False Economy - Alan Beattie [42]
The regional marketing of goods and food became more sophisticated as metallic currencies were adopted throughout the empire, and hence trade became easier. Local markets were held throughout the empire, often once every eight days—the length of the Roman week.
When the Roman empire collapsed in the fifth century a.d., the trading system was damaged along with it. As the infrastructure of trade—including sea lanes, roads, and markets—eroded, so did the commerce that had flowed through it. Slowly, over several centuries, the trading networks were rebuilt, first by Islamic empires centered around the Mediterranean and the Middle East, and then by the city-states of Europe such as Venice and Genoa. By 1300, the coastal regions of the Mediterranean, benefiting from the same advantages of sea trade as a millennium earlier, had rebuilt a trading network to supply the cities of Italy, southern France, and Spain.
As before, the building of an intra-European trading system, and then longer trade routes, started with the small, light, and expensive before moving on to the big, heavy, and cheap. In the thirteenth century, the Mongols swept across the steppes of Asia and established an empire that stretched from China to the Mediterranean. Henceforth the overland route that had brought silk from East Asia to ancient Rome at extraordinary difficulty and expense became much safer and cheaper. Say what you like about the Mongols—and we will encounter in later chapters their injurious influence on some of the civilizations they subdued—but they certainly helped trade by enforcing the peace. It was partly uncertainty about the overland silk route after the collapse of the Mongol empire, together with the desire of the Portuguese to outflank the Islamic merchants who dominated the spice trade, that led to Columbus's accidentally stumbling across the Americas in 1492.
Within Europe, the same pattern of trade also slowly emerged. The first goods to be exported in significant quantities were of high value and often produced by a skilled industry that could not be easily replicated elsewhere, even if the raw materials could. It was these products that first bridged the gap between what were generally two discrete European trading zones, one concentrated on the coasts of the northwest and another around the Mediterranean.
Woolen cloth from northwestern Europe started to gain a large market from the eleventh and twelfth centuries on. It embodied such a vital part of the English economy that the Lord Chancellor, traditionally the head of the English judicial system, still sits on a sack stuffed with wool in the House of Lords. Cotton cloth came from the Italian republics (as early as the thirteenth century), and olive oil and cork from Spain and Portugal.
The European wine industry, though supplying a fairly exclusive elite, had concentrated itself into areas of specialization from the twelfth century in parts of France, the Rhine, Portugal, and Spain, resulting in the collapse of winemaking in England and the Low Countries. In 1300, the southwestern French region of Gascony was exporting 100,000 tons of wine to London each year. When grain prices fell in Europe after the Black Death (bubonic plague) in the mid-fourteenth century reduced the demand for basic food, peasants in Aix-en-Provence petitioned their landlords to let them switch to vines, pleading, "It profits us nothing to grow grain."
Regions close to the sea and navigable rivers and with large urban areas, which reduced the average transport costs, saw faster growth in trade than elsewhere: Flanders, northern Italy, Paris and London, and the valleys of the Po, Rhine, Seine, Garonne, Thames, Elbe, Oder, and Vistula.
Areas that established trade routes selling small-volume, high-cost items