Europe: A History (90 page)
International relations were governed by St Augustine’s idea of a just war. In theory, war could only be just if it satisfied certain conditions. According to Ramón di Peñafort, these were: the desire to redress injury, the exhaustion of alternative means, the use of professional soldiers, the good faith of the instigator, and the approval of the sovereign. In practice, warfare was endemic. Subservient clerics could always be found to confirm the justice of anyone’s cause, private or public. Outbreaks of temporary peace punctuated the normal predominance of fighting. And war involved the unbridled licence of the soldiery. Medieval military logistics and technology did not facilitate the rapid settlement of disputes. Armies were tiny, the theatres of operations vast. A defeated enemy could easily retire and recoup. Action was directed at local castles and strong-points. Sieges were more common than set battles. The spoils of war were more desired than mere victory. In the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries mercenary companies, first raised by the Italian cities, were used to supplement the unwieldy feudal hosts. Longbows, and crossbows, greatly improved since their appearance in the twelfth century, increased fire-power. Gunpowder, first used in the fourteenth century, led to artillery, which, in the hands of Hussites or Turks, became a decisive arm. But armoured cavalry remained the backbone of any major fighting force.
Medieval architecture was dominated by two classes of stone building— churches and castles. The late medieval church style, which the nineteenth century was to dub ‘Gothic’, is widely thought to be essentially aesthetic in inspiration—soaring, as it were, towards Heaven. As such, it is often contrasted with the military functionalism of the turrets, barbicans, and machicolations of the castles. In fact, all the main Gothic features, from the pointed arch to the flying buttress, are no less functional than aesthetic: they were devised for the purposes of efficient vaulting and of large window spaces. From the innovations of Abbot
Suger at St Denis, the Gothic spread all over Latin Christendom. Gothic cathedrals were built from Seville to Dorpat, and at all points in between. The Orthodox world, in contrast, stayed loyal to the Romanesque-Byzantine tradition. East of the Catholic/Orthodox divide there are neither Gothic cathedrals nor private castles. New-found civic pride gave rise to magnificent belfries, city halls, and cloth halls. Fine examples were built at Brussels (1402), Arras, Ghent, Ypres (1302), and Cracow (1392).
[GOTHIC]
Most medieval arts developed in the setting of church or cathedral. Painting was directed either to icons and altar-pieces or to the religious scenes of church murals. Book illumination was undertaken to adorn bibles and psalters. Sculpture in stone gloried in the statues and tableaux of cathedral fronts, and in the effigies of tombs and chantries. Sculpture in wood embellished choir stalls or choir screens. Stained glass filled the vast expanses of Gothic church windows. ‘All art was more or less applied art.’
33
Yet the secular element in medieval art, never completely absent, was growing. Princes, and then the rich bourgeois, began to commission their portraits or their statues. The art of illumination was applied to copies of the
chansons de geste
and to the fashion for books of hours, herbaries, and bestiaries. Late medieval dress entered a period of extravagant flamboyance where rich materials, fantastic styles, and brilliant colours were all designed for effect. Green represented love; blue, fidelity; yellow, enmity, white, innocence. Heraldry moved from its original military function into the realm of social ostentation.
Medieval music, too, saw a fruitful blending of the sacred and the profane. The dominant sounds still emerged from the churches; but secular patronage was increasing, notably in Burgundy and the Flemish cities. The
ars nova
style of the fourteenth century enjoyed the same international influence as Gothic architecture. John Dunstable (c.1390–1453), court musician to the Duke of Bedford in France, was innovative and influential, as was Guillaume Dufay (c.1400–74). Choral polyphony developed, as did instrumental music. The dulcimer has been noted in 1400, the clavichord in 1404, the organ keyboard in 1450, the sackbut or trombone in 1495.
The ‘medieval person’ is an abstraction, and as such is unhistorical. Individuals are by definition unique, and no one person can possibly reflect all the main social, intellectual, and artistic trends of an age. Yet some attempt must be made to overcome the anonymity which surrounds many medieval endeavours. Individualism was not in fashion. Artists such as Jan Van Eyck might occasionally sign their works—JVE FECIT—but as often as not leading figures remained anonymous. Hence the very great value of modern works which seek to reconstruct the detailed lives of ordinary people,
[MERCANTE]
No one is more medieval, however, in the utter conviction of the mission of Christendom, and yet more open to all the rich currents of the age, than the famous Catalan doctor, philosopher, linguist, poet, prodigious traveller and martyr, Ramon Llull (c.1235–1315). Born in Palma, Majorca, shortly after the Ara-gonese conquest, he knew Arabic no less than Latin; and he was raised on the
works of the Moorish and Jewish philosophers. He laboured for many years at the Franciscan monastery at Miramar on Mt Randa, before setting out on his endless tours to persuade popes and princes to adopt the teaching of oriental languages. He taught at various times at Montpellier, Paris, Padua, Genoa, Naples, and Messina, and journeyed as far afield as Georgia and Abyssinia. At the Council of Vienne in 1311 he witnessed the nominal acceptance of his cherished proposals. He made repeated missionary expeditions to Muslim North Africa, where he was tragically stoned to death for his pains. His
Libro del Gentil
(1272) (Book of the Gentile and the Three Sages), first published in Arabic, describes an inconclusive disputation between the three religions. His
Ars Major
and
Ars generalis
contain a mass of speculative philosophy, which impressed thinkers as different as Giordano Bruno and Leibniz but which is largely disregarded. Llull had a vision of universal knowledge:
MERCANTE
I
N
1348 or 1349 the young Messer Francesco Datini inherited a small plot of land in the town of Prato, near Florence. Both his parents had died in the Black Death. He sold the land, and used the proceeds to set up business in the papal city of Avignon. There he flourished, importing silk, spices, weapons, and armour from Italy. In due course he was able to transfer the business to Florence, opening branches in Pisa, Genoa, Barcelona, Valencia, Majorca, and Ibiza. He was specially strong in the wool trade, buying fleeces direct from producers in England, Spain, and the Balearios. As he sat at his counter in Florence, he supervised the construction of a splendid
palazzo
in Prato, and the management of his country estate in the Apennine foothills. The
palazzo
, which still stands, was built round an arcaded courtyard and with a marble-panelled frontage. It was run by his wife, Monna Margharita, helped by his bastard daughter Ginevra, and by a large domestic staff, including slaves. It was enlivened by the constant flow of messengers and mule-trains. When Messer Francesco died heirless on 16 August 1410, of the gallstones, he bequeathed his estate, his papers and an enormous endowment of 70,000 gold florins, to the poor people of Prato. Over the door was inscribed:
Ceppo di Francescho di Marco
Mercante dei Poveri di Xto
del quale il Chomune di Prato
è dispensatore
lasciato nell’anno MCCCCX.
(Almshouse of Francesco, son of Marco | Merchant of Christ’s Poor | Of which the Commune of Prato | is trustee | Bequeathed in the year 1410).
Francesco’s will also arranged for the manumission of his slaves, the cancellation of all debts, and payment of a sum for the restitution of profits from usury.
1
The Datini Archive contains over 150,000 letters, 500 account ledgers, 400 insurance policies, and 300 deeds of partnership. It shows how Messer Francesco, by extraordinary attention to detail, kept the pulse of a multinational operation. It also gave historians an unparalleled picture of a medieval company and household.
2
A typical bill of exchange reads:
In the name of God, 12th February 1399. Pay at usance
3
by this first of exchange to Giovanni Asapardo £306. 13s.
Ad. Barcelonesi
, which are for 400 florins received here from Bartolomei Garzoni at 15s.
Ad
. per florin. Pay and charge to our account there and reply. God keep you. Francesco and Andrea, greetings from Barcelona. Accepted March 13. Set down in Red Book B, f 97.
4
Such transactions moved money and credit round Europe effortlessly. But they did not cure Messer Francesco’s incurable anxiety: I dreamed last night of a house that had fallen to pieces … and it gives me much to ponder on. For there is no news of a galley that left Venice more than two months ago bound for Catalonia. I had insured her for 300 florins … But I am so vexed … The more I seek, the less I find. God knows what will happen.
5
According to Braudel, the world of the
Mercante a taglio
or
Fernhandler
, the rich and powerful ‘long-distance merchants’, has to be extracted from the petty dealing and intense competition of small-scale, local market economies. The former were the true capitalist pioneers. Thanks to their superior sources of intelligence and their command of large sums of ready cash, they could escape the laws of market competition. By concentrating on single transactions of great promise, this ‘small group of large merchants’ stood to make exorbitant profits:
From the very beginning, [these men] went beyond national boundaries … [They] knew a thousand ways of rigging the odds in their favour: the manipulation of credit, and the profitable game of good money for bad … They grabbed up everything worth taking—land, real estate, rents.
6
Generally speaking, the capitalists did not specialize, and they did not finance manufactures. They put their money promptly wherever the maximum opportunity lay. Money trading was the one area in which they did sometimes concentrate their interest. ‘But its success never lasted long, as if the economic edifice could not pump enough nourishment up to this high point of the economy.’ From the fourteenth century onwards, therefore, a cavalcade of inordinately wealthy capitalists creamed off the greatest profits of the European economy—the Bardi, the Medici, the Fuggers, the Neckers, and the Rothschilds.
Clearly, the successes and disasters of the capitalists rested on the general movements of the European economy. In the fifteenth century, ‘the “ground floor” of economic life recovered’, especially in the cities. In the sixteenth century, when Atlantic trade expanded, ‘the driving force operated at the level of the international fairs—Antwerp, Frankfurt, Lyons and Piacenza’. The seventeenth century, though often described as a period of stagnation, saw ‘the fantastic rise of Amsterdam’. In the ‘general economic acceleration’ of the eighteenth century, when London supplanted Amsterdam, the uncontrolled private market outperformed the regulated public market. Finally, ‘financial capitalism only succeeded … after the period 1830–60, when the banks grabbed both industry and merchandise, and when the general economy could support this edifice permanently’.
7
About that time, in 1870, Messer Francesco’s ledgers were found in a pile of sacks under the stairs of his house in Prato. His motto was written inside each ledger ‘ln the Name of God and of Profit’.
It took the form of what can only be described as a computing engine, which linked up the basic principles or ‘ground-words’ of all knowledge by a mechanism consisting of concentric circles segmented by radii and of geometric symbols. It seems to have been what might be called a cybernetic machine, prepared to unravel every problem, every science, even faith itself…
34
His
Blanquerna
(1283) is sometimes cited as the world’s first novel, or the first Utopian tract. His poetry, in
El Desconort
or
Lo Cant de Ramon
, is beautifully simple and sincere. Llull has been called ‘a great European’.
The fifteenth century is generally taken as the century of transition between the medieval and the modern periods. In certain spheres the quickening pace of change led to a decisive break with the medieval tradition. This was true in learning, in the arts, and, to some degree through the rise of national monarchies, in politics (see Chapter VII). In most other spheres, the old order held sway. Huge variations, of course, continued to persist. If life in some of the late medieval cities was precociously developed, especially in Italy and the Low Countries, life in the countryside remained largely unaffected. Old and new lived side by side,
[PRESS]
The gulf between Latin Christendom in the West and Orthodox Christendom in the East was steadily increasing.
For the fifteenth century saw a momentous shift in the strategic confrontation between Christendom and Islam. In 1400 the European Peninsula was still gripped in the Muslim pincers that had stayed in place for the previous 700 years. One arm of the pincers still held on, ever more precariously, to Granada. The other arm, ever more persistently was throttling Constantinople. Yet by 1500 the pincers had slipped, and the main axis of the confrontation had moved dramatically. Islam, which was finally defeated in the West, was victorious in the East. As the Moors finally faltered, the Ottoman Turks triumphed. At the very time that Western Europe broke free of the Muslim blockade, Eastern Europe was confronted with the Muslim challenge in intensified form. In 1400 the main weight of the Muslim world could be felt along the whole of the traditional southern front.
By 1500, though the green flags of the Prophet still waved along the African coast, they were concentrated overwhelmingly in the East. Christians of the Latin West could rejoice; Christians of the Orthodox East could not.
[MATRIMONIO]
