Much of fourteenth-century Europe was still as nature had made it. Its vast mountain forests for the most part remained intact. The wide grass lands of central and eastern Europe had not yet been ploughed up for agriculture or mined for minerals. Except in the Mediterranean area the great European rivers meandered shallow, broad, unbanked and unbridged through wide tracts of marsh where only a few fowlers and fishermen could live. Its mineral wealth, especially that of Scandinavia, the Ukraine and Great Britain, was still largely undiscovered. The farmers and civil engineers of the Roman empire had indeed done much in southern and western Europe to control and exploit natural resources, but during the period of the wandering of the nations and of the barbarian invasions the forest and the swamp had resumed much of their primeval domain. Only slowly was the age-long struggle with nature turning again to man's advantage. In southern England, in France, Germany, Bohemia, Poland and Hungary farmers were still, as they had been for centuries, cutting their way into the forest, 'assarting' it for agriculture. The Netherlanders were building dykes against the sea and confining the mouths and tributaries of the Rhine delta between dams and polders. A beginning had been made in the confinement of the lower Thames within a brideable channel. Monks and municipalities were building causeways and embankments in the English Fens and in the marshy estuaries of the Po and the Rhone. But this taming of the rivers was still only in its beginning. The mazy channels of the Danube and the Tsza in Hungary still made a quarter of that country useless. The enormous marsh of the river Pripet in western Russia was an obstacle to the economic and political exploitation of the no-man's-land between Poland and Russia.
Every stage of economic development, from primitive food gathering to pre-capitalist production, was represented in fourteenth-century Europe. Specialization was still far from complete: farmers and shepherds supplemented their livelihood by hunting, fowling and bee-keeping, craftsmen by working in the fields, monks by agriculture, stock-raising and pisciculture, professional soldiers by brigandage. Nevertheless is it possible to define certain areas where one or another economic activity was predominant. In Iceland, around the coasts of the North Sea, and in the southern Baltic fishing was important. The profitable herring shoals of the North Sea were still making their annual migration into the Baltic and the people of Norway were beginning to exploit cod fishing. In an age when there was no fresh meat from Michaelmas to Easter and when the Church strictly enjoined, even when it could not enforce, the Lenten fast, fish was so valuable a commodity that landowners were making artificial lakes for fish breeding, especially in Bohemia where there are no natural lakes.
For another large minority of Europeans the chief source of livelihood was the breeding and nurture of animals: pigs, goats, poultry, cattle, horses and above all sheep, for there was then virtually no rival to wool as a textile except the scarcer and more costly linen; cotton was unknown except in Sicily and the Levant; though a little silk was already being manufactured in Naples and Tuscany, most of it had to be imported from Asia. Most sheep and cattle breeders, however, did not produce for the market but merely to provide themselves with clothing, meat, milk, butter and cheese. A great many of the pastoralists were semi-nomadic, moving with their flocks and herds from the valleys where they wintered to their summer pastures in the mountains. Such communities were to be found wherever there were alpine conditions, as in the Abruzzi or the central Apennines, in the forest cantons of Switzerland, on both sides of the Pyrenees and in Castile, in the mountains and valleys of Serbia and Greece and in the Carpathians, where the immigrant Vlach shepherds were finding new pastures throughout this period. Not only mountain pastures are suitable for sheep and cattle rearing, but also steppe and downland. At opposite ends of Europe the Tatars in southern Russia and the Cistercian monks in Yorkshire and the south-western shires were exploiting the natural grass, one of the most valuable and least troublesome of all raw materials. The production of wool for the market was increasing in value proportionately with the growth of a class of urban folk who kept no animals.
At the beginning of the fourteenth century most people in Europe still grew or bred or caught their own food. Agriculture was still primitive. In eastern Europe the hook plough, which could do little more than scratch the lighter soils, was still almost universal. The cultivation of the fields had indeed become nearly everywhere intensive. But though the farmers now tilled the same patch of cleared land year after year, they still left a third or a half of that patch fallow every year. The more economical three-field system and the heavy plough with its iron share had only reached those areas east of the Elbe where German colonists had already settled. The land was tilled by peasants who usually cultivated the two or three large, unenclosed fields as a community, though each peasant had the right to the crops from assigned strips of land. There were also some peasant freeholders and some landless farm labourers who worked for wages. The great majority of the peasants however paid rent for their holdings in money, produce, or services to a landlord. Many landlords still kept part of their estates at 'demesne' to be cultivated by peasants (and in some cases, serfs) to supply the lords' household needs or to produce commodities which they could sell in the market. The most fundamental factor making for the increasing differentiation of the two halves of Europe at this time was the decrease of demesne farming in the west and its increase in the east; intimately connected with this change was the consequent decline of serfdom in the west and its growth in the east.
Though land was still the chief source of wealth and though animal and field husbandry was still the occupation of the vast majority of Europeans, the localization and specialization of production and the exchange of goods produced by industry for the products of field and forest was rapidly developing. The craftsmen and merchants were indeed only a small minority, but because the profits of industry and commerce were proportionately far higher than those of unspecialized and often self-sufficing agriculture, the craftsmen and merchants exercised a much greater influence in politics and society than their numbers warranted. There was one really large city in Europe, Constantinople, but even that was now much reduced as a result of the Latin conquest. The number of places where the majority of the inhabitants spent most of their time in industry or trade had been increasing; the population of such places was usually only a few thousands but they were given and deserved the name of town or city. As trade extended further west and north so urbanization was spreading to eastern Spain, the Languedoc, Champagne, southern England, Belgium, the valleys of the Rhine and upper Danube, to northern Germany and the Baltic coast, to Bohemia, southern Poland, northern Hungary and Transylvania. With the advance of the Seljuk Turks in the Levant and the decline of Byzantium the economic centre of gravity in Europe had shifted from the Bosporos to the cities of the Veneto, Lombardy, and Tuscany. The world of Byzantium became a 'colonial' area for western merchants to exploit.
The increase in specialization was not merely a matter of individuals devoting themselves to particular crafts; large regions were ceasing to be self-sufficing and were specializing in the production and export of commodities for whose production they were particularly well fitted by their convenient geographical situation or by the possession of raw materials. Spain, England and elsewhere contained large tracts where men were beginning to appreciate the value of extensive grass lands and the sheep they nourished. German merchants in the Baltic were exploiting the wide market for fish. North-west Russia was sending furs to clothe the wealthy merchants and their wives in western Europe. The Flemish towns had used their favourable geographical situation to become the centre for the manufacture of good quality woolen textiles. The Czechs in Bohemia and the German immigrants in northern Hungary and Transylvania were producing silver and iron to supply the needs of European mints and metal workers.
The most grievous obstacle to the development of international trade was still the absence of roads good enough to carry wheeled traffic. Nor were there any canals. The rivers however were being used more and more, especially for the carriage of bulky goods on rafts of timber, which themselves were broken up for sale at the ports. But what contributed most to the growth of the international commerce in the later Middle Ages was the extension of maritime trade. Venice, which had been the greatest beneficiary from the Latin conquest of Constantinople, had eliminated Slav pirate bases on the Dalmation coast and had made the Adriatic, the eastern Mediterranean, the Aegean and the Black Sea, a network of maritime trade routes. The only serious rival to Venice in this area was Genoa. The sea also provided a link between the older commercial area of the Mediterranean lands and the newly developing commerce of northern Europe. In the more hazardous waters of the Atlantic, the Bay of Biscay, the Channel, the North Sea and the Baltic the small northern sailing ships, with their high freeboard and broad beam, were beginning to play an increasingly important part in exchanging the cloth, hardware, salt and luxury goods made in the west for the fish, corn, furs and forest products which the Hanseatic merchants were collecting from the countries of north-eastern Europe.
The clearing of the forests, the eastward extension of more advanced methods of cultivation of the soil, the renewed exploitation of mineral wealth, the development of specialized crafts and of international trade, all suggest that the economic condition of Europe was still improving at the end of the thirteenth century. This was perhaps more pronounced in western areas of the continent, where the burden of servitude was rapidly disappearing; but it had not yet been improved on the plains east of the Elbe. To that extent the lot of the humblest, and the majority of men were peasants of various legal categories, was than it had been. Barbarian invasions ceased after the Mongols in the mid-thirteenth century and, until the 1350s or so wars were for the most part local and short-lived. But if there was prosperity its fruits were reaped by the high-farming landlords, and this by their exploitation of peasants, whose inability to make wage demands left them in real terms poorer. This was soon enough to change. The great famine of 1317, the ever-expanding conflict of the euphemistically termed 'Hundred Years War', the advance of the Turks and the Black Death brought misery, regression and disease.