In order to establish the validity of these generalizations it is of course needful to control them by the observation of facts, and the longer the period of time covered the more convincing will the observations be. The economic history of antiquity is still too little known, and its relations to the ages which follow have escaped us too completely, for us to take our point of departure there; but the beginning of the Middle Ages gives us access to a body of material sufficient for our purpose.
But first of all, it is needful to meet a serious objection. If it is in fact true, as seems to be usually conceded since the appearance of Bücher's brilliant Entstehung der Volkswirtschaft[2]—to say nothing here of the thesis since formulated with such extreme radicalism by W. Sombart[3]—that the economic organisation of the Middle Ages has no aspect to which one can rightly apply the term capitalistic, then our thesis is limited wholly to modern times and there can be no thought of introducing into the discussion the centuries preceding the Renaissance. But whatever may be the favor which it still enjoys, the theory which refuses to perceive in the medieval urban economy the least trace of capitalism has found in recent times ever increasing opposition. I will not even enumerate here the studies which seem to me to have in an incontrovertible manner established the fact that all the essential features of capitalism—individual enterprise, advances on credit, commercial profits, speculation, etc.—are to be found from the twelfth century on, in the city republics of Italy—Venice,[4] Genoa,[5] or Florence.[6] I shall not ask what one can call such a navigator as Romano Mairano (1152-1201), if, in spite of the hundreds of thousands of francs he employed in business, the fifty per cent. profits he realized on his operations in coasting trade, and his final failure, one persists in refusing to him the name of capitalist. I shall pass over the disproof of the alleged ignorance of the medieval merchants. I shall say nothing of the astonishing errors committed in the calculations, so confidently offered to us as furnishing mathematical proof of the naïveté of historians who can believe the commerce of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries to have been anything more than that of simple peddlers, a sort of artisans incapable of rising even to the idea of profit, and having no views beyond the day's livelihood.[7] Important as all this may be, the weak point in the theory which I am here opposing seems to me to lie especially in a question of method. Bücher and his partizans, in my opinion, have, without sufficient care, used for their picture of the city economy of the Middle Ages the characteristics of the German towns and more particularly the German towns of the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Now the great majority of the German towns of that period were far from having attained the degree of development which had been reached by the great communes of northern Italy, of Tuscany, or of the Low Countries. Instead of presenting the classical type of urban economy, they are merely examples of it incompletely developed; they present only certain manifestations; they lack others, and particularly those which belong to the domain of capitalism. Therefore in presenting as true of all the cities of the Middle Ages a theory which rests only on the observation of certain of them, and those the least advanced, one is necessarily doing violence to reality. Bücher's description of Stadtwirtschaft remains a masterpiece of penetration and economic understanding. But it is too restricted. It does not take account of certain elements of the problem, because these elements were not encountered in the narrow circle which the research covered. One may be confident that if, instead of proceeding from the analysis of such towns as Frankfort, this study had considered Florence, Genoa, and Venice, or even Ghent, Bruges, Ypres, Douai, or Tournai, the picture which it furnished us would have been very different. Instead of refusing to see capitalism of any kind in the economic life of the bourgeoisie, the author would have recognized, on the contrary, unmistakable evidences of capitalism. I shall later have occasion to return to this very essential question. But it was indispensable to indicate here the position which I shall take in regard to it.
Of course I do not at all intend to reject en bloc the ideas generally agreed upon concerning the urban economy of the Middle Ages. On the contrary, I believe them to be entirely accurate in their essential elements, and I am persuaded that, in a very large number of cases, I will even say, if you like, in the majority of cases, they provide us with a theory which is completely satisfactory. I am very far from maintaining that capitalism exercised a preponderant influence on the character of economic organization from the twelfth to the fifteenth centuries. I believe that, though it is not right to call this organization "acapitalistic", it is on the other hand correct to consider it "anticapitalistic". But to affirm this is to affirm the existence of capital. That organization recognized the existence of capital since it tried to defend itself against it, since, from the end of the thirteenth century onward, it took more and more measures to escape from its abuses. It is incontestable that, from this period on, it succeeded by legal force in diminishing the rôle which capitalism had played up to that time. In fact it is certain, and we shall have occasion to observe it, that the power of capital was much greater during the first part of the urban period of the Middle Ages than during the second. But even in the course of the latter period, if municipal legislation seems more or less completely to have shut it out from local markets, capital succeeded in preserving and in dominating a very considerable portion of economic activity. It is capital which rules in inter-local commerce, which determines the forms of credit, and which, fastening itself on all the industries which produce not for the city market but for exportation, hinders them from being controlled, as the others are, by the minute regulations which in innumerable ways cramp the activity of the craftsmen.[8]
Let us recognize, then, that capitalism is much older than we have ordinarily thought it. No doubt its operation in modern times has been much more engrossing than in the Middle Ages. But that is only a difference of quantity, not a difference of quality, a simple difference of intensity not a difference of nature. Therefore, we are justified in setting the question we set at the beginning. We can, without fear of pursuing a vain shadow, endeavor to discern what throughout history have been the successive stages in the social evolution of capitalism.
Of the period which preceded the formation of towns, that is, of the period preceding the middle of the eleventh century, we know too little to permit ourselves to tarry there. What may still have survived in Italy and in Gaul of the economic system of the Romans has disappeared before the beginning of the eighth century. Civilization has become strictly agricultural and the domain system has impressed its form upon it. The land, concentrated in large holdings in the hands of a powerful landed aristocracy, barely produces what is necessary for the proprietor and his familia. Its harvests do not form material for commerce. If during years of exceptional abundance the surplus is transported to districts where scarcity prevails, that is all. In addition certain commodities of ordinary quick consumption, and which nature has distributed unequally over the soil, such as wine or salt, sustain a sort of traffic. Finally, but more rarely, products manufactured by the rural industry of countries abounding in raw materials, such as, to cite only one, the friezes woven by the peasants of Flanders, maintain a feeble exportation. Of the condition of the negociatores who served as the instruments of these exchanges, we know almost nothing. Many of them were unquestionably merchants of occasion, men without a country, ready to seize on any means of existence that came their way. Pursuers of adventure were frequent among these roving creatures, half traders, half pirates, not unlike the Arab merchants who even to our day have searched for and frequently have found fortunes amid the negro populations of Africa. At least, to read the history of that Samo who at the beginning of the eighth century, arriving at the head of a band of adventuring merchants among the Wends of the Elbe, ended by becoming their king, makes one think involuntarily of certain of those beys or sheiks encountered by voyagers to the Congo or the Katanga.[9] Clearly no one will try to find in this strong and fortunate bandit an ancestor of the capitalists of the future. Commerce, as he understood and practised it, blended with plunder, and if he loved gain it was not in the manner of a man of affairs but rather in that of a primitive conqueror with whom violence of appetite took the place of calculation. Samo was evidently an exception. But the spirit which inspired him may have inspired a goodly number of negociatores who launched their barks on the streams of the ninth century. In the society of this period only the possession of land or attachment to the following of a great man could give one a normal position. Men not so provided were outside the regular classification, forming a confused mass, in which were promiscuously mingled professional beggars, mercenaries in search of employment, masters of barges or drivers of wagons, peddlers, traders, all jostling in the same sort of hazardous and precarious life, and all no doubt passing easily from one employment to another. This is not to say, however, that among the negociatores of the Frankish epoch there were not also individuals whose situation was more stable and whose means of existence were less open to suspicion. Indeed, we know that the great proprietors, lay or ecclesiastical, employed certain of their serfs or of their ministeriales in a sporadic commerce of which we have already mentioned above the principal features. They commissioned them to buy at neighboring markets the necessary commodities or to transport to places of sale the occasional surplus of their grain or their wine. Here too we discover no trace of capitalism. We merely find ourselves in the presence of hereditary servants performing gratuitous service, entirely analogous to military service.
Nevertheless commercial intercourse produced even then, in certain places particularly favored by their geographic situation, groups of some importance. We find them along the sea-coast—Marseilles, Rouen, Quentovic—or on the banks of the rivers, especially in those places where a Roman road crosses the stream, as at Maastricht on the Meuse or at Valenciennes on the Scheldt. We are to think of these portus as wharves for merchandise and as winter quarters for boats and boatmen. They differ very distinctly from the towns of the following period. No walls surround them; the buildings which are springing up seem to be scarcely more than wooden sheds, and the population which is found there is a floating population, destitute of all privileges and forming a striking contrast to the bourgeoisie of the future. No organization seems to have bound together the adventurers and the voyagers of these portus. Doubtless it is possible, it is even probable, that a certain number of individuals, profiting by circumstance, may have little by little devoted themselves to trade in a regular fashion and have begun by the ninth century to form the nucleus of a group of professional traders. But we have too little information to enable us to speak with any precision.
The operations of credit follow much the same course. We cannot doubt that loans had been employed in the Carolingian period, and the Church as well as the State had occupied itself in combating their abuses.[10] But it would be a manifest exaggeration to deduce from this the existence of even a rudimentary capitalistic economy. Everything indicates that the loans which we are considering here were only occasional loans, of usurious nature, to which people who had met with some catastrophe, such as war, a fire, or a poor harvest, were forced to have recourse temporarily.
Thus, the early centuries of the Middle Ages seem to have been completely ignorant of the power of capital. They abound in wealthy landed proprietors, in rich monasteries, and we come upon hundreds of sanctuaries the treasure of which, supplied by the generosity of the nobles or the offerings of the faithful, crowds the altar with ornaments of gold or of solid silver. A considerable fortune is accumulated in the Church, but it is an idle fortune. The revenues which the landowners collect from their serfs or from their tenants are directed toward no economic purpose. They are scattered in alms, in the building of monuments, in the purchase of works of art, or of precious objects which should serve to increase the splendor of religious ceremonies. Wealth, capital, if one may so term it, is fixed motionless in the hands of an aristocracy, priestly or military. This is the essential condition of the patronage that this aristocracy (majores et divites) exercises over the people (pauperes). Its action is as important from the social point of view as it is unimportant from that of economics. No part of it is directed toward the negociatores, who, left to themselves, live, so to speak, on the fringe of society. And so it will continue to be, for long centuries.
Landed property, indeed, did not contribute at all to that awakening of commercial activity which, after the disasters of the Norman invasion in the North and the Saracen raids on the shores of the Mediterranean, began to manifest itself toward the end of the tenth century and the beginning of the eleventh. Its preliminary manifestations are found at the two extremities of the Continent, Italy and the Low Countries. The interior seas, between which Europe was restricted in her advance toward the Atlantic, were its first centres of activity. Venice, then Genoa and Pisa, venture on the coasting trade along their shores, and then maintain, with their rich neighbors of Byzantium or of the Mohammedan countries, a traffic which henceforward constantly increases. Meanwhile Bruges at the head of the estuary of the Zwyn, becomes the centre of a navigation radiating toward England, the shores of North Germany, and the Scandinavian regions. Thus, economic life, as in the beginning of Hellenic times, first becomes active along the coasts. But soon it penetrates into the interior of the country. Step by step it wins its way along the rivers and the natural routes. On this side and on that, it arouses the hinterland into which the harbors cut their indentations. In this process of growth the two movements finally meet, and bring into communication the people of the North and the people of the South. By the beginning of the twelfth century it is an accomplished fact. In 1127 Lombard merchants, journeying by the long route which descends from the passes of the Alps toward Champagne and the Low Countries, reach the fairs of Flanders.
If the feeble and precarious commercial activity of the Carolingian period was sufficient to create gathering-places of merchants at the points most frequented in travel, it is not difficult to understand that the steady progress of economic activity from the end of the tenth century would result in the formation, at the strategic points of regional transit, of aggregations of like character but much more important and more stable. The surface of the land, the direction and the depth of the streams, determining the routes of commerce, also determined the location of the towns. Indeed, European cities are the daughters of commerce and of industry. Unquestionably in the countries of old civilization, in Italy or in Gaul, the Roman cities had not completely disappeared. Within the circle of their walls, which had now become too large and were filled with ruins, there gathered, around the bishop resident in each of them, a whole population of clerics and monks, and beside them a lay population employed in their service or support. In the North, one found the same spectacle at the centres of the new dioceses, at Thérouanne, at Utrecht, at Magdeburg, or at Vienna. But here was no trace, properly speaking, of municipal life. A certain number of artisans, some of them serfs, a little weekly market for the most indispensable commodities, sometimes a fair visited by the merchant-adventurers of whom we have spoken above—this is the sum total of economic life.