me covered the more convincing will the
observations be. The economic history of antiquity is still too little
known, and its relations to the ages which follow have escaped us too
completely, for us to take our point of departure there; but the
beginning of the Middle Ages gives us access to a body of material
sufficient for our purpose.

But first of all, it is needful to meet a serious objection. If it is in
fact true, as seems to be usually conceded since the appearance of
Buecher's brilliant _Entstehung der Volkswirtschaft_[2]--to say nothing
here of the thesis since formulated with such extreme radicalism by W.
Sombart[3]--that the economic organisation of the Middle Ages has no
aspect to which one can rightly apply the term capitalistic, then our
thesis is limited wholly to modern times and there can be no thought of
introducing into the discussion the centuries preceding the Renaissance.
But whatever may be the favor which it still enjoys, the theory which
refuses to perceive in the medieval urban economy the least trace of
capitalism has found in recent times ever increasing opposition. I will
not even enumerate here the studies which seem to me to have in an
incontrovertible manner established the fact that all the essential
features of capitalism--individual enterprise, advances on credit,
commercial profits, speculation, etc.--are to be found from the twelfth
century on, in the city republics of Italy--Venice,[4] Genoa,[5] or
Florence.[6] I shall not ask what one can call such a navigator as
Romano Mairano (1152-1201), if, in spite of the hundreds of thousands of
francs he employed in business, the fifty per cent. profits he realized
on his operations in coasting trade, and his final failure, one persists
in refusing to him the name of capitalist. I shall pass over the
disproof of the alleged ignorance of the medieval merchants. I shall say
nothing of the astonishing errors committed in the calculations, so
confidently offered to us as furnishing mathematical proof of the
naivete of historians who can believe the commerce of the thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries to have been anything more than that of simple
peddlers, a sort of artisans incapable of rising even to the idea of
profit, and having no views beyond the day's livelihood.[7] Important as
all this may be, the weak point in the theory which I am here opposing
seems to me to lie especially in a question of method. Buecher and his
partizans, in my op