232. Formation of the Bourgeoisie

Link to Table of Contents

Yes, I'm all over the place these days. I have three books going. But I'm just so happy to finally find this that I'm going to switch once again. 

A History of Europe

by Henri Pirenne
University Books, first published 1938 but written during the Great War

It turns out those passages about the origin of modern Capitalism, that I could never find again in Fernand Braudel's books, are actually in this book by Pirenne. 

Book Five - The Formation of the Bourgeoisie

I. The Revival of Commerce
2. The Northern Trade
p206 The cause for this vigorous expansion, [of trade in the Mediterranean Sea] whose effects upon European civilization were incalculable, was external to Europe, or at all events to Western Europe. Without the attraction exercised by Byzantium, without the necessity of fighting the Musulmans, Europe would doubtless have continued for centuries in a state of purely agricultural civilization. [Jane Jacobs would place the stress on the city economy of Byzantium. Barbara Tuchman, I believe, would place the stress on the role of the Crusades as they placed the nobility in the position of being in need of cash money.] There was no internal necessity which might have compelled her to venture forth into the outer world. Her commerce was not a spontaneous manifestation of the natural development of her economic life. It may be said that owing to stimuli arriving from the outer world it anticipated the moment when it must have come into being as a natural development.
...

p208 ...In the 10th century a new port, Kiel, on the Waal, took the place of Duurstede in Holland, and Bruges began to develop. The conquest of England by the Normans, by attaching this country to the Continent, was a further stimulus to navigation on the North Sea and the Channel.

...The volume of trade had now [11th century] become so great that it was beginning to expand northwards.

p209 From Venice, by way of the Brenner Pass, it gradually made its way into Southern Germany; or perhaps we should say that Venice attracted this trade to herself, for the Venetians did not travel overland. But the movement was much more active in the direction of France. Under the stimulus of the coastal trade both commerce and industry were becoming established in the Lombard plain, which from the middle of the 11th century was transformed by their influence. Through the passes of Saint Gothard or Mont Cenis the Lombard merchants ventured northwards. The magnet that drew them northwards was Flanders, the centre of the North Sea trade. From the beginning of the 12th century these Lombard merchants frequented the fairs of Ypres, Lille, Messines, Bruges, and Thourout. Then the centre of commercial exchanges shifted southwards, and the great markets of the 12th and 13th centuries were the famous fairs of Champagne: Troyes, Bar, Provins, Lagny, Bar-sur-Aube.

There, through the intermediaries of the Flemmings and the Lombards, the two commercial worlds, the northern and the southern, touched and intermingled. Of the two, the southern was the more advanced, the more complete and progressive. And this is not surprising... ...the first means of exchange, which made their appearance at the close of the 12th century, were Italian. One may say that the organization of European credit is entirely Romantic. Banks, bills of exchange, the lending of money at interest, and commercial companies were exclusively of Italian origin, and probably became generalized through the medium of the great fairs of Champagne. The most striking result of the renaissance of trade was the revival of money, the return to circulation of currency. The stock of precious metals was not actually increased, but money began to circulate again. As exchange became more general money made its appearance wherever man traded. Things which had never been valued in terms of money were now beginning to be so valued. The notion of wealth was undergoing transformation.

This would seem to favor Jacobs over Tuchman. I haven't read ahead, but Braudel noted that in many of these fairs (though these may have been later) very little money actually changed hands at the level of the principle merchants who ended the fair by canceling out most debts with bills of exchange. (In a process well known to anyone who has scored any of  the bocce/boules type games.) 

3. The Merchants
p210 Now we have to consider -- and this is an essential question -- how the mercantile class which was the instrument of this commerce came into being. ...because of the paucity of documents... it is probable that... [this question] will never be completely elucidated.

To begin with, we note that the merchants (mercatores) were "new men." They made their appearance as the creators of a new kind of wealth, side by side with the possessors of the old territorial wealth, and they did not emerge from the class of landowners.

...Here were two separate and impermeable worlds. [the nobility and the mercantile worlds] There can be even less question of their ecclesiastical origin. The Church was hostile to commercial life. It saw in commerce a spiritual danger... The clergy were forbidden to engage in trade. The ascetic ideal of the Church was in flagrant opposition to the ideals of commerce. The Church did not condemn wealth, but it condemned the love of riches and striving after wealth...

Did the merchants emerge from the class of villeins, these men who had their definite place in the great domains, living on their mansus and leading an assured and sheltered existence? There is no evidence that they did so, and everything seems to point to the contrary.

Strange as it may seem, then, only one solution remains: the ancestors of the merchants must have been the poor men, the landless men, the nomadic folk who wandered about the country, working for hire at harvest time, living from hand to mouth and going on pilgrimages. An exception must be made in the case of the Venetians, since their lagoons made them, from the first, fishers and refiners of salt, which they carried to Byzantium.

This sounds a lot like Braudel's description of the mountain peoples of North Africa, the Balkans, Corsica, and elsewhere. And I suppose you would have to fit the Jews into this description as well, or are we too early for that?

p211 Landless men are men who have nothing to lose, and men who have nothing to lose have everything to gain. They are adventurers, relying only on themselves; they have given no hostages to fortune. They are resourceful people, who know their way about; they have seen many countries, can speak many languages, are acquainted with many different customs, and their poverty makes them ingenious. It was from this floating scum, we may be sure, that the crews of the first Pisan and Genoese corsairs were recruited. And in the north of Europe, what were the Scandinavians who set out for Constantinople but men without possessions who were seeking their fortune?

...Starting with nothing but their courage, their intelligence, and their hardihood, they made their fortune. . . .

Why does this remind me of the bands of hunter-gatherers of the pre-agricultural human era?

It seems a simple matter to-day. An intelligent man, with nothing but his wits to rely on, may find capital to back him. But we must consider that the men of whom we are speaking had no hope of capital. They had to make their capital out of nothing. It was the heroic age of commercial origins, and it is worth our while to give thought to these poor devils, who were the creators of personal property.

Here is a very simple case... A man takes part in a successful privateering expedition... The privateers return to their port of origin, and now they can recruit a few poor fellows on their own account, and begin over again, or they can buy corn cheap somewhere, and carry it to some country where there is a famine, [he's already established this happens all the time with subsistence economies] where they can sell it very dear. For this was one of the prime causes of the creation of mercantile wealth. Everything was local. At the distance of a few leagues you would find the contrast of poverty and abundance, and consequently, the most astonishing fluctuations of price. In this way a man with very little wealth can make a great deal.

What he says about our never knowing for sure about this, is very true. While this is certainly plausible, and must have happened often, I wonder if he is too quick to dismiss the role of the gentry and church at least in providing capital. Contemporary piracy off the Horn of Africa happens just as he describes... except that the capital to fund these expeditions comes from wealthier parts of the Arab world (or so I've read) and merely makes use of the desperation of the locals. It certainly isn't impossible that there were men of the Land, or even of the Cloth, who had wealth -- or had access to wealth -- and who saw an opportunity and took it. I rather suspect it was a bit of all-of-the-above.

p212 On the Rhine, the Scheldt or the Rhone a wide-awake boatman could make considerable profits in time of famine. More than one who began by carrying small parcels of goods to the markets, or selling candles to pilgrims, may suddenly have acquired a useful liquid capital which would enable him to put to sea...

Thus, in this agricultural society, whose capital wealth was dormant, a group of outlaws, vagabonds, and poverty-stricken wretches furnished the first artisans of the new wealth, which was detached from the soil. Having gained a little, they wanted to gain more. The spirit of profit-making did not exist in established society; those whom it inspired were outside the social system; they bought and sold, not in order to live, not because they had vital need of their purchases, but for the sake of gain. They did not produce anything; they were merely carriers. They were wanderers, guests, gostj, wherever they went... They were not specialists; they were one and all brokers, carriers, sharpers, chevaliers of industry. They were not yet professional merchants, but they were on the way to becoming merchants.

They became merchants when commerce had definitely become a specific way of life, detached from the hazardous and hand-to-mouth existence of the carrier. And then they settled down. As soon as they had really entered upon the normal exercise of trade they found that a place of residence was necessary. They established themselves at some point which was favorable to their way of life: a landing-place for river-craft, or a favorably-situated episcopal city where they found themselves in the company of their fellows, and as their numbers increased still others arrived. And then, quite naturally, they began to form mutual associations. If they wanted to enjoy any security they had to travel in companies, in caravans. They banded together in guilds, religious associations, confraternities. All the trade of the Middle Ages, until nearly the end of the 12th century, was undertaken by armed caravans (hanses). This not only increased the security of trade, but also its efficiency, for while the companions protected one another on the highways and caravan routes they also bought goods in common in the markets. Thanks to the accumulation of their petty capitals, they were able to undertake transactions of considerable importance... About this period many merchants had already realized fortunes which enabled them to purchase valuable real estate. Moreover, it was the merchants' guilds that attended to the fortification of the town in which they resided.

p213 Of one thing we may be absolutely sure, that these men were inspired by a greedy spirit of profit-seeking. We must not think of them simply as respectable folk doing their best to make both ends meet. Their one object was the accumulation of wealth. In this sense, they were animated by the capitalist spirit, which the rudimentary psychology of our modern economists would have us regard as something highly mysterious, born in penury or Calvinism. They calculated and they speculated; to their contemporaries they appeared so formidable that no one would have been surprised to learn that they had made a pact with the devil. No doubt the majority were unable to read or write. Many great fortunes have been made by illiterates. To deny that they were actuated by a commercial spirit would be as absurd as to deny that the princes who were their contemporaries were actuated by the political spirit. In actual fact, the capitalist spirit made its appearance simultaneously with commerce.

...the history of European commerce does not present us... with the spectacle of a beautiful organic growth of the kind that delights the amateur of evolution. It did not begin with petty local transactions which gradually developed in importance and in range. On the contrary, it began, in conformity with the stimulus which it received from the outer world, with long-range trading and the spirit of big business -- but in the relative sense. It was dominated by the capitalist spirit, and this spirit was even more potent in the beginning than later on. Those who initiated and directed and expanded the commerce of Europe were a class of merchant-adventurers. This class was responsible for reviving urban life, and in this sense we must refer to this class the origin of the bourgeoisie, very much as we refer the origin of the modern proletariat to the great industrialists.

That last paragraph was either amazingly cunning or he may have slightly undermined what he has been arguing for. He has already pointed out that city economies reach out into their hinterlands and pull resources toward them. He even pointed out that the Venetians didn't need to involve themselves in the overland trade into Germany. Without the economic engine of established cities on the outside (Byzantium and Venice at this point) it would have been much harder, if not impossible, to engage in long distance trade. I think the cities provided much of the impetus for this development of commerce in Europe. There undoubtedly were "merchant-adventurers" but to some extent they acted as agents of the established cities. So commerce spread, by what the Church I'm sure saw as contagion, from the cities where commerce had never stopped, back into Medieval Europe.