To the northeast, traders from Italy penetrated the Black Sea to draw grain, fish, salt, and slaves from the Crimean Peninsula. Farther east still, they traveled to Azerbaijan, the Caspian Sea, and China. “The road from Tana [on the Sea of Azov] to Cathay,” a Tuscan merchant’s handbook told its readers, “is quite safe by day and by night according to the merchants who report having followed it.” Indeed, in the first half of the 14th century there were Italian merchant colonies (with husbands taking their wives along) and seven Italian missionary bishops in China.
In the West too, Italian commerce expanded its empire. The introduction of the compass to the Mediterranean, leading to new marine charts (the portolani, the earliest survivors of which date back to the 1290s), gave new wings to maritime daring. From at least 1277 the Genoese and from 1314 the Venetians sent annual galley convoys through the Strait of Gibraltar and thence, on a compass setting, across the Bay of Biscay to English and Flemish ports. Out into the Atlantic, Genoese navigators visited the Canary Islands. At the same time, shipbuilding technology advanced during the 14th century. Trireme galleys expanded from 50 to sometimes 150 tons, and Italian ports began to employ the cog, a square-sailed vessel capable of carrying 150 slaves and ideal for bulk cargoes. Meanwhile in banking, the most prominent of financial houses to extend their operations beyond the Alps were the Bonsignori company of Siena and the Florentine houses of the Acciaiuoli (with 53 branches throughout Europe), the Peruzzi (83 branches), and the Bardi (even larger than the Peruzzi). Within Tuscany again, beginning in the 14th century, the manufacture of textiles became a major industry.
Growth accompanied changes in the character of commerce. Resident capitalists emerged who held a tight grip on far-flung agents through a network of correspondence, and new mercantile techniques developed in which Italians could boast primacy—account books with Arabic numerals, double-entry bookkeeping, marine insurance, bills of lading, bills of exchange, and a mature law of the sea and law of commerce. The expansion of commerce was uneven; it was rudimentary in the south, and even in central and northern Italy most towns were no more than small market centres for the surrounding countryside. Nevertheless, the major commercial centres in the opening decades of the 14th century sustained an economy that was never again to expand so fast and be, in relation to the rest of Europe, so powerful. Famine, war, and plague (1340–80)
Italy’s thriving economy soon confronted severe challenges. Among these, first, were famines, which affected most of Italy in the years 1339–40, 1346–47, 1352–53, and 1374–75, and a general expansion and intensification of war compounded these catastrophes. The 13th century saw the diffusion of the crossbow, whose bolt far surpassed the arrow of the longbow in its power to penetrate. The crossbow obliged mounted knights to adopt heavier armour for better protection. Hence arose the need for stronger and more-numerous horses. Such technical developments began to make the practice of warfare much more expensive and professional, and in these circumstances mercenary troops came increasingly to supplement and then often to replace the old citizen militias. In the 14th century, Italian states raised these troops in ever larger numbers not by hiring individuals but by drawing up a condotta (contract) with a condottiere (contractor), who would engage to bring a band of up to several thousand soldiers in time of war to the aid of a commune or kingdom.
Stirrup crossbow, French, 14th centuryCourtesy of the West Point Museum Collections, United States Military Academy
Given the difficulties of securing political control over Italian military leaders (who might, it was feared, take over the state), it became common, beginning in the 1330s, to negotiate with non-Italian condottieri. Their forces rapidly grew to immense size. In the 1350s “The Great Company,” founded by Werner of Urslingen, comprised some 10,000 troops and 20,000 camp followers and had its own government, consultative council, bureaucracy, and foreign policy. Throughout the 1360s and ’70s these “mobile states”—for example, the companies of the Englishman Sir John Hawkwood and the Germans Albrecht Sterz and Hannekin Baumgarten—dominated war in Italy, and in times of peace they were all too likely to subject their former employers to a variety of blackmailing threats.
These changes in the practice of war went hand in hand with a considerable expansion in the power of governments. The weak, decentralized communes of the 13th century, with comparatively primitive administration and very light taxation, gave way in the 14th century to republics and signorie with much stronger political control and exclusive new means of fiscal exploitation. States raised revenues through property taxes, gabelle (e.g., taxes on contracts, sales, transport of goods into and out of town), and forced loans (prestanze), while they developed sophisticated measures, including the consolidation of state debts into a form of national debt, to service long-term deficit financing. At Florence, for example, where from 1345 state debtors were issued securities at 5 percent interest, negotiable in the open market, revenues rose from around 130,000 florins in the 1320s to more than 400,000 florins in the 1360s.
Such innovations—fruit of the interrelated needs of food provision, war, and taxation—brought about considerable growth in bureaucratic institutions and in the number of administrative officials. At the same time, however, these innovations allowed war to be waged on a larger scale, and states increasingly diverted productive wealth into war. That is, these innovations helped cause the setbacks that occurred in many sectors of the economy during the 1340s. In that decade, with trade already disrupted by the beginning of the Hundred Years’ War in France, the overextension of Italian (particularly Florentine) banks became clear. In 1343 the Peruzzi company collapsed, in 1345 the Acciaiuoli, and in 1346 the Bardi.
Still more disastrous was the arrival from the east of the Black Death. Galleys and cogs brought the plague in its bubonic and pneumonic forms to Messina in early October 1347. By January 1348 it had reached Genoa and Pisa, by February Venice. From these ports it spread throughout the peninsula and on to the rest of Europe. Estimates of the death toll vary between one-third and one-half of the population. Yet the effects were not confined to 1348, as plague was henceforth rooted in Italy. Although slackening in its power and appearing more sporadically, the disease returned to many parts of the peninsula, in both town and countryside, in 1361–62, 1363, 1371, 1373–74, 1382–83, 1398–1400, 1407, and 1410–12. Thereafter it continued as a town disease in individual, sporadic, but continually threatening assaults up to the 18th century.
The second pandemic of the Black Death in Europe (1347–51)