Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

by Dan Jones

with increasingly sophisticated ways of trading and financing business invented, and new markets opened up. The name historians have given to the changes that took place in this age is the Commercial Revolution, and this is a deservedly grand term. What took place in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries was as economically significant as the Industrial Revolution of the nineteenth century and Digital Revolution through which we are presently living. The Commercial Revolution placed power in the hands of new agents besides emperors, popes, and kings. It allowed the merchant to assume a prominent place in medieval society and culture. It gave cities in which merchants dominated newfound political status and independence. Tastes in art and literature were moved by the mores of the merchant class who could afford to act as both patrons and creators. Political regimes and wars were underwritten by merchant money. It is a cliché much repeated by historians that the medieval world was made up of three groups of people: those who prayed, those who fought, and those who worked. But from the thirteenth century onward, we must also take into account those who counted, moved, saved, and spent. It is to the rise of the merchants, and their contribution to both the Middle Ages and the world today, that the rest of this chapter will now turn.