Debt: The First 5000 Years - autonomous learning

292 DEBT
most famous for their complex joint-stock organization and for spearheading
the use of Islamic-style bills of exchange.129 At first these were
simple enough: basically just a form of long-distance money-changing.
A merchant could present a certain amount in florins to a banker in
Italy and receive a notarized bill registering the equivalent in the international
money of account (Carolingian derniers), due in, say, three
months' time, and then after it came due, either he or his agent could
cash it for an equivalent amount of local currency in the Champagne
fairs, which were both the great yearly commercial emporia, and great
financial clearing houses, of the European High Middle Ages. But they
quickly morphed into a plethora of new, creative forms, mainly a way
of navigating-or even profiting from-the endlessly complicated European
currency situation.130
Most of the capital for these banking enterprises derived from the
Mediterranean trade in Indian Ocean spices and Eastern luxuries. Yet
unlike the Indian Ocean, the Mediterranean was a constant war zone.
Venetian galleys doubled as both merchant vessels and warships, replete
with cannon and marines, and the differences between trade, crusade,
and piracy often depended on the balance of forces at any given
moment.131 The same was true on land: where Asian empires tended
to separate the sphere of warriors and merchants, in Europe they often
overlapped:
All up and down Central Europe, from Tuscany to Flanders,
from Brabant to Livonia, merchants not only supplied
warriors-as they did all over Europe--they sat in governments
that made war and, sometimes, buckled on armor and
went into battle themselves. Such places make a long list: not
only Florence, Milan, Venice, and Genoa, but also Augsburg,
Nuremberg, Strasbourg, and Zurich; not only Lubeck, Hamburg,
Bremen, and Danzig, but also Bruges, Ghent, Leiden, and
Cologne. Some of them-Florence, Nuremberg, Siena, Bern,
and Ulm come to mind-built considerable territorial states. 1 3 2
The Venetians were only the most famous in this regard. They
created a veritable mercantile empire over the course of the eleventh
century, seizing islands like Crete and Cyprus and establishing sugar
plantations that eventually-anticipating a pattern eventually to become
all too familiar in the New World-came to be staffed largely
by African slaves. 133 Genoa soon followed suit; one of their most lucrative
businesses was raiding and trading along the Black Sea to acquire
slaves to sell to the Mamluks in Egypt or to work mines leased from