The Victory of Reason: How Christianity Led to Freedom, Capitalism, and Western Success

by Rodney Stark

In 829 Emperor Theophilus of Byzantium watched a beautiful merchant ship sail into the harbor of Constantinople. When he asked who owned the ship, he was enraged to learn it belonged to his wife. He snarled at her, “God made me an emperor, you would make me a ship captain!” and ordered that the ship be burned at once. For centuries, Byzantine historians praised Theophilus for this act.7 The classical philosophers would have done so too.

Consequently, the fall of Rome was not a tragic setback; had the empire prevailed, there would be nothing to call Western Civilization.

“the expansion of capitalism—and European civilization—owes its origins and raison d’être to political anarchy.”

It is belief in moral equality that has informed Western political and legal practices guaranteeing equality before the law and many other forms of equal rights.

Many also express admiration for John Locke’s seventeenth-century works as a major source for modern democratic theory, seemingly without the slightest awareness that Locke explicitly based his entire thesis on Christian doctrines concerning moral equality.

Pursuing the logical implications of the right of private property led William of Ockham and other theologians to conclude that since it is a right that precedes the laws imposed by any sovereign, rulers cannot usurp or arbitrarily seize the property of those over whom they rule. A sovereign can infringe on private property only when “he shall see that the common welfare takes preference over private interest.” But “he cannot do this at his own arbitrary discretion.”

In Article 61 the king agrees that the barons “shall choose any twenty-five barons of the kingdom they wish, who must with all their might observe, hold and cause to be observed, the peace and liberties which we have granted and confirmed them by this present charter.” The House of Lords was thereby created.

During the fourteenth century there were about a thousand independent statelets in Europe.40 This proliferation had several very important consequences. First, it tended to make for weak rulers. Second, it provided for creative competition. Third, it offered people some opportunity to depart for a setting more suitable in terms of liberty or opportunity.

Why were these particular medieval Italian city-states the first to achieve them? There were two major factors. First was their ability to play off imperial, papal, and Byzantine ambitions, and so to establish and maintain their independence. Second was their leadership in a rapidly expanding foreign trade that resulted in the dispersion of political power among a set of well-matched interest groups: not only the aristocracy, the military, and the clergy but also merchants, bankers, manufacturers, and the workers’ guilds.

What emerged was a city populated with an abundance of families who had legitimate claims to noble status but who no longer had rural estates to support them with rents, and who had seized the opportunity to engage in commerce, probably making Venice the first society to live by trade alone.

Being well organized and possessed of financial resources, the guilds became such a significant political force that they were assigned representation in the councils; thus the masses were given a significant voice in government.

Called the podesteria, it was a sort of city-manager setup. Each year the city-state hired a non-Genoese podestà to be its military commander, chief judge, and political administrator.

In 1293, sea trade alone produced an income of nearly 4 million Genoese pounds. This amount was ten times the total annual income of the French royal treasury! 56

Regardless of which faction was in control, the right of the guilds to a major voice in government was acknowledged.

The answer to “Why not Naples?” is quite straightforward. Naples sat at the edge of a very large, fertile hinterland, supporting many noble estates. The result was a highly stratified society that allowed very little freedom for commercial ventures. 72 In contrast, Amalfi had no hinterland and no interfering nobles. From earliest days it had been a republic dominated by commerce.

However, democracy in the northern cities never led to the elaborate structures typical of Italy. First came democracy for the upper classes, in that they selected a group of their members to act as a government. Soon, other significant social groups gained representation until a truly popular government was achieved.

Christian ideals, small political units, and within them, the appearance of a diversity of well-matched interest groups.

The proximate cause of the rise of Italian capitalism was freedom from the rapacious rulers who repressed and consumed economic progress in most of the world, including most of Europe. Although their political life often was turbulent, these city-states were true republics able to sustain the freedom required by capitalism. Second, centuries of technological progress had laid the necessary foundations for the rise of capitalism, especially the agricultural surpluses needed to sustain cities and to permit specialization.

One statistic reveals much: in Florence, in 1338, nearly half of the school-age population was attending school, 6 this in an age when there were no schools in most of Europe, and even many kings were illiterate. Similar levels of schooling were sustained in Venice, Genoa, Milan, and other northern Italian commercial cities. Consequently, it is obvious that not only was “the whole business class . . . thoroughly literate and numerate” but so too were most of the artisans and craftsmen.

These schools probably first appeared during the thirteenth century, stimulated by the publication and widespread distribution of a textbook by Leonardo Fibonacci. Also known as Leonardo of Pisa, he was one of the greatest number theorists in the history of mathematics. But he had even greater impact on early capitalism. When his Liber Abaci (Book of the Abacus) appeared in 1202, it made Hindu-Arabic numerals and the concept of zero available for the first time outside the circle of professional mathematicians.

Beginning in about 1300, many sumptuary laws prohibiting conspicuous consumption and luxurious lifestyles were adopted throughout the northern Italian city-states. Between 1299 and 1499, forty-two different sumptuary statutes were adopted in Venice, sixty-one in Florence (between 1281 and 1497), nineteen in Genoa (1157 to 1484), and five in Milan (1343 to 1498). The intent of the laws is clearly revealed by these excerpts from their preambles:

In the wake of the plague, the number of English cloths exported to the Continent declined by almost two-thirds in 1349 and 1350, and lingered at that level through 1353. But in 1354, the preplague export level was achieved once again, “and during the next four years [the woolen export business] was to become more prosperous than before the pestilence . . . [and] had doubled within a decade.”

Even in Roman times, the towns of Flanders were famous for making the finest woolens in the world,

As they gained familiarity with the local scene, the bankers soon recognized the remarkable opportunity offered by the fact that the Flanders woolen “industry” consisted of a disorganized maze of tiny weaving shops and home-based piece workers. Immense gains in productivity and efficiency were soon realized as the Italians submerged hundreds of these small producers as subcontractors to a few large firms capable of efficient management, planning, and marketing.

With the full backing of the local ruler in return for regular permission fees, the merchant weavers’ guilds in the various towns and cities operated as repressive cartels, narrowly restricting the entire industry and able to impose truly severe punishment on nonconformists. For example, anyone found to have varied the formula for a popular scarlet dye could be “condemned to the crushing fine of £105 or, failing payment, to the loss of his right hand.”2

But for their economic development it was sufficient that these communities had escaped from the control of local nobility, paying their taxes instead to distant rulers such as the Count of Flanders or the Holy Roman Emperor,

After nearly a century of intermittent outbursts, a general revolution broke out in Flanders in 1280.

Not that Bruges ever became a manufacturing town. It lived instead from trade and transportation. Nearly all of the fleeces imported from England came to Bruges and were then sent on to inland weaving towns such as Ghent, 10 from whence finished cloth was returned to Bruges for export.

In fact, the very first bourse, precursor to the modern stock exchange, was originated in Bruges by Flemish merchants in 1453.

The English were also blessed with an exceptionally productive agriculture and vast mineral resources, as well as abundant waterpower.

Moreover, unlike those on the Continent, English industries did not need to huddle in a few crowded, expensive, independent cities but could enjoy the same political freedom in rural areas and small towns as they could in London.

Perhaps the most remarkable feature of the English wool industry, one that subsequently was imitated by many other English industries, was dispersion. There never really were any “woolen” cities in England similar to those in Flanders, or even Italy.

English woolen industry had rapidly migrated from urban locations to villages and rural areas. Why? Several factors were involved, but water-powered fulling mills played such an important role that Carus-Wilson entitled her famous paper “An Industrial Revolution of the Thirteenth Century.”

Then at some point a new method was introduced: two wooden hammers, attached to a drum and turned by a crank, were raised and dropped on the cloth in a trough—although the process still depended on muscle power. An immense breakthrough occurred when someone hooked such a device to a water mill

Some historians propose that fulling mills appeared in the eleventh century and some say it was not until the twelfth, but fulling mills were so common in the thirteenth century that they revolutionized the English industry, leaving Europe far behind.

Why didn’t this happen in Europe? Because in Europe it was only in the cities that there existed enough freedom and sufficiently secure property rights to sustain industry.

Soon after the fulling mill came the gig mill, for raising the pile on fabrics. Then, in 1589, came the knitting machine; then the flying shuttle (1733), the spinning jenney (1770), the spinning mule (1779), and the power loom (1785).

The Romans had dealt with seepage by hand bailing via bucket brigades. The English met the problem with a variety of pumps driven by waterpower or by horses turning a wheel.

There they stood, solidly Catholic societies ruled by despots who taxed, looted, and regulated commerce to a virtual standstill. Meanwhile, capitalism continued to flourish in England and Holland, both predominately Protestant.

But then Henry Kamen produced a whole new deck: Spain never declined because it never rose!

This was a source of pride among leading Spanish citizens—known as the hidalgos. Manufacturing and commerce were for inferior people and nations,

For centuries all European capitalists had embraced the principle of “selling dear”—charging the highest possible prices. But English capitalists, in “a fundamental departure in economic thought . . . [adopted] a new way of thinking about competition and prices . . . [to sell] as cheaply as possible.” 28 That is, they took volume into account when computing potential returns. And when they did so they realized that they had unbeatable cost advantages,

This new regime, which historians prefer to call the “Old Regime,” soon sustained an astonishingly large and unprincipled bureaucracy. The king had uncontested power to levy taxes, in no way checked by any legislative body.

the most significant aspect of this absolutist state was the king’s ability to impose taxes without seeking any consent.

American wages were high because employers had to compete with the exceptional opportunities of self-employment in order to attract adequate numbers of qualified workers.

Nearly 150 years later, these huge educational differences persist. If we look only at persons aged twenty-five and older, as of the year 2000, the average American had completed 12.3 years of school and the average Canadian 12.1 years. In Argentina the average person had completed 8.8 years of schooling, in Chile and Peru 7.6, in Mexico 7.2, in Venezuela 6.6, in Ecuador 6.4, in Columbia 5.3, in Brazil 4.9, in Nicaragua 4.5, and in Guatemala 3.5. These Latin American rates are similar to Spain’s, where the average person has 7.3 years of schooling, while Portugal’s rate is 5.9 years.62