Gone Medieval - Trade After the Roman Empire

Episode Date: May 24, 2022

Rivers, Silk roads and camels - how did international trade adapt and survive beyond the Roman Empire into the middle ages? In today's episode Cat is joined by author Hilary Green to talk about her debut non-fiction book, "International Trade in the Middle Ages". Together they examine products like wool, silk, spices and salt - items we take for granted now, but materials that were once symbolic of status and wealth. What were the secret routes taken and how do we know about their journeys?For more Gone Medieval content, subscribe to our Medieval Mondays newsletter here. If you'd like to learn even more, we have hundreds of history documentaries, ad free podcasts and audiobooks at History Hit - subscribe today! To download, go to Android or Apple store.Join the History Hit Book Club in time for the June and July read of Charles Spencer's, The White Ship. Become part of a community of readers who are passionate about history and its thrilling lessons. Members read a new book every 2 months, and get a £5 Amazon voucher towards the cost of the book, as well as exclusive access to an online Q&A between History Hit presenters and the author in the second month. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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You can sign up today by following the link in the description below to start reaping the rewards of membership of History Hits Book Club. Hello and welcome to today's episode of God Medieval from History Hit. I'm Dr Kat Jarvan. From wool to leather and silk, spices and gems, the Middle Ages saw the European in trading commodities develop exponentially, laying the foundations of the trade that still takes place today. And alongside those complex networks, people interacted across cultures and borders and organised their businesses into increasingly complex systems. And all of this, of course,

had hugely significant consequences for the societies involved. How exactly was all of it organised? International Trade in the Middle Ages is the title of a new book by author Hilary Green. Hillary is the author of several historical novels and in this new book, she has taken the extensive research she carried out for background information for her novels to present a highly readable history of medieval trade. Hillary, thank you so much for joining me here on Gone Medieval Today. Thank you for inviting me. So congratulations on the new book. I've just read through it and it's brilliant. Did you enjoy reaching it? I did, yes. I found it fascinating. So this focus is very much on the sort of 11th century

onwards, really. I mean, you go a little bit earlier than that in the beginning, but it's from that point on that you focus your work. And what was it about trade in Europe at that particular time that interested you? Well, I think that was the time when trade in Europe really started to get going again. After the fall of the Roman Empire, everything got very fragmented, small, conflicting entities fighting each other across Europe. And of course the Roman roads fell into disrepair. The bridges collapsed, the causeways collapsed. People didn't have communications facilities that they needed for good trade. So it was in the 11th century that they started to remedy that. There was a great deal of bridge

building at that time. It was regarded as a holy responsibility to create bridges, largely so the pilgrims could get across and go to places like Rome and Compostela, but of course it also facilitated trade. You know about the bridge of Avignon, which was built when a young monk called Benizier had a vision that God wanted him to create a bridge across the Rome at that point. So obviously, once bridges were there and the roads were improving, then merchants could move backwards and forwards much more easily,

and trade really took off. Yeah, so you have the sort of logistics there, which is something actually that you talk about a bit more in the beginning of the book as well, so that these sort of trading networks develop to really quite a vast extent. And so bridges obviously and the roads one thing. But how about other modes of transport? I mean, how does this work? You know, what are the sort of key elements of those logistics? Well, I think another very important element was the availability of money. And that's the century. Several silver mines were open. There was a silver mine discovered in Cumbria, for example, which allowed English kings to mint large quantities of coins.

And that tended to start breaking down the funeral system, because when people could pay for goods and services, they weren't tied to the land in the way that they had been. The lords who owned the vast estates didn't have to live on the estate the whole time. They could pay for what they wanted. And of course, the king could settle in one place. and open a court, and then all the noble lords wanted to flock there, to be right there, to get preferment and so on, and they built themselves fantastic houses, and of course it was very important to show that you were just as rich and just as affluent as your rivals, which meant

that there was a tremendous market for luxury goods, so they became focal points for traders. and the availability of cash was a very important element, I think, at that period in getting trade moving. I guess now we're sort of, are we moving into completely coin-based economies, or is Bartur an exchange of goods still a thing that happens? I think Barter probably still worked at the local level, but once you needed anything that you couldn't produce actually on the land, you had to go to the nearest town or city or market to get. get it. And then you needed money. So I think really, barter was quite minor once trade really started to flow. And of course, I suppose once you have those larger economies, then it becomes easier for sort of rulers and kings to control that through things like taxation and coin production as well, I suppose. Oh yes, that was very important. Yeah, it's always sort of big a knock-on

effect, I suppose. What about sort of ways of moving goods and things? Is it mainly land-based? You talked about bridges now, or how much is it water-based? Most important was water-based. It was a lot easier, not necessarily quicker, but a lot easier and cheaper, to move stuff by water, either by sea, but particularly over rivers. That's where the great rivers of Europe came into their own. And that's why most of the great trade fairs, which were so important at this period, were set up in cities which were on a river. Yeah, exactly. And that's a really interesting one, because I've looked at the same in the Viking engine. Not on the same scale, but on a smaller scale, actually rivers.

I think it's something that we've almost forget about in the 21st century, how important the rivers actually have been in the past, isn't it? It's sort of they get a bit neglected, I suppose. Yes, I think it's a shame, really. I mean, if you go to France or other parts of Europe, you do see a lot more river traffic, huge barges going backwards and forwards. and it seems a much more sensible way of transporting goods to me. Of course, part of the trouble is our rivers are not really big enough on the whole

to take big barges. Exactly. That's quite different in other parts of the continent, isn't it? Because, I mean, we're talking about quite substantial-sized rivers that can take that sort of traffic. And another thing you wrote about, which I thought was really interesting, was how when these trading networks are developing and trade is increasing, you see increased needs for administration of all of this as well, because we're not talking to sort of small individuals scale anymore, but really quite large scale.

And sort of those people involved need to be administered as well. Can you give some examples of how that need was responded to? Well, I think a lot more people became literate and numerate. It was vital if you wanted to be any involved in trade of any sort, or if you were working for one of the great kings or lords of the administrator, you had to be able to read and write. I think the universities came into their own. And of course, usually it was only people in clerical orders who could learn to read and write, but it meant that it began to be ordinary laymen,

largely men, but women as well, who did find that they needed to read and write. Yeah, and that's such an interesting because we don't necessarily connect those two, do we sort of think they're separate? But I think you're absolutely right that when those bigger needs are there, then actually people have to respond to it, I suppose. Yes, quite. So in the book then, you go through different products and different places, and it's a great sort of journey across Europe, really, and especially talking about some of these commodities. And you start out here in England, and you start talking about the wool industry. And can you tell me how that came about, how that became such a key export for England in this

sort of period? Well, I think the main factor was that English wool was better than any wall that could be obtained on the continent, better, for example, the Spanish wall. The fleeces were softer and the fibres were longer and better for weaving. And of course, the Cistercian monks who owned huge tracts of land in Yorkshire and Wales and areas like that, they ran these huge herds of sheep. And it was extremely profitable, of course, to run these hos of sheep, shear them, and send the wool south to London and then to be exported. But there used to be quite a strong local, British weaving industry. But then when the merchants of Flanders and the weavers of Flanders discovered how good English wool was, so much of it went abroad that for a while the English

weaving industry more or less faded out. Came back later when taxes meant that, not. not so much was getting exported. But I think it's interesting that so many phrases that we use now in common parlance actually come from the wool trade. Things like spinster being an unmarried woman who spins, you spin a yarn. If somebody tells you a story they might be trying to pull the wool over your eyes, and if you believe them, you could be fleeced.

And then if you start worrying about that, what do you do? You can't sleep. You can't sheep. You know, there's so many different phrases. So it just goes to show that the whole wool trade permeated English consciousness. And of course, it's no accident that the Lord High Chancellor sits on the wool sack. It was the foundation of English wealth. That's so interesting, isn't it?

It's just how it really seeped into all those different aspects of society. And how much should we know about how the wool industry was organized on a more sort of practical level? Well, I think the most important thing there is, of course, the king wanted to be able to get his taxes. So he created London as a staple city, which meant that all wool had to be traded through London. I mean, people got rounded and illegally exported it from other places, but the majority of it went through London. And it could only be handled by members of the right honourable company of staplers who were very wealthy merchants. and it was a very tight thing to get into, you know, not everybody could do it. So a lot of people made a great deal of money out of it.

And of course it meant that the king knew exactly what was going in and out and he could tax it. And the taxes paid for Edward I's First wars in Scotland. It paid for Edward III's wars in France. And in order to increase the money he needed for his wars, he put the taxes up. and it caused such an outcry that he had to put them down again because it was absolutely vital to the well-being and the wealth of so many people.

That's fantastic. It's really, and I think a lot of big buildings and churches and things were essentially funded by a lot of the wall trade, weren't they? Well, of course, in a lot of places you get cloth halls. There aren't many examples of them left in England, but in some continental cities, these magnificent things, buildings which are like palaces, but they were there purely for the trading in cloth. So interesting. And so you talk about the wool industry and then you also talk about some of the

related industries to this. And you mentioned weaving a little bit earlier on. And one of the things that the textile and weaving industry was very reliant on is of course colour because you don't want just completely plain textiles. You want them dyed. And how extensive and sort of important was the trade in dyes and the sort of things that people used to die with? It was crucial for the weavers of Flanders and elsewhere, of course, and some of it could be locally produced. I mean, Wode, for example, grows fairly freely and you can get blue dye from that. There's a plant called Weld, which again is a wildflower, which produces yellow. You got red from madder, but if you wanted a really good red, you had to go for Kermis,

which was the eggs of an insect which fed on Kermi's Oaks around the Mediterranean. And so those were the main basic things of different dyes. Of course there was purple, but only the imperial family of Constantinople could use that. You had to be porphyrogenitous born in the purple. And the other important thing, of course, was that it had to be fixed. you had to have alum which fixed the dyes to the fabric and alum came largely from the Near East and it was imported by the Genoese and the Venetians

and there was a great deal of fighting basically about the supplies of alum because it was so important and when somebody discovered a deposit of alum on the papal lands that really disrupted the whole trade because suddenly the Pope had this wonderful facility. He gave him an awful lot of money and of course it started to cut out the Venetians and the Genoese. So there was a lot of fighting around supplies of Alam in those days. So I guess that demonstrate how vulnerable some of these societies or these communities or these groups of people

could be to disruption in the trade, doesn't it? And what sort of knock-on effect that could have? Oh yes. Yes. It was a very iffy sort of prospect for everybody. Yes. It's interesting. I mean, we see similar things today with everything that happens around Brexit and when these products are disrupted. I mean, when the Muslim empire started to spread, of course, it disrupted supplies. And then people had to find different ways of getting around that and bringing stuff into Europe. And I think these things, they have big knock on effect, haven't they, on just great groups of people, but also the sort of products, the port of fashions, presumably if you suddenly can't get the products and the colours anymore,

than that has a knock on effect for that too, I suppose. Hi there. I'm Kate Lister, sex historian and author, and I am the host of Betwixt the Sheets, The History of Sex, Scandal and Society, a new podcast from History Hit. Join me as I root around the topics which have been skipped over in your school history lessons. Everything from the history of swearing

to pubic hair, satanic panic, cults, there is nothing off limits. We'll be bed-hopping around different time periods from ancient civilizations to the Middle Ages to Renaissance and early modern right up to now. Listen and subscribe wherever you get your podcasts. We mentioned some of these kind of quite high status things that are being traded here and especially that color. But I think in terms of textiles, another one that I always find very, very interesting, is the trade in silk, so opposite end of the spectrum, I suppose, to the wool.

And that's, of course, extremely extensively traded as well and highly valued. and we know that the trade, the silk trade, goes back centuries really, but what about this period in particular that you focus on? Who was it that sort of dominated the silk trade from the 11th century onwards? Well, it varied. Initially, it was the Byzantine emperors. They knew that silk came from China. They didn't know how it was produced,

but they had an alliance with a tribe called the Sogdians, who more or less controlled a lot of the Silk Road, a lot of the route through. Of course, it wasn't a road. I mean, people think of the Silk Road as one continuous thing, but it wasn't. It was a series of tracks that went from one oasis to the next oasis, and a merchant would bring his good to market,

and then they'd be sold on and brought to the next oasis and so on. But the Sogneans did control quite a lot of that. So the Byzantine emperors made an alliance with them to make sure they got the trade through. But eventually, two Nestorian monks smuggled silkworm eggs out of China hidden in the hollow of their staffs and took them to the Emperor Justinian in Constantinople. And from there, they were able to set up their own silk trade. For a long time, it was exclusive to the imperial household.

But then as the supplies grew and there were more silkworms bred, they were able to spread out and start silver. production in various different parts of the empire. But then of course when the Muslims spread, they took over the Silk Road. They controlled it. They dominated it for a while. But again, it was always a good idea to keep trade flowing. So they didn't stop it. Sometimes the route changed a bit depending on who was in charge, who was on top. It went a bit further north or a bit further south, but it kept flowing. And then, of course, along came Genghis Khan. And you might be surprised that he was actually very keen on trade. And he set up posting houses for merchants who were travelling. He planted trees along routes to give people shade. He passed laws

against fraud and so on or stealing. And he made it much safer for people to. And he made it much safer for people to travel back and forth through Asia. It was known as the Pax Mongolia and it lasted for quite a long time. But then of course when he went, that empire broke up. Then later on you had Tamberlane, you know Timur the lame. He was in charge of things for a long while. But those people more or less dominated the silk trade until King Roger II of Sicily. While the emperor was in Constantinople was distracted by the Crusades, he, He managed to steal silkworms and took them and set up a silk industry in Sicily. So that was the breakup of the monopoly.

And of course the Crusaders, when they took the Holy Land, they were able to take over several of the places that the Byzantines had set up. And the other thing that happened was that when the sack of Constantin opened in 1202, a lot of the operatives who worked in the silk trade fled, and they mostly fled to Italy. and they settled around the city of Luka, and that became a centre of the European silk trade. I mean, it's really quite extraordinary, isn't it, to think about how clearly so many people have seen the benefit of this trade and seen the benefit of that as a commodity and taking it on, and then sort of essentially manipulated the trade a little bit for their own benefit. But this, I mean, so silk clearly was something that there was always quite a lot of wealth in, I guess.

Oh, yes. It wasn't something that the peasants. Goodbye. No, exactly. So because that exclusivity. And I guess it's also, certainly in northwestern Europe, because the production isn't in warmer climates especially, it becomes one of these luxury, exotic goods as well. And I mean, there's quite a few other things,

sort of goods, I think, that I've been traded that you talk about in the book. And the other one that sort of appealed to me quite a lot is the trade in spices, which again goes back quite far. But how about that? Can you tell me about the trade in spices? How was that organised? Well, they came mostly from the Spice Islands in the Indian Ocean, and they'd be traded by local merchants, often Indian merchants, and brought to the Red Sea ports like Aden.

Then they'd be carried on up to, by camel, they would be taken to Mecca or Alexandria, or then maybe further north the ports like Aker and Tyre. And then of course the Venetians and the Germans and the Germans. Genoese had their fundukes, their foundations in these places, and they would buy the spices and so on. And they were then carried across Europe in armed galleys because they were so valuable that they couldn't risk sending them in ordinary ships. But the interesting thing is, of course, the secret. Nobody would tell anybody where they actually came from. And there all sorts of legends to try and put people off the idea of finding them.

Cinnamon was supposed to grow on trees that were defended by fire-breathing snakes. All these legends grew up, but eventually, of course, more enterprising merchants started to move out and go to the Spice Islands and found where they could get the supplies from. But I think it's very romantic the idea of coming all that way on camel trains, through the desert, these mysterious... objects that nobody quite understood but were so valuable. Absolutely, and I love that.

And I love sort of thinking about how somebody in northwestern Europe, how much they knew about the other end of that networks and the journeys that these goods had actually taken. I suppose most of the time it's just going step by step, isn't it? So a few people are going all the way from A to B. That's right. Very few people knew the whole chain. There were a few travellers, a man like Ibn Batuta, who was a North African Muslim.

He travelled widely and he did find the source of quite a lot of these products and wrote about it. But for the ordinary people, it was a complete mystery where they came from. And that, I suppose, make them even more exotic and more desirable when they sort of are from those distant locations. So these are the kind of more exceptional things, I suppose, which I suppose from your average person living in England, for example, would perhaps not see a lot of at all. But you talk about other commodities too that saw quite an extensive trade that perhaps are a little bit more common. And one of those was salt, which I think is something that, again, we maybe forget a little bit about now we're sitting here in the 21st century, that actually salt was extremely important. So why was it? Well, salt is absolutely vital to life.

And it was also vital for preserving meat and preserving fish. So it was a very, very valuable commodity. And Europe is crisscrossed by salt roads. where people took salt from where it was produced to important cities and so on. England was lucky because we had salt mines of our own in Cheshire. Towns like Middlewich and Northwich, that which means salt, and they were salt producing cities or towns. And also, once Henry II, Marigandaracquitaine,

we had access to the salt pans in Gascany, so salt could be brought up from there. Other than that, there were various... I mean, two great cities were founded on salt. Lunaberg and Salzburg were founded because they were actually sitting on salt mountains. And the whole process of producing the salt, boiling it and purifying it, was very, very carefully controlled,

and the salt pans were walled off so that people couldn't steal it. And then, of course, there was the Salern Le Bain in France, again sitting on a salt lake basically. Interesting. The French taxed salt, it was a very punitive sort of tax. Everybody in France had to buy so much salt every month. It was forced on them and, of course, paid tax.

Do you know, that lasted right up until the Second World War? Oh, really? I did not know that. Yeah, extraordinary, isn't it? Yeah, absolutely. Because that's something that we, today, we don't really think about salt very much at all. Absolutely. And yet, I mean, in medieval era, the salt seller was a very important item on the table.

And if you were seated below the salt, of course it meant you were very unimportant. So it's interesting. You have these sort of cultural references that relate to it as well. That's right. And I think what's really interesting, what you demonstrate really nicely in your book, and you go into it in one of the latest chapters as well. We've talked about it a little bit already, that these big trading now, networks. These, you know, all of this has a huge impact on so many different things. We talked a little bit about the buildings, for example, earlier on. We talked a little bit about literacy as well. But there's also an impact, as you write about, of people meeting together so that that travel that's involved in all of this actually causes lots of different languages, lots of different cultures to interact and coexist. So we see some very specific impacts of that there you talk about in your book. Can you describe some of those sort of quite

direct results. I think the most important thing was that when European merchants came into contact with the Arabic civilization, they were able then to come into contact with a whole field of wisdom and learning, which had been completely cut off. Because when the Roman Empire split into two, the Latin side, governed by the Roman Catholic Church. They banned the writings of the ancient Greeks because they were pagan, whereas in Constantinople, the language was Greek. So the scholars there always had access to the writings of Aristotle and Plato and all the great Greek philosophers. And they were then copied and translated. And then when the Arab

countries came into contact with them, they took them and translated them into Arabic. And then when British or European merchants went to places like Alexandria or Cairo where these great libraries existed, they came across these documents and got them translated back into Latin and eventually people started going actually to the Greek originals to translate them. But the thing was that the Arabic culture was so much in advance of medieval Europe. Europe. I mean, in fields like medicine or astronomy, mathematics, I mean, they invented algebra, they invented the concept of zero, built observatories. The grandson of Genghis Khan set up an observatory and got a Persian astronomer to take charge of it. And they calculated the length of the year to within a matter of minutes of what we now accept as being the correct answer. And of course,

field of medicine, people like Avicenna, as he was known in the West, his treatises on medicine really were the basis of medical practice right up until the 17th century. So it really opened up a whole new world of learning. And I think it was that very largely which gave an impetus to the Renaissance. One thing that's really obvious reading your book is there are so many great stories here and there's so many interesting people and so many interesting connections. And And this, I believe, is your first non-fiction book, isn't it? But actually, you're the author of several successful historical novels, so writing isn't new to you at all. And the background research that you did for this book forms the basis of your latest fiction book, which is called Iron Hand.

Can you tell me a little bit about that? Well, the idea of that was that it was about a boy who was orphaned in the Norman conquest and had to make his own way in life. So he goes through various phases. He's a seaman for a while and then a mercenary soldier. And then eventually he starts trading in Mediterranean and becomes a very wealthy merchant. In the end, he gives it all up to go on the First Crusade, but that's the second book called God's Warrior.

But when I started researching that, I found it absolutely fascinating. The different things he was importing and the conditions that he had to import them under. and so on. So that was the basis and that was what gave me the impetus for this non-fiction book. Fantastic. I mean, there's obviously so much sort of overlap, I suppose, in a way. And how did you find that process of writing non-fiction as opposed to writing fiction? I didn't actually find it so very different because all my fiction books have been based on very extensive research and I

really enjoy the research. So that was all part and part of the same thing. And then I'd try to to give the non-fiction book, not exactly a plot, but a bit of a linear, consecutive feeling so that one thing led to another. So a little bit like plotting the story of a novel. So it wasn't really so very different. That's really interesting to hear. And I can definitely see that. I mean, I very much enjoyed reading it because it's very readable because you sort of pushes the narrative essentially forward. And it is a narrative because all these events and these knock and effects that you demonstrate this very well now, I think, happen are essentially a narrative as well. Yes, that's exactly the way I felt about it.

I think our listeners should definitely check it out. So the book is called International Trade in the Middle Ages, written by Hilary Greene. It charts this whole story and tells us about all the different goods, all the different networks, and I would absolutely recommend people check it out. So Hillary, thank you so much for joining me and I'm talking about it here today. Well, thank you very much for inviting me. So thank you everyone for listening. This has been an episode of Gone Medieval by History Hit.

I'm Dr. Kat Jarman and we will be back again with another episode on Saturday and again next Tuesday. In the meantime, don't forget you can subscribe to the podcast and also to our Medieval Monday's newsletter. Just look in the episode notes and that will tell you how to do so. So thanks again for listening and I hope you'll join us again soon.