A Brief History of the Future: A Brave and Controversial Look at the Twenty-First Century (5 page)

By a curious irony, this tilt from the imperial to the mercantile order engenders a return of peasant and traveler to a nomadic way of life. Whence the importance of the long history of nomadism (the foundation of human culture), which has resurfaced in our era and which, as we shall see, will be even more present in our future.

Down to our own day, the mercantile order has experienced nine successive forms. We will see that they can be designated by the name of the core city (Bruges, Venice, Antwerp, Genoa, Amsterdam, London, Boston,
New York, Los Angeles). They can also be identified by the roster of services they progressively transform into mass consumer goods (foods, clothing, books, finances, transport, domestic aids, instruments of communication, and forms of entertainment). Or else again by technology that allows men to extend the field of commerce (the stern rudder, the caravel, printing, accounting practices, the reed instrument, the steam engine, the internal combustion engine, the electric motor, the microprocessor), and finally by the name of the dominant currency (groat, ducat, guilder, genovino, florin, pound sterling, dollar). Perhaps even (as we will also see) by the name of an artist or philosopher representative of the core.

The essentials of economic, technical, political, and military history of the last seven centuries can be discerned in the strategies deployed by powers to become the core, to remain the core, to escape the periphery or to exit from the mercantile order. And this history reveals the laws of the future even more clearly than those of the past.

At the end of the twelfth century, a handful of ports in Flanders and Tuscany (whose hinterlands boast the continent’s finest farming soil) are home to visiting merchants, rebellious slaves, and serfs driven from their fields. In these townships, on the margins of feudalism, no absolute monarch takes the surplus; serfdom does not monopolize the whole work force; a new
innovative class, the bourgeoisie, implements new technical knowledge and economizes on work practices to grasp the profits for itself.

In the surrounding countryside there first appear triennial crop rotation, the horse and ox collar, the windmill, and the mechanization of threshing. These technical advances make possible the beginnings of industrialization of farm products. Then comes the all-important invention of the stern rudder, allowing ships to sail into the wind and, a little later, to arm themselves for the very first time. Such innovations give these townships — at once seaports, arsenals, and fairs — the means of mastering seaborne trade. In the regions they control, money displaces force, wage-earning displaces serf-dom, investment displaces monumental building projects, and trade displaces the police. Division of labor grows more complex; agricultural productivity rises; the price of wheat, now produced in great quantities, sinks; more citizens can consume it and buy woolen clothing colored by new dyes; the first spinning machines appear; the need for credit arises. Tiny Jewish communities, sparsely populated on the European continent for more than thirteen centuries but still the only ones theologically authorized to lend at interest, are obliged (as they were under Islam) to lend to kings, traders, and peasants in exchange for a precarious protection — and to create banking systems. And since the seasons are no longer precise enough instruments to demarcate city time, bells appear on church belfries after six centuries of tolling prayer hours in monastic houses. Time belongs to the new masters.

By the end of the twelfth century, Bruges is the
most dynamic of these little seaports. It is still no more than a large township with a vast farming hinterland. Its merchants already travel by land and by sea to Scotland, England, Germany, Poland, France, and Spain, while some of them creep stage by small stage as far as Persia and India. Its harbor, constantly menaced by silting and constantly dredged, becomes one of the most important ports of call of all the great Flemish fairs. From 1227, Genoese vessels moor there; Venetian ships follow in 1314. Italian traders settle there and exchange steel, wool, glass, and Flemish jewelry for Levantine spices, thus partaking in the spice trade of the Levant, India, and China.

Differences between the standard of living of craftsmen and merchants (the “patricians” who control the city) are considerable; one insurrection is followed by another. In 1302, the craftsmen take the side of the count of Flanders and temporarily triumph over the patricians, who are supported by the king of France. Democratic life expands. Intellectual and artistic life, although still under the control of the church, is a little freer than elsewhere.

At the start of the fourteenth century, Bruges becomes the core of the new order’s first form — capitalism. A very small core: in 1340, at the height of its power, the city numbers only thirty-five thousand inhabitants.

In the environs of this core are the fairs of the Hanseatic League, Germany, France, and Italy. On the periphery are those of the rest of Europe, dominated by big landowners. The core and the environs ship wine, linen, money, glass, and jewels to the periphery as well
as to neighboring empires. In exchange, they receive wheat, timber, furs, and rye. In the big kingdoms, nobody attaches the slightest importance to the bustle of these cities.

In Asia — still the repository of most of the world’s wealth — the imperial merry-go-round continues. The Mongol Genghis Khan and then the Turk Tamerlane build vast kingdoms extending from the Pacific Ocean to the suburbs of Vienna. They rule them in nomad fashion, through force and fear. Demographically and economically, they tower over the world, terrifying Europeans who live in constant fear of seeing their vast forces loom on the horizon.

Then this first structure becomes shaky. Insecurity in Asia slows long-distance trading, and a cooling climate discourages the urge to travel. In 1348, the Great Plague (reaching Europe from Turkey and the Mediterranean) kills one-third of the European population and severs mercantile circuits. The Hanseatic ports and Champagne’s fairs are ruined.

Bruges no longer possesses the means to maintain its port, which finally silts up for good. By the end of the fourteenth century, this first core gradually subsides (thanks to its beauty) into the eternity of the work of art. For another century, the city will remain the greatest mercantile power of northern Europe, but it is no longer the core of the mercantile order.

While France and England tear one another apart in a war that will last a century, a new mercantile structure takes shape around a still insignificant city, a new core quite as improbable as the first — Venice.

Like Bruges in its day, Venice is an isolated port with a huge agricultural hinterland, condemned either to expansion or to nonexistence. As with Bruges, it is out of a lack that its power is born, from defiance that its prestige derives, from insolence that its splendor arises. Lesson for the future: after Venice, all succeeding cores will be the products of catching up.

Venice is now a small town, but it is situated deep in the Adriatic Sea and ideally placed to receive the silver just discovered in German mines. But necessity is not enough: luck also plays a part. Venice encounters the opportunity with the late-eleventh-century Crusades. To build the Crusaders’ vessels, financed with money stolen from the Jewish communities massacred en route, the Most Serene Republic constructs shipyards.

Even though the early-thirteenth-century sack of Constantinople by the Crusaders and their departure from Venice briefly interrupt this traffic, the Serenissima remains throughout the century Europe’s only shield against the Turkish menace, and an obligatory stopover for Asian products destined for northern Europe. In addition, a daring bridge on the flanks of the Brenner Pass opens the route from Saint-Gothard and directly links the German silver mines to the Adriatic. It allows the cities of the North to receive products from the empires of the East, with no more need to use the threatened Flemish ports nor the arrogant merchant houses of northern Europe. Germany is still just a point of
passage, and the North Sea ports, from Altona to Talinn, will never succeed in rising to the status of a core or scarcely even that of environs.

When, midway through the fourteenth century (and after the end of the Great Plague), Bruges suddenly declines, Europe experiences a fresh craving for life and its pleasures. For the next hundred years Venice becomes the core of the mercantile order. Although living in the shadow of the Turks, the city takes control of trade between Europe and the East.

Like Bruges, Venice by now is an entity ruled with an iron hand by princes who are at once merchants and soldiers. The doge (duke), chief of the executive and theoretically elected for life, can be forced to resign under pressure from the oligarchs. For its own account, the city establishes the workshops and financial institutions necessary for shipbuilders, bankers, and merchants, who now pour in from the four corners of the world. Even more than was the case in Bruges, it enjoys a formidable intellectual, artistic, and human freedom. Waging a war never won and never lost against the Roman Empire of the East, and then against the Ottoman Empire, Venetian leaders constantly negotiate skillful compromises, often trading glory for wealth. Meanwhile, the Hundred Years’ War exhausts the rest of Europe.

The Chinese empire suffers successive coups d’état, with the Jin dynasty replaced by the Mongols and then, in 1368, by the Ming. In spite of these political upheavals, an unprecedented mastery of farm production and a redoubtable bureaucratic system allow China to implement major technical advances (such as
the movable press), to produce more than ten tons of iron each year and to finance a million-man army. Turned once again toward the exterior, the imperial fleet sends exploratory missions led by a certain Zheng He as far afield as Africa, Australia, and perhaps even the Americas, but without gaining control of the trade routes or seeking to conquer markets or spread knowledge. Other empires — Indian, Russian, Mongolian, Turkish, and Greek — still separate China from Europe.

Venice, a very modest city in comparison with these huge empires, now becomes the center of the mercantile world. Venetians set the price of the major commodities, manipulate the rates of their own currency, accumulate profits, and establish aesthetic, architectural, graphic, and musical canons. Writers, philosophers, and architects — of whom Palladio will soon be master — flock in to write and to theorize about freedom before spreading their ideas throughout Europe. The Catholic city distances itself from the Roman Church and rejects all its attempts to moralize. By the end of the fourteenth century, Venice dominates Europe. Venetian money changers control all the continent’s financial markets, from France to Flanders, Castile to Germany. Differences in power are enormous — the Venetian standard of living is fifteen times higher than that of Paris, Madrid, Antwerp, Amsterdam, or London.

Venice is now a complex city, ruled by a narrow aristocracy and several thousand first-class strategists. Under their governance, the hundred thousand guild members, protected wage-earners with high earning power, keep the workshops moving. Below them toil the “proletariat of the sea” — some fifty thousand seafarers subject to
the laws of a remorseless labor market. And many others, insecure and evanescent — mercenaries and courtesans, the religious, artists, and physicians.

The city now equips itself with a fleet of three-hundred-ton merchant ships (
galere da mercato
), using both oar and sail power, sturdy and stoutly defended by mercenaries. It leases them to merchant cartels whose position is constantly challenged, for once again military necessity impinges on the demands of commerce.

Like Bruges and other cores to follow, Venice is not the center of technological innovation. The core does not invent — it hunts down, imitates, and implements the ideas of others. This will hold true for all its successors. Thus, at this same moment (while Genoa mints the first gold coin, the genovino, and Florence invents the check and the holding company), Venice is the first to gather them into a sophisticated system of stock exchanges, trading houses, banks, and insurance companies. Venice is also the first to have ships chartered by shareholding companies financed by a great number of small depositors.

The world becomes the locus of adventure for seafarers, discoverers, and explorers, civilizing by the sword in the service of Venice.

And then, around 1450, like the rest of Europe, the Serenissima runs short of money. To find it, like everyone else, it seeks ways of reaching the unknown lands described in legends evoking fabulous kingdoms where gold is to be found in unlimited quantities. Alas, the Venetian sailors return empty-handed.

Threatened neither by France, nor Spain, nor England, Venice now becomes a menace to itself.
Maintaining its structures becomes increasingly costly, and its guilds become more and more rigid. Its galley cartels and its armies are neither big enough nor well enough equipped to defend its routes. The precious metals extracted from German mines are rarer and cost-lier. Smothered by Turkish pressure, this city of one hundred thousand people has become too rich and too intent on the good life, and is about to grow weary.

This sudden weakness brings down upon Venice enemies that its power had kept at bay. In 1453 the Turks, already masters of almost the whole of the old Empire of the East, take Byzantium — encircled for a half century — and challenge Venetian domination of the Adriatic. The Empire of the East perishes. A sign of the times: Greeks driven from Byzantium by the Turks seek asylum in Florence and not in Venice. The Serenissima has lived out its time.

Which city can now become the third core?

Florence cannot, because it is not a port. And the port it uses to ship its magnificent fabrics, Genoa, is not yet ready to pick up the torch from the Most Serene Republic. Bruges might return to power. The city is still powerful, attracting both artists and merchants. Jan van Eyck paints the first portrait of merchants in the history of painting — two Florentines settled in Bruges, the Arnolfini, thus signaling the entry into art history of the secular individual. But in 1482 the Flemish city’s splendor fades forever with the death of Marie of Burgundy, which puts an end to the Burgundian splendor on which Bruges depended.