Gold and Spices: The Rise of Commerce in the Middle Ages (review)

Favier is one of the leading historians of late Medieval France. He has published a magisterial analysis of papal finances during the Great Schism, and a cluster of ouvrages de vulgarisation on aspects of French society and politics in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. This study of the emergence of a European entrepreneurial class in the high and late Middle Ages was originally published in France (1987). The heroes of this story are those intrepid merchants who lived in a world characterized by an agrarian economy, by a society that was feudal and hierarchical, by a political system dominated by kings and sacral power, and by a culture that was profoundly and pervasively Christian and otherworldly. These merchants broke away from the structures, practices, and mores of traditional society to create a radically new economic order that we identify as capitalism. In its basic outlines, this story is familiar. The careers and fortunes of these pioneering businessmen have been explored by generations of scholars before and after Karl Marx. The distinctive features of Favier’s synthesis are the broad geographical and topical range of his work, and the richness and diversity of the illustrative material that he cites to document it.

The first three chapters describe in broad outline the evolution of this business class which, by 1500, had created the basic foundations of a capitalist economy. Succeeding chapters discuss specific aspects of this mercantile world, including its technical dimensions (trade routes, navigation, and capital formation), as well as merchants’ relations with the wider world. Favier displays an exceptional talent for describing such topics as currency, credit transactions, and insurance. Though he is aware of regional differences within this European business elite (for example, between Genoese individualism and Venetian dirigisme), he stresses, instead, their common characteristics and goals—above all, their “search for the greatest profit with the least risk” (7). Italians were the pioneers in creating the institutions and techniques of this new economic order, and their innovations were copied, belatedly and sometimes grudgingly, by their counterparts north of the Alps. The author’s treatment of the usury problem and its circumvention (193–199, 205–209), and of the slow and reluctant shift from roman to arabic numerals in account books are models of succinctness and clarity (262–263).

Favier is most effective in describing the internal world of premodern businessmen, and their strategies for gaining profit and avoiding loss. His discussion of the contexts—political, social, and cultural—in which these merchants lived and worked is more uneven. His chapter on “privilege” is an excellent analysis of the efforts by merchants to negotiate advantageous benefits from European princes. But his concluding chapters on the social and cultural role of these early capitalists are perfunctory.

Favier’s account is also static; it does not focus on the ruptures in the European economy during these centuries, such as the Black Death and the rise of the Ottoman Turks. His book is a competent summary of the traditional interpretation of the origins of the European bourgeoisie, but it does not consider the problematic and controversial aspects of that phenomenon in “the rise of the West.”