Ceuta, the small Spanish enclave on the coast of North Africa, has been in the news lately. And I’ve seen a couple of articles mentioning that Ceuta has been a Spanish possession since 1668.
Which triggered my inner history nerd, because on one hand actually Ceuta has been under the Spanish crown since 1560, not 1668. And also, Ceuta has been under European control for even longer, because the Portuguese conquered it way back in 1415. That’s knights-and-castles time, most of a century before Columbus.
[a long day of street-fighting with swords and axes]
So why 1668? Because in 1560, Spain took over Portugal and all Portuguese possessions. Then eventually the Portuguese rebelled against Spanish rule. Which led to a protracted war of independence that wasn’t resolved until 1668 when, as part of the final treaty / divorce settlement, Spain got Ceuta.
Meanwhile, in Alaska, archeologists have found about a dozen glass beads of European origin. They’re either Venetian glass beads, or French copies. What makes these particular beads interesting is that, depending on which group of experts you believe, they are from sites that date either to the late 15th century, or the late 16th century. Either way, these beads were in Alaska long, long before any European.
[around 500 years, give or take]
These two facts — the Portuguese conquest of Ceuta and the Alaskan glass beads — are related. What connects them is, of course, deflation.
Apparently economic historians have been aware of the Great Bullion Famine since at least the 1970s. But for some reason it doesn’t seem to have penetrated into popular history much. Go figure.
Here’s the short version: by late medieval times, Europe had been running a trade deficit with the rest of the world for well over a thousand years. Not kidding! Back in classical times, you had Roman pundits wringing their hands over the relentless flow of gold and silver eastward towards India and China. The underlying issue was that India and China had a bunch of stuff that Europe wanted, while Europe didn’t have much that India or China wanted. So European buyers had to pay with bullion: gold or silver.
To make matters worse, most of the stuff that Europe wanted from India and China consisted of consumables, like silks and spices. They were luxury goods that got used up or worn out. So there was literally no end to the outward flow of bullion.
For a while, Europeans were able to deal with the situation by just mining more gold and silver. (Although the outflow may have contributed to the relentless debasement of the Roman currency from Nero onwards.) But by the late 1300s, Europe was hitting a wall. Europe isn’t that big a continent. There were only so many places to mine gold or silver, and existing mines were coming up against hard geological and technological limits — for instance, Europeans hadn’t figured out how to mine below a water table yet. So Europe began running out of gold and silver.
(Once again I feel the lack of an abbreviation that signals “Yes, I am oversimplifying a complex topic, and I acknowledge this. That said, to the best of my understanding this brief summary is basically correct.”)
The inevitable result of this was deflation. As gold and silver became scarce, they became more valuable. So the prices of goods and services that were denominated in gold and silver tended to fall.
The effects of long-term deflation on the late medieval economy go beyond the scope of this blog post, but let’s just say that the bullion shortage and the accompanying deflation were causing all sorts of problems. So people went looking for solutions.
Let’s talk about some of those attempted solutions: two from Portugal, and one from Venice.
The Venetian solution involved technology and marketing. I said above that Europe didn’t have much that India or China wanted. But “not much” is not the same as “nothing”, and there were a few European goods that could be traded east.
One of these was Venetian glass. Venetian glass had always been good, but in 1291 the Venetian government took the key step of moving all the city’s glassworks to the island of Murano.
This was partly for safety reasons — glassworks had an unfortunate tendency to catch fire or even explode, and glassmaking involved a number of toxic substances. But it was also to protect Venice’s technological edge. The glassworkers and their families needed special permission to leave Murano, and another special permission to leave Venice.
If a glassmaker wanted to emigrate to another city, taking his trade secrets with him, the Venetian government could (and did) hold his family hostage. If that didn’t work, well, they would send a hit squad of assassins after the defector, to kill him.
[a forward-leaning posture on IP protection]
As it turned out, one unexpected side effect of putting all the glassmakers in one place was that — when they weren’t busy setting themselves on fire or going mad from breathing toxic fumes or whatever — they started to compare notes and raise their game. Murano became what industrial analysits call a “cluster”, like Silicon Valley or Hollywood. So soon Venetian glass was not just good, but hands-down the best in the world.
So the Venetians decided to leverage this technological advantage by cranking out lots of beautiful glass beads, and using them as trade goods — especially in trade with the East. These days we think of glass beads as something you pay a few pennies for at that one weird little shop that somehow survives at the far end of the high street. But 600 years ago, glass beads were luxury goods. And the Venetians embarked on an aggressive marketing campaign to let the world know that Venice produced the best and most fashionable glass beads in the world.
And it worked! Sort of. For a while. Venetian glass beads flowed into markets all over the world. Egypt and Persia, India and China, everybody loved these beautiful beads. The bead trade didn’t stop the relentless drain of bullion from Europe, but — for a time — they slowed it a bit.
And one cool side-effect: there’s a whole cottage industry of classifying and dating these beads, because Venetian glass beads show up in archeological digs basically everywhere. They’ve been found in the tombs of Indian princesses and as decorations in Chinese temples and as bling adorning Central Asian steppe warriors.
And a few of them, somehow, got to Alaska. The best guess would be something like “China -> Manchus? -> Siberian tribes -> trade across the Bering Strait.” That may sound far fetched, but beads are small and very portable, and apparently there’s solid evidence for every one of those links.
(And the beads aren’t a one-off; there’s roughly a shoebox worth of Asian artifacts that have been retrieved from pre-Columbian sites in Alaska, including a bronze buckle that appears to have come from medieval China.)
I said the beads worked “sort of, for a while”. Problem #1 was that unlike spices or silk, glass beads are quite durable. So, in spite of the best efforts of Venetian marketing, gradually the market got saturated and demand dropped off.
Problem #2 was that while Venetian glass was better, it wasn’t so much better that it was impossible to copy. By the late 1400s the French were making pretty good beads using Venetian techniques that they had either stolen or reverse-engineered. They got good enough that we’re still not sure whether the Alaskan beads are Venetian or French. A bit later, the Chinese did the same thing.
[but sometimes, it rhymes]
So while it was a great boon to future archeologists, the Venetian effort to work around the Great Bullion Famine wasn’t a long-term success. What about the two Portuguese attempts?
Well, by 1400 Europe was running short on gold. But Europeans did have access — limited, intermittent access — to one source of gold from outside of Europe: Africa. Specifically, West Africa. West Africa had a lot of gold.
And Europeans were aware of this! Here’s a detail from the 1375 Catalan Atlas:
The guy at lower right — with the golden staff, golden crown, and holding a gold nugget — is labeled “Rex Mali”, the king of Mali. (He should be much further down and to the left, but I suppose that would have literally put him off the edge of the map.) History nerds may recall that Mansa Musa, the Emperor of Mali, controlled so much gold that he was arguably the richest human in the world up to that time.
[also one of the more reasonable NPC leaders in the Civilization games]
Of course, there’s another human figure there: a guy on a camel, wielding a scourge. Which was a neat graphic representation of a geostrategic problem. Because West African gold had to come north across the Sahara Desert, by caravan, passing through middlemen who were often hostile.
So Portuguese Idea #1 was to seize control of that trans-Saharan trade route. Or anyway to grab one end of it. Because the main caravan route north from West Africa reached the Mediterranean coast at, you guessed it, Ceuta.
So after months of preparation — unusually careful and methodical preparation, by the standards of medieval rulers — the King of Portugal launched a surprise attack on Ceuta. The Venetian attempt at a solution had involved technology and marketing; the Portuguese attempt would involve hitting people very hard with swords and axes.
And — it worked! Ceuta fell. The Portuguese installed a garrison, fended off an attempt by the local emir to retake the city, and settled in for a long term stay.
Let’s pause here and note that this was the first successful European expansion outside of Europe since the Crusades had petered out a couple of centuries earlier. For reasons I’ll get to shortly, I don’t view the conquest of Ceuta as the first baby step towards European global imperialism. But there are people who do view it that way, and I see their point.
— Digression for a bit of deep-cut nerd trivia. When the Portuguese took Ceuta, they of course installed a guy to be the first Christian bishop there, or anyway the first one since the Muslim conquest 700 years earlier. The new bishop was a Franciscan monk from England.
Why from England? Because he was the confessor of Queen Philippa of Portugal. And Philippa was English — she was the sister of Henry IV. Her sons, King Edward the Eloquent of Portugal and his little brother, the famous Prince Henry the Navigator? Were first cousins to Henry V, the guy who was winning Agincourt right around this time.
[Henry V and Henry the Navigator and it’s not just me, right? you can totally see it]
This means that the next few Portuguese monarchs were actually Lancastrians, with a better claim to the English throne than either the Yorkist kings or the Tudors. However, by the time the Wars of the Roses were under way, the kings of Portugal had more interesting projects to pursue than chasing after the much-disputed throne of a chilly northern island. So they never sent their Lancastrian cousins anything but thoughts and prayers. End digression.
Right, so: the Portuguese took Ceuta. And did this give them access to those desirable gold-carrying caravan routes?
No, it did not. The local Moroccans, now more hostile than ever, simply shifted the caravan terminus 50 miles further west, to the port of Tangier. Which led to Portuguese Idea #1.5: attack and conquer Tangier!
Except that didn’t work. This time the Moroccans were ready, and the attack on Tangier was a complete fiasco.
So the Portuguese were stuck. Ceuta was a dead end, and they were no closer to that West African gold.
Except.
This is where Prince Henry the Navigator enters our history books. Because Henry got behind Portuguese Idea Idea #2: sail down the African coast, avoiding the middlemen entirely, and make contact with the West Africans directly.
Henry funded a whole series of expeditions sailing south and southwest. One of these discovered the Madeiras, which was an unexpected windfall — the uninhabited islands could be turned into plantations of wheat and wine, helping fund further exploration. By 1445, the Portuguese had gotten past the Sahara and could interact directly with sub-Saharan Africa.
I say interact because the history gets complicated here. The Portuguese hadn’t reached the gold mines; it turned out that those were another thousand miles further east. So they tried slave raiding first. That didn’t work out so well. The Portuguese were at the very edge of their force projection, and West Africa had a couple of centralized states that could rapidly deploy large groups of heavily armed men.
It took the Portuguese a generation or so to figure out the formula: why raid for slaves when you could just buy them instead? Make friendly overtures to the local rulers, establish yourself as a good reliable customer, build a series of forts and trading posts. Unlike Indians or Chinese, West Africans were very interested in European trade goods. And in exchange, they were willing to offer quite reasonable prices on ivory, gold and slaves.
— Yah, the African slave trade predates Columbus by about 50 years. By 1492 there were tens of thousands of African slaves in Portugal, and a sprinkling of black Africans could be found across western Europe.
[Henry VIII’s trumpeter: famous, but far from unique]
Anyway: once friendly trade relations with West African states had been established, the money started rolling in. And the profits got bigger as the Portuguese edged closer to the gold mines. When they finally reached the mining region they built a huge fortress — A Mina or Elmina, “The Mine” — and settled in for a stay that would last for centuries.
[history’s first Bond Villain lair]
And did this end the Great Bullion Famine? Well… the short answer is, it ended it in Portugal. Since gold moves around, it’s more complicated than that —
[hello again]
— but it gave the Portuguese kings something that every early modern monarch dreamed of: a steady, reliable source of gold.
Which led to the next chapter of the story. The Portuguese had gone to a lot of trouble to develop ships that could sail out of sight of land for thousands of miles. They had built up navigation techniques and a cadre of highly trained long-distance sailors. And it had made them rich!
So… why stop here? Why not keep going, and see if they could reach the real jackpot: a sea route to India and the Far East?
— One last digression. We all know the story of how the gold and silver of the New World first enriched Spain, and then led to Spain’s eventual decline and ruin. This tends to get spun as a finger-wagging morality tale: see how unearned wealth is toxic in the long term!
Except that’s not always true. Portugal started accessing extra-European gold long before Cortez rolled up to Mexico City. And the Portuguese took their windfall and, for the most part, used it wisely.
Yeah, they blew some on royal bling, prestige building projects and wars of choice, the macroeconomic equivalent of hookers and blow. But they also invested a lot of it — not just in further exploration, but in stuff like building bridges and aqueducts, dredging ports, and building up their merchant marine. For a very rough modern analogy, consider the difference between how Norway and the UK have spent their North Sea gas-and-oil wealth.
Anyway, to bring it back: the Portuguese did eventually find a sea route to India. Which freaked out their Spanish neighbors so badly that they were willing to roll the dice on Columbus. Which led, eventually, to the conquest of Mexico and Peru. Which gave Europeans access to literally a couple of new continents worth of gold and silver, thus definitively ending the Great Bullion Famine.
But not before that desperate scrabbling for bullion produced deflationary winds that blew the Portuguese into Ceuta, Venetian glass beads clear across Eurasia to Alaska, Africans into Europe and, eventually, Europeans all over the place.
And that’s all.