ertain industries and in restraining certain branches of commerce to
the groups of merchants best suited to their promotion. Thus, for
example, in the course of the thirteenth century the trade in fine cloth
became a monopoly of the towns of Flanders, and banking a monopoly of
certain merchant companies of Lombardy, Provence, or Tuscany.
Thenceforward commercial life ceases to overflow at random, so to speak.
It has a less arbitrary, a more deliberate, and consequently a more
embarrassed quality.

These limitations resting upon commerce have resulted in turning away
from it the patricians, who moreover have become, as has been said
above, a class of landed proprietors. The place which they left vacant
is filled by new men, among whom, as among their predecessors,
intelligence is the essential instrument of fortune. The intellectual
faculties which the first developed in wandering commerce are used by
these later men to overcome the obstacles raised in their pathway by
municipal regulations of commerce and ecclesiastical regulations in
respect to money affairs.[22] Many of them find a rich source of profit
by devoting themselves to brokerage. Others in the industrial cities
exploit shamelessly and in defiance of the statutes the artisans whom
they employ. At Douai, for example, Jehan Boinebroke (1280-1310)
succeeds in reducing to serfdom a number of workers (and
characteristically, they are chiefly women) by advancing wool or money
which they are unable to repay, and which therefore place them at his
mercy.[23] The richest or the boldest profit by the constantly
increasing need of money on the part of territorial princes and kings,
to become their bankers. It will be remembered that it was Lombard
capitalists who furnished Edward III. with money to prepare his
campaigns against France,[24] and, quite recently, the history of
Guillaume Servat of Cahors (1280-1320) has shown us a man who, setting
out with nothing, like Godric in the eleventh century, accumulates in a
few years a considerable fortune, supplies the King of England with a
dowry for one of his daughters, lends money to the King of Norway, farms
the wool duties at London, and, unscrupulous as he is shrewd, does not
hesitate to engage in shady speculations upon the coinage.[25] And how
many other financiers do we not know whose career is wholly similar:
Thomas Fin at the court of the counts of Flanders,[26] the Berniers at
that of the counts of Hainaut, the Tote