Powers and Thrones: A New History of the Middle Ages

by Dan Jones

theory at least) made longer overland trading journeys safer and more secure. As trading networks began to extend further afield, so institutions appeared to help make business easier. In the eleventh century, markets began to grow and expand in towns across Europe, at predictable times of the week, month, or year. Here, surplus grain could be exchanged for wine, leather, worked metal, or livestock, which was distributed by traveling traders. Over the next two hundred years, markets and fairs (originally markets associated with a religious festival or holiday) became an increasingly important part of economic life in Europe. With the rise of the market came a surge in coin production, along with the silver and copper mining required to mint coins.25 Meanwhile, basic financial services came to be offered in the growing towns and cities across the west, especially through Jewish commercial networks. Between the ninth and eleventh centuries Jewish people all over the west became prominent in moneylending, as well as long-distance trade, carrying commodities like salt, cloth, wine, and enslaved people throughout the old Roman world.26 Of course, Europe’s Jews were not thanked for this pioneering contribution to the macroeconomic fabric of their world: rather, they were the object of suspicion, derision, and bursts of violent persecution, which accelerated during the Crusades and crescendoed in the late thirteenth century with waves of pogroms and expulsions throughout western ...