Nature's Evil [calibre 5.27.0]

But the borders of the European world were widening thanks to the quest for ore. The exchange included increasingly remote lands – England, which was rich in tin, the Caucasus with its copper deposits, the Alps with their silver and copper, the Carpathians with their forests and metals. The curators who conducted the trade in metals belonged to various ethnic communities: at first they were Phoenician, then Armenian and Jewish, and later Venetian and German merchants. Europe exchanged its metals for ‘Eastern luxuries’ – sweets, spices and textiles, brought by Portuguese, Spanish and Dutch ships. The first such centre of exchange was Venice; supplied by the mining industry in Central Europe, it developed in new ways which did not depend on the Roman traditions. New industrial centres were set up on the frontiers of the German and Slav worlds – in Bohemia, Saxony, Styria and the Tyrol. Disappointed by the revenue from their peasants, local landowners put their faith in the depth of mines and the heat of furnaces. At German princely courts, alchemy and the science of minerals were held in high regard. From Munich to St Petersburg, cabinets of curiosities displayed local ores and crystals jumbled up with exotic finds from the colonies (whalebone, a shaman’s tambourine, the horn of a rhinoceros), the corpses of newborn freaks and sculptures carved from sugar.

Fugger

The most successful entrepreneur of the mining Renaissance was Jakob Fugger – as his recent biography attests, he was the richest man who ever lived. 7 Fugger was born in 1459 in Augsburg, the textile centre of southern Germany. The most important route of medieval Europe, from Danzig to Venice, ran through Augsburg. Blending local linen with Egyptian cotton, the Fugger family distributed orders to local spinners and then sold fustian at fairs in Cologne and Frankfurt. They competed with dozens of other fibre curators, but Jakob was lucky: his family business had a branch in Venice, and he was sent there as an apprentice.

Venice was the commercial centre of the world. Silk, pepper and cotton from the East were traded there for French wine, German steel, Russian fur, Italian wheat and Venetian salt. Splendid palaces began as warehouses which stored goods for long-distance trade. The banks stored silver and circulated promissory notes for trade. With his newly acquired experience, the young Fugger changed business. Using family funds, Fugger bought a silver mine in Schwaz in the Austrian Alps. A silver boom had begun there in 1409, and Schwaz was booming. Taverns and churches sprang up on the land as mineshafts were sunk into it. Until the opening of the Mexican mines, it was the biggest known deposit of silver in the world – a super-profitable monopoly.

We know about the conditions of mining in those times thanks to the works of Georgius Agricola – a Saxon doctor and alchemist. In his metallurgical recipes, published at the dawn of the age of printing, ore was repeatedly heated and cooled, crushed and washed. The alchemists of his circle discovered the phenomenon of liquation: when an alloy is cooled, different metals crystallise at different times, which separates them from one another. They also discovered catalysis: the addition of mercury helped to separate copper. A scholar of mining craft, Agricola had no understanding of the chemical processes which took place in the furnace and the forge. He compared veins of ore with the veins of the human body; just as blood collects in the arteries, the power of the earth collects metal. Agricola’s language remained the language of alchemy, which compared the processes which occurred in metals to the phenomena of body and soul. Fire purifies metals just as faith purifies the spirit. But Agricola knew how to build waterwheels, how to pump the mines, how to get ore to the surface. He could tell by the colour when metal had reached forging temperature and how many times it had to be smelted and forged to hammer out the impurities. His stories were a rich mix of Nordic paganism and frivolous Latin imagination. Agricola classified the demons living in the mines: goblins do harm, but gnomes surreptitiously help miners. Pure essences exist in mixtures but can be separated from one another and, moreover, dream of nothing but this separation. * Olaus Magnus, the author of the first history of the northern lands, published in Rome in 1555 (he was the brother of the last Catholic archbishop of Sweden), claimed that the peoples of the North had a special relationship with trolls. With or without their help, medicine and metallurgy, two fields of natural magic, spread from the south of Europe to the north. 8

Alchemists wished to turn copper or lead into gold. But only the financiers did what the alchemists promised – they turned lowly substances into jingling coins. The Tyrol belonged to Duke Sigmund, a Habsburg. People said that he had fifty children and was short of silver. A group of bankers financed him by issuing credit notes, which were calculated in pounds of future silver, with a discount. Fugger joined this group; he would receive from Sigmund a pound of silver for 8 florins of debt, and then sell it in Venice for 12 florins. Then the Tyrol lost the war with Venice and had to pay reparations. Fugger collected this sum on behalf of Sigmund after demanding full control over the mines of Schwaz. When the Tyrol was handed over to Maximilian, the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, the mines remained with Fugger. The capital of his empire was Arnoldstein, a woody estate halfway between Vienna and Venice. Fugger mined copper there and built furnaces to process ores from all over the Alps and the Carpathians. The Saxon engineer Johann Turtzo built pumps powered by waterwheels, which were adopted there for the first time. The sovereigns of Europe learnt the first lessons of the political economy of resources: the fate of states was decided not on the fields of battle but in scary mines and quiet offices. Mercenaries fought their battles, and sovereigns were even more dependent on their creditors in times of war than in times of peace. And the creditors, in turn, depended on the mines.