TRADE PRIOR TO THE COMMERCIAL REVOLUTION
Just as agriculture is the ultimate basis of human society, so town- life has always been an index of culture and civilization. And the fortunes of town-life have ever depended upon the vicissitudes of trade and commerce. So the reviving commerce of the later middle ages between Europe and the East meant the growth of cities and betokened an advance in civilization.
[Sidenote: Revival of Trade with the East]
Trade between Europe and Asia, which had been a feature of the antique world of Greeks and Romans, had been very nearly destroyed by the barbarian invasions of the fifth century and by subsequent conflicts between Mohammedans and Christians, so that during several centuries the old trade-routes were traveled only by a few Jews and with the Syrians. In the tenth century, however, a group of towns in southern Italy—Brindisi, Bari, Taranto, and Amalfi—began to send ships to the eastern Mediterranean and were soon imitated by Venice and later by Genoa and Pisa.
This revival of intercourse between the East and the West was well under way before the first Crusade, but the Crusades (1095-1270) hastened the process. Venice, Genoa, and Pisa, on account of their convenient location, were called upon to furnish the crusaders with transportation and provisions, and their shrewd Italian citizens made certain that such services were well rewarded. Italian ships, plying to and from the Holy Land, gradually enriched their owners. Many Italian cities profited, but Venice secured the major share. It was during the Crusades that Venice gained numerous coastal districts and islands in the Ægean besides immunities and privileges in Constantinople, and thereby laid the foundation of her maritime empire.
The Crusades not only enabled Italian merchants to bring Eastern commodities to the West; they increased the demand for such commodities. Crusaders—pilgrims and adventurers—returned from the Holy Land with astonishing tales of the luxury and opulence of the East. Not infrequently they had acquired a taste for Eastern silks or spices during their stay in Asia Minor or Palestine; or they brought curious jewels stripped from fallen infidels to awaken the envy of the stay-at-homes. Wealth was rapidly increasing in Europe at this time, and the many well-to-do people who were eager to affect magnificence provided a ready market for the wares imported by Italian merchants.
[Sidenote: Commodities of Eastern Trade]
It is desirable to note just what were these wares and why they were demanded so insistently. First were spices, far more important then than now. The diet of those times was simple and monotonous without our variety of vegetables and sauces and sweets, and the meat, if fresh, was likely to be tough in fiber and strong in flavor. Spices were the very thing to add zest to such a diet, and without them the epicure of the sixteenth century would have been truly miserable. Ale and wine, as well as meats, were spiced, and pepper was eaten separately as a delicacy. No wonder that, although the rich alone could buy it, the Venetians were able annually to dispose of 420,000 pounds of pepper, which they purchased from the sultan of Egypt, to whom it was brought, after a hazardous journey, from the pepper vines of Ceylon, Sumatra, or western India. From the same regions came cinnamon-bark; ginger was a product of Arabia, India, and China; and nutmegs, cloves, and allspice grew only in the far-off Spice Islands of the Malay Archipelago.
Precious stones were then, as always, in demand for personal adornment as well as for the decoration of shrines and ecclesiastical vestments; and in the middle ages they were thought by many to possess magical qualities which rendered them doubly valuable. [Footnote: Medieval literature is full of this idea. Thus we read in the book of travel which has borne the name of Sir John Maundeville: "And if you wish to know the virtues of the diamond, I shall tell you, as they that are beyond the seas say and affirm, from whom all science and philosophy comes. He who carries the diamond upon him, it gives him hardiness and manhood, and it keeps the limbs of his body whole. It gives him victory over his enemies, in court and in war, if his cause be just; and it keeps him that bears it in good wit; and it keeps him from strife and riot, from sorrows and enchantments, and from fantasies and illusions of wicked spirits. … [It] heals him that is lunatic, and those whom the fiend torments or pursues.">[ The supply of diamonds, rubies, pearls, and other precious stones was then almost exclusively from Persia, India, and Ceylon.
Other miscellaneous products of the East were in great demand for various purposes: camphor and cubebs from Sumatra and Borneo; musk from China; cane-sugar from Arabia and Persia; indigo, sandal-wood, and aloes-wood from India; and alum from Asia Minor.
The East was not only a treasure-house of spices, jewels, valuable goods, and medicaments, but a factory of marvelously delicate goods and wares which the West could not rival—glass, porcelain, silks, satins, rugs, tapestries, and metal-work. The tradition of Asiatic supremacy in these manufactures has been preserved to our own day in such familiar names as damask linen, china-ware, japanned ware, Persian rugs, and cashmere shawls.
In exchange for the manifold products of the East, Europe had only rough woolen cloth, arsenic, antimony, quicksilver, tin, copper, lead, and coral to give; and a balance, therefore, always existed for the European merchant to pay in gold and silver, with the result that gold and silver coins grew scarce in the West. It is hard to say what would have happened had not a new supply of the precious metals been discovered in America. But we are anticipating our story.
[Sidenote: Oriental Trade-Routes]
Nature has rendered intercourse between Europe and Asia exceedingly difficult by reason of a vast stretch of almost impassable waste, extending from the bleak plains on either side of the Ural hills down across the steppes of Turkestan and the desert of Arabia to the great sandy Sahara. Through the few gaps in this desert barrier have led from early times the avenues of trade. In the fifteenth century three main trade-routes—a central, a southern, and a northern—precariously linked the two continents.
(1) The central trade-route utilized the valley of the Tigris River. Goods from China, from the Spice Islands, and from India were brought by odd native craft from point to point along the coast to Ormuz, an important city at the mouth of the Persian Gulf, thence to the mouth of the Tigris, and up the valley to Bagdad. From Bagdad caravans journeyed either to Aleppo and Antioch on the northeastern corner of the Mediterranean, or across the desert to Damascus and the ports on the Syrian coast. Occasionally caravans detoured southward to Cairo and Alexandria in Egypt. Whether at Antioch, Jaffa, or Alexandria, the caravans met the masters of Venetian ships ready to carry the cargo to Europe.
(2) The southern route was by the Red Sea. Arabs sailed their ships from India and the Far East across the Indian Ocean and into the Red Sea, whence they transferred their cargoes to caravans which completed the trip to Cairo and Alexandria. By taking advantage of monsoons,—the favorable winds which blew steadily in certain seasons,—the skipper of a merchant vessel could make the voyage from India to Egypt in somewhat less than three months. It was often possible to shorten the time by landing the cargoes at Ormuz and thence dispatching them by caravan across the desert of Arabia to Mecca, and so to the Red Sea, but caravan travel was sometimes slower and always more hazardous than sailing.
(3) The so-called "northern route" was rather a system of routes leading in general from the "back doors" of India and China to the Black Sea. Caravans from India and China met at Samarkand and Bokhara, two famous cities on the western slope of the Tian-Shan Mountains. West of Bokhara the route branched out. Some caravans went north of the Caspian, through Russia to Novgorod and the Baltic. Other caravans passed through Astrakhan, at the mouth of the Volga River, and terminated in ports on the Sea of Azov. Still others skirted the shore of the Caspian Sea, passing through Tabriz and Armenia to Trebizond on the Black Sea.
The transportation of goods from the Black Sea and eastern Mediterranean was largely in the hands of the Italian cities,[Footnote: In general, the journey from the Far East to the ports on the Black Sea and the eastern Mediterranean was performed by Arabs, although some of the more enterprising Italians pushed on from the European settlements, or fondachi, in ports like Cairo and Trebizond, and established fondachi in the inland cities of Asia Minor, Persia, and Russia.] especially Venice, Genoa, Pisa, and Florence, although Marseilles and Barcelona had a small share. From Italy trade-routes led through the passes of the Alps to all parts of Europe. German merchants from Nuremberg, Augsburg, Ulm, Regensburg, and Constance purchased Eastern commodities in the markets of Venice, and sent them back to the Germanies, to England, and to the Scandinavian countries. After the lapse of many months, and even years, since the time when spices had been packed first in the distant Moluccas, they would be exposed finally for sale at the European fairs or markets to which thousands of countryfolk resorted. There a nobleman's steward could lay in a year's supply of condiments, or a peddler could fill his pack with silks and ornaments to delight the eyes of the ladies in many a lonesome castle.
[Sidenote: Difficulties of European Commerce]
Within Europe commerce gradually extended its scope in spite of the almost insuperable difficulties. The roads were still so miserable that wares had to be carried on pack-horses instead of in wagons. Frequently the merchant had to risk spoiling his bales of silk in fording a stream, for bridges were few and usually in urgent need of repair. Travel not only was fraught with hardship; it was expensive. Feudal lords exacted heavy tolls from travelers on road, bridge, or river. Between Mainz and Cologne, on the Rhine, toll was levied in thirteen different places. The construction of shorter and better highways was blocked often by nobles who feared to lose their toll-rights on the old roads. So heavy was the burden of tolls on commerce that transportation from Nantes to Orleans, a short distance up the River Loire, doubled the price of goods. Besides the tolls, one had to pay for local market privileges; towns exacted taxes on imports; and the merchant in a strange city or village often found himself seriously handicapped by regulations against "foreigners," and by unfamiliar weights, measures, and coinage.
Most dreaded of all, however, and most injurious to trade were the robbers who infested the roads. Needy knights did not scruple to turn highwaymen. Cautious travelers carried arms and journeyed in bands, but even they were not wholly safe from the dashing "gentlemen of the road." On the seas there was still greater danger from pirates. Fleets of merchantmen, despite the fact that they were accompanied usually by a vessel of war, often were assailed by corsairs, defeated, robbed, and sold as prizes to the Mohammedans. The black flag of piracy flew over whole fleets in the Baltic and in the Mediterranean. The amateur pirate, if less formidable, was no less common, for many a vessel carrying brass cannon, ostensibly for protection, found it convenient to use them to attack foreign craft and more frequently "took" a cargo than purchased one.
[Sidenote: Venice]
These dangers and difficulties of commercial intercourse were due chiefly to the lack of any strong power to punish pirates or highwaymen, to maintain roads, or to check the exactions of toll- collectors. Each city attempted to protect its own commerce. A great city-state like Venice was well able to send out her galleys against Mediterranean pirates, to wage war against the rival city of Genoa, to make treaties with Oriental potentates, and to build up a maritime empire. Smaller towns were helpless. But what, as in the case of the German towns, they could not do alone, was partially achieved by combination.
[Sidenote: The Hanseatic League. Towns in the Netherlands: Bruges]
The Hanse or the Hanseatic League, as the confederation of Cologne, Brunswick, Hamburg, Lübeck, Dantzig, Königsberg, and other German cities was called, waged war against the Baltic pirates, maintained its trade-routes, and negotiated with monarchs and municipalities in order to obtain exceptional privileges. From their Baltic stations,— Novgorod, Stockholm, Königsberg, etc.,—the Hanseatic merchants brought amber, wax, fish, furs, timber, and tar to sell in the markets of Bruges, London, and Venice; they returned with wheat, wine, salt, metals, cloth, and beer for their Scandinavian and Russian customers. The German trading post at Venice received metals, furs, leather goods, and woolen cloth from the North, and sent back spices, silks, and other commodities of the East, together with glassware, fine textiles, weapons, and paper of Venetian manufacture. Baltic and Venetian trade- routes crossed in the Netherlands, and during the fourteenth century Bruges became the trade-metropolis of western Europe, where met the raw wool from England and Spain, the manufactured woolen cloth of Flanders, clarets from France, sherry and port wines from the Iberian peninsula, pitch from Sweden, tallow from Norway, grain from France and Germany, and English tin, not to mention Eastern luxuries, Venetian manufactures, and the cunning carved-work of south-German artificers.