surplus is transported to
districts where scarcity prevails, that is all. In addition certain
commodities of ordinary quick consumption, and which nature has
distributed unequally over the soil, such as wine or salt, sustain a
sort of traffic. Finally, but more rarely, products manufactured by the
rural industry of countries abounding in raw materials, such as, to cite
only one, the friezes woven by the peasants of Flanders, maintain a
feeble exportation. Of the condition of the _negociatores_ who served as
the instruments of these exchanges, we know almost nothing. Many of them
were unquestionably merchants of occasion, men without a country, ready
to seize on any means of existence that came their way. Pursuers of
adventure were frequent among these roving creatures, half traders, half
pirates, not unlike the Arab merchants who even to our day have searched
for and frequently have found fortunes amid the negro populations of
Africa. At least, to read the history of that Samo who at the beginning
of the eighth century, arriving at the head of a band of adventuring
merchants among the Wends of the Elbe, ended by becoming their king,
makes one think involuntarily of certain of those beys or sheiks
encountered by voyagers to the Congo or the Katanga.[9] Clearly no one
will try to find in this strong and fortunate bandit an ancestor of the
capitalists of the future. Commerce, as he understood and practised it,
blended with plunder, and if he loved gain it was not in the manner of a
man of affairs but rather in that of a primitive conqueror with whom
violence of appetite took the place of calculation. Samo was evidently
an exception. But the spirit which inspired him may have inspired a
goodly number of _negociatores_ who launched their barks on the streams
of the ninth century. In the society of this period only the possession
of land or attachment to the following of a great man could give one a
normal position. Men not so provided were outside the regular
classification, forming a confused mass, in which were promiscuously
mingled professional beggars, mercenaries in search of employment,
masters of barges or drivers of wagons, peddlers, traders, all jostling
in the same sort of hazardous and precarious life, and all no doubt
passing easily from one employment to another. This is not to say,
however, that among the _negociatores_ of the Frankish epoch there were
not also individuals whose situation was more stable and who