Chapter DXXVIII: Section 63: of this latter act reads: 'For all purposes (7)

The two peoples who inhabit the region called the
Netherlands—a purely Germanic stock in the north (modern
Holland) and a mixed but largely Celtic population in the
south (modern Belgium)—have had a history so much in common
that it cannot well be divided, though they have differed in
experiences as widely as in character. The struggle with
nature for a foothold in the lowland itself was harder in the
north than in the south, and no doubt that is why the Teutonic
Frisians led the way in industrial training. It was among them
that the arts of weaving and dyeing were cultivated first to a
notable excellence. As early as the age of Charlemagne (8-9th
centuries), Frisian robes, of white and purple woolen stuffs,
are mentioned among the choice gifts which the Emperor
sometimes sent to foreign princes, and even to the great
caliph, Haroun al Raschid. In the 9th century, Frisian weavers
are said to have been persuaded by an enterprising count of
Flanders to settle in his dominions, at Ghent, and introduce
there a better knowledge of their art. But if the Flemish
people borrowed from the Frisians in this matter, they soon
outran their teachers and made the loom their own peculiar
property. The shuttle, ere long, was in the hands of a very
large part of the whole south Netherland or Belgian
population, and they became almost a nation of weavers. The
same Count Baldwin of Flanders who brought the Frisian weavers
into Ghent established annual markets, or fairs, in various
towns, which drew merchants from abroad, promoted trade and
stimulated manufacturing industries throughout the country.
Woolen, linen, and finally silk looms multiplied to a
prodigious extent, and the weavers in all these branches
acquired remarkable skill. The working of metals was also
learned with great aptness, and Flemish cutlery, weapons and
armor became very nearly as renowned as those of Milan and
Damascus. Tanning was another valuable art which the Flemings
and their Netherland neighbors cultivated, and the tilling of
the soil was so industriously pursued that flax, hemp, grain
and other farm products were raised quite abundantly for sale
abroad. In the north Netherlands—the Hollow-land of the sturdy
"Free Frisians" and Batavians, who were afterwards called the
Dutch—the hard working energy of the people had been pushed in
some different directions. The old trade of weaving was still
vigorously carried on, in nearly every important town, and
Dutch woolens, damask linens, carpets, velvets, etc., were
largely produced and widely sought after; but this industry
was never so prominent as it became in the Belgian provinces.
The fortunes of the Hollanders were founded to a large extent
upon their fisheries, and especially the herring fishery,
which assumed great importance in their hands after the middle
of the 12th century. Before that time, they appear to have
been obliged to seek the herring in other waters than their
own—along the shores of England, Scotland and Norway. But some
change in the movements of those curiously swarming fish, about
the time above mentioned, brought great shoals of them to the
Dutch coast, and the herring harvest thereafter was a rich
source of gain to the Hollanders.
{3710}
They discovered some secrets of salting or curing the fish
which were very much valued, and the Dutch herring were
eagerly bought for all parts of Europe. The making of pottery
was another industry to which the Dutch applied themselves
with success, and particularly at the town of Delft, which
gave its name for many centuries to the common earthenware
used in western Europe. In dairy farming and skilful
horticulture, or gardening, the Hollanders were superior to
all other people at an early time. Wherever sea-fisheries are
extensive, sailors and ship builders are trained and ocean
navigation and commerce are sure, in time, to be prosperously
pursued. It was so with the Dutch. Their Frisian ancestors had
suffered so much on their coasts from the harassing raids of
the Norse pirates, or Vikings, that they did not figure very
early in seafaring enterprise. But they fought the
free-booters in their stubborn and stout-hearted way and were
able at last to make the harbors of their coast tolerably
safe. From that time the seaport towns of Holland grew
rapidly, and Dutch merchants and merchant ships, trading with
the cities of the Baltic, with England and with Flanders and
France increased in number. The Hollanders had an advantage in
this matter over their Flemish neighbors of the South
Netherlands. They were provided with better harbors and they
held the outlets of the great rivers in their hands. This
latter was the cause of incessant quarrels between the two
peoples. The 15th century found the whole Netherlands, both
north and south, in a thriving state, so far as industry and
trade were concerned, notwithstanding bad government and
disorderly times. The people were counted among the richest in
Europe. Many great and wealthy cities had grown up, containing
large populations and very busy ones. In the north, there were
Dordrecht or Dort, Hoorn, Zierikzee, Haarlem, Delft, Leyden,
Deventer, Enkhuizen, Middelburg, Nimeguen, Utrecht, Rotterdam,
and Amsterdam, which last named city eclipsed them all in the
end, though it was one of the latest to rise. In the south
there was Ghent, with forty thousand weavers inside its strong
walls, who were always as ready to string the bow as to throw
the shuttle, and whose hot-tempered revolts against tyranny
and wrong are among the most exciting incidents of history.
There was Bruges, which became for a time the great emporium
of the commerce of northern and southern Europe, but which
lost its importance before the 15th century closed. There was
Antwerp, which succeeded to the trade of Bruges and rose to
unrivalled rank; and there were Lille, Mechlin (or Malines),
Courtrai, Ypres, Louvain, and other towns, all centers of
flourishing manufactures, chiefly those of the loom.

COMMERCE: MEDIÆVAL.
Trade Routes, west and north from the Mediterranean.

"The connection between the two great divisions of European
commerce, the northern including the Hansa and the Flemish
towns, and the southern the Italian republics and
Mediterranean ports, was effected by two chief routes. One was
by sea from the Mediterranean through the Straits of
Gibraltar, up the coasts of Spain and France to Flanders. This
route was used more by the southern, and especially by
Venetian, merchants than by the northern traders, for … Venice
sent every year a large fleet to Flanders and the English
Channel, which fleet would meet at Bruges, the great Hansa
depot, the most important merchants of North Europe and the
Hansa traders. Bruges was indeed for a long time the central
mart in the north for the commercial world, till 1482, when
the canal connecting it with the port of Sluys was blocked up.
But at Bruges also the maritime trade just mentioned met the
overland trade through central Europe, a trade that was very
important, and which enriched many a city upon the Rhine and
farther south, from Augsburg to Cologne. We must consider this
overland route more carefully. The great centre from which it
started, or to which it tended, was Venice, where as we know
were collected most of the products of the East, coming both
via Egypt and via the lands round the Black Sea. … Starting …
from Venice, the merchants used to cross the Alps by the
Brenner or Julier Passes, and then would make for the Upper
Danube or one of its tributaries, and thence get on to the
stream of the Rhine. Their object was generally to utilise a
natural waterway wherever possible, rather in contrast to the
old Roman traders, who preferred the roads. But the roads of
the Middle Ages were far inferior to the old Roman highways.
One of the first great cities which the mediæval trader passed
on this route, coming from Venice, was Augsburg. … Thence he
might go down the stream to Regensburg (Ratisbon) and Vienna;
or he might go up to Ulm and then make a short land journey
till he reached the Rhine, and so right away down that
convenient stream. This was perhaps the main route from north
to south. But many others converged from central Europe to
Italy, and many important cities owed their wealth to the
stream of trade. In Karl the Great's time the cities on the
great waterway to the East along the Danube became very
flourishing; Regensburg, Passau, and Vienna being the most
important. From Regensburg there ran north and west two great
commercial highways into the interior of Germany, one by way
of Nürnberg and Erfurt and the other past Nürnberg to the
Rhine. Another route from Regensburg, by river, to Trentschin
on the river Waag took its merchants through Galicia into
Russia, whither they went as far as Kief, the centre of
Russian trade. Along this great waterway of the Danube and its
tributaries came the products of the East from Constantinople
and the Black Sea. … Another important route was that from the
cities of the Rhine, such as Coblenz and Basle, up that river
and on to Chur and then by the Julier Pass and the Engadine
and the Etschthal to Venice; or again, after passing Chur,
through the Septimer Pass and the Bergeller Thal to Genoa.
These Rhine cities were very flourishing, from Basle to
Cologne. … Like most trading towns in the Middle Ages, the
Rhine cities were compelled to form themselves into a
confederacy to resist the robbery and extortions of feudal
nobles, whose only idea of trade seems to have been that it
providentially existed as a source of plunder to themselves.
But besides this Confederacy of the Rhine there was another
great Confederacy of the Swabian cities, arising from the same
causes. … That of the Rhine included ninety cities, and
existed in a fully organised form in 1255.
{3711}
The Swabian Confederacy was formed a little later, about 1300
or 1350, under the leadership of Augsburg, Ulm, and Nürnberg,
and was in close political and commercial relations both with
Venice and Genoa. … If now we turn from trade routes in Europe
itself to those which led to Europe from the East, we find
that at the time of which we are now speaking there were three
main streams of commerce. In the 12th century the caravan
trade in Central Asia had passed along several different
paths; but after the Crusades, and the decline of the Eastern
empire by the capture of Constantinople (1204), the various
tribes of Central Asia, rendered more fanatical and warlike
than ever by these military and religious events, caused
caravan trading to become very unsafe. The first of the three
routes which now remained in the 13th century was from India
and the western coasts of Asia, past Basra on the Persian Gulf
to Bagdad by water. From Bagdad merchants went, still by
water, along the Tigris to the point on that river nearest to
Seleucia and Antioch, and so to Orontes, and then to the coast
of the Levant. The second route followed the same course as
the first till the point of leaving the Tigris, and then
proceeded over the Highlands of Asia Minor and Armenia to the
port of Trebizond on the Black Sea, where Venetian vessels
used to meet Asiatic traders. For both these routes Bagdad
formed a very important centre. … The third route from the far
East was from India by sea to Aden, then by land across the
desert to Chus on the Nile, which took nine days, and then
again by water down the Nile to Cairo, a journey of thirteen
days. From Cairo there was a canal, 200 miles long, to
Alexandria, where again Venetian and Genoese merchants were
ready to receive the rich spices, sugar, perfumes, precious
stones, gum, oil, cotton, and silk brought from the East."

_H. de B. Gibbins,
History of Commerce in Europe,
book 2, chapter 5._

COMMERCE: MEDIÆVAL:
The English.

"Whilst the Italians were vigorously pursuing their trade in
India and Europe, and Spain was renowned for her manufactures;
whilst the Hanse merchants were extending their factories, and
Portuguese navigators were bent upon maritime discoveries;
whilst the Dutch were struggling for independence, and France
was planting the seeds of her industries; England was only
known as possessing a few articles of commerce of great value.
Her wools and her metals were eagerly sought by foreign
traders, but she had no ships of her own to carry them abroad.
She had many raw materials, but she produced no manufactures
for exportation. Nor was her policy respecting foreign trade
the most wise. The chief concern of the legislature in those
days seemed to be to prevent foreign nations doing with
English produce what, after all, the English could not do
themselves. Again and again the export of wool was prohibited,
or was hindered by prohibitory duties. … The people regarded
the introduction of foreigners with the utmost jealousy. They
resented their competition, they grudged their profits and
their advantages. The guilds would not admit them as members,
and it was hard for the poor strangers to establish a footing
in England, even although Magna Charta had long before
declared that all merchants shall have safety in coming to or
going out of England, and in remaining and travelling through
it, by land or water, for buying or selling, free from any
grievous imposition. Anyhow, whatever the opposition of cities
and corporations, the nation was benefited by the foreign
merchants. Thankful, indeed, might England have been for the
Lombards, who brought hither money and merchandise, banking
and insurance; for the Flemings, who, driven by intestine
dissension, found refuge on British soil, and became the
founders of the woollen manufacture; and for the Huguenots,
who brought with them the silk manufacture. … But a new era
advanced. The discovery of the American continent by Columbus,
and of a maritime route to India by Vasco da Gama, altered the
course and character of commerce. Till then trade was
essentially inland, thenceforth its most conspicuous triumphs
were to be on the ocean. Till then, the Mediterranean was the
centre of international trading. From thenceforth the tendency
of trade was towards the countries bordering on the Atlantic.
… It was not long … before England followed the lead of Spain
and Portugal. John Cabot and his sons went in quest of land to
North America; Drake went to circumnavigate the globe;
Chancellor sailed up the White Sea to Russia; Willoughby went
on his ill-fated voyage in search of a north-eastern passage
to India; Sir Walter Raleigh explored Virginia; the Merchant
Adventurers pushed their adventures to Spain and Portugal; and
English ships began to be seen in the Levant. Meanwhile,
English trade enlarged its sphere, English bravery at sea
became most conspicuous, and English industry advanced apace."

_L. Levi,
History of British Commerce,
2d edition, introduction._

"In the 14th century the whole of the external, and much of
the internal, trade of the country had been in the hands of
foreigners; in the 15th our merchants began to push their way
from point to point in the Mediterranean and the Baltic; in
the 16th they followed slowly in the wake of other
adventurers, or tried to establish themselves in unkindly
regions which had attracted no one else. When Elizabeth
ascended the throne England appears to have been behind other
nations of Western Europe in the very industrial arts and
commercial enterprise on which her present reputation is
chiefly based."

_W. Cunningham,
Growth of English Industry and Commerce,
volume 2, page 2._

COMMERCE: MEDIÆVAL:
Trade and Piracy.

"It would be wrong to infer from the prevalence of piracy at
this period [the 15th century] that commerce must have
declined. On the contrary, it was probably the increase of
commerce, unaccompanied by the growth of adequate means for
its defence, which made the pirate's calling so profitable.
Nor was the evil confined to the professional pirate class, if
we may use the expression. Even recognised associations of
merchants frequently indulged in practices which can only be
characterised as piracy. Commerce, in fact, was deeply imbued
with the spirit of lawlessness, and in these circumstances it
is probable that the depredations of pirates did not excite
the same alarm nor discourage trade in the same degree as
would be the case in more law-abiding times. In the 15th
century the profession of Christianity and extreme
respectability were not incompatible with a life of violence
and outrage, and it is to be feared that in some cases the
Governments which should have repressed pirates by the
severest measures, encouraged their depredations.
{3712}
Certainly they have never enjoyed such immunity from the
strong arm of the law as in the 15th century. Outrage and
robbery went on unchecked along the coasts and in the track of
merchant vessels. No trader was safe even in the rivers and
ports of his own country. The pirates burnt and sacked towns
as important as Sandwich and Southampton; they carried off not
only the goods they could lay their hands on, but men and
women, and even children, whom they held to ransom. Unable to
look to the Government for protection of life and property
while they were engaged in trade, the merchants were thrown
upon their own resources to provide security. The best method
of grappling with the pirates, and that which was most
frequently adopted, was for merchant vessels to sail together
in such numbers that they could repel attack; and these
voluntary efforts were sometimes aided by the Government. In
1406 Henry IV. granted the merchants 3s. on every cask of wine
imported, and certain payments on Staple exports for purposes
of defence. Two Admirals were appointed, one for the north and
the other for the south, with full jurisdiction in maritime
affairs and power to organise naval forces. But this scheme
was unsuccessful. A similar expedient was tried in 1453, but
abandoned two years afterwards. The only satisfactory remedy
would have been a strong navy, but the conditions necessary
for this had not yet been realised. The country could not have
supported the charge of maintaining a strong naval force. …
That merchants were beginning to realise the importance of the
subject, and were becoming wealthy enough to build vessels of
a considerable size, is evident from the operations of John
Taverner, of Kingston-upon-Hull, and the famous William
Cannynges of Bristol, the latter of whom is said to have
possessed 2,470 tons of shipping and some vessels of 900 tons
burthen."

_W. A. S. Hewins,
Industry and Commerce
(in "Social England," edited by H. D. Traill,
chapter 7, volume 2)._

COMMERCE: MEDIÆVAL:
The Portuguese, and the finding of the Ocean Way to the Indies.

It was not by accident that the Portuguese rose all at once,
in the closing years of the 15th century and the early years
of the 16th, to a position in which they controlled and
directed the main current of trade between Europe and the
Eastern world. The discovery by Vasco da Gama of an ocean
route to the Indies, and all the results (hereafter
described), which it yielded to his countrymen for the time,
were a reward of enterprise which the Portuguese had fully
earned. They had worked for it, patiently and resolutely,
through almost a hundred years. The undertaking was begun, at
about the commencement of the 15th century, by a Portuguese
prince who ought to enjoy greater fame than if he had
conquered an empire; because his ambition was nobler and the
fruits were of higher worth to the world. He was known as
"Prince Henry the Navigator," and he was the third son of the
Portuguese King John I. who was called the Great, on account
of his success in wars with the Castillians and the Moors. But
this young son, Prince Henry, was much the greater man of the
two. He could not endure the ignorance of his time with regard
to the mysterious ocean that stretched westward and southward
from the shores of the little country which his father ruled.
He was bent on knowing more about it; and he was specially
bent on having the Portuguese sailors make their way down the
shores of the African continent, to learn where it ended and
what track to the farther side might be found. Beyond Cape
Nun, at the southern extremity of the modern empire of
Morocco, nothing was known of the western coast of Africa when
Prince Henry began his work. The Phœnicians and Carthaginians,
two thousand years earlier, had probably known more about it;
but their knowledge was lost. Prince Henry studied everything
that could give him light and became well convinced that round
the continent of Africa there was a way to the Indies for bold
sailors to find. Then he applied himself, with a zeal which
never flagged, to the working out of that achievement. He was
a young man when he began, and during more than forty years of
his life he devoted his time and his means almost wholly to
the fitting out and directing of exploring ships and he fixed
his residence upon the most southerly promontory of Portugal,
to watch their going and coming. But the art of navigation was
so little understood and the navigators were so timid, that
slow progress was made. Each explorer only ventured a little
farther than the one before him; and so they went feeling
their way, league by league, down the African coast. The
forty-three years of Prince Henry's endeavors were consumed in
reaching what is now the settlement of Sierra Leone, near the
head of the gulf of Guinea. But even this added more than a
thousand miles of the western coast of Africa to the maps of
the 15th century and was a greater advance in geographical
knowledge than had been made since Carthage fell. Before he
died (A. D. 1460), Prince Henry secured from the Pope (who was
supposed to have the giving of all heathen countries) a grant
to Portugal of all these discoveries, both island and
mainland, and of all which the Portuguese explorers might make
in the future, between Europe and India. So he died well
content, let us hope, with the work which he had done for his
country and for mankind. The enthusiasm for exploration which
Prince Henry had awakened in Portugal did not die with him,
though his efforts had met with unending opposition and
excited very much discontent. Repeated expeditions were still
sent down the African coast, and they crept farther and
farther toward the goal of desire. At last, in 1486,
Bartholomew Diaz, with three ships, actually rounded the Cape
of Good Hope without knowing it, and only learned the fact
when he turned backward from his voyage, discouraged by
storms. Eleven years later, Vasco da Gama set out, fired with
fresh determination, by the great discovery of a new world
which Columbus had so lately made for Spain, and this time
there was no failure. He passed the Cape, sailed up the
eastern shores of the African continent to Melinda, in
Zanguebar, and thence across the Indian Ocean to Calicut in
Hindostan. The ocean route to India was now fully proved; the
new era was opened and its grand prize plucked by the
Portuguese—thanks to Prince Henry the Navigator.

See, also, PORTUGAL: A. D. 1415-1460
and 1463-1498 (pages 2571-2573).

{3713}

COMMERCE: MODERN:
New Routes and New Marts.

There is nothing at all imaginary in the line which is drawn
in history across the later years of the 15th and the early
years of the 16th century, to mark the beginning of a new era
in human affairs. It is a line very real and very distinct,
dividing one state of things, known as the mediæval, from
another state of things, known as the modern. It was fixed by
the occurrence of a series of extraordinary events, which came
quickly, one after the other, and which brought about, either
singly or together, the most tremendous changes, in many ways,
that ever happened to the world in the same space of time. The
first of these was the invention of printing, which dates as a
practical art from about 1454. The second was the discovery of
the new world by Columbus, A. D. 1492. The third was the
passage around the Cape of Good Hope by the Portuguese
navigator, Vasco da Gama, A. D. 1497. The fourth was the
religious reformation set in motion by Martin Luther, at
Wittenberg, A. D. 1517. The combined effect of these great
events was to make really a new starting point in almost every
particular of human history, and to do so very quickly. The
commercial changes which resulted are among the most
remarkable. No sooner had the route by sea to southern and
eastern Asia and the islands of the Indian ocean been found,
than almost the whole traffic of Europe with that rich eastern
world abandoned its ancient channels and ran into the new one.
There were several strong reasons for this. In the first
place, it cost less to bring goods by ship from India, Ceylon
or China direct to European ports, than to carry them over
long distances by land to the eastern shores of the
Mediterranean and there ship them to the West. In the second
place, by taking its new route, this commerce escaped the
Moorish pirates in the Mediterranean, who had long been very
troublesome. And, lastly, but not least in importance, the
European merchants gained a great advantage in becoming able
to deal directly with the East Indians and the Chinese,
instead of trading at second hand with them, through Arabs and
Mahometan Turks, who controlled the Asiatic and African
routes. So the commerce of the Indies, as it was generally
called, fled suddenly away from the Mediterranean to the
Atlantic; fled away from the Venetians, the Genoese, the
Marseillaise, and the Barcelonians; from Constantinople,
lately conquered by the Turks; from Antioch and Alexandria;
and from many cities of the Hansa League in the north, which
had learned the old ways of traffic and were slow to learn
anything new. Soon many of the great marts which had been
busiest, grew silent and deserted and fell into slow decay.
The most enriching commerce of the world was passing to
different hands and bringing younger races into the front of
history.

COMMERCE: MODERN:
The Portuguese in the lead.

Having found the way to India by sea, the Portuguese were
prompt in taking measures to make themselves strong in that
part of the world and to control the trade with it. They were
helped in this effort by the grant of imagined rights which
Prince Henry had obtained from the Pope, long before. But they
strengthened the rights which the Pope gave them, by the older
fashioned methods of conquest and possession. They began at
once to plant themselves firmly at important points in the
eastern seas and on the Indian coast. They sent out one of
their ablest military men, Francesco d'Almeida, with a strong
force of ships and volunteers, and appointed him Viceroy of
India. He took possession of several parts of the Malabar
coast (the western coast of the southern extremity of
Hindostan) and built forts in which garrisons were placed. He
similarly established the Portuguese power in Ceylon, took
possession of the Maldive Islands and founded trading
settlements in Sumatra. The Venetians, who saw that their
ancient trade with the East was doomed unless this new rivalry
could be crushed, now joined their Mahometan allies of Egypt
in a great effort to drive the Portuguese back. A formidable
fleet was fitted out on the Red Sea and sent against Almeida.
He was unfortunate in his first encounter with these allied
enemies and lost the squadron that opposed them. But the
resolute viceroy was undaunted. Recalled from his command, he
refused to give it up until he had equipped and led another
fleet against the navy of the Egyptians and completely
destroyed it. The successor of Almeida, as viceroy of India,
was a remarkable personage who is known in the annals of his
time as "the great Afonso D'Albuquerque." The chronicle of his
exploits in Africa and India, compiled by his son from his own
letters and records, and entitled "The commentaries of the
great Afonso D'Albuquerque," has been translated into English
and published by the Hakluyt Society. He was a remarkably
energetic commander, and very honest in his way, according to
the notions of his time; but he did the work of subjugation
and conquest which he was sent to do in a cruel and rapacious
style. He was not rapacious on his own account; but he saw no
wrong in anything done for the profit of his country. In the
course of seven years he spread the Portuguese power so widely
and fixed it so firmly on the East Indian coasts and in the
neighboring seas that there was hardly an attempt for many
years to disturb it. None but Portuguese ships dared enter the
Indian ocean without special permits, and the few which
received admission were forbidden to trade in spices—the most
precious merchandise of the region. From the Indies the
Portuguese made their way to the coasts of China and put
themselves on friendly terms with its people. They were
permitted to occupy the port of Macao and have possessed it
ever since. Some years later they discovered the islands of
Japan and opened the earliest European commerce with that
singular country. So they held for a time the complete mastery
of eastern trade and enlarged it to greater bounds than it had
ever reached before. But they were satisfied with keeping the
sources of the supply of eastern goods to Europe in their own
hands. The first handling of the commodities was all that they
tried to control. They brought to Lisbon the spices, silks,
cotton, pearls, ivory, sugar, aromatic drugs and the like,
which their ships and merchants gathered up, and there sold
them to other traders, Dutch, English and German for the most
part, who found the final markets for them and who enjoyed a
good half of the profits of the trade. These latter derived
great advantages from the arrangements—much more than they had
gained in their trading with Genoa and Venice—and the commerce
of Holland and England grew rapidly as the result.
{3714}
But the glory and prosperity of the Portuguese, as masters of
the rich traffic of the eastern world, were not of long
duration. Before the 16th century closed, they had lost the
footholds of their power and were slipping into the background
very fast. By misfortunes and by folly combined, all the
fruits of the patient wisdom of Prince Henry, the persevering
courage of Vasco da Gama, the bold energy of Almeida, and the
restless enterprise of Albuquerque, were torn out of their
hands. Almost from the first, a greedy and jealous court had
done all that could be done to destroy the grand opportunities
in trade which the country had gained. Private enterprise was
discouraged; the crown claimed exclusive rights over large
parts of the commerce opened up, and these rights were sold,
given to favorites and dealt with in many ways that are
ruinous to successful trade. Royal jealousy sent three
viceroys to divide among them the government of the Portuguese
possessions in the East, when there should have been but one,
and the same jealousy kept these vice-royalties ever changing.
Of course, there was nowhere good government nor thrifty
management of trade. In the midst of this bad state of things,
the royal family of Portugal died out, in 1580, and Philip II.
of Spain set up claims to the crown which he was strong enough
to make good. Portugal thus became joined to Spain, for the
next sixty years, and was dragged into Philip's wicked war
with the Netherlands. Her Spanish masters did what they could
to draw her trade away from Lisbon to Cadiz and Seville. The
Dutch and English, her former customers and friends, made
enemies now by Philip of Spain, pushed their way into the
eastern seas, defying the mandates of the Pope, and broke down
her supremacy there. When the Portuguese, in 1640, threw off
the Spanish yoke and asserted their independence again,
calling a prince of the house of Braganza to the throne, there
was not much left of their former power or their former trade.
They still held Goa, on the western coast of Hindostan, and
the Chinese port of Macao—as they do to the present day; and
they retained, as they still do, considerable possessions in
Africa. But their brief importance in navigation, in
colonization and trade, was quite gone and they dropped back
to a humble position in the history of the world. Even the
management of their home trade with other countries fell
mostly, after a time, into the hands of the English, who
became their special allies and friends.

COMMERCE: MODERN:
The Spaniards.

While the Portuguese were pursuing glory and gain in the track
of Vasco da Gama, which led them south and east, the Spaniards
were doing the same in the wake of the three little ships
which Columbus, with a bolder hand, had steered westward, to
strange shores which he never dreamed of finding. These newly
opened regions of the globe, in the Atlantic and on both sides
of it, were divided between the two nations by the Pope, and
it was a bold matter in those days to dispute his right. He
gave to the Spaniards all islands and countries found west of
a meridian line drawn 27½° west of the island of Ferro, in the
Canary group. This nearly corresponds with the meridian 45½°
west of Greenwich. To the Portuguese he assigned all
discoveries east of it. So they both went on their appointed
ways, with pious hearts and untroubled consciences, busily
hunting for heathen lands to seize and despoil. But the
eastern field, in which the Portuguese did most of their work,
was one where commerce was old and where something of Europe
and its people was already known. They were forced to look
upon trade as the chief object of their pursuit. With the
Spaniards the case was different. They found their way to a
quarter of the world which Europe had never heard of and came
upon people who never saw the faces of white men until then.
These strange races of the new world were some of them quite
as civilized, in certain respects, as the Spaniards who
invaded them, and even more so, it would seem, in their
notions of truth and in the refinement of their manners and
modes of life. But they were simple and unsuspecting; they
were not warlike in disposition and they were rudely and
poorly armed. So the mail-clad cavaliers of Spain crushed them
into helpless slavery with perfect ease. From the islands of
the West Indies, which they discovered and occupied first, the
Spaniards had soon made their way to the shores of the two
continents of America, North and South. They found cities and
nations which astonished them by their splendor and wealth and
set them wild with greedy desires. Europe looked poor in
comparison with the shining wealth of Mexico and Peru. The
Spaniards went mad with the lust of gold. They lost human
feeling and common sense in their greediness to grasp the
metal treasures of the new world. They were indifferent to the
more precious and abounding products that it offered, and
neglected to build up the great commerce which might have
filled their hands with lasting riches. They made the old
fable of the goose which laid golden eggs a piece of real
history. They killed the goose; they destroyed their source of
wealth in Peru and Mexico by their eager extortions. Of true
commerce between the old world and the new there was little
while the Spaniards controlled it. They did, in the course of
time, ship considerable quantities of sugar, tobacco, hides,
logwood, indigo, cochineal, cocoa, cinchona, or Peruvian bark
(from which quinine is extracted) and other American products,
from their various colonies; but to no such extent as a wise
and enterprising people would have done, having the same
opportunities. Once a year, or once in two years, a fleet of
ships was sent from Seville, at first, and afterwards from
Cadiz, to Vera Cruz, for freights from Mexico, and another to
Porto Bello, on the Isthmus of Panama, for the South American
freights. The ships which made the latter voyage were
distinguished from the Mexican fleet by being called the
galleons. For a long time, twelve galleons in the one squadron
and fifteen ships in the other, making their voyage once a
year, and sometimes only every other year, conveyed all the
trade that passed between Spain and America; which shows how
little the Spaniards drew from their great possessions, except
the enormous treasure of silver and gold which a few ships
could transport. This glittering treasure formed, in fact, the
main cargo of the Peruvian galleons and the Mexican fleet.
Before the close of the reign of Philip II. the number of
galleons was increased to about forty and that of the fleet to
fifty or sixty.
{3715}
It is quite certain that no country had ever before received
such a quantity of gold and silver as came into Spain during
the 16th century. Instead of enriching, it ruined the nation.
Neither rulers nor people had sense enough to see what a
treacherous and delusive kind of wealth it formed, if trusted
to alone. They vainly fancied that, with such a store of
precious metals to draw upon, they could afford to despise the
homely labors by which other people lived. With such mad
notions as these, the honest industries of Spain were treated
with neglect or worse. Her trade with neighboring countries
was looked upon as a business too insignificant for Spaniards
to care for or trouble themselves about. It was mostly given
over to the Dutch and Flemings, while they remained under
Spanish rule, and it was afterwards kept up in great part by
smugglers, Dutch and English. Agriculture decayed, and its
destruction was helped by the formation of a great
aristocratic company of sheep-farmers, called the Mesta, to
which such tyrannical rights and privileges were given by the
crown that the most fertile parts of Spain were finally turned
into sheep-pasture, under its control. The best artisans and
the most enterprising merchants of the kingdom were driven
out, because they were Moors and Jews, or they were burned for
Christian beliefs which the Church did not approve. The
Inquisition was so busy, with its racks and its fires, that no
other business could thrive. Every kind of production
dwindled, and for the supplying of all descriptions of wants
the Spaniards were soon driven to look to other countries. The
few who laid hands upon the riches coming in from the plunder
of America spent it recklessly, in extravagant ways, while
costly foreign wars which had no success, and plots in France
and England which came to nothing, drained the coffers of the
king. And thus the great stream of gold and silver which
flowed into Spain from the new world ran out of it quite as
fast, until nearly every other country in Europe held more of
it than Spain herself. The strong hand with which the
Spaniards were able at first, and for some time, to hold the
vast domain of sea and land which the Pope had given them and
which their own sailors and soldiers had explored and seized,
grew weak before the end of a hundred years after the
memorable voyage of Columbus was made. The hardy Dutch, driven
to revolt and enmity by tyrannical government and by cruel
religious persecutions, attacked them everywhere, in the
eastern and western world. The English, just beginning to grow
ambitious and bold on the ocean, and constantly threatened by
the armadas of Spain, did the same. But these were not the
only enemies who harassed the Spanish colonies and fleets. In
a general way, the whole world went to war with the insolent
nation which claimed the lordship of the earth. There came
into existence, in the 17th century, a powerful organization
of pirates or freebooters, made up of daring men of all
nations, who carried on for many years a villainous warfare of
their own against the Spaniards at sea and against their
American settlements. These Buccaneers, as they were called,
gained strongholds in several islands of the West Indies, from
which the Spaniards were not able to dislodge them. Under the
attacks of all these enemies, combined with her own
misgovernment and her contempt and abuse of thrifty industries
and fair trade—which no people can neglect without ruin—Spain
steadily and rapidly sank.

COMMERCE: MODERN:
The Flemings and the Dutch.

In the first half of the 16th century, the people of the
Netherlands were the tolerably contented subjects of that
famous monarch, the Emperor Charles V., who ruled in Spain, in
Naples, in Germany (the old Empire), and in Burgundy, as well
as in the Lowland principalities, Flanders, Holland, and the
rest. They were already very prosperous, working hard at many
callings, trading shrewdly and busily with the rest of the
world, and diligently picking up all kinds of knowledge
everywhere. In the southern provinces (which we may call the
Belgian, because they are mostly now embraced in the modern
kingdom of Belgium) the chief industries were those of the
loom, in all branches of weaving; and in skilful workmanship
of every kind the people were tasteful and apt. These
provinces were the seat of a much greater and more general
activity in manufactures than appeared in the states to the
north of them (which we will call the Dutch states, without
distinction, because they are now included in the kingdom of
Holland). The latter were more extensively employed in
fisheries, in navigation and in ship building, although most
kinds of industry, manufacturing and agricultural, were
thriftily and successfully carried on. At the time when
Charles V. ruled the Netherlands, the city of Antwerp, in the
Belgian circle of provinces, was the great metropolis of
Netherland trade. It was much more than that. It was the
foremost commercial capital of the world. The traffic which
slipped away from Venice and Genoa, had fixed its central seat
in this younger town on the Scheldt. It was sure to plant its
new emporium somewhere in the Netherlands, because there was
nowhere else in Europe so much energy, so much enterprise, so
much industry, so much commercial wisdom, so much activity of
domestic trade. Spain and Portugal held the wealth of the
Indies and the Americas in their hands, but we have seen how
incapable they were of using the commercial advantage it gave
them. Lisbon, Cadiz and Seville were only depots for the
transfer of merchandise; it was impossible to make them real
capitals of trade, because they could not and would not
furnish either the spirit, or the genius, or the organized
agencies that it demands. The Netherlands, with their long
schooling in commerce upon a smaller scale, were ready to meet
every requirement when the new era opened and gave them their
greater chance. There was no other mercantile organization so
well prepared. The league of the Hansa Towns was breaking and
failing; the English were just beginning to show their
aptitude for manufactures and trade. Some one of the
Netherland cities was sure to win the sovereignty in
commercial affairs which Venice gave up, and Antwerp proved
the winner, for a time. During most of the 16th century, it
was the business center of Europe. It was the gathering-place
of the merchants and the seat of the money-changers and
bankers. Two and three thousand ships were often crowded in
its harbor, at one time. It distributed the merchandise of the
East and West Indies, which it took from Portugal and Spain,
and the manifold wares of the many manufacturing towns of
Flanders, Brabant, southern Germany, to a great extent, and
northern France.
{3716}
At the same time, its own looms, anvils, tanneries,
glass-works, dyeing-vats and mechanic shops of various kinds
were numerous and busy. Its thriving population was rapidly
increased, for it welcomed all who came with skill or
knowledge or money or strong hands to take part in its work.
Such was Antwerp during the reign of Charles V., and at the
time (A. D. 1555-1556) when that weary monarch gave up his
many crowns to his evil son, Philip II. of Spain, and went
away to a Spanish monastery to seek for rest. The government
of Charles in the Netherlands had been hard and heavy, but the
people were left free enough to prosper and to grow
intelligent and strong. Under Philip the prospect changed. The
story of his malignant persecutions and oppressions, of the
revolt to which they drove the Netherland provinces, of the
long, merciless war in which he strove to ruin or subdue them,
of the independence which the Dutch provinces achieved and the
prosperous career on which they entered, is told in another
place.

See NETHERLANDS (page 2256, and after).

Antwerp, the great capital of trade, stood foremost in the
struggle, as became its greatness, and it suffered
correspondingly. The death-blow to its fortunes was given in
1585, when, after a siege that is almost unexampled, it was
taken by the Spaniards under Alexander Farnese, Duke of Parma,
and given up to pillage and slaughter. Its surviving
inhabitants fled in large numbers, the greater part of them to
Holland, some to England, and some to other countries.
Commerce abandoned the port. The chief merchants who had made
it the center of their undertakings chose Amsterdam for their
future seat of business, and that city rose at once to the
commercial rank of which Antwerp had been stripped by the
stupid malice of its Spanish sovereign. While the Belgian
Netherlands fell hopelessly under the fatal despotism of
Spain, the Dutch Netherlands fought their way slowly to
independence, which Spain was forced to acknowledge in 1648.
But long before that time the Dutch Republic had become a
power in Europe—much greater in every way than Spain. Its
foundations had been laid by the union of the seven provinces
of Holland, Zealand, Friesland, Utrecht, Groningen, Overyssel
and Gelderland. It had grown firmer and stronger year by year,
and the people, after a time, had not only found themselves
able to thrive generally in the midst of their desperate war
with Spain, but the war itself opened their way to wealth and
power. They learned, early, as we have seen, that they could
attack their enemy to the best advantage at sea. In pursuing
this ocean warfare they were led on to the East and West
Indies, and soon broke, in both regions, the exclusive power
which the Spanish and Portuguese had held. When Portugal was
dragged into a fatal union with Spain, under Philip II., it
had to suffer the consequences of Philip's wars, and it bore
more than its share of the suffering. The Dutch and the
English forced their way pretty nearly together into the
eastern seas, and, between them, the Portuguese were mostly
driven out. They divided the rich commerce of that great
Asiatic and Oceanic region, and, for a time, the most
lucrative part of it was gained by the Dutch. While the
English got their footing on the coasts of Hindostan and were
laying the foundations of their future empire in India, the
Dutch gained control of the spice-growing islands, which, in
that day, were the richer commercial prize. The first Dutch
fleet that rounded the Cape of Good Hope and made its way into
East Indian waters, sailed under the command of one Cornelius
Houtmann, who had been in the service of the Portuguese and
learned the route. He started in 1595 with four ships and
returned, after a voyage of eighteen months, with only two. He
had lost more than half his men, and he brought back very
little cargo to pay for the adventurous undertaking. But the
Dutch were well satisfied with the experiment; they knew that
more experience would lead to better success. Another fleet of
eight ships was sent out in 1598 and when four of them
returned the next year with a precious cargo of spices and
other merchandise from Java, which they had procured very
cheaply in exchange for the cloths, the metal wares and the
trinkets that they took out, the delight of the nation can
hardly be described. Part of the fleet had remained in the
East to hold and strengthen the position they had gained, and
other ships were sent speedily to join them. Very soon the
armed merchantmen of the Dutch were thickly swarming in that
part of the world, ready for fight or for trade, as the case
might be. So many companies of merchants became engaged in the
business that too lively competition between them occurred and
they threatened to ruin one another. But that danger was
overcome in 1602 by joining the rival interests together in
one strong association, to which the government gave exclusive
rights of trade in the East. Thus the Dutch East India Company
was formed, in which the merchants of Amsterdam, Rotterdam,
Delft and other cities of the republic put their capital
together. By its charter, this great company held powers of
war as well as of commerce and it used them both with
prodigious energy. At first, the chief trading stations of the
Dutch in the East were at Bantam, in Java, and Amboyna, one of
the group of the Moluccas or Spice Islands; but the city of
Batavia, which they founded in Java in 1619, became afterwards
their principal seat of trade and the capital of their
surrounding possessions. The chief aim of the Dutch was to
gather into their hands the profitable commerce of the island
world of the Eastern Archipelago, but they did not fail to
pursue their Spanish and Portuguese enemies in other quarters,
where the chances of traffic looked inviting. They seized
positions on the Guinea coast of western Africa and took their
full share of the trade with its savage natives, who gave gold
dust, ivory, ebony, gums, wax, ginger, pepper, palm oil,
various choice kinds of wood, and slaves (for the West Indies
and America, when the plantations there began to want labor),
in exchange for trinkets and cheap goods. They also occupied
and colonized the Cape of Good Hope, which the Portuguese had
neglected, and made it, in time, a very prosperous and
valuable possession. That they should carry their war with
Spain into the West Indies and to the American coasts, was a
matter of course. In 1623 a Dutch West India Company was
chartered, to organize these operations in the western world,
as the East India Company had organized undertakings in
the East.
{3717}
But the West India Company was much less commercial and much
more warlike in its aims than the corporation of the orient.
Its first object was to take spoils from the enemy, and it
found the prizes of war so rich that not much else was thought
of. On the North American continent, a most important lodgment
was made, as early as 1614, at the mouth of the Hudson River,
where the colony of New Netherland was founded. In this
quarter, as everywhere, the Dutch and English were rivals, and
before many years they came to open war. In the series of wars
which followed (1652, 1665, 1672), and in the long contest
with Louis XIV. of France which they shared with England, the
Dutch expended more of their energies than they could afford.
The English, with their well protected island, rich in soil
and in minerals, had heavy advantages on their side, when once
they had acquired the knowledge of commerce and the ability in
labor which enabled them to compete with the Dutch. To the
latter nature had always been wholly unfriendly. They had
fought against circumstances at every step in their history,
and had won their wealth, their knowledge, their high
importance and influence in the world, by sheer hard work,
tireless patience and indomitable will. But the natural
advantages against which they struggled were sure to overcome
them in the end. It must be said, too, that they did not grow
in character as their fortunes rose. It is not difficult,
therefore, to account for the fact that the Dutch nation
slowly slipped back, during the 18th century, from the high
and leading position in civilization to which it had climbed,
and lost by degrees its commercial supremacy, while the
English nation came to the front.

COMMERCE: MODERN:
The English:
16-17th Centuries.
Commercial progress.
The East India Company.