Early Modern Overview Four: Religion, Economics, and Technology

Middle Ages, the Catholic Church was surprisingly tolerant. There were grumm blayings about superstitions, etc. Etc. But there was very little that the Church could do about these issues anyway, even if it had wanted to. But by the sixteenth century, two key things had happened. One there was now a real enemy, the other for Catholics, these were Protestants and vice versa. Interestingly, both sides were more than willing to ally with the Ottoman Muslims if it gave them an

advantage over their Christian adversaries. The other was also now just a lot more radical than it had been in the Middle Ages. Now people were rejecting things like infant baptism and openingly questioning the Trinity. But the second factor was more important. Governments had become much more sophisticated by the sixteenth century. As a result, they, in conjunction with the Church, could now crack down oh non aberrant behavior. This drove persecution and ultimately the religious wars of the

late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. It's worth pointing out as we begin that the Eastern Orthodox Church did not split in the same way the Catholic Church did in the West, so this wasn't a pan European phenomenon necessarily. Now, the biggest source of conflict in the late sixteenth century was not between Lutherans and Catholics, or Anglicans and Catholics. It was driven by what might be called the more radical reformers.

Some individuals and groups rejected outright the idea that the church and state needed to be united and sought to create voluntary communities of believers as they understood that they might have existed at the time that the New Testament was first written. In terms of theology and spiritual practice, these and groups very wildly, though they were generally sort of termed radicals for their insistence on a more extensive break with the medieval past. Many of them, as I mentioned,

outright repudiated infant baptism. They wanted as members only those who had intentionally chosen to belong. Some adopted baptism of believers, for which they were given the title of anabaptists or rebaptizers by their enemies. Others saw the outward sacrament of rituals as misguided and concentrated on total inner spiritual transformation. Some groups attempted to follow Christ's commandments in the gospels literally,

while others reinterpreted the nature of Christ. Radicals were often pacifists and refused to hold any office or swear oaths, which were required of nearly anyone with any position of authority, including city midwives, toll collectors, as well as anyone involved in a court proceeding. Some groups attempted communal ownership of property, living very simply and rejecting anything that they thought was

on biblical. Different groups blended these practices in different ways, and often reacted very harshly to members who deviated, banning them from the group and requiring other group members, sometimes including their spouses, to shaan or have no contact with them until they had changed their behavior. Others, in turn, argued for complete religious toleration and individualism. That idea was especially common against the radicals, who rejected the idea of

the Trinity and viewed Christ as thoroughly human. The majority of those expressing radical beliefs were not theologians, nor were many particularly learned. Many, in fact, were women. One of the issues facing many Anabaptist groups were whether mixed marriages between those of different faiths were even permissible. Persecution also led radical leaders and their followers to migrate to parts

of Europe that were more tolerant. Sympathetic nobles in the Holy Roman Empire sometimes allowed them to live in their territories, as did nobles in Moravia modern day Slovakia and Czech Republic, Silatia in modern day Poland and other parts of Eastern Europe. Eventually, many of these groups were forced to move even further. In the seventeenth century, some polls of an anti Trinitarian sect went into exile in what is Transylvania modern day Hungary.

Mennonites and Huterites moved to southern Russia. The radicals represented one way that the early reformers were pushed further. Many of their ideas had social, economic, and political implications, which is in part why already saw them as so dangerous. Groups that linked Protestant ideas directly to various political and

social programs were threatening. In fifteen twenty two to fifteen twenty three, free Imperial knights, who controlled small territories in the Empire and numbered in the thousands, revolted against their larger territorial princes. Their grievances were basically economic and military, but they used Lutheran ideas to justify their movement. Armies led by territorial princes quickly suppressed the revolt and burn

a number of the knights castles. The Knights revolt thus succeeded only in making some princes more weary of these new religious ideas. And then, of course, the German peasants Revolt, which we talked about in the past, had much more far reaching consequences. Peasants in many parts of Germany objected to new laws limiting hunting and fishing rights, the rising

levels of taxation, and the imposition of labor organizations. Local groups of peasants formed regional revolutionary organizations and military alliances in what was then central and southeastern Germany. In March of fifteen twenty five, a union of these groups issued the Twelve Tables of Mimigan, a manifesto that called for the total abolition of serfdom, hunting and fishing rights, reduced taxation and labor services, the right of the community to

elect and dismiss pastors. Most dramatically, the Twelve Articles stated that any practice not in accordance with the Gospels should be rejected, thus linking the word of God what we might call divine law, with issues of social justice. All of this was expressed in clear language, and the articles were published as a small pamphlet which was quickly reprinted. The demands of the Twelve Articles were backed by military action, and peasant armies seized castles, noble houses, abbeys, and even

a few cities. Of course, in the end we know what would become the largest peasant uprising until we get to The French Revolution was brutally crushed by the Emperor and the nobles, but to an extent, the genie was out of the bottle. Though peasant grievances long predated the Reformation, the ideas of Luther and Zingli and others about Christian freedom and the reshaping of Christian life certainly influenced the way in which the peasants now called for change. The

response by magistraal reformers was uniformly hostile. However, Luther urged rulers quote as God soored on earth to knock down, strangle, and stab the insurgents as one would a mad dog

end quote. He and other reformers constantly asserted that their message was not to be linked with economic, social, or political grievances, and that the peasants and poor people owed their superiors obedience spiritual reasons never gave in individuals the right to oppose political authority by force, an idea that

Zwingli later reaffirmed in fifteen twenty six. Now, not surprisingly, these reform efforts lost a lot of their popular appeal after fifteen twenty five, when they were brutally crushed, though peasants in urban rebels sometimes found a place for their social and religious ideas within the radical groups of the period. The Reformation brought with it more than one hundred years of nearly NonStop religious warfare. In fifteen fifty five, the initial stage of that conflict came to a brief pause

in the Holy Roman Empire with the Peace of Augsburg. However, one of the key limitations of said peace was that it did not recognize Calvinism as a faith, which by fifteen fifty five was perhaps the most dynamic form of Christianity in Europe. It spread mostly in territories in which the nobility was relatively free to make decisions about their religion.

In fact, in some parts of Germany and for a time in Poland, calvin became the official state religion, even though it was never recognized by the Peace of Augsburg. If Calvinism was the most important Protestant factor in the second half of the sixteenth century, the Jesuits were by far and away the most important Catholic innovation. The Society of Jesus or the Jesuits, had been founded by Ignatius Loyola.

Loola was a Spanish knight who became acquainted with the works of religious writers and mystics while his leg was mending after being broken in several places during a battle in one of the ongoing Habsburg Valooi Wars. Like Luther, Loyola went through a period of inner turmoil and a crisis of conscience, but resolved this through a rigorous program

of contemplation rather than a new theology. He later described his techniques in the Spiritual Exercises, which set out a training program of structured meditation designed to develop a spiritual discipline and allow one to meld one's word with God. The ultimate aim of Loyola's program, though, was action on

behalf of God. Though Loyola had never studied as a humanist, his stress on individual will and possibility of self control and holiness certainly fitted with the idea of Erasmus and others. Their training and control of educational institutions made the Jesuits extremely effective. The Jesuits would, as a result, continued to be the most important Catholic order in Europe throughout the early modern period. What's been the rest of this our

final overview episode discussing economics and technology. Needless to say, in both Arena's life changed a lot for Europeans. In fact, a lot more for Europeans between fourteen sixty and sixteen fifty two hundred years than it had perhaps between eight hundred of the Common Era and fourteen hundred six hundred years. In fact, some might argue that it changed more than it had between the year one of the Common Era

and fourteen hundred. By the eighteenth century, economics and economists, and both of those were starting to become things began emphasizing the powerful role of capitalism, though it certainly had become force long before it was recognized. Obviously, the biggest name in the game here is Adam Smith, whose inquiry into the naturing causes of the Wealth of Nations in seventeen seventy six became virtually gospel until the twentieth century. For Smith, people had a natural tendency to trade with

one another. This inclination led to the specialization of trade, as first individuals, then groups, then regions, and ultimately nations concentrated on products and tasks that they could produce or carry out better than their neighbors. The highest level of development,

production and innovation. In other words, the greatest wealth of nations would be achieved by allowing free trade and open competition in both products and labor, an economic system later called capitalism, though I think it's worth noting Adam Smith never used that term. The development of capitalism was slow, uneven, and complicated. It involved change in the organization of production and the handling of money. And also increase in the

amount of goods manufactured, bought, and sold. This expansion of the European economy was driven in part by a growth in population. Population statistics before the advent of regular registrations of births, baptisms, marriages, and deaths are sketchy at best, but many demographers set the population of Europe at about

eighty million in thirteen hundred. Famine, plague, and other diseases killed at least a quarter of the population of the next century, but by about fifteen hundred it climbed again to pre plague levels, and over the next century it gradually grow to about one hundred million. Rulers and their officials regarded the growth in population as a good thing, for more people offered the possibility of greater economic and

military power. The rising population brought problems as well as opportunities, though, The demand for food increased, leading to a sharp rise in food prices, especially the price of grain, which increased between four and seven times in Europe during the period from fourteen fifty to sixteen twenty. Prices of firewood and charcoal also rose as people chopped down trees for fuel or to increase the amount of land under the plow forests contracted sharply in size, and new land was created

as coastal areas and marshes were drained. The hardest hit by the rising prices were those who had to buy all or most of their food, especially the urban and rural poor. This throughout the period led to bread and other types of riots. In fourteen ninety seven, five years after Columbus discovered the New World, a crowd of poor people in Florence attacked the city's public granary, provoking a riot in which some of them were trampled to death

when crushed. In fifteen eighty five, a city council in Naples ordered that the standard loaf of bread would be smaller but cost the same, a common practice in cities during times of shortage. A mob seized one of the council members who made that decision, killed him, mutilated his corpse, and then burned his house to the ground. Crowds did not regularly kill officials, but they did often riot, seizing grain, flour, or bread and then selling it at what they regarded

as the just, that is, the lower price. Governments, private groups like guilds and trading companies, and even the Church often attempted to shape economic growth by imposing tariffs and taxes, setting wages, establishing monopolies, and passing all other sorts of regulations. National governments attempted to build up their own industries by setting high tariffs on imported manufactured goods and promoting exports.

We still do that today. Government actions to ensure a positive balance of trade were part of an economic doctrine that later would be called mercantilism, which was the most popular form of economics in Europe between the sixteenth and eighteenth centuries. Mercantilists saw the amount of trade and production as fixed, so their policies were directed at grabbing a bigger piece of the pie and then taxing it and defending it, sometimes by military force. Government and personal responses

to rising prices generally made things worse. Governments devalued coins, which meant minted coins with less precious metal content, either by making the coins smaller or by mixing the precious metals with other metals like lead. But this only drove prices up faster as people demanded more devalued coins for

any purchase. Merchants and miller's hoarded grain and flour in the hopes of greater profits, which drove prices up further, and cities and nations prohibited the export of food, which often kept food from where it was actually needed to go. Most famines in Europe were actually completely localized and avoidable. One valley might have two little rain well the next

one was totally fine. Or one village might experience especially devastating hailstorms right at harvest time their neighboring villages they were unscathed. The increasing population meant there was no shortage of tenants and landowners raised fees, fines and rents. Rents on Land and England may have increased as much as nine times between fifteen ten and sixteen forty, while grain

prices simultaneously went up four times. Rural rebellions such as the German Peasants War or kentce Rebellion in England combined religious demands with those on a rollback to earlier levels of rents or fees. There was also no shortage of workers, especially those who little or no specialized training, so that wages increased much more slowly than food prices or rent

and real wages declined. Wages in general increased more slowly than prices for manufactured goods, and enterprising investors saw the opportunity for enhanced profits in manufacturing. They developed new forms of capitalist organization for the production of goods, hiring families of workers while retaining ownership of the raw materials, tools, and finished products. Some of these merchant entrepreneurs were able to benefit from the enormous amount of gold and silver

flowing into Europe from the Americas. This influx of precious metals drove down the value of coinage, which was made from gold and silver, the same way that an increase in the supply of any commodity were reduced price. The long period of price increases, which economist historians have labeled the price revolution, enhanced the wealth and power of long standing elites such as Eastern European noble landlords, and of

relative newcomers such as Western European merchant entrepreneurs. Trade production, and population growth are all important factors in explaining Europe's economic expansion in the early modern period, though that expansion didn't change the fact that the vast majority of Europeans lived in rural villages, growing crops and raising animals for their own use. For the use of their landlords and for sale. In fourteen fifty, about one out of every twenty Europeans lived in a town or city with more

than ten thousand inhabitants. By eighteen hundred, that proportion had only climbed to one out of every ten. There were places like the Netherlands, for example, where about eighteen hundred three out of every ten people lived in the city, but these, of course were offset by other geographic locations, places like Scandinavia and Spain in Eastern Europe, where there

were almost no cities at all. Now, thinking about late medieval agriculture, terns of land ownership varied from one region of Europe to another, and one village to another, and honestly, sometimes one family to another within a single village. Some land that was termed allodial was owned by the peasants who farmed it, who might owe fees for certain services, but no other direct obligations. Most land was held by an absentee landlord, which might be an individual or an institution,

oftentimes a monastery. The peasants who farmed it paid rents, taxes, and fees to the landowner, which had earlier been paid in labor or agricultural products, but which by the mid fifteenth century in Western Europe was increasingly paid with cash. This transformation to cash payments had been accompanied by disappearance of serfdom, so the peasants were no longer legally tied

to the land, but were tenants of the landowner. They still often owed fees based on earlier feudal rights, such as special fees to mill grain or pressed grapes, to buy sell inherent land, or to take a case to court, and in some areas they still had a few labor obligations called the courvet in France that's going to be hated by the way going into the revolution. Peasants also generally paid taxes and fees to support the church, which were collected by the village priest and then shared with

his superiors. Priest himself was often poor and integrated into the economic life of the village, so that he farmed during the week alongside his parishioners. Landlords generally appointed officials from the outside village to oversee the legal and business operations of their holdings, collecting taxes and fees, handling disputes.

The lords of their officials also had courts at regular intervals which handled legal matters like fights, assaults, robberies, litigations between villagers, and infractions of laws and customs regarding roads or public places. These courts relied more on the collective memory of village traditions and customs than unwritten laws, so that groups of responsible adult men in England called jurors, were often asked to decide issues such as who had the right to a certain piece of land, by simply

talking amongst themselves and to others who might know. Because of this, jurors were chosen from among those most likely to know the facts of the case, quite the opposite of modern jury selection. Landlords and government officials had direct power in the countryside. By the fifteenth century, villages in many parts of Europe had also developed self governing institutions to handle issues like crop rotation and to choose additional

officials such as constables, churchwardens, and even ale testers. How they were chosen and elected was more often a matter of oral tradition than written law. That both those who chose officials and the officials themselves were almost always adult men, and generally the heads of households. Women had no official voice in the running of the village, though they did buy, sell,

and hold land independently. There were handfuls of cases in England of women chosen as churchwardens in the minor office, charged with the physical upkeep of the parish church, especially as widows. Women headed households and were required to pay all rents and taxes. Being a woman might have meant you had no sand government, but you still had to

pay your taxes. In areas of Europe where men were going for long periods of time foresting or fishing, like Portugal or the northern Basque region of Spain, or were men left seasonally or more permanently in search of work Elsewhere, women made decisions about the way village affairs were to be run, though they did not set up formal institutions. In a previous episode, I mentioned this, but it bears repeating that most parts of Europe depended on grain based agriculture.

In southern Europe this meant rye while oats were dominant in the north. Along the coasts, many people dependent on fishing. Of course, in the more rugged terrains of Brittany, Scandinavia and Ireland, the grays of sheep, goats and cattle with the most important economic activity, and of course all of

these are primarily agricultural activities. In Western and Central Europe, villages were generally made up of small houses for individual families with one marital couple, their children, including step children, and perhaps one or two other relatives, a grandmother or

perhaps a cousin whose parents had died. A significant minority of the population didn't marry until late in life or not at all, so some households contained only an unmarried person or a widow, or several unmarried people who lived together. Villages themselves were nucleated. What I mean by that is that houses were clumped together, with the field stretching beyond the group. Each house might have a tiny yard for smaller animals like chicks or ducks, and of course a

vegetable garden. Crops were rotated according to tradition and need, and some fields were left unworked or fallow to a allow the soil to rejuvenate. Most families also allowed to let their pigs, oxen, cows, and sheep grays in the woods and meadows beyond the fields. They worked to gather firewood, nuts, mushrooms, and other foods from these areas. They were called the commons because they were held in common by the village whole.

Remember in England this is the fierce debate over the enclosure movement in Southern In some parts of Eastern Europe, though nuclear families and single person households were not unknown, extended families were more likely to live in the same household or very near to one another than in Northern Europe. Father and son or two married brothers might share a house with both of their families, forming what demographers call

the stem or complex household. The milder climate and the Mediterranean allowed for more frequent planting and greater range of agricultural products. Commercial agriculture developed mostly in more urbanized regions of Europe, where city populations provided a concentrated market for crops. In Flanders, peasant farmers worked their land more intensively by multiple hoeings, plowings and weedings, and planted bean crops and peas to cover and rejuvenate the soil rather than allowing

it to lie fallow. Rural areas, however, were not static and changed tremendously over the course of the early modern period, in both areas with specialized agriculture and places where traditional grain growing predominated. The relative prosperity of most peasants in the fifteenth century generally gave way to an impoverishment of a majority of these same people. By the late sixteenth century, landlords increased rents and fees faster than the prices for

agricultural products rose. Centralizing states, always in need of money, increased tax let throughout the incredibly expensive sixteenth century. Wealthier peasants were sometimes able to take advantage of the situation and purchase more land, but this came from middling and poor peasants, who, as a result, were reduced to holding nothing but a cottage or no property at all. In England, by sixteen twenty, around forty percent of rural residents held

only a cottage and a garden with outfields. In southern Spain, almost three quarters of the rural population held no land at all. This process of increasing polarization of wealth in the countryside proceeded slightly differently in different parts of Europe. In Spain, government officials sold off communal lands known as ballidios, to wealthy, aristocratic or ecclesiastic landlords, depriving peasants of places

to gather firewood or let their stock. Graze. Those same noble landlords also purchased position as tax collectors als, assuring their exemption from paying taxes. They were not interested in agricultural improvements, but in extracting as much as they could from their tenants. Rants and taxes became so high that many peasant families could not pay them. They lost their leases and swelled the ranks of the growing landless poor

in Italy. Wealthy urban residents increasingly bought land around major cities places like Florence, Pisa, and Venice. They rented it out to tenant farmers, often through sharecropping contracts called mesodia, in which the owners supplied the seed, animals, and tool

as well as the land. Landowners increasingly increased the interest rates in mezededia contracts and other rents, and the city governments that controlled the countryside fixed prices artificially low on agricultural products in a misguided effort to control inflation and assure urban residents of access to food. Tenants got caught in the middle of this whole process, and the number

who were well off declined dramatically. Village organizations of self government did little and could do little to halt this neither peasant tenants nor wealthy landlords saw any benefit in agricultural improvements, and landlords increasingly spent their excess income on

fancy country houses, elaborate furnishings, and art. The situation was no better in France, where the religious wars absolutely destroyed year in and year out crops and villages, and government policies exempted land owned by nobles and often owned by bourgeoisie urban residents from taxes. This made land attractive to upper and middle class buyers, but as they purchased more and more land, the tax burden became spread among fewer

and fewer were remaining people. Only in the Netherlands, where taxes and rent on rural land remained moderate and leasa's long term did prosperity continue for a broad spectrum of the present population. So as we know, England was not unique in suffering through agricultural difficulties during the early modern period, but it did suffer from one somewhat unique phenomenon enclosure. Enclosure is just what it sounds like. A landlord builds a fence around what had previously been common land and

used it for economic profit. Normally, this meant for grazing land for sheep to produce wool, but this meant a plot of land previously used for the whole village was now used for one individual. Peasants often relied on those public plots to raise communal cattle or goats to grow gardens. As a result, they suffered tremendously. Nobles and yeoman peasants,

along with urban landlords, benefited from enclosure horror. Peasants quickly became forced to sell what small plots they owned it just to survive, since it wasn't economic to keep them without access to public land. I don't want to overstate this process. Though enclosure was slow and uneven, by sixteen fifty, only ten percent of the land in England had been enclosed. Men and women with little to no land in the countryside worked in the expanding labor pool for handicrafts no

matter how many family members worked. However, their wages simply couldn't keep pace with inflation. Real wages for agricultural labors and rural artisans in England were cut in half during the period from fifteen hundred to sixteen fifty, and those

around Paris slashed by two thirds. There was often too little work available even at depressed wage levels, and large numbers of landless agricultural workers drifted continuously in search of employment or better working conditions, in addition to those who

migrated seasonally following the harvests. It appeared to many contemporaries that poverty was increasing at an alarming rate, and that more of the poor were what they termed sturdy beggars, that is, able bodied men and women who could work if they chose, rather than those who were poured through no fault of their own, such as orphans, the infirm,

or the handicapped. Most cities in Europe began to pass laws forbidding healthy people to beg or ordering them back to their home area, or even forcing them into workhouses. But things were a lot worse for the peasantry in East central Europe were the reintroduction of serfdom, tied people to the land, forbidding them to move or even increasingly. By fourteen hundred, serfdom had all but disappeared in Central Europe.

Onerous labor services in the Holy Roman Empire, called robot in Czech, which is the root of our modern word robot, had all but vanished, but then between fourteen hundred and sixteen hundred, a series of weak ruling houses in Central and Eastern Europe led to a dramatic expansion in the power of the nobility. In Germany, these powerful nobles were called junkers. Acting together, these nobles curtailed the power of cities, limited their growth, reinstated labor duties for their peasants, and

increased rents. Without a strong central authority, there truly was nothing to stop them then, as we know, in fourteen ninety seven, Russian legal codes restricted the of peasants to move. Later, even the Terrible abolished their right to move all together and sell their labor. In sixteen forty nine, a new Russian code will set no limit to the lord's ability and authority over their peasants, who could now be bought

and sold. This process was replicated elsewhere. In fact, thirty thousand young German men in the late seventeen seventies were outright sold to the British to fight in the American War for Independence. Neo serfdom was just as onerous in its labor obligations and limitations on freedom as earlier European serfdom, but it was very economically different in that it was

not designed for the market, not for subsistence either. Landlords sold the grain produced on their estates and taken in as taxes on rents and peasant land, both regionally and internationally. In Poland, for example, rye exports to the west were six thousand tons in fourteen sixty, seventy thousand tons in fifteen sixty, and two hundred thousand tons in sixteen eighteen.

Nobles sold grain locally to the increasing number of peasants who had become landless when they could no longer afford their rents, and to the armies regularly engaged in the various dynastic and religious wars or battles. Some landlords specialized in other types of commercial crops, such as wine, grapes, hops,

and flax, but grain remained the primary product. Increases in the price of grain during the sixteenth and seventeenth century encouraged landlords to raise rents, further, expand labor obligations, buy more land, and put still more land into grain cultivation. All of these resulted in more short term profits and were safer and easier than trying to introduce new crops

or new agricultural techniques. Long run, though, these practices lowered yields and reduced productivity and hindered economic growth of all types, not just in agriculture. The situation was so terrible for

serfs that slavery sometimes seemed like the better option. Slaves were quite common around Moscow, perhaps around ten percent of the population, where they could include the offspring of slaves, military captives, indentured servants, and people who had enslaved themselves or their entire family just to pay off their debts. Most slaves lived in rural areas and worked the lands,

but some were estate managers, household workers, or soldiers. Though a series of slave rebellions in the early seventeenth century had led the government to prohibit military training for slaves. In the mid sixteenth century, a central office for recording and handling all types of slaves, called the Slavery Chancellery, was established in Moscow. About half the slaves were limited contract slaves, who after the fifteen nineties were freed on

the death of their owners. The fact that slave status was not heritable and that slaves did not pay taxes led peasants to sell themselves more frequently, especially after legal changes in sixteen forty nine made serfdom even more onerous. Once the government realized what was happening, it converted all slaves back into serfs, which effectively ended slavery per se,

although Russian serfdom by this point wasn't much different. Russians, along with Ukrainians, Poles, and other Eastern Europeans, were also captured by Crimean tartars and sold as slaves into the Ottoman Empire. Perhaps as many as two point five million slaves were handled through the Crimean port city of Kafa in the period between fifteen hundred to seventeen hundred. Armies fighting over a territory and religion in Europe were enormous,

sleek consumers of grain and other foodstuffs. They also had an insatiable appetite for metal, particularly after the development of gun based weapons. By one calculation, the siege of an average size city at the end of the sixteenth century used more than ten thousand cannon balls per day, to say nothing of the metal required to make the artillery

that shot those cannon balls. Warfare consumed massive quantities of copper, lead, tin, iron, and various mixtures of these, and the demand for metal and architecture housing and other crafts increased dramatically in the early modern period as well. Metals to be smelted required huge amounts of fuel, which in the Middle Ages have been primarily meant wood or charcoal made from wood. Wood prices increased and many areas were deforested, leading to soil

erosion and other environmental problems. Coal was increasingly used as an alternative to wood, and coal mining dramatically expanded in certain areas around the city of Liege. In the Low Countries it basically quadrupled in the first half of the sixteenth century, and in the English counties of Northumberland and Durham it grew ten times between fifteen hundred and sixteen fifty.

Mining and metal production in the Middle Ages were largely organized in the same way as other crafts were, with groups of artisans and guilds or associations who leased from landowners the land on which ore was found. As the demand for metals went up, however, complicated machinery was needed to dig and maintain deeper tunnels and speed up the

production process. This was too expensive for artisans, but as the price and possibility for profit works also growing up, other players became interested rulers, including the popes and various members of the Habsburg family, opened or expanded mines. The popes had a monopoly on alum, a mineral used for fixing dye in cloth, and the Habsburgs held copper and

silver mines in Eastern Europe. Noble landowners opened new mines and iron foundries on their estates, using some of the profits they had earned from the grain trade to build vast blast furnaces, gravitational or hydraulic pumps to get the water out of mine shafts, devices for ventilating shafts, and other types of machinery. As part of their increased labor obligations, serfs on these estates were required to cut wood or

hul raw materials. Private individuals and family ferns also expanded mining operations through huge amounts of initial investments and the increased use of machines. Clearly, metallurgy was important, but the most common non agricultural occupation for Europeans was in the textile industry. Raw wool and finished cloth remained the most

important European commodity other than food throughout the sixteenth century. Initially, most finished cloth was produced in Italy, but By the sixteenth century, Dutch, English and the French began playing a much larger role in the process, particularly in the Northern Netherlands, which became the Dutch Republic. New technology enhanced organizational changes to increase production. The Dutch ribbon bloom, for example, allowed a single worker to weave up to twenty four ribbons

at a time. Wind power was tapped to full cloth and fulling meals similar to the one that started Don Quixote were built in many parts of the Dutch countryside. Because the Netherlands is flat, falling water is not a common power option, but the Dutch adapted technology developed for water mills to wind power, using windmills to grind seed,

crush seed for oil sawmill, and many other purposes. These technological innovations required large amounts of capital, much of which was provided by the partnerships and companies that had been originally established to share the risk in trading ventures. The Dutch combined new technology, a simplification of production processes and a sharper division of labor in shipbuilding and in textile production.

Throughout the early sixteenth century, Dutch shipyards were producing many types of ships from small fishing boats to huge galleons, supplying a merchant fleet that at its height in the seventeenth century could have numbered upwards of fifteen thousand ships. Toward the end of the century, Dutch shipbuilders invented the flute or fly boat, a long, flat bottom ship made of pine or fur soft wood that could be cut

by wind driven sawmills. Because there was little piracy in the North and Baltic seas, where the Dutch primarily traded, flutes carried no guns but could be crammed with bulky cargoes such as grain, fish, lumber, wine, and metals. Flutes were mass produced quickly and cheaply in the area just north of Amsterdam. Because they were rigged simply, they needed only half the crew of other ships for the same amount of cargo, making them much cheaper to operate as

well as produce. Dutch ships brought raw materials from all over Europe and later from around the world to the Netherlands, where merchants invest in traffics, trafficking and judge. These were firms that specialized in the processing and refinishing products for re export. Raw sugar could be refined into white table sugar,

and raw diamonds cut into gems. In Amsterdam, gin was distilled, tobacco was cut, whale blubber could be boiled into whale oil, clay made into ceramics and paper and leather goods and glass produced throughout the various Dutch towns. These products were then shipped internationally and also sold locally to prosperous farmers and city residents over the canals and river that crisscrossed the Dutch countryside. New types of financial organization also played

a role in this commercial expansion. In the fifteenth century, the most important European banks were run by Italian merchants in Florence, Venice and Genoa. They loaned money to individuals and governments, issued maritime insurance on overseas voyages, speculated in foreign exchange, and accepted deposits of coins. Deposit banks with similar functions became common in major cities, but they often

made speculative loans and frequently failed. These failures ultimately led to the creation of public banks overseen by government officials, of which the first was Tabila di Covenia of Barcelona, founded in fourteen oh one. In the middle of the sixteenth century, Naples and Palermo founded public banks, and the northern Italian cities soon followed. Those in Genoa were specifically designed to handle gold and silver coming from the Spanish

New World. Public banks were opened in Amsterdam and other Dutch and North German cities in the early seventeenth century and gradually took over more and more business from private banks. Though both private and public banks issued various forms of paper bills of exchange and statement of deposit, most businesses in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries was carried out with coins. We're talking gold, florins, ducats, ekus, or nobles for large

transaction of the nobility. In merchant class, we could talk about large silver coins for major purchases and rents, smaller silver or copper pennies for everyday purchases. Mints that made coins were monitored and taxed by government authorities, but were generally operated privately. When governments needed money, they ordered mints to make smaller coins or used less precious metal, thus increasing the amount of taxes flowing to the government for

the same amount of metal. Debased coins grew smaller and their purity declined from twenty four it's to eighteen and then even less. While silver coins turned black because they had such a high copper content. Some even grew so thin that they simply crumbled upon touch. Merchants thus often weighed coins rather than counting them, and relied on networks of information about which coins they should avoid. The debasement always led to inflation. Now look, most Europeans never saw

a large gold eku or silver coin. They paid their taxes and bought items with the small silver, copper, or often mixed metal variety. In the beginning of the sixteenth century, Antwerp was the largest financial center in all of Europe. Portugal decided to make Antwerp the main outlet for spices in Europe after the first Portuguese voyages to India. Once the money was there, where the Habsburg Holy Roman emperors

did most of their banking in Antwerp itself. Loaning money to the crowned heads of Europe was of course the most lucrative venture at the time, but it was also the riskiest. As we know, Philip the Second of Spain defaulted on his debts several times. Antwerp reached the height of its prosperity circa fifteen sixty. Then came the Dutch Revolt in fifteen seventy six, Spanish troops housed in the city who had not been paid for months ran amok.

They seized everything of value, burned buildings, raped women, and slaughtered between six to seven thousand citizens. This Spanish fury was followed less than a dec heead later by the French Fury, when French soldiers did basically the same thing. These incidents ended half a century of Antwerp's dominance, and the he receded in importance. Urban life continued to improve throughout the early modern period. Almost all European cities were

now enclosed by walls and gates. The center of most cities was the most desirable neighborhood, with large houses of merchants, lawyers, and other wealthy individuals. The city center was also home to government buildings. Slightly out from the center were the

homes of guild masters and other professionals. The control of servants and journeymen was important to urban elites, but they were more worried about the large number of people who neither lived nor worked in the households of responsible tax paying citizens. Tax records from early modern cities indicate that half or even more households didn't own enough to pay

any taxes at all. These were people married, single widowed, who lived in attics and sell in rooms that they shared, or in flimsy housing just inside or just outside the city walls. They supported them anyway that they could. Men repaired houses and walls, dug ditches and hauled goods from ship. Women laundered clothing, spun, wooled, and cared for invalids. Children carried messages or packages around the thriving city or even

into the surrounding countryside. The poor found work in city orphanages, infirmaries and hospitals, where the poor made up most of the patients, as well as being the caregivers. They made or sold simple items that were unregulated by the guilds, little things like wooden dishes, pins, and soap. They gathered nuts or firewood outside city walls, carried them through the

gates and sold them for a few pennies. They bought eggs from villagers, cooked them in a small pot on a charcoal brazier, and sold them as a quick to go beal. They bought and sold used clothing, household articles, or worked in taverns or inns. Sometimes these people engaged in criminal activities, stealing merchandise from houses or wagons and then selling it on the sly, or cutting the strings of pouches and purses, or they did all these at once,

taking advantage of whatever opportunity presented itself. For those without any means of support, the only alternative was begging. But as inflation increased in economic conditions worsened in the later sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, states began cracking down on begging. Cities band begging and opened workhouses where people were forced to perform basic manual labor. Orphaned boys were apprenticed to

learn a trade, girls were taught domestic tasks. Poor relief was handled by accommodation of institutions, private philanthropic organizations, monasteries, voluntary charitable groups, city village agencies, the parish, and in Catholic areas of piscopal councils. Beginning in the fifteen twenties, both Protestant and Catholic cities in Western Europe tried to centralize and consolidate the dispensation of charity, control begging, and

put everyone who could work to work. They often established what were called common chests or central collections of gifts appointed men women as overseers of the poor to visit people in their homes and distribute these alms in places called almshouses. In Catholic areas, orders like the Franciscans who survived by begging, oppose the new poor laws, arguing that the poor are a right to beg and that begging allowed people to show their Christian charity. Most Catholic clergy

and rulers did not have such misgivings. However, acts of mercy, such as donating to the poor were certainly meritorious good deeds, but they needed to be funneled through structures established and controlled by bishops. Franciscans and other orders were allowed to beg, but Catholic rulers preferred that they solicit contributions through personal appeals,

not on the streets. In both Catholic and Protestant areas, authorities hoped that voluntary contributions would provide enough money for poor relief, but they also recognized that forced contributions could be necessary, especially during times of famine or epidemics. Poor people could only collect support in their home, parish or town, however, not in the cities where they might have migrated. To

looking for work. Poor laws in many places made sharp distinctions between the quote unquote worthy poor talking about orifans, widows, the elderly, working families with many children, those whom illnesses or accidents might have incapacitated or maimed, in other words, respectable people who had fallen on hard times, and the quote unquote unworthy poor, vagrants and idlers, who came usually

from somewhere else. The worthy poor were to be taken care of in their own homes or in municipal hospitals. The unworthy poor sent to workhouses, where they were often joined by debtors and people awaiting prison sentences. Workhouses and jails could never hold all the people in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries who didn't have work, Given the often runaway inflations and rapidly changing economic conditions. Throughout the eighteenth century,

physical punishments for idleness continued to be common. Banishment from a city for a period of time was often the consequence of someone who was chronically without work. Beginning in the late fifteenth century, France, Spain, and the Italian city states started sentencing vagrants to galley service. By the seventeenth century, galley service was the most common criminal punishment in all of France, and it was only when they stopped using

the galleys that that stopped being the case. So economics and technology changed rapidly between fourteen fifty and roughly sixteen fifty, transforming the lives of Europeans, both for the better and oftentimes for the worse. And we're going to see all of these factors play out now in our next massive

story arc, the Thirty Years War. Thirty Years War is so deliciously complicated that I'll be spending the next couple episodes walking through the Holy Roman Empire at the time that the Thirty Years War breaks out in the seventeenth century, and explaining how the idiosyncrasies of the Empire overlapped with changing religious, economic, and technological developments to create the perfect tinderbox for the most devastating war that Europe would experience

up until the Napoleonic period. Now, if you've enjoyed the show, please consider leaving a rating or review. It helps other people find it. And if you're looking for financial ways to support the show, there's a bunch of different options in the links in the show notes. In Western CIV two point home