Powers and Thrones - 22

Chapter 10 Merchants For God and Prophet Personal motto of Tuscan merchant Francesco Di Marco Dattini. In early September 1298, two fleets decked for war, bore down on one another in the Adriatic Sea, in the strait between the mainland of what is now Croatia and the large Dalmatian island, then known as Cursola, Corcula. Scores of sleek galleys all bristling with troops flew the flags of two of Europe's leading maritime states, the Republic of Venice and Republic of Genoa. Located on opposite sides of the Italian peninsula, Venice in the northeast and Genoa in the northwest, these ambitious, autonomous cities, along with the third rival, the Republic of Pisa, had been at loggerheads for nearly 50 years. They had fought in the Holy Land and in Constantinople, they had fought in the ports of the Black Sea and around the islands of the Aegean and Adriatic. Their contest was for supremacy on the waves, and they played the game very roughly, for victory could bring more than simple, neighborly bragging rights or plunder. The Venetians, Genoese and peasants were competing to become the leading mercantile power in the west. At the turn of the 14th century this was no small prize, world trade was booming, commodities and luxury goods were flying halfway around the globe at a pace seldom seen before in the whole of human history. Small dominance in this age was worth fighting and dying for. The clash in the Strait of Cursola was a bloody, one-sided affair. The brilliant Genoese admiral Lambert Doria, a member of a swaggeringly famous noble family, had significantly fewer ships than his opposite number, Andrea Dandolo, a relative of the old Dodger and Rico Dandolo, who had burned Constantinople during the Fourth Crusade. But Doria had luck and the tides with him. As the galleys clashed ores, his captains drove the Venetianships into shallow waters where many were run aground. The Genoese boarded the stricken enemy vessels slaughtering and taking prisoners as they pleased before scuppering almost the entire Venetian fleet. As many as 7,000 Venetian sailors were killed in the fighting, Admiral Dandolo was captured and committed suicide in prison rather than live with the shame of defeat. When news of his humiliation arrived back in the Venetian Lido, the city authorities were forced to sue for peace. The battle of Cursola would not be remembered as Venice's finest hour. But strangely, it would not be remembered as Genoese triumph either. Instead, this bloody skirmish in the blue waters off the Dalmatian coast would come to be associated most closely with one of the Venetian prisoners of war. He was a veteran adventurer from a family of merchants, who had been further around the world than almost any person alive, seeing many extraordinary things and meeting many astonishing people. A survivor and a charmer, he had mind-boggling stories to tell, and after he was captured at the Battle of Cursola, he had the opportunity to tell them. He was incarcerated alongside a sympathetic and talented professional writer called Rustikello of Pisa, who drew memories out of his cellmate and wrote them down for posterity. The result was a great popular travelogue, which still sells thousands of copies every year. Of course, the merchant was Marco Polo, and his story is justly one of the most celebrated of the whole Middle Ages. Born in Venice in 1253 to a family of businessmen, Marco Polo was 45 when he fought at the Battle of Cursola. He had spent most of his adult life away from Europe. His father, Niccolo Polo, and Uncle Matthew Polo, were among the vanguard of European travelers to the Mongol court, having made their first journey to visit Kublai Khan in 1260, after liquidating earlier business ventures in Constantinople to escape the restoration of a Byzantine emperor. On making their way to the far east, they had found the Mongols receptive to Western commerce and interested in exchanging diplomatic letters with kings and popes in Europe. So for a decade thereafter, Niccolo and Mafia shuttled back and forth between East and West. When they set out from Venice on one trip in 1271, they took the now-teenaged Marco with them. It was the start of a wondrous journey. The introduction to Marco Polo's memoirs today known as the Travels that originally called a description of the world, claimed that, from the time God formed Adam down to this day, there has been no man, Christian or pagan, Tata or Indian, or of any race whatsoever, who has known or explored so many of the various parts of the world and of its great wonders as Marco Polo. This was hyperbole, ably injected into the story by Rusticcolo, whose talent for crafting best-selling stories had been honed while composing Arthurian romances for the English King Edward I. But it was not far from the truth. As we saw in chapter 9, the Polo family were by no means the first European travellers to make the expedition to the land of the Karns in the 13th century. From the 1240s onwards, a regular procession of envoys and missionaries headed out Eastwoods. We have already met Giovanni da Pian del Carpine and William of Rubroch. There were many others. Giovanni da Monte Corvino was sent to Carmbalic, Beijing, in the 1290s, under papal instruction to establish himself as the city's first archbishop. He led a successful mission in Mongol China for nearly 20 years, preaching and converting people at the churches he founded and translating the New Testament into the Mongol tongue. Around the same time, Thomas of Tolentino toured Armenia, Persia, India and China, preaching relentlessly until he was tried and executed for blasphemy in Thane, today part of the greater metropolitan area of Mumbai, for telling the Muslim authorities he believed Muhammad was burning in hell. Later, between 1318 and 1329, Oderic of Pordenone would embark on a marathon preaching tour of China and Western India. Giovanni da Madignoli was sent as spiritual advisor to the last Wand Dynasty Emperor between 1338 and 1353. Yet Marco Polo differed significantly from these other travellers. Almost without exception, they were friars, Dominican or Franciscan holy men, whose chief responsibility was to the word of God and the well-being of the Latin church, and for whom the hardship of the journey was part of their spiritual calling. But while the Polos were Christians, they were no churchmen. They did not venture thousands of miles from home to save souls. Rather, they were merchants, traders who sought profit, specifically by selling pressure stones to wealthy Mongol princes and freelancing as intermediaries in business and international diplomacy. What was more, they were Venetians, citizens of one of the most ruthless and outward-looking mercantile states in the West. Marco's adventures in the East represented something rather different to the friars. He went east in search not of salvation, but gold. The Polos journey east took them along a broadly familiar route. In 1271, they sailed from Venice to Constantinople and crossed the Black Sea, disembarking at Trebusond in Armenia. A long, overland trek on camelback across Persia took them into Central Asia, and onwards to the Khan's summer palace at Shangdu, sometimes called Xanadu, where they arrived after three and a half years of travel. This opulent residence built in marble and decorated in gold was home to many bizarre and exotic hangars on, including sorcerers whose sacrifice live animals ate the flesh of condemned criminals and played conjuring tricks at mealtimes. Along with thousands of bald-headed ascetic monks who worshipped fire and slept on the ground. And it was also, of course, the seasonal home of Kublai Khan himself, grandson of Genghis, the mightiest man whether in respect of subjects or of territory or of treasure who is in the world today or who ever has been. These were Marco's words, and well might he have sung old Kublai's praises. For it was he the last of the great Khan's who gave Marco the opportunities that changed his life for good. Young, tenacious, clever, culturally sensitive and confident in strange surroundings, Marco caught Kublai Khan's eye as soon as he was presented at court and was given a place among the Khan's attendance of honour. This was a huge step into the unknown, but Marco thrived, not least thanks to his facility with learning new tongues. He acquired a remarkable knowledge of the customs of the Tartars, claimed the travels, and mastered four languages with their modes of writing. While Niccolo and Maffeo busy themselves trading jewels and gold, Marco was employed as an itinerant civil servant, trusted by the Khan, with all the most interesting and distant missions, transacting official diplomatic business while keeping a keen eye out for the oddities and peccadillos of people in the furthest reaches of the Mongol Empire, about whom Kublai Khan would always quiz him when he returned to court. The colorful tales Marco collected for Kublai provided the bulk of the travels, and just as they entertained the Khan, so too they dazzled Europeans, with descriptions of many of the great cities of eastern China, Burma, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, West India and Persia. Alongside stories about Russia and the region of darkness, a place where pale-faced tribes lived in semi-permanent night, trapping wild animals for their furs. Marco was especially attuned to unusual religious practices and foodstuffs, sexual habits, odd illnesses and weird physical characteristics. He also had a keen eye for flora, fauna and topography, but nothing caught his eye so much as commerce. Although his father and uncle were more directly involved in the Polo's actual business ventures in the Mongol Empire than he was, Marco never lost his own Venetian's eye for profit. Almost everywhere he went, Marco took note of business opportunities. He discovered that Shebergan in Afghanistan exported the best-dried melon sweets. The countryside around Bulk, also in Afghanistan, yielded incredible rubies, whose production and sale abroad was strictly limited in order to keep prices high. "In Kashmir," he said, Coral was sold at a higher price than in any other part of the world. "Harmie," in northwestern China, had a booming economy based on pimping and prostitution. A place he knew as Su Chow in China's modern Gansu province, abounded with a delicious variety of rhubarb and the merchant's who procure loadings of it convey it to all parts of the world. Gowser produced wonderful gauze and gold cloth. The best camphor was from Java. The finest pearls were fetched by professional oyster divers in the Pulk straight between India and Sri Lanka. Kalam, in the Indian state of Kerala, produced great Indigo dyes, which could eventually be sold at premium prices in Europe. Marco was so as Siduous in his quest for commercial intelligence that he even recorded the trading advantages of places he had not managed to see. The best elephant's teeth and ambergrie, he said, came across the Indian Ocean from Madagascar and Zanzibar, while Aiden in Yemen was the place to trade horses, spices, and drugs at the highest profit. Marco reserved his highest praise, however, for Kinsai, modern Hangzhou, near Shanghai in eastern China, which he thought was the handsomest place on earth. A warrant of streets, canals, marketplaces, squares, and innumerable shops. He loved Kinsai. He adored the wet markets where live animals were sold for next to nothing and killed on the spot. He savored the fruit, the fish, the local wine, the spices, trinkets, drugs, and pearls sold from shops which occupied the street-level stories of high buildings. He wowed to the daily buzz of crowds of shoppers and traders, he estimated at 40 or 50,000 strong. He admired the efficient municipal governance in which a civic police force monitored crime, fraud, and riotous assembly, where gong sounded to mark the passing of the hours, where the streets were paved not with gold, but with a practical surface of brick and stone, which allowed couriers, carriages, and pedestrians to move efficiently and quickly about the city, facilitating swift and easy business in everyday light hour. Kinsai was a mercantile hub of paper money, perfumed quartersans, busy workshops, and frictionless trade. A Venice away from Venice, in which 1.6 million families, or so Marco said, lived in grandeur and beauty, which might lead an inhabitant to imagine himself in paradise. Even as he sat in a Genoese prison dictating his memoirs, Marco seemed able to close his eyes and return. The sheer colour and exotic detail of Marco Polo's anecdotes alone made and makes the travels worth reading. But at the dawn of the 14th century AD, his work had a significance that elevated it, beyond a mere cabinet of oriental curiosities. The travels was not just the medieval equivalent of gap year blogging. It was a tract full of valuable commercial insight. We have just encountered examples of specific guidance for the enterprising merchant looking to trade jewels, or ivory, or rhubarb. But Marco also made careful note of the wider conditions under which traders could expect to operate. In Persia, he observed, where there was a busy market for transporting horses for sale in India. People in many districts were brutal and bloodthirsty, forever slaughtering one another. But they left merchants and travellers alone, because they themselves lived in terror of the Mongols, who imposed severe penalties upon them. In China, where paper money was used, the advanced attitude to macroeconomics meant the great Khan, has more treasure than anywhere else in the world. Along major roads throughout the empire, he observed trees were planted along the roadside, to increase both the safety and aesthetic appearance of the thoroughfare. All of this mattered for it showed how a new, commerce-focused and globally connected world was coming to life under the Pax Mongolika, the vast trading zone pacified and policed by the Khan's. Marco was an evangelist for the Mongol regime, which for all its severity and illiberality kept the peace and allowed trade to flourish safely and securely, over a hiver to unimaginable span of territory, joining up the Christian West directly with the Chinese and Indian East, and making overland travel through Islamic Persia safe and reliable. This was not a totally benign judgment, for millions of masochered civilians and their families, the Mongol advance of the 13th century had not been so much an economic miracle as a cataclysmic tragedy. But in the amoral worldview of the Prophet hungry salesman, the Khan's had ushered in a boom. And in Marco's mind, Eastern trade was there to be seized by adventurous businessmen in Europe and particularly by the merchants of the advanced Italian city republics. Marco Polo had latched on to an important point, and in a sense he was right about the Mongols. Yet he did not tell the whole story, for it was not only long-distance trade that was taking off in the 13th century. Major changes were happening closer to home. During Marco's lifetime and the century after it, the Western world underwent sweeping economic changes, 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 13th and 14th centuries was as economically significant as the industrial revolution of the 19th 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, new-found 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 cliche 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 13th century onwards 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. Bust and boom Trade is almost as old as human society itself. 200,000 years ago and more, stone age people in East Africa, modern Kenya, were transporting and exchanging obsidian, the tough volcanic glass which could be worked into tools and weapons, over distances in excess of 150 kilometres. In the Bronze Age, enterprising merchants in Assyria traded goods like tin, silver, gold, luxury fabrics and wool across hundreds of kilometres between modern Iraq, Syria and Turkey, recording their transactions on clay tablets and negotiating protection and safe passage for their caravans with the rulers whose territory they traversed. In the 5th century BC, the Greek historian Herodotus described several successful long-distance trade expeditions. He included in his histories the story of a ship, captained by a man called Koleus, whose crew were the first Greeks to venture all the way from Greece to Tartesus, southern Spain and back. The profits made on their cargo, once they had returned home, were larger than those of any other Greek trader for whom we have reliable information. Herodotus wrote. Half a millennium later, during the zenith of the Roman Empire, the Mediterranean world was alive with trade, joined to an unprecedented degree in a single political and economic market under imperial supervision. Inside this trading zone, goods and people were transferred frictionlessly and in huge quantities between places as far afield as Syria and the lowlands of Scotland, North Africa and the forests of the Ardenne. Empire offered huge advantages for trade, safe, good quality roads in which the chance of being stuck up and robbed was low. Reliable coinage and a legal system that could settle commercial disputes. And it allowed regular people to participate as farmers produced grain to feed armies, wealthy townsfolk, sought expensive pottery and imported spices, and workshops and households demanded slaves to do their dirty work. Interestingly, despite the sheer amount of trades that took place by land and sea, particularly during the first two centuries of empire, the Romans did not hold merchants in especially high regard. Buying and selling was not a profession considered fit for a patrician and the economic life of the upper classes was usually focused on managing their country estates. Beyond tax collection and coin minting, the financial tools of the Roman state remained relatively underdeveloped. Still, as would be starkly clear in retrospect, Roman emperors oversaw a trading block that was uniquely powerful and diverse in its own time, and which would be badly missed when the empire fell apart. For Roman trading relied on Roman unity. Once Rome shattered and its authority waned, the basic conditions for long distance and high frequency trading worsened steeply. Of course, Rome's barbarian successor states did not do without trade completely. But when Roman towns and political horizons contracted, the once busy Mediterranean economy slowed down. Trade shrank to the village to village level. Long distance exchange between the post-Roman West and India and China was complicated by political and religious upheaval in the Middle East and Central Asia, not least the Byzantine Persian Wars, the rise of Islam, and depredations of the Magyars in eastern Europe. Luxury goods became more difficult to import, global trade stalled considerably, and so did regional trade around the Mediterranean and the former Roman provinces. Compared to the rest of the known world, from the sixth century onwards, Europe became a commercial backwater, with little to export, except for Baltic furs, Frankish swords, and slaves. Although it would be misleading to write off the whole of the early Middle Ages as a dark period in which all business, receded to nothingness and human progress, went into hibernation. In the grand scheme of Western history, it was a period of stagnated economic development, which lasted several hundred years. Slowly, however, business recovered. From around the year 1000, Europe's population boomed in tandem with a surge in agricultural production. The medieval climate optimum was kind to farmers and huge new tracts of land were brought under the plow through forest clearances and marsh draining. Territory was seized from itinerant pagan slavs and put under Christian plows. A process which started with the Carolingians and continued under the Crusaders. New farming technologies were developed with heavy plowers improving soil quality and the three-field crop rotation system preventing soil exhaustion. Shipbuilding also improved, making long voyages by sea safer and faster, whether those voyages were for Viking style, slave-taking and monastery plundering or buying and selling goods in foreign markets. And from the time of Charlemagne onwards, Western Christian monarchs slowly began to stake their claims to ever larger kingdoms, subjecting them to deeper mechanisms of royal control and governance, which, in theory at least, made longer overland trading journeys safer and more secure. As trading networks began to extend further a field, so institutions appeared to help make business easier. In the 11th 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 200 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. Meanwhile, basic financial services came to be offered in the growing towns and cities across the west, especially through Jewish commercial networks. Between the 9th and 11th centuries, Jewish people all over the west became prominent in money-lending, as well as long-distance trade, carrying commodities like salt, cloth, wine and slaves throughout the old Roman world. Of course, Europe's Jews were not thanked for this pioneer in 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 13th century with waves of pogroms and expulsions throughout Western Europe. Nevertheless, the Jewish contribution to the great medieval economic revival was significant. Slowly but surely then, around the turn of the millennium, Western economies began to spring noticeably back to life. One of the most famous trade hubs to emerge in the reinvigorated medieval world could be found in the county of Champagne, east of Paris. From the 12th century, this county, which clung fiercely to its independence from French royal oversight, became home to an annual series of trade fairs. There were six main fairs, held in the four towns of Lani, Basuob, Provan and Troix, according to a calendar in which each fair lasted six to eight weeks. These were much more than bazaars for the people of Champagne to visit for their weekly shopping. Champagne occupied a convenient geographical location where cloth manufacturers in the low countries could mingle with vendors of foreign luxury goods, imported via Byzantium and Italy, and fur traders from the Baltic. All who attended were protected by the authority of the counts of Champagne, who by licensing the fairs, also took responsibility for ensuring they were kept free from swindling or brawling, and seeing that there was a fair process for resolving disputes and pursuing those who welched on their debts. The Champagne fairs soon attracted traders from hundreds of miles away, lured by the promise of a stable, safe, fixed location where business could be done at volume. Initially attendees brought with them large quantities of stock and samples, which could be stored in purpose-built warehouses in and around these towns. But as time went on, the Champagne fairs would evolve into something closer to what we would today call a stock exchange, with currency, credit and contracts changing hands, and real goods being delivered, or not, at some future moment, with much business being done by specialist agents on behalf of wealthy companies, banks and governments. By the late 13th century, a visitor to the fairs in Champagne or Flanders could expect to find representatives of Italian business consortia, bargaining with agents representing multiple northwest European wool producers and cloth manufacturers, drawing up contracts for payment schedules with debts to be cleared at future fairs, months or even years in advance. Champagne fairs were not the only marketplaces of their sort, nearby Flanders also hosted large-scale exchanges in towns like IEP, where a bustling cloth-making industry was emerging in the later Middle Ages. But they were the longest-lasting and the best known of their times, a bell-weather for adorning age of international commerce. Rise of the Republics Many of the most high-profile customers at the fairs of Champagne and Flanders travel there across the Alps from the Italian city republics, of which the most reliably bullish was Venice. The city nicknamed Las Serenissima had not even existed during Roman times, but during the 6th century a settlement developed around the lagoon and its islands. Initially it was ruled from Constantinople via the ex-archate of Ravenna. But by the 9th century the dodges of Venice had shaken off Byzantine oversight and started to build up their independent power along the shores of the Adriatic. In their early days the Venetians manufactured salt and glass, but as the Middle Ages wore on they found there was better business to be done as professional middlemen who took advantage of their blessings of geography and the necessity of making a living without any farmlands to fall back on, to link to get at the markets of Arab North Africa, Greek Byzantium and the Latin West, importing and exporting commodities and luxury goods. Hand in hand with trading in this world went coin striking, which was carried out in a Venetian mint called Zeca. Also critical for a port city was shipbuilding. This took place in the shipyard known as the Arsenal, which fielded orders from the city government, its merchants and would be mariners from further away, not least 12th and 13th century lords and kings who needed to commission fleets to transport their armies on crusade. And since the high seas of the Mediterranean could be violent as well as rough, the Venetians became adept at fighting, whether to defend their convoys, see off hostile Arab and Greek vessels or simply to indulge in out and out piracy. The line between trading and raiding was always tenuous in the Middle Ages, the Venetians usually had a foot on either side of it. The city's patron saint was and is St. Mark the Evangelist, to whom the famous Basilica on the Rialto is dedicated. But even he was in a sense stolen goods. In 828 a pair of Venetian merchants thieved Mark's relics from the Egyptian city of Alexandria, smuggling the saints' bones through customs inside a barrel of pork, which they trusted rightly, the Muslim inspectors would not investigate too closely. Around the turn of the millennium, Venice and a handful of other Italian cities, mostly on the coasts of the Long Peninsula, began to experience economic lift off. The motor for their success was their innate sense of adventure. Rather than simply trading from within their own city walls, colonies of Italian merchants set up shop in every other significant trading city that would have them. Usually living together as neighbors in protected quarters, where they were allowed to observe their own religious rights, use their own weights and measures, and claim immunity from a raft of local taxes and tolls. Their favored status and insular expatriate lifestyle did not always win them friends, and murderous riots against Italian merchants were a regular event throughout the later Middle Ages. In 1182 Constantinople witnessed the dreadful massacre of the Latins when tens of thousands of Italian merchants were murdered or enslaved in a frenzy of anti-Western bloodletting encouraged by the imperial government. On that occasion, the papal legate's head was cut off and dragged through the streets, tied to a dog's tail. So trade was not without risk, but the reward was evidently worth the danger, which was why, during the 11th and 12th centuries, Italian merchants fanned out across the West. In the ports of the Eastern Mediterranean, they did business with Turks, Arabs, and other merchants working the silk roads into Central Asia. A state of affairs made considerably more lucrative once the Crusader states were established in Syria and Palestine. The Black Sea, where the Genoese had a special interest, gave access to the Balkans, Asia Minor, the Caucasus, and the lands of the Russe. During the 11th century, peas and merchants took a keen interest in the ports of North Africa and peas and ships sent troops to sack both Carthage and Mardia to attempt to permanently yoke them to Pisa's rule. Meanwhile, traders from a fourth Italian city republic, Amalfi, could also be found in most major Mediterranean ports, although their prominence sharply waned from the 11th 30s after they were defeated in a war with Pisa. There was intense competition between the Italian city-states, and none of them were ever overburdened by moral compunction. During the 13th century, Genoese traders in the Black Sea port of Caffer struck a deal to run slaves captured in the Caucasus by the Mongols to the Mamluk rulers of Egypt, shipping them to the Nile Delta via the Black Sea and Mediterranean, whereupon the slaves would be forcibly impressed into the Mamluk army. Effectively, this meant that the Christian Genoese were directly responsible for supplying workers to a power that was doing its best to crush the Western Crusader states of Syria and Palestine. Meanwhile, although Venice had no slaves to trade with the Mamluks, they cultivated exclusive trading arrangements between Alexandria and Western ports, ensuring that the Mamluk state took a juicy share of the profits of long-distance trade between the Far East and Europe. Both Venice and Genoa, thereby profited handsomely from supporting the Egyptian economy and military, at a time when the stated goal of Egypt was to wipe the Crusader states off the map. None of this stood up very well to ethical scrutiny. Yet then as now, markets seldom suffered pangs of conscience, and neither did merchants by the time of the Mongol conquests when Marco Polo was enjoying his adventures at the court of Kubla Khan, Italy's city-states occupied the box seat in Mediterranean trade, and were naturally placed to benefit from the opening up of commercial routes to the Far East. The Persian historian Atom Alec Juveini wrote of the Mongol Empire that fear of the Khan's made the road so safe that a woman with a golden vessel on her head might walk alone across it without fear or dread. The Italians did not carry gold vessels on their heads, but they took full advantage of conditions nonetheless. Yet at the same time, the travels of Marco Polo and others like him had demonstrated the one major hurdle that faced would be Eastern traders, sheer distance. It had taken the Polo family three full years to make their way from Venice to China, the physical toll this took on a person, no matter how well provision they might be, was enough to make anyone think hard about making the journey more than once. The same was true on a smaller but still significant scale of trade everywhere. The merchant stood a far better chance of making profit if he could stay in one place and let others move goods on his behalf. This was where the other side of the medieval commercial revolution came in. During the 13th and 14th centuries new financial tools and institutions emerged which could help businessmen realize the goal of making money without traipsing relentlessly around the world in person. These new money-making devices lent merchants enormous power both in their hometowns and beyond. The best way to understand how this worked is to unpack an example from the height of the commercial revolution when the power of mercantile money forged the political shape of a kingdom. The merchants in question were wall trading bankers from the city of Florence. The realm was the kingdom of England.