bribes triumph over [your] good qualities, and drive the grain we yearn for out of the
city as should not happen.”^16 He was right: merchants from Genoa and Venice were
bribing the emperor to allow them first to import into Constantinople grain from the
Black Sea region and then to export it to Italy, where they could make handsome
profits.
Merchants like these were participating in far-flung markets that extended from
the Black Sea to England. Italian cities no longer fed themselves from nearby farms:
they relied on imports. Florentines got their grain from Sicily, Genoa (as we have
seen) from as far away as the Black Sea. Controlling these imports were the cities
themselves, which functioned like mini-states. Great merchants (like those at
Byzantium) worked in collusion with the political powers in place. In England, major
landowners were now as much agri-businessmen as they were feudal lords.
Anticipating food shortages, middlemen hoarded food stocks until prices rose
steeply. Rulers were torn by their desire to make money and their duty to the
common good. The kings of Aragon (in Spain) prohibited the export of wheat in
times of scarcity, but they also sold special licenses to individuals, allowing them to
ignore the law. City governments found themselves in a balancing act: they could
store food in reserve to sell at below-market cost to the needy, but they also wanted
to please their merchants.
Peasants were not passive in the face of the new conditions. They too were
involved in markets—not in the grand long-distance networks of Venetian and
Genoese traders, but in small-scale exchanges among local hamlets and villages. The
countryside had its own sort of commerce, petty but active. The little Provençal
village of Reillane, for example, with a population of 2,400, supported 13 cloth
makers. Such merchants might also sell meat or extend credit, on the side, to the
local peasantry. The Mediterranean region—Italy, Spain, southern France, and
Provence—boasted more diversified crops than the north: this meant that, when
wheat harvests were poor, peasants could survive on chestnuts and millet. Or they
could relocate to regions better suited to their needs. When peasants in Navarre
found that they could not afford to pay their lord his dues, they moved to the Ebro
valley, where they found a place in the flourishing commercial economy there. All
was not bleak in the age of the Great Famine; much depended on who and where
you were—and on how fair the markets were.
*****
In the second half of the thirteenth century, Europeans found ways to mesh their
