embarrassed it much more. At the beginning the merchants had devoted themselves to the most various operations at once. Wandering from market to market, they bought and sold without feeling in need of centring their activity on this or that kind of products or commodities, but from about 1250 this is no longer the case. The progress of economic evolution has resulted in localizing certain industries and in restraining certain branches of commerce to the groups of merchants best suited to their promotion. Thus, for example, in the course of the thirteenth century the trade in fine cloth became a monopoly of the towns of Flanders, and banking a monopoly of certain merchant companies of Lombardy, Provence, or Tuscany. Thenceforward commercial life ceases to overflow at random, so to speak. It has a less arbitrary, a more deliberate, and consequently a more embarrassed quality.

These limitations resting upon commerce have resulted in turning away from it the patricians, who moreover have become, as has been said above, a class of landed proprietors. The place which they left vacant is filled by new men, among whom, as among their predecessors, intelligence is the essential instrument of fortune. The intellectual faculties which the first developed in wandering commerce are used by these later men to overcome the obstacles raised in their pathway by municipal regulations of commerce and ecclesiastical regulations in respect to money affairs.[22] Many of them find a rich source of profit by devoting themselves to brokerage. Others in the industrial cities exploit shamelessly and in defiance of the statutes the artisans whom they employ. At Douai, for example, Jehan Boinebroke (1280-1310) succeeds in reducing to serfdom a number of workers (and characteristically, they are chiefly women) by advancing wool or money which they are unable to repay, and which therefore place them at his mercy.[23] The richest or the boldest profit by the constantly increasing need of money on the part of territorial princes and kings, to become their bankers. It will be remembered that it was Lombard capitalists who furnished Edward III. with money to prepare his campaigns against France,[24] and, quite recently, the history of Guillaume Servat of Cahors (1280-1320) has shown us a man who, setting out with nothing, like Godric in the eleventh century, accumulates in a few years a considerable fortune, supplies the King of England with a dowry for one of his daughters, lends money to the King of Norway, farms the wool duties at London, and, unscrupulous as he is shrewd, does not hesitate to engage in shady speculations upon the coinage.[25] And how many other financiers do we not know whose career is wholly similar: Thomas Fin at the court of the counts of Flanders,[26] the Berniers at that of the counts of Hainaut, the Tote Guis, the Vane Guis, at that of the kings of France, not to name the numberless Italians entrusted by the popes with the various operations of pontifical finance, those mercatores Romanam curiam sequentes among whom are found the ancestors of the great Medici of the fifteenth century.[27]

In the course of the fifteenth century this second class of capitalists, courtiers, merchants, and financiers, successors to the capitalists of the hanses and the gilds, is in its turn drawn along toward the downward grade. The progress of navigation, the discoveries made by the Portuguese, then by the Spaniards, the formation of great monarchical states struggling for supremacy, begin to destroy the economic situation in the midst of which that class had grown to greatness, and to which it had adapted itself. The direction of the currents of commerce is altered. In the north, the English and Dutch marine gradually take the place of the hanses. In the Mediterranean, commerce centres itself at Venice and at Genoa. On the shores of the Atlantic, Lisbon becomes the great market for spices, and Antwerp, supplanting Bruges, becomes the rendezvous of European commerce. The sixteenth century sees this movement grow more rapid. It is favored at once by moral, political, and economic causes; the intellectual progress of the Renaissance, the expansion of individualism, great wars exciting speculation, the disturbance of monetary circulation caused by the influx of precious metals from the New World. As the science of the Middle Ages disappears and the humanist takes the place of the scholastic, so a new economy rises in the place of the old urban economy. The state subjects the towns to its superior power. It restrains their political autonomy at the same time that is sets commerce and industry free from the guardianship which the towns have hitherto imposed upon them. The protectionism and the exclusiveness of the bourgeoisies are brought to an end. If the craft-guilds continue to exist, yet they no longer control the organization of labor. New industries appear, which, to escape the meddling surveillance of the municipal authorities, establish themselves in the country. Side by side with the old privileged towns, which merely vegetate, younger manufacturing centres, full of strength and exuberance, arise; in England, Sheffield, and Birmingham, in Flanders, Hondschoote and Armentières.[28]

The spirit in which is now manifested in the world of business, is that same spirit of freedom which animates the intellectual world. In a society in process of formation, the individual, enfranchised, gives the rein to his boldness. He despises tradition, gives himself up with unrestrained delight to his virtuosity. There are to be no more limits on speculation, no more fetters on commerce, no more meddling of authority in relations between employers and employed. The most skillful wins. Competition, up to this time held in check, runs riot. In a few years enormous fortunes are built up, others are swallowed up in resounding bankruptcies. The Antwerp exchange is a pandemonium where bankers, deep-sea sailors, stock-jobbers, dealers in futures, millionaire merchants, jostle each other—and sharpers and adventurers to whom all means of money-getting, even assassination, are acceptable.

This confused recasting of the economic world transfers the rôle played by the capitalists of the late Middle Ages in a class of new men. Few are the descendants of the business men of the fourteenth century among those of the fifteenth and sixteenth. Thrown out of their course by the current of events, they have not been willing to risk fortunes already acquired. Most of them are seen turning toward administrative careers, entering the service of the state as members of the councils of justice or