Bruges: Cradle of Capitalism (review)

Before Antwerp, Amsterdam, and London became, in Braudel's view, anchors of the early-modern world economy, Bruges was the trade center of northern Europe, and the economic midwife to these heirs.¹ For all its economic complexity and cultural richness, fourteenth-century Bruges is surprisingly understudied, especially outside of Belgium. Murray's new book is a fresh, deeply researched social portrait of the city and its economic life from the late thirteenth to the late fourteenth century that goes a long way to fill this scholarly lacuna. The book bristles with important social data about Bruges' financial world and its wider civic realm, offering a compelling, impressively researched case study of early capitalism in a mercantile society. For this reason alone, Murray's study should be of signal importance to scholars who seek to understand better one of late-medieval Europe's economic linchpins and how its nexus of moneychangers, brokers, hostellers, and merchants made Bruges an international "node and network" of commerce, finance, international trade, and textiles.

Murray's book offers the fullest portrait hitherto of Bruges as an early center of capitalism. This city, after all, had the famous Bourse square, site of the original hostel "Ter Beurse" ("Sign of the Purse") that became a master symbol of late-medieval commerce. Murray is particularly fascinated with the role of money, credit, and exchange in Bruges' public life, but less in their abstract, formal qualities than in their social dimensions. Money to Murray is a palpable commodity—"clinking money," as Netherlanders called it. It is a thing of weight, fineness, and variety, signifier of Bruges' commercial bustle, but the source of instability too, since its continuous debasement at the hands of Flemish counts rendered the city's economy parlous. To Murray, pawnbrokers and moneylenders were the work-a-day agents who lubricated Bruges' commercial world by their pragmatic ability to negotiate chronic shortages of ready money, sudden debasements of currency, and a wild variety of coinage.

Practitioners of a complex system of credit and debt that thrived despite official proscriptions against usury, pawnbrokers and moneychangers in Bruges offered a wide variety of financial services. Pawnbrokers took pledges and loaned money. Moneychangers—some of them licensed but many not—set up shop in public venues like Sint-Pieter's bridge to examine and exchange coins and bullion, make payment orders for book transfers, dabble in real-estate investments, and even open accounts for deposit banking. But the two practices were not wholly discrete; pawnbrokers and moneychangers sometimes entered into business partnerships. Equally important were Bruges' hostellers and brokers, who provided essential services in housing, warehousing, and deposits to the city's swelling number of foreign merchants. They, too, were hardly isolated, offered a wide array of financial services, and could work in partnership with moneychanging operations.

Murray anchors his study in the concrete, material practices of Bruges' citizenry. Murray's portrait is not as cleanly demarcated as Raymond de Roover's Money, Banking and Credit in Mediaeval Bruges (New York, 1948), which in many ways serves as Murray's inspiration and foil. In de Roover's classic study, moneylenders, moneychangers, and pawnbrokers catered to the local market, whereas Italian merchant bankers, equipped with a system of international credit transfer through bills of exchange, dominated the upper echelons of finance. Murray mines many of the same records that caught de Roover's scholarly eye, particularly the ledgers of the moneychanging business of Willem Ruweel, whose license to operate came legally from his wife's dower property, and the even richer records of Collard de Marke, who, unlike Ruweel, did not operate with an official permit. But Murray digs deeper and wider than did de Roover, analyzing Ruweel's and de Marke's transactions through the many layers of Bruges' social world. The result is less de Roovere's multitiered hierarchy of financial practitioners than a "honeycombed" world of interdependence, in which moneychangers and pawnbrokers were as important as Italian banking firms.

Murray's exhaustive research leaves no stone unturned in an...