The humanitarian catastrophe had a thin silver lining. The lucky peasantry that survived the Black Death now could farm much larger land holdings, could concentrate on better land, and were thus significantly richer. For instance, in 1341 in the English village of Stoughton, 52 percent of landholdings were eleven acres or less. By 1477, only 16 percent were that size, with 58 percent of holdings larger than thirty acres.20 With many in the community becoming more prosperous, life became less precarious, and the need for emergency consumption loans and Church charity diminished.
The poor were still around, albeit fewer in number. Fortunately, with more people possessing surplus resources, competition to lend to those in adversity increased. With vast tracts of now-untilled land as well as commercial opportunities in towns beckoning the poor, the extremes in bargaining power that might have led to debt bondage no longer prevailed. Indeed, across much of Western Europe, the Black Death precipitated the end of serfdom.21 Greater prosperity and competition to lend that prosperity now diminished the old rationales for prohibiting usury.
As we will see throughout the book, natural or economic catastrophes and technological progress are the big drivers of societal change. After the Black Death, technological progress took over. Francis Bacon, the seventeenth-century courtier and philosopher, thought gunpowder, printing, and the compass were the three greatest inventions known to man.22 Their arrival in the West played a part in the expansion of markets, and the further weakening of the feudal community as well as the Catholic Church. They also heralded the rise of the nation-state, a key player in our narrative.
Cannons and Internal Commerce
In feudal Europe around the turn of the first millennium, all that it seemed to take to create a self-sufficient political entity—it would be too much to call this a state—were fortified walls and a retinue of armed men. Indeed, often the first use of the independent taxation authority a town received was to build a strong wall—a policy that still appeals to some of our politicians.23 In the fourteenth century, by some counts there were over one thousand separate political entities in Europe.24 Each entity levied its own duties, taxes, and tolls, especially on goods crossing its borders, which increased the cost of transporting goods over long distances. These were just the legal impediments to commercial traffic; entrepreneurial lords could indulge in their own banditry, while sea captains could engage in piracy. If you drive alongside the Rhine near Frankfurt today, you will see the castles of the original robber barons at regular intervals, though today they only relieve tourists of their money, and in a far more civilized way than in the past. All these impediments ensured that the size of the market any producer could safely and profitably access was quite small—often only within the borders of the little political entity he resided in.
The cannon changed everything. The Chinese invented gunpowder, but it was the Europeans who fully discovered and developed its destructive potential. At the battle of Crecy in 1346, English bowmen used small bombards, which, primed with gunpowder, shot little iron balls to frighten enemy horses.25 A hundred years later, massive siege cannons could demolish even the strongest fortifications. Techniques of fortifying changed in response, so the net effect of the cannon was to increase both the cost of attack and of defense.
Military techniques also changed. Cannonballs and musket fire could slaughter charging armored knights on horseback. However, muskets took time to reload, which meant an experienced musketeer even in the beginning of the seventeenth century could shoot a round only once every two minutes.26 Against a cavalry charge, this meant essentially only one shot between the enemy coming into range and the commencement of hand-to-hand combat. The tactical solution was to have musketeers drawn up in long parallel lines, with the first line firing then stepping behind the second to reload, and so on, so that near-continuous volleys of fire could be directed at the enemy. To be effective, the army needed many more recruits with substantial drilling and discipline, which meant a large standing army.27 The size of armies of some states increased tenfold between 1500 and 1700.28
To afford both cannonry and an army, any political entity required a larger catchment area, both to find peasant recruits and to find taxes to pay their bills. Little political entities no longer had the population nor could afford the minimum necessary expenditure. The average size of the state increased as entrepreneurial rulers started integrating smaller entities in the fifteenth century, and by the end of the century, the number of entities had halved to around five hundred. By 1900, these were down to twenty-five or so.29
The expansion in the size of the political state also meant an expansion in the size of its domestic market. Monarchs increasingly obtained monopoly control over violence within their country by controlling the powerful landed magnates, a subject we will explore in greater detail in the next chapter. They also suppressed the entrepreneurial robber barons and pirates, making trade routes safe.
This meant that producers could sell in the entire national market. Moreover, in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, aids to navigation like the dry compass and the astrolabe, coupled with new technologies in ships such as multiple masts with lateen sails and the sternpost-mounted rudder meant ships no longer had to hug the coast, and could venture much farther out at lower risk. This expanded trade, and thus added to the size of the accessible market. With larger available markets, producers could specialize, as well as raise the scale of their production, thus reducing unit costs of production. As the prices at which they were willing to sell fell, demand for goods increased.
In sum, political consolidation led to economic integration. When combined with maritime technological innovation that allowed trade with more distant land, producers could now exploit economies of scale. European production of crafts and manufactured goods, centered in towns and cities, expanded. And as markets delivered all manner of goods, the manor too specialized, with some focusing on cash crops like grapes, transformed into wine, instead of the earlier emphasis on necessities like cereals—for cereals could now be bought with the money obtained from selling wine.30
The increase in production and trade played an important role in weakening the case against usury. A master craftsman or merchant wanting to borrow to finance an expansion in his business or trade was not in the sympathetic position of an illiterate peasant living at the margin of starvation. As the community turned from consumption loans to small production or trade loans, public attitudes toward usury became more favorable. After all, it seemed only fair that those who sought commercial loans to make profits should pay a share of their profit out as interest.
The Powerful Interests
Moreover, the monarch was now an interested party. With the increase in the expense of fighting wars, he needed additional sources of revenue. The merchants, artisans, and moneylenders in the growing towns could be taxed, but yet more tax revenue could be obtained if they were freed somewhat from Church regulations concerning the just price at which transactions could be done or the interest that could be charged, and allowed to make larger taxable profits.
Furthermore, when rulers still needed funds after squeezing all they could out of the taxpayer, debasing the currency, and seizing the estates of weak lords, they had to make their way to the moneylender. There was always a danger that the king could turn on his lenders, labeling them usurers and refusing to repay. The few who did lend did so at high rates. They kept the impecunious monarch on a tight leash so that if he defaulted, he risked shutting off further recourse to loans, which might especially weaken his ability to fight off his enemies. So monarchs repaid enough to keep the loan spigot open, and were inclined to look for ways to permit such lending.
There was also a mighty potential lender: the Church itself. It had become rich, in part because of the way it had shaped rules governing usury and inheritance. Church treasuries were full of reliquaries, candlesticks, and vessels made of precious metals, which not only increased the grandeur of Church services, but also could easily be melted down, coined, and loaned. The French historian Henri Pirenne asserts that “the Church was the indispensable moneylender