Cultures and civilisations are interchangeable
in most contexts. They are ways of
ordering ecological space just as economies are. Culture is the oldest character in
human history, economies succeed each other more rapidly.
All of Europe considered collectively'
as Isaac de Pinto puts it,' is the entire political
and economic area known as Europe, with its long past; an inheritance including
the shape imposed upon the continent long ago by Rome.
The predominance of the city-states in
the Middle Ages can only be explained in
the context of the first world-economy ever to take shape in Europe, between the
eleventh and thirteenth centuries. It was in this period that the extensive trading-
zones were established of which the cities were at once the instruments, the
articulations and the beneficiaries. 'All of Europe considered collectively' as Isaac
de Pinto puts it,' is the entire political and economic area known as Europe, with
its long past; an inheritance including the shape imposed upon the continent
long ago by Rome'.
The birth of Europe, the great shaper
of world history, took place in the first
centuries of the second millennium AD. The major coordinates and articulations of
European history were already beginning to emerge half way through the first
millenium with the founding of the Carolingian Empire. In other words the core or
central zones, a proto-capitalism almost inevitably appeared in Northern Europe.
This development appears not as a simple transition from one identifiable state to
another, but as a series of stages and transitions, the earliest dating from well
before what is usually known as `the' Renaissance of the late fifteenth century.
There could be no world economy until
there was a dense enough urban network
with trade of sufficient volume and regularity to breathe life into a central or core
zone. But in these distant centuries, nothing can be firmly asserted, nothing
established beyond reasonable doubt. The upward secular trend from the eleventh
century encouraged development in general, but led to the growth of a number of
different centres. Not until the rise of the Champagne fairs in the early thirteenth
century did it become evident that a coherent zone existed, stretching from the Low
Countries to the Mediterranean, bringing advantages not to ordinary towns, but to
those with fairs, not to sea- passages but to the long overland routes. This was an
original first stage or rather episode in European history, since it cannot be
accounted the true beginning. For what would the Champagne fairs have been
without the pre-existing prosperity of the Low Countries and northern Italy, two
areas of precocious development destined by the force of circumstance to come
into contact with one another?
For the true beginning of the new Europe,
we have to look at the growth of these
two complexes, the North and the South, the Low Countries and Italy, the North Sea-
Baltic and the Mediterranean. There was not one pole of attraction in the West but
two, and this bipolarity, pulling the continent in two directions, would last in some
form for several centuries. This was to be one of the major features of European
history - possibly the most important of all. When we speak of medieval and
modern Europe, we must speak two different languages: what was true of the North
was never literally applicable to the South.
