Twixt Meuse and Scheldt. Town and Country in the Medieval Economy
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Twixt Meuse and Scheldt. Town and Country in the Medieval Economy of the Southern Netherlands from the 6th to the 12th century* Jean-Pierre Devroey, Université libre de Bruxelles Henri Pirenne, writing in the early 20th century in what was ultimately to become his monumental Histoire de Belgique, sketched the basic outlines of the development of our part of Europe. Belgian history cannot be conceived of and described as if the world ends at its boundaries. Belgium is a ‘microcosm of Western Europe (...). The Scheldt and Meuse basins have not only served as the cockpits of Europe: they were also the place where ideas were traded between the Latin and German world (...), it was their ports which for centuries were the ‘entrepôts’ for merchandise from both North and South’1. Opposed to geographical and linguistic determinism, Pirenne was convinced that the ‘Belgian nation’ (‘a land of contrasts, a country lacking natural frontiers, where two languages are spoken’), was born of a political, economic, and cultural community, forged from the urban freedoms, which had grown up on the banks of the Meuse and Scheldt. By the end of the Middle Ages, the Burgundian ‘State’ was a step on the road, which would inevitably lead to the establishment of 19th century Belgium. Although his finalistic vision of the Belgian nation is now seen as belonging to another age, Pirenne's thesis continues to be the most imaginative and powerful to be developed in the 20th century about medieval European history and its Belgian microcosm2. How can we explain the extraordinary blooming of economy and urban society in the Southern Netherlands during the Middle Ages? What was the basis of this growth and how quickly did it proceed? Could it have started in 7th century with the birth of new flows of trade in Northwest Europe, or in the 9th century with the Carolingian renaissance, or perhaps in the 11th century with the rebirth of the towns? Did this growth come from outside - a part of the reestablishment of large-scale trading in the 10th and 11th centuries - or was it internal, pushed by the dynamism of the countryside, the appearance, followed by control by the non-producing classes, of the agricultural surpluses so essential to urban life? Who helped to create this growth: the great merchants - entrepreneurs and capitalists; the king or the Carolingian monks who controlled the great estates; or the peasants who pioneered new lands? The answers suggested by Pirenne were inspired by the fact that he was a historian committed to a particular vision, ‘a child of his times, nationalist, liberal, bourgeois and optimistic (...), who saw history as a record of progress, driven by * Originally published as ‘Twixt Meuse and Scheldt: Town and Country in the Medieval Economy of the Southern Netherlands from the Sixth to the Twelfth Century’, The Fascinating Faces of Flanders: Through Art and Society, Lisbon, 1998, pp. 48-76, © Jean-Pierre Devroey. Translated from French by Van Lokeren, edited by Prof. dr. A. Verhulst. The original text has been slightly corrected for the on- line version. This paper has been published one year before Verhulst’s Rise of Cities in North-West Europe (Cambridge, 1999), with a different view on relations between urban and rural phenomenon. Three years later, Verhulst was taking up the idea of a ‘long slow rise’ of the European economy in his last book, The Carolingian Economy (Cambridge, 2002). 1 Pirenne 1900. 2 Verhulst 1986. 1 urban development, trade and capitalism’3. However, modern research tends to put the accent on the dynamism of the relationship between town and countryside since the Early Middle Ages and the patent role in economic development played by figures from the religious and political worlds. The creation of wealth is essential for the production of art and culture. The accumulation of capital was made possible by the transfer of economic surpluses from the base to the centres of control, from the country to the town, from the peasant, the subsistence producer, to the consumer, nobleman or burgess. The countryside and its economy are the essential preconditions for the development of Europe. Mohammed and Charlemagne The celebrated question of Mohammed and Charlemagne stresses continuity between the Ancient World and the Middle Ages4. Historians of Church and State nowadays tend to speak more of a transition when referring to the passage from late Antiquity to the successor states such as the Merovingian kingdoms of our regions. For Pirenne the turning point in the development of the West was not the Germanic invasions of the 5th century, but came later, in the early 7th century with the arrival of Islam, which brought an end to the economy of the Mediterranean world. For Carlo Cipolla and Roberto Lopez, the West went through a long period of depression, lasting almost a thousand years, between the crisis of the Late Empire and the beginnings of the trading revolution of the 12th century5. The first signs of economic recovery were not felt before the 10th century, which must be seen as the inflection point in a long economic cycle starting in the 3rd century. We now know that the decline of Mediterranean commerce started in the middle of the 4th century and reached an absolute low point in about 7006. However, this did not lead to a general contraction of the economy, a return to the countryside and the disappearance of town life between the 7th century and the year one thousand. What really happened was that the centre of economic gravity gradually moved away from the Mediterranean to the northwest of Europe7. The routes and circuits, venues, materials, and people involved in trade changed profoundly. In the heart of the Frankish world, between the Loire and the Rhine, the independent merchant was squeezed out to make way for agents of the king and church. The abbeys of Northern Gaul slowly abandoned the arduous transport ventures, which took them south of the Loire, where they could buy valuable merchandise such as olive oil, wax, fish and spices. From then on their involvement in the trading economy seems to have been primarily motivated by the desire to sell the agricultural surplus of their estates to best advantage, be it at fairs (wine at the big fairs held at Saint-Denis near Paris), town and country markets, in the ancient river ports of Rouen or Maastricht and at the new emporia, such as Quentovic, on the mouth of the Canche, or Dorestad, on the confluence of the Rhine and the Lek8. The bulk of trade in northwest 3 Verhulst 1986. 4 Pirenne 1937. 5 Cipolla 1956; Lopez 1974. 6 Claude 1985, Handel. 7 Claude 1985, Aspekte; Verhulst 1993. 8 Devroey 1984. 2 Europe did not consist of luxury goods, but rather of food products (cereals, wine and salt), and other basic commodities (textiles, wood and minerals) and the output of craft workshops (millstones and grindstones from the Eifel region, pottery from Badorf, Rhenish glassware, Frankish weapons, ‘Frisian’ and Frankish linen, etc.). This new start, sustained as it was by demographic and agricultural growth, coincided with the military expansion of the Frankish kingdom and the colonization of land to the north and east, including Frisia, Saxony, and Germany, an unprecedented campaign of evangelization and territorial organization, and the installation between the Rhine and the Loire of the structures of the great estate system. Starting in the 7th century, the West appears to have entered an extended cycle of development, culminating in the 13th century, in which various factors united to produce effects such as demographic growth, diffusion of new technologies, changes in the organization of work, the rebirth of trade, the flowering of urban life. The role of agri- culture in this development cannot be denied! The Countryside in the Early Middle Ages It is impossible to ignore the evidence - in the Middle Ages nine out of ten people were peasants. The historian has every reason to be modest. Despite the advances in our knowledge contributed by archaeologists, and the new disciplines devoted to the study of ancient environments (palynology, paleopathology, paleoclimatology, etc.), we are still far from being able to provide an explanation or even a general picture of the development of the natural environment between the 3rd and the 11th centuries. Nonetheless it seems that we are now able to speak of two very different periods in the general environment in Western Europe, that are characterized by a series of natural and human factors: climate, health, nutrition and demographic change. Even so it is extremely difficult to measure their impact in regional terms. Starting with the crisis in the Late Empire, the European climate became slowly worse, turning colder and moister. In all likelihood this trend bottomed out in the 6th century, with a fall in mean temperatures of 1.5°C. Written sources (such as the Histoire des Francs of Gregory of Tours) and archaeological findings suggest that there may have been a disastrous conjunction of ecological factors in the 6th century, marked by a series of natural calamities including famine, floods, epidemics (two pandemics: the Justinian plague, which started in 541 and a plague of smallpox starting in 570) which hit a population already weakened by malnutrition. It is likely that the population fell and that certain regions were depopulated. The transition from the Ancient World to the Middle Ages left traces in both the natural and human landscape the extent of which historians have long wondered at. These include the abandonment of the large farm units of the Romans, the movement of populations and their division into the romance and germanic groups.