Trade In Grains

As the country lived off its harvests, and the cities off the surplus, it was practical for a town to get its supplies from within a reaching distance.  ‘From its own possessions’, as a council-meeting in Bologna advised in 1305.  This provisioning from within a radius of twenty or thirty kilometers dodged the difficulties of transport and the always risky recourse to far-off suppliers.  It worked all the better because towns almost everywhere controlled the nearby rural areas.  In France until Turgot and the Flour War, even until the Revolution, peasants were obligated to sell their grain at the market of the nearby town.  During the troubles of the summer famine of 1789, rioters knew where to lay their hands on those grain merchants believed to be hoarders.  Everybody knew them.  This was probably true all over Europe.  For instance, there was no place in eighteenth-century Germany without a measure against usurers, grain hoarders, Getreidewucher.
   

This life based on local exchanges was not without problems.  Every bad harvest forced the towns to appeal to more fortunate areas.  Wheat and rye from the north most likely reached the Mediterranean as early as the fourteenth century.  Even earlier than this, Italy was taking delivery of Byzantine, and later Turkish, wheat.  Sicily had always been a great supplier.  Equal to Canada, Argentina, or Ukraine in a later period.

   

These suppliers on which the large towns depended had to be easily to hand.  On the sea or the banks of navigable rivers, as water transport was better for heavy goods.  In years of good harvests, Picardy and the Vermandois exported to Flanders by the Scheldt, and to Paris by the Oise, up to the end of the fifteenth century.  Champagne and Barrois supplied Paris in the sixteenth century, their grain leaving Vitry-le-Francois to make the often-dangerous journey down the Marne.