(^66) Chapter Three
As in China in the same age, places where transport and communica
tions were unusually easy led the way. In Mediterranean lands,
Europe’s commercial development was also affected by the fact that
skills were readily imported from adjacent, more developed societies
(i.e., from Byzantium and from Moslem countries). To begin with, this
configuration gave primacy to Italy. A secondary commercial center
arose in the Low Countries where the navigable Rhine, Meuse, and
Scheldt rivers converge. Overland portage routes linked these two
main nodes of commercial and artisan activity; and exchanges between
the two regions were consummated at a series of fairs held in Cham
pagne. Little by little more time and effort went into production for
market sale, sometimes at a distance. Specialization led to increased
wealth, and altered social balances in favor of merchant-capitalists. In
the most active economic centers, the preeminence of knights and of
social leadership based on rural relationships came into question be
fore the end of the twelfth century.
These social and economic changes were reinforced by a parallel
weakening of knightly supremacy in war. In the eleventh century a
few hundred Norman knights had been able to conquer and rule south
Italy and Sicily; a few thousand sufficed to seize and hold Jerusalem at
the very end of the century. Yet, in the twelfth century, an army of
German knights met unexpected defeat in northern Italy at Legnano
(1176) when they vainly charged pikemen who had been put in the
field by the leagued cities of northern Italy. The military might of the
Lombard League, attested by that victory, was essentially defensive,
like the town walls which had begun to sprout wherever traders and
artisans had become numerous enough to require and pay for this kind
of protection.
The result was a standoff, in Italy at least, between older and newer
forms of warfare and social leadership. Armed townsmen sought to
control the surrounding countryside. How else assure safe passage for
their goods and the punctual delivery of food within city walls? Some
times an accommodation between rural landholders and the ruling
elements of nearby towns proved possible; sometimes noble land
holders moved into town to mingle with and rival the urban upper
class of merchant-capitalists. On top of this, from the eleventh century
onward, the rival claims of emperor and pope divided Italy. Both
aspired to exercise a general hegemony over the existing medley of
the east, and ties to a particular set of fields was weaker for nobles and peasants alike
because scratch plow cultivation made it comparatively easy to start afresh on new land
prepared for cultivation by the age-old technique of slash and burn.
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