FERNAND BRAUDEL
THE MEDITERRANEAN AND THE MEDITERRANEAN WORLD IN THE AGE OF PHILIP II VOLUME ONE
TRANSLATED FROM THE F...
529 downloads
3005 Views
31MB Size
Report
This content was uploaded by our users and we assume good faith they have the permission to share this book. If you own the copyright to this book and it is wrongfully on our website, we offer a simple DMCA procedure to remove your content from our site. Start by pressing the button below!
Report copyright / DMCA form
FERNAND BRAUDEL
THE MEDITERRANEAN AND THE MEDITERRANEAN WORLD IN THE AGE OF PHILIP II VOLUME ONE
TRANSLATED FROM THE FRENCH BY
sIAN REYNOLDS
Contents Preface to the English Edition Preface to the Second Edition Preface to the First Edition
poge 13 14 17
Part One THE ROLE OF THE ENVIRONMENT 1.1HIll'ENlNSULAS: MOUNTAINS, PLATEAUX, AND PLAINS
I.
-,
Mountains Come First Physical and human characteristics Dcfinina the mountains Mountains, civilizations, and religions Mountain freedom The mountains' resources: an assessment Mountain dwellers in the towns Typical cases of mountain dispersion Mountain life: the earliest civilization of the Mediterranean?
2. Plateaux, Hills, and Foothills
The high plains A hillside civilization ThehiDs
i"
3. The PJojns Water problems: malaria The improvement of the plains The example of Lombardy Big landowners and poor peasants Short term change in the plains: the Venetian Terraferma Long term change: the fortunes of the Roman Campagna The strength of the plains: Andalusia i
,4- Transhumance and Nomadism Transhumancc Nomadism, an older way of life Transhumance in Castile Overall comparisons and cartography Dromedaries and camels: the Arab and Turk invasions Nomadism in the Balkans, Anatolia, and North Africa Cycles spanning the centuries
D. nIB Hl!ART OF 1HB MEDrrERRANEAN: SEAS AND COASTS
I.
17te Plains o/tM Sea Coastal navigation
25
25 25 30 34 38
41 44 47
51 53 53 55 58
60 62 66 72 75 78 81 82
85 85 87 91 94 95 98 101 103 103 103
6
Contents The early days of Portuguese discovery The narrow seas, home of history The Black Sea, preserve of Constantinople The Archipelago, Venetian and Genoese Between Tunisia and Sicily The Mediterranean Channel The Tyrrhenian Sea The Adriatic East and west of Sicily Two maritime worlds The double lesson of the Turkish and Spanish Empires Beyond politics 2. Mainland Coastlines
The peoples of the sea Weaknesses of the maritime regions The big cities The changing fortunes of maritime regions 3. The Islands
Isolated worlds Precarious lives On the paths of general history Emigration from the islands Islands that the sea does not surround The Peninsulas
m. BOUNDARIES: TIlE GREATER MEDITERRANEAN I.
2.
108 108 110 115 116 117 120 124
133 134
135 137 138 138 140 145 146 148 149 151 154 158 160 162
A Mediterranean of historical dimensions
168 168.
The Sahara, the Second Face of the Mediterranean
171
The Sahara: near and distant boundaries Poverty and want Nomads who travel far Advance and infiltration from the steppe The gold and spice caravans The oases The geographical area of Islam
171 173 176 177 181 185 187
Europe and the Mediterranean 188 The isthmuses and their north-south passages 188 The Russian isthmus: leading to the Black and Caspian Sea 191 From the Balkans to Danzig: the Polish isthmus 195 The German isthmus: an overall view 202 The Alps 206 The third character: the many faces of Germany 208 From Genoa to Antwerp, aDd from Vemce to Hamburg: the conditions of circulation 211 Emigration and balance 'of trade 214 The French isthmus, from Rouen to Marseilles 216 Europe and the M e d i t e r r a n e a n 2 2 3
3. The Atlantic Ocean
Several Atlantics
224 224
Contents The Atlantic learns from the Mediterranean The Atlantic destiny in the sixteeth century A late decline IV. THE MEDlTBRRANEAN AS A PHYSICAL TJNIT: CLIMATE AND HISTORY
I.
The Unity 0/ the Climate The Atlantic and the Sahara A homoeeneous climate Drought: the scourge of the Mediterranean
2. The Seasons
The winter standstill Shipping at a halt Winter: season of peace and plans The hardships of winter The accelerated rhythm of summer life The summer epidemics The Mediterranean climate and the East Seasonal rhythms and statistics Determinism and economic life '3. Has the Climate Changed Since the Sixteenth Century? Supple~ntary note
v. THE MEDITERRANEAN AS A HUMAN UNIT:
ntine Marshes without harm in spite of mosquito bites;215 and more particularly, since in September, 1494, the army of Charles VIII - 30,000 men at the lowest estimate - encamped safely around Ostia, in a particularly dangerous site. But these examples arc hardly sufficient to formulate, let alone to solve the problem. We need far more precise documentation of the history of malaria than we possess at the moment. Was it malaria or dysentery that decimated Lautrec's troops in July, 1528, in the flooded countryside around Naples ?216 We need precise knowledge of the regions that were seriously afrected by it in the sixteenth century. We do knoi.v that Alexandretta, which scrved as a port for Aleppo from 1593, had to be abandoned latcr because of fever. We know that Baiae, on the gulf of Naples, which in Roman times was a resort for leisured high society, and which was described as a charming place by Petrarch in a letter to Cardinal Giovanni Colonna in 1343, was deserted by its population, fleeing from fever, in the sixteenth century. But we have only incomplete records of even these particular cases. Of Alcxandretta we know that the town was later reoccupied by English and Frcnch consuls, and that it has . survived; but how? and under what conditions ?217 As for Baiae, is it not because it was already in decline, at least two generations before Tasso 213 W. H. S. Jones, Malaria, a neglected factor in the history of Greece and Rome, London, 1907. m P. Hillebrandt, Der Kampfums Millelmeer. 1940, p. 279. Leo X, who was fond of hunting, also seems to have succumbed to an attack of malaria (Gonzague True, Uon X, 194t, p. 71 and 79). And did not Dante himself die of malaria, as Guido Cavalcanti had twenty years before? (L. Gillet, Dante, 1941, p. 340.) As far as we know, that is. m P. Hillebrandt, op. cit., p. 279. 216 Bernardo Segni, Storie florentine • •• da/l'anno 1527 a11555, 1723, p. 4. 217 J. B. Tavernier, The Six Voyages, p. 55, mentions the 'standing pools' of Alexandretta, in 1691.
66
The Role of the Environment
landed there in 1587. that fever was able to take such a firm grip?218 On the other hand we should note that about twenty years before Columbus, in 1473, the Venetian fleet, which was operating along the Albanian coast during the first siege of Scutari, was decimated by fever and had to put into Cattaro to recover. The provveditore Alvise Bembo died; Triadan Gritti came close to death. Pietro Mocenigo decided to go to Ragusa 'per farsi medicar'.219 Nevertheless one cannot escape the impression that there was a fresh, outbreak of malaria in the sixteenth century. Perhaps it was because at . this time man was running ahead of the enemy. During the whole of the sixteenth century, as indeed of the fifteenth, he was in search of new land. Where was there a more promising prospect than in the shifting marshes of the plains '1 And precisely the greatest danger lies in the first disturbance of infested regions. To colonize a plain often means to die there: we know how many times the villages of the Mitidja had to be resettled at the beginning, before the plain was won over from fever in the painful struggle of the nineteenth century. The internal colonization which was carried out throughout the Mediterranean in the sixteenth century also took its toll. It was particularly marked in Italy. If Italy took no part in the great movement of colonization of distant territories the reason is perhaps partly to be sought in her preoccupation with reclaiming all available land within ber own frontiers, from the flooded plains to the mountain peaks. 'Italy is cultivated right up to the mountain tops,' wrote Guicciardini at the beginning of his History of Italy.m . ,. The improvement of the plains. To conquer the plains has been a dream since the dawn of history. The vessel of the Danaides might be a. folkmemory of the introduction of perpetual irrigation into the plain of Argos.m The inhabitants of the shores of Lake Kopais began to encroach 218 K. Eschmid, in Werner Benndorf, Das Mittelmeerbuch, Leipzig, 1940, p. 22. A propos of the extension of malaria, what lies behind the following remark by Stendhal (Promenades, II, 164) 'M. Metaxa, I believe, a celebrated doctor and man of wit, has drawn a map of the places affected by fever'1 219 A.d.S. Venice, Brera 54, f O144 vO. 220 Francesco Guicciardini, La historia d'/talia, Venice, 1568, p. 2 (peaceful Italy) 'cultivata non meno ne luoghi piu montuosi et piu sterili, che neUe pianure, et regioni sue piu Jertili'. Cf. the astonishing observations of Montaigne, op. cit., p. 237, around Lucca, since about fifty years ago, (1581) vines have been taking the place of 'woods and chestnut trees' on the mountains, p. 248; and 'this method they have of cultivating the mountains right up to the peak'. I am not therefore in agreement with Michelet's eloquent remarks, La Renaissance, Paris, 1855, p. 31-32. Ph. Hiltebrandt, op. cit., p. 268, sees the problem in the same light as I do. The Italians took part in the great discoveries - Venezuela is after all, little Venice - but the Italian population was not short of space at this period; the bourgeoisie was not interested in the world beyond the Mediterranean horizon; and finally, the Peninsula was not troubled by the religious disturbances which drove Englishmen and Dutchmen overseas. 121 Herbert Lehmann, 'Die Geographischen Grundlagen der kretiscn-mykenischen Kultur,' in Geogr. Zeitschr., 1932, p. 335.
The Peninsulas: Mountains, Plateaux, and Plains
67
upon its marshy edges at a very early date. The network of underground canals covering the Roman Campagna, of which archaeologists have found traces, dates back to Neolithic times. m We know too of the primitive works of the Etruscans in the narrow plains of Tuscany. Between these early attempts and the vast 'improvements' of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries mentioned above, the struggle was never abandoned although 1t may have been relaxed at times. Mediterranean.man has always had to fight against the swamps. Far more demanding than the problem of forest and scrubland, this colonization is the distinguishing feature of his rural history. In the same way that northern Europe established itself or at any rate expanded to the detriment of its forest marches, so the Mediterranean found its New World, its own Americas in the plains. Throughout the sixteenth century, as indeed in the fifteenth, many improvement schemes were under way with the limited means available to the period: ditches, trenches, canals, low-powered pumps. In the following century Dutch engineers perfected more efficient techniques. 224 But the Dutch engineers had not yet made their appearance in the period un4er discussion. The inadequacy of means therefore limited the undertakings. The marsh was attacked sector by sector, which led to many failures. In Venetia, in the Adige Valley, Montaigne in 1581 came across 'an infinite expanse of muddy sterile country covered with reeds',22s formerly ponds that the Signoria had tried to drain, 'to put under the plough . . • ; they lost more than they gained by trying to alter its nature', be concluded. Similarly whatever the 'press' of the period - the official chroniclers - might say, the enterprises of Grand Duke Ferdinand in the Tuscan Maremma and the hollow of the Val di Chiana were not a suecess.226 In the Maremma the grand dukes, from Cosimo on, tried to create a grain-producing region (the equivalent on a grander scale of what Genoa attempted in the eastern plain of Corsica). To this end measures to encourage population were taken, advances were offered on capital and yield, 222
221 August Jarde, Les Cereales dans I'Antiquitc grecque, 1925, p. 71, references to Strabo. A. Philippson, 'Der Kopais-See in Griechenland und seine Umgebung,' in Zeitschr. der Gesellschaft fur Erdkunde zu Berlin, XXIX, 1894, p. 1-90. P. Guillon, ~s Trepieds du Ptoion, 1943, p. 175-195. 23 M. R. de la Blanchere, 'La malaria de Rome et Ie drainage antique,' in Melanges _ ,d'Arch et d'hist., published by the French School at Rome, II, 1882, p. 94 fT. 224 Was the first 6f these 'Hollanders', these northerners, the engineer - or dijkmeester - whom the nuncio sent to Ferrara at the request of the Pope in 1598, and who seems to have been thinking of using windmills to drain the water. Correspondance de Frangipani, published by Armand Louant, 1932, Vol. II, Brussels, 13th June, 17th June, 25th July, 13th August, 1598, p. 345, 348, 362-3, 372. m Montaigne. op. cit., p. 138. 226 A. von Reumont, Geschichte Toscana's, I, p. 358 fT. On the same subject, O•. Corsini, Ragionamento istorico sopra la Val di Chiana, Florence, 1742; V. Fossombroni, Memorie idraulico-storiche sopra la Val di Chiana, Florence, 1789; Michelet, Journal inedit, p. 169-170. 1n the sixteenth century there was an unsuccessful attempt to improve lake Castiglione, A. von Reumont, op. cil .. I, p. 369.
68
The Role of the Environment
manpower was recruited and here and there drainage schemes carried out. Grosseto on the Ombrona was then becoming a port for the export of grains to Leghorn. The reasons for the semi-failure of the scheme were spelled out long ago by Reumont in his History of Tuscany.m The grand dukes were pursuing two contradictory ends. They were creating a grain· producing plain, which entails great outlay, and setting up a monopoly of the purchase of the grain for their own advantage, that is for selling at a low price. What they should have done was to throw the market open to the competition of all the Mediterranean buyers. For these improvement schemes were expensive and the return on them, the utilita, was not always worth the outlay. In 1534 the Orators of Brescia pointed out to the Venetian Senate that 'to divert and contain the waters requires infinite expense; so much so that several of our citizens have been ruined through wanting to further such enterprises. Besides the initial expense of bringing the water, there is the continual cost of maintenance, so that when it is all reckoned there is very little difference between expense and profit.' m In this case evidently the people of Brescia were producing arguments and pleading poverty to avoid paying too many taxes, but it is nevertheless true that improvement schemes were large undertakings which required much financing. Ideally they were undertaken by governments. In Tuscany it might be an 'enlightened' government that took charge of them, or as in 1572, a prince from the ducal family, the future Grand Duke Ferdinand who was interested in possible improvements in the marshy Val di Chiana. 229 It was on the initiative of the Duke of Ferrara that what came to be called the grande bonifica estense was set up in the Valle..ast is a protection against the sudden and violent· Mediterranean winds, especially off-shore winds. When the mistral blows in the Gulf of Lions, the best course even today is to keep close to the coast and use the narrow strip of calmer water near the shore. So the lodestone was not essential to Mediterranean life. In 1538, unlike the Spanish galleys, the French galleys did not use it. 20 Again they could have if they had wanted to. 15 Richard Ehrenburg, Das Zeita/tef d.r Fuggtr, 1922, I, 373, Paul Herre, Weltguchichte am Mitre/meer, 1930, p. 229-231. 16 P. Gaffarel, Histoir. du Bresilfran~ais au XVI. siic/., 1878, p. 100-101. 17 A.d.S. Venice, HO Lippomano to the Doge, Madrid, 19th November, 1586. 11 A.d.S. Florence, Mediceo 2079, foo 337 and 365. The ships were probably Italian. For a direct voyage from Brazil to Leghorn, but probably by a Portuguese, ship, see Mediceo 2080, 29th November, 1581. There is also mention of a ship sent 'alIe Indie' by the Grand Duke Ferdinand to discover new lands, dated 1609, in Baldinucci Giornaledi ricordi, Marciana, VI, XCIV. Could there be an error ofa year in the date? The Grand Duke Ferdinand was in agreement with the Dutch to colonize part of Brazil at the beginning of the seventeenth century, Giuseppe Gino Guarnieri. Un audace impresa marittima di FerdilUlndo I dei M.dici, co;' documenti e g/o33ario indocaraibico, Pisa, 1928, p. 24, notes. U J. Cvijic, La peninsule balkaniqve, 1918, p. 377. 20 Edouard Petit, Andrl Doria, un amiral condottiere QII XVI. siic1e, 1466-1560, 1887, p. 175. Belon writes, op. cit., p. 92, 'the ancients bad more difficulty in navigating than we do now ••• and usually did not lose sight of land. But now That everyone
Seas and Coasts
107
Besides, sailing close to shore was more than a protection against the elements. A nearby port could also be a refuge from a pursuing corsair. In an emergency the ship could run aground and the crew escape by land. This was how Tavernier escaped a corsair in 1654 in the Gulf of Hyeres; he even had the luck not to lose the ship in the incident. 'Tramping' also made it possible to take on cargo. It gave ample opportunity for bargaining, and for making the most of price differences. Every sailor, from captain to cabin-boy would have his bundle of merchandise on board,and merchants or their representatives would travel with their wares. The round trip, which could last several weeks or months, was a long succession of selling, buying, and exchanging, organized within a complicated itinerary. In the course of the voyage, the cargo would often have completely altered its nature. Amid the buying and selling, care was always taken to call at some port, such as Leghorn, Genoa, or Venice, where it was possible to exchange spices, leather, cotton, or coral for metal currency. Only the big specialized salt and grain ships had any resemblance to the destination-conscious shipping of today. The others were more like travelling bazaars. The calls at port were so many opportunities for buying, selling, reselling, and eXChanging goods, not to mention the other pleasures . pf going ashore. There was the further advantage of the almost daily renewal of supplies, rations, water, and wood, which was the more necessary since the boats were of small capacity. and on board rations, even drinking water, quickly deteriorated. Frequent stops were made to 'faire aiguade et lignade', 'to take on water and wood', as Rabelais says. This slow-motion shipping, if we can call it that, governed the geography ofthe coastal regions, in the sense that for one big ship capable ofby-passing ports we must reckon dozens of boats and smaIl sailing vessels that were processionary by vocation. In the same way that along land routes, such as the Roman roads in the western countries, daily halts led to the remarkably regular establishment of villages, along the coastal sea routes, the ports are found a day's voyage apart. Where river estuaries were unsuitable because of sandbanks, they grew up on the sheltered shores of bays. In between them there was practically nothing. l1 Sometimes on a knows the virtue of the Lodestone, navigation is easy'. And he mentions the use corsairs made of the lodestone. But the corsairs of course were the very ships which did need to sail away from the coast, in order to surprise other vessels by coming from the open sea. The compass is supposed to have arrived in the Mediterranean from China in the twelth century. But is this certain? F. C. Lane, 'The Economic Meaning of the· Invention of the i:ompass' in The A.merican Hi3torical Re¥iew, vol. LXVIII, No.3, April, 1963, p. 615. ' 11 Cf., Bisschop's remarks, op. cit., p. 332, on the arid and unwe1 regions to the plains and cities. We have already discussed this at some length. Another pointer is the flow of men from Christendom to Islam which seems to have obeyed some law of equilibrium. Algiers, the city that sprang up on the 'American' pattern was peopled almost entirely by immigrants. Emigration from Italy was responsible for the spread into northern Europe, the countries of Islam, and even the Indies, of a skilled labour force of artisans, artists, merchants, and artillerymen. Venice, at the end of the century claims that 4000 or 5000 Venetian families were living in the Middle East. 305 Here and there we find traces of these emigrations, such as the workers from Como who at the end of the sixteenth century left for Germany and Moravia; 306 or the agricultural day-labourers who left Liguria in about 1587 307 for the plains of Corsica; or the 'technidans'30' whom one finds almost everywhere, particularly in France, bringing with them the manufacturing skills of the Italian peninsula, the weaving of gold and silk brocade, the secrets of glass-making from Murano 309 or of majolica from Alblssola. 310 Italian inventors, artists, masons, and merchants travelled along every road in Europe.31l But how does ohe begin to draw up a list of all these individual adventurers or estimate the size of the persistent immigration, in the opposite direction, from Germany 304 G. Pariset, L'E/at et les Eglises de Prusse sous Frederic-Guillaume ler, 1897, p.785. 305 See below, p. 560, notes 127-8, which does not mean to say that the figure is not eltccssive. 306 G. Rovetli, Storia di Como, 1803, Ill, 2, p. 116--117, 145-147, quoted by A. Fanfani, op. cit., p. 146. 307 F. Borlandi, Per la storia della popolazione delle Corsica, 1940, p. 66, 67, 71, 74, 82; quoted byA. Fanfani, op. cit., p. 146. 308 U. Forti, Storia della tecllica italiana, 1940. 309 Even in England, A. Fanfani, op. cit., p. 146. 310 Which lay behind the development of Nevers porcelain after 1550, Louis Gueneau, L'organi:Jation du trallail a Nellers aux XVlle et XVllle siedes, 1919, p. 295. 311 On the dispersion of Italian immigrants throughout the world there is a tremendous amount of literature both published and unpublished. Its extent can be judged from two studies, both remarkable, one of immigration to Lisbon, Peragallo, Misc. di. st. itaI., 1944, the other ofemigration towards Geneva, Pascal, 'Da Lucca a Ginevra' in Rivista :Jtorica italiana, 1932. There have been as yet no studies of the emigration of soldiets; on the role of the Comaschi and the inhabitants of the Ticino valley in the art of the Baroque noted by 1. Burckhardt, Die Renllissance, op. cit., p. 16--17; on Italian engineer-architects, see index under Fratino or lean-Baptiste Toriel1o for example in Douais, OPt cit., II, 110 etc.
The Measure of the Century
417
into Italy? Historians have been inclined to assume that in both cases only small numbers of people were involved. But small numbers can add up to a large total in the end, at least in sixteenth-century terms. A hundred thousand Spaniards are said to have left the Peninsula for America during this period;312 a hundred thousand spread over a century, about a thousand a year: not many by modern standards. But Vivero has strong words to say about it in 1632: 'The way things are going', he writes, 'Spain will soon be depopulated', and the Indies are in danger of being lost by these lazy newcomers (Vivero was born in New Spain and prejudiced). As soon as they arrive, 'Those who were cobblers want to be gentlemen of leisure and the labourers are unwilling to take up a pick .. .'.313 Clearly the problem was exaggerated by contemporaries and by all those who having seen Seville have reflected on the destiny of Spain in their own times. On the other hand, there has been almost total silence on the subject of the stream of French immigrants into Spain, the importance of which in the sixteenth century has been revealed in recent studies. 314 A typically overpopulated country, France continually dispatched artisans, itinerant mercllants, water-carriers, and farm-workers to the neighbouring Peninsula. They came principalIy but not exclusively from the south of France. Catalonia received large contingents of these workers, who often settled there permanently; as early as August, 1536, a Spanish report notes that more than half the population of Perpignan was French,31' as was the majority of the Catalan population at the beginning of the seventeenth century, 'ayant ouy assurer y avoir un tiers de plus de Fran~ois que de naturalz', having heard it said that there are a third as many Frenchmen again as natives of the place, as a traveller 316 says in 1602. The same writer, Joly, also remarks that there were arriving 'every day' in Catalonia people from 'Rouergue, Auvergne, Gevaudan, and Gascony'.317 Perhaps the nickname Gavaches 318 which the Catalans gave to poor French immigrants derives from the place name 'Gevaudan' though this is unlikely.m What is certain is that there was a steady stream ofimmigrants from France. The newcomers also went to Aragon, artisans attracted by the high wages 'because manufactured goods in Spain are dear',32o unskilled men, taken on as pages and then 'clad in livery, for these gentlemen [their masters] 311
Wilhelmy, in Geographische Zeitschrift, 1940, p. 209.
313 B.M., Add. 18287. 314 G. Nadal and E. Giralt, La population catalane de ISS3 a 1717, 1960. 315 A.N., K 1690, F. de Beaumont to the Empress, Perpignan, 20th August, 1536, 'Esta villa esta /lena de franceses que son muchos mas que los naturales.' The same is reported (B.M., Add 28368 fO 23 vOl po de Salablanca to H.M., Madrid 16th June, ]575: Perpignan is losing its inhabitants 'y son todos gente pobre y gran parte del/os france:ru'. 31' 'Voyage de Barthelemy Joly en Espagne, 1603-1604', published by L. Barrau Dihigo, in Revue Hispanique, 1909, off-print, p. 29. 311 Ibid., p. 21 and 29. 311 Ibid., p. 21 and 29. 31' Littre derives gavache from the Spanish gavacho which is no answer. 3ZO 'Voyage de Barth~l~my Joly •• .', p. 82.
418
Collective Destinies
take great pleasure in such vanity' 321 - or peasants who were even better received 'because of the indolence of the natives' - as our French informer tells us, adding 'they marry if they can their masters' widows' ,322 all in any case fleeing from the crippling French tailles - and all much taken with the Spanish prostitutes, 'beautiful ladies, scented with musk, painted, and dressed like French princesses'.323 It was not only to Catalonia and Aragon that they came. In Valencia,U4 there were to be found among the shepherds and farmhandS' of the villages of the Old Christians, Frenchmen, arrived there who knows how. In Castile the Inquisition has plenty to tell us about the French artisans ' with their imprudent talk, the psalms they sing, their movements and the inns that are their regular rendezvous. If imprisoned, they will denounce each other. In this connection we find mention of every trade: weavers, cloth-croppers, tinkers, shovelmakers, blacksmiths, goldsmiths, locksmiths, cooks, roast-meat sellers, surgeons, gardeners, peasants, sailors, seacaptains, merchants or rather pedlars of books, professional beggars; often young men under twenty or twenty-five. One learns with astonishment of the journeys made right across France by these immigrants, like those printers of playing cards who left Rouen to meet a tragic fate at Toledo.32S If this flow of immigrants dried up in about the 1620s,326 as has been suggested, it certainly started again later. From Beam, says a text written in 1640,32'7 'there passes every year a great quantity of haymakers, reapers, cattle gelders, and other workers who relieve their households of the burden of feeding them and bring back some profit to their families .•.'.It was not only from Auvergne,328 as was still thought only recently~ that these immigrants, whether temporary or permanent, were attracted by the employment and high wages in Spain. I think we may take it that these immigrants amply compensated the Peninsula for its losses to Italy and the Indies. 3.
IS IT POSSIBLE TO CONSTRUCT A MODEL OF THE MEDITERRANEAN ECONOMY?
Have we here enough material to measure the Mediterranean, to construct a comprehensive, quantitative 'model' of its economy? As a unit 'Voyage de Barthelemy Joly ...., p. 82. Ibid. 323 Ibid. 324 T. Halperin Donghi, 'Les Morisques du Royaume de Valence au XVIe siecle' in Annale6 E.S.C., 1956, p. 164. 325 Ernst Schafer, Geschichte des spanischen Protestantismus, 3 parts in 2 vols., 1902, Vol. I, part II, p. 137-139. 326 J. Nadal and E. Giralt, op. cit., p. 198. 327 P. de Marca, Histoire du Bearn, 1640, p. 256-257, quoted by Henri Cavailles, La vie pastorale et agricole dans les Pyrenees des Gaves de l' Adour et des Nestes, Bordeaux, 1932, p. 137-138. 328 Response de Jean Bodin Ii M. de Malestroict, ed. Henri Hauser, op. .rit., p. 14. 321
3%1
The Measure
0/ the Century
419
it could then be compared to other 'world-economies' either bordering on or connected to the Mediterranean. An attempt on this scale will provide at best some indication of orders of magnitude, the faintest of guide lines. To tell the truth it is one way of presenting the material. Such a model, if we can construct it, must aim to represent not any particular year or period but the century in its entirety looking beyond times of crisis or of plenty. What it should convey, if it is at all possible, is the mean, the water-line, so to speak. of the successive phases of the century. We shaH fall far short of our aim, it is clear; but the effort will be worth while in spite of the difficulties ahead, not to mention the preliminary obstacles. Can it be said for a start that the Mediterranean is an internally coherent zone? On the whole the answer is yes, in spite of the indefinite and above all changeable boundaries both on its continental and on its seaward sides: the Black Sea, the Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, the Straits of Gibraltar, and the Atlantic Ocean. These problems we have already discussed without reaching any hard and fast conclusion. 329 It was my original idea, in the first edition of this book, that the many dimensions of the Mediterranean in the sixteenth century should be sug&ested through a series of examples, by selecting certain important and indicative details: 330 a city of 700,000 inhabitants, Constantinople; a grain fleet which every year, good or bad, ferried a million quintals of wheat or other cereals; the 3000 or so tons of wool which in 1580 lay on the quaysides of Leghorn; 331 the estimated 100,000 combatants, both Turks and Christians, assembled in the gulf of Lepanto on 7th October, 1571; the 600 vessels (totalling perhaps 45,000 tons) that participated in Charles V's expedition against Tunis in 1535; the highest recorded level of shipping at Leghorn, 150,000 tons entering the port in 1592-1593, probably an exaggerated figure; or two rather different annual totals at Naples: 1,300,000 ducats of business transacted on the exchanges, against 60,000 or 70,000 in insurance. 331 But this would mean leaving enormous blank spaces See above, Chapter III. La Mediterranee ••., 1st edition, 1949, p. 342 If. 331 F. Braudel and R. Romano, Navires et marchandises a['entree du port de Livourne, p. 101. Hundreds of details of this kind are worth quoting: exports extra regnum of Neapolitan wine, of which the average volume between 1563 and 1566 was, for vini latini. 23,677 bustt, for vini grechi dulci et mangiaguerra, 2319 busti (Sommaria Con'sultationum 2, fO 223, 2nd October, 1567); 'every year on average, there are sold in Apulia about 80,000 rubii of wool', ibid., fO 75, 8th August, 1564; French trade in the Levant, estimated by Savary de Breves at 30 million livres at the beginning of the seventeenth century, had by 1624 fallen by 50%, E. Fagniez, op. cit., p. 324; some of the personal fortunes of the rich merchants of Genoa: many exceeded 500,000 ducats, Tomaso Marino was worth much more, Adamo Centurione almost a million, Museo Correr, Cicogna ..., fO 2 and 2 vO; the total revenue of the Spanish Crown, 11 million ducats in 1572, Marciana 8360 CVIII-3, fO II yO; the amount of coined money in circulation in Europe at the end of the fifteenth century: a thousand million (livres), according to P. Raveau, L'agricu/ture et les classes paySannes, 1926, p. 11, n. 1 (the unit is not, alas, clearly indicated). 3011 A.d.S., Naples, Sommaria Consultationum, I, fO 216, 28th April, 1559. 329
330
420
Collective Destinies
between the specks of colour; at best, it would only give an impressionistic notion of the distance that separates our world from that of the sixteenth century. Today, on the other hand, I am more attracted towards the language of what economists call 'national accounting'. I should like to try to draw up a tentative balance sheet of the Mediterranean in the sixteenth century, not in order to judge its relative mediocrity or modernity but to determine the relative proportions and relationships between the different sectors of its activity, in short, to form a picture of the major structures of its material life: a difficult and hazardous project. The risk. trater in Spagna restando chiusa la navigazione e per Italia dificilrnente ... '. Medina Celi's fleet in 1572 had been fairly small. It was decided to assemble a larger one in Biscay in 1573-1574. It is hardly an exaggeration to call it the first Invincible Armada. It was placed under the command of a distinguished commander Pero Menendez, but he died in 1574; then funds . Tan short, epidemics broke out, and the fleet was left fretting away in the harbour.u~ That year, 1574, struck a decisive blow at the vitality of Spain, from the Bay of Biscay to the distant Netherlands. There were a few subsequent shipments from the Peninsula to the Scheidt. In 1575 a small fleet under Recalde sailed from Santander to Dunkirk, where it arrived on 26th November, putting in on the way at the Isle of Wight, which suggests that relations with England had not yet reached breaking point. On the other hand there is no evidence that Recalde's Beet was carrying silver. 133 In any case it would probably have been incapable of doing so. It is easy to ascertain how abnormal it had become to transport silver using the Atlantic route. Just after the state bankruptcy of 1575, declared to his advantage, Philip II found himself with several million crowns in liquid assets. Nothing could apparently be simpler, since they were needed in the Netherlands, than to convey the currency to Laredo or Santander and ship it north. But no merchant would touch it. Instead, he had to beg the 130 It is symptomatic of the time that the Duke of Alva, in 1567. with his troops, his money and his bills of exchange, should have travelIed to the Netherlands by way of Genoa, Savoy, and the Franche-Comte (Lucien Febvre, Philippe 1l et la FrancheComte, p. 520 tf.), Lorraine and Luxemburg. A revealing detail: in 1568, 150,000 crowns on their way to the Duke of Alva were stopped on the Rhine by the Count Palatine. The Genoese responsible for conveying the money, Luciano Centurione and Constantino Gentile, obtained restitution of the sum seized on payment of an indemnity, Charles IX to Fourquevaux, 24th March, 1568, p. 169; Fourquevaux to Charles IX, Madrid, 6th April,1568, C. Douais, op. cit., I, p. 345; reportfrom Brussels, 7th March, 1568, H. van Houtte, art. cit., p. 437. 131 Antwerp, 31st July, 1572, A.d.S., Genoa, OIanda, Lettere Consoli, 1265. 131 Armada reunida en Santander para ir a Flandes, Simancas EO 561; C. Duro, Armada espanola, II, 288 tf. 133 AntoniodeGuarastoZaya~,London,29thNovember,1575, CODO/N, XCI,p.l08.
!seE
szz
484
Collective Destinies
Fuggers to consent to convey 70,000 crowns (delivered to them in chests sealed with the royal seal to avoid trouble with the customs) to Lisbon, where they obtained in exchange good bills of exchange on Antwerp from local businessmen who needed the silver coins for their trade with the Portuguese Indies. Even for such relatively small sums, Thomas Miiller. the Fuggers' agent in Spain, preferred to operate through Portugal because of the semi-neutrality of Portuguese merchants in the northern troubles. Thanks to this subterfuge, the money was transferred without leaving the Peninsula.13-4 Sometimes it really did leave. In the autumn of 1588, Baltazar Lomellini and Agustin Spinola risked, in order to assure their payments in Flanders to the Duke of Parma, 'una suma de dinero que ambian en tres zabras que han armado'ys A year later in 1589 a sum of 20,000 crowns that the Malvendas, Spanish merchants at Burgos,136 had sent in a galleasse, was • recorded at Le Havre. 137 In the same year, still on the Atlantic route. Spinola repeated his e1Cploit of the previous year by sending two little galleasses, which he had fitted out himself and which were carrying silver on his acCount, to the Netherlands. 138 But these are exceptions that prove the rule. In fact, as a Venetian dispatch indicated in 1586, the Atlantic route had become extremely hazardous 139 and was little used. And to Spain this route had been vital.
The French detour. Since the route from Laredo and Santander was no longer usable, an alternative had to be found. Philip II resorted to the roads across France. Although shorter, they might at any time be interrupted by France's internal troubles, and transport required long convoys and a ; . heavy escort. The transport of a mere 100,000 crowns, for example, from Florence to Paris at the end of the century140 required seventeen wagons, escorted by five companies of cavalry and 200 foot soldiers. To reduce the weight, gold alone might be sent. This was tried several times in about 1576, using reliable carriers, men in the service of Spain, who carried up to 5000 gold crowns each, sewn into their garments, from Genoa to the Netherlands. 141 But such an expedient was only for exceptional, desperate, and dangerous Occasions. 142 R. Ehrenberg, op. cit., I, 180-181, p. 213, 215. Philip II to the Duke ofParma, S. Lorenzo, 7th September, 1588, A.N., K 1448, M. R. Ehrenberg's suggestion that they were out of action after 1577 is incorrect, op. cit., I, p. 362-363. 137 Philip II to B. de Mendoza, Madrid, 17th March, 1589, A.N., K 1449. 138 Ibid., the king to Mendoza, S. Lorenzo, 6th May, 1589 and 14th June, 1589. 139 Bart. Benedetti, Intorno aile relazionl commercilz/l ••. di Venezia e di Norimberga, Venice, 1864, p. 30. 140 L. Batitfol, La "ie intime ,rune relne de France au XVIIe si~c1e, Paris, 1931, p. 18. 1411diaquez to the Marquis of Mondejar, Venice, 26th March, 1579, A.N., K 1672. G 38, copy. ldiaquez is recalling an incident from the time when he was ambassador at Genoa, hence the uncertainty of the date. 142 In '590 six couriers coming. from Italy were robbed near Basle of 50,000 crowns intended for Ambrogio Spinola at Antwerp. Each courier could carry 10,000 crowns in gold pieces, V. Vazquez de Prada, op. cit., I, p. 37. 134 135 136
Precious Metals. Money. and Prices
485
It was at the end of 1572. after the St. Bartholomew Massacre, that the first large consignment of bullion from the Spanish crown passed through France. 143 The Duke of Alva. who had been short of money since his arrival in the Netherlands, was in desperate straits. It was rumoured at the beginning of 1569 that he had already spent 5 million ducats. l44 Two years later in 1571 the documents repeatedly insist on 'the tightness of money', 'la estrecheza del dinero'. in which he found himself. Merchants were no longer willing to do business with him. 14s With DO liquid currency, his credit diminished. the Duke saw that the possibility of using bills ofexchange was receding, just as a bank never needs reserves so badly as when its customers suspect it has none. By 1572 the situation was so serious 146 that in April the Duke decided to appeal to the credit of the Grand Duke of Tuscany. His approaches were successful, but the Spanish government was on poor terms with the Grand Duke, suspecting him of intriguing both inside and outside France against Spanish interests; Alva's request was disowned and the credit that had been granted was never used. 147 Meanwhile, Philip II had sent through France 500,000 ducats in cash. 'We wish,' he wrote to his ambassador. Diego de Zuiiiga,148 'to send to the Duke of Alva, from the Kingdom of Spain. a sum of 500,000 ducats in .