Early Modern Europe Part One: 1450

not confident anyone remembers that now. Once we finished with today's program, I'm going to do a short series of shows that examine changes in society, culture, politics, economics, and technology. That should set us up nicely to begin what will be, for me, the longest story arc I have ever attempted, the Thirty Years War. I want to start by looking at how business and business was intertwined with travel circa

fourteen fifty. Now, look, before I even do that, I should note that there was no such thing as a uniform quote unquote Europe in fourteen fifty. France and England are still in the one hundred Years War, though it only is about three years to go. Italy is a patchwork. The Reconquista still rages in Spain. Heck, for a little

while at least, Constantinople is still a thing. So I'll draw distinctions where possible, but please understand that I'm going to paint with a broad brush here, and so I'm sure a lot of things that I'm going to say historians would argue wouldn't hold up to close scrutiny. Good thing, then I'm not a historian. So with that being said, Business and travel urban merchants in Italy, Germany and the Low Countries and the Low Countries I've used this phrase

before today, that's Belgium, Luxembourg and the Netherlands. People of these areas developed new business techniques, including various forms of contracts, some of them temporary partnerships and some more permanent arrangements in Italian which were called compagnie. That's obviously the root of the English word company. Compagnie in Italian literally means

bread together, i e. Sharing of bread. These trading companies Circle fourteen fifty sponsored land and sea expeditions in search of better routes, sources of supply, and of course new markets. Merchants from Florence, Venice, Genoa and other northern Italian cities established merchant colonies or at the very least set up

permanent agents in far off locations. During the fourteenth century, merchants from Venice, Genoa, Barcelona, and other southern European cities developed permanent trading centers in most of the ports of the Middle East and many in North Africa. Genoese merchants dominated in the Aegean and Black Sea, meeting caravans carrying goods from India, Central Asia, and China. As we know, these caravans also brought the Black Death, which came to

Europe from Asia in thirteen forty seven. Venetian merchants paid more attention to Asian spices in the Red Sea up to Cairo, which in the mid fifteenth century was the capital of the Mamlouk Empire. In near Eastern cities, so in what today we would call Turkey, Egypt, and the Middle East, European merchants lived separately from the rest of the community. Now, don't get me wrong, these weren't ghettos

or the precursors to ghettos. Merchants lived in their own enclaves, but lived a higher standard of living than most of the rest of the population. Here, local rulers granted these foreign merchants special rights and privileges. The same could be said of Northern Europe. In northern European cities from Holland to Poland, different communities joined together to create Europe's first

ever commercial league, the Hanseatic League. The Hanseatic League controlled a large swath of Northern trade, from the fur trade with Moscow, the fish trade with Norway and Sweden, and the wool trade in Flanders. But by the fourteen fifties, driven by the fall of Constantinople, the European trade market was decisively changing. It was, in a word, turning west. The Portuguese made direct contact with the Mali Empire in West Africa, opening up the potential for trade in gold

and slaves. This is where African slavery as a concept in Europe and the Americas really begins. Portugal then encouraged colonization in the islands of the Atlantic, which later provided a springboard for further exploration into Africa and west toward the Americas. They built docks and shipyards and places like the Azores, the Madeira Islands, Verde Islands, and the Canaries. While economic motives inspired merchants to travel and escaping creditors

or legal authorities, maybe spurred sailors and pedlars. Religious motives drew others to the sea routes of Europe. From ancient times, many of the world's religions encouraged pilgrimages to holy sites. Chinese Buddhists went to India. Japanese Buddhist sech later went to China. Now, of course, Christian pilgrims traveled well, and another group of travelers worth pointing out here is, of course,

the pilgrims. Christian pilgrims traveled to Canterbury in England, Mario Wolf in Austria, Chechwara in Poland, and some ventured to the international pilgrimage sites of Jerusalem, Rome Constantinople which kept its name, or Santiago de Compostela in northern Spain, because making a pilgrimage to Mecca is one of the duties

of a believer in Islam. Even by the year twelve hundred, there was a steady pilgrimage traffic in the western Indian Ocean local shrines to holy believers, also through Muslims, inns, hostels and shops were established along major routes, supplying these pilgrims with shelter, food, and even souvenirs. And this is one area where women as well as men made these journeys. There wasn't such a thing as leisure travel or vacation as we think of it. For ninety nine point nine

percent of the population. Royals went on progress and the nobility would retire to country estates. Nobody went on like vacation to Paris, for example, But as I mentioned, people did travel a lot out of religious conviction. Even after the fall of Constantinople, European pilgrims still traveled to see saint relics and holy shrines, and in particular the Santiago de Compostele, as I mentioned in Spain, became an extremely

popular destination. Christian communities in Asia and Africa were separated from European Christians by the spread of Islam, which first motivated an accompanied Arab conquests in the Middle East, North Africa, and the Iberian Peninsula, and then later continued to expand in sub Saharan Africa and South and Southeast Asia. Muslim legal scholars, Sufi mystics, and other religious leaders helped to spread and solidify Muslim teachings both within and beyond territories

in which the rulers were Muslims. Effective missionaries in both Christianity and Islam often absorbed and modified indigenous traditions and customs as they moved, so that place is sacred to specific gods became identified instead now with saints or apostles in Christianity, and sometimes local gods could become the men

off stations of Allah in Islam. By fourteen fifty. There were therefore wide variations in rituals, practices, institutions, and even doctrine in both religions, some sanctioned by authorities, others not. Travelers from one part of Christendom or one part of Dar al Islam the land of Islam to another frequently commented on just how strange and perhaps unacceptable they found

the practices of their co religionists as they moved. Now, look, the vast majority of Europeans didn't travel very far from their home villages, most for their entire lives, but some were going great distances, and by the fourteen fifties those distances were rapidly expanding. Not that new routes of travel were always a one way street. Mind you, routes could close or disappear. The Viking colony on Eland had all

but died out by fourteen fifty. The Ottoman conquest in Greece had cut off many routes of travel to the East, but the key difference was by the fourteen fifties, Europeans responded to these setbacks by finding new routes. While it's unlikely that most Europeans would have noticed it at the time, fourteen fifty marks the beginning of a much greater European

interaction with the rest of the world. Now, in terms of society, if we examined Europe as a whole in fourteen fifty, the nobility is still by far the most powerful group, though to be fair, the term nobility is becoming a bit misleading now because the nobility varied a lot, from kings, princes all the way down to petty lords. Now, traditionally, Europe had been throughout all of the Middle Ages what

is called tripartite. That means is that there were three social groups, those who fought nobles, those who prayed clergy, and those who worked everyone else. Of Course, the key problem with this is that the traditional conception of society overlooked the people who lived in the towns and cities. By fourteen fifty that numbered perhaps one quarter of the population in the Low countries, one fifth of Italy, one

sixth of Spain and Portugal. Towns began to grow in Europe during the eleventh century around a couple of key cores, military camps, crossroads of trade, cathedral, seaports. Those sorts of things Gradually they won from whatever sovereign they happened to have legal and political rights, often codified in a town charter. They developed institutions of self government, regulated trade and production,

attracted migrants from the countryside. These were the communities that were often hard hit by first and subsequent outbreaks of the Bubonic plague, though a few, like Nuremberg in Germany, developed strict rules of quarantine that managed to keep the plague outside the walls. Even by fourteen fifty, the tripartype model for Europe was out of date. Still, society remained divided by group or social order. That much was still true. It is crucial to note, however, that while money might

overlap with status, that wasn't a given. Those in the first order, the nobility, were more likely to be wealthier than the third, but that wasn't always the case. If it wasn't the case, then why in the world would merchants constantly be buying titles of nobility, increasingly an excellent source of revenue for kings. James the First, as we know, sold titles of nobility like they were going out of style, indicating that oftentimes the merchants of the quote unquote third

social order were actually wealthier than some nobility. And then, of course there was gender. Certainly most Europeans believed that men were superior to women, but to what extent well factored in here were not as sure, or at least

not everyone agreed back then. Was a wealthy noble woman superior to a peasant man, yes, but was she superior to a lesser male noble Opinions on that were divided poverty less in the divisions between men and women, creating a sort of quote unquote equality of misery, never a good thing to have. Many women recognized a level of liberation if they were widowed and they chose to remain unmarried. Politically, European boundaries continued to be in a state of flux.

In fourteen fifty. Other than a few rivers, there were not firm boundaries in the way that we think of them today. Rather, I think it's best if we think of the lines on the maps that we all see as sort of blurred lines and regions. France was less of a united kingdom than a patchwork of allied lesser states, for example, and honestly it will remain so until the eve of the Revolution. For most people in Europe, cultural and intellectual life in fourteen fifty was still very closely

ranked to religion. Oh this is slowly starting to change. Monasteries, convins and cathedral schools had always been the main avenues to basic literacy since the tenth century for all but the elite, who could afford to hire private tutors. By the twelfth century, wealthy businessmen in a few cities had established small schools to teach reading and arithmetic, but even

these used religious texts as their basic reading material. Beginning in the twelfth century, some of these cathedral or municipal schools developed into universities, teaching advanced subjects in law, medicine, theology, and philosophy. Of course, they were taught only to older male students and This is along with a more general curriculum what we would call the liberal arts to younger

boys and men. Students at these universities, even those not studying theology or planning on a church career, were considered to be clergy in terms of legal jurisdiction and tax issues. The technical term is that they were in the quote unquote minor orders, though their regular participation in riots and drunken brawls might make us reconsider just how clerical this group was. Universities shaped the cultural and economic life of the cities in which they were located. The number of

universities increased slowly from the twelfth century onward. In the year thirteen hundred, there were fifteen to twenty universities in Europe. By fifteen hundred there were over fifty university education and the preparatory study necessary to enter those universities was all conducted in Latin. Now, what that meant was that scholars from Portugal to Poland could communicate with one another in a lingua franca. Students could travel from one university to

another easily, and they freated did. Learning Latin served as kind of a male puberty right for urban boys with an ion careers that required university study. It often bonded this group together and set it aside from the rest of the population. Scholars corresponded with one another and published in Latin until the eighteenth century, and university classes in many subjects continued to be taught in Latin right up

to the nineteenth though Latin dominated scholarly discourse. Beginning in the fourteenth century, writers in some parts of Europe began to use local dialects rather than Latin for poems and stories, and these local dialects slowly developed into the vernacular literary languages of Italian, French, English, and others. This new type of literature was the result of increasing levels of vern

literacy in the cities of Europe. Alongside schools teaching boys Latin, small schools, often very little more than a room or maybe even just a corner of someone's house, had begun to teach boys and a couple girls basic reading, writing, and basic mathematics. Vernacular languages slowly replaced Latin in official and business records, providing employment for folks in notary positions,

secretarial positions, and clerks. This process started to broaden the circle of literate individuals within one area, but it also separated those in one area more sharply than those elsewhere. In the twelfth century, everyone in Europe spoke a local dialect, often referred to as the mother tongue, and very very few spoke, read, and wrote Latin. By the mid fifteenth century, this was still true, but in addition, some people now spoke, read, and wrote dialects that were becoming to be regarded as

French or Italian. Those whose mother tongue was a dialect that did not become a literary language, let's say, people in Wales, for example, had to learn a language that varied extremely from their own, almost to the extent that perhaps Latin did. This was perhaps the period when vernacular literatures were taking off for the first time. This is

the age of Dante and Chaucer. It was also the age of humanism, which was a totally new approach to education that began in northern Italian cities and rapidly spread outward. Humanism was a lot like the classical concept of rhetoric. It was supposed to prepare you for a life in business or at court. Humanism stressed things like the art of persuasion, public speaking, and effect writing. Crucially, to humanists, education was never about private edification. It wasn't about cloistering

yourself up in some monastery and searching for truth. You were supposed to be in public, and ideally, this education you were getting, you were supposed to use it for the public good. Humanism is one aspect of the Renaissance, the self conscious cultural movement begun by Italian intellectuals, artists, and writers that emphasized a definitive break with the medieval past.

They didn't reject Christian teachings or separation from the Church. Instead, Renaissance thinkers artists put greater emphasis on the secular and material world. A new attitude toward artists, writers, composers, and other creators of culture started to develop which emphasized their creative genius. Certain type of art, particularly painting, sculpture, and architecture, began to be viewed as the product of an individual

rather than as a collective workshop. And now we're seeing the idea of art, rather than just simply a craft or a product, coming into the vernacular for the first time. Humanist education and Renaissance art are extremely important if we look at them backwards in hindsight, It's important to remember, though, that these changes in art and literature, and the way of thinking about one space in the world, all these had very very little impact on ordinary, day to day people.

For most people, their cultural world remained one transmitted orally and visually through stories that were told in the evenings sermons preached by wandering friars. These oral and visual images continued to teach them to look forward to a pair paradise in heaven, rather to seek fame in this world. Paradise where food would be plentiful, work would be short, an illness unknown. In other words, a very different world

than the one that they knew. It's worth pointing out that religiously, Europe was Roman Catholic in fourteen fifty, apart from the East, which was Orthodox. That was about to change, of course, we know that, But in fourteen fifty the church remained dogmatic and hierarchical. It also suffered from a myriad of problems which I have documented previously in this podcast, and I'm not going to go over again in great detail right now. Religion was never simply a matter of institutions. However,

it was also about beliefs, rituals, and practices. It's almost impossible for us to know the beliefs of ordinary Christians, because their religious ideas make it into the historical record, generally only when they come into conflict with the institutional church during trials for heresy. Beliefs were expressed through rituals and actions, however, and there is much historical evidence regarding these.

We know that people participated in processions dedicated to the Virgin Mary or a specific saint to ask for a good harvest or prosperity in their city. They asked the assistance of saints to get through childbirth, healed disease, protect them while traveling. They paid church taxes, and they often made voluntary donations for the building and maintenance of churches

and cathedrals. At least once a year, sometimes more regularly, people confess their sins to the village priest, who then set forth certain actions, such as praying or fasting, as penance for those sins. By the fifteenth century, every single major life transition was marked by religious rituals, especially for Christians. There was baptism shortly after birth, preferably by a priest,

but in an emergency situation by a midwife. On baptized babies couldn't enter heaven, so baptism was sometimes carried out even on dead children, even though technically theologically this wasn't acceptable. Though a church wedding wasn't required, most weddings in Europe were conducted by a priest, who often then went on to bless the marital bed. Women who had given birth went through the ritual that was called churching six days after childbirth, in which they thanked God for their safe

delivery and then we're welcome back to the congregation. Of course, there were rituals for dying as well. Not only were individual life events marked by religious ceremonies, but the calendar was one hundred percent driven by religious festivals and days. The life of Christ was reenacted in an annual cycle of special Holy days, with days also dedicated to the Virgin Mary and a myriad of saints. All of these intersected intentionally with the agricultural cycle of planting and harvesting.

By fourteen fifty, as many as fifty days out of the year were marked off as special Holy days in addition to every single Sunday, meaning there were over one hundred and two official holidays throughout the year. Interestingly, enough. Weekly attendance at church service wasn't always the norm, though The Church constantly entreated people to confess their sins to a priest at least once a year, though honestly many didn't.

Now economically, Europe was in a far better position in fourteen fifty than had been in say, the previous three hundred years. The Italians, for the moment, continued to be the dominant players in the European economy. Florentine cloth was the finest in all of Europe and was exported throughout the continent. Cloth production in places like England and Ghent

started to take off in the fifteenth century. Making cloth was one of the first types of production in Europe to be organized along what we would call capitalist lines, in which the raw materials, finished product, and sometimes tools needed for production were owned by someone other than the person who was doing the actual work. Cloth merchants, called drapers, purchased raw wool, hired workers for all stages of production,

and then sold the finished product. Some stages of production might be carried out in the draper's home or in buildings they owned, but more often than not production was actually done in the houses of the people that they hired. Drapers in many towns, sometimes in combination with merchants of other types of products, joined together to form guilds that prohibited non members from trading in their towns. Mining was

also a capitalist enterprise. Silver mines in Germany and Bohemia, lead and tin mines in western England, copper mines in Spain and Sweden, iron mines in England, Poland and eastern France, and salt mines throughout the Alps all provided opportunity for

investment and for wage employment for workers. This investment paid for deeper tunnels, more machinery, more complex smelting processes, all of which increased the volume and the quality of the metals that Europeans were producing by fourteen fifty, and these metals were essential to the new techniques of warfare, which required much larger quantities of metal for armor, cannon balls,

and shot for arquibosis. Most goods were not produced by wage workers hired by investors, however, but through craft guilds. Craft guilds had first developed in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. Craft guilds were organized around the production or sale of a particular product. They could regulate the hours that could be worked, the number of workers in a shop, the amount of raw materials any shop could maintain, and of course,

the quality of standards required in finished products. These were set and down in written ordinances stipulating rules. Guilds were led by master craftsmen, adult heads of household who became members through producing a product judge acceptable called masterpiece, and often paying a fee. Each craftsman led his own shop, which was located within his household, unless his type of work required that he'd be at a specific location this is morally just building sites. He could hire an apprentice

or two. The number was often set by guild regulations. Boys of around ten and whose parents then might sign an apprenticeship contract. These boys learned the trade while they worked. Once the apprenticeship was finished the duration, also being set by guild regulations, became journeymen and either continued to work in the same shop or traveled around working for various masters.

Some years later, they could have the opportunity to settle down, make their own masterpiece, get married, open their own shop. Guilds created norms of masculinity that were very different from nobles. The ideal guild man was a stable provider for his home. He wasn't a warrior off fighting. Though women, especially the wives, daughters, and servants of guild masters, worked in guild shops, they

didn't generally go through a formal training program. And I'm sure this won't surprise you, but they didn't have any voice in the running of the shop. Now, if the master died, the widow of a master might continue to operate the shop for a period of time after her husband's death, making her a very attractive marriage partner. Larger cities in Europe could have quite literally hundreds of different guilds, each of which which developed its own strong sense of

work identity, and sometimes these groups had distinctive clothing. Guilds also had a non economic function. They could have special altars dedicated to patron saints, they could establish funds for orphans of masters, or they could carry a casket in a funeral. Though merchants, crafts, and guilds dominated the economic life of cities, most of the people who lived in cities weren't members of them. They made their living producing

goods and performing services that weren't regulated by guilds. They could carry goods from place to place gather and selling firewood. They could work as servants. They could wash clothes, they could repair houses, brewing beer, which was not a guild at this point, but it could care for the sick. The growth of the cities of Western Europe was made possible by economic and political developments in the countryside. Labor obligations had begun to be replaced by cash rents in

many parts of Western Europe in the thirteenth century. Attempts by landlords to reverse this trend after the Black Death hadn't worked at all, though some labor services like fixing roads or transporting goods to market and remained. Peasants in many areas now raised crops for themselves and for the market. They did not raise them for their lord as they had and say, the year twelve hundred, a similar process

had started to occur in Eastern Europe. But as I'll talk about later, and as I mentioned a little bit in the Ivan the Terrible Episodes, by the fourteenth and especially fifteenth centuries, that trend in Eastern Europe is actually starting to go in reverse. Now. In terms of society in general, most European diets were nothing to write home about. In fourteen fifty Grain was the primary European staple eaten as bread or drunk as beer. Thus, grain growing remained

the centerpiece of European economics. Interestingly, give us our day, our daily bread was the only portion of the Lord's prayer, the most important in all of Europe that referred to material goods. By the fifteenth century, specialized agricultural production had also developed in certain areas, some of which became dependent on imported grain. Southern Spain, Sicily and Greece produced olives. Southern France and Central Italy produced wine, Northern Italy silk.

Northern France and Germany flax for linen. The residents of coastal areas from Lithuania to Norway and from Pultugal to Crete caught fish which they dried or salted for long distance trade. The trade in food stuffs gradually became an increasingly important segment of long distance trade, particularly when Western European merchants hooked up with Eastern European landlords to export

their grain that the serfs had produced to the West. Now, increasingly shipments of these food stuffs and the growth of specialized economies were becoming dependent on sea transport and this just I can't stress this enough. This just wasn't a thing in the Middle Ages. Large scale sea transportation was something that was just beyond the pale of medieval Europe.

There wasn't the infrastructure, there wasn't the technology, and there just wasn't the stability to establish these sea transport lanes in the first place. This was probably the biggest area of technological advancement in the fifteenth century. It was certainly most relevant to our story. In the fifteenth century, Europeans added a stern post rudder, which had originally been a Chinese invention, and they added two types of sales, a square one for speed and power, and a triangular or

Latin sale for crosswinds. This was the same time when Europeans adopted the magnetic compass an astrolab so they could chart their course effectively. Thanks to these innovations, ocean trade became more profitable, efficient, and reliable. When it wasn't, Europeans started to adopt a form of maritime insurance so that

trade might be guaranteed and encouraged. If you looked at a European ship in fourteen fifty, you would have noticed another difference compared to one, in say, fourteen hundred cannons. Gunpowder was in the process of revolutionizing the European battlefield, a process that will continue to play out throughout our story. As gunpowder grew in importance, Europeans began to perfect the methods of its production, increasing the demand for raw materials necessary,

namely black powder and saltpeter. This in turn increased trade. But of course, the biggest innovation of the fourteenth century had been movable type. The printing press and movable type allowed Europeans to transmit knowledge in a way previously unimaginable. Critically, it broke the stranglehold the church and university system held over the acquisition of information. Knowledge became practical and useful. Suddenly Aristotle didn't look so perfect. Maybe he wasn't right

after all. Maybe Europe and Asia weren't surrounded by a massive ocean all right. So that sets our base line at fourteen fifty. Next week, I'm going to look closely at society and examine societal change between fourteen fifty and sixteen fifty. If you've enjoyed the show, the best way by far to support what we do here is to leave a rating or a review. That helps more people

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