The drive to reduce costs across Europe began gradually to acquire an aggressive rather than a reactive character after the more obvious and relatively easy responses to adversity had been made. Businessmen in the fifteenth century began to apply their learning-by-doing methodology to cost cutting in two directions, one to find ways of getting as close as possible to the source of their products, and the other to develop new forms of industrialization. Unlike the swift, theorized perceptions of modern business (downsizing, reengineering, reinventing, etc.) these developments were part of a slow, almost organic evolution, as businessmen followed the demands of the marketplace to their logical conclusion and sought ways to circumvent their traditional suppliers by identifying new ones or becoming producers themselves. This fifteenth-century development reflects the earliest stirrings across Europe of the drive toward vertical integration that so came to typify the strategy of nineteenth-century business leaders. Drawing closer to both producer and customer became the imperative of the late medieval businessman.

Although we have not stressed this point earlier, getting close to product sources was by no means a new idea in medieval Europe. European merchants, especially those of Venice and Genoa, had long perceived the virtues of this approach, establishing colonies throughout the Mediterranean and Black Seas, and securing trading privileges wherever they could, especially from a weakening Byzantine Empire. The strategy enabled them to obtain key raw materials and luxury manufactures at the lowest possible cost.