Marks of Opulence: The Why, When and Where of Western Art 1000–1914

CHAPTER THREE Recession and Renaissance

‘Civilization both in the East and the West was visited by a destructive plague’, wrote Ibn Khaldun of the first onset of the Black Death, ‘which devastated nations and caused populations to vanish. It swallowed up many of the good things of civilization and wiped them out … The entire inhabited world changed.’1 He was right, of course. Yet he could not have known, as a contemporary witness of the Great Pestilence, just how long-lasting those changes would prove to be. Reduced by at least a third in 1347–50, Europe’s populations either stabilized at that level for the next 150 years or fell still further. And while some of that reduction was arguably inevitable – a necessary purge following centuries of growth, bringing people and resources back in balance – what followed was a recovery so sluggish and so unequal as to put a blight on the economy for generations. Downsizing a labour force is effective only if what is left provides a springboard for future growth. Yet there was to be little growth of any kind before the 1480s at earliest. And the real tragedy of the Black Death, in the longue durée, was Western society’s lamentable failure to rebuild.

That failure was more complete in some localities than in others. Norway, at one extreme, lost 64 per cent of its pre-plague population between 1348 and 1500; whereas England, over the same period, lost nearer 50 per cent, and others went down by just a third. These are estimates only, of which the accuracy has often been disputed. But even if wrong in detail, what the figures clearly show are conspicuously low replacement rates across the population as a whole, frequently barely adequate for survival. The most successful urbanized economies of the first half of the fifteenth century were Burgundian Flanders and Republican Florence. Both were especially attractive to skilled immigrants and, in part as a result, became the leading contemporary capitals of the arts. Yet the population of the Flemish cities, for all the magnetism of their wealth, continued to drift downwards through much of the fifteenth century, with no recovery of any substance before the end of it. And in Florence likewise, whereas population losses had bottomed out by the 1420s, there was then no upward movement for half a century at least, so that there were still markedly fewer Florentines in 1500 than there had been in 1347.

A severe and exceptionally long-lasting demographic collapse was thus the shared experience of almost all late-medieval communities in the West. And very little of what happened after the Black Death makes sense without reference to the pestilence. However, bubonic plague was just one element of a general retreat which, while certainly triggered by the Black Death in 1347–50, very rapidly developed its own momentum. That first outbreak of the disease had killed huge numbers, with some death-counts rising as high as 80 per cent even in remote rural communities. While increasingly an urban phenomenon, killer plagues then returned repeatedly for over three centuries before vanishing unaccountably in the 1700s. Yet plague was never the only – nor even the principal – population curb in the Western towns and cities it most afflicted. In late-medieval Europe, it was less bacteria that frustrated growth than full employment.

In practice, plague survivors were in great demand in every sort of occupation, and the jobs-for-all bonanza of the Black Death’s aftermath was self-perpetuating. Working women, in what is sometimes seen as their original ‘Golden Age’, were free at last to choose when to stop work and start a family. And in opting to marry later, only then setting up households of their own, they also cut the numbers of their children. Europe has many cultures, and neither the marriage patterns nor the household formation systems of North and South were then – or have ever been – the same. But whereas Mediterranean brides continued to find their partners before the age of twenty-one, post-plague northerners usually waited until their mid-twenties to make a match, and not infrequently stayed single out of choice. Where women married late and were prone to die in childbirth, where infant mortality was chronically high, where breast-feeding postponed conception for two years or more, and where life expectations, already low before the plague, fell still further, populations soon stopped growing. In short, the key demographic variable after the Black Death was arguably not mortality but nuptiality.

‘People are not poor because they have large families’, wrote a student of household systems in modern India. ‘Quite the contrary, they have large families because they are poor.’2 And, in contrast, it was the relative affluence of individual plague survivors – and particularly, in this context, of independent farmers and their wives – which enabled them to settle for smaller nuclear families with fewer children. Traditional extended family systems, while still very much alive in the Third World today, were dying out in north-west Europe by 1400. And those comfortably-off English yeomen and their womenfolk who built the solid oak-framed farmhouses of the fifteenth-century Kentish Weald, were never in the business of offering accommodation to all and sundry. In their big open halls – relics of a life-style once entirely led in common – the uncles and aunts, nephews and nieces, grandparents, in-laws and cousins far and near, came together only, as it were, for Sunday lunches.

It was thus high levels of employment and good wages in the West which enabled that critical threshold to be crossed between a ‘situation where people cannot afford not to have children [and] one where they cannot afford to have many of them.’3 And paradoxical though it may sound, it was this new post-plague prosperity that, by discouraging large families, helped put off demographic recovery. Another token of private affluence, of which the outcome was the same, was the single-person household of the unmarried working woman or merry widow. In Florence in 1427, one in four adult women were widows, and many had doubtless chosen to remain in that condition, coming to view the death of older spouses as liberation: ‘as if a heavy yoke of servitude (un grave giogo di servitu) had been lifted from their backs’, observed Lodovico Dolce in the next century.4

Ensnared by Mamma’s cooking, Florence’s affluent bachelors had been reluctant to leave home before their early thirties, or even later. And fathers who had married tardily were another obvious reason why European city populations, even before the plague, had always found it difficult to replace themselves. Traditionally, the gap had been filled by immigration from rural areas. But whereas new recruitment remained steady in the half-century following the Black Death, as the smaller and more marginal settlements lost out to the towns, that pool was drying up by 1400. Newly prosperous peasant families, with too much land at their disposal and too little labour of their own, remained (and kept their children) in their localities. For if the populations of big cities risked extinction in post-plague times, so too – and often more so – did village communities. The Tuscan city of Pistoia was a near-neighbour and dependency of Florence. And Pistoia’s contado (rural territory) had been haemorrhaging population since the late thirteenth century, losing more than 70 per cent of its pre-plague maximum by 1400. That figure conceals huge differences between well-situated lowland villages, which continued to keep up numbers, and remote hill-top communities already in the advanced stages of disbanding. Nevertheless the fact remains that Pistoia the city – regular plague-trap though it was – held its strength marginally better than the contado. When surveyed in 1415, Pistoia’s population had fallen from around 11,000 shortly before the Black Death to just below 4000, or a loss of some 65 per cent.5

‘Death was everywhere’ in post-plague rural Normandy, of which fully half the population had disappeared by 1380.6 In Castile likewise, in the wake of ‘the Great Death’, settlement desertions gathered pace as bubonic plague returned again in 1363–4, in 1374, in 1380, in 1393–4, in 1399 and 1400.7 But while Castile shed many villages in the Black Death’s aftermath, Normandy lost rather few. And here it was the weather, rather than plague, that made the difference. The hot dry summers and mild wet winters of temperate Europe’s high-medieval warm epoch had begun to break up shortly after 1250. And what followed was a much lengthier cooling phase, starting with the great sea-storms and coastal inundations of the late thirteenth century and persisting through the rest of the Middle Ages. Characterized by wild temperature swings from cold to hot again, with their associated floods and droughts, it damaged most particularly those outlying farming communities which, in two centuries of increasing overcrowding before the Great Pestilence, had pushed out settlement into the more marginal territories on the hillsides, in the marshlands, and through the forests. Too hostile to allow survival, Castile’s parched and barren uplands were among the first to be deserted, as were the thin-soiled hill-top settlements of Mediterranean Pistoia, and the eroded slopes of Bray in the otherwise lush green pastures of Atlantic Normandy.

Imposed rather than created, plague and a deteriorating climate were the two principal exogenous factors in the Great Recession of the ‘long’ fifteenth century. No Western European economy was unaffected by them. Yet it was the endogenous factors – made by man himself – which were more likely to touch the arts directly. Chief among these was the weakness of money systems: a combination of politically-driven debasements (almost always to finance a war) and of chronic silver shortages in the West. Precisely because such crises were man-made, their incidence and fall-out could differ spectacularly between neighbours. Weak currencies and bullion famines were everywhere the norm in fifteenth-century Europe. But in Spain, whereas Aragon maintained a strong currency, Castile’s was one of the weakest; and while bullion in Aragon was in short supply, Castile’s location on the trade routes north from Africa kept gold flowing through the markets of Seville.8

For prince and people alike, Philip the Good concluded in 1433, ‘ung des principaulx poins de toutes bonnes policies … es davoir monnoye ferme et durable, tant d’or comme d’argent’.9 And it is perfectly true that a weak currency – the very reverse of une monnaye ferme et durable – was especially damaging to the receipts of great landowners, dependent on long-term leases and sluggish rents. Inflation, on the other hand, suited rent-payers very well, leaving fifteenth-century governments with the dilemma that if they devalued, the aristocracy rebelled, while every attempt to strengthen the currency was certain to be resisted by their tenants. In the event, it was the nobility who cried loudest, swinging the balance in favour of strong money. And the regular savage debasements which alone had enabled Philip VI of France to pay his troops in the opening campaigns of the Hundred Years War, were already largely over by 1360. For the next 350 years, interrupted only by such short-term wartime debasements as those of 1417–22 and 1427–9, France pursued the strong money policy, supported by taxation, which best suited its tax-exempt nobility. Yet the attractions of a stratagem which – explained Guillaume le Soterel (treasurer general of Navarre) – allowed the prince to ‘strike coin as feeble as he likes to have the means to pay his troops to defend him and his people and his land’, were too powerful to resist in a crisis.10 And nowhere was this more obvious than in post-Black Death Castile, where four ‘spectacularly awful’ debasements – starting in 1354, 1386, 1429 and 1463 – each paid for a war but cost the maravedi, or Castilian money of account, as much as 95 per cent of its value.11

In contrast, the post-plague Low Countries under their Burgundian dukes – Philip the Bold (1384–1404), John the Fearless (1404–19), Philip the Good (1419–67) and Charles the Bold (1467–77) – became a model of firm government and strong money. Yet precipitous debasement would return, if only briefly, at the start of Habsburg rule in the 1480s: again to pay for mercenaries. Nor had it been possible for the dukes, vastly wealthy though they were, to survive unscathed through the deeply disruptive bullion famines of the fifteenth century. The accompanying hiatus in Europe’s money supply imposed constraints of every kind on the economy. It had begun with the mid-fourteenth-century exhaustion and closure of the Central European silver mines, aggravated by hoarding and accumulations of plate, and by the steady drain of bullion towards the East. Severe by 1400, the famine was most complete in 1440–65, when so catastrophic were the silver shortages that every mint was empty and hardly a new coin was struck. Surrounded by a countryside in deep recession, mid-century Brussels (home of the Burgundian court) was one of only four Brabantine cities to ride the storm successfully, the others being Malines (the legal centre), Louvain (for its new university), and Antwerp (for its capture of the English cloth trade). Even so, for almost a generation from 1437 the Brabantine mint at Brussels struck no new silver coins, closing completely (i.e. for gold as well as silver) for rather more than half of that long period.12

Defaulting rulers, among them Edward IV of England, contributed to the crisis which, from the late 1450s, had enveloped even Florence, damaging the Medici and causing the collapse of several major banking families (the Baldesi, the Partini, the Banchi and their like) in the late autumn of 1464. ‘It is the greatest calamity that has happened in this city since 1339 [the bankruptcy of the Bardi and Peruzzi]’, reported Angelo Acciaiuoli, himself a banker, that December. However, Florence’s crisis proved short-lived, and of more general significance to the economies of the West was the all but total disappearance – ‘throughout the universe’, thought the councillors of Barcelona in 1447 – of an official silver coinage, along with the small change (petty currency or ‘black’ money) of everyday transactions in street and marketplace.13 Disadvantaged already by uncompetitive pricing and by the deflationary pressures of the Burgundians’ pursuit of hard money, the once famous Brabantine draperies, with their long-established German and French outlets, had only just survived the growing competition of English imports. Then, in the mid-fifteenth century, two decades of currency starvation wiped them out.14

A flexible economy – and Brabantine Malines had one of those – can survive just about anything. But whereas the weavers of Malines moved successfully into dyeing and leather-processing, gun-founding, furriery, embroidery and carpet-making, the more normal case was that of Flemish Ypres, unable to diversify or to make the required transition from the high-cost quality draperies of the traditional Low Countries industry to the cheaper cloths which alone could compete with English imports. There had been some 1500 looms at Ypres in 1311; by 1502, that number had fallen to just a hundred, while population had retreated by two-thirds.15 Flanders’ loss was England’s gain, with English cloth exports rising by as much as two and a half times between Edward IV’s debasements of 1464–5 and the early 1500s. However, England too had suffered devastating currency shortages in the mid-century. And the subsequent continent-wide success of English cloth – swamping the European markets in what would be likened thirty years later to ‘an immense inundation of the sea’ – was at least in part the product of a 1450s rationalization of the export trade, concentrating capital in fewer hands as those without access either to cash or to credit went out of business.16

‘I thank God and ever shall’, wrote John Barton (d.1491) of Holme, merchant of the Staple of Calais, ‘’tis the sheepe hath payed for all.’ And for a rich man like himself, obtaining credit held few terrors even in the worst of times, nor would he have been excluded, as lesser men might be, from those complex barter arrangements – exchanging wool for alum, cloth for wine or iron – which were all that the mid-century currency shortages allowed. By making the rich still richer, the post-plague bullion famine thus added another element to the already serious distortion of family inheritance histories created by exceptionally high mortalities and low birth-rates. If the generations are too compressed and wealth cascades too rapidly, and if a failure to reproduce, or the sudden death of heirs, brings unanticipated enrichment to distant kin, high levels of consumerism may result. In late-medieval Europe, such extraordinary windfall riches – a major factor, even then, in the funding of the arts – bore no more relation to the real health of the economy than the inflated lottery takings of today.

In those circumstances exactly, it was the deaths in quick succession of no fewer than six better-qualified heirs that catapulted John Hopton on 7 February 1430 into the spreading estates which enabled him to take a leading role in the rebuilding of his parish church at Blythburgh.17 And it was other swiftly acquired fortunes which made great church-rebuilders also of John Barton of Holme, of John Tame of Fairford, of John Baret of Bury, of Thomas Spring of Lavenham, and of the Cloptons (John especially) of Long Melford. These small-town English clothiers, protected from competition by the Low Countries slump, could expect to sell everything they produced. Nothing could prevent them getting richer. However, even in those Flemish cities which lost out most to English exports, there had been opportunities enough under Burgundian rule for the accumulation of considerable private fortunes. Mid-century Ghent – its looms fallen silent and its weavers out of work – was among the more prominent casualties of the recession. Yet just two decades earlier, a wealthy Ghent couple had nevertheless found the means to commission a high-quality painted altarpiece from the best artists of the day, pensioners of Philip the Good. Hubert and Jan van Eyck’s luminous polyptych, the Adoration of the Lamb (1432), was painted for the personal chantry at St John’s (now Ghent Cathedral) of Joos Vijd and Elizabeth Borluut. It was a ‘stupendous’ painting: huge and vastly detailed.18 And of course it was enormously expensive.

Other big commercial fortunes in the post-plague North included those of William Canynges, shipowning philanthropist of Bristol, and Jacques Coeur, merchant-financier of Bourges. Each would support an ambitious building programme – a cathedral-like preaching nave for St Mary Redcliffe (Bristol); a fabulous townhouse in Bourges – in which there is not the slightest evidence of economy. Likewise vast preaching naves, spectacular prodigy gatehouses, and big town halls characterized the more successful of the late-medieval German towns where, for example, by the early 1500s the taxable worth of some thirty-seven burghers of Nuremberg and fifty-three of Augsburg – each assessed at more than 10,000 Rhenish florins – would have ranked them among the top 1 per cent of Florentine taxpayers a century earlier.19 Meanwhile in Florence itself the number and scale of individual private fortunes continued growing. And it was the steadily increasing disposable wealth of Florence’s better-off citizenry which underpinned its continuing eminence in the arts.