Europe's Economic Recovery in the Fifteenth Century

After widespread economic difficulties in the fourteenth century, Europe began to recover and develop new initiatives. For example, some English towns developed thriving cloth weaving industries, so that England, a great exporter of wool in 1300, became a great exporter of cloth by 1500.Some German towns began investing in mines, using new advances in mining technology to profit from the extraction of copper and iron. Others began to specialize in linen or silk production. Some Flemish towns (towns in the northern part of modern Belgium), reacting to the improving living standards and purchasing power of late medieval consumers, switched from the production of luxury cloths to cheaper cloths that attracted a broader market. And some cities in Portugal began to make good use of improvements in ship design and navigation to establish trade links down the coast of West Africa. If some merchants responded to the challenges of the late medieval economy by seeking merely to guard the privileges they already possessed, others looked farther afield to find profit in new markets, new commodities, and new trade routes.

Three developments would be especially important for the future of Europe. First and most critical, the voyages of discovery slowly made it clear, for the first time in human history, that the oceans of Earth were linked into a single vast body of water that could carry seaworthy ships to any coast anywhere. These voyages began not with Columbus in 1492 but almost two centuries earlier. In the early fourteenth century, ships from the Italian cities Venice and Genoa began to venture onto the high seas of the Atlantic, making yearly expeditions to England and other destinations. By the mid-fourteenth century, commercial links had been established with the Madeiras and the Azores, and in the next century these two island groups and the Cape Verde Islands passed into Spanish or Portuguese hands. By 1500 Portuguese ships had traveled down the long coast of West Africa and traversed the Indian Ocean, bringing Portugal a direct sea route to India and a vast commercial empire in the Far East. Similarly, Spanish ships traversed the Atlantic to the New World. In the sixteenth century, the commercial economy of Europe would be transformed by such voyages. As new ocean routes short-circuited old trade routes, both the Ottoman Empire (which controlled major routes in the Middle East) and the cities of the Italian peninsula fell into commercial decline. The economic future lay not in the Mediterranean Sea but in the Atlantic and Indian Oceans.

Second, some entrepreneurs began to take industrial work, especially work in cloth making, into the rural villages that surrounded their towns. These so-called rural industries offered entrepreneurs cheaper and less regulated production than could be had within town walls. And they offered peasants extra income, especially during the winter when agricultural demands were few. Rural industries would become a mainstay of industrial production and rural economy in early modern Europe, and, indeed, they remain important in some regions of Europe even today.

Third, technological innovation drove much of the economic expansion of the fifteenth century. In addition to improvements already mentioned in mining and shipping, water power was harnessed in better ways, mechanical clocks measured time more precisely than ever before, spinning wheels (first introduced to Europe in the late thirteenth century) continued to replace older tools for producing thread, eyeglasses became ever more common, and advances in the metallurgical arts gave birth to two entirely new urban industries: the production of firearms and cannons and printing with movable type. Gunpowder, invented in eleventh-century China, was in military use—very limited use—in Europe by the 1320s, but it became an increasingly important factor in the warfare of the later fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Printing from movable type began with the production of the Gutenberg Bible in Mainz, Germany, in 1445, and within a generation about three dozen cities in Europe—stretching from Oxford to Valencia to Krakow boasted printing presses. Both printing and gun manufacture gave rise to a different sort of working environment than before, slowly replacing family workshops with larger workplaces, rather like small factories, to which many employees would gather for each day's work.