Download PDF | McCormick, Michael_Pirenne, Henri - Medieval cities their origins and the revival of trade-Princeton Unversity Press (2014).
207 Pages
INTRODUCTION
Globalization has a deep history. The Belgian historian Henri Pirenne (1862-1935), educated in Belgium, Germany, and France, cast in the twentieth century a long shadow over medieval studies and the history of the European economy. Medieval Cities, originally published in 1925, resulted from lectures that the celebrated medievalist and German war detainee gave in leading American universities on both coasts and in between (Keymeulen and Tollebeek 2011, 76-84).
These lectures were an early synthesis of Pirenne’s broad vision of the end of the ancient world, the rise of medieval Europe, and the origins and enduring impact of medieval cities in creating Europe’s economy and its distinctive civilization. Against the prevailing wisdom of his time, Pirenne argued that the Roman economy and the civilization built on it survived the Germanic invasions. Even if, politically, the former Roman provinces came under the leadership of barbarian kings, they remained on the Roman gold standard and integrated into the longdistance Mediterranean trade that Pirenne viewed as the dynamic driver of economic development.
Pirenne argued that the ancient world really ended only when Islam violently shattered that Mediterranean’s unified economic structures in the seventh and eighth centuries. With Charlemagne, Europe set out around 800 on a new path oriented toward the North Atlantic. Real cities as centers of economic development would emerge again only in the eleventh century when the human movers and shakers of the renewed growth of international trade coalesced in favored places and came to govern themselves. These medieval merchants’ new towns would shape a commercially oriented economy, some of whose essential patterns proliferated across the globe and, indeed, persisted down to the last century.
As Peter Brown, one of the twentieth century’s leading exponents of late antiquity, has observed, Pirenne’s argument that the ancient world outlasted the barbarian invasions, created the intellectual space in which the new field of late antique studies could bloom. And this is but one of the creative results of Pirenne’s remarkable ceuvre. His publications contributed to almost every aspect of the discipline. Beyond bold works of synthesis and countless learned articles, he established the model for bibliographical handbooks of Belgian history and published a palaeographical guide to reading medieval legal documents.
Pirenne’s critical editions of Latin primary sources were exemplary for their time and range from a riveting eyewitness account of the crisis triggered by the murder of the Count of Flanders to volumes of Flemish textile industry records. His classroom teaching animated a school of disciples in Belgium and America, and the memorializing and debate about his life and work continue unabated (Duesberg 1938; Ganshof 1959; Lyon 1974, cf. E.A.R. Brown 1976; van Caenegem 1994; Simons 1997; Keymeulen 2011). His exquisite technical expertise served a distinguished historical imagination whose rigorous argument and limpid exposition illuminated the rise of Europe’s trading economy in the Middle Ages; the legal, social, and economic origins of medieval cities; the deep history of the principalities that would become the kingdom of Belgium; and the background of capitalism itself.!
A child of the Industrial Revolution and champion in war and peace of the newly created nation-state of Belgium, Pirenne hailed from well-to-do manufacturers in the east of the small country. He studied at the University of Liége but learned perhaps his most fecund lessons in Germany, particularly from the teaching of the economic historian Gustav von Schmoller (1838-1917; see Thoen and Vanhaute 2011) and his friendship with a creative pioneer in medieval economic history, Karl Lamprecht (1856-1915; see Warland 2011). Most of his academic career unfolded as a professor and post-war rector at the university founded in the nineteenth century in the proud medieval city of Ghent. A member of the French-speaking population whose elite then dominated the new kingdom, Pirenne rose to national and international fame for his conduct and internment during the terrible ordeal of World War I.
The conflict that raged back and forth across Flanders’ fields sharpened immense social and political stresses, particularly in Flanders, whose ancient and illustrious Germanic language—about half way, linguistically, between English and German—was egregiously looked down upon by most of the dominant French-speaking elite, and whose native speakers then suffered considerable linguistic and political discrimination. ‘Those political and social stresses, and the early successes of the Flemish Movement between the two world wars, are the context that led to Pirenne’s retirement from his position as professor of medieval history when his university became a Flemish-language institution in 1930. The man regarded as one of Europe’s foremost historians spent his last years in association with the Free University of Brussels, where his family has deposited his archives.
Pirenne’s posthumous reputation has taken somewhat different paths in North America and in his native Belgium. Although his work continues to be honored in both, Belgian historians have concentrated on the critical task of correcting the master’s detailed work and on probing the ideological content of his syntheses, particularly the History of Belgium, with its rather unitary vision of the past, present, and future of the southern Low Countries (Keymeulen and Tollebeek 2011, 108-11). Pirenne’s impact has been real but somewhat lighter in the German-speaking world.
In his synthetic thinking about the end of the ancient economy and the origins of the European economy, Pirenne drew advantage from the work of the distinguished Austrian economic historian, Alfons Dopsch (1868-1953), whose major monographs argued powerfully for the continuity of the underlying Kultur of Western Europe through and beyond the great migrations. Though both might agree on the persistence of the Roman economy after the invasions of the fourth and fifth century, Pirenne came to a dramatically different view of the novelty and, indeed, impoverishment of the Carolingian economy thanks to what he believed was its divorce from Mediterranean trade. Whatever the merits of Dopsch’s optimistic reading of the Carolingian evidence, his systematic formulation of the questions and evidence reverberated to the end of the twentieth century in German-language scholarship more strongly than Pirenne’s vision. That is clear from the subjects and organization of the mighty six-volume study of the early medieval economy published by the Academy of Sciences at Gottingen (K. Ditwel et al. 1985-1997).
Medieval Cities is the work of an eminent historian teaching in the Ghent built by the powerful counts, the wealthy abbeys, and, especially, the rising merchants and tradesmen of Flanders. The burgeoning towns of Flanders—in particular, Bruges, Ghent, and Ypres—and their textile trade had been at the forefront of European economic development starting in the eleventh century.
North of the Alps, they led the way toward the emergence of urban privilege, the rise of a new kind of civic consciousness, and new forms of economic organization and urban culture that, for the first time since the later Roman Empire, spawned a middle class between the early Middle Ages’ peasants and aristocrats. But Medieval Cities emerged from lectures in America, and was, in fact, first published in English. Even if the translation falls short of Pirenne’s vigorous and clear French, the book lays out, cogently and succinctly, some of his key ideas on the continuity of the Mediterranean economy in what we would call late antiquity and of the medieval origins of the cities of modern Europe.
In the next generation or two, many Belgian scholars critiqued and improved on Pirenne’s fundamental contributions to the history of the medieval Flemish towns and their economy. Under the influence of that other giant, the French medievalist and cofounder of the Annales school of social history Marc Bloch (1886-1944), medieval historians innovated by focusing increasingly on the countryside and the rural economy in which Pirenne’s urban centers were ensconced. ‘This was even so in Belgium, particularly in the work of the eminent scholars Adriaan Verhulst of Ghent and Léopold Genicot of Louvain (Leuven) and Louvain-la-Neuve.
The controversy about the ideas Pirenne presented in Medieval Cities and in his final, unfinished, and posthumously published work, Mohammad and Charlemagne, rose and fell in the decades following their publication. This aspect of Pirenne’s work is known to generations of North American college students and historians as the “Pirenne Thesis” (e.g., Havighurst 1976). A slew of monographs and articles sought to confirm or overturn Pirenne’s argument that the rise of Islam ended a unitary Mediterranean economy—and broader high culture—founded on Roman gold coinage and long-distance trade.
Pirenne had detected the end of that late antique Mediterranean economy from such little-noticed markers as the shift from imported Egyptian papyrus to presumably home-grown parchment in surviving royal charters of the kings of Merovingian Gaul; the fact that local cuisine used Far Eastern spices abundantly until sometime around 700; and that the Greek and Syrian merchant diaspora who dominated the trade of Gaul disappeared in the seventh century. Henceforth Europe was forced, according to Pirenne, to turn its back on the ancient Mediterranean world and to grow a new economy oriented and geared to the Atlantic. Charlemagne’s rural, aristocratic civilization emblematized this change.
Tiny towns existed merely as administrative centers for the church or as defensive strongholds. Only with the rebirth of trade in the eleventh century did towns reappear as economic entities. The new debate about the end of antiquity elicited distinguished responses that illuminated developments far beyond medieval Europe, as it drew in economic historians of the Muslim caliphate’s economy (e.g., Ashtor 1970, Cahen 1980) and as Byzantinists and others debated the continuity, changes, or even survival of ancient-style cities in Byzantium (Kazhdan 1954; Ostrogorsky 1959; Foss 1977; Lavan 2012) and in the Muslim Levant (Kennedy 1985; Avni 2011). With respect to Mediterranean trade in the early Middle Ages, Maurice Lombard (1904-1965) formulated stimulating, if unevenly documented arguments (1971, 134-8 and 214-16; 1972) that the burgeoning economy of the early Islamic world in fact traded significantly with the Carolingians.
By 1980, the debate slowed, for the controversy had reached a point of diminishing returns. There seemed to be no more written evidence to add to the debate, what was available could be interpreted in different ways, and the essential questions of the volume and value of trade movements appeared impenetrable. A Venetian ship sailing to the Holy Land ca. 800 was either an exceptional event without significance for the broader European trend, as Pirenne might have had it, or the tip of an unrecorded iceberg, in the vision of Lombard, for instance. By the former interpretation, it said nothing about a rebirth of commercial links between Europe and the Levant; by the latter, it exemplified that rebirth. Similarly it was hard to judge the broader development of the economy—the demographic trend, the agrarian matrix, and non-agrarian types of production—from the written sources alone. The conventional wisdom seemed to align with Georges Duby’s masterful summary (1968; originally published in 1961) of the underpopulated Carolingian rural economy as stagnant and underdeveloped, even though a few well-informed voices adduced scattered written indications of positive change in some areas of the countryside (Verhulst 1966; Toubert 1983; Devroey 1993). Many viewed the seventh and eighth centuries as a kind of huge economic depression; like Pirenne, they saw the demographic and economic turnaround as coming only toward the year 1000.
Then, from the 1980s on, unexpected new evidence began to shed light on the destiny of the ancient economy and the birth of the Middle Ages. Most came from the soil and the sea. Late antique and medieval archaeologists made rapid advances as modern Europe’s economic development led to intensified excavation. Better methods spread, new ceramic typologies refined the dating of finds, and a generation of researchers uncovered subtle but eloquent material traces of late Roman and post-Roman civilizations and economies. Archaeologists such as Richard Hodges and David Whitehouse (Hodges and Whitehouse 1983, carefully revised in 1996; Hodges 1989) dared to speak the language of historians, and historians began to read them. ‘The delicate remains of the organically-built early trading towns, or emporia, about whose archaeological investigation Pirenne had only the first inklings, have now emerged around Europe’s northern seas. The new little towns are more numerous and started earlier than might have been thought. These settlements’ primary vocation was manifestly commerce and craft production. And they have now begun to appear in the Mediterranean as well.
At the same time, surveys and excavations in the northwestern European countryside are uncovering considerable numbers of visibly multiplying and growing settlements, water mills, rural churches, and cemeteries, starting in the seventh or even late sixth centuries (see Loveluck 2013 for a major new synthesis). Numismatists established the detailed history of the coinage circulating in these landscapes, proving that the shift to silver from gold took place almost a century before Charlemagne was born, and they began reflecting on its economic significance (Grierson and Blackburn 1986; Lafaurie 1990; Metcalf 1996, 2006, 2007; Spufford 1988).
Focusing on communications coaxed more insights from neglected written sources, even from early medieval fiction. Instead of limiting their vision to the rare individuals explicitly identified as merchants, historians began counting travelers such as pilgrims, ambassadors, and slaves and reconstructing their trips across the Mediterranean (McCormick 2001) or detecting networks in the northern seas (Sindbek 2007).
None of these travelers built the ships on which they sailed, and so they allow us to glimpse hitherto invisible structures of communication and even commerce. Most recently, the sciences have begun to throw surprising light on ancient environments and economies, starting with the first reconstructions of aggregate metal production in the northern hemisphere from ancient pollution deposited in the glaciers of Greenland or the bogs of Switzerland (Hong et al. 1994 and 1996; Shotyk 1998). ‘They are illuminating the history of the imports of wares into Europe that can be recovered archaeologically. Pirenne’s head would probably spin, for instance, at scientific methods that now distinguish the garnets that were mined in India, Bohemia, or Portugal and imported to France to adorn Merovingian jewelry (Périn et al. 2007).
To give a thorough account of all the work that has followed in the path traced by Pirenne would require a volume much greater than this little one. The research is ongoing, and we are far from a definitive assessment. Yet the work of many historians, archaeologists, numismatists, and scientists makes a few things seem clear.
Pirenne was quite right that the ancient trading economy continued after the first invasions and the establishment of the mixed Romano-barbarian successor kingdoms. Some kind of connectivity by sea endured continuously, even if at very low levels (Horden and Purcell 2000). Burgeoning knowledge of amphoras, ancient ceramic shipping containers whose shape and fabric signal their place and time of origin, is shedding much light on shifting directions and volumes of exchange, even as molecular analysis has begun to identify their contents (Hansson and Foley 2008). Combined with the ceramic fine ware—table vessels—produced in a few major centers of late Roman industry and imported across the empire (Lewit 2011), the study of amphorae has clarified both the changing structures and diminishing volume of late antique maritime trade linking Gaul, Spain, and Italy to the southern and eastern Mediterranean (e.g., Tchernia 2011; Reynolds 2010).
Other work identifies the new Mediterranean pottery forms that succeeded those of antiquity (Vroom 2005) and so illuminates still-dark corners of the seventh, eighth, and ninth centuries. Within an overall framework of the continuity of goods moving across the sea, the quantities traded in the western Mediterranean diminish markedly in the course of the fifth and sixth centuries. The picture varies considerably from place to place and moment to moment, and there are significant complications to simply counting the indestructible amphorae, since perishable barrels competed with and sometimes outperformed them as early as the second or third century; compared to ceramic, wooden barrels rarely survive in the archaeological record (Marliére 2002; McCormick 2012, 74-76). With respect to northern Europe’s trade links to the Mediterranean, the role of Marseilles and the Rhone valley corridor it served seems to fade in the seventh century (Bonifay et al. 1998; McCormick 2001, 78-82). Ancient shipwrecks tell a similar story of contracting and restructuring trade movements (Parker 1992 and 2008; McCormick 2012). ‘The forces behind the shifting patterns of western, eastern, and southern Mediterranean supply, demand, and costs, and the structures that linked them, remain complex and controverted. But the tailing off of long-distance trade seems clear, even though its consequences and its causes—clearly connected with demand and also with the end of subsidized sea transport of food supplies for the capitals— remain under debate (Wickham 2005, 819-824; McCormick 1998).
Beyond the indubitable impact of the military and political triumph of Islam in the seventh and eighth centuries and its consequences for the disarray of the once mighty eastern Roman or Byzantine Empire, scholars are now exploring disease and environmental change as important components in the crisis and, ultimately, collapse of the ancient economy.
While many of the former northwestern provinces of the Roman Empire look, from today’s evidence, to have been nearing an economic free fall in the fifth century, things appear much brighter in the southern and eastern areas of the ancient empire. There, troubles would accumulate only in the sixth and, especially, the seventh centuries. They would be serious, even if their impact and duration in different regions remain complex and sometimes unclear. Of course, that very complication honors the achievements of archaeologists, whose development of new data initially has blurred the simpler picture deduced from fewer facts (see, e.g., Magness 2003; Walmsley 2007; Kytryn-Silverman 2012).
Among those troubles was the Justinianic pandemic. It comprised a fearsome series of epidemics that recurred some fifteen times across the Mediterranean and its hinterlands, penetrating all the way to Bavaria, as molecules preserved in its victims’ skeletons now indicate. Two centuries of terrible plagues began in 541 (Little 2007). Independently replicated molecular evidence is strengthening the case that the main pathogen was Yersinia pestis, bubonic plague, a disease of rodents (Harbeck et al. 2013). If it was anything like the medieval Black Death, now established to have been Y. pes‘is, the initial Justinianic outbreak may have killed between one third and two thirds of the population that it reached (Haensch et al. 2010; Bos et al. 2011). ‘This identification fits well with the early medieval eyewitnesses who tell us that the infection traveled far by sea, like the rats that harbored it (McCormick 1998, 52-65; 2003b). The great shipping arteries that had connected Roman markets now became pipelines pumping poison into the old empire’s ports. This surely hurt ancient shipping and the commerce it carried. The unfolding biomolecular archaeology of the pandemic’s victims should bring many new insights to this terrifying story.
The environment, too, was changing in the sixth century. Across the northern hemisphere, some kind of aerosol, possibly of volcanic origin, dimmed the sun for eighteen months starting in 536 (Gunn 2000; Larsen et al. 2008; Ferris et al. 2011). The diminished solar radiation caused severe cooling and may have been associated with precipitation shifts. Such conditions surely disrupted farming and stock-raising. Moreover the event in 536 was only one of a number of unfavorable climate developments in that period, when the Alps’ glaciers resumed their advance and drier conditions took hold in the precipitation-sensitive eastern provinces of the Roman Empire (McCormick et al. 2012; McCormick 2013).
Even if ships continued to deliver small quantities of rare goods, especially in Italy, the seventh and earlier eighth centuries mark a western nadir, as the old pattern of eastern ships carrying eastern goods to western ports approached the vanishing point, and the dynamic eastern economy struggled with plague, environmental setbacks, and unending war with the Persians and then the Muslims. By the later seventh century, only one main trunk route still linked northwestern Europe to the Middle East. It went down the Rhone, coasted from Marseilles toward Rome, reached around the Italian boot and over to Greece, and up into the Aegean heartland of Byzantium. Thence it continued along Asia Minor’s southern coast to the lands under Islamic dominion. Few people or wares would have been able to make this trip without changing ships multiple times. Direct links between North Africa or Alexandria and Western Europe were a thing of the past. The single route and scarce movements, mostly indirect, reflect the low level of communications and commerce between Europe and the Middle East (McCormick 2001, 101-114 and 502-508).
Economic trends may have varied in different regions of the Roman East. But there the prosperous-looking days of the fifth and early sixth centuries had given way to mounting economic difficulties in the mid- to late sixth century. The seventh century indubitably witnessed urban and rural change and even contraction in some eastern regions. Yet in some places, the turnaround came soon. Early Islamic archaeology is beginning to clarify the economic resurgence of the formerly Roman East, as the conquered provinces increasingly integrated into a dynamic new economic world centered on Syria and Iraq and spanning the globe from Spain to India. The coming decades should reveal more about this process of change, recovery, and renewal, which had begun by ca. 700 at the latest (Walmsley 2007; Avni 2011).
New evidence, mostly archaeological, also is accumulating for the first stages of an economic turnaround in northwestern Europe, where, as we have seen, some regions’ countrysides were growing more populated. Long before the eleventh century, in the seventh and, especially, the eighth century, small new towns emerged, all of them specializing in the long-distance trade so dear to Pirenne (see in general Gelichi and Hodges 2012): Dorestad (van Es 2009; Willemsen and Kik 2010) and now Quentovic (Lebecgq et al. 2010) in the Frankish kingdom; Hamwic, Ipswich, Lundenwic in England (e.g., Cowie 2001; Metcalf 2003); Haithabu (Danish “Hedeby”) (Schultze 2008; Dobat 2011) and Ribe in Jutland (Feveile 2006, 2012); Kaupang in Norway (Skre 2007); and Birka in Sweden (Ambrosiani 2013). Smaller centers engaged in monetary transactions also seem unmistakable (Metcalf 2003; Newman 2003; Palmer 2003). Most emporia show growth into the ninth century, when the Rhine had outstripped the Rhone as a major artery of north-south trade. At the southern end of this corridor, finds of Arab coins reinforce what the texts say about the early stages of Venice’s growing trade with the caliphate and the Carolingian Empire around 800 (McCormick 2001, 361-369 and 523-531). And in the last few years, another new Adriatic trading settlement has emerged from excavation at Comacchio. Here imports from the Aegean started arriving in the later seventh century (Gelichi 2006, 2009; Gelichi and Hodges 2012).
It is still early days in the archaeological discovery of these southern emporia, but what we see so far strengthens the historical and numismatic evidence that a new trading system sprang up around the Adriatic rim and gained speed in the later 700s. Although the volume may appear small compared to Rome’s Late Antique heyday, trade was growing, and it featured high value slaves, spices or drugs, fine textiles, weaponry, and precious metals, not all of which leave discernible traces in the archaeological record—at least so far. Western exports of slaves, furs, and weaponry were strong enough to foster the influx of Arab gold and silver into Carolingian Europe and its eastern Slav borderlands, along with expensive silks and spices (McCormick 2001, 696-728; 2003a). Under Charlemagne’s son Louis the Pious, Venice’s ambiguously liminal position between Byzantine and Frankish control even encouraged a doubly profitable way of buying western wares to export eastward. Nominally a part of the Byzantine Empire, the Venetians minted “Frankish” coins to pay their western suppliers for them. Lighter in weight and lower in silver content than the real Frankish coins, Venetian pennies increased profit margins beyond the additional money that minters traditionally made by issuing coins (Sarah et al. 2008). Venice surely plowed some profits from its Frankish and Muslim commerce back into financing its rise to Mediterranean dominance in which its more famous Byzantine trade would figure so prominently in the tenth century. Contrary to what Pirenne thought, this early Venetian trade was intimately linked to the Carolingian empire and the Slav lands: Venice sent these regions many of its imports, and from them it obtained most of its exports.
The new trading centers attracted pioneers whose backgrounds are obscure. But they certainly counted new men of murky social origin, such as those from Cremona who started trading goods from Comacchio on the Po River (McCormick 2001, 778-780). These people and others like them expanded or invented new trading networks that linked the resurgent rural economy of northwestern Europe with the economic powerhouse of the Islamic world. The emporia or their successor settlements would grow into the medieval cities whose rise Pirenne detected from the later evidence of the written archives.
In contrast to the solitary main trunk route that still showed life around 650, by the later ninth century, five or more routes, depending on how one counts them, connected Western Europe to the caliphate’s economy. Various links ran from Europe to the lively traffic that ran along the Mediterranean’s southern, Islamic rim. The Adriatic emerged as the central shipping axis between Europe and the eastern and southern Mediterranean, and overland corridors similarly revived across the Balkans and down the Danube. Ships never stopped sailing the old main trunk route. Remarkably, a new east-west route with no Roman precedent emerged far to the north. The Baltic trading emporia had initially connected only to the Atlantic emporia. Now their traders established a northern arc across Eastern Europe’s portage and river routes to Muslim Central Asia and Byzantium. On present coin evidence and archaeology, massive amounts of Arab silver began to reach Scandinavia in the second half of the ninth century, as the Scandinavian trading diaspora fomented new societies and hinterland networks along the way, most notably in early Rus’, at Staraya Ladoga, and Novgorod (Brisbane et al. 2013). By the second half of the ninth century, then, multiple routes or complexes of routes linked Western Europe to the rising world economy centered on Baghdad, and to a resurgent Byzantium. Trade coursed along all or parts of them in the hands of merchants, particularly Venetians, Frisians, Scandinavians, Franks, Anglo-Saxons, and Jews. The latter included the celebrated “Radanites,” whose Arabic description fits perfectly with what we can see of these routes and their commerce, and seems to capture the features of the handful of Jewish traders who are known by name from their association with the Frankish court (Ashtor 1977; McCormick 2001, 688-693).
So we now know that the ancient world’s end took much longer and came quite differently from what Pirenne imagined. The new beginning started earlier. The further implication is that the rise of medieval cities, and of Europe’s broader rural and trading economy, was longer, and therefore more complex and difficult than Pirenne and successive generations imagined. The western European economy quickened, slowed, and quickened again, possibly many times over, in these once dark centuries. If most of the early emporia that emerged in the seventh and the eighth centuries dwindled in significance toward 900, some found a nearby successor site more suited to tenth-century circumstances. A few, especially Venice and London, did not move at all. At the same time, other small sites, such as the garrisons that defended the waterways of the County of Flanders, fostered a permanent demand that the Carolingian traders’ successors could cater to (Verhulst 1989). Archaeological research is shedding new light on activities and on the sites of the new towns that so arrested Pirenne, and some of those activities look to antedate the earliest written records (see the multifarious studies assembled in Henning 2007; cf. Glaser et al. 1997). Even summarizing the enormous bibliography on the subsequent development of medieval towns (Ennen 1987 recapitulates the earlier advances) and merchants (Spufford 2003; Nightingale 1995) would reach well beyond the boundaries afforded here. But archaeology will clarify much in coming years about trade, town growth, and their relations with demographic and rural development from the later ninth and tenth century onward.
In the meantime, tenth-century Venice reoriented its trade toward Byzantium, and places like Amalfi and Genoa came to compete with it there and in the Islamic world. By the eleventh century, the rise to dominance of the Italian trading cities across the entire Mediterranean was already under way (Lane 1973; Abulafia 1977; Jacoby 1989, 1997, 2005; Epstein 1996; Laiou and Morrisson 2007). By the thirteenth century, that triumph was nearly complete, as Europe accomplished the grueling first stage in its climb to global trading hegemony.
This, then, is a provisional balance sheet on a great historical investigation. Research continues and delivers new insights into the questions and debates launched by the great Pirenne. Nowhere did he formulate his thought on these matters as concisely as in this little book that boldly charts how Europe began to build a trade-driven urban economy. Today’s scholars are relentlessly expanding our vision outward toward the far-flung connections of the ancient and medieval worlds.
In them they locate the long, slow, but sweeping construction of the global matrix that has given rise to the world in which we eat, think, trade, and live. Yet it is well on occasion to look back to the seminal scholarship that helped induce the new discoveries. As a distinguished historian and former student wrote of Pirenne some time ago, he belongs to that rare class of scholars whose works, even when they appear dated, still deliver precious insights to all thinking readers (Ganshof 1959, 722). Rereading Pirenne reminds us that globalization has a long and deep history indeed.
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