he fourteenth century stands unmatched in history for
its unrelenting sequence of famine, pestilence, social chaos, and
warfare. It was a terrible contrast to the progress and
achievements of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries in Europe.
Barbara Tuchman, who wrote an entire book on the horrors of the
fourteenth century, described it as "a violent, tormented,
bewildered, suffering and disintegrating age, a time, as many
thought, of Satan triumphant."' The twentieth century has witnessed
its own grotesque terrors, but at least there was peace among the
major powers in Europe from 1900 to 1914, from 1918 to 1939, and
again after 1945. The fourteenth century enjoyed no such
relief.
How could the glow of gold possibly shine through the gloom of such an age? We shall find that gold gleamed on occasion too brightly during the fourteenth century. Gold even saved lives that might otherwise have been lost. This was not a time when innovations in coinage or other financial instruments made comparable progress to what had been achieved in the preceding two hundred years, but gold did not sink back into the shadows. And then, when the horrors of the fourteenth century finally gave way in the fifteenth century to substantial progress in living standards and economic development, the available supply of gold appeared to be far below the expanding demand for it, setting great movements under way to seek for new sources of gold in other parts of the world.
The summer of 1314 was uncommonly cold and wet in Europe. Crops rotted, harvests were late, and alarmed authorities placed price controls on farm products and firewood. All these were routine disasters that had happened many times before.
The Great Famine, as it came to be known, was only the introductory chapter to this appalling story. In 1347, the Genoese were defending their Crimean colony of Kaffa (known as Feodosia in modern times) against a besieging Tartar army that had recently swept in from the Far East and across the great expanses of Russia. The siege was not going well for the Tartars, so they decided to use a unique projectile to catapult over the walls and into the center of Kaffa: dead bodies of their own men who had just died from a particularly vicious form of the plague. Stricken with terror-and soon sickened-the Genoese abandoned Kaffa, fleeing in their galleys through the Black Sea and the Aegean toward Italy. When one of the Genoese ships arrived at Palermo in Sicily, its fleas and rats and dying humans launched what has come to be known as the Black Death.2
This frightful affliction spread like wildfire throughout Europe over the next two years. Population estimates are fragmentary and unreliable, but it is likely that the Black Death killed about a third of the people from India to Iceland, at least twenty million deaths. The population of Europe would not regain the levels of 1300 until the middle of the sixteenth century .3
Men, and an even higher proportion of women, died so fast that there was no time or inclination for last rites, nor was proper burial an option. In some big cities, the death rate exceeded 50 percent and was highest in the close quarters of monasteries. The plague had no respect for status: it took the king of Castile; the queen of Aragon and her daughter; the son of the emperor of Byzantium; the queen of France, as well as her daughter; the queen of Navarre; the wife of the Dauphin; Petrarch's beloved Laura; the Sienese painters Ambrogio and Pietro Lorenzetti; Andrea Pisano of Florence; the great historian Giovanni Villain (who died in the middle of a sentence: "in the midst of pestilence there came an end"); the second daughter of King Edward III of England; the archbishop of Canterbury, his appointed successor, and the successor's appointed successor.4 If all this were not bad enough, in 1348 just as the Black Death was gathering momentum-a calamitous earthquake spread havoc and destruction from Naples to Venice, with aftershocks that smashed buildings and killed humans as far away as Germany and Greece.
Nature was by no means the only force to deliver violence and death in the fourteenth ceptury. Brutal political disruptions became endemic.
In 1303, the pope was taken prisoner by a Roman mob and died shortly afterward under mysterious circumstances; one historian refers to his dying "of humiliation."5 His successor was murdered. The next in line, a Frenchman by the name of Clement V, took the prudent step of removing the papacy to the papal enclave in his native land at Avignon in 1305, where the popes lived in high style for the next 73 years. Petrarch complained that even the papal horses were "dressed in gold, fed on gold, and soon to be shod in gold if God does not stop this slavish luxury."' What was the source of all that gold? It was from the bunching of bequests from the wealthy who had died from the Black Death. It was at this time that the king of France, Philip IV, prohibited any exportation of gold from France. One writer suggested that this ruling, rather than fear of physical violence, was the real motivation for the pope to move to Avignon. He argued that the papacy would have faced bankruptcy if it had remained in Rome and that it transferred itself to France in order to sustain its ample revenues from French sources.'
In 1327, Edward II of England, an avowed homosexual, was slaughtered with a hot iron poker shoved up his rectum. Louis X of France, known as Louis the Quarrelsome, was deposed in 1316 after only two years on the throne. In 1332, even the melancholy Danes dissolved into anarchy. In the Holy Roman Empire, Guelfs went to war against Ghibbelines. In 1338, the Hundred Years' War between England and France broke out, piling organized state-sponsored killings on top of widespread mayhem on a private level. Workers' uprisings in Italy broke out in 1346-1347. Shortly afterward, Rome was thrown into chaos by Cola di Rienzi's brutal uprising motivated by the dream of restoring the Roman republic of Cicero. In 1358, the Jacquerie produced a violent peasant revolt in France against war taxes, the burden of paying huge ransoms for captured royalty, and the pillage perpetrated by wandering mercenary veterans of the wars. In 1379, a year after insurrection in Florence, the weavers and merchants of Ghent mounted their own insurgency, going so far as to try to divert the river Lys and leading the contemporary historian Froissart to ask, "What shall they say that readeth this or heareth it read, but that it was the work of the Devil?"8 In 1381, following a succession of new poll taxes, the English got their version of a fierce uprising by the peasants, led by Watt Tyler. Seventeen years later, Henry Bolingbroke deposed his cousin, King Richard II.
The economic consequences of all these deaths and disruptions were strange, to say the least, especially the massacre of the Black Death. As the masses of human bodies disappeared, their physical possessions and monetary wealth remained behind. This grisly process left most Europeans far richer than they had been before tragedy struck. To turn a phrase, as the poor got fewer, the rest got richer. They would soon act accordingly.
According to one historian, the citizens in Albi, in southern France, with fortunes greater than one hundred livres grew from 11 percent to 20 percent of the population between 1343 and 1357, while those with less than ten livres declined from 31 percent to 18 percent.9 Many people died without the opportunity to write wills, leaving their wealth with no readily identifiable ownership. This led to a great demand for lawyers to settle the quarrels over questions of inheritance and succession, but it also led to opportunities for the enterprising to pick up unclaimed assets. In addition, as the supply of labor had shrunk dramatically, a scarcity of labor joined with the plethora of money to produce a sharp rise in wages and the incomes of working people.
Contrary to what one would expect under the circumstances, with so many workers leaving the farms to enjoy the temptations of the city, the price of food was remarkably stable. The loss in population was so enormous that it had an even greater impact on the demand for food than the reduced supply of food caused by the decline in the number of people engaged in agriculture."' With necessities taking a smaller proportion of total spending, the consumption of meat, butter, fish, wine, and exotic spices began to expand even among people at the lowest end of the scale."
In the uncertain and turbulent environment, the incentive to save was minimal while the incentive to spend was irresistible. As late as 1375, a Florentine chronicler was indignant "at the spectacle of the popolo minuto who refused to practice their old trades, dressed themselves in a manner unbefitting their station and insisted on the finest delicacies at their table."12 In Britain, a petition from the House of Commons in 1362 blames rising prices on "laborers [who] use the apparel of craftsmen, and craftsmen the apparel of valets, and valets the apparel of squires, and squires the apparel of knights."1s William Langland, in Piers Plowman, attacked the worker "who refuses to bear the burden of poverty patiently, but blames God and murmers against Reason and curses the king and his council for making statutes [legalized ceilings on wages] to plague the workmen."14
The clergy were no exception. In 1351, Pope Clement VI asked his prelates, "What can you preach to the people? ... If on poverty, you are so covetous that all the benefices in the world are not enough for you. If on chastity-but we will be silent on this, for God knoweth what each man does and how many of you satisfy your lusts."15
While the cost of ordinary domestically produced agricultural products was relatively stable, exotic foods came increasingly into fashion, with predictable consequences for prices. According to one authority, the price index of foreign goods such as herring, pepper, oil, sugar, almonds, and saffron rose from 100 in the period 1261-1350 to 162 during the period 1351-1400. He also calculates that per capita expenditures on wine approximately doubled at the same time.16
The swollen appetite for imported luxuries such as fancy foods and the increasingly popular clothing frills combined with a heavy burden of military expenditures to send the demand for both gold and silver surging. The supply of precious metals, however, failed to respond to the expanding demand. Metal shortages left the mints inactive for extended periods of time. From 1373 to 1411, the production of gold coins in England averaged only (9500 a year, about a tenth of the output prior to the Black Death." Mining sources also dried up as even record high pay was insufficient to attract men to the discomforts of working the gold mines. Ordinances against exporting "good money" or precious metals accomplished no more than the regulations that required importers to use the revenues they earned to purchase domestically produced goods for export. The repetitive sequence of such orders suggests that they were difficult to enforce and frequently ignored."
Controls over both wages and jobs did not fare any better. For example, Edward III's Statute of Labourers, enacted in 1351, set maximum rates of pay at preplague levels, required all able-bodied men to work, and limited the mobility of workers between jobs and even their freedom of movement between villages. Repeated attempts to enforce these restrictions would ultimately lead to Watt Tyler's hotheaded rebellion in 1381.''
One of the more curious-and equally fruitless-efforts to economize on gold included a multiplication of regulations with the odd name of sumptuary laws. The word derives from the Latin sumptuarius-to take or to spend-and has the same roots as sumptuous. Sumptuary also shares roots with consume, which breaks down into "con" and "sume." "Sume," in turn, derives from the French sumere, which means to take or to spend.
The purpose of these laws was to economize on scarce gold by prohibiting people from using it lavishly as personal adornment-a dubious objective in the wake of the Black Death. This was a time, as Tuchman described it, of "frenetic gaiety, wild expenditure, luxury, [and] debauchery. "2°
A statute of Edward III enacted in 1363 was typical of the fourteenth-century sumptuary laws. Edward set upper limits for the permissible extravagance of each class. Rustics were limited to blanket cloth and the coarse reddish-brown homespun called russet; grooms and servants were not allowed to wear gold in any form; gentlemen below the rank of knight were prohibited from dressing with any cloth of gold; knights were forbidden to wear gold rings. In 1380, the king of Castile went further by prohibiting all Spaniards except queens and princesses from wearing cloth of gold or gold jewelry.21
Like the prohibitions against the export of gold, and doubtless for the same reason, the sumptuary laws were enacted over and over again. Gold, like liquor, satisfies too many needs to survive prohibition.
The Byzantine emperors used gold to persuade others to fight and kill on their behalf. The almost constant warfare of the fourteenth century put gold to the opposite use: for the payment of ransoms that would save lives. Most of the ransoms in the fourteenth century called for the movement of gold within Europe, but the risks of military defeat in all countries meant that monarchs had no choice but to hoard massive reserves of gold as insurance against the evil day when prisoners would have to be redeemed. In the ugly environment of the fourteenth century, ransoms were especially onerous.
Should we deplore the heavy price of redeeming prisoners? The higher the price that the victors could expect, the greater the incentive to constrain the bloody slaughter on the battlefields. The ransom business-and in many ways it was a business-must have saved many lives, especially among the upper classes of society.
The most spectacular example of capture and ransom involved the king of France himself, jean II, who was known as jean le Bon. Jean loved luxury to the extreme of having the court painter decorate his toilets. In a remarkable step for his time, he commissioned French translations of the Bible so that he could read it more easily. He spent so much money on himself and on trying to fight the English that he soon became an expert at debasing the currency: eighteen alterations in the first year of his reign and seventy more over the next ten years. One churchman, who found monetary affairs in his time even more baffling than the Black Death, wrote a few immortal words on the subject:
Jean le Bon's son, the Dauphin (who was also duke of Normandy), was shifty in his loyalty to his father. In April 1356, he hosted a dinner party in his castle in Rouen for his cousin and neighbor Charles le Mauvais, king of Navarre, hoping to organize a conspiracy to capture the throne of France. Charles le Mauvais was such a bad man that almost anybody compared to him, like jean, would have been characterized as "le Bon." Jean, who had advance notice of the meeting between Charles and the Dauphin, burst in on the gathering in full armored regalia. He thereupon had some of Charles's entourage butchered, threw Charles into prison, and confiscated Charles's Norman estates.
Charles's brother and surviving associates appealed for English help to recover their estates. The English responded without delay and, under the command of the Duke of Lancaster, were soon on their way into France from Cherbourg. In July, the Prince of Wales, known as the Black Prince and one of the greatest fighters and commanders of his age (the "black" referred to his armor), landed at Bordeaux with eight thousand troops and launched a series of devastating raids as he traveled northward through western France. Jean decided that he had no choice but to face his enemies in pitched battle. Confidently leading his army of sixteen thousand men, the largest army of the century, jean marched toward the Loire to block the Black Prince's northward approach.23
On September 19, 1356, the French army was overpowered by the Black Prince's forces at the Battle of Poitiers, despite superior strategic positions in the field and twice the number of soldiers. Seven hours into the battle, the English discovered Jean's unit and charged at high speed against it, "like the wild boar of Cornwall. 1124 Jean fought valiantly with one of his loyal sons beside him, but he lost his helmet and began to bleed from two wounds on his face. When voices cried, "Yield, yield, or you are a dead man,"" Jean handed over his glove to an enemy soldier and thus the king of France became a prisoner of war.
The king was by no means the only distinguished prisoner to be taken that day. The list included the highest-ranking French military commanders and over two thousand members of the nobility. The number of prisoners was greater than the English could handle. Most of the prisoners were instructed on their honor to come to Bordeaux with their ransoms by Christmas-in the days of chivalry, such a request was a matter of routine. And still many of the English soldiers complained that their archers' aim had been too good, because the arrows that hit the French forces with such accuracy had deprived the victors of an even larger number of prisoners to hold for ransom.26
The Black Prince took the French king to England seven months after the battle and installed him in high style at the Savoy Palace until the ransom was paid. But how big was the ransom to be? When the French rejected a preliminary settlement in 1358, the English responded by raising their demands. Meanwhile, the clock was ticking.
In March 1359, with just six months left before the truce negotiated at Poitiers was scheduled to expire, jean signed the Treaty of London. His desperation is apparent in the conditions to which he agreed: in exchange for his release from captivity, he yielded all of western France from Calais to the Pyrenees plus a ransom of four million gold ecus (gold crowns, the equivalent of more than C600,000), the ransom to be collateralized by forty noble and royal hostages. If the French blocked the execution of this treaty in any fashion, Edward had the right to send his armies back to France-at the expense of the French king. Edward knew what he was doing by putting the financial burden on the enemy, for his wars in France were terribly costly. In one year alone, he borrowed two hundred thousand gold florins from his Italian bankers (on which he subsequently defaulted).21
When the Dauphin, serving as regent in his father's absence, received word of this total capitulation, he summoned the estates general to help him make the fearful choice between peace and renewal of the war. The response was immediate and unanimous: the treaty was intolerable, and war was to be declared on England.
The English promptly launched another protracted campaign in northern France, but this time the French resisted a pitched battle, resort ing to a scorched-earth strategy instead. On April 13, when the depleted and now ragged English army was camped near Chartres, an extraordinarily powerful hailstorm hit them, accompanied by cyclone-force winds and cloudbursts of freezing rain. According to Tuchman, "In half an hour Edward's army took a beating that human hands could not have inflicted and that could hardly be taken as other than a celestial warning."28
It is the rare military commander who at one time or another has not heeded messages from supernatural sources. Edward III, tough though he was in many ways, decided at this point that discretion was the better part of valor. In any case, he retained plenty of bargaining power, because jean was still his prisoner. He agreed to reopen negotiations, which were finally completed on May 8, 1360, at the nearby village of Bretigny. Jean's ransom was scaled back to three million gold crowns. The territorial concessions were also reduced, but they still amounted to about a third of France, a prize unmatched until Hitler invaded France 580 years later.
The treaty was explicit about the terms for the forty hostages to be held as security against the payment of the king's ransom. The stipulations included the king's two younger sons, his brother, the brotherin-law of the Dauphin, and nine great counts. The English agreed to return jean from London to Calais, upon payment of the first installment of six hundred thousand gold crowns on the ransom. At that point, ten of his fellow noble prisoners would also be liberated, but they were to be replaced by forty wealthy members of the Third Estate-the bourgeoisie; like Willy Sutton, Edward III knew where the money was. The remainder of Jean's ransom was due in six semiannual installments of four hundred thousand gold crowns, with one-fifth of the hostages to be released after each payment.
The ransom would have been a terrible burden on the French under any circumstances, but especially following the depredations of the Black Death and the havoc and destruction of war. The going was so difficult at one point that the French invited back the Jews whom they had ejected from France in 1306, offering them twenty years' residence subject to payment of twenty florins per head entrance fee and seven florins annually thereafter.29 Jean himself contributed the handsome golden dowry he earned from marrying off his eleven-year-old daughter to the rich tyrant of Milan, Galeazzo Visconti, a step that the chronicler Matteo Villain described as the king "selling his own flesh at auction."31
The first installment of the ransom was made in October 1360. Edward then met with jean in Calais, and the two monarchs swore together to keep the peace into perpetuity. After four years in captivity, the king of France was finally a free man. The moment was hardly one for rejoicing. Jean returned to a country that Petrarch, on hand as an ambassador from Visconti, described as "a heap of ruins.... Everywhere was solitude, desolation, and misery. "31
Nor is this the end of the story of Jean's ransom payments. Plague, which continued to reappear periodically, killed off some of the hostages in England. Other members of the group were attempting to use their own resources to buy their freedom. The ransom payments were soon in arrears. Ceded territories resisted the change in sovereignty. In 1363, convinced that his honor was in disrepute, jean sailed back across the Channel the week after Christmas and restored himself to captivity in London, disregarding the urgent advice of his Council, his prelates, and his barons. He was received by the English with great ceremony and celebration, but he soon fell ill and died in April 1364. He was only 45 years old. A million gold crowns were still payable on his ransom.
In the end, less than half the ransom was paid, but even 1.5 million gold crowns was a colossal amount of money. It was equivalent to a full year's pay for approximately six thousand agricultural laborers, three hundred thousand sheep, or 1.6 million gallons of ale, or to more than four times the total of all the poll taxes that would stir up a vicious rebellion almost twenty years later.31
One other golden ransom payment is worth comment, even though it was paid in the following century. This fifteenth-century ransom was once again a consequence of the English wars with the French, which were still fitfully occupying both countries as late as the 1470s.
In 1478, King Edward IV of England abandoned an intended invasion of France in return for a down payment by the French of 75,000 crowns and an annual pension of fifty thousand additional crowns. The following year, the French also agreed to ransom Henry VI's widow, Margaret of Anjou, for fifty thousand crowns, to be paid in five annual installments. Christopher Challis's authoritative history of the English Mint calculates that if all this money had actually been paid up to the time of the death of Edward IV in 1483-and the evidence suggests that it was paid-the total would have come to 517,000 crowns or L103,400. This sum compares with the Mint's total gold output of L185,684 from 1474 to 1482.
The English got a better deal than the raw figures indicate. In 1471, during the Wars of the Roses, the Yorkist leaders Edward and his brother Richard Duke of Gloucester-the future Edward IV and Richard III, respectively-had captured, deposed, and murdered the Lancastrian King Henry VI as well as his son, the prince of Wales. This event put the ex-queen, Margaret of Anjou, into the ranks of the involuntarily unemployed. One can only wonder why the French had to offer such a generous sum in order to persuade the English to part with Margaret. She must have been a terrible harridan, hanging around with nothing to do but bemoan the terrible fate that the victorious Yorkists had visited upon her husband and son.
Edward and Richard should have considered her worth disposing of at any price. In Act I, Scene 3 of Shakespeare's Richard III, Richard describes her to her face as "thou hateful withered hag." Perhaps that was only fair, because Margaret tells Richard off by calling him, among other things, "Thou elvish-marked, abortive, rooting hog ... the son of hell/Thou loathed issue of thy father's loins!" Yet we must admit the possibility that Shakespeare was taking poetic license in his choice of words. Margaret was reputed to be a great beauty. After her return to France, however, she succumbed to a skin ailment, described by one more scholarly historian than Shakespeare as "a dry scaly withering of her once-golden beauty. Overnight, she became hideous. Only her eyes remained, ravaged and terrible."13 Nevertheless, one can only speculate what the Yorkists might have done to Margaret had not her king so generously offered those fifty thousand golden crowns for the dubious pleasure of repatriating her.
Those people who survived the endless agonies of the fourteenth century must have been convinced that the darkness of their age would never lift. Yet as this terrible century finally drew to an end and the new century dawned, conditions in Europe began to improve. Peace provided opportunity to put abandoned farmlands back into use, and the lower prices for food that resulted led to an expanding population. After losing six million people from 1350 to 1400, the population of Europe grew by fifteen million-about a third-during the next fifty years and gained another nine million between 1450 and 1500. Improving food supplies also facilitated a return to urbanization, which in turn enabled commerce and industry to revive.34
Progress was not uniform across Europe. Italy fared best among the major European countries, and there the greatest glory of the fifteenth century was in Venice, although Florence also became a great center of commerce, industry, finance-and art-during this period. Venice remained the most important station for the great volume of trade with the lands to the east, but the city was not just a group of charming islands in the Adriatic. By the end of the century, Venice controlled most of the cities within a radius of around one hundred miles from Saint Mark's Square-including such centers as Verona, Vicenza, Ferrara, and Bologna-as well as the Mediterranean islands of Corfu, Cyprus, and Crete.
That kind of power gains gold. The territories remitted a million gold ducats a year to the Venetians, which paid for many of the palaces that are now so familiar on the Grand Canal, including the Ca d'Oro or House of Gold, whose exterior ornamentation was once generously covered with gold. This lovely edifice is familiar to millions of modern tourists, who deposit their own good money there for the pleasure of the visit.
Probably the most revolutionary developments in the course of the fifteenth century took place in an area that had been a sideshow to the Middle Ages in Europe: Iberia. The marriage of Ferdinand of Aragon to Isabella of Castile in 1469 united Spain. Under their leadership, the Spaniards finally expelled the Moors and, while they were at it, the Jews. Ferdinand and Isabella also launched a commanding dynasty that would deploy Spanish power across the entire European landscape and, in time, in the Americas as well. One daughter was married to the king of England, the other, Joanna the Mad, to the oldest son of the Holy Roman Emperor. Poor Joanna earned her name because she carted her husband's cadaver around with her for many years after his death. The contribution of Ferdinand and Isabella and the Spanish to the history of the Americas needs no elaboration.
Meanwhile, the little country of Portugal was also stirring. The Portuguese had always been great sailors; as early as 1300, they had established a navy trained by Genoese and Venetians. King John I, crowned in 1385, was an enlightened ruler who found ways to transform a thirdrate nation of only one million people (one-sixth the population of Morocco) into a world power.3' John signed an alliance with the English that was to last into perpetuity and is still in effect; he then cemented the deal by marrying a granddaughter of Edward III, whose brother, Henry Bolingbroke, would soon usurp the English throne from Richard II.' John's third son, Henry the Navigator, an ascetic who never married, was encouraged by his father to motivate the great explorations of his century. These explorations would lead to the discovery of the sea route to the Far East around the Cape of Good Hope, the discovery of America, and Magellan's triumphant discovery of the sea passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific during his ships' circumnavigation of the globe. The Portuguese were so turned on by their successes in exploration that the country was significantly depopulated of men of working age, unable to resist the temptation to join in. Many of these men either settled in far-off lands or disappeared in shipwrecks.
European output of gold during the fifteenth century was smaller than ever relative to the needs of the times. According to one authoritative estimate, domestic gold production in Europe in 1400 was no more than four tons.36 In money, that works out to about one million ducats." It is estimated that the Venetians alone exported the equivalent of a ton of gold a year in the form of ducats during the fifteenth century, significantly reducing the available supply of gold.36 Economic historian Charles Kindleberger cites estimates that as much as 5 percent a year of the coinage also disappeared due to ordinary wear, hoarding, shipwreck, and movement into plating for decorative purposes.*39
After some three thousand years of developing civilization, the total amount of gold in Europe in 1500 in all forms-coins, hoards, and every manner of adornment and decoration-could have been fashioned into a cube only two meters in each dimension. This modest supply meant that even small discoveries or transfers had a magnified effect on the gold market.411
The economic historian John Day, in an essay titled "The Great Bullion Famine of the Fifteenth Century," cites striking examples of the shortage of gold coins that developed during the fifteenth century as well as the fruitless efforts by governmental authorities to do something about it. "In 1409, the Paris money-changers protested in chorus that they had no bullion for the mint at any price. The civil war years (1411-35) witnessed the rapid decline of the influential goldsmiths' guild of Paris for lack of metal, lack of clients, and because of new restrictions on the manufacture of gold and silver artifacts, which were intended `to prevent the destruction of the king's coinage.' "41 An ordinance issued at the port of Bruges in 1401 required merchants to settle all foreign exchange transactions entirely in gold; the ordinance was repealed eight months later because so few paid attention to it.42 The mints of the Estates of Flanders were shut down from 1402 to 1410.43 The output of the Tower Mint in London, which averaged around £5000 in gold coins in the 1460s, fell to X2000 from 1476 to 1485 and then virtually came to a halt over the next ten years. Silver coinage shows similar trends.4 Day estimates that total bullion reserves in Europe shrank by 50 percent between about 1340 and 1460.41
The dearth of both silver and gold provoked a reversion to barter in many communities, especially for local payments. Pepper, worth more than its weight in gold, was the most popular commodity enlisted for this purpose; German princes even called their bankers "peppermen."ab Although this kind of improvised money served a purpose, the import flow of such commodities as pepper was uneven, which made their prices uncomfortably volatile. A few bags of pepper unloaded in Amsterdam or London could quickly depress its price. Not so a few bags of gold or silver. As a result, paper currencies-essentially promissory notes issued by high-quality borrowers-began to circulate, but Day argues that "The circulation remained overwhelmingly metallic. Even in mid-eighteenth-century England, on the threshold of the industrial revolution, it was estimated that minted coin accounted for 90 percent of all the money in circulation.... As late as 1861, Italian circulation consisted of 75 percent coin."47
When money is in short supply, people try to economize on the amount they spend for goods and services. The usual result is a declining price level. That is precisely what happened during the fifteenth century. Reliable estimates indicate that prices for commodities throughout western Europe fell by anywhere from 20 percent to 50 percent between 1400 and 1500. In Aragon, for example, the index of prices fell about 20 percent." The price of English wheat fell by half between 1360 and 1500, while the price of rye in Frankfurt dropped even faster.49 Similar trends in the Low Countries and Italy demonstrate that this was a universal phenomenon in fifteenth-century Europe.
At the same time, however, the demand for gold was so great that its price moved in the opposite direction. In England, where developments were typical of trends throughout Europe, the price of gold climbed slowly but almost without interruption from 23 shillings an ounce in 1345 to 40 shillings by 1492."' The resulting increase in the purchasing power of gold meant that the volume of commodities that an ounce of gold could buy doubled, at the very least, between the beginning and the end of the fifteenth century. As a consequence, this was one of the few periods in history when gold was spent instead of hoarded.
Gold has always been a valuable prize, but the alluring combination of falling commodity prices and rising gold prices promised tempting rewards for those who could find new sources. In that setting, the great explorations of the fifteenth century appear to have been an inevitable response.
Or was it inevitable? One might argue that the forces of raw economics were only an incidental cause of the passion for exploration across the seas in the 1400s. Perhaps these enterprising voyages to reach the ends of the earth were just one more manifestation of the spirit of the Renaissance, a new age that broke with the more rigid mindsets that religion had imposed on the Dark Ages and the Middle Ages, a time that encouraged bold experimentation in art, culture, and science. Progress in navigation and the expansion of geographical knowledge were natural by-products of the important innovations during the Renaissance in mathematics, in measurement, and in perspective. The discovery of the world was what the Renaissance was all about. Between 1492 and 1500, the size of the world known to Europeans more than doubled; 25 years later, it had more than tripled."
At first glance, this explanation appears to make sense, but the contention that the great explorations could not have happened in an earlier age leads to two strange and counterintuitive conclusions. First, if the surge in the purchasing power of gold had occurred during a less innovative era, there would have been no one like Henry the Navigator, Columbus, or Magellan-explorers who were unable to resist the temptation of extraordinarily profitable rewards from hunting for gold across the seas. Sailors would have gone along traveling the traditional routes as though nothing had happened to the market for gold. Second, if the great explorations were purely a consequence of the adventurous spirit of the Renaissance, these voyages would have taken place even if the price of gold was falling while the price of commodities was rising. Neither of these possibilities makes much sense.
The argument need not end there, however. The search for gold was not the only motivation for these remarkable adventures. Dreams of glory and, perhaps even more important, the zeal to convert heathens to Christianity were also part of the inspiration. However, dreams of glory and the enthusiasm for turning heathens into Christians were surely not unique to the Renaissance. Men have always fantasized great deeds, and Christians have always been eager proselytizers.
The burning hunger for gold remains as the critical stimulant. The hunger for gold is always "burning," but it burned especially bright in the fifteenth century. The Spaniards and the Portuguese, and, later on, the English, the Dutch, and the French, conveniently managed to blur the distinction between the desire to do good works in the name of God and the desire to fatten their purses. The effort to become rich and powerful and to bring the blessings of Christianity to the great unwashed are characteristically presented with a blended rationale that must have been a source of o eat self-satisfaction.
Columbus summed it up well when he wrote to Ferdinand and Isabella about his early encounters with the natives of the lands he discovered:
So your highness should resolve to make them Christians, for I believe that ... you will achieve the conversion to our holy faith of a great number of peoples, with the acquisition of great lordships and riches and all their inhabitants for Spain. For without doubt there is in these lands a very great amount of gold. 12