Think About the Wool!

14 Oct, 2024

Everyone likes to think about merchants in their medieval-ish worlds transporting goods we today associate with wealth - jewels, precious stones and metals, fine things, etc. You know what was much more likely that those guys were carrying around?

Wool.

"But surely everyone spun their own woolen cloth and had their sheep, right?" Right! Consider, however, that you have a big city like Paris, Bruges, or Ghent. The thing about humans is that they need to eat, so a lot of that land is going to be for growing grain.¹ Quite a bit of it should also be forest and pasture for cattle - nobles eat meat, see, not those nasty greens.

You could make a long-winded, cockamamie scheme to grow more wool... but hey, your neighbour, the Low Countries, have just noticed that the weather is a lot sunnier than a while back (due to the Medieval Warming Period) and have started sucking water from the sea and throwing it around. They call it "drainage".

Unfortunately, all that land is very salty and brackish, terrible for growing food... but sheep don't give a fuck. Sheep will yum that down, they don't care. Plus they have all those canals that are better than roads to move goods up and down, and that generates a lot of money. Cities need a lot of money to operate, because you see, humans need to eat, and you could build a long-winded cockamamie scheme to try and grow more food on your brackish marshy shitty salt...

It's a loop, Jerry.

So you have all these merchants moving around wool from places that can't or don't grow food very well (such as England or the Low Countries) to big cities where they can refine that wool into woolen cloth (such as Bruges and Ghent), to then sell those in bigger cities that can grow food very well. All this commerce and moving around of goods means that money starts becoming a whole lot more convenient, because you - the merchant - want something to keep you liquid. Not taking cloth to then bring back food.

The shift towards silver also means that lords are more inclined to demand taxes from their subjects in coin rather than work (that is, corvée labour), which frees their schedule up to cultivate cash crops, make more money, and eventually turn into the burghers.

And so the Medieval age spins on! It's just two goods, it's not hard to implement in a medieval world, especially if you have shit like floating islands and "islands that were raised" running all over the place. The peasants WILL use them to raise sheep! You just need to draw a line between the biggest city in the region that produces wool to the big city that produces food and you'll have a nice stew brewing.

So next time you have a merchant running around, or are wondering what goods this city is known for, odds are it's either food, wool, refined wool (cloth), or - in Asia - paper. Always remember the wool!