Steven Solomon

by Power;Civilization Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth

  As waterwheel know-how migrated from the monasteries to Europe’s growing commercial towns, it was employed for market-driven industrial applications. Waterpower propelled mechanized sawmills, bore wood and metals, and helped pound beer mash. In mining it was employed to crush metals, power shaft ventilation machines, and raise winches that removed buckets of mine water and excavated ores to the surface.

  But it was in the seminal industries of papermaking, textiles, and iron forging that waterwheel-power technology stood out as having the most dramatic impact on Europe’s economic rise. Paper mills with giant, water-powered beaters that pounded pulp migrated from Baghdad to Damascus by 1000 and to Muslim Spain by 1151. Christian Europe’s first water-powered paper mill was opened in 1276 in Fabriano, Italy, where the watermark was shortly thereafter pioneered. Since papermaking required vast amounts of clean water as an input in the production process, most paper mills were located upstream of the nearby towns that might pollute it. Mass production reduced the cost of paper, stimulating the nascent commercial bookmaking industry that evolved from the monasteries in the twelfth century and the thriving centers of Islamic civilization. This paved the way for the landmark fifteenth-century invention of the printing press, which in turn helped democratize European society and reinforce the foundations of Western humanism and science through the dissemination of books and knowledge to a wider public—the original information revolution.

  Clothing textiles also had a special place in European history. Textiles were one of the earliest major industries to go international, linking raw material suppliers and intermediary and finished goods producers in a web of market activity that stretched from England to northern and Mediterranean Europe. Waterwheel mechanization powered the beaters used by cloth fullers and, when the Chinese silk loom reached the West in the thirteenth century, to drive silk-spinning machines. By the fourteenth century, one silk mill in Lucca, Italy, employed an undershot waterwheel to drive 480 spindles. Eventually, the water-powered spinning of cotton and other low-priced textiles in eighteenth-century England accompanied world history’s first fully mechanized factories, the earliest signature hallmark of the Industrial Revolution.

  The waterwheel played a decisive role in medieval Europe’s catalytic discovery of the blast furnace to smelt iron. Religious demand in the twelfth century for huge iron church bells may have provided the early impetus for the breakthrough. In the ensuing centuries, Europe’s iron foundries relocated from wood-abundant forests to riversides and fast-running stream banks to tap the continent’s waterpower. Waterwheels gradually supplanted the force of the smithie’s arm in pounding the iron by delivering uniform strokes of giant, 1,000- to 3,500-pound trip hammers and lighter ones of 150 pounds that tapped iron into shapes with 200 strokes per minute. By the late fourteenth century, waterwheels were widely used to blast powerful drafts of air through pairs of enormous leather bellows, several feet in diameter, to heat furnaces that could run nonstop for weeks on end at up to 1,500 degrees centigrade. Iron ore heated by these stronger blasts was liquefied, enabling for the first time in Europe the casting of abundant volumes of molten iron. In short order, the water-powered blast furnace transformed iron making from a traditional, small-batch handicraft into one of Europe’s earliest mass production industries. By 1500, iron production in Europe reached 60,000 tons. Soaring demand for iron nails, one of history’s humblest but most useful inventions, inspired a new water-powered rolling mill in which two iron cylinders flattened iron into bars that were then mechanically cut into nails by rotary disks. At the forges, mechanical trip-hammers attached to a wooden shaft pounded large volumes of malleable fired iron into various shapes that became farm and industrial tools. Iron’s marriage with the contemporaneous spread of gunpowder to fabricate firearms and cannonry, meanwhile, armed Europe’s vessels and soldiers with the advanced weaponry it would use so devastatingly to subdue societies around the world.

  Although comparatively backward in most other technologies and economic development, Europe by about 1150 was applying waterwheel-transmitted power to early industries on parity with the advanced civilizations of China and Islam. One of history’s puzzling questions was why only in Europe this budding mechanical prowess continued to develop into the direct precursor of the eighteenth-century Industrial Revolution. Islam’s failure can be explained partly by the fact that its dearth of small, year-round streams imposed upon it too great a deficiency of waterpower and internal waterway transport, and hitched its historical trajectory intractably to the plodding, overland trade network of the camel. One of China’s principal hindrances was its surfeit of cheap labor, which rendered mechanical innovation less urgent, and even potentially threatening to the established social and political order as well if it reduced employment. The Grand Canal transportation network’s enabling of the state to assert stronger internal command over the economy also generally blunted the innovating impetus of private market forces. Whatever the causes, the net effect was that China’s vaunted technical and scientific know-how was never rigorously applied to industrial production.

  Europe’s natural water resources, by contrast, helped create conditions more favorable to the development of market-driven industries and pluralistic, liberal democratic states. Rain-fed, plow agriculture and myriad navigable, and energy-providing small rivers favored the rise of multiple, autonomous, decentralized regions. The natural competition among neighboring states, whetted by sea-trading merchants’ freedom to choose among ports offering the most advantageous terms, strengthened the development of private property and individual political rights. In pondering the question of why parliamentary democracy and capitalism arose first in Europe, the late anthropologist Marvin Harris advanced an inverse hydraulic theory. In northern Europe, he noted,

  where there is no Nile or Indus or Yellow River and where winter snows and spring rains provide sufficient moisture for field crops and pastures, population remained more dispersed than in hydraulic regions…

  Unlike hydraulic despots, Europe’s medieval kings could not furnish or withhold water from the fields. The rains fell regardless of what the king in his castle decreed, and there was nothing in the productive process to necessitate the organization of vast armies of workers…And so the feudal aristocracy was able to resist all attempts to establish genuinely national systems of government.

  Without control over water resources, no authoritarian, centralized state could rule firmly over a great area, leaving a wider berth for independent, cooperative manorial villages and competitive market-centric towns to shape the political economic norms of society. In Roman times slavery had retarded the incentive for labor saving innovation; by the Middle Ages slavery had all but disappeared and cheap labor was scarce. The profit-seeking logic of market forces applied Europe’s waterpower potential to mechanized technologies to overcome labor scarcity. Further accelerated by the competition between states, it drove European commerce and industry toward innovations that, in the end, could not be restrained by centralized command. The way was paved for developments that would eventually help drive Europe’s economic rise.

  First, however, the commercial and mechanical revolutions between 950 and 1350 spurred market-driven exchanges between northern and Mediterranean Europe that gradually linked the two regions into an integrated economic area. Initially, the central axis of trade between north and south was overland and concentrated on a series of seasonal fairs, which attracted merchants from all over Europe, who negotiated trade contracts based on sample goods displayed at the fair. From the late twelfth to early fourteenth centuries, the largest were six fairs held in rotation nearly year round in the Champagne region of northeastern France, astride the main roads and waterways running from the Mediterranean Sea to the North Sea, and from the Baltic to the English Channel. Yet the Champagne fairs rapidly declined in the early thirteenth century as soon as a much cheaper, faster and more reliable alternative became available—the opening of a direct Atlantic coast sea route betwee
n the Mediterranean and the north. It was this private commerce-driven, Atlantic seacoast trade route that bonded Europe’s two disparate environmental zones together into a dynamic, unified marketplace that ignited Europe’s rapid takeoff and the ascension of Western civilization.

  The first of what would become the famous Flanders Fleet set sail from Genoa to Bruges in 1297. By 1315 regular convoys were traveling to the North Sea from Venice and Genoa. For 235 years to 1532, the Flanders Fleet sailed between Italy and the Low Countries, twin hubs of the European economy until the eighteenth century when the center moved decisively to England. In its cargo holds it transported bulky commodities of wool, raw materials, and salted herring, as well as some luxuries and spices from the Orient.

  One key event in the rise of the Atlantic coast trade was the breaking of the Muslim grip over the Strait of Gibraltar. Throughout history, control of the eight-mile-wide strait had been a source of power and wealth. For centuries from antiquity, the strait known to the Romans as the Pillars of Hercules had been firmly controlled by the long-vanished city-state of mysterious origin, Tartessus. Located outside the Pillars at the mouth of Spain’s Guadalquivir River, Tartessus flourished as an emporium for locally mined silver and lead and precious tin for making bronze that was imported from as far away as Brittany and Cornwall. Despite founding a trading colony close by to the east at Gades, modern Cádiz, the Phoenicians could not challenge Tartessus’ Atlantic monopoly. Finally, around 500 BC, soon after Tartessus disappeared from history, the Phoenicians of rising Carthage sent an expedition under a captain named Himlico into the North Atlantic along the old Tartessian trade routes. Thereafter, for over two centuries, Carthage was master of the strait and the rich trade monopoly it conferred. With Carthage’s defeat in the Punic Wars, Rome took control of the Pillars. It helped secure Rome’s empire through sea power control of the mouths of the major western and northwestern European rivers and supported Emperor Augustus’ sending of fleets as far as the coasts of the North Sea in his unsuccessful effort to extend Rome’s frontiers from the Rhine to the Elbe. The next great civilization to profit from the long-held monopoly over the Strait of Gibraltar was Islam through its control of the land on both sides in Spain and Morocco.

  The European breakthrough at the strategic strait was accomplished in 1291, when Benedetto Zaccaria of Genoa destroyed the Moroccan fleet that defended it. Zaccaria was a colorful figure, whose exploits embodied the animating spirit of Europe’s early rise. Marco Polo of Genoa’s archrival Venice was his contemporary; indeed, Polo was imprisoned in Genoa dictating his tales of the Silk Roads and the Orient while Zaccaria was living outsized adventures influential in European history. Over the course of Zaccaria’s eclectic career—which included being a pirate in the Aegean, mercenary naval commander for several states, diplomat, crusader in Syria, ruler over a Greek island, governor of a Spanish seaport, and Europe’s most powerful alum baron—his many ships put in at almost every important seaport from Flanders to the Crimea in the Black Sea. Zaccaria was a member of the upper merchant class of the Genoese republic, which had arisen as a great Mediterranean power from the late eleventh century after it and other city-states from Italy’s western coast, including Pisa and Amalfi, had united to drive out piratical Muslim sea raiders from their waters.

  As a youthful trader in the international wool, cloth, and color dye business, Zaccaria in 1274 had seized the opportunity to exchange naval assistance to the Byzantine Empire for the right to develop a huge, virgin, extremely high-grade deposit of alunite he had surveyed in Asia Minor. When processed, alunite provided the basis for alum. Alum was widely used in medieval times, most importantly as a color fastener in dyeing textiles and as a hardener in tanning. Because colors fastened best with the highest-grade alums, alum quality was a key determinant of the order of economic supremacy among the competing dye centers of Italy, Flanders, and England. Because alum’s great bulkiness made it expensive to transport overland, comparative advantage accrued to states on the sea routes of the Mediterranean, where the era’s best deposits were located. One other Asia Minor quarry had alunite deposits of superior grade to Zaccaria’s; through political maneuvering, Zaccaria was able to get its exportation rights temporarily blocked—until he himself succeeded in securing an ownership interest in it. Zaccaria’s huge alum refining operation featured giant processing vats that were protected on land by a fortress and at sea by cruising ships. Armed soldiers helped ensure the safe transport of the alum cargo ships once the convoys put out to sea for the textile markets. As he sought the best market price, Zaccaria was inevitably drawn northward. One of his ships got through Gibraltar and reached England as early as 1278. Ultimately, the lure of lucre drew him toward his showdown victory over the Islamic Moroccan fleet at Gibraltar in 1291 that opened the Atlantic coast to unimpeded European shipping. A naval warrior and would-be crusader to the last, Zaccaria died in 1307 or 1308, bequeathing his heirs one of medieval Europe’s earliest and largest private commodity empires.

  Despite the Genoese’s pioneering, it was archrival Venice that ultimately profited most from the Flanders-Mediterranean sea trade. From the redoubt of its island-flecked lagoon on the upper Adriatic Sea, the Venetian republic had been one of the earliest Italian city-states to lead the revival of Mediterranean Europe from the tenth century. From its earliest roots, Venice was wedded to the sea; indeed, a great festival symbolically commemorating this marriage was consummated anew each year with the tossing of a ring into the waters. From the fifth century, when Roman citizens from the countryside fled the invading barbarians for the protection of its mucky marshes and islands, Venice’s fate had hinged on its response to one of urban society’s most water challenged environments. With no agriculture and sinking soils, its flat, muddy, and often waterlogged islands had to be constantly drained, built up with soil dredged from its lagoon beds, and protected from the sea tides by laboriously constructed artificial barriers. Malaria and the diseases of miasmic swamps abounded. Indeed, when Dante Alighieri’s special embassy in 1321 regarding navigation rights on the Po River was unfavorably received by Venetian leaders, the great author of The Divine Comedy and professional diplomat was forced to return to Ravenna via malarial swamplands, from which he took fever and died.

  With scant natural resources save fish and the salt of its lagoons, Venice depended from the start on commerce and sea power. By the sixth century, its flat-bottomed trading barges crawled along the rivers of northern and central Italy. In the ninth century, it ventured forth into the Muslim-dominated Mediterranean under the protective shield of the largest and wealthiest city in Christendom, Constantinople. By the tenth century, it began to emerge as a thriving sea trading power in its own right. Its ships sailed among the ports of the Mediterranean, Europe, and the Levant, exchanging Eastern luxuries like spices, silks, and ivory that arrived by sea and camel train from Islamic Alexandria for bulky Western commodities like iron, timber, naval supplies, and slaves, as well as Venetian salt and glass.

  As an entirely maritime, merchant-oriented republic, Venice resuscitated the democratic, free-market traditions of ancient Athens. Yet in the favorable environment of commercially awakening medieval Europe, these Greek traditions took deeper root and flourished. They also were transplanted to other parts of Europe. Venice itself became history’s longest-enduring republic—1,100 years—and one of important progenitors of modern capitalism. Its devotion was to the pursuit of profit and commerce; more than once its leaders, who actively participated in speculative ventures, defied the Latin Church, even accepting excommunication, rather than obey a papal directive that crossed its vital commercial interests.

  By 1082 Venice had attained parity with Constantinople as a Mediterranean power. In that year its merchants became exempted from Byzantine tolls and received other special trade privileges when Venice agreed to provide naval help against the regional invasions of the Normans. By 1203–1204 it became master of the Mediterranean when, through astonishing cunning, cal
culated risk, and bravery of arms, its blind, octogenarian elected doge, Enrico Dandolo, diverted the Norman armies of the Fourth Crusade from their original target of Egypt and, against the pope’s wishes, induced them to successfully besiege and sack Constantinople as repayment for Venice’s furnishing of the crusaders’ fleet. The Venetians succeeded where the Muslim besiegers 400 years earlier had not by capturing the Golden Horn. Its soldiers seized control of the huge windlass used to raise and lower the great iron chain across the Horn’s mouth that regulated entry. Then, led by the charging Dandolo, and his banner of St. Mark, the Venetians from one side and the Normans from the others breached the walls for the first time since Emperor Constantine had founded the city nearly 900 years earlier—250 years before it would fall out of Christian hands to the Turks. Following several months of political intrigue, and a final siege and customary three-day sacking of Constantinople, Enrico Dandolo, by treaty with the Norman crusaders, took the best parts of the Byzantine Empire for Venice. Venice got three-eighths of Constantinople, including prime frontage on the Golden Horn, free-trade rights throughout the Byzantine Empire, from which its archrivals Genoa and Pisa were to be banned, and a choice string of ports stretching all the way from Venice to the Black Sea. Thus Venice was the clear winner of the Fourth Crusade, which in the end never fulfilled its purpose of assaulting Egypt or the Holy Land.