The schepens who made up this court, with two or more burgomasters and a certain number of prominent citizens, organized as a council or vroedschap, carried on the affairs of the city, making its laws, exercising its jurisdiction, and administering its finances in almost entire independence of the central government. [Footnote: Fruin, Geschiedniss der Staatsinstellingen in Nederland,68, 69.] The representatives of the larger towns, along with the deputies of the nobles, also made up the states of Holland, any one city having the right of veto in any proposed national action. [Footnote: Davies, History of Holland, I, 85.] Outside of the towns the open country was either domains of the count, or fiefs held from him by church corporations or nobles. On the latter many old feudal powers survived through the sixteenth century. The nobles exercised always low and sometimes high jurisdiction, they taxed their own tenants, they carried on private war with other nobles, and they enjoyed an exemption from the payment of taxes. The feudal conditions in these rural domains and the highly developed internal organization of the cities seem at first glance diametrically opposed; but, after all, their relation to the central government was much the same, the city being treated as a fief held by its council; [Footnote: Jameson, in Magazine of Am. Hist., VIII., chap, i, 316.] and as a matter of fact it was these two institutions which were introduced into New Netherland. [Footnote: O'Callaghan, Documentary History of New York, I., 385-394.]
CHAPTER VII
THE SYSTEM OP CHARTERED COMMERCIAL COMPANIES
(1550-1700)
The priority of Portugal and Spain in distant adventure did not secure them from the competition of the other nations of Europe, whose awakening activity, ambition, and enterprise perceived clearly the advantages of the New World and of the new routes to the south and east. Almost within the first decade of the sixteenth century an Englishman cries out: "The Indies are discovered and vast treasures brought from thence every day. Let us, therefore, bend our endeavors thitherwards, and if the Spaniards or Portuguese suffer us not to join with them, there will be yet region enough for all to enjoy." [Footnote: Lord Herbert (1511), quoted in Macpherson, Annals of Commerce, II., 39.] Soon England, France, and the Netherlands were sending exploring and trading expeditions abroad, and somewhat later they all aimed at colonial empires comparable with that of Spain. These colonial settlements were chiefly made for commercial profit and depended closely on a new and peculiar type of commercial organization, the well-known chartered companies. It was these companies which established the greater number of American colonies, and the ideals, regulations, and administrative methods of corporate trading were interwoven into their political fabric.
Revolutions in commerce have been as frequent, as complete, and, in the long run, as influential as have been revolutions in political government. Europe in the fifteenth century had a clearly marked and well-established method of international commerce; yet before the sixteenth century was over a fundamentally different system grew up, which was destined not only to characterize trade during the next two hundred years, but, as has been said, to exercise a deep influence on the settlement and government of colonies in general and on the policy of their home governments.
A complete contrast exists between international trade in 1400 and 1600. The type of commerce characteristic of the earlier period was carried on by individual merchants; that belonging to the later period by joint-stock companies. Under the former, merchants depended on municipal support and encouragement; under the latter they acted under charters received from national governments. The individual merchants of the earlier period had only trading privileges; the organized companies of the later time had political powers also. In the fifteenth century the merchants from any one city or group of cities occupied a building, a quarter, or fondaco, in each of the foreign cities with which they traded; in the seventeenth they more usually possessed independent colonies or fortified establishments of their own on the coasts of foreign countries. In the earlier period trading operations were restricted to Europe; in the later they extended over the whole world.
The essential elements of the organization of trade at the period chosen for this description are its individual character, its restriction to well-marked European limits, and its foundation upon concessions obtained by town governments.
At the beginning of the fifteenth century there were five principal groups of trading cities, whose merchants carried on probably nine- tenths of the commerce of Europe. These groups were situated: (1) in northern Italy; (2) in southern France and Catalonia; (3) in southern Germany; (4) in northern France and Flanders; (5) in northern Germany. Two of them were in the south of Europe, and found their most considerable function in transmitting goods between the Levant and Europe; the Hanse towns of northern Germany, at the other extremity of Europe, carried the productions of the Baltic lands to the centre and south; the Flemish and south German groups, intermediate between the two, exchanged among themselves and transmitted goods from one part of Europe to another. There were of course, vast differences of organization among the trading towns. Venice and Cologne, Barcelona and Augsburg, Bruges and Lubeck were too far separated in distance, nationality, the nature of their trade, and the degree of their development to have the same institutions. And yet there were many similarities.
The city authorities obtained for their citizens the privileges of buying and selling within certain districts and under certain restrictions, and very frequently of having their own warehouses, dwelling houses, and selling-places. Examples are to be found in the fondachi of Venice, Genoa, and other Italian, French, and Catalan cities, established in the Greek and Mohammedan districts of the eastern Mediterranean, on the basis of grants given by the rulers of those lands and cities. Just as characteristic examples can be found in western Europe; in London the "Steelyard" was a group of warehouses, offices, dwellings, and court-yards owned jointly by the towns of the Hanseatic League, and occupied by merchants from those towns who came to England to trade under the concessions granted them by the English government. [Footnote: Lappenberg, Geschichte des Hansischen Stahlhofes zu London.] The south Germans had their fondaco dei Tedeschi in Venice, and the north Germans their "St. Peter's Yard" in Novgorod. The Venetian merchants trading to the city of Bruges usually met for mercantile purposes in the house of a Flemish family named Van de Burse, a name which is said to have given the word "bourse" to the languages of modern Europe. [Footnote: Mayr, in Helmolt, History of the World, VII., 81.]