographical errors corrected by the etext transcriber:
be part of of it=> be part of it {pg 85}
search of a professsion=> search of a profession {pg 158}
and a jurispdudence=> and a jurisprudence {pg 220}
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