w is less commonly held now than it was 50 years ago, and the burgeoning state of the merchant class (who were laying the foundations for modern capitalism and the marketplace as we understand it today) were one of the primary reasons that the era cannot be looked upon as a stagnant one (Gies and Gies, 1995, p. 111).
A very brief look at the early Middle Ages is important to understand how trade would develop in later centuries. The Middle Ages is often conveniently said to begin with either the sack of Rome by the Goths under Alaric I in 410 or the deposition in 476 of Romulus Augustulus, the last Roman emperor in the West. Yet, more precisely, by the end of the fifth century the culmination of several long-term trends, including a severe economic dislocation and the invasions and settlement of Germanic peoples within the borders of the Western Empire, had changed the face of Europe (Hunt and Murray, 1999, p. 28).
For the next 300 years western Europe remained essentially a primitive culture, albeit one uniquely superimposed on the complex, elaborate culture of the Roman Empire, which was never entirely lost or forgotten. Although during this period the loose confederation of tribes began to coalesce into kingdoms, virtually no machinery of government existed, and political and economic development was local in nature - a state that is almost unimaginable to us today. It is hard to fathom what it would be like to live in a world in which everything that one used come from materials drawn from within walking distance of where you were born and was made by people that one knew. The dramatic changes in trade and mercantile patterns set into motion in the Middle Ages can be understood in comparing this type of a world with our own (Hunt and Murray, 1999, p. 109).
Regular formal commerce during the early Middle Ages ceased almost entirely, although the money economy never entirely vanished. It did become fundamentally less importa...