For, if Antwerp was the microcosm which reflected the soul of commercial Europe, the heart of Antwerp was its Bourse. The causes which made financial capitalism as characteristic of the age of the Renaissance, as industrial capitalism was to be of the nineteenth century, consisted partly in the mere expansion in the scale of commercial enterprise. A steady flow of capital was needed to finance the movement of the produce handled on the world-market, such as the eastern spice crop—above all pepper, which the impecunious Portuguese Government sold in bulk, while it was still on the water, to German syndicates—copper, alum, the precious metals, and the cloth shipped by the English Merchant Adventurers. The cheapening of bullion and the rise in prices swelled the profits seeking investment; the growth of an international banking system mobilized immense resources at the strategic points; and, since Antwerp was the capital of the European money-market, the bill on Antwerp was the commonest form of international currency. Linked together by the presence in each of the great financial houses of the Continent, with liquid funds pouring in from mines in Hungary and the Tyrol, trading ventures in the East, taxes wrung from Spanish peasants, speculations on the part of financiers, and savings invested by the general public, Antwerp, Lyons, Frankfurt and Venice, and, in the second rank, Rouen, Paris, Strasbourg, Seville and London, had developed by the middle of the century a considerable class of financial specialists, and a financial technique, identical, in all essentials, with that of the present day. They formed together the departments of an international clearing-house, where bills could be readily discounted, drafts on any important city could be obtained, and the paper of merchants of almost every nationality changed hands.118
Nourished by the growth of peaceful commerce, the financial capitalism of the age fared not less sumptuously, if more dangerously, at the courts of princes. Mankind, it seems, hates nothing so much as its own prosperity. Menaced with an accession of riches which would lighten its toil, it makes haste to redouble its labors, and to pour away the perilous stuff, which might deprive of plausibility the complaint that it is poor. Applied to the arts of peace, the new resources commanded by Europe during the first half of the sixteenth century might have done something to exorcise the specters of pestilence and famine, and to raise the material fabric of civilization to undreamed-of heights. Its rulers, secular and ecclesiastical alike, thought otherwise. When pestilence and famine were ceasing to be necessities imposed by nature, they reestablished them by political art.
The sluice which they opened to drain away each new accession of superfluous wealth was war. “Of all birds,” wrote the sharpest pen of the age, “the eagle alone has seemed to wise men the type of royalty—not beautiful, not musical, not fit for food, but carnivorous, greedy, hateful to all, the curse of all, and, with its great powers of doing harm, surpassing them in its desire of doing it.”119 The words of Erasmus, uttered in 1517, were only too prophetic. For approximately three-quarters both of the sixteenth and of the seventeenth centuries, Europe tore itself to pieces. In the course of the conflict the spiritual fires of Renaissance and Reformation alike were trampled out beneath the feet of bravos as malicious and mischievous as the vain, bloody-minded and futile generals who strut and posture, to the hateful laughter of Thersites, in the most despairing of Shakespeare’s tragedies. By the middle of the sixteenth century the English Government, after an orgy of debasement and confiscation, was in a state of financial collapse, and by the end of it Spain, the southern Netherlands including Antwerp, and a great part of France, including the financial capital of southern Europe, Lyons, were ruined. By the middle of the seventeenth century wide tracts of Germany were a desert, and by the end of it the French finances had relapsed into worse confusion than that from which they had been temporarily rescued by the genius of Colbert. The victors compared their position with that of the vanquished, and congratulated themselves on their spoils. It rarely occurred to them to ask what it would have been, had there been neither victors nor vanquished, but only peace.
It is possible that the bankruptcies of Governments have, on the whole, done less harm to mankind than their ability to raise loans, and the mobilization of economic power on a scale unknown before armed the fierce nationalism of the age with a weapon more deadly than gunpowder and cannon. The centralized States which were rising in the age of the Renaissance were everywhere faced with a desperate financial situation. It sprang from the combination of modern administrative and military methods with medieval systems of finance. They entrusted to bureaucracies work which, if done at all, had formerly been done as an incident of tenure, or by boroughs and gilds; officials had to be paid. They were constantly at war; and the new technique of war, involving the use of masses of professional infantry and artillery—which Rabelais said was invented by the inspiration of the devil, as a counterpoise to the invention of printing inspired by God—was making it, as after 1870, a highly capitalized industry. Government after Government, undeterred, with rare exceptions, by the disasters of its neighbors, trod a familiar round of expedients, each of which was more disastrous than the last. They hoarded treasure, only to see the accumulations of a thrifty Henry VII or Frederick III dissipated by a Henry VIII or a Maximilian. They debased the currency and ruined trade. They sold offices, or established monopolies, and crushed the taxpayer beneath a load of indirect taxation. They plundered the Church, and spent gorgeously as income property which should have been treated as capital. They parted with Crown estates, and left an insoluble problem to their successors.
These agreeable devices
