72 Chapter ThreeOverall, therefore, the picture of European economic development
in the fourteenth century is not completely black. However acute
local hardships and the plague disaster may have been, the market for
goods of common consumption—grain, wool, herring, salt, metal,
timber, and the like—became far more pervasive. This affected an
expanding proportion of the work force and enriched the continent as
a whole. Yet the new wealth remained precarious. Price fluctuations
and changes in supply and demand brought severe suffering to
thousands of individuals from time to time, because their livelihood
had come to depend on what happened in distant markets over which
they could have no personal control.
The primary managers of the commercial economy of Europe were
Italians, operating from such towns as Venice, Genoa, Florence, Siena,
and Milan. They bought and sold wholesale, brought new techniques
to backwoods regions (e.g., organizing or reorganizing salt mines in
Poland and tin mines in Cornwall), and, above all, extended credit to
(or withheld it from) lords, clerics, and commoners.
Clerical, royal, and princely administration, as well as long-distance
trade, mining, shipping, and other large-scale forms of economic ac
tivity, all became dependent on loans from Italian bankers. The rela
tionship was not an easy one. The prohibition of usury in canon law
created an aura of impropriety around credit operations. Reckless and
impecunious monarchs could invoke the wickedness of usury to jus
tify repudiation of their debts. Such an act could have widely ramify
ing consequences. The bankruptcy of the English King Edward III in
1339, for example, triggered a general financial crisis in Italy and
provoked the first clearly recognizable business cycle in European
history.
Taking a personal part in the defense of their hometowns could
scarcely seem worthwhile to international merchants and bankers who
found it easier and more comfortable to hire someone else to man the
walls or ride into battle. A hired professional was also likely to be a
better and more formidable soldier than a desk-bound banker orMan and Metals (New York, 1932), 2:507–69, has scattered data; Charles Singer, ed., A
History of Technology (Oxford, 1956), 2:11–24, marks no advance; John Temple, Mining:
An International History (London, 1972) is equally uninformative. The difficulty pre
sumably lies in the fact that mining skills developed on an artisan basis and were not
recorded in writing until 1555 when George Bauer’s masterwork was published as
Agricola, De re metallica, complete with instructive illustrations of technical procedures.
Richard, Singer, and Temple depend entirely on what Agricola has to say for technical
matters. Painstaking archaeology will be required before modern scholars can discover
when and where technical advances took place before De re metallica suddenly opens up
a view of what European miners of the sixteenth century had accomplished.