The 16th century thus owed much to trends originating in the late Middle Ages. It would, however, be wrong to view its history simply as a playing out of earlier movements. New developments proper to the century also shaped its achievements. Those developments affected population; money and prices; agriculture, trade, manufacturing, and banking; social and political institutions; and cultural attitudes. Historians differ widely in the manner in which they structure and relate these various developments; they argue over what should be regarded as causes and what as effects. But they are reasonably agreed concerning the general nature of these trends. Demographics
For the continent as a whole, the population growth under way by 1500 continued over the “long” 16th century until the second or third decade of the 17th century. A recent estimate by the American historian Jan De Vries set Europe’s population (excluding Russia and the Ottoman Empire) at 61.6 million in 1500, 70.2 million in 1550, and 78.0 million in 1600; it then lapsed back to 74.6 million in 1650. The distribution of population across the continent was also shifting. Northwestern Europe (especially the Low Countries and the British Isles) witnessed the most vigorous expansion; England’s population more than doubled between 1500, when it stood at an estimated 2.6 million, and 1650, when it probably attained 5.6 million. Northwestern Europe also largely escaped the demographic downturn of the mid-17th century, which was especially pronounced in Germany, Italy, and Spain. In Germany, the Thirty Years’ War (1618–48) may have cost the country, according to different estimates, between 25 and 40 percent of its population.
Cities also grew, though slowly at first. The proportion of Europeans living in cities with 10,000 or more residents increased from 5.6 percent of the total population in 1500 to only 6.3 percent in 1550. The towns of England continued to suffer a kind of depression, now often called “urban decay,” in the first half of the century. The process of urbanization then accelerated, placing 7.6 percent of the population in cities by 1600, and even continued during the 17th-century crisis. The proportion of population in cities of more than 10,000 inhabitants reached 8.3 percent in 1650.
More remarkable than the slow growth in the number of urban residents was the formation of cities of a size never achieved in the medieval period. These large cities were of two principal types. Capitals and administrative centres—such as Naples, Rome, Madrid, Paris, Vienna, and Moscow—give testimony to the new powers of the state and its ability to mobilize society’s resources in support of courts and bureaucracies. Naples, one of Europe’s largest cities in 1550, was also one of its poorest. The demographic historian J.C. Russell theorized that Naples’ swollen size was indicative of the community’s “loss of control” over its numbers. Already in the 16th century, Naples was a prototype of the big, slum-ridden, semiparasitic cities to be found in many poorer regions of the world in the late 20th century.
Commercial ports, which might also have been capitals, formed a second set of large cities: examples include Venice, Livorno, Sevilla (Seville), Lisbon, Antwerp, Amsterdam, London, Bremen, and Hamburg. About 1550, Antwerp was the chief port of the north. In 1510, the Portuguese moved their trading station from Brugge to Antwerp, making it the chief northern market for the spices they were importing from India. The Antwerp bourse, or exchange, simultaneously became the leading money market of the north. At its heyday in mid-century, the city counted 90,000 inhabitants. The revolt of the Low Countries against Spanish rule (from 1568) ruined Antwerp’s prosperity. Amsterdam, which replaced it as the greatest northern port, grew from 30,000 in 1550 to 65,000 in 1600 and 175,000 in 1650. The mid-17th century—a period of recession in many European regions—was Holland’s golden age. Late in the century, Amsterdam faced the growing challenge of another northern port, which was also the capital of a powerful national state—London. With 400,000 residents by 1650 and growing rapidly, London then ranked below only Paris (440,000) as Europe’s largest city. Urban concentrations of such magnitude were unprecedented; in the Middle Ages, the largest size attained was roughly 220,000, reached by a single city, Paris, about 1328.
Another novelty of the 16th century was the appearance of urban systems, or hierarchies of cities linked together by their political or commercial functions. Most European cities had been founded in medieval or even in ancient times, but they long remained intensely competitive, duplicated each other’s functions, and never coalesced during the Middle Ages into tight urban systems. The more intensive, more far-flung commerce of the early modern age required a clearer distribution of functions and cooperation as much as competition. The centralization of governments in the 16th century also demanded clearly defined lines of authority and firm divisions of functions between national and regional capitals. Trade and the “Atlantic revolution”
The new importance of northwestern Europe in terms of overall population and concentration of large cities reflects in part the “Atlantic revolution,” the redirection of trade routes brought about by the great geographic discoveries. The Atlantic revolution, however, did not so much replace the old lines of medieval commerce as build upon them. In the Middle Ages, Italian ports—Venice and Genoa in particular—dominated trade with the Middle East and supplied Europe with Eastern wares and spices. In the north, German cities, organized into a loose federation known as the Hanseatic League, similarly dominated Baltic trade. When the Portuguese in 1498 opened direct maritime links with India, Venice faced the competition of the Atlantic ports, first Lisbon and Antwerp. Nonetheless, Venice effectively responded to the new competition and attained in the 16th century its apogee of commercial importance; in most of its surviving monuments, this beautiful city still reflects its 16th-century prosperity. Genoa was not well placed to take advantage of the Atlantic discoveries, but Genoese bankers played a central role in the finances of Spain’s overseas empire and in its military ventures in Europe. Italians did not quickly relinquish the prominence as merchants and bankers that had distinguished them in the Middle Ages.
In the north, the Hanseatic towns faced intensified competition from the Dutch, who from about 1580 introduced a new ship design (the fluitschip, a sturdy, cheaply built cargo vessel) and new techniques of shipbuilding, including wind-powered saws. Freight charges dropped and the size of the Dutch merchant marine soared; by the mid-17th century, it probably exceeded in number of vessels all the other mercantile fleets of Europe combined. The English competed for a share in the Baltic trade, though they long remained well behind the Dutch.
In absolute terms, Baltic trade was booming. In 1497 the ships passing through the Sound separating Denmark from Sweden numbered 795; 100 years later the number registered by the toll collectors reached 6,673. The percentage represented by Hanseatic ships rose over the same century from roughly 20 to 23–25 percent; the Germans were not yet routed from these eastern waters.
In terms of maritime trade, the Atlantic revolution may well have stimulated rather than injured the older exchanges. At the same time, new competition from the western ports left both Hanseatics and Italians vulnerable to the economic downturn of the 17th century. For both the Hanseatic and Italian cities, the 17th—and not the 16th—century was the age of decline. At Lübeck in 1628, at the last meeting of the Hanseatic towns, only 11 cities were represented, and later attempts to call a general meeting ended in failure. Prices and inflation
In historical accounts, the glamour of the overseas discoveries tends to overshadow the intensification of exchanges within the continent. Intensified exchanges led to the formation of large integrated markets for at least some commodities. Differences in the price of wheat in the various European regions leveled out as the century progressed, and prices everywhere tended to fluctuate in the same direction. The similar price movements over large areas mark the emergence of a single integrated market in cereals. Certain regions came to specialize in wheat production and to sell their harvests to distant consumers. In particular, the lands of the Vistula basin, southern Poland, and Ruthenia (western Ukraine) became regular suppliers of grain to Flanders, Holland, western Germany, and, in years of poor harvests, even England and Spain. In times of famine, Italian states also imported cereals from the far-off Baltic breadbasket. From about 1520, Hungary emerged as a principal supplier of livestock to Austria, southern Germany, and northern Italy.