Yet another set of cultural responses to inflation created disparities of a different kind: fiscal imbalances between public income and expenditures. Governments fell deep in debt during the middle and later years of the thirteenth century. As spending outran revenues, monarchs borrowed heavily from domestic and foreign merchants. In Constantinople, the last Latin Emperor Baldwin II (1217–1273), was so hard pressed for ready cash between 1237 and 1261 that he surrendered the Crown of Thorns as collateral for loans by Venetian bankers. Public deficits began to grow out of control—another dangerous tendency that developed in the later stages of every price-revolution and gravely weakened the spring of government.42
Figure 1.10 finds that wealth inequality increased in the late stages of the medieval price revolution, and the early years of the Renaissance equilibrium. The cause appears in figures 1.08 and 1.09: a rise in real returns to capital and a fall in real returns to labor. The evidence consists in the distribution of assessed wealth in the Italian commune of Santa Maria Impruneta, six miles south of Florence. Data are from the èstimi of 1307 and 1330, and the catasto of 1427, in David Herlihy, “Santa Maria Impruneta: A Rural Commune in the Late Middle Ages,” in Nicolai Rubenstein, ed., Florentine Studies (Evanston, 1968), 242–76. The data are organized in a Lorenz Curve which measures wealth shares in the population by decile.
The Third Stage: Growing Instability
In the late thirteenth century, the medieval price-revolution entered another stage, marked by growing instability. Prices rose and fell in wild swings of increasing amplitude. Inequality increased at a rapid rate. Public deficits surged ever higher. The economy of western Europe became dangerously vulnerable to stresses that it might have managed more easily in other eras.
In the late thirteenth century, the growth of population was pressing very hard against resources. Many people found themselves living precariously near the edge of survival. As the number of people increased, lands of lesser quality had been brought into cultivation. Farmers on these poor lands had to work much harder to scratch a living from the soil. Production and productivity fell for both land and labor. Many were driven to the margin of subsistence.43
For peasant farmers in that situation, the most immediate perils arose from changes in the weather. Throughout western Europe, the size of the harvest had always varied from one season to the next. Rainfall was the vital factor. In Europe, unlike other parts of the world, the great danger was too much rain rather than too little. Heavy rains in midsummer beat down the ripening grain and rotted it in the fields. Wet years, more than dry ones, brought short crops and soaring prices.
There had been seasons of scarcity even in the best of times. Most years had their dreaded disettes, which were the intervals that came after the last grain crop had run out, and before the new crop came in. Disettes occurred even in normal years. When things went wrong there were grand disettes, and scarcity became starvation. From 1260 to 1320, the rhythm of grain prices in England and Wales showed that grand disettes increased in frequency, severity and duration. Similar patterns appeared in greater or lesser degree throughout western Europe. In a time when people were living closer to the margin, the effect of harvest fluctuations was to create dangerous instabilities.44
Even in normal times, the margin was so narrow that a shortage of only 10 percent in the harvest caused severe suffering among impoverished peasant families. A shortfall of 20 percent meant starvation. And these were not normal times. The social effect of even small variation in the climate was enlarged by a growing imbalance between population and resources.
Within the villages of medieval Europe, the effect of harvest fluctuations on farm prices was compounded by other problems in medieval markets. Agricultural conditions were apt to vary from one region to another, even from one village to the next. The transportation of bulk-commodities such as wheat or barley across the countryside was not easy in the thirteenth century. Scarcity and surplus often existed within a few miles of one another. In Normandy during the year 1180, wheat fell to one livre at Norrancourt where the market was glutted. At the same time, the price was ten livres at Mortain and sixteen livres on the Cotentin peninsula, which suffered a shortage. These places were only a few miles apart.45
Added to market problems were monetary disturbances. As prices rose in western Europe, governments manipulated their coinage with an increasingly heavy hand: sometimes debasing it by reducing the quantity of silver; sometimes restoring its value by recoinages. These repeated acts had an impact upon price levels. Debasements drove prices up; recoinages brought them down again. Economic historian David L. Farmer has shown that the price of oxen fell after each recoinage in England during the thirteenth century.46
The effect of repeated recoinages and debasements in the thirteenth century was to increase the instability of markets and prices. When one medieval state debased its coinage, merchants responded by carrying their silver to another kingdom and having it reminted in a currency that held its value. In France, for example, Philip the Fair debased his silver coins so severely that Geoffroi de Paris protested that “the king was playing the magician, transforming 60 into 20 and 90 into 30.”47
Moneyed men carried their silver across the channel, and had it struck as English sterling. In 1305, John de Everdon, England’s Warden of the Exchange, reported that the “merchants were daily bringing silver there in great quantities,” so much so that the mint was running six weeks behind. The quantity of England’s money supply surged from 1305 to 1310, and prices of even the most humble commodities increased sharply. Eggs, which had cost less than four pence a hundred before 1305, suddenly rose above sixpence in 1306. The price of a laying hen doubled, from one penny to more than twopence. A historian of this sudden inflation concludes that the leading cause was a change in the size of the money supply.48
Exchange rates also became highly unstable in the fourteenth century. Governments tried to stabilize their fragile economies by imposing export controls. The effect was often the opposite of what was intended. England’s Edward I, for example, tried to make things better by forbidding the export of English coins in 1299. By 1307, he had prohibited the removal of foreign money as well. He also pegged gold at an artifically high level relative to silver. These policies caused increasing distortions in exchange rates, which in turn created dislocation in English trade.49
Other sources of instability were financial in their nature. In the late thirteenth century, a major crisis led to the disruption of credit and banking in the western world. The great Italian banks dangerously overextended themselves by lending heavily to monarchs and private borrowers. These loans were highly lucrative—for a time. They brought prosperity to the north of Italy, and especially to the city of Siena, which in the words of one leading historian was “for seventy-five years the main banking center of Europe.” As Siena flourished in the thirteenth century, its citizens began to build a great cathedral which was intended to be the largest in Europe. The magnificent architecture of its central square, which today delights so many tourists, was created by the prosperity of this era.50
In the year 1298, Siena’s banking boom came suddenly to an end, with the failure of its greatest bank, the Gran Tavola of the Buonsignori. This was a world bank, with agents throughout Europe and the Mediterranean basin. Among its borrowers were great merchants, cities, nobles, kings and even the Pope himself. Increasing numbers of these loans went sour. In the year 1298, a banking panic began in Siena. The Buonsignori managed to hold things together for nearly a decade, but finally in 1307 the great bank collapsed. Many lesser enterprises failed with it.
The economy of Siena did not recover from this disaster for many years. Work on the great cathedral was abandoned. The building stands today in the same unfinished state as when workers downed tools in the fourteenth century. The city’s magnificent central square is still frozen in time—a fiscal Herculaneum that had been engulfed by the great wave of the thirteenth century.51
Siena’s lo
ss was at first a gain for the city of Florence. In the early fourteenth century there were three great Florentine banks—the Bardi, Peruzzi and Acciaiuoli—and many smaller ones such as the Mozzi, Franzesi, Pulci, Rimbertini, Frescobaldi and Scali. Some of these enterprises grew even larger than the Sienese houses that had preceded them. The bank of the Peruzzi, for example, had fifteen branches throughout the world, and was bigger than the Medici Bank would ever become.
The big Florentine banks made foreign loans to the kings of England and Naples. This was a dangerous business. Once it had begun, the loans grew inexorably larger. The banks could not call them in, for fear of default or confiscation. The results were inexorable.
Early in the fourteenth century Florentine banks began to fail. The Mozzi went under in 1302, the Franzesi in 1307, the Pulci and Rimbertini in 1309, the Frescobaldi in 1312, and the Scali in 1326. Six houses failed in 1342. Then, in 1343 and 1346, the three great houses of the Peruzzi, Acciaiuoli and Bardi all collapsed with a great crash. Not for many years would banking enterprise recover in Tuscany.
Behind these events, many factors were operating at the same time: climatological, demographic, monetary, commercial, fiscal and financial. Together they unsettled social relationships throughout Europe, and caused deep suffering among the poor.
Monarchs attempted to impose price regulations with little success. In the fourteenth century, powerful elites condemned price controls as unnatural, ineffectual and immoral, much as other economic moralists would do in the twentieth century. The Canon of Bridlington wrote in 1316, “How contrary to reason is an ordinance on prices, when the fruitfullness or sterility of all living things are in the power of God alone, from which it follows that the fertility of the soil and not the will of man must determine the price.”
The arguments of medieval theologians differed in detail from those of modern neoclassical economists, but the conclusions were much the same. Price controls were condemned in the fourteenth century both as constraints upon the free market, and as violations of the will of God. In every price-revolution, as we shall see, propertied and powerful elites would oppose economic controls and profit by their absence.
As prices rose and fell and rose again, complex linkages and multipliers began to operate. Rising prices led to a need for larger stocks of silver and gold, which drove prices higher still. Great kingdoms and small city states teetered on the edge of bankruptcy. They struggled to survive by borrowing heavily at ruinous rates of interest, and by debasing their money, thereby introducing powerful instabilities into the price system of western Europe. Manorial lords maintained their incomes by raising rents. A growing peasant population brought marginal lands into cultivation, causing productivity to fall. More workers competed for fewer jobs, and wages lagged behind price increases. As real wages fell, the margin of subsistence became paper-thin. There was less security against any sort of trouble, at a time when danger was increasing. Medieval Europe had come to the edge of disaster.
The Crisis of the Fourteenth Century
The first years of the fourteenth century were a time of dark foreboding for the suffering peasantry of Europe. The economy of the Western world was in deep disorder. Material inequalities had dangerously increased. The growth of population far outpaced the means of its subsistence. The cost of food and firewood surged to high levels. Poverty and hunger increased in many parts of the Western world.
Then, in the summer of 1314, the weather turned cold and very wet. Rain fell incessantly. Crops rotted in the fields. Grain harvests were late and desperately short. In England, Parliament asked King Edward II to impose price controls on farm products. He speedily did so. Royal sheriffs rode through the realm proclaiming maximum prices for food, poultry and livestock.
These disturbances seemed at first to be merely another routine disaster of a sort that had often afflicted medieval Europe. Crops had fallen short before. In the winter of 1314, people tightened their belts and prayed for better times.
But the next harvest was worse. The spring of 1315 brought heavy rain throughout Europe. Stormy weather lashed the continent for months. Dikes collapsed in England and the Low Countries. Entire fields washed away in France. Villages were destroyed by rising rivers in Germany. Once again grain and fodder crops failed. This was not merely a set of local shortages. It was, in the words of historian Henry Lucas, “a universal failure of crops in 1315 . . . from the Pyrenees to Slavic regions, from Scotland to Italy.”1
In England during the year 1315, the price of wheat rose eightfold, from five shillings to as much as forty shillings. Hungry livestock sickened and died. The chronicles tell of a “great murrin” which took a heavy toll of domestic animals. Impoverished peasants ate cats, rats, reptiles and insects. Many tried to survive on animal droppings. Others ate the leaves from the trees. In London, Paris, Ypres, Breslau and Utrecht, the streets were littered with dying people. Gangs of starving laborers roamed the countryside in search of food. Crime became widespread—mostly the theft of food, or anything that could be exchanged for food.2
The economy of Europe, already dangerously fragile, disintegrated under a stress that it might have survived at another time. People sought scapegoats for their suffering. Millers and bakers became favorite targets. In France, the people of Paris staged a mass punishment of bakers who had been found guilty of mixing their flour with animal droppings. Sixteen bakers were lashed to wheels in public squares and made to hold bits of rotten bread in outstretched hands, while they were beaten and reviled by the multitude.3
Figure 1.11 measures annual harvest prices as a percent of decennial means. Abundant crops drove prices down; scarcity sent them up again. The impact of scarcity grew more severe as the price revolution continued, reaching a peak in 1315–17, the worst famine in European history. This graph is created from price series in James E. Thorold Rogers, A History of Agriculture and Prices in England, vols. I & II.
In England, even the King felt the famine. One chronicle recorded that “when Edward II with his household stopped at St. Albans at the Feast of St. Laurence [August 10], it was practically impossible to procure bread for his court.” But large hoards of grain remained in the hands of kings and noblemen in the west, and Teutonic Knights in the east, and great abbeys throughout Europe. The ruling few of Europe were slow to open their granaries to feed the starving many. All of these things happened in the year 1315.4
Then, inconceivably, torrential rains came again in 1316. The grain crop failed a third year in a row. Europe began to experience the worst famine in its history. When other sources of food ran out, people began to eat one another. Peasant families consumed the bodies of the dead. Corpses were dug up from their burying grounds and eaten. In jails the convicts ceased to be fed; we are told that starving inmates “ferociously attacked new prisoners and devoured them half alive.” Condemned criminals were cut down from the gallows, butchered, and eaten. Parents killed their children for food, and children murdered their parents.5
The death toll in this famine is unknown. It must have been very large. The town of Ypres, with a population of perhaps 25,000 souls, counted 2,794 burials at public expense from May to October, 1316, not including many others whose families paid for their interments. More than 10 percent of the population died in pauperis within the span of less than six months. Many other deaths must have gone unrecorded. Ypres was not unique in its suffering. Some historians estimate that a tenth of Europe’s teeming population perished in the years 1315 and 1316.6
In the wake of famine, epidemics began to break out. Both people and animals suffered from a nameless pestilence that spread swiftly through the continent. Some of its symptoms were similar to those of modern anthrax; others were more like ergotism and dysentery. Probably this was a polydemic of many different diseases, including some that may be unknown to modern science.
Famine, epidemics and oppression were followed by an increase in crime. As price-movements became more volatile, every surge in the cost of living was accompa
nied by a sudden increase in criminal violence. Most of these crimes were thefts and robberies by desperate men and women. Many were homicides, assaults and acts of rage against the cruel suffering that had been visited upon so many people.
There were also acts of collective violence and insurrection. In rural France, a movement called the Pastoureaux spread rapidly through the countryside. A great mass of peasants and laborers gathered in the northwest, and began marching south and east toward the Holy Land, gaining numbers as they went. On the way, the Pastoureaux attacked castles, sacked monasteries, burned archives, released convicts, slaughtered Jews, murdered Lepers, and settled scores with the nobility for many centuries of oppression. They spread terror among the possessing classes, until finally they were dispersed and hanged by the hundreds. Their gaunt bodies dangled from the branches of trees throughout the south of France.
Figure 1.12 compares the price of wheat in Norfolk (silver shillings per quarter) with criminal indictments in the same county. Crimes (in order of frequency) include larceny, burglary, homicide, robbery, receiving stolen goods, treason, counterfeiting, arson, and rape. The source is Barbara Hanawalt, Crime and Conflict in English Communities (Cambridge, Mass., 1979), 243, 279.
While these disorders spread through the western world, yet another misery was inflicted upon the people of Europe. As if famine, pestilence, and social violence were not suffering enough, this period became a time of bloody war between the sovereign states of Europe. “Wars are not evenly distributed throughout the centuries,” writes A. R. Bridbury, “they come in clusters.” He observed that one such run of conflicts began in the year 1294, and continued for fifty years. Major wars occurred between Scotland and England, England and France, France and Flanders; many smaller conflicts broke out between German, Swiss and Italian city-states. Warfare had been endemic in medieval Europe, but Bridbury and others find that its incidence greatly increased after the year 1294.7
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