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.

十四世纪，欧洲经历了广泛的经济困难之后，开始恢复并发展新的举措。例如，一些英国城镇发展了繁荣的织布业，英格兰1300年还是羊毛的重要出口国，到1500年成为了布料的重要出口国。一些德国城镇开始投资于矿业，利用采矿技术的新进展从铜和铁的开采中获利。其他一些城镇则开始专门生产亚麻布或丝绸。一些佛兰德城镇（位于现在比利时的北部），为了适应中世纪晚期消费者生活水平和购买力的提高，从生产奢侈品布料转向生产吸引更广泛市场的廉价布料。而葡萄牙的一些城市则利用船舶设计和航海技术的改进，建立了沿西非海岸的贸易联系。面对中世纪晚期的经济挑战，一些商人只是寻求保护他们已经拥有的特权，而另一些则眼光更远，寻找在新市场、新商品和新贸易路线中赚取利润。

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.

对欧洲未来尤为重要的有三大进展。首先，也是最关键的，发现之旅逐渐明确了，地球上的海洋是一个联系在一起的广阔水体，能够载着适航的船只到达任何一个海岸，这是人类历史上第一次。这些航行不是始于1492年的哥伦布，而是早在将近两个世纪前就开始了。在十四世纪初，来自意大利城市威尼斯和热那亚的船只开始冒险进入大西洋的公海，每年进行到英格兰和其他目的地的远征。到十四世纪中叶，已经与马德拉群岛和亚速尔群岛建立了商业联系，而在下一个世纪，这两个群岛和佛得角群岛划归西班牙或葡萄牙管辖。到1500年，葡萄牙船只已经沿着西非的漫长海岸航行，并横渡印度洋，为葡萄牙带来了通往印度的直接海上航线和在远东的庞大商业帝国。同样，西班牙船只也横渡大西洋抵达新大陆。在十六世纪，欧洲的商业经济因这些航行而发生了转变。随着新的海洋航线取代了旧有的贸易路线，控制中东主要路线的奥斯曼帝国和意大利半岛的城市都陷入了商业衰退。经济的未来不在地中海，而是在大西洋和印度洋。

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.

其次，一些企业家开始将工业生产，特别是纺织业，带到围绕他们城镇的乡村。这些所谓的乡村工业为企业家提供了比城镇内更加廉价且监管较少的生产环境。此外，它们还为农民提供了额外收入，尤其是在农业需求较少的冬季。在现代欧洲早期，乡村工业成为工业生产和农村经济的支柱，实际上，即使在今天的欧洲某些地区，它们仍然保持着重要地位。

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.

第三，技术创新推动了十五世纪的经济扩张。除了之前提到的在采矿和航运方面的改进，水力得到更好的利用，机械钟比以往更精确地测量时间，纺车（首次在十三世纪末引入欧洲）继续取代旧的生产线工具，眼镜变得越来越普遍，冶金技术进步，从而催生了两个全新的城市产业：火器和大炮的生产以及活字印刷术。火药在十一世纪的中国被发明，到1320年代它在欧洲已被用于军事（尽管使用非常有限），但在十四世纪末和十五世纪，它成为战争中一个越来越重要的因素。活字印刷术始于1445年在德国美因茨生产的古腾堡圣经，在一个世代之内，欧洲大约三十几个城市 - 从牛津到瓦伦西亚再到克拉科夫 - 都拥有了印刷机。印刷业和火器制造业都催生了与以前不同的工作环境，逐渐取代了家庭作坊，变成了较大的工作场所，有点像小工厂，许多员工每天聚集在一起工作。