The Trade in General

Commodities

The international and inter-regional trade of Northern Europe and its principal industries bear little resemblance to the conventional image of medieval economy. The traffic across the continent of Western Europe, or between the European mainland and the lands immediately to the north and to the north-east, evokes in a modern reader none of that romance which clings to the trade of Southern Europe. The latter brought to Western Europe exotic goods of every kind: pepper, ginger and other spices of the East Indies, silks, brocades and tapestries, sweet wines, oranges, raisins, figs and almonds. It enticed the merchant into the mysterious lands of the Near and Middle East, to Byzantium and Syria, often to Africa, and sometimes even to China. It was also the trade of the caravans, the galleys, the junks; and of the Venetian, Genoese and Florentine adventurers and merchant princes. This was the medieval trade as popular writers know it, and this is the trade which some serious writers have in mind when they insist on the luxury character of medieval commerce.

The trade of Northern Europe was quite different. It was not greatly concerned with oriental and Mediterranean commodities. At various times between the sixth century and the tenth, traders and warriors brought goods from the extreme north of Europe to Byzantium and reimported Byzantine goods into Northern Europe.