The Power of Gold: The History of an Obsession

by Peter L. Bernstein

  The economic consequences of all these deaths and disruptions were strange, to say the least, especially the massacre of the Black Death. As the masses of human bodies disappeared, their physical possessions and monetary wealth remained behind. This grisly process left most Europeans far richer than they had been before tragedy struck. To turn a phrase, as the poor got fewer, the rest got richer. They would soon act accordingly.

  According to one historian, the citizens in Albi, in southern France, with fortunes greater than one hundred livres grew from 11 percent to 20 percent of the population between 1343 and 1357, while those with less than ten livres declined from 31 percent to 18 percent.9 Many people died without the opportunity to write wills, leaving their wealth with no readily identifiable ownership. This led to a great demand for lawyers to settle the quarrels over questions of inheritance and succession, but it also led to opportunities for the enterprising to pick up unclaimed assets. In addition, as the supply of labor had shrunk dramatically, a scarcity of labor joined with the plethora of money to produce a sharp rise in wages and the incomes of working people.

  Contrary to what one would expect under the circumstances, with so many workers leaving the farms to enjoy the temptations of the city, the price of food was remarkably stable. The loss in population was so enormous that it had an even greater impact on the demand for food than the reduced supply of food caused by the decline in the number of people engaged in agriculture."' With necessities taking a smaller proportion of total spending, the consumption of meat, butter, fish, wine, and exotic spices began to expand even among people at the lowest end of the scale."

  In the uncertain and turbulent environment, the incentive to save was minimal while the incentive to spend was irresistible. As late as 1375, a Florentine chronicler was indignant "at the spectacle of the popolo minuto who refused to practice their old trades, dressed themselves in a manner unbefitting their station and insisted on the finest delicacies at their table."12 In Britain, a petition from the House of Commons in 1362 blames rising prices on "laborers [who] use the apparel of craftsmen, and craftsmen the apparel of valets, and valets the apparel of squires, and squires the apparel of knights."1s William Langland, in Piers Plowman, attacked the worker "who refuses to bear the burden of poverty patiently, but blames God and murmers against Reason and curses the king and his council for making statutes [legalized ceilings on wages] to plague the workmen."14

  The clergy were no exception. In 1351, Pope Clement VI asked his prelates, "What can you preach to the people? ... If on poverty, you are so covetous that all the benefices in the world are not enough for you. If on chastity-but we will be silent on this, for God knoweth what each man does and how many of you satisfy your lusts."15

  While the cost of ordinary domestically produced agricultural products was relatively stable, exotic foods came increasingly into fashion, with predictable consequences for prices. According to one authority, the price index of foreign goods such as herring, pepper, oil, sugar, almonds, and saffron rose from 100 in the period 1261-1350 to 162 during the period 1351-1400. He also calculates that per capita expenditures on wine approximately doubled at the same time.16

  The swollen appetite for imported luxuries such as fancy foods and the increasingly popular clothing frills combined with a heavy burden of military expenditures to send the demand for both gold and silver surging. The supply of precious metals, however, failed to respond to the expanding demand. Metal shortages left the mints inactive for extended periods of time. From 1373 to 1411, the production of gold coins in England averaged only (9500 a year, about a tenth of the output prior to the Black Death." Mining sources also dried up as even record high pay was insufficient to attract men to the discomforts of working the gold mines. Ordinances against exporting "good money" or precious metals accomplished no more than the regulations that required importers to use the revenues they earned to purchase domestically produced goods for export. The repetitive sequence of such orders suggests that they were difficult to enforce and frequently ignored."

  Controls over both wages and jobs did not fare any better. For example, Edward III's Statute of Labourers, enacted in 1351, set maximum rates of pay at preplague levels, required all able-bodied men to work, and limited the mobility of workers between jobs and even their freedom of movement between villages. Repeated attempts to enforce these restrictions would ultimately lead to Watt Tyler's hotheaded rebellion in 1381.''

  One of the more curious-and equally fruitless-efforts to economize on gold included a multiplication of regulations with the odd name of sumptuary laws. The word derives from the Latin sumptuarius-to take or to spend-and has the same roots as sumptuous. Sumptuary also shares roots with consume, which breaks down into "con" and "sume." "Sume," in turn, derives from the French sumere, which means to take or to spend.

  The purpose of these laws was to economize on scarce gold by prohibiting people from using it lavishly as personal adornment-a dubious objective in the wake of the Black Death. This was a time, as Tuchman described it, of "frenetic gaiety, wild expenditure, luxury, [and] debauchery. "2°

  A statute of Edward III enacted in 1363 was typical of the fourteenth-century sumptuary laws. Edward set upper limits for the permissible extravagance of each class. Rustics were limited to blanket cloth and the coarse reddish-brown homespun called russet; grooms and servants were not allowed to wear gold in any form; gentlemen below the rank of knight were prohibited from dressing with any cloth of gold; knights were forbidden to wear gold rings. In 1380, the king of Castile went further by prohibiting all Spaniards except queens and princesses from wearing cloth of gold or gold jewelry.21

  Like the prohibitions against the export of gold, and doubtless for the same reason, the sumptuary laws were enacted over and over again. Gold, like liquor, satisfies too many needs to survive prohibition.

  The Byzantine emperors used gold to persuade others to fight and kill on their behalf. The almost constant warfare of the fourteenth century put gold to the opposite use: for the payment of ransoms that would save lives. Most of the ransoms in the fourteenth century called for the movement of gold within Europe, but the risks of military defeat in all countries meant that monarchs had no choice but to hoard massive reserves of gold as insurance against the evil day when prisoners would have to be redeemed. In the ugly environment of the fourteenth century, ransoms were especially onerous.

  Should we deplore the heavy price of redeeming prisoners? The higher the price that the victors could expect, the greater the incentive to constrain the bloody slaughter on the battlefields. The ransom business-and in many ways it was a business-must have saved many lives, especially among the upper classes of society.

  The most spectacular example of capture and ransom involved the king of France himself, jean II, who was known as jean le Bon. Jean loved luxury to the extreme of having the court painter decorate his toilets. In a remarkable step for his time, he commissioned French translations of the Bible so that he could read it more easily. He spent so much money on himself and on trying to fight the English that he soon became an expert at debasing the currency: eighteen alterations in the first year of his reign and seventy more over the next ten years. One churchman, who found monetary affairs in his time even more baffling than the Black Death, wrote a few immortal words on the subject:

  Jean le Bon's son, the Dauphin (who was also duke of Normandy), was shifty in his loyalty to his father. In April 1356, he hosted a dinner party in his castle in Rouen for his cousin and neighbor Charles le Mauvais, king of Navarre, hoping to organize a conspiracy to capture the throne of France. Charles le Mauvais was such a bad man that almost anybody compared to him, like jean, would have been characterized as "le Bon." Jean, who had advance notice of the meeting between Charles and the Dauphin, burst in on the gathering in full armored regalia. He thereupon had some of Charles's entourage butchered, threw Charles into prison, and confiscated Charles's Norman estates.

  Charles's brother and surviving associa
tes appealed for English help to recover their estates. The English responded without delay and, under the command of the Duke of Lancaster, were soon on their way into France from Cherbourg. In July, the Prince of Wales, known as the Black Prince and one of the greatest fighters and commanders of his age (the "black" referred to his armor), landed at Bordeaux with eight thousand troops and launched a series of devastating raids as he traveled northward through western France. Jean decided that he had no choice but to face his enemies in pitched battle. Confidently leading his army of sixteen thousand men, the largest army of the century, jean marched toward the Loire to block the Black Prince's northward approach.23

  On September 19, 1356, the French army was overpowered by the Black Prince's forces at the Battle of Poitiers, despite superior strategic positions in the field and twice the number of soldiers. Seven hours into the battle, the English discovered Jean's unit and charged at high speed against it, "like the wild boar of Cornwall. 1124 Jean fought valiantly with one of his loyal sons beside him, but he lost his helmet and began to bleed from two wounds on his face. When voices cried, "Yield, yield, or you are a dead man,"" Jean handed over his glove to an enemy soldier and thus the king of France became a prisoner of war.

  The king was by no means the only distinguished prisoner to be taken that day. The list included the highest-ranking French military commanders and over two thousand members of the nobility. The number of prisoners was greater than the English could handle. Most of the prisoners were instructed on their honor to come to Bordeaux with their ransoms by Christmas-in the days of chivalry, such a request was a matter of routine. And still many of the English soldiers complained that their archers' aim had been too good, because the arrows that hit the French forces with such accuracy had deprived the victors of an even larger number of prisoners to hold for ransom.26

  The Black Prince took the French king to England seven months after the battle and installed him in high style at the Savoy Palace until the ransom was paid. But how big was the ransom to be? When the French rejected a preliminary settlement in 1358, the English responded by raising their demands. Meanwhile, the clock was ticking.

  In March 1359, with just six months left before the truce negotiated at Poitiers was scheduled to expire, jean signed the Treaty of London. His desperation is apparent in the conditions to which he agreed: in exchange for his release from captivity, he yielded all of western France from Calais to the Pyrenees plus a ransom of four million gold ecus (gold crowns, the equivalent of more than C600,000), the ransom to be collateralized by forty noble and royal hostages. If the French blocked the execution of this treaty in any fashion, Edward had the right to send his armies back to France-at the expense of the French king. Edward knew what he was doing by putting the financial burden on the enemy, for his wars in France were terribly costly. In one year alone, he borrowed two hundred thousand gold florins from his Italian bankers (on which he subsequently defaulted).21

  When the Dauphin, serving as regent in his father's absence, received word of this total capitulation, he summoned the estates general to help him make the fearful choice between peace and renewal of the war. The response was immediate and unanimous: the treaty was intolerable, and war was to be declared on England.

  The English promptly launched another protracted campaign in northern France, but this time the French resisted a pitched battle, resort ing to a scorched-earth strategy instead. On April 13, when the depleted and now ragged English army was camped near Chartres, an extraordinarily powerful hailstorm hit them, accompanied by cyclone-force winds and cloudbursts of freezing rain. According to Tuchman, "In half an hour Edward's army took a beating that human hands could not have inflicted and that could hardly be taken as other than a celestial warning."28

  It is the rare military commander who at one time or another has not heeded messages from supernatural sources. Edward III, tough though he was in many ways, decided at this point that discretion was the better part of valor. In any case, he retained plenty of bargaining power, because jean was still his prisoner. He agreed to reopen negotiations, which were finally completed on May 8, 1360, at the nearby village of Bretigny. Jean's ransom was scaled back to three million gold crowns. The territorial concessions were also reduced, but they still amounted to about a third of France, a prize unmatched until Hitler invaded France 580 years later.

  The treaty was explicit about the terms for the forty hostages to be held as security against the payment of the king's ransom. The stipulations included the king's two younger sons, his brother, the brotherin-law of the Dauphin, and nine great counts. The English agreed to return jean from London to Calais, upon payment of the first installment of six hundred thousand gold crowns on the ransom. At that point, ten of his fellow noble prisoners would also be liberated, but they were to be replaced by forty wealthy members of the Third Estate-the bourgeoisie; like Willy Sutton, Edward III knew where the money was. The remainder of Jean's ransom was due in six semiannual installments of four hundred thousand gold crowns, with one-fifth of the hostages to be released after each payment.

  The ransom would have been a terrible burden on the French under any circumstances, but especially following the depredations of the Black Death and the havoc and destruction of war. The going was so difficult at one point that the French invited back the Jews whom they had ejected from France in 1306, offering them twenty years' residence subject to payment of twenty florins per head entrance fee and seven florins annually thereafter.29 Jean himself contributed the handsome golden dowry he earned from marrying off his eleven-year-old daughter to the rich tyrant of Milan, Galeazzo Visconti, a step that the chronicler Matteo Villain described as the king "selling his own flesh at auction."31

  The first installment of the ransom was made in October 1360. Edward then met with jean in Calais, and the two monarchs swore together to keep the peace into perpetuity. After four years in captivity, the king of France was finally a free man. The moment was hardly one for rejoicing. Jean returned to a country that Petrarch, on hand as an ambassador from Visconti, described as "a heap of ruins.... Everywhere was solitude, desolation, and misery. "31

  Nor is this the end of the story of Jean's ransom payments. Plague, which continued to reappear periodically, killed off some of the hostages in England. Other members of the group were attempting to use their own resources to buy their freedom. The ransom payments were soon in arrears. Ceded territories resisted the change in sovereignty. In 1363, convinced that his honor was in disrepute, jean sailed back across the Channel the week after Christmas and restored himself to captivity in London, disregarding the urgent advice of his Council, his prelates, and his barons. He was received by the English with great ceremony and celebration, but he soon fell ill and died in April 1364. He was only 45 years old. A million gold crowns were still payable on his ransom.

  In the end, less than half the ransom was paid, but even 1.5 million gold crowns was a colossal amount of money. It was equivalent to a full year's pay for approximately six thousand agricultural laborers, three hundred thousand sheep, or 1.6 million gallons of ale, or to more than four times the total of all the poll taxes that would stir up a vicious rebellion almost twenty years later.31

  One other golden ransom payment is worth comment, even though it was paid in the following century. This fifteenth-century ransom was once again a consequence of the English wars with the French, which were still fitfully occupying both countries as late as the 1470s.

  In 1478, King Edward IV of England abandoned an intended invasion of France in return for a down payment by the French of 75,000 crowns and an annual pension of fifty thousand additional crowns. The following year, the French also agreed to ransom Henry VI's widow, Margaret of Anjou, for fifty thousand crowns, to be paid in five annual installments. Christopher Challis's authoritative history of the English Mint calculates that if all this money had actually been paid up to the time of the death of Edward IV in 1483-and the evidence suggests that it was paid-the total would hav
e come to 517,000 crowns or L103,400. This sum compares with the Mint's total gold output of L185,684 from 1474 to 1482.

  The English got a better deal than the raw figures indicate. In 1471, during the Wars of the Roses, the Yorkist leaders Edward and his brother Richard Duke of Gloucester-the future Edward IV and Richard III, respectively-had captured, deposed, and murdered the Lancastrian King Henry VI as well as his son, the prince of Wales. This event put the ex-queen, Margaret of Anjou, into the ranks of the involuntarily unemployed. One can only wonder why the French had to offer such a generous sum in order to persuade the English to part with Margaret. She must have been a terrible harridan, hanging around with nothing to do but bemoan the terrible fate that the victorious Yorkists had visited upon her husband and son.

  Edward and Richard should have considered her worth disposing of at any price. In Act I, Scene 3 of Shakespeare's Richard III, Richard describes her to her face as "thou hateful withered hag." Perhaps that was only fair, because Margaret tells Richard off by calling him, among other things, "Thou elvish-marked, abortive, rooting hog ... the son of hell/Thou loathed issue of thy father's loins!" Yet we must admit the possibility that Shakespeare was taking poetic license in his choice of words. Margaret was reputed to be a great beauty. After her return to France, however, she succumbed to a skin ailment, described by one more scholarly historian than Shakespeare as "a dry scaly withering of her once-golden beauty. Overnight, she became hideous. Only her eyes remained, ravaged and terrible."13 Nevertheless, one can only speculate what the Yorkists might have done to Margaret had not her king so generously offered those fifty thousand golden crowns for the dubious pleasure of repatriating her.