Download PDF | [Cambridge Medieval Textbooks] Edwin S. Hunt, James Murray - A History of Business in Medieval Europe, 1200-1550, Cambridge University Press, 1999.
289 Pages
A History of Business in Medieval Europe, demolishes the widely held view that the phrase “medieval business” is an oxymoron. The authors review the entire range of business in medieval western Europe, probing its Roman and Christian heritage to discover the economic and political forces that shaped the organization of agriculture, manufacturing, construction, mining, transportation, and marketing. Then they deal with the responses of businessmen to the devastating plagues, famines, and warfare that beset Europe in the late Middle Ages.
The remarkable success in coping with this hostile new environment was “a harvest of adversity” that prepared the way for the economic expansion of the sixteenth century. Two main themes run through the book. First, the force and direction of business development in this period stemmed primarily from the demands of the elite. Second, the lasting legacy of medieval businessmen was less their skillful adaptations of imported inventions than their brilliant innovations in business organization.
Edwin S. Hunt is a retired businessman and former adjunct professor of history at the University of Cincinnati. He is the author of The Medieval Super-companies. James M. Murray is Associate Professor of History at the University of Cincinnati. He is the author of Notarial Instruments in Flanders.
INTRODUCTION
Definitions are the first order of business for any book, particularly one whose title contains such slippery terms as “business” and “Europe.” A second order is to forewarn the reader that there are two distinct divisions that must be recognized in this history, one geographical and the other temporal. And the third is to emphasize that this is a business history, not an economic history. In this book, business will be dealt with in its broadest sense, that is, any activity involving exchange between two or more parties – in country or town, and on a local, regional, or international scale. Our coverage will therefore range from the organization of small artisanal workshops to the operations of large international manufacturers and marketers.
And it will deal extensively with the vital role in business of medieval governments of all sorts. The Europe whose business we will be examining is somewhat more restricted in scope, being limited to those territories contemporaries called Western Christendom, including the Iberian peninsula as it became Christianized. Stated another way, we will be looking at what is commonly known as western Europe, plus Poland and Hungary. We will, however, also be discussing the activities of European businessmen wherever they took place, especially in North Africa and the Near East. The geographic division is necessary in order to recognize the significant differences between northern and southern Europe in the evolution of business practice. First, what we will be calling “north” or “northwest” will include the British Isles, Scandinavia, the Low Countries, Germany, and north and central France. The “south” will consist of Italy, Iberia, and southern France.
Poland, Bohemia, Hungary, and Switzerland do not fall into either of these categories and will always be cited specifically. In broad terms, the south was more sophisticated and innovative than the north with regard to corporate organization, financial devices, and accounting techniques for most of our period. But there were also numerous differences within each of these regions, so that it is misleadingly simplistic to lump all the south and all the north into single units of analysis. To be sure, it can be said that the evolution of banking and accounting procedures was more or less simultaneous throughout the cities of Italy, Provence, and Catalonia, but business organization developed very differently in each of those locations. For example, enterprise units in Venice were relatively small, closely regulated, and dominated by state policy, whereas in Tuscany, although businesses were closely identified with government, some of them became quite large and operated more or less independently. Similarly, in the north, enterprises in the Low Countries and England were not very large by Italian standards but maintained a degree of independence, while those of the German Hanse became highly regulated and dominated by the town and princely governments of the league. In this sense, Robert Lopez’s vision of the north and south as mirror images of each other is insightful, despite the obvious differences.
The Black Death of 1347–50 marks the halfway point of our period and our book.Yet the plague’s importance, we will argue, was as much symbolic as real, epitomizing a period of severe disruptions lasting throughout most of the fourteenth century. In this reign of “King Death” recurring famines, plagues, and endemic warfare profoundly affected the demography, psychology, and economy of western Europe, to which business had to adapt.
Thus, in Part I we attempt to describe various components of business activity as practiced in the High Middle Ages, and to trace, however briefly, the evolution of each. Here was a business environment characterized by the need to provide necessities and luxuries for increasingly populous towns and increasingly prosperous rural magnates from increasingly long distances. Part II is the story, first of the successful adaptation of business to an extended period of calamity, and then of the pursuit of opportunities to secure low-cost sources of goods wherever they might be found. The overriding theme of this book is that medieval business was driven from beginning to end by the continuous demands of the elite.
To be sure, there will be plenty of evidence for mass markets, for example in foodstuffs and textiles, but these developed as a consequence of the urbanization that resulted from the expansion of trade.The initial thrust came from the elite’s dietary preferences, inherited from Mediterranean and Christian cultures, and from their insatiable desire for lux-uries of food, clothing, and ornamentation. These pressures stimulated exchange and the need for business specialists to provide or procure the goods.Thus, we depart somewhat from tradition as we argue that elitist demands affected, directly or indirectly, virtually all businesses, rather than just those dealing in luxury goods.
At the beginning of the thirteenth century, the point where our history begins, it is the ruling classes and their bureaucracies (which included businessmen) that largely determined how surpluses were spent, whether on cathedrals, castles, infrastructure, or luxuries. And although purchasing power began to spread among more people, especially after the Black Death, the demands of governments continued to influence the direction of investment and thus of innovation. These demands became increasingly accompanied by reams of enforcing regulations. At the end of our story, governments are vigorously engaged in controlling trade at all levels, but with diminishing success. Chronology presents an inevitable problem in a book covering the many facets of business activity across a wide geographical area. The history of medieval business is not an orderly march over the centuries; the innovations and practices that we shall discuss do not fit into tidy time frames. Rather, each kind of business evolved over lengthy periods in different ways at different paces in different parts of our territory.
Thus, our subject requires a business-by-business approach, each with its own chronology, especially in the first part of the book, where we must frequently reach back to ancient Mediterranean civilizations and the early Middle Ages to provide adequate background and perspective. The selection of 1200–1550 as the prime period of enquiry might seem odd to economic historians accustomed to studying the spectacular rise and decline of commerce during the High and late Middle Ages. Starting with the commercial revolution near its apogee rather than at its beginning enables us to focus on the adaptations that businessmen in different lines of endeavor in different parts of Europe had made to take advantage of the long economic expansion. And extending the survey some fifty years beyond 1500, the conventional closing date of the Middle Ages, makes it possible to highlight the evolution of some extremely important business innovations and their direct linkage to some of the spectacular developments, good and bad, of the early modern period. These included large-scale mining, mass-market fisheries, new financing mechanisms, and slave-worked plantations, to name a few.
This somewhat unconventional approach enables us to take full advantage of recent research and interpretations and separates this work from the older syntheses of economic historians such as Robert Lopez and Harry Miskimin, who regarded the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries as an economic wasteland. Our closing date also coincides roughly with the last years before the flow of precious metals from the New World profoundly changed the economies of western Europe. We strive throughout the book to observe the distinction between economic and business history. Seeking to imitate the lengthy magnificence of the Cambridge Economic History of Europe would be foolish, although the economic environment and changes in it are of course crucial to this survey. Consideration of developments in politics, warfare, technology, and social attitudes is also important, as all of these forces presented problems and opportunities to medieval businessmen who had to find a variety of ways of coping with them day by day.
But business must remain the window through which we view the larger changes of European economy and society. It provides a quite different vision of the late Middle Ages from even those economic historians such as Carlo Cipolla who share our disagreement with the depression theory for that period. Cipolla’s analysis stresses per capita economic improvement; the business window highlights the qualitative changes that laid the basis for the sixteenth-century expansion. Pursuing our subject – even closely defined – across a culturally diverse territory over a 350-year period in a short format has forced considerable economies in the selection of representative data.
Thus much interesting and important material has been omitted, and significant geographical areas and commercial endeavors have been given short shrift. And although we have cited certain business or cultural practices derived from Rome, Byzantium, and Islam that we believe to be relevant to the medieval story, we have avoided overburdening this book by venturing very deeply into those business histories. Some may find the lacunae too numerous, or the choices ill-made. Nonetheless, if our account brings a new and coherent picture of the vitality, variety, and adaptability of business activity in medieval Europe, it will have served its purpose.
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