ABSTRACT
Every stage of economic development, from primitive food gathering to pre-capitalist production, was represented in fourteenth-century Europe. The most powerful factor was still what it had been since the Iron Age, the division of the European continent into physically different halves by the diagonal which runs from the Rhine delta to the Bosporus. Much of fourteenth-century Europe was as nature had made it. Its vast mountain forests for the most part remained intact. The wide grass lands of central and Eastern Europe had not yet been ploughed up for agriculture or mined for minerals. Except in the Mediterranean area the great European rivers meandered shallow, broad, unbanked and unbridged through wide tracts of marsh where only a few fowlers and fishermen could live. German merchants in the Baltic were exploiting the wide market for fish. North-west Russia was sending furs to clothe the wealthy merchants and their wives in Western Europe.
