Up to the end of the Middle Ages the world was divided into a number of almost self-contained regions which only made contact through strictly limited channels of trade. It is indeed possible to maintain, as Fritz Rörig has done in a brilliant article, that the medieval world already enjoyed a world-economy, for the spice trade and the silk trade, the voyages of the Norsemen and the explorations of the Arabs, even the wanderings of occasional travellers and missionaries, gave external contacts of varying importance. Nevertheless western Europe, the Near East, India and Indonesia, the Far East, to mention only the great and obvious divisions, each followed its own particular way of life.

Then, from the end of the fifteenth century onwards, contacts were increased and became more and more active, slowly helping to produce a single market for the whole world. Faced with new tasks, the European peoples who bordered on the Atlantic developed and applied new economic techniques. They changed the framework of their economic organization, created new methods of co-operative action and new state departments and above all new merchant companies. They improved their techniques and their methods of using capital, changing their methods by a new organization of property and by a re-introduction of slavery. The states intervened more directly in economic affairs and slowly created modern colonies; their methods, in general terms, became accepted as Mercantilism and eventually developed into modern capitalism.

From Medieval to Modern

Criticism has left little unchallenged of the once popular view that scientific and technological progress was conspicuously lacking from the Middle Ages. On the contrary it is now clear that the period after the twelfth century was one of rapid and fairly continuous development, surmounting even the great demographic and economic crisis of the Black Death. Intellectually, the rise of the universities furnished centres for the study of natural science based largely (but not exclusively) on the works of the ancient Greeks. Technologically, the employment of power derived from water and wind, the adoption of textile machinery and a more efficient metallurgy (vol. II, pp. 408–13, 458–69), together with the spread of more recent inventions such as the mechanical clock, the compass, and gunpowder gave promise of a new era in production, trade, and warfare. It may indeed be argued that it was still necessary to clear away most of the doctrines of late medieval science and medicine in order that modern ideas and methods should take their place, and to revolutionize the practices of the medieval craftsman in order that they should support a modern society. Nevertheless, in each case what had been achieved by the end of the fifteenth century was as superior to the standards prevailing in Charlemagne's time, as it was in turn inferior to the science and technology of the nineteenth century. Without this intermediate stage neither the scientific revolution of the seventeenth century, nor the industrial revolution of the eighteenth, could have occurred.

The ‘mercantilist’ age was not idly so christened. Everywhere along the western seaboard of Europe and along the coastline of the Mediterranean from Malaga to Venice, in the centuries that stretched from the Renascence to the Enlightenment the merchants were the dynamic element in society. As the volume of trade grew, as the fleet of international shipping expanded, linking places and trades hitherto isolated, the operations of merchants and manufacturers slowly helped to change the face of western European society partly through the goods and manufactures they made available, partly through the social changes they wrought by introducing new or extending existing methods of manufacture, and partly through the influence they exercised directly or indirectly on the policies of Government. On any statistical basis, most men everywhere were still connected with the land in one way or another: but everywhere in the later Middle Ages and early modern age trade and tradesmen were undermining the crumbling walls of custom that surrounded the economic community of the Middle Ages.

It used to be possible for historians to delineate the major features of this emergent economy under the name of capitalism and it became fashionable to bracket capitalism and the Reformation together with the overt proposal that the latter explained, at all events in part, the former. It was assumed that the sixteenth century saw the birth, specifically in northern Europe, of a novel type of economic society based on energies and ambitions which were themselves old as man but were now in some way released for good or ill on society at large: and that Protestantism – and in particular the teaching of Calvin – was a prime mover in the process.

Amid the many motives which led Europeans to take part in the overseas movements of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries, the need to provide some overspill for redundant population was negligible. Men wished, perhaps, to strike the infidel a blow, to strengthen their native state, to ascertain the shape and the nature of the earth, to gain great wealth or to escape from a humdrum existence—or perhaps a mixture of these things. Seldom was the hope of access to the trade goods, the spices and the silks and cotton of the sophisticated East far from their minds. But they neither wished to settle overseas themselves to earn their livings in alien lands nor to provide opportunity for their compatriots to do so. They were not colonizers, but, usually, traders or would-be traders. The desire to colonize, to settle or even to organize production, came late, and was accepted reluctantly.

Any estimate of the population of Europe as it came into the modern age, still more of the different states of Europe which were becoming increasingly the effective units, must be largely a matter of guesswork in which such data as the number of hearths, of communicants, of shipowners, of serviceable military men or even of corpses, are subjected to multipliers and distributors. Figures got by such processes can be closely related to contemporary estimates, but they remain slightly conjectural, and they are largely irrelevant from the point of view of overseas expansion. The general picture, however, has begun to emerge with reasonable clarity and to gain in significance. It is a picture which starts with a widespread and catastrophic decline in population in the fourteenth century and in which any sustained recovery was delayed by endemic plagues and constant warfare until the last quarter of the fifteenth century.

The Mediterranean Trades

The Mediterranean at the beginning of the sixteenth century was still very much a world of its own. It was still a large world, not yet dwarfed by comparison with the world of great oceans beyond Suez and Gibraltar. A ship – an ordinary merchant ship, with reasonable weather – took up to two months to make the passage, say, from Cartagena or Alicante to Alexandria; perhaps two or three weeks from Messina to Tripoli of Barbary; ten or twelve days from Leghorn to Tunis. There was plenty of space, plenty of elbow room; and the area as a whole was almost self-supporting. The sixty million or so people who inhabited the countries bordering the inland sea produced between them most of the food, many of the raw materials and almost all the manufactured goods which they consumed. They built their own ships and carried their own trade. The richest, liveliest and most varied economic activity of the region was concentrated in the relatively small area of northern Italy comprising Milan, Florence, Genoa, Venice, and their smaller neighbours and satellites. Florence and Milan were primarily manufacturing centres – Florence had little success in developing its own trading fleet, and Milan never possessed one – but Venice and Genoa, both great industrial centres, were also major naval powers and bases of great merchant fleets. Outside Italy, Ragusa specialized in very large ships for carrying bulky goods, grain, salt and wool. France, growing in unity and prosperity, attracted an increasing volume of Mediterranean traffic into the Rhone Valley by way of Marseilles, with its busy fleet of light lateen-rigged craft.

Introduction

Among historians—as distinguished from administrators and writers on political arithmetic, both of whom were concerned with the present rather than the past—interest in demographic data was slow in arising. As late as 1764 Voltaire found it necessary to admonish his fellow-historians to pay more attention to questions of population. ‘On exige’, he wrote in his programmatic article ‘Histoire’ (Dictionnaire philosophique), ‘des historiens modernes plus de détails,…des dates précises,….plus d'attention à la population.’

Few modern historians, presumably, will demur at Voltaire's injunction; but most of us would protest that, in the field of population at least, his demand for ‘détails’ and ‘dates précises’ is difficult to meet. Indeed, the historian who undertakes to trace the demographic development of Europe in the early modern period has more than once occasion to recall Professor Sée's emphatic disclaimer, ‘Nous n'en savons rien et nous n'en pouvons rien savoir.’

Even if he does not fully subscribe to this declaration the historian of early modern population cannot fail to recognize that his task is formidable. Admittedly, the period to be covered is no longer innocent of statistical inquisitiveness. What seems to be the oldest reference to a count of ‘hearths’ (focaticum) dates from 1092; and Italian cities, no less precocious in this respect than in so many others, are known occasionally to have collected quasi-demographic intelligence as early as the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. On the eve of the modern era enumerations of one sort or another had long since ceased to be a novel feature of public administration, though it was only in sixteenth-century Italy (in Venice, on the island of Sicily, and a little later in Tuscany) that census-like data would be gathered as a matter of routine.

The history of prices in Europe from the mid-fifteenth to the mideighteenth century is a very large problem indeed, and not to be undertaken in a single chapter without some trepidation. It is easy enough to outline the framework for such a history, but there is little possibility in the present state of our knowledge of discovering all the facts, or even of interpreting them with confidence. The principal advantage of such an enquiry is to establish once more the validity and basic characteristics of price history.

The first difficulty is that the economy under review is old, and now largely superseded, with structures and rhythms very different from those of industrializing Europe in the nineteenth and even more in the twentieth century. A readjustment of basic concepts is thus required on the part of the reader and of the historian of this economy.

Then again, price history has not yet succeeded in acquiring its own tools of analysis. For better or worse, it must rely on those provided by economists and statisticians. This has meant a constant effort to define terms, and in turn as a result, the methodological refinements have imposed uncertainties and repeated changes of view. It is as though each scholar believed in the persuasive value of a single method – his own – which‘ in the name of Science’ made him free to dispense with, and even reject, the contributions of his predecessors.