If the most powerful cities can no longer
exclude the stranger, upon whom they live, they impose upon him a minute
regulation, the purpose of which is to defend against him the position
of their own citizens. They force him to have recourse in his purchases
to the mediation of his "hosts" and his "courtiers"; they forbid him to
bring in manufactured articles which may compete with those which the
city produces; they exploit him by levying taxes of all sorts: duties
upon weighing, upon measuring, upon egress, etc.

In those cities especially in which has occurred the popular revolution
transferring power from the hands of the patriciate into those of the
craft-gilds, distrust of capital is carried as far as it can go without
entirely destroying urban industry. The craftsmen who produce for
exportation--for example, the weavers and the fullers of the towns of
Flanders--try to escape from their subjection, to the merchants who
employ them. Not only do the municipal statutes fix wages and regulate
the conditions of work, but they also limit the independence of the
merchant, even in purely commercial matters. It will be sufficient to
mention here, as one of their most characteristic provisions, the
forbidding of the cloth merchant to be at the same time a wool merchant,
a prohibition inspired by the desire to prevent operations that will
unfavorably affect prices and the workman's wages.[21]

But it is not solely the municipal authority which attacks the
speculations born of the capitalistic spirit. The Church steps forward,
and under the name of usury forbids indiscriminately the lending of
money at interest, sales on credit, monopolies, and in general all
profits exceeding the _justum pretium_. No doubt these prohibitions
themselves attest the existence of the abuses which they endeavor to
oppose, and their frequency proves that they did not always succeed. It
is none the less true that they were very burdensome and that the
pursuit of business on a large scale found itself much embarrassed by
them.

The increasing specialization of commerce embarrassed it much more. At
the beginning the merchants had devoted themselves to the most various
operations at once. Wandering from market to market, they bought and
sold without feeling in need of centring their activity on this or that
kind of products or commodities, but from about 1250 this is no longer
the case. The progress of economic evolution has resulted in localizing
c