Anyone who has perused the mercantile correspondence from the
period of Antwerp's commercial prosperity, c. 1470-c. 1570, cannot
but have been struck by the similarities between the content of
these epistles and that of the present-day financial press. At
the foot of each letter were the quotations of exchange rates
and commodity prices prevailing in the city from which the dispatcher
had sent his letter. This was a simple BI-LATERAL exchange of
relevant information, which was usually effected within the organisational
structures of his merchant house. At the height of Antwerp's prosperity
these involved the use of "free market" institutions
but later, as commercial activity within that city waned they
became more bureaucratic. An examination of the van Bombergen
(1532-3) and Van der Molen (1538-44) papers reveals, amongst
these houses that continued to dominate the overland trade to
Italy, the organisational forms within which such exchanges of
information took place. Both of these firms acted at Antwerp on
commission for Venitian merchant houses, buying and selling commodities
for their clients and organising the transportation of these wares,
arranging the transmission of funds on the exchange and gathering
relevant mercantile intelligence. Antoine van Bombergen in 1532-3
undertook most of these operations himself, personally selling
his client's wares at the Brabant fairs and buying there the English
kerseys and long cloths which he would ultimately dispatch to
Italy. He also visited the Bourse in person, some times to put
out money on the exchange for transmission to Italy but more often
simply to gather commercial and financial market intelligence.
At every turn he used free market institutions to undertake his
transactions and when such local facilities at Antwerp proved
inadequate he had recourse to a series of occasional correspondents
to extend the markets within which he could operate. His operations
were conducted on the basis of excellent market intelligence in
conditions of near-perfect competition. Van der Molen on the other
hand in 1538-44 operated at Antwerp within a much more bureaucratically
organised trading system. He spent most of his days in his office
where his perception of market conditions was formed from a constant
and voluminous stream of correspondence delivered by rapid postal
service from his customers and agents. On the basis of this information
he formulated purchase and sales strategies, which were implemented
through a commercial system which encompassed all aspects of the
cloth trade from producer to customer. The house maintained factors
in each of the main cloth producing areas. Adam van Riebecke was
situated at Bruges to buy Flemish cloths. Jacob van der Tombe
bought at Hondschoot the says woven in the small town and the
adjacent countryside, as well as the finer products of the Bergues
- Saint Winoc sayetterie. In London they dealt with Italian cloth
agents like Martino de Frederico or Maurizio de Marini, a Genoese
whose activities at the English capital span almost the whole
ambit of this paper. In Lille and Valencienne they had agents
through whom they could order worsteds. Whilst, therefore, they
enjoyed some flexibility in purchasing by being able to shift
orders between their agents, their overall pattern of cloth acquisition
was more rigid and divorced from the free-play of the market which
had itself been marginalized. A similar rigidity may be observed,
moreover, in their provision of transport services. At Arnemuiden
they maintained a forwarding and shipping agent, one Piero di
Negrino, but his major duties were confined to the trans-shipment
of incoming cloths into shouts for passage to Antwerp where they
were stored and subsequently transported, in the care of professional
carriers, to Italy. Once again a fixed pattern, this time of transportation,
had imposed itself on their trade. Cloth (without passing through
a market) was despatched to Italy by land and in the absence of
any demand alternative modes of transport withered and died. Thus
when the land route was cut and the van der Molen sought other
ways of getting their goods to market they found no satisfactory
alternative and were forced to embark their wares on "tramps"
which would wend a long and circuitous route to Italy. Under the
guidance of houses like the van der Molen the free-market institutions,
from which van Bombergen had gained such strength, were disappearing
or becoming buried under a welter of bureaucratic organisations.
An analogous process affected those MULTI-LATERAL informational
systems that yielded the merchants the political and commercial
news, which was entered at the head of their letters. At each
of the nodes of the prevailing trading system, which extended
from London via Antwerp to northern Italy and the Levantine ports
beyond at the height of the contemporary trade boom, the mercantile
houses maintained their offices. The daybooks of the traders inhabiting
these offices, like those preserved in the Hengrave Hall MSS.,
reveal the throng of people who visited these offices each day.
Tendering bills-of-exchange to be honoured, making payments for
goods which had been delivered to them and eagerly awaiting the
cancellation of their outstanding debts, or demanding payment
for wares they had supplied, men flocked to the counting houses
of the international traders. They also brought with them news
of events that had occurred in their hometowns. Passing from office
to office or to recognised sites for conducting their business,
like the steps of St Pauls in London, information was picked up
and rapidly disseminated. Within an area only a little larger
than a small village within each of the great commercial emporia,
like London or Antwerp, everyone knew everyone else's business
not only within the "city" but also from within each
of those settlements which were embedded within its commercial
hinterland. At the end of each day, moreover, this information
was sifted and prècised and despatched by letter to the
agents' masters across Europe. At each of the nodes of the prevailing
commercial system the merchants had at their finger tips each
day information provided by agents within their own commercial
hinterland and transmitted to them by their agents from across
Europe. The value of this intelligence-system was not only recognised
by the merchants, moreover, but also by their political masters.
Thus when spy-masters, like Walsingham, wanted information of
clandestine military movements in the Low Countries, they utilised
the services of Thomas Gresham who through his commercial agents
was in a position to gather such intelligence.
At the periphery of this extended European intelligence network
moreover were towns, like Kaffa, which were at the interface of
other equally efficient trans-continental commercial intelligence
networks. Kaffa was a city inhabited by different ethnic and religious
communities, such as Westerners (mostly people from present-day
Italy, France, and Spain, in a word, Latins), but also Orientals,
who probably formed the vast majority of the city population;
among them were Greeks, Armenians, Muslims, and, later, Jews.
The two "groups" enjoyed intimate and amicable relations
with each other and as such the "Latins" were privy
to information circulating in the city concerning trading conditions
prevailing in trans-Asiatic Islamic trading systems- information
which they quickly despatched home. At one remove, the merchants
of Genoa, Marseilles and Barcelona, thus received intelligence
of trading conditions on the "Silk Road" or at the ports
of the Red Sea, Indian Ocean and beyond. And from these nodes
of the European informational ststem embedded deep in the European
intelligence network the information was disseminated outward
for all to share.
When, however, mercantile activity was deflected away from
Antwerp (c.1527- c.1570) and merchants at London and other centres
began to trade directly with their suppliers and customers, the
advantages of access to such an intelligence network were lost.
During the years 1527-9 in English trade, for instance, there
was an organisation of commercial activity within networks of
"direct" trade. A system of permanent factors was established
not only in the French and Levantine trades but also in the commerce
to Hamburg and Danzig. The factor permanently located abroad
was in a position, at least theoretically, to explore market opportunities
and accordingly through better information evolve more effective
business strategies. He could discover where and at what time
of the year goods were best bought or sold thereby diminishing
price fluctuations in commodity markets and allowing price maximisation
on the goods despatched to him and cost minimisation in the acquisition
of the commodities he wished to obtain for shipment home. He could
explore the merits of local money markets and credit systems as
a source of loans or as an outlet for the balances he often held
on an intra-annual basis, again widening his options and affecting
his finance costs. Overall, in theory, permanent factorage resulted
in an improvement in the market situation confronting the merchant
abroad. Yet in reality such gains were not so instantaneously
achieved for with the establishment of such permanent factors
in an alien environment the host merchants consistently tried
to maintain market imperfections, restricting the incomer's movements
and limiting his access to information. The location of a permanent
factor abroad thus normally signalled the beginnings of a long
and protracted process of negotiations. From these he only at
best slowly, and sometimes never, achieved the reductions in transactions
costs inherent in his position to the levels that had been achieved
in the great metropolitan emporia.
The years, c. 1470-1570 thus saw the new metropolitan emporium of Antwerp assume the mantle of the great medieval fairs. Merchants frequenting that city benefited from their access to an economic intelligence system which drew information, directly or indirectly, from within the bounds of a commercial system encompassing the whole of the known world. When, however, within that system factors' access to information was restricted, as in contemporary Transylvania, or merchants abandoned the emporia to engage in trade directly with their suppliers and customers the advantages of access to such an intelligence network were lost, transactions costs rose and trade was impeded.