When Wealth Was Good and Poverty Sin: Profit, Greed, Generosity, and the Creation of the Noble Merchant in Konrad Fleck's Flôre und Blanscheflûr

In his book Economy and Nature in the Fourteenth Century, the historian Joel Kaye writes, "[t]he taint on commerce and profit seeking so clear in [Aristotle's] Politics remained a potent influence on scholastic moral and economic thought."¹ Commerce and trade, its desired outcome (profit), and those who practiced the former and benefited from the latter (merchants, vendors, and small peddlers) were, in other words, frequently looked upon with suspicion during the Middle Ages. The aristocracy and nobility, those who commissioned literary works, were the main patrons of artists and writers, and constituted the audience for much of the literature produced during the medieval period, may have shared in and approved of the skepticism of theologians and philosophers. They, too, may have looked with suspicion upon the growing number of increasingly wealthy and powerful merchants who populated the cities and rivaled or surpassed the aristocracy in wealth, sophistication, and political influence.

The literary historian John A. Yunck writes: "The cash-centered soul, the fiscal villain, innocence and decency crushed by the might of money, are common data of human experience."² In the thirteenth century, merchants were among those suspected of fiscal malice, of being greedy and deceitful, of driving a hard bargain for personal profit and at the expense of the poor and the common good. "The merchant in the Middle Ages was not held in contempt as commonly as he is said to have been [ . . . ]," writes Jacques Le Goff. "Nevertheless, while the Church very early gave protection and encouragement to the merchant, it long allowed serious suspicions to persist as to the legitimacy of essential aspects of his activity."³ Mercantile enterprises were suspect primarily because their expected outcome was profit. The issue of profit did not fit easily into scholastic economic thought, for "[i]n contrast to the theories of classical economists and to our modern understanding of economic motivation, in both Aristotelian and scholastic economic theory, not profit and the desire for gain but the establishment of equality is the proper motive and end of exchange."⁴ "What the Doctors in the Middle Ages were really interested in was to determine the rules of justice governing social relations," concurs Raymond de Roover.⁵ And he adds, "the Schoolmen considered equity in distribution and exchange as the central problem in economics."⁶ In a model in which justice and equity were the guiding principles of economic exchange, profit, which smacked of injustice and inequality, had to be a contentious issue. Thus even late medieval commentaries on trade and commerce frequently "betray a lingering disdain for individuals engaged in mercantile pursuits and a persistent anxiety about whether it was actually possible for a merchant to live a life free from dishonor and sin."⁷

Yet, attitudes towards merchants and their business were not consistently negative. In the first half of the twelfth century, Hugh of St. Victor extols the merchant as an agent of peaceful negotiation, and commerce as a catalyst for the increase of communal wealth and welfare and an enterprise that "reconciles nations, calms wars, strengthens peace, and commutes private good of individuals into the common benefit of all."⁸ Kaye points out that by the thirteenth century, moods began to shift even more dramatically as "[t]he growth of the consciousness of money's place and function in society paralleled the rise of the merchant estat from a lowly position to one of great social and political power over the course of the long thirteenth century."⁹ Summarizing Henry of Ghent's thoughts on the role of the merchant, articulated during the last quarter of the thirteenth century, Kaye writes: "By the late thirteenth century, the value placed on the common good had grown sufficiently great to change the designation of particular occupations and particular economic acts from evil to good within scholastic discourse."¹⁰ Part of this growing interest in the common good and the subsequent reevaluation of the merchant's role in society was, in the...