Money & Power.
Howard Means.
Foreword.
by David Grubin.
*HEN BRUNO COHEN, CNBC"s SENIOR VICE PRESIdent, asked me if I would consider producing a doc.u.mentary about the history of business, I wondered aloud whether it would be possible. Where does a story with such a vast scope begin, I asked him, and where does it end? We"d like you to figure that out, Bruno said, but he a.s.sured me that he and his boss, Bill Bolster the man behind CNBC"s phenomenal success as a network devoted to business news were certain it could be done, and they wanted me to give it a try. Two years later, the two-hour doc.u.mentary "Money and Power," produced by Ed Gray and Nick Davis with the a.s.sistance of Amanda Pollak, Annie Wong, and Alex Dionne, proved to me that they had been right.
This splendid book by Howard Means explores the same themes as our film, but extends and elaborates upon them, adding new material we didn"t have the time or inclination to include. I"ve always believed that a television doc.u.mentary should make you want to sit down and read a book. This companion volume to our program will allow you the pleasure of doing just that.
I usually start work on a film ignorant and uncertain, and this one was no exception, but there was one thing I was sure of. I didn"t want "Money and Power" to be an ill.u.s.trated essay. I could have begun, for example, with a pan across a herd of brindled cows grazing on a mountainside meadow lit by the early morning sun, the narrator explaining that cattle are one of the oldest forms of wealth, and noting that our word capital is derived from the Latin for a herd of cattle, caput. But as Casey said when he let the ball sail over the plate without taking a swing, "Ain"t my style." I"m a storyteller. Rather than fashion an a.n.a.lytic economic history, I wanted to do what film does at its best: tell stories, not about history, but about people who, after all, make history.
But what idea would bind the various stories together and make them relevant to our own time and place? When I considered how we go about our lives each day, the comforts we enjoy, the luxuries available, I found the connection to the past I was looking for. Today most of us who live in the Western world know an abundance beyond the wildest dreams of yesterday"s richest king. We eat better, live longer, can travel farther and faster. We take our daily pleasures for granted, rarely pausing to consider that it hasn"t always been this way. Viewed through the long lens of history, we in the West are a privileged few. Through the development of great industries and banks and of vast networks of ma.s.s communication and transportation, the West has become the center of the most productive economic engine the world has ever known.
How did it happen? That was a compelling question. To try and provide some answers I decided to tell the stories of people whose lives were emblematic of forces that were larger than themselves. The careers of the great tyc.o.o.ns for example, the Rockefellers and the Morgans, the Medicis and the Rothschilds were object lessons in the creation of private and public wealth. I would begin a thousand years ago, when the West was an economic backwater and nearly everyone lived by farming. Banking had not been invented, merchants were few, factories almost unknown. The Catholic Church, which defined the social, religious, and political climate of the times, no more encouraged trade than did the archaic numbering system, which made calculation difficult for anyone who needed to tally profit and loss. The price of goods was often set by cus tom, and trade was mostly a matter of barter and exchange, centering on small towns and manors. In the year 1000, the people of the Western world were no richer than those anywhere else on the planet. The Chinese and the Arabs were wealthier, more technologically advanced. No one then could have predicted that the West would one day outstrip every other culture in the acc.u.mulation of riches and power.
Scientists and politicians, artists and scholars, all contributed to the millennium of change, but the world"s businessmen its bankers, industrialists, merchants, and entrepreneurs were a powerful driving force behind the stunning transformation. In telling their stories, I could explore a fundamental paradox: The great business moguls, sometimes ruthless, sometimes charitable, always bent on acc.u.mulating vast fortunes for themselves, helped create the modern world.
We decided to begin our film by standing viewers on their heads shaking up their preconceptions by inviting them into a world with ideas and values radically opposed to their own. One thousand years ago, business as we know it did not exist. Life centered on the church, which discouraged innovation and change. The notion that the love of money is the root of all evil served as a warning that the life of the spirit was more important than getting rich, and the feudal system, with serfs working the land for lords of the manor, made it difficult for new wealth to be created that everyone could share. But in spite of limited economic opportunities, there was a growing demand for more exotic goods tapestries, jewels, and spices from n.o.blemen and even members of the church itself And there were already a few hardy merchants who were determined to pursue a more vigorous path with regard to their own purses.
G.o.dric of Finchale was one of them. Forsaking the ties that bound him to the land, he acc.u.mulated a vast fortune trading on the high seas, then gave it all to the poor, retiring to a lonely forest in northern England where he dedicated the rest of his life to G.o.d. He came to be known as a holy man, and in the end was canonized by the church as a saint.
G.o.dric was the first businessman we profiled in our film. It"s interesting that he was vilified in his own time as a man of ruthless ambition, then became what we would call in our day a philanthropist. Whether he sought to a.s.suage his guilt, improve his image, or simply to help those less fortunate than he was, it"s hard to say now because facts are few and he lived when history easily blended into legend. But the similarity of his story to the Medicis, the Rockefellers, and Bill Gates is difficult to ignore although none of these latter-day moguls are likely to ever be canonized.
Starting with G.o.dric we would span 1,000 years, telling how the merchant Cosimo de" Medici became the greatest banker of his day, as powerful as the pope himself; how King Philip II of Spain squandered the gold that had made Spain the richest country on earth; how industrialist Matthew Boulton provided inventor James Watt with the secrets of finance and marketing that made Watt"s steam engine the dynamo behind the Industrial Revolution. And we would go on to tell the stories of towering American businessmen and their creations: J.P. Morgan and his banking empire, John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil, Henry Ford and the Model T, Henry Luce and Time magazine, Robert Woodruff and Coca-Cola, Harry and Jack Warner and Warner Bros., Bill Gates and Microsoft.
Along the way we would witness the creation of banking and the first stock exchange; the beginning of the industrial revolution and the building of the great railroads in America; the invention of the automobile; the birth of advertising, the movies, the computer, and the Internet. From a time when economies were local and money largely unknown, we would be catapulted into our own world where money instantly leaps across borders electronically in a nonstop, 24-hour world economy.
I"m delighted that Howard Means has taken this story off the television screen and put it down on the page for you to consider at your leisure. Television brings the past alive like no other medium, but prose gives you the time to meditate upon it.
When I meditate on the formidable figures who people this story, I remember Citizen Kane, and the wealthy businessman who told an impecunious young reporter that "It"s easy to make a lot of money if all you want to do is make a lot of money." I"ve never been sure whether the businessman was chiding himself or mocking the poor reporter because, after all, it"s not easy to make a lot of money, but in any case, it is sometimes difficult to decide what you want, and that"s something I like to think about.
INTRODUCTION.
*N THE LONG SWEEP OF HISTORY, BUSINESS IS BOTH nearly as old as human beings and almost brand new. The Phoenicians were famous seagoing merchants. By 1500 B.C., the Chinese had established sophisticated markets in all manner of luxury goods, from silk to turquoise and tortoise sh.e.l.ls. Money changers, the first bankers, are found in the Bible, doing the unglamorous but necessary work of stabilizing currencies across widely divergent cultures.
The Greeks, the Egyptians, and the Abyssinians all did business they couldn"t have avoided it even had they wanted to. We humans seem to have been programmed from the beginning to deal to swap risk and reward in the pursuit of gain. If we could peer back far enough into the unrecorded history of the planet, we undoubtedly would find cave dwellers storing up st.u.r.dy clubs to trade for a mammoth flank or the skin of a saber-toothed tiger when the moment was right.
Business with a capital B, though business not just as a way of providing but as a system of social and economic organization-emerges only within the last ten centuries, and for the most part far more recently than that.
Until people began to break free from the monarchies and theocracies that so limited and controlled their destinies, they had neither sufficient opportunity to pursue profit nor much incentive. Why strive so hard to make what you are so unlikely to be able to keep? Early businesspeople were also faced with reconciling their desire for a successful return on their investment of time, labor, or money with religious prohibitions against excessive gain: They had their souls to look to, the ultimate bottom line.
Labor markets and consumption markets had to be created. Means of production had to be improved. Capital mechanisms had to be established and refined. Transportation needed to be up to the challenge of moving goods and services to those places where they were most likely to reap the greatest rewards. People had to both broaden their horizons -I want that which I cannot see or procure on my own and simultaneously narrow them: Exotic markets weren"t impossibly far away; they were just far enough away to make it worthwhile to trade in what they had to offer. A human revolution, in short, had to take place before capital-B Business could set roots and grow. And grow. And grow.
That all this happened most dramatically in western Europe attests to a parallel political revolution as well. In part thanks to the Greeks and Romans, in part thanks to the independent spirit of the conquering hordes that ravaged Europe through much of the first millennium, the beginnings of democratic government, of self-determination, first seem to have set their hooks in the hearts of those who lived on the western extreme of the Eurasian land ma.s.s.
Runnymede and the Magna Carta ring out loud in the history of politics, but they ring out just as loud in the history of business. People had to be free before they could act freely. They had to win the rights of self-governance and economic self-determination simultaneously. Being free to pursue political fortune almost inevitably entailed the freedom to pursue economic fortunes. The two cross-fertilized, and as they did, business began to blossom.
It was the two great and parallel revolutions of the last half of the last millennium that finally put business over the top. The Industrial Revolution created the means of ma.s.s production, just as the American Revolution was creating the world"s first great experiment in democratic capitalism. The congruence between the two is almost spooky: James Watt first demonstrated his steam engine publicly on March 8, 1776, in Birmingham, England, less than four months before the American Founding Fathers met in Philadelphia to declare independence from Great Britain. Once again, politics and business were marching hand in hand, to the benefit of both. Soon the two would find themselves wedded to a companion Consumer Revolution: As more production capacity came on line, people gained more capacity to purchase, and as they gained more capacity to purchase, so grew their list of wants and needs.
Before the 1800s were through, capital had begun to flow across the Atlantic, and America was poised to become, first, the business locus and then the political locus of the world. The 1900s were only half over when Harry Luce dubbed them, quite correctly, "the American century." Soon, though, yet another revolution would take place. Call it the Information Revolution, the High-Tech Revolution, the Internet Revolution by whatever name, it took business by the neck, shook it, and spread its spirit broadly around the globe.
Today, business drives the world, from all around the world. A global network of corporations, stock markets, banks, and industries churns out more riches than humankind has ever known. Poverty hasn"t been defeated. Miseries from war to disease and famine spread themselves far too broadly. The environment is threatened, in some cases by the very rapaciousness of the business spirit we are describing. But today, the access to this global wealth and the capacity to partic.i.p.ate in the machinery that produces it is available in ways that would have been almost unthinkable even half a century ago.
People have more freedom to be, to do, to go, and to know at the start of the new millennium than they ever have had in the history of time. They have more means and capacity and opportunity to do all those things than the human race has ever known. And in no small measure the credit for that belongs to the business leaders of the previous millennium who have set the table for us all.
How to tell such a tale? In this case, we followed the money to the personalities both definitive and representative that have dominated the last thousand years of business, and to some of the most defining and colorful events of the millennium.
Economic power frequently precedes and helps create political power, but business itself is often a trailing indicator of where politics is heading. So it is with business in our own time. The inclusiveness that has come to increasingly characterize Western politics over the last century of women and of minorities, most notably has been far slower to invade the ranks of the moguls, the dominating figures of commerce and industry. The history of business exploitation is rich with people from all across the global spectrum, but only recently has the history of business opportunity come to have anything even approaching a rainbow face. Mostly, the story of business is the story of white Western males.
We begin with the story of one such man with whom most readers will be completely unfamiliar: the Englishman G.o.dric, later St. G.o.dric. Why such an obscure figure? Maybe most importantly, because G.o.dric is representative of that relative handful of people who, beginning roughly a thousand years ago, rose up, threw off the circ.u.mstances of their birth, and began to freely pursue business opportunity and profit. It would be wrong, perhaps, to claim that such people launched the millennium of business, but it is certainly no exaggeration to write that they served as its early warning system. It was in their persons-their physical beings and in their psyches that the combination of vectors that would point to economic selfdetermination were gathering.
G.o.dric gathered his wealth mostly as a seagoing trader across the English Channel and along the newly profitable Baltic and North Atlantic trade routes. Mediterranean traders had it easier in some ways: Markets and ports of call were more established, and the eastern and southern coasts of the great sea of the Middle Earth served as gateways to the exotic goods of Africa and the Islamic world and, beyond that, the empires of the Far East that Marco Polo had brought to the attention of the West.
Even the wealthiest of the merchant traders, though, suffered from the absence of capital markets. Financing a venture, bridging the lengthy interval between the time a ship left port and the time it returned laden with goods a.s.suming it hadn"t broken up in a storm, or been sacked by pirates, or simply run up against one of the myriad forms of bureaucratic disaster that even then plagued merchants all this required the creation of a modern banking system. And that, as it turned out, took the Italians.
Perhaps it was their own deep involvement in Mediterranean trade that encouraged the breakthrough, or simply native genius. Either way, the Italians seem to have first understood the alchemy of banking. By the mid-fifteenth century, the Italians were bankers to Europe; the city-state of Florence was at the center of the Italian banking industry; and at the center of both Florence and banking stood the man who would beget one of the most celebrated family lines in the history of the continent: Cosimo de" Medici.
Born without royal blood, Cosimo would have the power of a prince. As financier to the Vatican, he was also able to strike a bargain reconciling his pursuit of profit with his desire for eternal peace, and the bargain, in turn, would give Florence and the Renaissance some of the most enduring religious art and architecture of the millennium. Money was becoming the great equalizer: Through its exercise on behalf of the public good, even usurers could earn a place in heaven.
Cosimo de" Medici was in his grave less than thirty years when another Italian, Christopher Columbus, set sail for the New World in the service of the Spanish crown -a business venture with an enormous payback. A century and a half later, Spain under Philip II had become the wealthiest monarchy the world had ever known.
Had he been a businessman at heart, one suspects Philip would have known what to do with all the gold and silver that flowed in from his mines in South America. There was infrastructure to be built, both at home and abroad, and markets as well. Spain had virtually no manufacturing capacity: Instead of providing for the needs of its colonies, it had to turn elsewhere in Europe for fulfillment. Spain had to turn elsewhere, too, for the guns and other munitions with which Philip waged a steady succession of increasingly futile wars.
Thus the wealth that came into Spain poured out in a steady stream under Philip, it never learned to produce wealth on its own and thus Spain, which had been rich almost beyond belief when Philip ascended to the throne, found itself nearly bankrupt by the time of his death. Not only was money becoming the great leveler; the capacity to handle national wealth was becoming the great discriminator between nations that endured and those that flashed brightly for a moment in time and burned as quickly down to embers.
No contrast in the dynamics of national wealth could be greater than that between Spain under Philip II and the tiny maritime nation that overthrew Spanish rule just as Philip was dying and quickly established itself as the center of European economic power.
In Spain, economic power had been centralized in the crown. In the Netherlands, money and power were spread broadly across the people. The great Dutch merchant firms the East and West India trading companies were funded by public subscription, with the profits flowing back to investors. Just as the Italians had discovered the multiplier effect of banking, so the Dutch discovered the multiplier effect of the stock market. For the first time in European history, national economic decisions were being made by businessmen, not by the crown, a narrow band of rulers, or the Church. The people had available to them, in somewhat primitive form, nearly all the mechanisms we have today for a.s.suming risk in the search for reward, and they were just as free to abuse those mechanisms as modern investors are.
The power of greed to move markets in irrational directions is by now well known, but in the Netherlands in the early 1600s, when the power of greed finally settled on the unlikely commodity of the tulip bulb, the investment bubble that arose was virtually unique. In the opening month of 1637 alone, the price of some of the most prized bulbs shot up nearly 3,000 percent. Then in the first and second weeks of February, the bottom fell out on tulips, and prices plunged even more quickly than they had soared. All across the Netherlands, solid citizens who had gone to bed rich on paper, at least woke up star ing ruin in the face. Money was not only the great leveler and discriminator; the stock market had also made it the great temptress, a siren that could now infect the dreams of the populace as a whole.
The Dutch empowered the people, and the people learned, ultimately to their great pain, that in a market-driven society, the price of any commodity is whatever investors are willing at any given moment to pay for it. The Industrial Revolution would empower, literally, the world, but for all its consequences, all its resonance through modern history, the Industrial Revolution begins with a simple, almost serendipitous partnership of two deeply different men.
James Watt was, in effect, his own research-and-development team: a brilliant theorizer, an incessant tinkerer, even a superb a.n.a.lyst. Matthew Boulton was very nearly the business ethos incarnate: a born salesman with a keen instinct for numbers who searched restlessly for new markets and new products to turn out at his great Soho Manufactory in Birmingham, England. Apart, unpartnered, neither could have laid claim to enduring fame. Together with Watt"s inventive genius urged on and directed by Boulton"s business ac.u.men they brought about the single most important happening in the world economy.
Steam engines existed before Watt and Boulton, but they were immense contraptions that could move only up and down. Watt figured out how to compact the engine and turn its reciprocal motion into a rotary one, and Boulton knew just how and where to sell a machine that could make things turn. The difference was monumental.
A partnership also empowered the Transcontinental Railroad this one between government and private interests. The railroad made all the difference, too, and at its core was the rotary power unleashed by James Watt"s steam engine, adapted by other hands. The Industrial Revolution had found its wheels.
Until the final spike was driven at Promontory Summit, Utah, on May 10, 1869, America for all its natural wealth of people and resources was still a nation divided. The Civil War had resolved the political differences that split the nation, or at least had declared a winner, at horrible cost. But it remained for the Transcontinental Railroad to resolve the more epic divisions of time and s.p.a.ce.
Getting the rail to Promontory Summit had involved some of the most audacious characters to sidle through American history: men like Thomas "Doc" Durant, Collis Huntington, and Leland Stanford. Congress, which authorized payment for the track laid, had allowed itself to be bribed and otherwise cajoled nearly to a fare-thee-well. But in the end, the railroad got built, new industries and markets sprang up in its wake, and the United States of America was on its way to becoming the strongest economic power on earth. Morality may have been lacking in Durant"s case, it seems never to have been an issue but as a business proposition, the Transcontinental Railroad made perfect sense.
Two problems plagued American business development in the wake of the completion of the Transcontinental Railroad. One was a continuing absence of access to the European capital markets: If opportunity sat to the west of the Atlantic, money still resided on its eastern sh.o.r.es. The second problem only compounded the first: The rapid growth of the railroads had let loose an orgy of cutthroat economic compet.i.tion that further exaggerated capital needs. J. Pierpont Morgan would attempt to solve both.
Working initially with his father, who ran the family bank"s London office, Morgan made himself the guarantor of the money that was being sent across the Atlantic. Like Cosimo de" Medici before him, he knew that everything rested on his word. To a.s.sure his word was accurate, Morgan also consolidated ruthlessly where he considered it necessary warring industries. For good measure, he also served, in effect, as the central bank of the United States, the lender of last resort in panics and crises. Nine decades after Morgan"s death, Federal Reserve Chairman Alan Greenspan grew famous for moving markets with a few cryptic sentences. Famously taciturn, Morgan saved the nation with little more than nods and grunts.
Like other nascent American industries, the oil business was characterized by the fierce compet.i.tionJ.P Morgan so despised. Unlike other industries, though, oil found its own consolidator already lurking under the tent. The son of a snake-oil salesman, John D. Rockefeller would become the world"s richest man and the very epitome of the robber baron lords of commerce and industry, anointed by their economic power in a time when business called the shots and American government mostly got out of the way. Rockefeller would also give away an absolute fortune during his lifetime and launch one of America"s most dynastic, generous, and accomplished families.
Money and power are never simple, but in John D. Rockefeller and the man who would become history"s first billionaire, Henry Ford, the two mixed in spectacularly combustible ways. A genius of industrial systems, Ford not only brought the a.s.sembly line to automobile manufacturing; he used the a.s.sembly line to drive down costs so much that he created a ma.s.s market for the cars that rolled off the end. Brilliant. Strangely, though, it appears never to have occurred to him that an auto market of growing sophistication might eventually want more than cheap.
Ford was toasted globally by labor organizations for inst.i.tuting the $5 work day, which he used to spy on his employees, most notably on any ties they might have to labor organizers. No American industrial mogul has ever come closer to the presidency, especially in the early 1920s when Ford for Presi dent clubs were commonplace. He was also highly esteemed by Adolph Hitler for his virulent anti-Semitism, freely expressed in books and the press. Finally, too, for a man who understood the ma.s.s market so well, Henry Ford was virtually blind to the power of advertising and image.
Robert Woodruff, by contrast, seems never to have met an advertising medium he didn"t like. A college dropout, Woodruff was hired by a syndicate headed by his father to rescue its investment in a nearly 40-year-old Atlanta soft-drink company. In the course of doing so, he oversaw some of the most successful ad campaigns the world has ever known. (Santa Claus"s suit is Coca-Cola red for a reason.) Through his advertising, his attention to detail, his messianic zeal, and his product placement including placement in the hands of American soldiers during World War II Woodruff also built c.o.ke into the first global brand. Many have attempted to go where Robert Woodruff led them, but Woodruff was there first and, so far, best.
Like politics, business can make for strange bedfellows. The point is not to fall in love; it"s to turn a profit. But even in the pursuit of the bottom line, the merger that brought together an entertainment company founded by a feisty pack of Jewish brothers with a media company launched by the Yale-educated son of Chinese missionaries has to rank among the strangest.
The Warner brothers put sound in film; they invented almost on their own the rip-and-read, gritty movies of the 1930s. In the end, though, they seemed to do more harm to themselves especially in the warfare between the elder Harry and the brash youngJack than was visited upon any of their celluloid heroes and villains. Henry Luce, by contrast, would use his stable of middle-brow magazines (Time, Life, Fortune, Sports Ill.u.s.trated what a genius for t.i.tles he had) to both shape America"s image of itself and to tell the nation how to behave, at home and on the world stage.
In the end, after all the princ.i.p.als were dead and gone, their companies would unite to merge content and conduit in what amounted to a royal wedding of the Information Age. How could we not include the Warners and Henry Luce in our story?
And how could any history of money and power across the millennium fail to conclude with Bill Gates? Like Cosimo, he"s a king without portfolio. Half Watt and half Boulton, he understood from the beginning both the science and the marketing of software. Like Rockefeller, Ford, and the rogues who built the Transcontinental Railroad, Gates has also never had an aversion to playing tough. And like Woodruff, he knows not just in his bones but deep in his bank account the value of multinational advertising and global branding.
Never before has such wealth resided in one set of hands: $60 billion, $70 billion, $80 billion every small tick in the share price of Microsoft translates into tens of millions of dollars won and lost. Never before also has such concentrated wealth presaged such a global expansion of opportunity. And there may be the final irony of money and power in this just concluded millennium: that they would concentrate themselves so intensely in the very industry that is extending their grasp to every corner of humanity even perhaps to some new, yet unknown G.o.dric, waiting for the vectors that will drive the next thousand years of business to point the way.
1.
ST. G.o.dRIC.
G.o.d and Profit.
*VERYTHING HAS A HISTORY. BEFORE THERE WAS THE Internet, there was the Arpanet. Palm Pilots trace back through laptops and desktops to the 30 ton ENIAC (electronic numerical integrator and computer), which has its roots in the programmable computers invented by the nineteenth-century British mathematician, Charles Babbage. Automobiles were preceded by steampowered tricycles; trains, by wind-propelled land ships. Bankers are the heirs of money changers whose professional ancestors could be found guarding sacred temples used as safe depositories for personal a.s.sets.
Great fortunes have histories as well. They are created by visionaries who introduce themselves, their products, and ideas into the proper moment in time, the right crease in history. Henry Luce launched his middle-brow magazine empire just as a huge, and largely h.o.m.ogenous, American middle cla.s.s was taking shape. Robert Woodruff took advantage of a shrinking globe and a second world war to create the first global brand: Coca-Cola. John D. Rockefeller seized control of the oil refining business just as industry was bursting forth with new energy demands. James Watt and Matthew Boulton launched the rotary steam engine under similar conditions a century earlier. For Spain to grow rich off the mineral wealth of the New World, there had to be slave laborers to dig the gold and silver out of the earth, transportation technology to get the precious metals to the Old World, and a market demand to satisfy. Tulip bulbs could soar to astronomical values in the seventeenthcentury Netherlands only because the Dutch had made fortunes in sea trading and had a stock market to condition people to accepting risk for reward.
The transfer of money and power from the cross and crown to the new secular empire of business the defining change of the last millennium didn"t just happen either. The desire to do business, the impulse to trade for profit, salesmanship born from merchant life these are instincts nearly as old as the human species. But somewhere around a thousand years ago, a constellation of forces began to pull together in Western Europe.
War, invasion, and conquest, which had ravaged the continent since before the fall of Rome, abated. Until the Hundred Years" War got underway in 1337, Europe was, relatively speaking, at peace. Plague and pestilence subsided, too, and would stay in the background until the Black Death erupted about 1348, eventually killing perhaps one in two people continent-wide. With the coming of political stability, trade began to flourish throughout the Mediterranean and in the north of Europe, around the Rhine River and Baltic Sea. Cities grew and prospered as well, as land-poor lords started to sell off parts of their holdings in the form of town charters. The combination of growing urban populations and growing trade served to concentrate both marketplaces and workforces. Merchant and artisan guilds, which regulated the quality and price of trades, became powerful advocates of self-government.
A hunger for opportunity and personal freedom was awakening at the same time that western Europe began to provide the means for fulfilling individual ambition. The seeds of a business-based economy were being sown. And as that happened a handful of people pioneers of the rough and tumble economic frontier, bold adventurers in the experiment that would come to be known as democratic capitalism began to emerge.
One of first of these capitalist pioneers was the remarkable G.o.dric. Born in the year 1065 near Walpole in Norfolk, in the east of England, he was the oldest of three children of AngloSaxon parents. His father, Aedlward, was a freeman who worked a small croft or an enclosed field, on which he most likely grew subsistence quant.i.ties of leeks, parsley, shallots, and the like. In return for the holding and the right to work the home farm, Aedlward was expected to render agricultural services to the lord of the manor. He was also dependent upon the lord"s stores for food during famine and for protection in time of war both being ever-present threats.
In the normal course of events, Aedlward"s life would have become G.o.dric"s, but as a young man G.o.dric aspired to something different, and perhaps even then, to something more. While still a teenager, he left his parents, brother, and sister, and set out to find his fortune. For a time he became a peddler, traveling on foot from market town to market town, selling whatever small wares he could lay his hands on at the annual fairs that were the commercial and social meeting place of the times. Working out of a tent or stall, one merchant might sell hair bought cheap at nunneries for women to add to their thinning locks; others might offer wines or furs. Notaries were available to seal contracts. The rich and poor alike gathered to ogle dancing bears, magicians, and stilt walkers. As they traveled from fair to fair, the peddlers would build a network and, if they had high aspirations, would use their new connections to expand their businesses.
G.o.dric"s aspirations soon led him to work as a ship"s mate as well as a peddler. Traveling up and down the east coast of the British Isles, he would sell for a profit in the English ports what he had bought cheap from the farmers and craftsmen of Scotland. As his maritime skills expanded, so did his trading network. By age 18, G.o.dric had joined the ranks of the roving merchant-adventurers who led a precarious existence on the margins of the medieval economy, trading freely across the English Channel as they sold ornaments and tapestries to n.o.blemen with a taste for luxury. Instead of answering to the laws and strictures of a lord, as his father had done, G.o.dric was now bound only to the law of profit.
Simultaneously, England itself was emerging as perhaps the wealthiest country in northern Europe. In 1066, the year after G.o.dric"s birth, William the Conqueror had defeated the AngloSaxon King Harold on the plains of Hastings and thrown the island kingdom into disarray. By 1086, though, William had consolidated his rule so effectively that his agents could undertake a survey of his lands and people that wouldn"t be matched for thoroughness for another eight hundred years. The survey results were collected in two volumes that came to be known as the Great and Little Domesday books because the tax judgments rendered from them were as binding on men as G.o.d"s final judgment on Doomsday.
A national currency system was in effect in England: The monetary term "sterling," used to describe the silver penny introduced by William and his Normans, came into common use just as G.o.dric was leaving home for the first time. Social mobility was possible, too. For a man of G.o.dric"s extraordinary, even fierce ambition, there couldn"t have been a better time and place, and he was clearly not one to let such an opportunity slip by.
"Thus aspiring ever higher and higher, and yearning upward with his whole heart, at length his great labours and cares bore much fruit of worldly gain," writes his biographer, the monk Reginald of Durham, who got much of the story from G.o.dric himself For he laboured not only as a merchant but also as a shipman ... to Denmark and Flanders and Scotland; in all which lands he found certain rare, and therefore more precious, wares, which he carried to other parts where he knew them to be least familiar, and coveted by the inhabitants beyond the price of gold itself; wherefore he exchanged these wares for others coveted by men of other lands; and thus he chaffered most freely and a.s.siduously. Hence he made great profit in all his bargains, and gathered much wealth in the sweat of his brow; for he sold dear in one place the wares he had bought elsewhere at a small price.
As the breadth of G.o.dric"s revenue stream grew, so did his net worth, and his potential grew with it. Although born in poverty, he found himself in his early thirties the half owner of a merchant ship and part owner of another. In time, he began sailing south out of England to the ports of northern Spain and then through the Straits of Gibraltar. The novelist Frederick Buechner speculates, in his fact-based but fictional account of G.o.dric"s life, that as his budding trading fleet began to reach into the Mediterranean, G.o.dric multiplied his profits from each trip by carrying pa.s.sengers in the hold pilgrims bound for the Holy Land or the Vatican in Rome and by small acts of pirating. Still in his thirties, G.o.dric had become truly rich, a merchant king. For good measure, he even befriended and helped a real king, Baldwin I of Jerusalem, after his defeat in 1102 on the plains of Ramleh. G.o.dric is mentioned specifically in the account of that battle as "Gudericus, pirata de regno Angliae." G.o.dric, pirate of the English kingdom.
G.o.dric was "vigorous and strenuous in mind, whole of limb and strong in body," Reginald of Durham tells us. He was of middle stature, broad-shouldered and deep-chested, with a long face, grey eyes most clear and piercing, bushy brows, a broad forehead, long and open nostrils, a nose of comely curve, and a pointed chin. His beard was thick, and longer than the ordinary, his mouth well-shaped, with lips of moderate thickness; in youth his hair was black, in age as white as snow; his neck was short and thick, knotted with veins and sinews; his legs were somewhat slender, his instep high, his knees hardened and h.o.r.n.y with frequent kneeling; his whole skin rough beyond the ordinary, until all this roughness was softened by old age.
He was also, if Frederick Buechner"s G.o.dric is to be believed, a brawler and wencher, an especially shrewd trader and, when necessary, a con man and worse. What G.o.dric seems to have been most of all, though, was a man caught in a dilemma. That dilemma the intersection of values and money, and the search for meaning among conflicting definitions of success would continue to trouble businesspeople throughout the millennium that G.o.dric saw begin. Cosimo de" Medici bargained with a Pope to resolve it. John D. Rockefeller would bargain with his Maker, while the contemporary global financier John Templeton has spent a fortune encouraging exploration into G.o.d"s true nature. (Physicist Freeman Dyson, winner of the year 2000 Templeton Prize for Progress in Religion, received a staggering $948,000.) By the millennium"s end, a culture obsessed with finding meaning in a world and workplace radically altered by the technological revolution would be rushing to embrace the spirituality of the new age. G.o.dric, though, had no similar range of options. Then as now, a businessman defined his business progress by the profit he made; but then unlike now, the Roman Catholic Church was very clear on which choice G.o.dric had to make. The only true progress was to be found on the road to salvation, and the pursuit of profit inevitably put that progress, and the soul, at risk.
On the North Sea island of Lindisfarne, where St. Cuthbert had once been bishop and where G.o.dric sometimes put in to port during his trading voyages, all the irreconcilable claims on his soul appear finally to have overwhelmed him. The community of monks who lived on Farne invited the wealthy merchant to join them in prayer, and as he did so, G.o.dric was overwhelmed with remorse. Am I doing the right thing by my fellow man? he is said to have asked himself, Am I doing right by my maker? Is this trading deceitful? Convinced that he was traveling the wrong path, G.o.dric fell to his knees by the windswept sh.o.r.e where the monks lived and vowed to renounce his life as a merchant, a vow he eventually kept with an almost frightening fidelity. G.o.dric"s life as a businessman was over.
At age 40, with his sins weighing heavily upon him, G.o.dric left behind his worldly goods and set out to lead the life of a hermit. After walking for many months, he joined a fellow hermit, Elric, at Wulsingham in Durham. After Elric"s death in 1108, G.o.dric settled for good at Finchale, on the river Wear near Durham, where he built a small wooden chapel to the Virgin Mary and lived for another 57 years.
At Durham, it is said, G.o.dric mercilessly mortified his flesh in the praise of G.o.d. He also developed the gift of prophecy foretelling, for example, the a.s.sa.s.sination of Thomas a Becket at his cathedral church in Canterbury in the closing days of 1170 and became a friend of wild animals, many of whom would seek refuge with him when they were being hunted. Even snakes were drawn to him: He kept them as pets, forc ing them out of his room only when they distracted him from his prayers. G.o.dric is also credited with being the earliest lyric poet in the English language. One of his works that still survives is a hymn to the Virgin Mary that he set to music. He died shortly before his 105th birthday, on May 21, 1170, and was canonized not long afterward by the Roman Catholic Church.
To the Catholic Church, G.o.dric"s transformation is a triumph of spirituality over the misguided values born of a life devoted to commerce. Precious few of us stand so firmly in our principles that we would sell our businesses and give away our riches to save our souls. Nor is it an easy choice to live out the rest of a very long life without earthly comforts, doing penance in solitude. Not only was G.o.dric able to do all these things, but in doing them, he discovered his true gifts: an astounding ability in lyrical poetry and a special communion with animals. By the standards and understandings of the time, the dramatic reversal of G.o.dric"s life is proof enough of saintliness.
But G.o.dric"s life tells a more complex story than the sainthood he earned. Born at a time when capital acc.u.mulation for the peasantry was nearly unthinkable, he was nonetheless a model of modern wealth creation: an up-from-the-bootstraps capitalist who transformed the hand fate had dealt him. In both the major decisions of G.o.dric"s life to pursue wealth and to pursue salvation he chose to give up the safety and comfort of his known world to pursue at great personal risk goals that might in the end be unattainable. In both circ.u.mstances he had to break free of his confines, the perceptions of himself, and the expectations he had been born to. If the second half of his life is a model for the eternal conflict between personal values and the pursuit of prosperity, the first half provides a model as well: of the potential of emerging free-market capitalism to create secular wealth even for those outside of the upper cla.s.ses. Business was rising with the new millennium. A new kind of economy was starting to take shape. The pursuit of money and power was just beginning to break free of the politics of the church and the crown, and the Western world would never be the same again.
2.
COSIMO de" MEDICI.
Putting Money to Work.
*T. G.o.dRIC MANAGED TO TRAVEL AS FAR AS Jerusalem in pursuit of his business interests, a remarkable journey for someone born a serf in eleventh-century England. Born only 84 years after G.o.dric"s death to a n.o.ble family with roots in the Dalmatian Mountains, Marco Polo traveled to the edge of the known world, a remarkable journey by any reckoning.
The world was beginning to open up. The eight crusades that were waged between 1095 and 1291 produced only a marginal European presence in the Holy Land. However, even in warfare, they connected the Christian and Muslim worlds, illuminating both. Meanwhile in the Far East, Genghis Khan was creating the largest land empire the world had ever known larger even than the Roman Empire. In Italy, the establishment of the independent university at Bologna in the late eleventh century was another step down the road blazed by Saint Anselm and enn.o.bled by Thomas Aquinas: Education was beginning to flourish again outside the church. Although no one could have known it, reason had just taken its first tentative steps towards ascendancy.
It was against this backdrop that Marco Polo set out in 1271, in the company of his father and uncle. Just seventeen years old, Marco traveled largely by foot across Turkey and Persia, then along the northern border of Tibet and across the Gobi Desert until, in 1275, the party reached the summer palace of Kublai Khan at Shang-tu (the Xanadu of Coleridge"s famous poem). There they would remain for seventeen years, with side trips to Burma, India, and elsewhere, at the bidding of Kublai, the grandson of Genghis Khan and the founder of the Mongol dynasty. In 1292, Marco and company set out for home again, this time by sea around the Malaysian peninsula and up the Indian coast to the Persian Gulf, arriving at Venice three years later in 1295. By then, the ever-observant Marco had ama.s.sed one of the most remarkable travelogues of all time, rich with details of his own journey, but rife, too, with a meticulous accounting of the peoples, customs, crops, and other goods, from what was, by far, the most powerful and advanced empire of its day.
Although some of its more flamboyant pa.s.sages have since been discredited, The Book of Marco Polo would help to part the veil that Islam had raised between Europe and the Far East. Before Marco"s journey, there had been mostly mystery; with his return and the publication of his observations, there was a fresh understanding of a two-thousand year-old civilization that far outstripped the West in both economic might and scientific innovations. Europeans still moved rocks by hand. Saddles were primitive contraptions. People reckoned direction from the stars and sun. China had wheelbarrows, stirrups for a rider"s feet, and compa.s.ses to tell commercial travelers and ship captains where they were going, day or night, in sunshine or in rain. Traders working between the Muslim and Byzantine worlds and the West would introduce Europeans to gunpowder, and to far superior technology for making silk, casting iron, printing, and even processing paper.