Important changes become apparent in the late thirteenth century that signal the late medieval economic crisis. Population had grown beyond the capacity of existing agricultural technology to feed it. The climate also began worsening at the turn of the fourteenth century, affecting food production. Population was declining in parts of Italy in the late thirteenth century, in the north shortly after 1300, particularly after the devastating famine of 1315 and the subsequent plagues. By
27 N. Fryde, Ein mittelalterlicher deutscher Grossunternehmer: Terricus Teutonicus de Colonia in England, 1217-1247 (Stuttgart, 1997).
1330 all parts of western Europe had substantially lower populations than in 1270.42
Signs of an overheated economy mounted. Interest rates at the Champagne fairs declined sharply after 1245. The large cities of Europe almost without exception experienced food shortages, which led in Italy to even stricter repression of the contado in order to extract more grain from the countryside. Violent conflicts after 1280 led to some broadening of the membership on town councils. By 1320 most city councils in the economically developed parts of Europe were chosen on the basis of guild affiliation; but, given that most nominally artisan guilds were dominated by merchants who furnished the raw materials of the trade to those who actually practised the craft, the result was something less than artisan control.
Some have seen yet another ‘commercial revolution’ in the late thirteenth century succeeding that of the late twelfth. There are two obvious signs. First, the mines whose opening had provided the liquidity for the great changes of the thirteenth century were becoming exhausted, and before 1320 a serious shortage of bullion was being felt in an economy that had become accustomed to a limitless supply of coin. Yet the trading structure that had developed in the thirteenth century was so strong, in the use of fiduciary money and negotiable instruments, that patterns of interregional trade were modified but not altered fundamentally. Trade became more reciprocal, particularly in the case of the Italians in England: prior to 1300 the English merchants had amounted to middlemen for the Italians, conveying their goods from the ports to and from the fairs in the interior, but by the middle of the fourteenth century most of the crucial wool export was in native English hands.
Secondly, regular voyages between the Mediterranean and the north began when the Genoese alum galleys began visiting the northern ports in 1277, returning with English wool. The ships used for Atlantic voyages could carry larger cargoes and move goods more cheaply than was possible in the overland trade leading to Champagne. The fairs accordingly declined, although not sharply, and they maintained their importance as banking centres until the 1320s. Granted that it required some years before this meant large-scale movement of goods, since only a few boats came per year, the Genoese were coming to Bruges and London almost annually by 1300. Over the long term goods that previously had been largely in inter-Mediterranean commerce now came to the north in profusion, leading to an elevation of the standard of living for those in the declining population who survived, particularly after the onset of the great plagues.
The Italians became more conspicuous at Southampton, but they docked by preference at Sluis, the outport of Bruges. Cloth production in both Ghent and Ypres declined sharply around 1320; evidently the major problem was the loss of the market of cheaper grades to Italians, who now had easier access to English wool. This led to the Flemings concentrating on luxury cloth thereafter. Furthermore, just when the Italians began visiting the north directly rather than dealing with Flemish merchants at the fairs, the merchants of the German Hanse set up resident offices at Bruges, which thus became the proverbial ‘marketplace of the medieval world’.29 With the nearly simultaneous establishment of Italian, German, and Castilian colonies at Bruges, the northern and southern economies were linked more commodiously than through the fairs.
In summary, during the central Middle Ages the production of agricultural surpluses, the expansion and intensification of settlement, the movement of Europeans outside the Roman and Germanic heartland, and a growing demand for luxuries by the ruling elites led to a hierarchically ordered market economy and the integration of Europe as an economic region. Western Europe produced far more food in 1330 than in 980, and the relative increase in commercial activity and industrial production was even greater. Fuelled by a quantum increase in the volume of coin in circulation, the development of new credit mechanisms and by increasing sophistication of transportation technology, an ‘infrastructure’ was born that gave birth to commercial capitalism, fixed the essential contours of the urban map of Europe and established the service or tertiary sector as a significant component of the production and exchange of goods.
29
R. Hapke, BrUgges Entwicklung zum mittelalterlichen Weltmarkt (Berlin, 1908).
World History
