THE POLISH GRAIN TRADE 209warfare, and until the 1640s its own warships, which formed the core of the
Royal Fleet. Its society was organized in an elaborate system of castes and
guilds, each with their own exclusive rules and membership. In the eyes of some-
one just arrived from a village of the interior, where the year-long toil of scores
of peasants barely sufficed to produce a few sacks of corn, it must have looked
incredibly rich and prosperous. Its three thousand workshops turned out all the
imaginable luxuries of the day - velvet, silk, furniture, jewellery, books, paint-
ings. Above all, it was a shop-window of European life. Its people were in touch
with all the latest news, fashions, and heresies. They affected Spanish clothes
and lived in houses built in the Flemish style. They travelled abroad, and wel-
comed all sorts of refugees from Dutch weavers to French Huguenots. The
patricians, when not talking business, mixed in a high life of politics, music,
libraries, collecting, and of elegant villas surrounded by formal gardens. The
artisans and workmen sweated in an atmosphere of high insecurity and great
opportunity, where wages were good but competition fierce, where privileges
were jealously guarded with factions and tumults, and where municipal charity
looked harshly on idleness. Danzig was an anthill of work, prosperity, and cul-
ture, common enough in Italy or the Netherlands, but unique in Poland. As such
it undoubtedly presented a superlative attraction, a materialist Mecca to which
the Polish nobleman was drawn and tempted - to buy and sell, to be ruined or
to make his fortune, to load himself with trinkets and luxuries for his house and
family, to hear the news and gaze at the sights, and at last, relieved and
exhausted, to sail against the current of the Vistula on the long, slow journey
home.
To support a high standard of life, the export trade in grain obviously had to
be complemented with a wide variety of other commodities. Exports were
matched by imports. The ships which took the grain also carried wool, flax,
leather, timber, and metals. On the inward voyage, they brought in manufac-
tures, colonial products, fish, alcohol, salt, and coal. The structure of Danzig's
trade was in fact very complex. On the inland side, it was connected with all
parts of the Republic. To the west, there were connections with Germany, espe-
cially Silesia, a source of fine cloth, high-grade metal-work, tools, arms, and
implements: to the south, with Cracow and the Danube Basin; to the east, with
Lukow, the centre of the cattle and leather trade, with the Ukraine, whence
valuable shipments of potash and saltpetre derived; and by extension with
Muscovy, whence in 1600 alone some 800,000 fur pelts were delivered to the
market at Gniezno. Overseas, there were connections with all the active markets
of the world. The over-all picture fluctuated considerably. But the collected sta-
tistics for one specimen year, 1641, provide a cross-section of the quantity and
variety of the main items: