The seminal breakthrough of the agricultural revolution that stirred northern Europe’s economic awakening came with the heavy wheeled moldboard plow. Pulled by a team of four to eight oxen, the moldboard plow had deep, curved iron or iron-covered blades that turned over deep furrows and produced high dirt ridges unlocking the fertility of the heavy soils over a wide expanse. The key technical breakthrough besides the application of costly iron blades was the placement between the team and the plowshare of wheels, which acted as a fulcrum for applying greater pressure to the heavier plowshare and improved the machine’s mobility over uneven terrain. By the tenth century it was in widespread use everywhere across northern Europe.
Northern Europe’s landscape was dramatically transformed. Forests were felled, swamplands were drained, and everywhere wilderness was converted to arable cropland. The intensification of water management wrought by the heavy moldboard plow extended the footprint of mankind’s intensively cultivated cropland to new climate zone and sustained one of history’s great expansions of farming on rain-fed lands. Agricultural production and productivity both soared, setting the basis for an agricultural revolution that reached its apex in the eleventh to thirteenth centuries. Notably drier and milder climate—1 to 2 degrees centigrade—in Europe from the mid-eighth to thirteenth centuries abetted the expansion. The proof of its great impact was a surge in European population, which more than doubled from AD 700 to 1200 to 60–70 million. Population density increased wherever the moldboard plow came into widespread use.
The moldboard plow also acted as a major catalyst in the structural transformation of medieval economic society. Being a powerful, but costly implement, it encouraged the cultivation of larger fields, the collective sharing of scarce draft animals, and cooperative labor among farmers. Fences separating individually owned fields came down and the collectively managed land came to be governed by peasant village councils—an early form of representative democracy—that settled disputes and rendered executive decisions about total cropland management. These councils became essential features of northern Europe’s characteristic self-sufficient and self-contained village communities, or manors, which contrasted distinctively from the individualistic economic and social structures that prevailed in the scratch-plowing, drier lands south of the Loire River and the Alps.
The heavy moldboard plow became the foundation of a new three-field triennial crop rotation system that originated in northern France in the ninth century and within three centuries was common throughout northwestern Europe. Wheat or rye was planted in one of three fields surrounding the village in the autumn; the second field was planted in the spring with oats, barley, or peas; the third was left fallow in order to replenish the fertility of the soil. Farming villages often encompassed the cultivated landholdings of free peasants as well as tenant-farmers working part of the lord’s manorial domain. The lord provided many general services, such as blacksmithing and the waterwheel-powered gristmill for grinding grain into flour to make the daily bread; tenant-farmers commonly were obligated to use the manorial mill for a standard one-thirteenth share of their grain or flour. The village-centric, manorial economy was integrated into the decentralized, governing feudal association of lords, vassals, knights, and peasants to constitute the signature political economic system of the era.
The agriculture bounty and population growth unlocked from Europe’s waterlogged plains by the moldboard plow helped activate other of the region’s latent water assets to impel further economic expansion. After 1000, Europe’s long inland rivers and northern seacoasts came alive with merchant vessels, often heavily armed, transporting crops and raw material goods like timber, metals, wax, furs, wool, and eventually salted herring, among rising free commercial towns and seasonal trade fairs. On the northern seas, many of these early merchants were descendants of the longboat Norse raiders.
Major advances in the flat-bottomed cog from the eleventh century transformed the treacherous, lonely northern seas into active trade highways carrying bulk cargo with small crews of 20 or fewer. The new cog was a much larger, sturdier single-square sail vessel with a rounded bottom and an innovative central sternpost rudder that replaced the traditional long steering oar. Cargo carrying capacity of the largest cogs sextupled, reaching 300 tons by the late twelfth century. When lofty platforms for archers were added, the high-decked cog also proved to be an excellent warship. Armed convoys of cogs became the workhorse of an informal network of free German seaport cities that by the twelfth century had started to dominate sea commerce in the Baltic and North seas. Centered in Lübeck on the Baltic side of the neck of land dividing the two seas, the powerful German-centered Hansa commercial association (also known as the Hanseatic League), with its own governing membership, laws, and customs, eventually numbered almost 200 free-trading cities and towns. The Hansa domain stretched the breadth of the northern seacoast and, as inland river trade developed, up the Rhine as well. One late-joining Hansa member was Cologne, situated at the juncture of two Rhine waterways, one flowing upstream and the other downstream, and a major overland route. This intersection made Cologne Germany’s largest town, albeit with a modest 20,000 inhabitants, in the fifteenth century.
Although always smaller in volume than its sea trade, northern Europe’s inland river commerce created an extensive, inexpensive waterway network that galvanized economic activity in much the same manner, although to a far-lesser degree, as the Grand Canal in China. Localities built and maintained flood levees and interconnecting transport canals. In the Low Countries of modern Holland and Belgium, where extensive cropland was reclaimed by drainage, some 85 percent of commercial traffic moved by water, abetted by the use of navigation weirs and, from the late fourteenth century, canal locks. Rivermen often poled their boats downstream on busy rivers, sometimes paying exorbitant tolls for the chains stretching across them to be lowered, much like modern auto tollgates on a highway.
Buoyed by trade and agricultural bounty, the quickening economic pace expanded northern Europe’s wealth to levels that eventually surpassed those of the older centers of Mediterranean Europe, which were concurrently undergoing their own commercial upswing impelled by private merchants and market economic forces. “Commerce between the tenth century and the fourteenth century became the most dynamic sector of the economy in country after country, and merchants were the main promoters of change,” writes historian Robert S. Lopez. The Commercial Revolution gradually eroded the controlling power “of landowners and officials and made the market, instead of the public place or the cathedral squares, the main focus of urban life.”
Urban hubs throbbing with new market activity rose to prominence starting in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Wherever navigable waterways converged or where key river crossing or favorable harbors were established, influential urban commercial centers arose. The most vibrant cluster in northern Europe was in the Low Countries, where the navigable Rhine, Meuse, and Scheldt rivers flowed near one another. It included the ports of Ghent, the largest city with 50,000 inhabitants in the fourteenth century, Bruges, Antwerp, and later Amsterdam; other big centers included Lübeck, London, and Paris. This was mirrored in Mediterranean Europe by a cluster of large northern Italian city-states, above all Venice, Genoa, Milan, and Florence, with populations surpassing 100,000.
Due to the overriding importance of water navigation, it was no accident that the central marketplaces of Europe’s Commercial Revolution developed literally on top of and alongside the bridges and quays of the leading medieval towns and city-states. Like towns, bridges underwent a major building boom from the eleventh to thirteenth centuries, often becoming each town’s pulsing central marketplace. Shops and houses located around the bridges enjoyed the further medieval privilege of having at hand a common drinking water and sewage disposal source in the river below. Crowded with shops and markets were the late twelfth-century Old London Bridge across the Thames, the Grand Pont across the Seine, also featuring 13 floating water mills moored b
elow its arches where the river flowed fastest to produce fourteenth-century Paris’s daily bread flour, and the stone bridge that still crosses the Arno at Florence, the Ponte Vecchio. Many pioneering early bridges were built by monastic orders, including the famous, 20-arched, Pont d’Avignon across the notoriously flooding Rhone in southern France that was erected in the late twelfth century by the Frères Pontifes, (Brothers of the Bridge). As bridges became a practical amenity that enhanced town trade and commerce, civic authorities undertook the responsibility for building many of them. This helped revive the Roman practice of public infrastructure investment, which became a mainstay of the West’s liberal, democratizing marriage of convenience between governments and private markets.
Few bridges were at the center of so much important medieval commerce as Venice’s Rialto Bridge, the lone crossing over the Grand Canal at the heart of the greatest Mediterranean sea trading power of the age. The first wooden Rialto Bridge was built in 1264, replacing an old pontoon crossing. Several wooden iterations later, the late sixteenth-century stone bridge was erected, crammed then as today with two arcades of noisy shops and businesses bustling along its banks. Bakers, butchers, fishmongers, fruit and vegetable sellers, acrobats and other entertainers, and even the infirm in their beds at the hospice were conspicuous daily sights. Upon closer look, the hierarchical skeleton structure of early market capitalism itself was physically visible beneath the manifold relationships of the merchants of Venice crowded around the Rialto: the small merchants haggling over price and exchanging goods for money on the bridge within earshot of the larger wholesale suppliers who bought, sold, and signed trade and shipping contracts every morning nearby in their loggia, or meeting room—an early commodities exchange—and who then later in the day walked a few paces to the narrow bank counter stalls of the banchieri—the “bankers”—who settled their transactions by book entry account fund transfers and reinvested the accumulated capital profits of the marketplace in a new circuit of loans and ownership stakes in fresh speculative ventures. Many modern financial practices began in this era, including the debit and credit and double-entry format of modern balance sheet accounting and, in the fourteenth century, the bill of exchange facilitating merchants’ ability to conduct business in distant locations. The era also inaugurated history’s notable sovereign loan defaults—by British monarchs to their Italian bankers—with the resultant bank collapses and international financial and economic crises.
For centuries the two distinctive, rival economic realms of town commerce organized by market supply and demand on the one hand, and the immense, traditional manorial economy of barter and self-sufficient farming on the other, coexisted side by side with overlapping trade between them. Gradually, however, the more-productive market realm expanded faster and brought more and more of Europe’s economic resources under its ambit, eventually relegating the manorial realm to the margins, and then the annals, of history. Enough development had occurred before the disruptive, population-decimating famines and plagues of the fourteenth century that the outline of Europe’s signature model of market economies operating across a fragmented political environment was visibly emerging.
The superior competitive dynamism of the town over the manorial realm in shaping Europe’s destiny was vividly illustrated by their contrasting uses of the waterwheel. On the manor, the waterwheel rarely transcended its traditional function for grinding grain into flour. Under the influence of commercial market forces centered in the towns, it was transformed into a primary agent of the Mechanical Revolution (eleventh to thirteenth centuries) that powered the takeoff of Europe’s early industries.
The waterwheel’s invention in the first centuries before the Christian era ranked as one of the watershed moments in the history of civilization. In contrast to its older cousin, the ancient, animal-powered noria, or wheel of pots, that lifted water mainly to irrigate cropland, waterwheels fitted with paddles or blades turned automatically in ceaselessly flowing currents to transmit the captured water flow energy to do productive work. In effect, the waterwheel was history’s first mechanical engine. It provided mankind with its first great breakthrough in harnessing an inanimate force of nature since the domestication of fire at the dawn of humanity and sailing at history’s early beginnings. For some two millennia waterpower would represent the pinnacle of civilization’s constructive command of nature’s power.
The simple horizontal waterwheel—in which water flow turned a wheel that lay parallel with the millstone affixed above it—was used the world over, chiefly to grind bread flour. It was several times more powerful than the ancient hand mill turned at about one-half horsepower by two slaves or a donkey. Horsepower was augmented by a factor of five to six times over the hand mill by the innovation of placing the wheel vertically in the water. The vertical undershot wheel transmitted its rotating power through a camshaft and gearing mechanisms to turn multiple millstones or other devices at higher speeds of rotation, even though its reliability varied with fluctuating stream and weather conditions, such as droughts, floods, and freezes. Another major improvement—which became crucial to launching Europe’s early industrial development in the late Middle Ages—was an overshot version of the vertical waterwheel. By directing a steady flow of water to fall onto the wheel blades from above, often through a millrace emanating from an artificial pond or a dammed river and regulated by a sluice gate, the vertical overshot wheel typically was three to five times more efficient than its undershot cousin and also permitted larger, more-powerful wheels to be employed. Leonardo da Vinci, who worked brilliantly on many problems of water hydraulics including canal locks, water pumps, bridges, and paddleboats as well as waterwheels, was among the earliest to argue, rightly, that the overshot wheel was the most efficient design some 250 years before engineers were able to prove why. A few exceptional overshot wheels in medieval Europe were capable of as much as 40 to 60 horsepower. Coastal regions from Venice to Brittany and Dover even experimented with ocean-tide-powered mills, although these always remained on the periphery of mainstream waterpower history.
Although ubiquitous, waterwheels until the eleventh century were commonly weak in individual horsepower and rarely used for industrial applications. The Domesday Book (1086), compiled by Britain’s new Norman rulers to assess what potentially taxable assets they’d won in their conquest of 1066, recorded that south of the Severn and Trent rivers there were no less than 5,624 mills serving 3,000 settlements—or nearly two water mills per settlement. The ratio was likely similar on the even more prosperous and heavily populated Continent. Mills were widespread enough to have been taxed by Charlemagne at the start of the ninth century. Damming rivers to power waterwheels is recorded in the annals of French history from the twelfth century, with one account describing how a king hastened the surrender of a town he was besieging by breaking the dams that powered its mills. In the early fourteenth century, the Seine near Paris had 68 mills concentrated within less than one mile. Floating mills were common sights under the bridges of major cities. Virtually every suitable little stream in inhabited regions had several flour mills, often situated every quarter to half mile apart. By the debut of the eighteenth-century Industrial Revolution, Europe likely had over half a million water mills, whose enormous combined horsepower provided an indicative proxy for the advanced stage of material civilization attained in the West.
The waterwheel’s greatest impact on world history was in Europe because it was there that it was most extensively applied to early industry, especially after the eleventh century. The waterwheel inspired experimentation by craftsmen with a panoply of mechanical gears, flywheels, camshafts, conveyor belts, pulleys, shifters, and pistons that seeded the foundational know-how of industrial production. The surprising technological pioneers of applying waterpower to industry were religious monasteries. Ever since St. Benedict foreswore his solitary hermit’s existence and instituted the Benedictine Rule for the monastic community he established in AD 529 at Monte Cassino in sout
hern Italy, European monks had been actively engaged in physical labor as a material and spiritual boon to their communities’ purpose. Self-sufficient monastic communities played a key role in early medieval civilization by preserving ancient books and rekindling classical learning, converting pagans to Christianity and less famously, advancing and disseminating many hydraulic arts, including dike building and maintenance, swamp drainage, and bridge building, as well as the application of waterpower to myriad monastic activities.
The most ambitious monastic pioneers of waterwheel technology were the rapidly expanding Cistercians, founded in the late eleventh century, whose monasteries were consciously built near rivers to exploit its waterpower and which often housed large factories. Few individuals in history put waterpower to better use than the celebrated mystic Cistercian leader St. Bernard at his twelfth-century Clairvaux Abbey, in a valley in northeastern France. Water was drawn to the abbey from a two-mile-long millrace fed by the river Aube. Paraphrasing the description of a contemporary observer, the water first rushed to the corn mill where the wheels turned millstones to grind the grain and shake large sieves to separate the bran and the flour. In the next building, the water filled the boiler used for brewing and then drove the heavy hammers that beat the fulling cloth. After the tannery it was routed into many smaller courses, where it was employed in sawing wood, crushing olives, and providing running water for cooking, washing, bathing, and ultimately carrying away all refuse. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Cistercians pioneered the breakthrough application of water-power to iron foundries in England, France, Denmark, and Italy and were among Europe’s leading iron producers for several centuries.
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