Merchants

Angeliki E. Laiou has another revealing article in the Wealth and Poverty volume cited earlier. She notes the regular warnings and even condemnations of commerce in the patristic literature, and goes on to examine medieval and Byzantine hagiography for the same themes. She is surprised to find a fairly positive view of merchants.

Saints use the marketplace for their charitable work – selling produce to raise money for the poor, securing loans which the poor then use to pay rent or buy necessities. The lives of the saints also celebrate cities for their commercial dynamism: Nicaea in 886 is “full of all good things, which attracts those who deal in money/merchandies, for it well placed for commerce.” Trebizond has “very numerous and wealthy merchants.” Pious professional merchants appear with some frequency.

Still, she doesn’t think that the patristic suspicions about commerce were totally ignored: “The idea that labor forms the basis of value had a long life. Charity, a profoundly uneconomic activity in intent, if not so much in effect, retained its force. Profit, while accepted, was broadly deemed to have limits in order to be considered legitimate. Justice in exchange . . . was a basic tenet of Byzantine legislation and ideology through the tenth century.” Merchants are accepted, but to gain salvation he had “to exercise his profession in the name of God and was always reminded that profit was earned at the will of the Lord.”

My main qualm about this informative article is that Laiou seems to define “economic activity” as an inherently secular, and almost an inherently selfish enterprise. Why, for instance, is charity “profoundly uneconomic”? Is maximizing profit the only economic motive she can envision?