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Robert Baldwin, Communal Money and Burgher Culture in 16th Century Northern Europe
Robert Baldwin
Associate Professor of Art History
ConnecticutCollege
New London, CT06320
Note for web posting in Jan. 2010
Written in 1996 and presented on 1/26/1996 at the PrincetonDavisCenter symposium on Medieval and Early Modern Business, this is a rough draft for chapter one of my unfinished book project on economic and social issues in the art of Bruegel.
This book analyzes works focused on economic issues such as Big Fish Eat Little Fish, Battle of the Moneybags and Strong Boxes, Elck, and Mad Meg (the latter posted here as a separate essay). It also has a chapter on the rise of the art market and the problematic relation of art to the market economy. This project is separate from my book project on Pieter Bruegel and the Rise of Renaissance Landscape. The first chapter for that book project is also posted on my site.
Economic Shift and Cultural Agency in Sixteenth-Century Northern Europe
The Example and Impact of Italy
Of the many problems confronting an emerging burgher culture in early modern Northern Europe, few were more central, all-encompassing, or troubling than the status of urban commerce, money-lending, and mercantile profit. [1] New rationales for trade and banking had emerged in Italian theology, law, and philosophy by 1300. Through the widespread use of commenda contracts whereby anyone with even small sums of money could invest in particular shipments, commercial involvement spread widely through most social sectors in the Italian trading centers. In Genoa, commercial participation was already widespread by the mid-thirteenth century; thus the adage, "A Genoese, therefore a merchant". (Genuensis ergo mercator). [2] Jacobus da Voragine, Genoa's archbishop in the 1290s, described Christ as a trader sailing aboard the Ship of the Cross to deliver spiritual goods while defending personal wealth by citing the riches of God and the Old Testament patriarchs. For his Dominican contemporary, Giovanni Balbi, the Incarnation was an exchange of spiritual and earthly goods. It was even common for Genoa's wealthy clerics to enter into commercial contracts. One such investor was Porchetto Spinola, the city's Franciscan archbishop in the early fourteenth century. [3]
Other Italian trading centers such as Venice, Florence, and Siena followed a similar path. By 1350, the whole of Venice depended on commerce including all of its doges and many of its clerics. [4] And by 1330, the Florentine government had legalized certain forms of usury by distinguishing between funeratio, or licensed and therefore legitimate money-lending which the city controlled and taxed, and unlicensed money-lending which remained illegal. [5] While all such changes fueled clerical attacks, such criticism was increasingly relegated to the cultural margins as commerce and money-lending installed themselves securely among urban merchants, nobles, and church officials (many dependent on loans from merchant-bankers). In 1340, the Sienese magistrates openly celebrated their well-governed city as a bustling commercial republic in Ambrogio Lorenzetti's fresco of Good Government in Siena painted for the town hall. [6]
Aided by the translation of the pseudo-Aristotle's Economics by the Florentine chancellor, Leonardo Bruni around 1420-22, a series of fifteenth-century Italian humanists including Bruni, Alberti, Palmieri, Poggio, and Patrizi developed a comprehensive reinterpretation of private and public wealth which was influential in sixteenth-century Northern European thinking. Wealth tied to productive labor was now important "both for the well-being of society and the self-fulfillment of the individual" and as "a necessary condition for the exercise of virtue in the active life."[7] Poverty was associated with vice, crime, ignorance, and a rude, bestial life. It was the antithesis of civilization and intellectual pursuit. With the rise of this civic humanism, urban culture in Italy shifted even further away from the late medieval asceticism of the mendicant orders. It also moved beyond the austere, in some ways quasi-monastic brand of Stoic humanism developed by late medieval humanists such as Petrarch. [8]
Though burghers and ennobled burghers were represented on city councils in Northern Europe since the early fourteenth century, mercantile civic culture began to emerge prominently in Germany, England, and the Low Countries only after 1475 with the shift of banking and trade from Italy and the Mediterranean to Germany, the Netherlands, and England. Prior to that, at least in the Burgundian Netherlands, the commonwealth or la chose publicque had been defined in rather feudal terms. Despite the circulation of Burgundian treatises redefining nobility in terms of virtue rather than birth, Burgundian politics remained hostile to notions of broad civic virtue since these invariably partook of republican constitutional models. While Burgundian court writers did formulate new discussions of the civic virtue of justice, it was reserved for the prince and remained within the confines of the traditional "mirror of princes" literature rather than the new humanist treatises on the Res Publica. [9] One irony is that Italian banking had long been powerfully installed in the major Dutch commercial centers, especially Bruges. But without any local culture of civic humanism, Italian financial practices and ideas were completely unable to combine fruitfully with larger social and political ideals as they did in the fifteenth-century Italian republics. Transplanted into the hostile soil of Burgundian feudalism, Italian economic ideas remained culturally and politically isolated, confined to a narrow financial zone of a tolerated though suspect usury.
By the early sixteenth century, the status of money and commerce changed dramatically in the Northern Europe thanks to a number of religious, political, economic, and intellectual shifts. In the religious sphere, German theologians tied to the House of Fugger played a leading role in the aggressive reinterpretation of money-lending (following the lead of Italian clerics before them). [10] As Heiko Oberman has shown, their efforts were crucial to the rapid expansion of credit finance in Northern Europe after 1500. Indeed, German theologians even surpassed German humanists in developing the religious, moral, and legal foundations for credit finance and capital-intensive, long-distance trade. [11]
The Economic Impact of Humanism in Northern Europe
Though clerical culture contributed significantly to the reinterpretation of Northern European banking and trade, humanism remained the primary vehicle for new economic values in the Netherlands and for their integration into a wider set of discourses. Even in Germany, it was humanists and magistrates in commercial centers such as Nuremberg and Ausgburg who integrated modern economic values and practices into new political ideals celebrating republican city states whose liberties were primarily economic and whose justice and peace depended on notions of a shared commercial prosperity. [12]
In the Netherlands, the new civic humanism emerged after 1500 in the writings of Erasmus, More, Vives, and the Dutch rederijkers. Also important were German humanists such as Georg Agricola. At the same time, banking and long-distance trade expanded throughout Europe and concentrated to a new extent in the Netherlands, and above all Antwerp. Since commercial wealth remained problematic on many levels, the highly visible concentration of so much wealth fueled a new discussion in literatures and images which even at its most critical tended to assume all sorts of new burgher communal social and political values. In short, the rapid expansion and concentration of trade in Northern Europe in the sixteenth century produce an accompanying critical discourse which both criticized and legitimized new practices and ideas.
Though new practices and discourses were not identical - the expansion of credit finance and long-distance trade did not directly "cause" the rise of Northern civic humanism or vice versa - neither were the two processes separable. For example, it was Northern humanists like Erasmus who gave exploration and travel a new dignity in their writings and provided later mercantile writers with the rhetoric used to transform the merchant into an Ulysses. So too, humanists provided the ideas and imagery used by the European princes to justify their overseas adventures and their glorious imperial destinies as illustrious navigators worthy of Hercules, Jason, and Aeneas. Rather than some sort of static, one-way dynamic between separate entities of hard practice and cultural superstructure, it makes more sense to see a dynamic process of give and take between an emerging humanist civic culture in Northern Europe and the rapid expansion of commercial and financial markets. Thus the agency of civic humanism in economic change remained highly diffused and subtle. New ideas on wealth and commerce circulated within new discussions of religion, politics, domestic matters such as marriage, family, and household management, individual and civic morality, political philosophy, work, begging, and poor relief, natural science and technology (especially mining and metallurgy).
At first, the new humanist civic culture was generally confined to Northern humanists writing in Latin such as Erasmus, Vives, More, and Grapheus. Imbedded into the humanist curriculum itself, the new economic values spread into Dutch grammar schools and into higher education with the founding of the TrilingualCollege in Louvain in 1517. By the early 1520s, Christian humanism had made strong inroads into some elements of the Dutch clergy and into the burgher jurist class which filled important municipal positions, provincial offices, and lower administrative slots in the retinues of powerful grandees and in the higher courts. [13] Though the explicit anti-clericalism of Dutch humanism were effectively quashed in the Southern Netherlands by the early 1520s, [14] the crackdown had no effect on the larger spread of new humanist economic and civic values derived from Cicero and Xenophon. Charles V even sided with the magistrates of Bruges and Ypres against the mendicant orders in the early 1520s when the Dutch cities began taking control of charitable institutions and poor relief and passed regulations outlawing begging.
After 1520, the new civic culture began to circulate even more widely in the Netherlands with the emergence of a robust vernacular humanist literature extolling a knowledge which was frequently and self-consciously described as practical and above all, "profitable". Among other things, the new civic culture, whether Latin or vernacular, elevated commercial arithmetic to the liberal arts, [15] redefined virtue and nobility in terms of an active civic life and a strong work ethic available to anyone, regardless of birth, redefined mining, minting, and long-distance commerce as "natural," virtuous work, transformed the ocean-going merchant into a "noble," heroic navigator-philosopher-cartographer worthy of Jason or Ulysses, reinterpreted both Christian and classical literature (including mythology) as a source for practical, moral philosophy (tied invariably to civic virtue), developed a new imagery of Mercury uniting philosophy with commercial prosperity, and made architectural and cultural investment into a kind of exchange whereby private money could transform itself into high-minded civic intellect and philosophy. Not surprisingly, the new civic humanism appealed most strongly to the urban elites - nobles, financiers, lawyers, town officials, big merchants, industrialists, tax farmers, publishers, and writers - who profited most from that economic expansion and who dominated the production of Dutch vernacular literature and material culture.
One of the ironies of the sixteenth-century situation was the impact of traditional feudal political thinking. Whereas the fifteenth-century court culture of the Burgundian dukes helped prevent Italian economic-political ideas from taking root, the attempts by successive Hapsburg regimes in the sixteenth century to consolidate control of the relatively independent Dutch provinces and cities contributed to the spread of a quasi-republican civic culture which was increasingly hostile to Hapsburg political claims and which eventually emerged in the 1570s as an overtly "Ciceronian" republicanism in which liberty was grounded primarily in self-governance. [16]
Had Charles V and his successor, Philip II not tried so hard to usurp the tax-collecting privileges of the Dutch nobility, crack down on heresy, introduce property confiscation in heresy cases, intrude on urban judicial autonomy, impose new and ever more onerous taxes, meddle in the local system of bishoprics and high clerical appointments, and create secret ruling councils which superceded more representative parliamentary bodies, things might have developed somewhat differently. As it was, clumsy Hapsburg attempts to centralize further helped give Dutch magistrates, nobles, jurists, church officials, wealthy merchants, political writers, humanists, artists, and guild officials a series of rallying points around which developed new forms of political identity, resistance, autonomy, and local culture. Through the mid-1560s, the main political objective was to preserve the status quo, to reaffirm traditional liberties, mutual obligations, and a governance shared between prince and local councils, whether provincial or urban.
Though strong economic competition continued to divide Dutch cities and provinces, the new mercantile-humanist civic culture gave Dutch magistrates and urban elites a place to come together to define and defend shared interests and what they called a "common" prosperity. To a large extent, cities in the later middle ages had always understood "freedom" in terms of the traditional economic privileges and customs guaranteed by monarch or emperor. [17] These included staples, monopolies, charters, internal constitutional protections, local authority in tolls, the freedom of local trade fairs, tax authority over the surrounding countryside and its villages, municipal authority in defining and imposing standards for weights and measures, and authority to regulate local extra-mural industries.
For republican trading cities like Florence and Venice, "free" imperial trading cities like Nuremberg, and cities with an unusual autonomy within the imperial system such as the larger towns of Flanders and Brabant, liberty was tied even more closely to prosperity and economic "independence". Not surprisingly, the expansion of credit finance and overseas trade in the early sixteenth century and the concentration of capital in a small number of wealthy trading cities greatly strengthened the equation of "liberty" and material prosperity. In an age of intense rivalry between cities for economic privileges, the prosperity of the great commercial centers really did depend on maintaining and expanding such "liberties". The more business at stake, the more vigilant the efforts of magistrates and leading bankers to protect such local freedoms. The result was a kind of mercantile Republicanism which was initially rooted in the financial centers but which spread outward to become a more general Netherlandish ideology.
Because it offered unusually explicit imagery and sheds light on a number of works by Bruegel, the allegorical title page of the 1564 Nuremberg city charter is particularly interesting (Fig. 7). Here God the Father looked down and blessed the "republic" of Nuremberg personified as Res Publica. Pointing up toward God, Res Publica governed Justicia with her scales, a sleeping Pax, and a Liberalitas holding a money purse which doubled as a bee hive. Flying in perfect formation with the city of Nuremberg directly behind them and flanked by the inscription, Concordia, the bees (as the text explained) represented the hard-working citizens of Nuremberg who united under their bee king (as the chief bee's sex was understood) to produce the honey of gold coin for the city. Liberalitas divided this urban wealth into the profits which came to all honorable merchants and the civic charity which the magistrates made available to the deserving poor. [18] This economic balance corresponded to the political balance held by Justicia and to the peace and concord which shared prosperity brought the city.
Justice and concord was also crucial political virtues in the Republican political writing of Cicero and of later sixteenth-century Dutch political writers. To be sure, there were significant differences between Nuremberg and Antwerp. The former was a free city run by a council composed almost entirely of merchants. The latter was part of the fief of Philip II and run primarily by urban nobles who answered, at least ostensibly, to a provincial and central government. Nonetheless, by the early 1560s the Antwerp magistrates and patriciate saw themselves in Republican terms not very different from those pictured in the 1564 Nuremberg charter. Indeed, in 1564, Antwerp opened what was architecturally the first Roman Republican town hall in Northern Europe whose facade celebrated the prosperity and common welfare brought by overseas trade. [19] And in the engraving of Belgia designed by Crispijn van den Broeck for a later, 1581 edition of Guicciardini's Description of the Low Countries (originally, 1567), the inscription read,