The tenor of the act prescribes the garb appropriate to the royal family, to nobles of different degree, to citizens according to their income, to servants and husbandmen, to the clergy, doctors of divinity, soldiers, lawyers and players. Such laws were common in all countries. A Scotch act provides "that it be lauchful to na wemen to weir [clothes] abone [above] their estait except howries." This law was not only "apprevit" by King James VI, but endorsed with his own royal hand, "This acte is verray gude."

Excessive fare at feasts was provided against for similar reasons and with almost equal frequency. By an English proclamation [Sidenote: 1517] the number of dishes served was to be regulated according to the rank of the highest person present. Thus, if a cardinal was guest or host, there might be nine courses, if a lord of Parliament six, for a citizen with an income of five hundred pounds a year, three. Elsewhere the number of guests at all {485} ordinary functions as well as the number and price of gifts at weddings, christenings and like occasions, was prescribed.

[Sidenote: 1526]

Games of chance were frequently forbidden. Francis I ordered a lieutenant with twenty archers to visit taverns and gaming houses and arrest all players of cards, dice and other unlawful games. This did not prevent the establishment of a public lottery, [Sidenote: 1539] a practice justified by alleging the examples of Italian cities in raising revenue by this means. Henry III forbade all games of chance "to minors and other debauched persons," [Sidenote: 1577] and this was followed six years later by a crushing impost on cards and dice, interesting as one of the first attempts to suppress the instruments of vice through the taxing power. Merry England also had many laws forbidding "tennis, bowles, dicing and cards," the object being to encourage the practice of archery.

Tippling was the subject of occasional animadversion by the various governments, though there seemed to be little sentiment against it until the opening of the following century. The regulation of the number of taverns and of the amount of wine that might be kept in a gentleman's cellar, as prescribed in an English law, [Sidenote: 1553] mentions not the moral but the economic aspect of drinking. The purchase of French wines was said to drain England of money.

Though the theater also did not suffer much until the time of Cromwell, plays were forbidden in the precincts of the city of London. The Book of Discipline in Scotland forbade attendance at theaters. [Sidenote: 1574] Calvin thoroughly disapproved of them, and even Luther considered them "fools' work" and at times dangerous.

Commendable efforts to suppress the practice of duelling were led by the Catholic church. Clement {486} VII forbade it in a bull, [Sidenote: 1524] confirmed by a decree of Council of Trent. [Sidenote: 1563] An extraordinarily worded French proclamation of 1566 forbade "all gentlemen and others to give each other the lie and, if they do give each other the lie, to fight a duel about it." Other governments took the matter up very sluggishly. Scotland forbade "the great liberty that sundry persons take in provoking each other to singular combats upon sudden and frivol occasions," without license from his majesty.

Two matters on which the Puritans felt very keenly, [Sidenote: 1551] blasphemy and Sabbath-breaking, were but scantily looked after in the century of the Reformation. Scotland forbade "grievous and abominable oaths, swearing, execrations and blasphemation," and somewhat similar laws can be found in other countries. Scotland was also a pioneer in forbidding on the Sabbath all work, "gaming, playing, passing to taverns and ale-houses and wilful remaining away from the parish kirk in time of sermon."

[Sidenote: Mail]

Government has other functions than the enforcement of the civil and criminal law. Almost contemporary with the opening of the century was the establishment of post offices for the forwarding of letters. After Maximilian had made a start in the Netherlands other countries were not slow to follow his example. Though under special government supervision at first these letter-carriers were private men.

[Sidenote: Sanitation]

In the Middle Ages there had been efforts to safeguard public sanitation. The sixteenth century did not greatly improve on them. Thus, Geneva passed a law that garbage and other refuse should not be allowed to lie in the streets for more than three days in summer or eight days in winter. In extreme cases quarantine was adopted as a precaution against epidemics.

{487} [Sidenote: War]

It is the most heart-breaking or the most absurd fact in human history, according as the elements involved are focused in a humane or in a cynical light, that the chief energies of government as well as the most zealous forces of peoples, have been dedicated since civilization began to the practice of wholesale homicide. As we look back from the experience of the Great War to the conflicts of other times, they seem to our jaded imaginations almost as childish as they were vicious. In the sixteenth century, far more than in the nineteenth, the nations boiled and bubbled with spleen and jealousy, hurled Thrasonical threats and hyperbolic boasts in each other's teeth, breathing out mutual extermination with no compunctious visitings of nature to stay their hungry swords—but when they came to blows they had not the power of boys. The great nations were always fighting but never fought to a finish. In the whole century no national capital west of Hungary, save Rome and Edinburgh, was captured by an enemy. The real harm was not done on the battlefield, where the carnage was incredibly small, but in the raids and looting of town and country by the professional assassins who filled the ranks of the hireling troops. Then, indeed, cities were burned, wealth was plundered and destroyed, men were subjected to nameless tortures and women to indescribable outrages, and children were tossed on pikes. Nor did war seem then to shock the public conscience, as it has at last succeeded in doing. The people saw nothing but dazzling glory in the slaughter of foemen on the stricken field, in the fanfare of the trumpets and the thunder of the captains and the shouting. Soldiers, said Luther, founding his opinion on the canon law, might be in a state of grace, for war was as necessary as eating, drinking or any other business. Statesmen like Machiavelli and Bacon were keen for the largest armies {488} possible, as the mainstay of a nation's power. Only Erasmus was a clear-sighted pacifist, always declaiming against war and once asserting that he agreed with Cicero in thinking the most unjust peace preferable to the justest war. Elsewhere he admitted that wars of self-defence were necessary.

[Sidenote: Arms]

Fire-arms had not fully established their ascendancy in the period of Frundsberg, or even of Alva. As late as 1596 an English soldier lamented that his countrymen neglected the bow for the gun. Halberdiers with pikes were the core of the army. Artillery sometimes inflicted very little damage, as at Flodden, sometimes considerable, as at Marignano, where, with the French cavalry, it struck down the till then almost invincible Swiss infantry. In battle arquebusiers and musketeers were interspersed with cross-bowmen. Cannon of a large type gave way to smaller field-guns; even the idea of the machine-gun emerged in the fifteenth century. The name of them, "organs," was taken from their appearance with numerous barrels from which as many as fifty bullets could be discharged at a time. Cannon were transported to the field on carts. Rifles were invented by a German in 1520, but not much used. Pistols were first manufactured at Pistoia—whence the name—about 1540. Bombs were first used in 1588.

The arts of fortification and of siege were improved together, many ingenious devices being called into being by the technically difficult war of the Spaniards against the Dutch. Tactics were not so perfect as they afterwards became and of strategy there was no consistent theory. Machiavelli, who wrote on the subject, based his ideas on the practice of Rome and therefore despised fire-arms and preferred infantry to cavalry. Discipline was severe, and needed to be, notwithstanding which there were sporadic and often very annoying {489} mutinies. Punishments were terrible, as in civil life. Blasphemy, cards, dicing, duelling and women were forbidden in most regular armies, but in time of war the soldiers were allowed an incredible license in pillaging and in foraging. Rings and other decorations were given as rewards of valor. Uniforms began first to be introduced in England by Henry VIII.

[Sidenote: Personnel of the armies]

The personnel of the armies was extremely bad. Not counting the small number of criminals who were allowed to expiate their misdeeds by military service, the rank and file consisted of mercenaries who only too rapidly became criminals under the tutelage of Mars. There were a few conscripts, but no universal training such as Machiavelli recommended. The officers were nobles or gentlemen who served for the prestige and glory of the profession of arms, as well as for the good pay.

[Sidenote: Size of armies compared]

But the most striking difference between armies then and now is not in their armament nor in their quality but in the size. Great battles were fought and whole campaigns decided with twenty or thirty thousand troops. The French standing army was fixed by the ordinance of 1534 at seven legions of six thousand men each, besides which were the mercenaries, the whole amounting to a maximum, under Francis I, of about 100,000 men. The English official figures about 1588 gave the army 90,000 foot soldiers and 9000 horse, but these figures were grossly exaggerated. In fact only 22,000 men were serviceable at the crisis of England's war with Spain. Other armies were proportionately small. The janizaries, whose intervention often decided battles, numbered in 1520 only 12,000. They were perhaps the best troops in Europe, as the Turkish artillery was the most powerful known. What all these figures show, in short, is that the phenomenon of nations with every man physically fit in {490} the army, engaging in a death grapple until one goes down in complete exhaustion, is a modern development.

[Sidenote: Sea power]

The influence of sea power upon history has become proverbial, if, indeed, it has not been overestimated since Admiral Mahan first wrote. It may be pointed out that this influence is far from a constant factor. Sea power had a considerable importance in the wars of Greece and of Rome, but in the Middle Ages it became negligible. Only with the opening of the seven seas to navigation was the command of the waves found to secure the avenues to wealth and colonial expansion. In Portugal, Spain, and England, "the blue water school" of mariners speedily created navies whose strife was apparently more decisive for the future of history than were the battles of armies on land.

When the trade routes of the Atlantic superseded those of the Mediterranean in importance, naturally methods of navigation changed, and this involved a revolution in naval warfare greater than that caused by steam or by the submarine. From the time that Helen's beauty launched a thousand ships until the battle of Lepanto, the oar had been the chief instrument of locomotion, though supplemented, even from Homeric times, by the sail. Naval battles were like those on land; the enemy keels approached and the soldiers on each strove to board and master the other's crew. The only distinctly naval tactic was that of "ramming," as it was called in a once vivid metaphor.

But the wild winds and boisterous waves of the Atlantic broke the oar in the galley-slave's hand and the muscles in his back. Once again man harnessed the hostile forces of nature; the free breezes were broken to the yoke and new types of sailing ships were driven at racing speed across the broad back of the sea. Swift, yare vessels were built, at first smaller than the {491} old galleons but infinitely more manageable. And the new boats, armed with thunder as they were clad with wings, no longer sought to sink or capture enemies at close quarters, but hurled destruction from afar. Heavy guns took the place of small weapons and of armed prow.

It was England's genius for the sea that enabled her to master the new conditions first and most completely and that placed the trident in her hands so firmly that no enemy has ever been able to wrest it from her. Henry VIII paid great attention to the navy. He had fifty-three vessels with an aggregate of 11,268 tons, an average of 200 tons each, carrying 1750 soldiers, 1250 sailors and 2085 guns. Under Elizabeth the number of vessels had sunk to 42, but the tonnage had risen to 17,055, and the crews numbered 5534 seamen, 804 gunners and 2008 soldiers. The largest ships of the Tudor navy were of 1000 tons; the flagship of the Spanish Armada was 1150 tons, carrying 46 guns and 422 men. How tiny are these figures! A single cruiser of today has a larger tonnage than the whole of Elizabeth's fleet; a large submarine is greater than the monsters of Philip.

SECTION 4. PRIVATE LIFE AND MANNERS

Of all the forces making for equality among men probably the education of the masses by means of cheap books and papers has been the strongest. But this force has been slow to ripen; at the close of the Middle Ages the common man was still helpless. The old privileged orders were indeed weakened and despoiled of part of their prerogatives, but it was chiefly by the rise of a new aristocracy, that of wealth.

[Sidenote: Nobility]

The decay of feudalism and of ecclesiastical privilege took the form of a changed and not of an abolished position for peer and priest. They were not cashiered, {492} but they were retained on cheaper terms. The feudal baron had been a petty king; his descendant had the option of becoming either a highwayman or a courtier. As the former alternative became less and less rewarding, the greater part of the old nobles abandoned their pretensions to independence and found a congenial sphere as satellities of a monarch, "le roi soleil," as a typical king was aptly called, whose beams they reflected and around whom they circled.

As titles of nobility began now to be quite commonly given to men of wealth and also to politicians, the old blood was renewed at the expense of the ancient pride. Not, indeed, that the latter showed any signs of diminishing. The arrogance of the noble was past all toleration. Men of rank treated the common citizens like dirt beneath their feet, and even regarded artists and other geniuses as menials. Alphonso, duke of Ferrara, wrote to Raphael in terms that no king would now use to a photographer, calling him a liar and chiding him for disrespect to his superior. The same duke required Ariosto to prostitute his genius by writing an apology for a fratricide committed by his grace. The duke of Mayenne poniarded one of his most devoted followers for having aspired to the hand of the duke's widowed daughter-in-law. So difficult was it to conceive of a "gentleman" without gentle blood that Castiglione, the arbiter of manners, lays down as the first prerequisite to a perfect courtier that he shall be of high birth. And of course those who had not this advantage pretended to it. An Italian in London noticed in 1557 that all gentlemen without other title insisted on being called "mister."

[Sidenote: Professions]

One sign of the break-up of the old medieval castes was the new classification of men by calling, or profession. It is true that two of the professions, the {493} higher offices in army and church, became apanages of the nobility, and the other liberal vocations were almost as completely monopolized by the children of the moneyed middle class; nevertheless it is significant that there were new roads by which men might rise. No class has profited more by the evolution of ideas than has the intelligentsia. From a subordinate, semi-menial position, lawyers, physicians, educators and journalists, not to mention artists and writers, have become the leading, almost the ruling, body of our western democracies.

[Sidenote: Clergy]

Half way between a medieval estate and a modern calling stood the clergy. In Catholic countries they remained very numerous; there were 136 episcopal or archiepiscopal sees in France; there were 40,000 parish priests, with an equal number of secular clergy in subordinate positions, 24,000 canons, 34,000 friars, 2500 Jesuits (in 1600), 12,000 monks and 80,000 nuns. Though there were doubtless many worthy men among them, it cannot honestly be said that the average were fitted either morally or intellectually for their positions. Grossly ignorant of the meaning of the Latin in which they recited their masses and of the main articles of their faith, many priests made up for these defects by proficiency in a variety of superstitious charms. The public was accustomed to see nuns dancing at bridals and priests haunting taverns and worse resorts. Some attempts, serious and partially successful, at reform, have been already described. Profane and amatory plays were forbidden in nunneries, bullfights were banished from the Vatican and the dangers of the confessional were diminished by the invention of the closed box in which the priest should sit and hear his penitent through a small aperture instead of having her kneeling at his knees. So depraved was public opinion on the subject of the confession that a {494} prolonged controversy took place in Spain as to whether minor acts of impurity perpetrated by the priest while confessing women were permissible or not.

[Sidenote: Conditions of the Protestant clergy]

Neither was the average Protestant clergyman a shining and a burning light. So little was the calling regarded that it was hard to fill it. At one time a third of the parishes of England were said to lack incumbents. The stipends were wretched; the social position obscure. The wives of the new clergy had an especially hard lot, being regarded by the people as little better than concubines, and by Parliament called "necessary evils." The English government had to issue injunctions in 1559 stating that because of the offence that has come from the type of women commonly selected as helpmates by parsons, no manner of priest or deacon should presume to marry without consent of the bishop, of the girl's parents, "or of her master or mistress where she serveth." Many clergymen, nevertheless, afterwards married domestics.

Very little was done to secure a properly trained ministry. Less than half of the 2000 clergymen ordained at Wittenberg from 1537-60 were university men; the majority were drapers, tailors and cobblers, "common idiots and laymen" as they were called—though the word "idiot" did not have quite the same disparaging sense that it has now. Nor were the reverend gentlemen of unusually high character. As nothing was demanded of them but purity of doctrine, purity of life sank into the background. It is really amazing to see how an acquaintance of Luther's succeeded in getting one church after he had been dismissed from another on well-founded charges of seduction, and how he was thereafter convicted of rape. This was perhaps an extreme case, but that the majority of clergymen were morally unworthy is the {495} melancholy conviction borne in by contemporary records.

[Sidenote: Character of sermons]

Sermons were long, doctrinal and political. Cranmer advised Latimer not to preach more than an hour and a half lest the king grow weary. How the popular preacher—in this case a Catholic—appealed to his audience, is worth quoting from a sermon delivered at Landau in 1550.

The Lutherans [began the reverend gentleman] are opposed to the worship of Mary and the saints. Now, my friends, be good enough to listen to me. The soul of a man who had died got to the door of heaven and Peter shut it in his face. Luckily, the Mother of God was taking a stroll outside with her sweet Son. The deceased addresses her and reminds her of the Paters and Aves he has recited in her glory and the candles he has burnt before her images. Thereupon Mary says to Jesus: "It's the honest truth, my Son." The Lord, however, objected and addressed the suppliant: "Hast thou never heard that I am the way and the door to life everlasting?" he asks. "If thou art the door, I am the window," retorted Mary, taking the "soul" by the hair and flinging it through the open casement. And now I ask you whether it is not the same whether you enter Paradise by the door or by the window?

There was a naive familiarity with sacred things in our ancestors that cannot be imitated. Who would now name a ship "Jesus," as Hawkins's buccaneering slaver was named? What serious clergyman would now compare three of his friends to the Father, the Son and the Holy Ghost, as did Luther? The Reformer also wrote a satire on the calling of a council, in the form of a letter from the Holy Ghost signed by Gabriel as notary and witnessed by Michael the Provost of Paradise and Raphael, God's Court Physician. At another time he made a lampoon on the collection of {496} relics made by his enemy the Archbishop of Mayence, stating that they contained such things as "a fair piece of Moses' left horn, a whole pound of the wind that blew for Elijah in the cave on Mount Horeb and two feathers and an egg of the Holy Ghost" as a dove. All this, of course, not in ribald profanity, but in works intended for edification. . . .

[Sidenote: The city]

Though beautiful, the city of our ancestors was far from admirable in other ways. Filth was hidden under its comely garments, so that it resembled a Cossack prince—all ermine and vermin. Its narrow streets, huddled between strong walls, were over-run with pigs and chickens and filled with refuse. They were often ill-paved, flooded with mud and slush in winter. Moreover they were dark and dangerous at night, infested with princes and young nobles on a spree and with other criminals.

[Sidenote: The house]

Like the exterior, the interior of the house of a substantial citizen was more pretty than clean or sweet smelling. The high wainscoting and the furniture, in various styles, but frequently resembling what is now known as "mission," was lovely, as were the ornaments—tapestries, clocks, pictures and flowers. But the place of carpets was supplied by rushes renewed from time to time without disturbing the underlying mass of rubbish beneath. Windows were fewer than they are now, and fires still fewer. Sometimes there was an open hearth, sometimes a huge tile stove. Most houses had only one or two rooms heated, sometimes, as in the case of the Augustinian friary at Wittenberg, only the bathroom, but usually also the living room.

[Sidenote: Dress]

The dress of the people was far more various and picturesque than nowadays. Both sexes dressed in gaudy colors and delighted in strange fashions, so that, {497} is Roger Ascham said, "he thought himself most brave that was most monstrous in misorder." For women the fashion of decollete was just coming in, as so many fashions do, from the demi-monde. To Catharine de' Medici is attributed the invention of the corset, an atrocity to be excused only by her own urgent need of one.

[Sidenote: Food]

The day began at five in summer and at seven in winter. A heavy breakfast was followed by a heavier dinner at ten, and supper at five, and there were between times two or three other tiffins or "drinkings." The staple food was meat and cereal; very few of our vegetables were known, though some were just beginning to be cultivated. [Sidenote: 1585-6] The most valuable article of food introduced from the new world was the potato. Another importation that did not become thoroughly acclimatized in Europe was the turkey. Even now they are rare, but there are several interesting allusions to them in the literature of that time, one of the year 1533 in Luther's table talk. Poultry of other sorts was common, as were eggs, game and fish. The cooking relied for its highest effects on sugar and spices. The ordinary fruits—apples, cherries and oranges—furnished a wholesome and pleasing variety to the table. Knives and spoons were used in eating, but forks were unknown, at least in northern Europe.

[Sidenote: Drink]

All the victuals were washed down with copious potations. A water-drinker, like Sir Thomas More, was the rarest of exceptions. The poor drank chiefly beer and ale; the mildest sort, known as "small beer," was recommended to the man suffering from too strong drink of the night before. Wine was more prized, and there were a number of varieties. There being no champagne, Burgundy was held in high esteem, as were some of the strong, sweet, Spanish and Portuguese {498} wines. The most harmless drinks were claret and Rhine wine. There were some "mixed drinks," such as sack or hippocras, in which beer or wine was sophisticated with eggs, spices and sugar. The quantities habitually drunk were large. Roger Ascham records that Charles V drank the best he ever saw, never less than a quart at a draft. The breakfast table of an English nobleman was set out with a quart of wine and a quart of beer, liquor then taking the place of tea, coffee, chocolate and all the "soft" beverages that now furnish stimulation and sociability.

[Sidenote: Tobacco, 1573]

"In these times," wrote Harrison, "the taking-in of the smoke of an Indian herb called 'Tobaco' by an instrument formed like a little ladle . . . is greatly taken up and used in England against rewmes [colds] and some other diseases." Like other drugs, tobacco soon came to be used as a narcotic for its own sake, and was presently celebrated as "divine tobacco" and "our holy herb nicotian" by the poets. What, indeed, are smoking, drinking, and other wooings of pure sensation at the sacrifice of power and reason, but a sort of pragmatized poetry? Some ages, and those the most poetical, like that of Pericles and that of Rabelais, have deified intoxication and sensuality; others, markedly our own, have preferred the accumulation of wealth and knowledge to sensual indulgence. It is a psychological contrast of importance.

Could we be suddenly transported on Mr. Wells's time machine four hundred years back we should be less struck by what our ancestors had than by what they lacked. Quills took the place of fountain pens, pencils, typewriters and dictaphones. Not only was postage dearer but there were no telephones or telegrams to supplement it. The world's news of yesterday, which we imbibe with our morning cup, then sifted down slowly through various media of {499} communication, mostly oral. It was two months after the battle before Philip of Spain knew the fate of his own Armada. The houses had no steam heat, no elevators; the busy housewife was aided by no vacuum cleaner, sewing machine and gas ranges; the business man could not ride to his office, nor the farmer to his market, in automobiles. There were neither railways nor steamships to make travel rapid and luxurious.

[Sidenote: Travel]

Nevertheless, journeys for purposes of piety, pleasure and business were common. Pilgrimages to Jerusalem, Rome, Compostella, Loretto, Walsingham and many other shrines were frequent in Catholic countries. Students were perpetually wandering from one university to another: merchants were on the road, and gentlemen felt the attractions of sight-seeing. The cheap and common mode of locomotion was on foot. Boats on the rivers and horses on land furnished the alternatives. The roads were so poor that the horses were sometimes "almost shipwrecked." The trip from Worms to Rome commonly took twelve days, but could be made in seven. Xavier's voyage from Lisbon to Goa took thirteen months. Inns were good in France and England; less pleasant elsewhere. Erasmus particularly abominated the German inns, where a large living and dining room would be heated to a high temperature by a stove around which travelers would dry their steaming garments. The smells caused by those operations, together with the fleas and mice with which the poorer inns were infested, made the stay anything but luxurious. Any complaint was met by the retort, "If you don't like it, go somewhere else," a usually impracticable alternative. When the traveller was escorted to his bedroom, he found it very cold in winter, though the featherbeds kept him warm enough. He would see his chamber filled with other beds occupied by his travelling companions of both {500} sexes, and he himself was often forced to share his bed with a stranger. The custom of the time was to take one bath a week. For this there were public bath-houses, [Sidenote: Baths] frequented by both sexes. A common form of entertainment was the "bath-party."

[Sidenote: Sports]

With the same insatiable gusto that they displayed in other matters the contemporaries of Luther and Shakespeare went in for amusements. Never has the theater been more popular. Many sports, like bear-baiting and bull-baiting, were cruel. Hunting was also much relished, though humane men like Luther and More protested against the "silly and woeful beastes' slaughter and murder." Tennis was so popular that there were 250 courts in Paris alone. The game was different from the modern in that the courts were 121 feet long, instead of 78 feet, and the wooden balls and "bats"—as racquets are still called in England—were much harder. Cards and dice were passionately played, a game called "triumph" or "trump" being the ancestor of our whist. Chess was played nearly as now.

Young people loved dances and some older people shook their heads over them, then as now. Melanchthon danced, at the age of forty-four, and Luther approved of such parties, properly chaperoned, as a means of bringing young people together. On the other hand dances were regulated in many states and prohibited in others, like Zurich and Geneva. Some of the dances were quite stately, like the minuet, others were boisterous romps, in which the girls were kissed, embraced and whirled around giddily by their partners. The Scotch ambassador's comment that Queen Elizabeth "danced very high" gives an impression of agility that would hardly now be considered in the best taste.

[Sidenote: Manners]

The veneer of courtesy was thin. True, humanists, {501} publicists and authors composed for each other eulogies that would have been hyperboles if addressed to the morning stars singing at the dawn of creation, but once a quarrel had been started among the touchy race of writers and a spouting geyser of inconceivable scurrility burst forth. No imagery was too nasty, no epithet too strong, no charge too base to bring against an opponent. The heroic examples of Greek and Roman invective paled before the inexhaustible resources of learned billingsgate stored in the minds of the humanists and theologians. To accuse an enemy of atheism and heresy was a matter of course; to add charges of unnatural vice or, if he were dead, stories of suicide and of the devils hovering greedily over his deathbed, was extremely common. Even crowned heads exchanged similar amenities.

Withal, there was growing up a strong appreciation of the merits of courtesy. Was not Bayard, the captain in the army of Francis I a "knight without fear and without reproach"? Did not Sir Philip Sidney do one of the perfect deeds of gentleness when, dying on the battle field and tortured with thirst, he passed his cup of water to a common soldier with the simple words, "Thy need is greater than mine"? One of the most justly famous and most popular books of the sixteenth century was Baldessare Castiglione's Book of the Courtier, called by Dr. Johnson the best treatise on good breeding ever written. Published in Italian in 1528, it was translated into Spanish in 1534, into French in 1537, into English and Latin in 1561, and finally into German in 1566. There have been of it more than 140 editions. It sets forth an ideal of a Prince Charming, a man of noble birth, expert in games and in war, brave, modest, unaffected, witty, an elegant speaker, a good dancer, familiar with literature and accomplished in music, as well as a man of honor {502} and courtesy. It is significant that this ideal appealed to the time, though it must be confessed it was rarely reached. Ariosto, to whom the first book was dedicated by the author, depicts, as his ideals, knights in whom the sense of honor has completely replaced all Christian virtues. They were always fighting each other about their loves, much like the bulls, lions, rams and dogs to whom the poet continually compares them. Even the women were hardly safe in their company.

Sometimes a brief anecdote will stamp a character as no long description will do. The following are typical of the manners of our forbears:

One winter morning a stately matron was ascending the steps of the church of St. Gudule at Brussels. They were covered with ice; she slipped and took a precipitate and involuntary seat. In the anguish of the moment, a single word, of mere obscenity, escaped her lips. When the laughing bystanders, among whom was Erasmus, helped her to her feet, she beat a hasty retreat, crimson with shame. Nowadays ladies do not have such a vocabulary at their tongue's end.

The Spanish ambassador Enriquez de Toledo was at Rome calling on Imperia de Cugnatis, a lady who, though of the demi-monde, lived like a princess, cultivated letters and art, and had many poets as well as many nobles among her friends. Her floors were carpeted with velvet rugs, her walls hung with golden cloth, and her tables loaded with costly bric-a-brac. The Spanish courtier suddenly turned and spat copiously in the face of his lackey and then explained to the slightly startled company that he chose this objective rather than soil the splendor he saw around him. The disgusting act passed for a delicate and successful flattery.

[Sidenote: 1538]

Among the students at Wittenberg was a certain Simon Lemchen, or Lemnius, a lewd fellow of the baser {503} sort who published two volumes of scurrilous epigrams bringing unfounded and nasty charges against Luther, Melanchthon and the other Reformers and their wives. When he fled the city before he could be arrested, Luther revenged himself partly by a Catilinarian sermon, partly by composing, for circulation among his friends, some verses about Lemnius in which the scurrility and obscenity of the offending youth were well over-trumped. One would be surprised at similar measures taken by a professor of divinity today.

[Sidenote: Morals]

In measuring the morals of a given epoch statistics are not applicable; or, at any rate, it is probably true that the general impression one gets of the moral tone of any period is more trustworthy than would be got from carefully compiled figures. And that one does get such an impression, and a very strong one, is undeniable. Everyone has in his mind a more or less distinct idea of the ethical standards of ancient Athens, of Rome, of the Middle Ages, the Renaissance, the Puritan Commonwealth, the Restoration, the Victorian Age.

The sixteenth century was a time when morals were perhaps not much worse than they are now, but when vice and crime were more flaunted and talked about. Puritanism and prudery have nowadays done their best to conceal the corruption and indecency beneath the surface. But our ancestors had no such delicacy. The naive frankness of the age, both when it gloried in the flesh and when it reproved sin, gives a full-blooded complexion to that time that is lacking now. The large average consumption of alcohol—a certain irritant to moral maladies—and the unequal administration of justice, with laws at once savage and corruptly dispensed, must have had bad consequences.

The Reformation had no permanent discernible {504} effect on moral standards. Accompanied as it often was with a temporary zeal for righteousness, it was too often followed by a breaking up of conventional standards and an emphasis on dogma at the expense of character, that operated badly. Latimer thought that the English Reformation had been followed by a wave of wickedness. Luther said that when the devil of the papacy had been driven out, seven other devils entered to take its place, and that at Wittenberg a man was considered quite a saint who could say that he had not broken the first commandment, but only the other nine. Much of this complaint must be set down to disappointment at not reaching perfection, and over against it may be set many testimonies to the moral benefits assured by the reform.

[Sidenote: Violence]

It was an age of violence. Murder was common everywhere. On the slightest provocation a man of spirit was expected to whip out a rapier or dagger and plunge it into his insulter. The murder of unfaithful wives was an especial point of honor. Benvenuto Cellini boasts of several assassinations and numerous assaults, and he himself got off without a scratch from the law, Pope Paul III graciously protesting that "men unique in their profession, like Benvenuto, were not subject to the laws." The number of unique men must have been large in the Holy City, for in 1497 a citizen testified that he had seen more than a hundred bodies of persons foully done to death thrown into the Tiber, and no one bothered about it.

[Sidenote: Brigandage]

Brigandage stalked unabashed through the whole of Europe. By 1585 the number of bandits in the papal states alone had risen to 27,000. Sixtus V took energetic means to repress them. One of his stratagems is too characteristic to omit mentioning. He had a train of mules loaded with poisoned food and then {505} drove them along a road he knew to be infested by highwaymen, who, as he had calculated, actually took them and ate of the food, of which many died.

Other countries were perhaps less scourged by robbers, but none was free. Erasmus's praise of Henry VIII, in 1519, for having cleared his realm of free-booters, was premature. In the wilder parts, especially on the Scotch border, they were still rife. In 1529 the Armstrongs of Lidderdale, just over the border, could boast that they had burned 52 churches, besides making heavy depredations on private property. When James V took stern measures to suppress them, [Sidenote: 1532] and instituted a College of Justice for that purpose, the good law was unpopular.

Bands of old soldiers and new recruits wandered through France, Spain and the Netherlands. The worst robbers in Germany were the free knights. From their picturesque castles they emerged to pillage peaceful villages and trains of merchandise going from one walled city to another. In doing so they inflicted wanton mutilations on the unfortunate merchants whom they regarded as their natural prey. Even the greatest of them, like Francis von Sickingen, were not ashamed to "let their horses bite off travellers' purses" now and then. But it was not only the nobles who became gentlemen of the road. A well-to-do merchant of Berlin, named John Kohlhase, was robbed of a couple of horses by a Saxon squire, and, failing to get redress in the corrupt courts, threw down the gauntlet to the whole of Electoral Saxony in a proclamation that he would rob, burn and take reprisals until he was given compensation for his loss. For six years [Sidenote: 1534-40] he maintained himself as a highwayman, but was finally taken and executed in Brandenburg.

[Sidenote: Fraud]

Fraud of all descriptions was not less rampant than force. When Machiavelli reduced to a reasoned {506} theory the practice of all hypocrisy and guile, the courts of Europe were only too ready to listen to his advice. In fact, they carried their mutual attempts at deception to a point that was not only harmful to themselves, but ridiculous, making it a principle to violate oaths and to debase the currency of good faith in every possible way. There was also much untruth in private life. Unfortunately, lying in the interests of piety was justified by Luther, while the Jesuits made a soul-rotting art of equivocation.

[Sidenote: Unchastity]

The standard of sexual purity was disturbed by a reaction against the asceticism of the Middle Ages. Luther proclaimed that chastity was impossible, while the humanists gloried in the flesh. Public opinion was not scandalized by prostitution; learned men occasionally debated whether fornication was a sin, and the Italians now began to call a harlot a "courteous woman" [Sidenote: c. 1500] (courtesan) as they called an assassin a "brave man" (bravo). Augustine had said that harlots were remedies against worse things, and the church had not only winked at brothels, but frequently licensed them herself. Bastardy was no bar to hereditary right in Italy.

The Reformers tried to make a clean sweep of the "social evil." Under Luther's direction brothels were closed in the reformed cities. When this was done at Strassburg the women drew up a petition, stating that they had pursued their profession not from liking but only to earn bread, and asked for honest work. Serious attempts were made to give it to them, or to get them husbands. At Zurich and some other cities the brothels were left open, but were put under the supervision of an officer who was to see that no married men frequented them. The reformers had a strange ally in the growing fear of venereal diseases. Other countries followed Germany in their war on the prostitute. In London the public houses of ill fame {507} were closed in 1546, in Paris in 1560. An edict of July 23, 1566 commanded all prostitutes to leave Rome, but when 25,000 persons, including the women and their dependents, left the city, the loss of public revenue induced the pope to allow them to return on August 17 of the same year.

[Sidenote: Polygamy]

One of the striking aberrations of the sixteenth century, as it seems to us, was the persistent advocacy of polygamy as, if not desirable in itself, at least preferable to divorce. Divorce or annulment of marriage was not hard to obtain by people of influence, whether Catholic or Protestant, but it was a more difficult matter than it is in America now. In Scotland there was indeed a sort of trial marriage, known as "handfasting," by which the parties might live together for a year and a day and then continue as married or separate. But, beginning with Luther, many of the Reformers thought polygamy less wrong than divorce, on the biblical ground that whereas the former had been practised in the Old Testament times and was not clearly forbidden by the New Testament, divorce was prohibited save for adultery. Luther advanced this thesis as early as 1520, when it was purely theoretical, but he did not shrink from applying it on occasion. It is extraordinary what a large body of reputable opinion was prepared to tolerate polygamy, at least in exceptional cases. Popes, theologians, humanists like Erasmus, and philosophers like Bruno, all thought a plurality of wives a natural condition.

[Sidenote: Marriage]

But all the while the instincts of the masses were sounder in this respect than the precepts of their guides. While polygamy remained a freakish and exceptional practice, the passions of the age were absorbed to a high degree by monogamous marriage. Matrimony having been just restored to its proper dignity as the best estate for man, its praises were {508} sounded highly. The church, indeed, remained true to her preference for celibacy, but the Inquisition found much business in suppressing the then common opinion that marriage was better than virginity. To the Reformers marriage was not only the necessary condition of happiness to mankind, but the typically holy estate in which God's service could best be done. From all sides paeans arose celebrating matrimony as the true remedy for sin and also as the happiest estate. The delights of wedded love are celebrated equally in Luther's table talk and letters and in the poems of the Italian humanist Pontano. "I have always been of the opinion," writes Ariosto, "that without a wife at his side no man can attain perfect goodness or live without sin." "In marriage there is one mind in two bodies," says Henry Cornelius Agrippa, "one harmony, the same sorrows, the same joys, an identical will, common riches, poverty and honors, the same bed and the same table. . . . Only a husband and wife can love each other infinitely and serve each other as long as both do live, for no love is either so vehement or so holy as theirs."

The passion for marriage in itself is witnessed by the practice of widows and widowers of remarrying as soon and as often as possible. [Sidenote: Remarriage common] Luther's friend, Justus Jonas, married thrice, each time with a remark to the effect that it was better to marry than to burn. The English Bishop Richard Cox excused his second marriage, at an advanced age, by an absurd letter lamenting that he had not the gift of chastity. Willibrandis Rosenblatt married in succession Louis Keller, Oecolampadius, Capito and Bucer, the ecclesiastical eminence of her last three husbands giving her, one would think, an almost official position. Sir Thomas More married a second wife just one month after his first wife's death.

{509} [Sidenote: Treatment of wives]

Sad to relate, the wives so necessary to men's happiness were frequently ill treated after they were won. In the sixteenth century women were still treated as minors; if married they could make no will; their husbands could beat them with impunity, for cruelty was no cause for divorce. Sir Thomas More's home-life is lauded by Erasmus as a very paragon, because "he got more compliance from his wife by jokes and blandishments than most husbands by imperious harshness." One of these jokes, a customary one, was that his wife was neither pretty nor young; one of the "blandishments," I suppose, was an epigram by Sir Thomas to the effect that though a wife was a heavy burden she might be useful if she would die and leave her husband money. In Utopia, he assures us, husbands chastise their wives.

[Sidenote: Position of woman]

In the position of women various currents crossed each other. The old horror of the temptress, inherited from the early church, the lofty scorn exhibited by the Greek philosophers, mingled with strands of chivalry and a still newer appreciation of the real dignity of woman and of her equal powers. Ariosto treated women like spoiled children; the humanists delighted to rake up the old jibes at them in musty authors; the divines were hardest of all in their judgment. "Nature doth paint them forth," says John Knox of women, "to be weak, frail, impatient, feeble and foolish, and experience hath declared them to be unconstant, variable, cruel and void of the spirit of council and regimen." "If women bear children until they become sick and eventually die," preaches Luther, "that does no harm. Let them bear children till they die of it; that is what they are for." In 1595 the question was debated at Wittenberg as to whether women were human beings. The general tone was one of disparagement. An anthology might be made of the {510} proverbs recommending (a la Nietzsche) the whip as the best treatment for the sex.

But withal there was a certain chivalry that revolted against all this brutality. Castiglione champions courtesy and kindness to women on the highest and most beautiful ground, the spiritual value of woman's love. Ariosto sings:

No doubt they are accurst and past all grace That dare to strike a damsel in the face, Or of her head to minish but a hair.

Certain works like T. Elyot's Defence of Good Women and like Cornelius Agrippa's Nobility and Excellence of the Female Sex, witness a genuine appreciation of woman's worth. Some critics have seen in the last named work a paradox, like the Praise of Folly, such as was dear to the humanists. To me it seems absolutely sincere, even when it goes so far as to proclaim that woman is as superior to man as man is to beast and to celebrate her as the last and supreme work of the creation.

[Sidenote: Children]

The family was far larger, on the average, in the sixteenth century than it is now. One can hardly think of any man in this generation with as many as a dozen children; it is possible to mention several of that time with over twenty. Anthony Koberger, the famous Nuremberg printer had twenty-five children, eight by his first and seventeen by his second wife. Albert Duerer was the third of eighteen children of the same couple, of whom apparently only three reached maturity. John Colet, born in 1467, was the eldest of twenty-two brothers and sisters of whom by 1499 he was the only survivor. Of course these families were exceptional, but not glaringly so. A brood of six to twelve was a very common occurrence.

Children were brought up harshly in many families, {511} strictly in almost all. They were not expected to sit in the presence of their parents, unless asked, or to speak unless spoken to. They must needs bow and crave a blessing twice a day. Lady Jane Grey complained that if she did not do everything as perfectly as God made the world, she was bitterly taunted and presently so nipped and pinched by her noble parents that she thought herself in hell. The rod was much resorted to. And yet there was a good deal of natural affection. Few fathers have even been better to their babies than was Luther, and he humanely advised others to rely as much on reward as on punishment—on the apple as on the switch—and above all not to chastise the little ones so harshly as to make them fear or hate their parents.

The patria potestas was supposed to extend, as it did in Rome, during the adult as during the callow years. Especially did public opinion insist on children marrying according to the wishes of their parents. Among the nobility child-marriage was common, a mere form, of course, not at once followed by cohabitation. A betrothal was a very solemn thing, amounting to a definite contract. Perfect liberty was allowed the engaged couple, by law in Sweden and by custom in many other countries. All the more necessary, in the opinion of the time, to prevent youths and maidens betrothing themselves without their parents' consent.

[Sidenote: Health]

Probably the standard of health is now higher than it was then, and the average longevity greater. It is true that few epidemics have ever been more fatal than the recent influenza; and on the other hand one can point to plenty of examples of sixteenth-century men who reached a crude and green old age. Statistics were then few and unreliable. In 1905 the death-rate in London was 15.6 per thousand; in the years 1861-1880 it averaged 23 per thousand. It has been {512} calculated that this is just what the death-rate was in London in a healthy year under Elizabeth, but it must be remembered that a year without some sort of epidemic was almost exceptional.

[Sidenote: Epidemics]

Bubonic plague was pandemic at that time, and horribly fatal. Many of the figures given—as that 200,000 people perished in Moscow in 1570, 50,000 at Lyons in 1572, and 50,000 at Venice during the years 1575-7, must be gross exaggerations, but they give a vivid idea of the popular idea of the prevalent mortality. Another scourge was the sweating sickness, first noticed as epidemic in 1485 and returning in 1507, 1517, 1528 and 1551. Tuberculosis was probably as wide-spread in the sixteenth as it is in the twentieth century, but it figured less prominently on account of worse diseases and because it was seldom recognized until the last stages. Smallpox was common, unchecked as it was by vaccination, and with it were confounded a variety of zymotic diseases, such as measles, which only began to be recognized as different in the course of the sixteenth century. One disease almost characteristic of former ages, so much more prevalent was it in them, due to the more unwholesome food and drink, was the stone.

Venereal diseases became so prominent in the sixteenth century that it has often been thought that the syphilis was imported from America. This, however, has been denied by authorities who believe that it came down from classical antiquity, but that it was not differentiated from other scourges. The Latin name variola, like the English pox, was applied indiscriminately to syphilis, small-pox, chicken-pox, etc. Gonorrhea was also common. The spread of these diseases was assisted by many causes besides the prevalent moral looseness; by lack of cleanliness in public baths, for example.

{513} Useless to go through the whole roster of the plagues. Suffice it to say that whatever now torments poor mortals, from tooth-ache to cold in the head, and from rheumatism to lunacy, was known to our ancestors in aggravated forms. Deleterious was the use of alcohol, the evils of which were so little understood that it was actually prescribed for many disorders of which it is a certain irritant. Add to this the lack of sanitary measures, not only of disinfection but of common cleanliness, and the etiology of the phenomena is satisfactorily accounted for.

[Sidenote: Medicine]

If even now medicine as a science and an art seems backward compared with surgery, it has nevertheless made considerable advances since it began to be empirical. In the Middle Ages it was almost purely dogmatic; men did not ask their eyes and minds what was the nature of the human body and the effect of this or that drug on it, they asked Aristotle, or Hippocrates, or Galen or Avicenna. The chief rivalries, and they were bitter, were between the Greek and the Arabian schools. [Sidenote: c. 1550] Galenism finally triumphed just before the beginnings of experiment and research were made. The greatest name in the first half of the century was that of Theophrastus Paracelsus, [Sidenote: Paracelsus, 1493-1541] as arrant a quack as ever lived, but one who did something to break up the strangle-hold of tradition. He worked out his system a priori from a fantastic postulate of the parallelism between man and the universe, the microcosm and the macrocosm. He held that the Bible gave valuable prescriptions, as in the treatment of wounds by oil and wine.

[Sidenote: Surgery]

Under the leadership of Ambroise Pare [Sidenote: Pare, 1510-90] surgery improved rather more than medicine. Without anaesthetics, indeed, operations were difficult, but a good deal was accomplished. Pare first made amputation on a large scale possible by inventing a ligature for {514} large arteries that effectively controlled hemorrhage. This barber's apprentice, who despised the schools and wrote in the vernacular, made other important improvements in the surgeon's technique. It is noteworthy that each discovery was treated as a trade secret to be exploited for the benefit of a few practitioners and not given freely to the good of mankind.

In obstetrics Pare also made discoveries that need not be detailed here. Until his time it was almost universal for women to be attended in childbirth only by midwives of their own sex. Indeed, so strong was the prejudice on this point that women were known to die of abdominal tumors rather than allow male physicians to examine them. The admission of men to the profession of midwife marked a considerable improvement in method.

[Sidenote: Lunacy]

The treatment of lunacy was inept. The poor patients were whipped or otherwise tormented for alluding to the subject of their monomania. Our ancestors found fun in watching the antics of crazed minds, and made up parties to go to Bedlams and tease the insane. Indeed, some of the scenes in Shakespeare's plays, in which madness is depicted, and which seem tragic to us, probably had a comic value for the groundlings before whom the plays were first produced.

[Sidenote: Hospitals]

As early as 1510 Luther saw one of the hospitals at Florence. He tells how beautiful they were, how clean and well served by honorable matrons tending the poor freely all day without making known their names and at night returning home. Such institutions were the glory of Italy, for they were sadly to seek in other lands. When they were finally established elsewhere, they were too often left to the care of ignorant and evil menials. The stories one may read of the Hotel-Dieu, at Paris, are fairly hair-raising.



{515}

CHAPTER XI

THE CAPITALISTIC REVOLUTION

SECTION 1. THE RISE OF THE POWER OF MONEY

[Sidenote: Reformation and economic revolution]

Parallel with the Reformation was taking place an economic revolution even deeper and more enduring in its consequences. Both Reformation and Revolution were manifestations of the individualistic spirit of the age; the substitution, in the latter case, of private enterprise and competition for common effort as a method of producing wealth and of distributing it. Both were prepared for long before they actually upset the existing order; both have taken several centuries to unfold their full consequences, and in each the truly decisive steps were taken in the sixteenth century.

It is doubtless incorrect to see either in the Reformation or in the economic revolution a direct and simple cause of the other. They interacted and to a certain extent joined forces; but to a greater degree each sought to use the other, and each has at times been credited, or blamed, with the results of the other's operations. Contemporaries noticed the effects, mostly the bad effects, of the rise of capitalism, and often mistakenly attributed them to the Reformation; and the new kings of commerce were only too ready to hide behind the mask of Protestantism while despoiling the church. Like other historical forces, while easily separable in thought, the two movements were usually inextricably interwoven in action.

[Sidenote: Rise of capitalism]

Capitalism supplanted gild-production because of its fitness as a social instrument for the production and {516} storing of wealth. In competition with capital the medieval communism succumbed in one line of business after another—in banking, in trade, in mining, in industry and finally in agriculture—because it was unable to produce the results that capital produced. By the vast reward that the newer system gave to individual enterprise, to technical improvement and to investment, capitalism proved the aptest tool for the creation and preservation of wealth ever devised. It is true that the manifold multiplication of riches in the last four centuries is due primarily to inventions for the exploitation of natural resources, but the capitalistic method is ideally fitted for the utilization of these new discoveries and for laying up of their increment for ultimate social use. And this is an inestimable service to any society. Only a fairly rich people can afford the luxuries of beauty, knowledge, and power, that enhance the value of life and allow it to climb to ever greater heights. To balance this service, it must be taken into account that capitalism has lamentably failed justly to distribute rewards. Its tendency is to intercept the greater part of the wealth it creates for the benefit of a single class, and thereby to rob the rest of the community of their due dividend.

[Sidenote: Primary cause of the capitalistic revolution]

So delicate is the adjustment of society that an apparently trivial new factor will often upset the whole equilibrium and produce the most incalculable results. Thus, the primary cause of the capitalistic revolution appears to have been a purely mechanical one, the increase in the production of the precious metals. Wealth could not be stored at all in the Middle Ages save in the form of specie; nor without it could large commerce be developed, nor large industry financed, nor was investment possible. Moreover the rise of prices consequent on the increase of the precious metals gave a powerful stimulus to manufacture and a {517} fillip to the merchant and to the entrepreneur such as they have rarely received before or since. It was, in short, the development of the power of money that gave rise to the money power.

In the earlier Middle Ages there prevailed a "natural economy," or system in which payments were made chiefly in the form of services and by barter; this gave place very gradually to our modern "money economy" in which gold and silver are both the normal standards of value and the sole instruments of exchange. Already in the twelfth century money was being used in the towns of Western Europe; not until the late fourteenth or fifteenth did it become a dominant factor in rural life. This change was not the great revolution itself, but was the indispensable prerequisite of it, and in large part its direct cause.

[Sidenote: Money-making kings]

Gold and silver could now be hoarded in the form of money, and so the first step was taken in the formation of large fortunes, known to the ancient world, but almost absent in the Middle Ages. The first great fortunes were made by kings, by nobles with large landed estates, and by officers in government service. Henry VII left a large fortune to his son. Some of the popes and some of the princes of Germany and Italy hoarded money even when they were paying interest on a debt,—a testimony to the increasing estimate of the value of hard cash. The chief nobles were scarcely behind the kings in accumulating treasure. Their vast revenues from land were much more like government imposts than like rents. Thus Montmorency in France gave his daughter a dowry amounting to $420,000. The duke of Gandia in Spain owned estates peopled by 60,000 Moriscos and yielding a princely revenue. Vast ransoms were exacted in war, and fines, confiscation and pillage filled the coffers of the lords. After the atrocious war against the Moriscos, the duke of {518} Lerma sold their houses on his estates for 500,000 ducats.

[Sidenote: Officials]

In the monarchies of Europe the only avenue to wealth at first open to private men was the government service. Offices, benefices, naval and military commands, were bought with the expectation, often justified, of making money out of them. The farmed revenues yielded immense profit to the collectors. No small fortunes were reaped by Empson and Dudley, the tools of Henry VII, but they were far surpassed by the hoards of Wolsey and of Cromwell. Such was the great fortune made in France by Semblancay, the son of a plain merchant of Tours, who turned the offices of treasurer and superintendent of finances to such good account that he bought himself large estates and baronies. Fortunes on a proportionately smaller scale were made by the servants of the German princes, as by John Schenitz, a minion of the Archbishop Elector Albert of Mayence. So insecure was the tenure of riches accumulated in royal or princely service that most of the men who did so, including all those mentioned in this paragraph, ended on the scaffold, save, indeed, Wolsey, who would have done so had he not died while awaiting trial.

It is to be noted that, though land was the principal form of wealth in the Middle Ages, no great fortunes were made from it at the beginning of the capitalistic era, save by the titled holders of enormous domains. The small landlords suffered at the expense of the burghers in Germany, and not until these burghers turned to the country and bought up landed estates did agriculture become thoroughly profitable.

[Sidenote: Banking]

The intimate connection of government and capitalism is demonstrated by the fact that, next to officials, government concessionaires and bankers were the first to make great fortunes. At this time banking was {519} closely dependent on public loans and was therefore the first great business to be established on the capitalistic basis. The first "trust" was the money trust. Though banking had been well started in the Middle Ages, it was still in an imperfect state of development. Jews and goldsmiths made a considerable number of commercial loans but these loans were always regarded by the borrower as temporary expedients; the habitual conduct of business on borrowed capital was unknown. But, just as the new output of the German mines was increasing the supply of precious metals, the greater costliness of war, due to the substitution of mercenaries and fire-arms for feudal levies equipped with bows and pikes, made the governments of Europe need money more than ever before. They made great loans at home and abroad, and it was the interest on these that expanded the banking business until it became an international power. Well before the sixteenth century men had made a fine art of receiving deposits, loaning capital and performing other financial operations, but it was not until the late fifteenth century that the bankers reaped the full reward of their skill and of the new opportunities. The three balls in the arms of the Medici testify to the heights to which a profession, once humble, might raise its experts. In Italy the science of accounting, [Sidenote: Science of accounting] or of double-entry bookkeeping, originated; it was slowly adopted in other lands. The first English work on the subject is that by John Gouge in 1543, entitled: "A Profitable Treatyce called the Instrument or Boke to learn to know the good order of the keeping of the famouse reconnynge, called in Latin, Dare et Habere, and, in Englyshe, Debitor and Creditor." It was in Italy that modern technique of clearing bills was developed; the simple system by which balances are settled not by full payment of each debt in money, but by comparing {520} the paper certificates of indebtedness. This immense saving, as developed by the Genoese, was soon extended from their own city to the whole of Northern Italy, so that the bankers would meet several times a year in the first international clearing-house. From Genoa the same system was then applied to distant cities, with great profit, even more in security than in saving of capital. If bills payable at Antwerp were bought at Genoa, they were paid at Antwerp by selling bills on Lisbon, perhaps, and these in turn by selling exchange on Genoa. These processes seem simple and are now universal, but how vastly they facilitated the development of banking and business when first discovered can hardly be over-estimated.

From the improvement of exchange the Genoese soon proceeded to arbitrage, a transaction more profitable and more socially useful at that time when poor communications made the differences in prices between bills of exchange, bullion, coins, stocks and bonds in distant markets more considerable than they are now. The Genoese bankers also invented the first substitutes for money in the form of circulating notes. In all this, and in other ways, they made enormous profits that soon induced others to copy them.

[Sidenote: Great firms]

Though the Italians invented modern banking they were eventually surpassed by the Germans, if not in technique at least in the size of the firms established. The largest Florentine bank in 1529 was that of Thomas Guadegni with a capital of 520,000 florins ($1,170,000). The capital of the house of Fugger at Augsburg, distinct from the personal fortunes of its members, was in 1546, 4,700,000 gold gulden ($11,500,000). The average annual profits of the Fuggers during the years 1511-27 were 54.5 per cent.; from 1534-6, 2.2 per cent.; from 1540-46, 19 per cent.; from 1547-53, 5.6 per cent. Another Augsburg firm, the Welsers, averaged 9 per {521} cent. for the fifteen years 1502-17. Dividends were not declared annually, but a general casting up of accounts was made every few years and a new balance struck, each partner withdrawing as much as he wished, or leaving it to be credited to his account as new capital.

[Sidenote: Risks of banking]

Though the Fuggers and other firms soon went into large business of all sorts, they remained primarily bankers. As such they enjoyed boundless credit with the public from whom they received deposits at regular interest. The proportion of these deposits to the capital continually rose. This general tendency, together with the habit of changing the amount of capital every few years, is evident from the following table of the liabilities of the Fuggers in gold gulden at several different periods:

Year Capital Deposits 1527 . . . . . . . 2,000,000 290,000 1536 . . . . . . . 1,500,000 900,000 1546 . . . . . . . 4,700,000 1,300,000 1563 . . . . . . . 2,000,000 3,100,000 1577 . . . . . . . 1,300,000 4,000,000

A smaller Augsburg firm, the Haugs, had in 1560, a capital of 140,000 florins and deposits of 648,000. As all these deposits were subject to be withdrawn at sight, and as the firms usually kept a very small reserve of specie, it would seem that banking was subject to great risks. The unsoundness of the method was counterbalanced by the fact that most of the deposits were made by members of the banker's family, or by friends, who harbored a strong sentiment against embarrassing the bank by withdrawing at inconvenient seasons. Doubtless the almost uniformly profitable career of most firms for many years concealed many dangers.

The crash came finally as the result of the bankruptcy {522} of the Spanish and French governments. [Sidenote: Bankruptcy of France and Spain, 1557] Spain's repudiation of her debt was partial, taking the form of consolidation and conversion; France, however, simply stopped all payments of interest and amortization. Many banks throughout Europe failed, and drew down with them their creditors. The years 1557-64 saw the first of these characteristically modern phenomena, international financial crises. There were hard times everywhere. Other states followed the example of the French and Spanish governments, England constituting the fortunate exception. Recovery followed at length, however, and speculation boomed; but a second Spanish state bankruptcy [Sidenote: 1575] brought on another crisis, and there was a third, following the defeat of the Armada. The failure of many of the great private companies was followed by the institution of state banks. The first to be erected was the Banco di Rialto in Venice. [Sidenote: 1587]

The banks were the agencies for the spread of the capitalistic system to other fields. The great firms either bought up, or obtained as concessions from some government, the natural resources requisite for the production of wealth. One of the very first things seized by them were the mines. [Sidenote: Mining] Indeed, the profitable exploitation of the German mines especially dates from their acquisition by the Fuggers and other bankers late in the fifteenth century. Partly by the development of new methods of refining ore, but chiefly by driving large numbers of laborers to their maximum effort, the new mine-owners increased the production of metal almost at a bound, and thereby poured untold wealth into their own coffers. The total value of metals produced in Germany in 1525 amounted to $4,800,000 per annum, and employed over 100,000 men. Until 1545 the German production of silver was greater than the American, and copper was almost as valuable {523} a product. Notwithstanding its increased production, its value doubled between 1527 and 1557. The shares in these great companies were, like the "Fugger letters," or certificates of interest-bearing deposits in banks, assignable and were actively traded in on various bourses. Each share was a certificate of partnership which then carried with it unlimited liability for the debts of the company. One of the favorite speculative issues was found in the shares of the Mansfeld Copper Co., established in 1524 with a capital of 70,000 gulden, which was increased to 120,000 gulden in 1528.

[Sidenote: Commerce]

Whereas, in banking and in mining, capital had almost created the opportunities for its employment, in commerce it partly supplanted the older system and partly entered into new paths. In the Middle Ages domestic, and to some extent international, commerce was carried on by fairs adapted to bring producer and consumer together and hence reduce the functions of middleman to the narrowest limits. Such was the annual fair at Stourbridge; such the famous bookmart at Frankfort-on-the-Main, and such were the fairs in Lyons, Antwerp, and many other cities. Only in the larger towns was a market perpetually open. Foreign commerce was also carried on by companies formed on the analogy of the medieval gilds.

New conditions called for fresh means of meeting them. The great change in sea-borne trade effected by the discovery of the new routes to India and America, was not so much in the quantity of goods carried as in the paths by which they traveled. The commerce of the two inland seas, the Mediterranean and the Baltic, relatively declined, while that of the Atlantic seaboard grew by leaps and bounds. New and large companies came into existence, formed on the joint-stock principle. Over them the various governments exercised a large control, giving them a semi-political character.

{524} [Sidenote: Portugal]

As Portugal was the first to tap the wealth of the gorgeous East, into her lap fell the stream of gold from that quarter. The secret of her windfall was the small bulk and enormous value of her cargoes. From Malabar she fetched pepper and ginger, from Ceylon cinnamon and pearls, from Bengal opium, the only known conqueror of pain, and with it frankincense and indigo. Borneo supplied camphor, Amboyna nutmegs and mace, and two small islands, Temote and Tidor, offered cloves. These products sold for forty times as much in London or in Antwerp as they cost in the Orient. No wonder that wealth came in a gale of perfume to Lisbon. The cost of the ship and of the voyage, averaging two years from departure to return, was $20,000, and any ship might bring back a cargo worth $750,000. But the risks were great. Of the 104 ships that sailed from 1497-1506 only 72 returned. In the following century of about 800 Portuguese vessels engaged in the India trade nearly one-eighth were lost. Even the risk of loss in sailing from Lisbon to the ports of northern Europe was appreciable. The king of Portugal insured ships on a voyage from Lisbon to Antwerp for a premium of six per cent.

[Sidenote: Spain]

Spain found the path towards the setting sun as golden as Portugal had found the reflection of his rising beams. At her height she had a thousand merchant galleons. The chief imports were the precious metals, but they were not the only ones. Cochineal, selling at $370 a hundredweight in London, surpassed in value any spice from Celebes. Dye-wood, ebony, some drugs, nuts and a few other articles richly repaid importation. There was also a very considerable export trade. Cadiz and Seville sent to the Indies annually 2,240,000 gallons of wine, with quantities of oil, clothes and other necessities. Many ships, not {525} only Spanish but Portuguese and English, were weighted with human flesh from Africa as heavily as Christian with his black load of sin, and in the case of Portugal, at least, the load almost sent its bearer to the City of Destruction.

But Spanish keels made other wakes than westward. To Flanders oil and wool were sent to be exchanged for manufactured wares, tapestries and books. Italy asked hides and dyes in return for her brocades, pearls and linen. The undoubtedly great extent of Spanish commerce even in places where it had no monopoly, is all the more remarkable in that it was at the first burdened by what in the end choked it, government regulation. Cadiz had the best harbor, but Seville was favored by the king; even ships allowed to unload at Cadiz could do so only on condition that their cargoes be transported directly to Seville. A particularly crushing tax was the alcabala, or 10 per cent. impost on all sales. Other import duties, royalties on metals, excise on food, monopolies, and petty regulations finally handicapped Spain's merchants so effectually that they fell behind those of other countries in the race for supremacy.

[Sidenote: France]

As the mariners of the Iberian peninsula drooped under the shackles of unwise laws, hardy sailors sprang into their places. Neither of the other Latin nations, however, was able to do so. The once proud supremacy of Venice and of Genoa was gone; the former sank as Lisbon rose and the latter, who held her own at least as a money market until 1540, was about that time surpassed, though she was never wholly superseded, by Antwerp. Italy exported wheat, flax, woad and other products, but chiefly by land routes or in foreign keels. Nor was France able to take any great part in maritime trade. Content with the freight brought her by other nations, she sent out few {526} expeditions, and those few, like that of James Cartier, had no present result either in commerce or in colonies. Her greatest mart was Lyons, the fairs there being carefully fostered by the kings and being naturally favored by the growth of manufacture, while the maritime harbors either declined or at least gained nothing. For a few years La Rochelle battened on religious piracy, but that was all.

[Sidenote: Germany]

In no country is the struggle for existence between the medieval and the modern commercial methods plainer than in Germany. The trade of the Hanse towns failed to grow, partly for the reason that their merchants had not command of the fluid wealth that raised to pre-eminence the southern cities. There were, indeed, other causes for the decline of the Hanseatic Baltic trade. The discovery of new routes, especially the opening of Archangel on the White Sea, short-circuited the current that had previously flowed through the Kattegat and the Skager Rak. Moreover, the development of both wheat-growing and of commerce in the Netherlands and in England proved disastrous to the Hanse. The shores of the Baltic had at one time been the granary of Europe, but they suffered somewhat by the greater yield of the more intensive agriculture introduced at that time elsewhere. Even then their export continued to be considerable, though diverted from the northern to the southern ports of Europe. In 1563, for example, 6630 loads of grain were exported from Koenigsberg, and in 1573 7730 loads.

The Hanse towns lost their English trade in competition with the new companies there formed. A bitter diplomatic struggle was carried on by Henry VIII. The privileges to the Germans of the Steelyard confirmed and extended by him were abridged by his son, partly restored by Mary and again taken {527} away by Elizabeth. The emperor, in agreement with the cities' senates, started retaliatory measures against English merchants, endeavoring to assure the Hanse towns that they should at least "continue the ancient concord of their dear native country and the good Dutches that now presently inhabit it." He therefore ordered English merchants banished, against which Elizabeth protested.

While the North of Germany was suffering from its failure to adapt itself to new conditions, a power was rising in the South capable of levying tribute not only from the whole Empire but from the habitable earth. Among the merchant princes who, in Augsburg, in Nuremberg, in Strassburg, placed on their own brows the golden crown of riches, the Fuggers were both typical and supreme. James Fugger "the Rich," [Sidenote: James Fugger, 1459-1525] springing from a family already opulent, was one of those geniuses of finance that turn everything touched into gold. He carried on a large banking business, he loaned money to emperors and princes, he bought up mines and fitted out fleets, he re-organized great industries, he speculated in politics and religion. For the princes of the empire he farmed taxes; for the pope he sold indulgences at a 33 1/3 per cent. commission, and collected annates and other dues. In Hungary, in Spain, in Italy, in the New World, his agents were delving for money and skilfully diverting it into his coffers. He was also a pillar of the church and a philanthropist, founding a library at Augsburg and building model tenements for poor workers. He became the incarnation of a new Great Power, that of international finance. A contemporary chronicler says: "emperors, kings, princes and governors have sent ambassage unto him; the pope hath greeted him as his beloved son and hath embraced him; cardinals have risen before him. . . . He hath become the glory {528} of the whole German land." His sons, Raymond, Anthony and Jerome, were raised by Charles V to the rank and privileges of counts, bannerets and barons.

Throughout the century corporations became less and less family partnerships and more and more impersonal or "soulless." They were semi-public, semi-private affairs, resting on special charters and actively promoted, not only in Germany but in England and other countries, by the emperor, king, or territorial prince. On the other hand the capital was largely subscribed by private business men and the direction of the companies' affairs was left in their hands. Liability was unlimited.

[Sidenote: Monopolies]

In their methods many of the sixteenth century corporations were surprisingly "modern." Monopolies, corners, trusts and agreements to keep up prices flourished, notwithstanding constant legislation against them, as that against secret schedules of prices passed by the Diet of Nuremberg. [Sidenote: 1522-33] Particularly noteworthy were the number of agreements to create a monopoly price in metals. [Sidenote: 1524] Thus a ring of German mine-owners was formed artificially to raise the price of silver, a measure defended publicly on the ground that it enriched Germany at the expense of the foreigner. Another example was the formation of a tinning company under the patronage of Duke George of Saxony. [Sidenote: 1518] It proposed agreements with its Bohemian rivals to fix the price of tin, [Sidenote: 1549] but these usually failed even after a monopoly of Bohemian tin had been granted by Ferdinand to Conrad Mayr of Augsburg.

[Sidenote: Corners]

The immense difficulty of cornering any of the larger articles of commerce was not so well appreciated in the earlier time as it is now. Nothing is more instructive than the history of the mercury "trusts" of those years. [Sidenote: 1523] When the competing companies owning mines at Idria in Carniola amalgamated for the purpose of {529} enhancing the price of quicksilver, the attempt broke down by reason of the Spanish mines. Accordingly, one Ambrose Hoechstetter of Augsburg [Sidenote: 1528] conceived the ambitious project of cornering the whole supply of the world. As has happened so often since, the higher price brought forth a much larger quantity of the article than had been reckoned with, the so-called "invisible supply"; the corner broke down and Hoechstetter failed with enormous liabilities of 800,000 gulden, and died in prison. The crash shook the financial world, but was nevertheless followed by still better planned and better financed efforts of the Fuggers to put the whole quicksilver product of the world into an international trust. These final attempts were more or less successful. Another ambitious scheme, which failed, was that of Conrad Rott of Augsburg [Sidenote: 1570 ff.] to get a monopoly of pepper. He agreed to buy six hundred tons of pepper from the king of Portugal one year and one thousand tons the next, at the rate of 680 ducats the ton, but even this failed to give him the desired monopoly.