Most of the capital for these banking enterprises derived from the Mediterranean trade in Indian Ocean spices and Eastern luxuries. Yet unlike the Indian Ocean, the Mediterranean was a constant war zone. Venetian galleys doubled as both merchant vessels and warships, replete with cannon and marines, and the differences between trade, crusade, and piracy often depended on the balance of forces at any given moment.131 The same was true on land: where Asian empires tended to separate the sphere of warriors and merchants, in Europe they often overlapped:
All up and down Central Europe, from Tuscany to Flanders, from Brabant to Livonia, merchants not only supplied warriors—as they did all over Europe—they sat in governments that made war and, sometimes, buckled on armor and went into battle themselves. Such places make a long list: not only Florence, Milan, Venice, and Genoa, but also Augsburg, Nuremberg, Strasbourg, and Zurich; not only Lübeck, Hamburg, Bremen, and Danzig, but also Bruges, Ghent, Leiden, and Cologne. Some of them—Florence, Nuremberg, Siena, Bern, and Ulm come to mind—built considerable territorial states.132
The Venetians were only the most famous in this regard. They created a veritable mercantile empire over the course of the eleventh century, seizing islands like Crete and Cyprus and establishing sugar plantations that eventually—anticipating a pattern eventually to become all too familiar in the New World—came to be staffed largely by African slaves.133 Genoa soon followed suit; one of their most lucrative businesses was raiding and trading along the Black Sea to acquire slaves to sell to the Mamluks in Egypt or to work mines leased from the Turks.134 The Genoese republic was also the inventor of a unique mode of military financing, which might be known as war by subscription, whereby those planning expeditions sold shares to investors in exchange for the rights to an equivalent percentage of the spoils. It was precisely the same galleys, with the same “merchant adventurers” aboard, who would eventually pass through the pillars of Hercules to follow the Atlantic coast to Flanders or the Champagne fairs, carrying cargoes of nutmeg or cayenne, silks and woolen goods—along with the inevitable bills of exchange.135
It would be instructive, I think, to pause a moment to think about this term, “merchant adventurer.” Originally it just meant a merchant who operated outside his own country. It was around this same time, however, at the height of the fairs of Champagne and the Italian merchant empires, between 1160 and 1172, that the term “adventure” began to take on its contemporary meaning. The man most responsible for it was the French poet Chretien de Troyes, author of the famous Arthurian romances—most famous, perhaps, for being the first to tell the story of Sir Percival and the Holy Grail. The romances were a new sort of literature featuring a new sort of hero, the “knight-errant,” a warrior who roamed the world in search of, precisely, “adventure”—in the contemporary sense of the word: perilous challenges, love, treasure, and renown. Stories of knightly adventure quickly became enormously popular, Chretein was followed by innumerable imitators, and the central characters in the stories—Arthur and Guinevere, Lancelot, Gawain, Percival, and the rest—became known to everyone, as they are still. This courtly ideal of the gallant knight, the quest, the joust, romance and adventure, remains central to our image of the Middle Ages.136
The curious thing is that it bears almost no relation to reality. Nothing remotely like a real “knight-errant” ever existed. “Knights” had originally been a term for freelance warriors, drawn from the younger or, often, bastard sons of the minor nobility. Unable to inherit, many were forced to band together to seek their fortunes. Many became little more than roving bands of thugs, in an endless pursuit of plunder—precisely the sort of people who made merchants’ lives so dangerous. Culminating in the twelfth century, there was a concerted effort to bring this dangerous population under the control of the civil authorities: not only the code of chivalry, but the tournament, the joust—all these were more than anything else ways of keeping them out of trouble, as it were, in part by setting knights against each other, in part by turning their entire existence into a kind of stylized ritual.137 The ideal of the lone wandering knight, in search of some gallant adventure, on the other hand, seems to have come out of nowhere.
This is important, since it lies at the very heart of our image of the Middle Ages—and the explanation, I think, is revealing. We have to recall that merchants had begun to achieve unprecedented social and even political power around this time, but that, in dramatic contrast to Islam, where a figure like Sindbad—the successful merchant adventurer—could serve as a fictional exemplar of the perfect life, merchants, unlike warriors, were never seen as paragons of much of anything.
It’s likely no coincidence that Chretien was living in Troyes, at the very heartland of the Champagne fairs that had become, in turn, the commercial hub of Western Europe.138 While he appears to have modeled his vision of Camelot on the elaborate court life under his patron Henri the Liberal (1152–1181), Count of Champagne, and his wife Marie, daughter of Eleanor of Aquitaine, the real court was staffed by low-born commerçants, who served as serjeants of the fairs—leaving most real knights in the role of onlookers, guards, or—at tournaments—entertainers.
This is not to say that tournaments did not become a kind of economic focus in their own right, according to one early twentieth-century Medievalist, Amy Kelly:
The biographer of Guillaume le Marechal gives an idea of how this rabble of courtly routiers amused itself on the jousting fields of western Europe. To the tournaments, occurring in a brisk season about twice a month from Pentecost to the feast of St John, flocked the young bloods, sometimes three thousand strong, taking possession of the nearest town. Thither also flocked horse dealers from Lombardy and Spain, from Brittany and the Low Countries, as well as armorers, haberdashers for man and beast, usurers, mimes and story-tellers, acrobats, necromancers, and other gentlemen of the lists, the field, the road. Entertainers of every stripe found liberal patronage … There were feasts in upper chambers, and forges rang in the smithies all night long. Brawls with grisly incidents—a cracked skull, a gouged eye—occurred as the betting progressed and the dice flew. To cry up their champions in the field came ladies of fair name and others of no name at all.
The hazards, the concourse, the prizes, keyed men to the pitch of war. The stakes were magnificent, for the victor held his prize, horse and man, for ransom. And for these ransoms fiefs went in gage or the hapless victim fell into the hands of usurers, giving his men, and in extremity, himself, as hostages. Fortunes were made and lost on the point of a lance and many a mother’s son failed to ride home.139
So, it was not only that the merchants supplied the materials that made the fairs possible; Since vanquished knights technically owed their lives to the victors, merchants ended up, in their capacity as moneylenders, making good business out of liquidating their assets. Alternately, a knight might borrow vast sums to outfit himself in magnificence, hoping to impress some fair lady (with handsome dowry) with his victories; others, to take part in the continual whoring and gambling that always surrounded such events. Losers would end up having to sell their armor and horses, and this created the danger that they would go back to being highwaymen, foment pogroms (if their creditors were Jews) or, if they had lands, make new fiscal demands on those unfortunate enough to live on them.
Others turned to war, which itself tended to drive the creation of new markets.140 In one of the most dramatic of such incidents, in November 1199, a large number of knights at a tournament at the castle of Écry in Champagne, sponsored by Henry’s son, Theobald, were seized by a great religious passion, abandoned their games, and swore a vow to instead retake the Holy Land. The crusader army then proceeded to commission the Venetian fleet for transport in exchange for a promise of a 50-percent share in all resulting profits. In the end, rather than proceeding to the Holy Land, they ended up sacking the (much wealthier, Orthodox) Christian city of Constantinople after a prolonged and bloody siege. A Flemish count named Baldwin was installed as “Latin Emperor of C
onstantinople,” but attempting to govern a city that had been largely destroyed and stripped of everything of value ensured that he and his barons soon ended up in great financial difficulties. In a gigantic version of what was happening on the small scale in so many tournaments, they were ultimately reduced to stripping the metal off the church roofs and auctioning holy relics to pay back their Venetian creditors. By 1259, Baldwin had sunk to the point of taking out a mortgage on his own son, who was taken back to Venice as security for a loan.141
All this does not really answer the question: Whence, then, this image of the solitary knight-errant, wandering the forests of a mythic Albion, challenging rivals, confronting ogres, fairies, wizards, and mysterious beasts? The answer should be clear by now. Really, this is just a sublimated, romanticized image of the traveling merchants themselves: men who did, after all, set off on lonely ventures through wilds and forests, whose outcome was anything but certain.142
And what of the Grail, that mysterious object that all the knights-errant were ultimately seeking? Oddly enough, Richard Wagner, composer of the opera Parzifal, first suggested that the Grail was a symbol inspired by the new forms of finance.143 Where earlier epic heroes sought after, and fought over, piles of real, concrete gold and silver—the Nibelung’s hoard—these new ones, born of the new commercial economy, pursued purely abstract forms of value. No one, after all, knew precisely what the Grail was. Even the epics disagree: sometimes it’s a plate, sometimes a cup, sometimes a stone. (Wolfram von Eschenbach imagined it to be a jewel knocked from Lucifer’s helmet in a battle at the dawn of time.) In a way it doesn’t matter. The point is that it’s invisible, intangible, but at the same time of infinite, inexhaustible value, containing everything, capable of making the wasteland flower, feeding the world, providing spiritual sustenance, and healing wounded bodies. Marc Shell even suggested that it would best be conceived as a blank check, the ultimate financial abstraction.144
What, Then, Were the Middle Ages?
Each of us is a mere symbolon of a man, the result of bisection, like the flat fish, two out of one, and each of us is constantly searching for his corresponding symbolon.
—Plato, The Symposium
There is one way that Wagner got it wrong: the introduction of financial abstraction was not a sign that Europe was leaving the Middle Ages, but that it was finally, belatedly, entering it.
Wagner’s not really to blame here. Almost everyone gets this wrong, because the most characteristic Medieval institutions and ideas arrived so late in Europe that we tend to mistake them for the first stirrings of modernity. We’ve already seen this with bills of exchange, already in use in the East by 700 or 800 ad, but only reaching Europe several centuries later. The independent university—perhaps the quintessential Medieval institution—is another case in point. Nalanda was founded in 427 ad, and there were independent institutions of higher learning all over China and the Near West (from Cairo to Constantinople) centuries before the creation of similar institutions in Oxford, Paris, and Bologna.
If the Axial Age was the age of materialism, the Middle Ages were above all else the age of transcendence. The collapse of the ancient empires did not, for the most part, lead to the rise of new ones.145 Instead, once-subversive popular religious movements were catapulted into the status of dominant institutions. Slavery declined or disappeared, as did the overall level of violence. As trade picked up, so did the pace of technological innovation; greater peace brought greater possibilities not only for the movement of silks and spices, but also of people and ideas. The fact that monks in Medieval China could devote themselves to translating ancient treatises in Sanskrit, and that students in madrasas in Medieval Indonesia could debate legal terms in Arabic, is testimony to the profound cosmopolitanism of the age.
Our image of the Middle Ages as an “age of faith”—and hence, of blind obedience to authority—is a legacy of the French Enlightenment. Again, it makes sense only if you think of the “Middle Ages” as something that happened primarily in Europe. Not only was the Far West an unusually violent place by world standards, the Catholic Church was extraordinarily intolerant. It’s hard to find many Medieval Chinese, Indian, or Islamic parallels, for example, to the burning of “witches” or the massacre of heretics. More typical was the pattern that prevailed in certain periods of Chinese history, when it was perfectly acceptable for a scholar to dabble in Taoism in his youth, become a Confucian in middle age, then become a Buddhist on retirement. If there is an essence to Medieval thought, it lies not in blind obedience to authority, but rather in a dogged insistence that the values that govern our ordinary daily affairs—particularly those of the court and marketplace—are confused, mistaken, illusory, or perverse. True value lay elsewhere, in a domain that cannot be directly perceived, but only approached through study or contemplation. But this in turn made the faculties of contemplation, and the entire question of knowledge, an endless problem. Consider for example the great conundrum, pondered by Muslim, Christian, and Jewish philosophers alike: What does it mean to simultaneously say that we can only know God through our faculties of Reason, but that Reason itself partakes of God? Chinese philosophers were struggling with similar conundrums when they asked, “Do we read the classics or do the classics read us?” Almost all the great intellectual debates of the age turned on this question in one way or another. Is the world created by our minds, or our minds by the world?
We can see the same tensions within predominant theories of money. Aristotle had argued that gold and silver had no intrinsic value in themselves, and that money therefore was just a social convention, invented by human communities to facilitate exchange. Since it had “come about by agreement, therefore it is within our power to change it or render it useless” if we all decide that that’s what we want to do.146 This position gained little traction in the materialist intellectual environment of the Axial Age, but by the later Middle Ages, it had become standard wisdom. Ghazali was among the first to embrace it. In his own way he took it even further, insisting that the fact that a gold coin has no intrinsic value is the basis of its value as money, since this very lack of intrinsic value is what allows it to “govern,” measure, and regulate the value of other things. But at the same time, Ghazali denied that money was a social convention. It was given us by God.147
Ghazali was a mystic, and a political conservative, so one might argue that he ultimately shied away from the most radical implications of his own ideas. But one could also ask whether, in the Middle Ages, arguing that money was an arbitrary social convention was really all that radical a position. After all, when Christian and Chinese thinkers insisted that it was, it was almost always as a way of saying that money is whatever the king or the emperor wished it to be. In that sense, Ghazali’s position was perfectly consonant with the Islamic desire to protect the market from political interference by saying that it fell properly under the aegis of religious authorities.
The fact that Medieval money took such abstract, virtual forms—checks, tallies, paper money—meant that questions like these (“What does it mean to say that money is a symbol?”) cut to the core of the philosophical issues of the day. Nowhere is this so true as in the history of the word “symbol” itself. Here we encounter some parallels so extraordinary that they can only be described as startling.
When Aristotle argued that coins are merely social conventions, the term he used was symbolon—from which our own word “symbol” is derived. Symbolon was originally the Greek word for “tally”—an object broken in half to mark a contract or agreement, or marked and broken to record a debt. So our word “symbol” traces back originally to objects broken to record debt contracts of one sort or another. This is striking enough. What’s really, remarkable, though, is that the contemporary Chinese word for “symbol,” fu, or fu hao, has almost exactly the same origin.148
Let’s start with the Greek term “symbolon.” Two friends at dinner might create a symbolon if they took some object—a ring, a knucklebone, a p
iece of crockery—and broke it in half. Any time in the future when either of them had need of the other’s help, they could bring their halves as reminders of the friendship. Archeologists have found hundreds of little broken friendship tablets of this sort in Athens, often made of clay. Later they became ways of sealing a contract, the object standing in the place of witnesses.149 The word was also used for tokens of every sort: those given to Athenian jurors entitling them to vote, or tickets for admission to the theater. It could be used refer to money too, but only if that money had no intrinsic value: bronze coins whose value was fixed only by local convention.150 Used for written documents, a symbolon could also be passport, contract, commission, or receipt. By extension, it came to mean: omen, portent, symptom, or finally, in the now-familiar sense, symbol.
The path to the latter appears to have been twofold. Aristotle fixed on the fact that a tally could be anything: what the object was didn’t matter; all that mattered was that there was a way to break it in half. It is exactly so with language: words are sounds we use to refer to objects, or to ideas, but the relation is arbitrary: there’s no particular reason, for example, that English-speakers should choose “dog” to refer to an animal and “god” to refer to a deity, rather than the other way around. The only reason is social convention: an agreement between all speakers of a language that this sound shall refer to that thing. In this sense, all words were arbitrary tokens of agreement.151 So, of course, is money—for Aristotle, not only worthless bronze coins that we agree to treat as if they were worth a certain amount, but all money, even gold, is just a symbolon, a social convention.152