Even as late as 1100 the major users of coin were lay and ecclesiastical rulers, but the expansion of the coin supply in the late twelfth century made the use of money normal also in towns. Virtually all large-scale transactions in Europe by 1300 used money. Urban artisans could now produce smaller quantities and goods of less value for export, where previously the cheaper items were feasible only for barter on the local market. Most services were now paid with a cash wage. The use of money then became generalized in the agrarian sector in the thirteenth century. In England, the best-documented case, mint output was less than one million pennies in the ii70s but rose to four million annually between 1180 and 1204, ten million between 1234 and 1247, and fifteen million in the 1250s. The total volume of coin in circulation was less than ?125,000 in 1180, rising to ?300,000 by 1218, ?400,000 by 1247, and more than doubling again to ?1,100,000 in 1311. This rate of increase meant the amount of coin per person more than trebled.15
Most cities of Europe reached their greatest population before the modern period at some point in the late thirteenth or early fourteenth century. The suburbs around the primitive Roman walls and princely fortifications were being walled, even before 1180, but there-
15 R. H. Britnell, The Commercialisation of English Society, 1000-1500, 2nd edn. (Manchester, 1996), 102-3.
After the rate of territorial growth increased. The population of the largest cities at least tripled in the thirteenth century, against an overall doubling of the population. Pisa more than tripled, to about 38,000 in 1293, but it still lost position in Tuscany to Florence, which was smaller than Pisa in 1200 but more than twice its size by 1300, due to its control of the grain trade from southern Italy and its rapid development of industry and banking. Northern Italy had the largest cities of Europe except for Paris, which quintupled in size after 1180 to a population of 250,000 by 1328. Milan, Genoa, Venice, Naples, Florence, and Palermo probably had populations of over 100,000 by 1300, declining thereafter. The other major pole of urban development was in north-western France and Flanders. In England London had a population of about 80,000 by 1300, double its late-eleventh-century size, but it completely dominated its region, with York, the second largest English city, having only 10,000 inhabitants in the late thirteenth century.
Several economic variables play into these changes. First, the tertiary sector of the economy, which involves activities such as services that were not directly connected to the production of consumer goods, first became significant in the late twelfth century. The impact that the tertiary sector could have on the primary and secondary sectors constitutes an essential difference between the urban and village economies, linked by liquidity.
Secondly, the towns that grew significantly developed industry, in most cases textiles, that could be exported. Industry was a late development with most towns, with the result that most of the city centres were given over to markets and financial operations, while the artisans, who came later to the city, lived in the suburbs. Yet with the rapid growth of the cities in the thirteenth century and the progressive walling of suburbs, many artisans found themselves living within the walls.
Thirdly, the cities themselves became demand markets for consumer goods. Most persons who immigrated to the cities in the thirteenth century found jobs, not only in exportable industries such as clothmaking, but even more in most cities in provisioning the local market with buildings, comestibles, and transport services. Poverty became a much more serious problem with the downturn of the fourteenth century, even though the cities’ populations by then were declining. Given that much more money was invested in commerce than in industry, even with the expansion of manufacturing, more profit went to the merchant who sold the product than to the artisans who produced it, and the cities in many areas, especially those that could be considered relatively developed economically, thus acquired an economic importance that exceeded both their percentage of population and their share of the wealth of the economic regions that came to be based on them.
Fourthly, since the cities were even less able to feed themselves after 1180 than before, the grain trade became critically important for them in the thirteenth century. Virtually all the larger cities—London is the conspicuous exception—had to develop a means to obtain food from outside the region, particularly in years of poor harvest. Ports such as Barcelona and Genoa, which had agriculturally poor hinterlands, were especially vulnerable but also had the coastal connections that facilitated grain importing. Inland towns had to rely on what could be brought by river and overland. The Flemish cities were fed by grain that came down the Leie and Scheldt rivers from Picardy and Artois in northern France. The Italian cities obtained considerable grain from North Africa and especially Sicily and Corsica. The inland cities tried to make their rural environs into granaries for the city, a policy that was pursued most effectively in Italy, but which often depressed the rural economy artificially to provide the city with cheap grain. The larger cities forbade grain exports from their ‘country’ (contado*) and required the peasants to sell in the city, even at a loss. Virtually all Italian cities instituted grain offices during the thirteenth century, and the city governments worked with private companies to secure the grain supply.
The cities were characterized by a highly differentiated occupational structure and a diversity of demand. The larger cities had several markets, often distinguished from one another by the type of goods sold, but at least one of them would be open every day except for religious holidays. On market days the farmers from the environs and wandering pedlars would set up their stalls on the market, often prefabricated shacks carried on their backs. But in addition, considerable wholesale traffic came through merchant halls, most often grain and meat markets, that were established in the larger cities in the thirteenth century as control points, to ensure the proper accounting of imported raw materials and high quality for goods that were being exported from the city and would bear its seal of quality.
By the thirteenth century the bannal power of princes was even more important than earlier in fostering the growth of the major cities. England, which had a relatively undifferentiated economy and low level of urbanization, with much of the trade infrastructure in foreign hands, nonetheless posed fewer hindrances to commerce than any other region, with few of the internal tolls that still slowed trade elsewhere by raising transport costs. On the Continent, in contrast, princes still used the cities as centres of toll collection (see p. 79) and administration, but, more importantly, the cities’ size now made them vulnerable to outside pressure, and particularly to interruption in the supply of food and industrial raw materials.
Thus virtually all cities either obtained from their lords or simply asserted a monopoly or ‘staple’ privilege. This might be over a specific profitable trade, such as the control of Bordeaux over the wine trade of the Garonne valley. The grain staple of Ghent obliged farmers of the environs to sell on the central town market and required all shipments of grain that passed by river through the city to stop, be taxed and be offered for sale on the market before being re-exported. Other staples were a coastal-intermediary trade involving many items, such as the famous example of Bruges (see p. 90). These monopolies were obtained only after the city was already large, but they characteristically involved both necessities for the local demand market and also goods for re-export.
The thirteenth century witnessed the critical transition to the urban manufacture of fine items that became the basis of the cities’ export trades, as they gained access through the fairs and in some cases simply through pre-emptive buying to more distant sources of industrial raw materials. Urban manufacture was still directed towards princely courts, but now increasingly also to the urban wealthy. Occupations that were too esoteric to command a mass market, such as glassmaking and gold - and silversmithing, could survive in the cities because their products could be exported through the growing urban networks. Clothmaking became more highly specialized, in the case of luxury woollens involving the work of as many as twenty separate artisans.
Particularly in the larger cities, occupational guilds developed, initially as charitable fraternities, but during the thirteenth century many of them began regulating the technical specifications of the guild’s product, labour conditions and wages, the importation of raw materials, and often the distribution of goods as well. Growing demand for silk after 1250 was met largely from the Italian cities, particularly Lucca before the fourteenth century, although Florence, Genoa, Venice, and Milan also had silkmaking. A virtual industrial zone developed in Flanders and north-western France, where the labour-intensive manufacture of fine woollen cloth enticed workers into the cities and gave them a valuable capital resource through export.
While before 1180 only the most expensive grades of cloth could be sold profitably outside the region of manufacture, in the thirteenth century the regional and international fairs made it feasible to sell medium grades to a broader demand market. The finest cloth was Flemish, but some of it was made in imitation of English export textiles (for example, the estanfort, named after Stamford), which began to lose ground to the Flemish products only in the second half of the century. Languedoc, Catalonia, and Lombardy also produced fine grades. The Italian cities bought ‘undressed’ northern cloth at the fairs and finished it, then sold it in the Levant and Africa. Linen manufacture, which used a simpler technology than woollens, became largely rural, although large quantities were marketed through the towns, particularly in south Germany and Switzerland. As quality-control regulations for cloth became more exacting in the thirteenth century, some Flemish statutes required given grades of cloth to use imported English wools. Less attention was given in the statutes to the cheaper grades, which were more mass-marketed than the luxury products, and to mixed fabrics, such as fustians, a mixture of linen and cotton.37
A few statistics can give some idea of the volume of trade in industrial raw materials and manufactured goods. In the early fourteenth century the English exported 35,000-40,000 sacks of wool annually, for a total weight of fifteen million pounds, and 50,000 cloths (each 28 yards long). At its peak, the Flemish industry produced three times this much cloth. The number of lead seals used to certify cloth at the hall at Ypres rose from 10,500 in 1306 to 92,500 in 1313. According to the chronicler Giovanni Villani, Florence produced 100,000 pezze of woollen cloth in the early fourteenth century, worth 1,200,000 gold florins. The value of goods subject to toll at Genoa, both imports and exports, quadrupled in the two decades after 1274. Around 1280 Venice produced 60,000 pieces of cotton cloth from 140 tons of raw cotton.
Cloth, wool, and grain were not the only commodities that developed mass markets. Production and trade of metals increased, most obviously gold and silver but also utilitarian metals such as tin. A major expansion of iron-working occurred in the late thirteenth century, with Swedish osmund and Biscayan iron as the major items.38 Olive oil, beer, building materials, and fuel are also found in interregional trade in the late twelfth century with the development of larger boats. The wine and salt trades were highly lucrative. The distributive networks of wool and wine were mirror images of each other, as wool moved south and wine north, virtually all of both going through the towns. Until the late thirteenth century most Atlantic trade was in the wines of Gascony and Poitou to England and the Low Countries, iron from the bay of Biscay and salt from the bay of Bourgneuf in western France. Once the kings of England had lost control of Normandy, which gave access through Rouen to southern French wines, Bordeaux became the major depot of wine for England from the second quarter of the thirteenth century, so that English demand led to increased grape cultivation in the Garonne valley. The wine trade was perhaps the most lucrative of all from the perspective of profit generated per unit of production. Labour costs were lower than for grain and the final product less heavy, and the price of wine, which was also heavily taxed everywhere, was quite high. The Burgundy and Rhine wine trade routes were essentially riverine but some overland connections had to be made. In the early fourteenth century 80,000-100,000 tons of wine were brought north annually. Wine accounted for 31 per cent of the value of all goods imported into England and 25 per cent of those brought to the Low Countries: Bordeaux’s export peaked at 103,000 barrels in 1308-9. The wine ships also carried Mediterranean fruits, wood products, honey, and dyes northward.39
Improvements were also made in overland trade during this period. Roads were being paved, new bridges built, and older ones rebuilt in stone—for example, London Bridge. By the thirteenth century land routes were competing with rivers as arteries of commercial transportation. The four-wheeled cart was being used for hauling in the twelfth century but became dominant in the thirteenth. The construction of inland canals formed important commercial networks everywhere. Before 1200 Flanders was laced with canals that brought the major cities into contact with rural supplies and markets, and the commercial cities themselves were linked by canals by the midthirteenth century. Canals are particularly important for the development of Milan, which was between two river systems, the Ticino and Adda, but was never linked to the region’s main river, the Po. While princes tried to attract merchants to their domains, their goal was more to enhance their own revenues than to promote the economic well-being of their subjects. Thus tolls were a problem everywhere except in England.
Until the thirteenth century the only pass through the Alps that was open throughout the year was the Brenner, but before 1300 the passes of Mont-Cenis, Great St Bernard, and Mont-Genevre were discovered and began carrying substantial traffic (see Map 2). From there the great trade routes led up the Rhone valley, then overland to the Saone and Seine valleys, thence north through the toll at Bapaume to Artois and Flanders. The Champagne fairs were a short distance from Paris by land routes, canals, and the Aube. A major direct road ran from Bordeaux across Orleans to Paris and thence to Flanders. In the late thirteenth century direct seaborne traffic became more common from Germany and the East to Bruges and London, but most commerce on the east-west axis was still overland, from Flanders across Brabant to the Rhineland, thence down the Rhine and Danube, with a major overland route linking Frankfurt to the Danube valley. A trip between the Mediterranean coast and Paris required between twenty and twenty-four days in the thirteenth century, or half that time for a solitary person on horseback. The merchant caravans from Italy took about twenty days to reach the fairs of Champagne.40
Merchants travelling to the fairs or domiciled in a foreign city often made interurban arrangements for mutual protection, including several German towns that had sponsored colonization in the East. Lubeck, originally a Slavic settlement, was refounded after 1159 on the isthmus of Holstein. Its location made it the logical link between the North and Baltic Sea trades, and it quickly cut into the profitable trade of the island of Gotland with Russia. German merchants established resident offices in Novgorod and Bergen in Norway. The pace of trade grew so rapidly that a string of German towns was founded on the Baltic coast in the early thirteenth century. The leagues led by Lubeck, Hamburg, and Cologne combined into a single ‘German Hanse’ that is first mentioned in London in 1281; in 1282 the German merchants received a charter of privileges at Bruges, where they joined Italians and Castilians in maintaining resident colonies. The Hanse became the conduit for the raw materials of the East toward overpopulated Western Europe, handling the distribution of furs, fish, honey, and wax, and eventually grain from the East, and importing mainly English wool and Flemish cloth.
Further evidence that princes fostered only the trade that could benefit them financially is shown by their treatment of foreign merchants. In England King John (1199-1216) and particularly Henry III (1216-72) used economic warfare, taking reprisals against French and other merchants from unfriendly powers and trying to strike at the French by hitting their potential trading partners. Native merchandising was severely hindered in England by the reliance of the kings on foreign moneylenders, whose collateral on their loans (see p. 84) was commercial privileges that were not enjoyed by denizens. Wherever German or Italian extraterritorial colonies existed, they controlled the export trades and much of public finance of the areas where they resided. Foreign merchants were able to export wool from England at a lower customs rate than natives, probably because they paid so dearly for the privilege and were a vulnerable group. For most of the thirteenth century Italian merchants were not restricted to the ports and thus controlled much of the distributive trade in the English interior, at the fairs. In 1303 alien merchants were given the right to live in their own hostels and trade with other foreigners, rather than going through native brokers, and were permitted to sell spices and other merchandise retail.
World History
