April 11, 2023 • 26 mins
Working and living in a Medieval city was a lot different than the countryside. There were merchants, guilds, and trade that relied on money, not bartering. Chris gives us a sense of city life, and even explains how loans and traveler’s checks existed all those years ago.
Half-Hour History: Secrets of the Medieval World is a co-production of iHeart Podcasts and School of Humans. It is a Curiosity Podcast.
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Speaker 1 (00:05):
Oh, lessons from the world's top professors anytime, anyplace, world
history examined and science explained. This is one day university Welcome.
(00:31):
This is half our history, Secrets of the Medieval World.
I'm your host, Mike Coscarelli. We're moving from the countryside
into the medieval cities, and those cities had a lot
of the same things that ours do today. Educational systems,
governing bodies, the exchange of goods and services, and some
(00:51):
really over the top cathedrals. Let Chris take it from here. Now,
we should say right off that more people in the
Middle Ages are still living in the countryside than in
(01:13):
the cities. In fact, it's not until about seventeen fifty
that more people in Europe live in cities than in
rural areas. It's not until eighteen fifty in the United
States that more people live in cities than in rural areas. Nevertheless,
people are living in cities at a higher rate than
(01:36):
they had been for about five hundred years. In fact,
by about eleven hundred. In medieval Europe you have cities
that have not been seen in number and size since
the Roman Empire, and they're bigger now than they were then. Again,
We said when we talked about the agricultural revolution that
(01:58):
the key was the agricultural revolutions increased production of food
because of particular technology, so that you have a surplus
and not a subsistence economy, and the people in the
cities can buy food, prepared food in terms of meals
that are ready to eat already, or prepared food in
terms of milk that's already been separated, created into cheese,
(02:22):
or animals that have already been slaughtered into portions to
be cooked. Most of the population of cities are free.
If you're in a city, you are either born free
or you're a surf who's escaped the countryside. Now this
(02:43):
got a little tricky because the cities, of course want
people to populate them. They need to give incentives, and
city charters said that if you're a surf and you
live in a city for a year and a day
and you're unclaimed, you're free. Now think about this. If
(03:04):
you're away surf and you come into a city, the
last thing you want to do is record your name
and a date, because if your lord comes in looking
for you, or he sends his steward or bayliff in,
there's a place to look. So there are all sorts
of backroom deals and underground under the table lists of
people so that they could claim a year and a day.
(03:25):
And the cities encouraged this kind of movement. Back on
the farm, some of the stewards and the bailiffs sweetened
the pot for surf so they wouldn't leave, but plenty did.
And when we talk about cities, we think of New York.
So what kind of size are we talking about in
the Middle Ages. Well, you had about fifteen or twenty
(03:47):
cities that would have had twenty five thousand people. That's
a good size. Remember we you know we'd have some
version of running water. We really don't quite have flush toilets.
You've got to get refused out of the city. You've
got to keep law and order, crime and punishment. Twenty thousand,
it is a pretty good number. And let's look at
(04:08):
some a couple of sites in all the major areas.
Barcelona had twenty five thousand, Valencia to lose, Bordeaux. In Germany,
Cologne and Nuremberg. Then you had some which were larger. London,
Bruges and Ghent all had forty thousand. Now if you
think of where London and Bruges and Ghent are right.
(04:29):
They're on either side of the English Channel. And in
fact those three cities were in close relationship with each
other because people would produce wool in the English countryside,
bring it to London, ship out the Thames across the
English Channel to Bruges and Ghent. Bruge and Ghent were
textile cities where the wool was finished into clothing and
(04:52):
that clothing was either shipped back to England or further
into the continent. So it makes sense that those three
cities were about the same size. And then you've got
some pretty good size cities, mostly in Italy because frem Italy,
jutting into the Mediterranean, connecting the Western Mediterranean to the
Eastern Mediterranean, are trading cities, and trading cities. Ports cities
(05:15):
are always exciting places. They're busy places. So a city
with about seventy five to one hundred thousand people, Ancient
Athens in the four hundreds, the high point of ancient
Greek history, had one hundred thousand people and it was
a polis where in Italy they're fascinated with Greek culture,
(05:38):
and so these self governing cities are in no way
part of a kingdom of Italy. They don't see themselves
as Italian. Even today you ask somebody from Italy, they
would never say they were Italian. They're from Genoa, They're
from Pisa, they're from Sicily. They break it down into regionalism.
Each of these trading centers saw themselves as a polis
(06:00):
seventy five to one hundred thousand people in Venice, in Florence,
in Genoa, and even up in Milan, which is not
particularly a trading city by water, but a trading city
by land, where all of the products and raw material
would move down along roads from the continent and then
to Milan, and Milan would ship it to these cities
(06:23):
on the ports. How did these cities run themselves. The
governments of cities were controlled by guilds. When you think
of guilds, you think of unions. And that's about right.
And remember when we said that feudalism was self policing
and had self government, And we said that when those
people moved from the countryside to the city, they brought
(06:44):
that tradition with them, that heritage with them to organize
these self patrolling units. And so there were many guilds
of skilled craftsmen. That's essentially what we would call them.
And the guilds policed themselves. They set compensation, they set
marks of quality and quantity because they're trying to control
(07:08):
quality and they're trying to control costs and they're trying
to control profits, pricing and education. Now, when you think
of guilds, you should think of some names, some words
that guilds even use nowadays. If you want to be
a plumber or an electrician, you're going to be a
journeyman for a time, an apprentice for a time usually
(07:29):
seven years. In the ancient system, medieval system, a journeyman
and then a muggistare a master. And this is replicated
in the American educational system, which came from the European
educational system, which reached back to guilds. The first groups
of students and teachers in Bologna and Oxford, in Cambridge
(07:49):
in the eleven and twelve hundreds were guilds of students
and teachers. Now the difference is that we talk about apprentice, journeyman, master,
and now in the educational system we have a bachelor
student would be the apprentice, the urneyman would be the master,
and then the doctorate would be the professor, if you will,
(08:11):
So the word master gets played with there. But look
at a graduation ceremony. The bachelors have the shortest sleeves,
the masters have the longest sleeves, and the people in
the doctoral robes have the cool outfits with the floppy
hats and the three stripes on their sleeves. And there
would be clothing in the medieval guilds for the apprentice,
(08:32):
the journman, and the master as well. And these guilds
would control the political life of the city, the economic
life of the city, the cultural life. They would sponsor
festivals and feasts, they would compete with each other to
do so. They also took care of their own when
things went wrong, what we would call social welfare. So
if a man lost his livelihood, lost his life, his
(08:56):
widow would be cared for, his children would be cared
for his orphans. But if he lost his livelihood, he
lost the hands or an arm, a part of his
body was disabled permanently. They had the equivalent of workmen's compensation,
so much of your paycheck, the version of their paycheck,
would go in each week or each month to a
(09:17):
common fund, and that the masters would put the common
fund money share it among these families of people who
could no longer work. Women could often have their own guilds.
If they had a husband, the husband was the guilds member,
but if the husband died, they often could be a
(09:40):
member of a guild on their own. There were certain guilds, though,
where women could represent themselves be masters on their own,
even if their husband was alive, and these were women
only guilds. And an example is in Paris, where there
were five guilds controlling the silk industry, the making of silk,
(10:00):
the trading of silk, the finishing of silk, all these
different steps in the process. There were five guilds women only.
So again, as in the countryside, women are having more
power than we might think. However, the men wouldn't let
them get political power. Sorry, ladies. And so when we
talk about the people who ran the government of the cities,
(10:21):
we call them the bourgeoisie or the burghers, the people
who lived in the burg or the borough. These were
the men of the town and they were moving from
being subjects of a lord, the vassal, the feudal system,
to citizens. And what you have is an emerging middle class.
This is an important moment in the history of government. Now,
(10:41):
when we talk about the Roman Empire, we say, weren't
they citizens? The Roman imperial system had citizens, but they
were citizens under an emperor. That's different than Roman citizens
in the republic. That was a Roman republic for about
five hundred years from five O nine BC or BC
(11:02):
to about the time that Julius Caesar is assassinated in
four four BC. That was a republic, a self regulating
group of people and government. It is the model of
our own government because Americans were trying to overthrow an emperor,
George the Third in parliament, and so this notion of
medieval city dwellers as bourgeoisie as citizens is very important
(11:26):
for the development of American government and American political theory
as well. So cities are centers of trade, their centers
of manufacturing, their centers of consumption. We'll take a quick
break here, but when we come back, Chris breaks down
trade in the medieval ages. Did you know travelers checks
(11:48):
were a thing back then? Plus the pride a craftsman
tick in creating a gargoyle. Let's talk about trade. Trade
talks about money and goods, of course, but what's interesting,
(12:09):
and I want to look at this in a different way,
looking not at caricatures or preconceptions, but something more subtle
and sophisticated. Trade was an opportunity for inter religious interaction.
Now notice I didn't say into religious dialogue, inter religious interaction.
People don't have to like each other in order to
do business with each other. I think we can all
(12:31):
agree that it works if we like each other. But
there are all sorts of business. They say politics makes
strange bedfellows, economics and business makes even stranger bedfellows. Trade
is controlled by capital. If you're dealing with a city,
economy and government, you're dealing with money and sales. You're
(12:54):
not dealing with a barter system. A difference from the countryside.
So rents which had been paid in goods or services
we saw in the countryside here are paid in money.
And trade has to go across land and sea. Now
then and now it is cheaper and faster to transport
(13:17):
your goods along water. To jump ahead hundreds of years.
One of the reasons why the Industrial Revolution happens in
England before it happens anywhere else in the sixteen and
the seventeen hundreds is that there is no one spot
in England that is more than seventy miles from a
body of water, a sea, or a canal or a river.
(13:40):
So it's cheap to get your goods to the water,
and it's cheaper then to move your goods and faster
along the water. The people who are transporting the goods
are Muslim ship captains. Italians and Muslims are in close
connection because the Roman Lake that's what the Mediterranean was
(14:01):
called under the Roman Empire, had now become Muhammad's Lake,
as they referred to it themselves, and so Muslim ship
captains were really good. Now. An example of this, to
again jump forward in time, is if you've ever seen Othello,
Shakespeare's play, even though that's written around sixteen hundred, the
ship captain in that Othello the more and so he
(14:23):
is an example of one of these Muslim ship captains.
So what you have here now in the cities running
the economy is a merchants class. They're buying and selling.
They're not manufacturing. Guilds manufacture goods. They're very diversified, they're
very powerful, but the most powerful people are the merchants.
(14:44):
They're the middlemen between the producer and the purchaser. They're
the ones doing the markup. And so in order to
do all of this financing, they need what we call
credit instruments. Now I'm going to use some words that
you might find very modern. They are, in fact very medieval.
(15:05):
Loans checks, travelers checks. Are you ready for this? Insurance premiums,
what's called a c loan, letters of credit or letters
of exchange. There's no ATM in the Middle Ages. I'm
not quite sure anybody nowadays uses travelers checks anymore. But
(15:25):
the reason you used to use traveler's checks for those
of you of a certain age will remember Karl Malden
telling you not to leave home without them for American Express,
and they had to be American Express. Those travelers checks
acted as money, but they weren't money. Well, you can't
move trunks of coins in this period of time, and
(15:46):
money is coins, it's not paper money, really, And so
in order to run this economy, to get all this
stuff going, what you need to do or create documents
where you can deposit money in one bank in one city,
get a piece of paper, travel hundreds of miles to
another bank and another city, and cash in if you
(16:07):
will that piece of paper, and very often the people
controlling those banks were the Jews. Because Jews were allowed
to make money on money, that is, they could charge
interest on loans. Christians could not do this. This was
called usury. So because of this, Jews began to get
(16:28):
involved in financing more than manufacturing. The Merchant of Venice
Shylock in the Merchant of Venice a very unfortunate example
of the rampant anti Semitism that was going on at
that period of time. Again, though Shakespeare's writing in sixteen
hundred days reflecting an earlier time. And so this is
(16:49):
where you get the development of these very famous families
that exist into the modern period, the Fougers and the
Rothschilds all across Europe. So you have an at home
lender who's Jewish. He's called a commenda. He gives you
a loan or a credit or a traveler's check. You
travel basically to either another Jew or his relative who
(17:12):
is another Jew, and that's that distant bank, and that's
how you do business. What does a city look like?
If you've ever been to a city, you can always
tell who the tourists are. They're looking up because if
(17:33):
you've been from a small city or never been to
a city. The first thing you notice is the height
of the buildings. Then and now, what does the Gothic
city look like? Now, this word Gothic is a little
bit controversial because you know, nowadays we talk about kids
wearing white makeup and dressed all in black and they're Goths.
(17:54):
Or we talk about the Goths and the Visigoths and
the Ostrogoths as barbarians, and we've already knocked down that
phrase earlier. What about this Gothic city, Well, goth is
just a word refers to one of those tribes that
married Roman imperial structures with their own tribal structures and
made kind of this hibrid sort of culture that we
(18:16):
call Gothic. And that hybrid culture actually starts in ancient
Greece and Rome, part of a Renaissance, and the fundamental
structure in the Roman world was the basilica. Now, when
I say basilica to you, you think of a Catholic church.
But a basilica was a judgment hall in ancient Rome.
(18:37):
And at the end of the judgment hall sat the
judge who was the provincial governor, or if you're in Rome,
the emperor himself. You've got to walk down this long aisle,
and this long aisle is called a nave, and at
the front it is kind of a cross aisle, which
is called an apse. And if the building is very high,
it lets a little light in, and that kind of atrium,
(18:57):
if you will, is called a chlorestery. This fundamental structure
becomes the first Christian basilicas because when the Christians along,
they're not going to knock that building down, that's stupid.
What they're going to do is convert that building, if
you will. And that's why the altar is at the
front and the bishop's chair, etc. And so in the
aftermath of Rome's transformation not fall. Remember, you have these
(19:22):
buildings that are like Roman buildings, roman Ish, or to
use the phrase Romanesque, and this is the style of building. Now,
some people say there's an artificial distinction between Romanesque and Gothic,
and I think what you can do is if you
look at take a good art history class, what you'll
see is that Romanesque over time becomes Gothic. So if
(19:42):
you're looking at a building from ten fifty and eleven fifty,
which is which, But if you're looking at a building
from five to fifty and thirteen fifty, Yeah, you're going
to see a big difference. And the big difference is
that the Romanesque building is not as tall. It's heavy,
Its walls are very thick, its windows are very small
because the weight of the building is much that they
(20:05):
can't go high. And so the innovations becoming in how
do you distribute the weight? And you distribute the weight
using something called vaulted ceilings, and these vaults are called
barrel vaults or groin vaults. And to use an example,
think of a baseball game. So here's a player, he's
rounding third, he's coming home. The catcher has the ball.
(20:27):
The catcher's not going to stand straight up to receive
getting hit by this guy coming. What's he gonna do.
He's going to spread his legs, he's going to crouch down.
He's going to lower his center of gravity to receive
that weight. And because of that he can receive more
weight at greater speed. That's what a vault does, and
so it allows you to kind of make the walls
(20:48):
a little thinner, allows you to build your basilica a
little higher, and you can open up your windows a
little bit, and so the facades can now be decorated
because the facade doesn't have to carry so much weight.
The vault is carrying the weight, and you can start
to decorate the facade as well. So this transition is
occurring one thousand, eleven hundred around there, twelve hundred, and
(21:11):
we're moving toward the Gothic style. Now, when you think
of the buildings when you go on those tours, when
you look in your own communities and you see Gothic
or Neo Gothic basilicas and cathedrals, you'll see that style
not just in church buildings but in secular buildings as well.
So a town hall or a guild hall, or a castle,
(21:33):
or a university or even a residence is start going
to start to look like this very distinctive Gothic style.
And so what is that Gothic style? Very elaborate arches.
One of the most interesting things to do when you
go on these tours is to lay on the ground
or to look up. And some of the best churches
(21:54):
allow you to look up, either with binoculars or they
have mirrors on the ground or on pivots, and you
can look up at the ceiling and they're magnified, and
you can see how elaborate these vaults are, higher and higher,
more and more elaborate. And these arches which begin to
cross each other, and because you do that, they soar up. Hey, listen,
(22:14):
you walk into a Gothic cathedral. You look one place,
and you look one place, only up. The architecture makes
you look up, form and function, being married. Because you're
in a church building, you're supposed to be raising your
eyes from the earth to spiritual matters, from this age
into the next age. And so the next big development,
(22:36):
the development of the Gothic cathedral, are these things called
flying buttresses. You take your arches and you put them outside,
and what these things as a scaffold or a skeleton
outside an eggxoskeleton, and it takes the pressure of those
walls outward. And because it does that, the walls can
get even thinner, and they can go even higher, and
(22:58):
the windows can way open up. Because the windows aren't
doing any work for you, the walls aren't doing any
work for you. The roof can now be peaked. And
so the weight bearing architectural element is the flying buttress.
The impact on light and windows on exteriors and facades
(23:18):
is amazing, and all of that stuff is done by
the guilds. The people designing what we would call architects
and engineers, the people doing the scaffolding, the people cutting
the wood and finishing it, the people cutting the stone
from afar and finishing it near, the people building the pulleys,
(23:42):
the people making the glass, the people staining the glass,
the people installing the glass, the people later on painting frescoes,
the people making the vestments, the people making the vessels.
Those are all guilds. When a bishop says we're going
to build a cathedral, everybody goes crazy because every buddy
(24:05):
has a job for a hundred years. It fuels the economy.
It becomes the center of the town to the point
where you have to get water away from the roof,
and you don't want the water to spill on the
people down below. So you put a gargoyle up there,
and you take that gargoyle and you make them some
fantastic figure, some really silly looking figure, caricatureish figure. He's
(24:27):
going to be three hundred feet in the air. Why
would you possibly make it so special if nobody's going
to see it because you made it because you're a craftsman,
because you have pride, and you believe that that is
your contribution to the creation of this cathedral that will
last forever a tremendous amount of what we say. No
(24:48):
people say, nobody has craftsmanship anymore, nobody has pride anymore.
The people in the Middle Ages did, and so it's
an economic engine when this happens. Now, one of the
questions is, could people really see that stained glass way
up there? It looks like a person, and all those
profits look alike. We always see a woman up there,
and somebody invariably says, must be marry. It's a Catholic church,
(25:11):
it must be marry. Could people read those stained glass windows?
You often hear that this was for an illiterate population.
The answer is probably not, but a preacher could make
reference to it, and the light that came in in
different colors would have had an impact. So what we
begin to see is that we have economics, we have
religion coming together, and it's all fueled by a bishop
(25:34):
who sits under a papacy. So we need to next
look at what was the papacy like in the Middle Ages.
Thank you for listening to another episode of Half hour
History Secrets of the Medieval World. Next Time Feudalism and
(25:55):
Feuding Popes. Half Hour History Secrets of the Medieval World
from One Day University is a production of iHeart Podcasts
and School of Humans. If you're enjoying the show, leave
a review in your favorite podcast app, and check out
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(26:18):
true crime, and more. School of Humans
Oh, lessons from the world's top professors anytime, anyplace, world
history examined and science explained. This is one day university Welcome.
(00:31):
This is half our history, Secrets of the Medieval World.
I'm your host, Mike Coscarelli. We're moving from the countryside
into the medieval cities, and those cities had a lot
of the same things that ours do today. Educational systems,
governing bodies, the exchange of goods and services, and some
(00:51):
really over the top cathedrals. Let Chris take it from here. Now,
we should say right off that more people in the
Middle Ages are still living in the countryside than in
(01:13):
the cities. In fact, it's not until about seventeen fifty
that more people in Europe live in cities than in
rural areas. It's not until eighteen fifty in the United
States that more people live in cities than in rural areas. Nevertheless,
people are living in cities at a higher rate than
(01:36):
they had been for about five hundred years. In fact,
by about eleven hundred. In medieval Europe you have cities
that have not been seen in number and size since
the Roman Empire, and they're bigger now than they were then. Again,
We said when we talked about the agricultural revolution that
(01:58):
the key was the agricultural revolutions increased production of food
because of particular technology, so that you have a surplus
and not a subsistence economy, and the people in the
cities can buy food, prepared food in terms of meals
that are ready to eat already, or prepared food in
terms of milk that's already been separated, created into cheese,
(02:22):
or animals that have already been slaughtered into portions to
be cooked. Most of the population of cities are free.
If you're in a city, you are either born free
or you're a surf who's escaped the countryside. Now this
(02:43):
got a little tricky because the cities, of course want
people to populate them. They need to give incentives, and
city charters said that if you're a surf and you
live in a city for a year and a day
and you're unclaimed, you're free. Now think about this. If
(03:04):
you're away surf and you come into a city, the
last thing you want to do is record your name
and a date, because if your lord comes in looking
for you, or he sends his steward or bayliff in,
there's a place to look. So there are all sorts
of backroom deals and underground under the table lists of
people so that they could claim a year and a day.
(03:25):
And the cities encouraged this kind of movement. Back on
the farm, some of the stewards and the bailiffs sweetened
the pot for surf so they wouldn't leave, but plenty did.
And when we talk about cities, we think of New York.
So what kind of size are we talking about in
the Middle Ages. Well, you had about fifteen or twenty
(03:47):
cities that would have had twenty five thousand people. That's
a good size. Remember we you know we'd have some
version of running water. We really don't quite have flush toilets.
You've got to get refused out of the city. You've
got to keep law and order, crime and punishment. Twenty thousand,
it is a pretty good number. And let's look at
(04:08):
some a couple of sites in all the major areas.
Barcelona had twenty five thousand, Valencia to lose, Bordeaux. In Germany,
Cologne and Nuremberg. Then you had some which were larger. London,
Bruges and Ghent all had forty thousand. Now if you
think of where London and Bruges and Ghent are right.
(04:29):
They're on either side of the English Channel. And in
fact those three cities were in close relationship with each
other because people would produce wool in the English countryside,
bring it to London, ship out the Thames across the
English Channel to Bruges and Ghent. Bruge and Ghent were
textile cities where the wool was finished into clothing and
(04:52):
that clothing was either shipped back to England or further
into the continent. So it makes sense that those three
cities were about the same size. And then you've got
some pretty good size cities, mostly in Italy because frem Italy,
jutting into the Mediterranean, connecting the Western Mediterranean to the
Eastern Mediterranean, are trading cities, and trading cities. Ports cities
(05:15):
are always exciting places. They're busy places. So a city
with about seventy five to one hundred thousand people, Ancient
Athens in the four hundreds, the high point of ancient
Greek history, had one hundred thousand people and it was
a polis where in Italy they're fascinated with Greek culture,
(05:38):
and so these self governing cities are in no way
part of a kingdom of Italy. They don't see themselves
as Italian. Even today you ask somebody from Italy, they
would never say they were Italian. They're from Genoa, They're
from Pisa, they're from Sicily. They break it down into regionalism.
Each of these trading centers saw themselves as a polis
(06:00):
seventy five to one hundred thousand people in Venice, in Florence,
in Genoa, and even up in Milan, which is not
particularly a trading city by water, but a trading city
by land, where all of the products and raw material
would move down along roads from the continent and then
to Milan, and Milan would ship it to these cities
(06:23):
on the ports. How did these cities run themselves. The
governments of cities were controlled by guilds. When you think
of guilds, you think of unions. And that's about right.
And remember when we said that feudalism was self policing
and had self government, And we said that when those
people moved from the countryside to the city, they brought
(06:44):
that tradition with them, that heritage with them to organize
these self patrolling units. And so there were many guilds
of skilled craftsmen. That's essentially what we would call them.
And the guilds policed themselves. They set compensation, they set
marks of quality and quantity because they're trying to control
(07:08):
quality and they're trying to control costs and they're trying
to control profits, pricing and education. Now, when you think
of guilds, you should think of some names, some words
that guilds even use nowadays. If you want to be
a plumber or an electrician, you're going to be a
journeyman for a time, an apprentice for a time usually
(07:29):
seven years. In the ancient system, medieval system, a journeyman
and then a muggistare a master. And this is replicated
in the American educational system, which came from the European
educational system, which reached back to guilds. The first groups
of students and teachers in Bologna and Oxford, in Cambridge
(07:49):
in the eleven and twelve hundreds were guilds of students
and teachers. Now the difference is that we talk about apprentice, journeyman, master,
and now in the educational system we have a bachelor
student would be the apprentice, the urneyman would be the master,
and then the doctorate would be the professor, if you will,
(08:11):
So the word master gets played with there. But look
at a graduation ceremony. The bachelors have the shortest sleeves,
the masters have the longest sleeves, and the people in
the doctoral robes have the cool outfits with the floppy
hats and the three stripes on their sleeves. And there
would be clothing in the medieval guilds for the apprentice,
(08:32):
the journman, and the master as well. And these guilds
would control the political life of the city, the economic
life of the city, the cultural life. They would sponsor
festivals and feasts, they would compete with each other to
do so. They also took care of their own when
things went wrong, what we would call social welfare. So
if a man lost his livelihood, lost his life, his
(08:56):
widow would be cared for, his children would be cared
for his orphans. But if he lost his livelihood, he
lost the hands or an arm, a part of his
body was disabled permanently. They had the equivalent of workmen's compensation,
so much of your paycheck, the version of their paycheck,
would go in each week or each month to a
(09:17):
common fund, and that the masters would put the common
fund money share it among these families of people who
could no longer work. Women could often have their own guilds.
If they had a husband, the husband was the guilds member,
but if the husband died, they often could be a
(09:40):
member of a guild on their own. There were certain guilds, though,
where women could represent themselves be masters on their own,
even if their husband was alive, and these were women
only guilds. And an example is in Paris, where there
were five guilds controlling the silk industry, the making of silk,
(10:00):
the trading of silk, the finishing of silk, all these
different steps in the process. There were five guilds women only.
So again, as in the countryside, women are having more
power than we might think. However, the men wouldn't let
them get political power. Sorry, ladies. And so when we
talk about the people who ran the government of the cities,
(10:21):
we call them the bourgeoisie or the burghers, the people
who lived in the burg or the borough. These were
the men of the town and they were moving from
being subjects of a lord, the vassal, the feudal system,
to citizens. And what you have is an emerging middle class.
This is an important moment in the history of government. Now,
(10:41):
when we talk about the Roman Empire, we say, weren't
they citizens? The Roman imperial system had citizens, but they
were citizens under an emperor. That's different than Roman citizens
in the republic. That was a Roman republic for about
five hundred years from five O nine BC or BC
(11:02):
to about the time that Julius Caesar is assassinated in
four four BC. That was a republic, a self regulating
group of people and government. It is the model of
our own government because Americans were trying to overthrow an emperor,
George the Third in parliament, and so this notion of
medieval city dwellers as bourgeoisie as citizens is very important
(11:26):
for the development of American government and American political theory
as well. So cities are centers of trade, their centers
of manufacturing, their centers of consumption. We'll take a quick
break here, but when we come back, Chris breaks down
trade in the medieval ages. Did you know travelers checks
(11:48):
were a thing back then? Plus the pride a craftsman
tick in creating a gargoyle. Let's talk about trade. Trade
talks about money and goods, of course, but what's interesting,
(12:09):
and I want to look at this in a different way,
looking not at caricatures or preconceptions, but something more subtle
and sophisticated. Trade was an opportunity for inter religious interaction.
Now notice I didn't say into religious dialogue, inter religious interaction.
People don't have to like each other in order to
do business with each other. I think we can all
(12:31):
agree that it works if we like each other. But
there are all sorts of business. They say politics makes
strange bedfellows, economics and business makes even stranger bedfellows. Trade
is controlled by capital. If you're dealing with a city,
economy and government, you're dealing with money and sales. You're
(12:54):
not dealing with a barter system. A difference from the countryside.
So rents which had been paid in goods or services
we saw in the countryside here are paid in money.
And trade has to go across land and sea. Now
then and now it is cheaper and faster to transport
(13:17):
your goods along water. To jump ahead hundreds of years.
One of the reasons why the Industrial Revolution happens in
England before it happens anywhere else in the sixteen and
the seventeen hundreds is that there is no one spot
in England that is more than seventy miles from a
body of water, a sea, or a canal or a river.
(13:40):
So it's cheap to get your goods to the water,
and it's cheaper then to move your goods and faster
along the water. The people who are transporting the goods
are Muslim ship captains. Italians and Muslims are in close
connection because the Roman Lake that's what the Mediterranean was
(14:01):
called under the Roman Empire, had now become Muhammad's Lake,
as they referred to it themselves, and so Muslim ship
captains were really good. Now. An example of this, to
again jump forward in time, is if you've ever seen Othello,
Shakespeare's play, even though that's written around sixteen hundred, the
ship captain in that Othello the more and so he
(14:23):
is an example of one of these Muslim ship captains.
So what you have here now in the cities running
the economy is a merchants class. They're buying and selling.
They're not manufacturing. Guilds manufacture goods. They're very diversified, they're
very powerful, but the most powerful people are the merchants.
(14:44):
They're the middlemen between the producer and the purchaser. They're
the ones doing the markup. And so in order to
do all of this financing, they need what we call
credit instruments. Now I'm going to use some words that
you might find very modern. They are, in fact very medieval.
(15:05):
Loans checks, travelers checks. Are you ready for this? Insurance premiums,
what's called a c loan, letters of credit or letters
of exchange. There's no ATM in the Middle Ages. I'm
not quite sure anybody nowadays uses travelers checks anymore. But
(15:25):
the reason you used to use traveler's checks for those
of you of a certain age will remember Karl Malden
telling you not to leave home without them for American Express,
and they had to be American Express. Those travelers checks
acted as money, but they weren't money. Well, you can't
move trunks of coins in this period of time, and
(15:46):
money is coins, it's not paper money, really, And so
in order to run this economy, to get all this
stuff going, what you need to do or create documents
where you can deposit money in one bank in one city,
get a piece of paper, travel hundreds of miles to
another bank and another city, and cash in if you
(16:07):
will that piece of paper, and very often the people
controlling those banks were the Jews. Because Jews were allowed
to make money on money, that is, they could charge
interest on loans. Christians could not do this. This was
called usury. So because of this, Jews began to get
(16:28):
involved in financing more than manufacturing. The Merchant of Venice
Shylock in the Merchant of Venice a very unfortunate example
of the rampant anti Semitism that was going on at
that period of time. Again, though Shakespeare's writing in sixteen
hundred days reflecting an earlier time. And so this is
(16:49):
where you get the development of these very famous families
that exist into the modern period, the Fougers and the
Rothschilds all across Europe. So you have an at home
lender who's Jewish. He's called a commenda. He gives you
a loan or a credit or a traveler's check. You
travel basically to either another Jew or his relative who
(17:12):
is another Jew, and that's that distant bank, and that's
how you do business. What does a city look like?
If you've ever been to a city, you can always
tell who the tourists are. They're looking up because if
(17:33):
you've been from a small city or never been to
a city. The first thing you notice is the height
of the buildings. Then and now, what does the Gothic
city look like? Now, this word Gothic is a little
bit controversial because you know, nowadays we talk about kids
wearing white makeup and dressed all in black and they're Goths.
(17:54):
Or we talk about the Goths and the Visigoths and
the Ostrogoths as barbarians, and we've already knocked down that
phrase earlier. What about this Gothic city, Well, goth is
just a word refers to one of those tribes that
married Roman imperial structures with their own tribal structures and
made kind of this hibrid sort of culture that we
(18:16):
call Gothic. And that hybrid culture actually starts in ancient
Greece and Rome, part of a Renaissance, and the fundamental
structure in the Roman world was the basilica. Now, when
I say basilica to you, you think of a Catholic church.
But a basilica was a judgment hall in ancient Rome.
(18:37):
And at the end of the judgment hall sat the
judge who was the provincial governor, or if you're in Rome,
the emperor himself. You've got to walk down this long aisle,
and this long aisle is called a nave, and at
the front it is kind of a cross aisle, which
is called an apse. And if the building is very high,
it lets a little light in, and that kind of atrium,
(18:57):
if you will, is called a chlorestery. This fundamental structure
becomes the first Christian basilicas because when the Christians along,
they're not going to knock that building down, that's stupid.
What they're going to do is convert that building, if
you will. And that's why the altar is at the
front and the bishop's chair, etc. And so in the
aftermath of Rome's transformation not fall. Remember, you have these
(19:22):
buildings that are like Roman buildings, roman Ish, or to
use the phrase Romanesque, and this is the style of building. Now,
some people say there's an artificial distinction between Romanesque and Gothic,
and I think what you can do is if you
look at take a good art history class, what you'll
see is that Romanesque over time becomes Gothic. So if
(19:42):
you're looking at a building from ten fifty and eleven fifty,
which is which, But if you're looking at a building
from five to fifty and thirteen fifty, Yeah, you're going
to see a big difference. And the big difference is
that the Romanesque building is not as tall. It's heavy,
Its walls are very thick, its windows are very small
because the weight of the building is much that they
(20:05):
can't go high. And so the innovations becoming in how
do you distribute the weight? And you distribute the weight
using something called vaulted ceilings, and these vaults are called
barrel vaults or groin vaults. And to use an example,
think of a baseball game. So here's a player, he's
rounding third, he's coming home. The catcher has the ball.
(20:27):
The catcher's not going to stand straight up to receive
getting hit by this guy coming. What's he gonna do.
He's going to spread his legs, he's going to crouch down.
He's going to lower his center of gravity to receive
that weight. And because of that he can receive more
weight at greater speed. That's what a vault does, and
so it allows you to kind of make the walls
(20:48):
a little thinner, allows you to build your basilica a
little higher, and you can open up your windows a
little bit, and so the facades can now be decorated
because the facade doesn't have to carry so much weight.
The vault is carrying the weight, and you can start
to decorate the facade as well. So this transition is
occurring one thousand, eleven hundred around there, twelve hundred, and
(21:11):
we're moving toward the Gothic style. Now, when you think
of the buildings when you go on those tours, when
you look in your own communities and you see Gothic
or Neo Gothic basilicas and cathedrals, you'll see that style
not just in church buildings but in secular buildings as well.
So a town hall or a guild hall, or a castle,
(21:33):
or a university or even a residence is start going
to start to look like this very distinctive Gothic style.
And so what is that Gothic style? Very elaborate arches.
One of the most interesting things to do when you
go on these tours is to lay on the ground
or to look up. And some of the best churches
(21:54):
allow you to look up, either with binoculars or they
have mirrors on the ground or on pivots, and you
can look up at the ceiling and they're magnified, and
you can see how elaborate these vaults are, higher and higher,
more and more elaborate. And these arches which begin to
cross each other, and because you do that, they soar up. Hey, listen,
(22:14):
you walk into a Gothic cathedral. You look one place,
and you look one place, only up. The architecture makes
you look up, form and function, being married. Because you're
in a church building, you're supposed to be raising your
eyes from the earth to spiritual matters, from this age
into the next age. And so the next big development,
(22:36):
the development of the Gothic cathedral, are these things called
flying buttresses. You take your arches and you put them outside,
and what these things as a scaffold or a skeleton
outside an eggxoskeleton, and it takes the pressure of those
walls outward. And because it does that, the walls can
get even thinner, and they can go even higher, and
(22:58):
the windows can way open up. Because the windows aren't
doing any work for you, the walls aren't doing any
work for you. The roof can now be peaked. And
so the weight bearing architectural element is the flying buttress.
The impact on light and windows on exteriors and facades
(23:18):
is amazing, and all of that stuff is done by
the guilds. The people designing what we would call architects
and engineers, the people doing the scaffolding, the people cutting
the wood and finishing it, the people cutting the stone
from afar and finishing it near, the people building the pulleys,
(23:42):
the people making the glass, the people staining the glass,
the people installing the glass, the people later on painting frescoes,
the people making the vestments, the people making the vessels.
Those are all guilds. When a bishop says we're going
to build a cathedral, everybody goes crazy because every buddy
(24:05):
has a job for a hundred years. It fuels the economy.
It becomes the center of the town to the point
where you have to get water away from the roof,
and you don't want the water to spill on the
people down below. So you put a gargoyle up there,
and you take that gargoyle and you make them some
fantastic figure, some really silly looking figure, caricatureish figure. He's
(24:27):
going to be three hundred feet in the air. Why
would you possibly make it so special if nobody's going
to see it because you made it because you're a craftsman,
because you have pride, and you believe that that is
your contribution to the creation of this cathedral that will
last forever a tremendous amount of what we say. No
(24:48):
people say, nobody has craftsmanship anymore, nobody has pride anymore.
The people in the Middle Ages did, and so it's
an economic engine when this happens. Now, one of the
questions is, could people really see that stained glass way
up there? It looks like a person, and all those
profits look alike. We always see a woman up there,
and somebody invariably says, must be marry. It's a Catholic church,
(25:11):
it must be marry. Could people read those stained glass windows?
You often hear that this was for an illiterate population.
The answer is probably not, but a preacher could make
reference to it, and the light that came in in
different colors would have had an impact. So what we
begin to see is that we have economics, we have
religion coming together, and it's all fueled by a bishop
(25:34):
who sits under a papacy. So we need to next
look at what was the papacy like in the Middle Ages.
Thank you for listening to another episode of Half hour
History Secrets of the Medieval World. Next Time Feudalism and
(25:55):
Feuding Popes. Half Hour History Secrets of the Medieval World
from One Day University is a production of iHeart Podcasts
and School of Humans. If you're enjoying the show, leave
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