Great Wave

by Fischer, David Hackett;

  Similar trends appeared throughout northern Italy. Outbreaks of mortal disease continued, but they happened less frequently after 1400, and their effects were less severe. The size of harvests continued to fluctuate from year to year, but the magnitude of price-variations slowly diminished during the fifteenth century. The Italian city-states entered a long period of slow recovery, stable growth and dynamic equilibrium in economic and demographic movements (circa 1405–80). The urban populations of Venice, Florence and Siena began to increase again, though still remaining smaller than before the Black Death. Commerce and industry revived, real wages rose buoyantly, and commodity prices continued to decline and stabilize.13

  Figure 1.17 shows a growth of stability in harvest prices from 1390 to 1480. Fluctuations continued, but magnitudes diminished through nearly a century. Major shortages became progressively less severe. This annual series (as a percent of decennial means) is computed from data in J. E. Thorold Rogers, A History of Agriculture and Prices in England, vol. 2.

  Italy was more advanced in these tendencies than other parts of Europe. North of the Alps, disorder and instability persisted for another generation or longer. The people of France suffered through three terrible periods of anarchy, pestilence, war and famine in the early fifteenth century. During the years from 1413 to 1420, France was afflicted with an insane monarch (Charles VI), an impotent government, an English invasion, and an internal rebellion led by a skinner named Simon Caboche. French prices rose to a great height during these disorders. They went even higher in 1428–30, when an English army besieged Orleans and burned a Saint, Jeanne d’Arc, at Rouen in 1431. A third time of troubles in France occurred during the years 1437–39, a period of grand disettes, the return of plague, and the anarchy of the ecorcheurs. In each of these three eras, French prices surged to very high levels.14

  Figure 1.18 shows the long decline of grain prices that continued from 1360 to 1480 in most parts of Europe. The central tendency was stable for more than a century. The source is Wilhelm Abel, Agrarkrisen und Agrarkonjunktur, 66; for similar trends in France, see d’Avenel, Histoire économique, 2:518.

  Figure 1.19 shows a long decline in rent from 1360 to 1460, when wages were rising. It also shows a rise in rent after 1460, when the next price-revolution was underway. Sources include David Herlihy, Medieval and Renaissance Pistoia (New Haven, 1967), and Guy Bois, Crise du feodalisme: Économie rurale et démographie en Normandie orientale du début du 14e siècle au milieu du 16e siècle (Paris, 1976).

  Figure 1.20 shows a strong rise in real wages from 1351 to 1475, while prices were falling. After 1476, when the next price revolution began, real wages began to come down. The source is Henry Phelps-Brown and Sheila V. Hopkins, A Perspective of Wages and Prices (New York, 1981), 28–31; Georges d’Avenel, Histoire économique de la propriété, des salaires, des denrées, et de tous les prix en générale, depuis l’an 1200 jusqu’en 1800 (7 vols., Paris, 1894–1926).

  Figure 1.21 shows the fall of interest rates in the fifteenth century. Levels differed widely: public securities such as Venetian prèstiti, French rentes and Dutch census loans combined higher security with lower rates. Commercial loans carried higher rates, but trends were much the same. The source is Sidney Homer, A History of Interest Rates (2d ed., New Brunswick, 1977), 104–43.

  After 1440, conditions began at last to improve in France. During the reigns of Charles VII “the Well Served” and Louis XI “the Bourgeois,” order was restored, the English were defeated and anarchy was suppressed. From 1437 to the end of the fifteenth century, prices stabilized throughout France. Annual price fluctuations diminished, and the cost of grain remained roughly on the same level for nearly half a century.15

  As France lagged behind Italy, so England lagged behind France. That unhappy island became a byword for political strife in the fifteenth century. A cruel and sordid conflict, inappropriately named the Wars of the Roses, persisted into the late fifteenth century. So also did economic instability. But even in England, the amplitude of price fluctuations steadily diminished after 1440 and real wages improved.16

  While real wages increased, returns to capital diminished. Rates of interest fell by 50 percent in France and the Low Countries in the century from 1370 to 1470. Italian rates also came down, though not so much as in northern Europe. Rents also came down during the same period, from 1370 to 1460. The same combination of rising wages, falling rents and falling interest rates also appeared in every period of price equilibrium from the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries.

  Figure 1.22 finds that when wages rose and rents fell during the fifteenth century, the peasantry of Europe enlarged their holdings. These English villages are cases in point. In Holywell, landholders included both customary and leasehold tenants; in Stoughton, they were freeholders as well as leaseholders and customary tenants. The number of holders fell: in Stoughton from 62 to 24, and in Holywell from 59 to 49. Sources include Edwin B. Dewindt, Land and People in Holywell-cum-Needingworth: Structures of Tenure and Patterns of Social Organization in an East Midlands Village, 1252–1457 (Toronto, 1972), 114; and Christopher Dyer, Standards of Living in the Later Middle Ages (Cambridge, 1989), 141.

  This was a difficult time for people who lived on rents and interest. But for most ordinary folk who earned their bread by daily labor, life was better. Real wages increased. Rents fell. Returns to labor outpaced rewards to land and capital. New trends slowly began to emerge in the distribution of wealth. In England, many studies have found that peasants and small proprietors enlarged their holdings in the fifteenth century.

  At the same time that these patterns of equilibrium began to appear in the European economy, new political trends emerged as well. The second half of the fifteenth century became an age of strong and successful state-building. This was the era of Poland’s great king Casimir IV, who united his grand duchy and drove out foreign invaders. In Russia it was the time of Ivan the Great (1462), the first truly national ruler. It was also the era of Hungary’s greatest king Mathias Corvinus (1458); of France’s Louis XI (1461), who transformed a medieval kingdom into a great national monarchy; and of England’s Henry VII (1485), who founded the Tudor dynasty.

  These patterns of demographic equilibrium, economic recovery and political stability developed in every part of Europe, but not all at the same time. They first appeared in the territories that bordered the Mediterranean Sea. The early fifteenth century might be remembered as the Mediterranean moment in modern history. It was an era of prosperity and proud achievement from the straits of Gibraltar to the Golden Horn.17

  In Spain, a new nation was born. Nobody could have predicted it. The future of Iberia seemed very bleak as late as the year 1410, when the death of Aragon’s King Martin I was followed by the collapse of Spain’s strongest dynasty. But in 1412 the throne of Aragon passed to a cadet branch of the family that ruled Castile, and the two strongest kingdoms in Spain were governed by members of the same clan. Contacts between these kingdoms steadily increased. In 1469, the foundation of a new national state was created by a marriage of two Spanish stepcousins, Ferdinand of Aragon and Isabella of Castile. A single national religion was forcibly imposed by the Spanish Inquisition (founded in 1478), and the Spanish church was protected from interference by a papal concordat in 1482. A system of national law was established in the Libro de Montalvo (1485). The Moors were expelled from Spain in the great reconquista which ended triumphantly with the liberation of Granada in 1492, the same year when Columbus sailed for America.

  These national events were closely linked to economic trends. The Spanish economy flourished during the fifteenth century. Its increasing stability supported the new political trends and was in turn reinforced by them. The result was the creation of the strongest nation-state in the Western world—one that was destined to dominate Europe and America through the sixteenth century.

  At the opposite end of the Mediterranean, another empire was created in a different way. The greatness of the Ottoman Empire
rose not from the imposition of cultural unity on a single nation, but from the reconciliation of cultural diversity within an imperial frame. In company with their Christian neighbors, the Ottoman Turks had suffered many vicissitudes during the fourteenth century. After 1413 a new trend appeared. Turkish armies captured Byzantium, ravaged the Balkans, and conquered the Crimea. They battered Greek cities into submission with marble cannonballs made from ancient monuments. The Ottoman empire was formed by conquest during the three reigns of Mehmed I (1413–21), Murad II (1421–51) and especially Mehmed II the Conqueror (1451–81).

  The new Ottoman Empire was a mixture of light and shadow. It was created by slaughter and maintained by terror. Sultan Mehmed II alone was thought to have been responsible for the murder of more than 800,000 people. But brutal as the Turks may have been, they were humanitarians by contrast with some of the despots whom they destroyed. One of their enemies was the sadistic Vlad Dracul of Wallachia—the original Dracula who ordered mass murders merely for amusement, and once impaled and crucified 20,000 captives in a single orgy of violence. The Turks drove Dracula from power.

  Once created by violent acts, the Ottoman Empire was tolerant of ethnic and religious minorities—more so than Christian states. In its prime, the Ottoman state was remarkable for administrative enlightenment, rational economic policies and ethnic pluralism. Throughout the eastern Mediterranean it forcibly imposed a pax ottomanica that lasted many centuries.18

  At the same time, the most remarkable achievements occurred in the center of the Mediterranean basin, mainly among the Italian cities of Florence, Siena, Genoa, Modena, Lucca, Milan, Padua and Venice. Here there was no single nation-state or despotic dominion, but something very different in structure and spirit. The sovereign cities of northern Italy, in rivalry with one another, invented a new institution which they named lo stato. We know it as the modern secular state. They also created the idea of a modern state system in which a political equilibrium was maintained by a balance of power, by spheres of influence, by the exercise of diplomacy and by the sway of international law.

  Some of these Italian city states also developed complex internal systems of republican liberty and self-government. Political stability was achieved in the stronger cities, and linked to a material equilibrium that prevailed throughout northern Italy in the fifteenth century.

  A leading example was the history of Venice in the quattrocento. From 1405 to 1484, this maritime republic annexed much of northern Italy: Padua, Vicenza, Verona, Treviso, Bergamo, and Brescia. Even to this day in many small Italian villages throughout these regions, the lion columns that symbolized Venetian sovereignty still stand in the town squares.19

  Venetian ships controlled the inland waterways of Italy, as far as the Lago di Garda. Venetian settlers occupied many Mediterranean islands that had belonged to the Byzantine Greeks and the Crusader States. They added Corfu in 1386, Saloniki in 1423, and Cyprus in 1489 to their medieval possessions of Crete in the Mediterranean and Negroponte in the Aegean Sea.

  These acquisitions made Venice into a great seaborne empire which dominated trade between West and East. Within the city of Venice itself, the arsenale became the largest industrial complex in Europe and the basis of the city’s naval power. Here the Venetians developed assembly lines and standardized parts, from which an entire galley could be manufactured in a single day. So secret was the arsenale that anyone who entered without permission could be blinded or put to death. Its great walls, bearing the date 1460, still stand today.

  After 1450, the Turks began to make inroads on the eastern fringes of Venetian empire, but the economy of Venice remained prosperous throughout the fifteenth century and prices were highly stable. Historian Frederic Lane finds an indicator of this new stability in the price of pepper, which had long been an exceptionally volatile commodity in medieval markets. After 1415, the price of pepper stabilized and fluctuated remarkably little until 1499—the result of Venetian commercial hegemony and of more fixed and regular trading conditions between East and West.20

  By the late fifteenth century, the Venetians were extracting from their territories a public revenue of a million gold ducats a year, and much private wealth as well. The immense prosperity of Venice appeared in its 200 opulent churches, in its Ducal palace that was rebuilt on a magnificent scale in the fifteenth century, and in the private palazzi that still line the Grand Canal. Venice became the golden city of the west. Its purse-proud merchants looked with envy upon the palazzo ca d’oro, a palace covered entirely with gold. They prayed in the Cathedral of San Marco before the pala d’oro, a screen of gold. They dreamed of gold, lived for gold, and at St. Mark’s they even appeared to worship gold.

  Very different in spirit was the city of Florence, which also became a great center of commerce, industry and finance during this period. The Medici Bank, with branches in London, Geneva, Bruges and Avignon, became highly profitable. The city’s silk and woolen industry also flourished in the fifteenth century. Prosperity came to great families such as the Medici themselves, and also to the popolo minuto of most social ranks and occupations.21

  Prices in Florence remained stable through much of the fifteenth century, and wages were relatively high. Historian Richard Goldthwaite observes that “the stability of wages was the result of a general equilibrium” in this period. Prices also fluctuated within a fixed range from 1380 to 1470. Politics and social relations were comparatively orderly. In those years, Florence experienced nothing like the great revolt of the Ciompi in 1378.22

  After many centuries of strife, the political and social institutions of Florence became more stable in the fifteenth century. The central figure was Cosimo de Medici. Without holding high office himself, Cosimo dominated his city from 1434 until his death in 1464. He gave Florence an enlightened and humane government, a more progressive system of taxation, a long period of prosperity at home, and a successful policy of peace abroad, which was maintained by complex diplomatic alliances. He also began a dynasty that continued under the leadership of his son Piero and his grandson Lorenzo de Medici.

  The strength and confidence of Florence during the fifteenth century was captured by its culture. The soaring spirit of the quattrocento simultaneously appeared in the exquisite beauty of Donatello’s sculpture, in the symmetry and grace of Brunelleschi’s great Duomo (1420–24)above the cathedral, in the austere grandeur of the Medici Palace, in the quiet serenity of San Marco’s convent cells, and especially in the beautiful frescos that were painted there by Fra Angelico (1439–45). The striking contrast between the celebrations of St. Mark in Florence and Venice could scarcely have been more complete. In very different ways, both cities captured the general mood of confidence and certainty that flourished in the north of Italy during the fifteenth century.

  Throughout that region, a remarkable transformation occurred in the life of the mind during the quattrocento. “Ever since the humanists’ own days,” writes historian Hans Baron, “the transition from the fourteenth to the fifteenth century has been recognized as a time of big and decisive changes.” During the early decades of the fifteenth century, Florentine humanists such as Leonardo Bruni, Coluccio Salutati and Poggio Bracciolini produced a literature which celebrated republican virtue, the rule of law, and the power of reason.

  This intellectual movement culminated in the rhetorical extravagance of Pico della Mirandola’s Oration on the Dignity of Man (1486), which argued that the greatness of man consisted in his freedom from material constraints. In Pico’s oration, the following words are addressed by God to Adam:

  You may have and possess whatever abode, form and functions that you might desire. The nature of all other beings is limited and constrained within the bounds of law prescribed by us. But you, constrained by no limits, in accordance with your own free will, in whose hand we have placed you, shall ordain for yourself the limits of your nature.23

  Pico’s idea of human life without external limit was one aspect of the Renaissance. Others included a n
ew spirit of civic humanism, a new idea of republican virtue, a new classicism, a new conception of Platonic idealism, and most of all a new dream of symmetry and order, which Hans Baron has described as the “geometric spirit.”

  The physical expression of this new spirit was the architecture of the Renaissance palaces that multiplied in Florence—the Medici palace north of the Duomo; the Pitti palace south of the river Arno, and the vast Strozzi palace to the west. These buildings, with their massive walls, rusticated masonry, heavy cornices, exposed windows, and careful symmetries all communicated a confident sense of order, strength and equilibrium.

  Whether one thinks of the neoclassical proportions of Renaissance architecture, or the rules of perspective in Renaissance painting, or the idea of balance in Renaissance statecraft, or the Platonic system-building of Renaissance philosophy, these expressions shared an assumption that the world was a place of harmony, symmetry, proportion and balance. They expressed a mood of cosmic optimism that arose during an era of comparative stability in the material culture of the West—an era that might well be remembered as the equilibrium of the Renaissance.24

  THE SECOND WAVE

  The Price Revolution of the Sixteenth Century