一. 作者生平： 

Robert Sabatino Lopez, 1910-1986.

The Yale Department of History

意大利犹太裔美国历史学家，研究中世纪欧洲经济史。在耶鲁大学任教多年。1962年创立跨学科研究生课程，并担任主席。1965年获得博士学位授予权。其主要学术贡献在中世纪地中海的贸易和商业史，特别是致力于中世纪城镇和经济网络的活力与创造力研究。 

二. 主要著作：

Medieval Trade in the Mediterranean World (edited with Irving W. Raymond) (1955; 2nd ed. 1969)

The Tenth Century: How Dark the Dark Ages? (1959)

The Birth of Europe (1966)

The Three Ages of the Italian Renaissance (1970)

The Commercial Revolution of the Middle Ages (1971)

Byzantium and the World around It: Economic and Institutional Relations (1978)

The Shape of Medieval Monetary History (1986)

三. 著作介绍

THE COMMERCIAL REVOLUTION OF THE MIDDLE AGES，950-1350

罗伯特·洛佩兹通过本书对中世纪的经济结构进行深刻分析。利用现代经济学概念来解释中世纪欧洲这种不发达的经济体系如何成功催生出商业革命。本书集中于革命诞生之地——封闭的城市和开放的乡村。洛佩兹认为，中世纪的商业革命见证了商人和工匠阶层的崛起以及社会对农业依赖的下降。

中世纪历史的一种全球视野：同时期的中国（宋元）与西欧。

四. 节选内容：

1.In spite of business failures, mounting taxation, piracy, wars, uneven distribution of wealth, and other disturbing factors, the thirteenth century completed for northern and central Italy, and to a lesser degree for the rest of Mediterranean Europe, the transition from inadequate or insecure supply to affluence (in medieval terms at least).

2.Never before had such a large proportion of the population been free from want, or such a variety and abundance of goods been constantly available—not in ancient Rome at its peak, not in Byzantine and Islamic countries at their best. People complained about ever-rising prices, but earnings generally went up still faster, and almost anything could be had at a price.

3.If a harvest failed somewhere, ships could promptly import grain from another country. If a war or an embargo obstructed a source of fine cloth, an order at the Champagne fairs could get much the same cloth from another producer.

4. Even the chronic shortage of metallic currency—a greater nuisance for ordinary customers than for businessmen who could pay by transfer orders on their bank accounts or letters of exchange—was alleviated when Genoa issued fine gold genoins in 1252, Florence followed suit a few months later with her gold florins of the same weight, and many other communal and royal mints took similar steps after a while.

5. We need not discuss the intricate and controversial interpretations of the background of the reform; probably the decisive, though not the sole factor was a steep rise in the price of silver, which in 1252 momentarily exceeded one-tenth of the price of gold.

6. The new gold coins released much silver for ordinary payments, provided a stable international currency in the midst of wild debasement and chaotic diversity, and advertised the economic superiority of Italy over the declining Byzantine and Muslim countries whose gold reserves were dwindling. The problems of plenty are different from those of scarcity. 

7. No great modifications were needed in the basic contracts that had served the merchants in the age of high risks, small markets, and thin competition, but adjustments had to be made to the fact that the number of sellers had increased in proportion to that of buyers, and efficiency rather than daring would lead to success on a diminished profit margin.

8. We have mentioned the organization of convoys to make voyages safer; but it still was expedient for isolated ships to take chances, and travel risks could best be separated from commercial risks by making insurance, like banking, a specialized profession.

9. Progress was slower, because insurance can hardly differ from gambling so long as it is not subdivided among very many insurers and spread over very many ships; but we can watch the first meandering experiments in the late thirteenth century, and by the early fourteenth Genoa and Florence are distinctly in the lead.

10. They also seem to be ahead of other Italian towns in the evolution of commercial and banking accounting, which gradually changes from scribbled memos to separate columns for credit and debt, and ultimately to rigorous double entry bookkeeping of the kind that is still used (with the help of computers) today.

11. These tools greatly helped a merchant to keep track of involved business, check the operations of his partners and agents, and learn from the past how to plan for the future.

12. More literary or scientific tools, ranging from manuals of commerce to maps, will be considered briefly when we take a look at the impact of the Commercial Revolution on culture, an impact that was felt earlier and more sharply in Italy than in the other Mediterranean countries.

13.Perhaps the most striking by-product of growing maturity was the consolidation of colonies and the increasing reliance of international traders on quasi-sedentary agents abroad.

14.Some economic historians, looking at the past in modern perspective, have saluted what they called "the advent of the sedentary merchant" as a sudden, revolutionary change, which made business more efficient by eliminating the waste of time and interruption of contacts the "traveling merchant" of old incurred when he boarded a ship or rode a horse instead of sitting behind his desk.

15.This, however, is an oversimplification. Peddlers, like modern traveling salesmen, were always on the move, and ordinary shopkeepers hardly ever had to move; but international merchants had good reasons to alternate office work and business trips.

16.The trips gave them access to the latest news and the best bargains; taking turns with associates and partners saved them much slow and uncomfortable travel, but cut down their profits.

17.Gradually, however, as profit rates went down and access to commercial opportunities broadened, the premium for traveling fell below the cost of travel.

18. An increasing proportion of transactions was carried out by correspondence: ships conveyed messages and contracts back and forth; a weekly courier service from and to the Champagne fairs brought price lists and market analyses to the home offices of Italian partnerships and shuttled back with detailed instructions to local representatives; a growing number of Italian merchants moved their headquarters from their native towns to a permanent outpost abroad.

19. The move was not always easy. Some foreign cities and princes, wishing to reserve the best opportunities, discouraged immigration by restricting residence permits or hiking taxes on resident aliens; but others were more open-minded or responded to pressure.

20. Colonies, of course, welcomed citizens of their motherland. Their original population was usually made up of younger sons, junior partners, salaried employees and commission agents who speeded back home as soon as they could.

21. As time went by, people of any age settled down in the colony, begat children from local women, and built replicas of their home cities abroad.

22. “So many are the Genoese—so scattered world wide—that they form other Genoas —wherever they reside,” said proudly a vernacular poet of the thirteenth century.

23. Each outpost in turn served as a jumping board for further expansion; and even where no colony existed, Italian penetration deepened inside Europe.

24. A Lucchese compagnia(合伙公司) with branches in France sent agents as far as Greenland to collect papal tithes payable in sealskins, whalebone, and sinews of whales.

25. The Florentine tithe collectors in England gradually displaced the local Jews as credit agents and gatherers of wool from monastic institutions. Money lenders from Asti（阿斯蒂） and Pistoia（皮斯托亚） used their first footholds in Savoy （萨伏依）and Burgundy （勃艮第）to spread their nets all over France. 

26. Central and eastern Europe were less affected, but individual Italians made their way here and there, with trades as different as farming, mining, and importing arbalests.

27. Greater breakthroughs were achieved by sea. As the Mediterranean got crowded with ships and the demand for goods beyond it pushed prices up, Italian pressure mounted against the political and economic barriers that separated it from the Black Sea, the Red Sea, and the Atlantic Ocean.

28. The first lock was broken in 1204, when the Byzantine Empire, which used to forbid foreigners to sail beyond Constantinople, was temporarily overthrown.

29. First the Venetians, then (as allies of a partially restored Byzantine Empire in 1261) the Genoese established a cluster of colonial outposts all around the Black Sea.

30. Repeated attempts at conquering Egypt and reaching the Red Sea through the Suez bottleneck failed, but the rise of the immense Mongolian Empire, stretching all the way from China to the Russian shores of the Black Sea and the Mediterranean coast of Asia Minor, suddenly disclosed to Italian merchants an immense field of operation.

31. In the course of the thirteenth century virtually the entire continent of Asia, many times larger than Europe—the places of origin of innumerable spices, the greatest sources of silk, the homes of both highly sophisticated nations and utterly primitive tribes, whose combined numbers and resources dwarfed the familiar European scene—was welded together by the terrible, merciless Mongolian might, then transformed into a relatively friendly confederation of four Khanates (Golden Horde, Persia, Turkestan, and China).

32. Here Italian enterprise was welcomed as a counterweight to that of the Arabs, the Hindus, the Chinese, and other traders still smarting under the Mongolian heel.

33. It took almost the entire century before the followers of Chingiz Khan and his successors changed their policies from brutal warfare to peace and toleration; nor was the change immediately evident to the frightened Europeans.

34. Uncommon perceptiveness and flexibility enabled the Italian merchants (first the Genoese and the Venetians, then traders from inland cities) to realize that by trusting the Mongolians they could bypass the Arab intermediaries of Far Eastern trade and travel safely over virtually unknown lands towards the coveted, fabulous wealth of the "Indies," under which name the Westerners used to lump together all countries beyond the Islamic Middle East.

35. Marco Polo, the Venetian, is but one of many who picked up the challenge between the second half of the thirteenth century and the first half of the fourteenth. His book made him alone deservedly famous.

36. It must not cause us to overlook the rank and file of merchants whom commercial contracts and narrative sources show motion back and forth from the Mediterranean to Peking or to Zayton（泉州）, the seaport opposite Formosa（福摩萨岛） on the Chinese mainland, where a miniature colony of Italian merchants took root for a short time.

37. Other merchants, after reaching Turkestan from South Russia or Asia Minor and Persia, crossed the Mongolian border into Delhi, the capital of the largest Muslim state in India.

38. A much larger number did not go that far, but made Tabriz in Persia, Sarai on the Volga River, and even Urgench（乌尔根奇） in Central Asia (the namesake of organdie cloth) as familiar as were Constantinople and Alexandria a century earlier.

39. Genoese ship builders, hired or protected by the Khan of Persia, sailed the Caspian Sea and the Persian Gulf.

40. The most daring attempt, however, was one that failed: in 1291 two Genoese brothers, Ugolino and Vadino Vivaldi（维瓦尔迪兄弟）, loaded two galleys with merchandise and crossed the strait of Gibraltar with the intention of reaching "the Indies" by a "westward route" (that of Columbus or that of Vasco da Gama?—the documents are not clear on this point), but they never came back.

41. The Italian penetration into the Asiatic continent was much more than a collection of isolated adventures. Its practical importance is stressed in a few pages of Pegolotti's （佩戈洛蒂）manual of commerce, which describe minutely the northernmost route, from the Crimea to Peking, as one that was "perfectly safe by day and night.”

42. Yet even that route, which could be covered in about nine months, entailed expenses and risks that severely restricted its attractiveness.

43. It paid to export directly to China the finest French and German linen and to bring back China silk, because the price differential outweighed the cost of those light, valuable wares, but other commodities could be exchanged only along shorter stretches of the route, as was the custom for inland trade in Europe.

44. Another route, from Asia Minor and Persia to India or China, was somewhat shorter but riskier. A route entirely by sea from the Persian Gulf along the shores of the Indian Ocean, was comparatively cheaper but took more than two years.

45. Obviously the capital and, above all, the manpower of the Italians were not adequate for a thorough exploitation of their opportunities in Asia, but if we consider the similarly inadequate means with which the Portuguese and the Spaniards in the sixteenth century began their expansion in the eastern and western "Indies," the potential of the earlier Italian expansion will look strong enough.

46. A nearer, and hence more easily exploited frontier lay beyond the strait of Gibraltar. Originally the keys of the passage between the Mediterranean and the Atlantic belonged to the Muslims, who controlled Morocco and Granada; but even before a Castilian-Genoese fleet broke the Moroccan sea power in 1293 the lock had never been too tight for individual ships to go through.

47. As early as the twelfth century the Genoese began sailing south along the Moroccan coast, looking above all for mysterious "Palola"（帕罗拉）, the Senegalese region from where much gold came at a low price.

48.They cautiously lengthened their routes during the thirteenth century and reached the Canary Islands in the early fourteenth.

49. Then the Portuguese and to a smaller extent the Castilians and French took over the lead in the step-by-step exploration of the southern Atlantic, which was to produce its greatest dividends in the fifteenth century with Vasco da Gama.

50. In the period with which we are concerned, however (before 1350), the most momentous maritime expansion was not along the southern but the northern Atlantic coast.

51. Unlike the African sea lanes, which persistent legends populated with monsters and filled with terrors, the European sea lanes from Gibraltar to Flanders and England were not frightening for the Mediterranean sailors.

52. Economic considerations, however, long dissuaded Italian seamen from competing with the Portuguese, Castilian, Basque, French, English, Flemish, and Dutch seamen who ploughed the Atlantic with smaller ships and over shorter stretches. Italian trade went north more cheaply by land routes through the Alps.

53. Between the end of the thirteenth century and the beginning of the fourteenth, however, the Genoese and the Venetians found ways to transport their wares more cheaply over direct sea routes to La Rochelle, Southampton and Bruges by combining precious and bulky wares more ingeniously on galleys that were enlarged enough to increase their payload, yet not too much to impair their speed.

54. The first convoys that reached the North Sea from Venice and Genoa around 1315 determined the virtual annexation of the northern Atlantic coast of Europe to the Mediterranean sphere of influence and transferred to the Italians a large proportion of the foreign trade of England, France, and the Low Countries.

55. Beyond these points, however, navigation from the Mediterranean became too circuitous to be competitive with land routes through the Alps. The northern seas remained the preserve of northern sailors.