Vermeer's Hat

by Timothy Brook

  We cannot see the silver coin on Catharina’s table well enough to identify it. The estimated date of the painting (1664) argues in favor of this being a ducat, not a guilder. We can corroborate this by considering its sole visible characteristic, its size. It is much larger than the gold coins beside it. Unlike silver coins, which were minted in many weights and denominations, most gold coins circulating in the United Provinces were of one type, the gold ducat (weighing 3.466 grams). A gold ducat was worth roughly two silver ducats. Given a silver-to-gold ratio of about twelve to one, it should therefore have weighed about a sixth of a silver ducat. This seems roughly to be the size differential between the silver and gold coins laid out on the corner of the table, circumstantial evidence that Catharina’s silver coin is indeed a ducat.

  Knowing something about Dutch currency does not lead us away from the theme of moral discrimination that imbues the painting. As the woman weighs her coins, so she measures her own behavior in the light of the divine judgment awaiting her at the resurrection. It is worth knowing that some artists used the image of a woman weighing coins to condemn the contemporary obsession with silver, not just the sin of worldliness. But that is not the sense of this painting. Vermeer is not inviting us to condemn Catharina. He bathes her in light, making her a figure of trust and conscience. She handles money, but her calculating of the family’s wealth is as honorable and wholesome as the fecundity of natural increase that her pregnancy signifies. Vermeer’s depiction is positive, in keeping with the new ethic of accumulation in seventeenth-century Holland. The capitalist economy was in formation, and making money was a virtue, so long as it was made by fair means. This, at least, is what the Dutch middle class now believed. Even Christ in this painting seems to bless Catharina’s accountancy.

  The large silver coin on Catharina’s table is our next door into the mid-seventeenth-century world. At the end of the corridor on the other side of this door we will catch a glimpse of the single most important global commodity of the time—silver. Silver played an enormous role in the economy of this period, shaping the lives of all who were touched by it, including Catharina’s.

  VERMEER LIVED TOWARD THE END of what has been called the silver century, which began around 1570. At no previous time had so much of this precious metal been circulating in travelers’ satchels, on pack animals, in riverboats, and, most of all, in the cargo holds of the Chinese junks and European carracks restlessly plying the waters of the globe. Silver was suddenly available in unheard-of volumes, and suddenly everything was being bought and sold according to its standard. That a thing could be “sold for its weight in silver,” the price that a mid-seventeenth-century English writer claimed Virginian tobacco cost at the turn of the century, was an expression calculated to amaze ordinary people. The cost of something in silver could also be taken as the height of folly, as a character in a Thomas Dekker play of 1600 observes when he satirizes a keen smoker as “an ass that melts so much money in smoke.”

  The power that silver exerted on the world was something of a mystery to those who actually thought about it. It could be put to decorative purposes, yet its actual uses were limited. Most people wanted to acquire it, but they did so only to acquire other things. Its own value was purely arbitrary.

  To contemporary moralists from Europe to China, silver created the illusion of wealth but was not itself wealth. It was, in the words of Paolo Xu, the Catholic convert in the Ming court, “merely the measure of wealth.” It was superfluous to the production of real value. The ruler who was concerned about the welfare of his people should be concerned that they had enough food, clothing, and land, not that they had enough silver. The problem with this maxim was that it no longer applied in a fully commercialized economy. If everything could be bought and sold for silver, then silver was all you needed. In a partially commercialized economy, on the other hand, which is the economy that most people in the seventeenth century inhabited, silver was useless when its supply dried up or famine drove prices beyond the reach of ordinary people, which still regularly happened. But once silver was present in the economy, most people had no choice but to use it, whether to buy their food or pay their taxes. They also had no choice but to acquire it by selling things or their own labor. Silver became unavoidable.

  The percolation of silver down into everyday transactions in Europe and China occurred as these economies were expanding, which created a huge demand for it. Chinese needed to import silver to compensate for their inadequate money supply, and Europeans needed to export it to buy their way into the Asian market. These needs created a demand for silver that stimulated supply from two major sources: Japan and South America. It was around this structure of supply and demand that the global economy of the seventeenth century took form. Silver was the perfect commodity that appeared at just the right time, linking regional economies into a web of interregional exchange that set the patterns for our own global predicaments.

  Where did the silver in Catharina’s coin come from? Japan was a major producer of silver in the seventeenth century, and Dutch merchants handled much of its exported bullion, as they alone were permitted to trade in Japan. But almost none of it found its way back to Europe. The Dutch profited from it strictly within the intra-Asian trade. So the silver in Catharina’s coin was likely not Japanese. There were much closer silver mines in Germany and Austria, though these accounted for barely 5 percent of world production, and most of their output was drawn into cash-poor Eastern Europe. So it is unlikely the silver was German. That leaves the only other major world source of silver, Spanish America, either New Spain (today’s Mexico) or Peru (which in the seventeenth century encompassed today’s Bolivia).

  For the sake of marking a clear trail, let us suppose it came from the Bolivian part of Peru, more specifically from the mining city that was more productive than any other in the first half of the seventeenth century. Let us suppose it came from Potosí.

  Potosí sits above the tree line at an altitude of four thousand meters, a zone that the people of the Andes declared to be puna, “uninhabitable.” A great beehive of a mountain, called Cerro Rico, or the Rich Hill, stands on the barren, windswept plain. The place would have remained forever puna were it not for the thick veins of high-grade silver running through the mountain. Before the Spanish Conquest, the Indians had mined this silver, but there was a limit to their need for precious metals. The same could not be said for the Spanish. The first Spaniards brought here by Indians in 1545 thought their wildest dreams had come true. Although the conditions on the high plain are harsh, nothing could deter them from exploiting the mountain’s treasure. At first they used recruitment to get Indians to mine the silver, but once the Indians discovered how dangerous and unprofitable the work was, the Spaniards instituted the mita, a system of forced labor dragooning Indians into labor service from as far away as eight hundred kilometers to work in the mines.

  Almost overnight, Potosí became the largest city in the Americas. The early decades, when the ore was rich and easy to dig, saw the city grow to 120,000 by 1570. People from all over Europe and South America showed up to live on this barren site and produce the silver or supply the goods and services a city demands. The productivity of the mines could not continue at that initial level, but even with their slow decline through the seventeenth century, the population continued to grow, approaching 150,000 in 1639. Thereafter it gradually dwindled, falling below the 100,000 mark in the 1680s.

  While the boom lasted, mine owners made incredible fortunes. The phrase “as rich as Potosí” entered the English language. No one lived in the shadow of the Rich Hill and remained untouched, though whether one did well or badly depended on a complex array of factors that included ethnic status, social ties, capital, and pure luck. As fortunes were made and lost, violence did much of the sorting among those who were caught between extreme wealth and extreme poverty: violence between Spaniards and Indians, between Spanish-born and American-born (known as Creoles), and between ethnic factions, especial
ly between the Basques, who tended to control the ore refineries, and everyone else. One small incident or affront to honor could throw the entire city into turmoil. When in 1647 the American-born Mariana de Osorio on her wedding day rejected the Basque to whom her Andalusian parents betrothed her in favor of a Creole who had been wooing her through the Creole manager of her father’s refinery, a virtual civil war erupted between Basques and Creoles that dragged on for years.

  Potosí did far more than enrich the men who controlled it and pit the rest in deadly struggles against each other. It enriched Spain first of all, but it also financed the consolidation of the Spanish Empire in South America, funded its reach across the Pacific to the Philippines, and drew the formerly separate economies of the Americas, Europe, and Asia into a de facto condominium. This happened without anyone intending that it should. Silver gained a global life of its own, as individuals improvised in the face of opportunity and compulsion to keep the bullion flowing.

  Before the silver could be transported, it had to be coined at the Potosí mint into reals.1 The greater portion went to Europe by two different routes, the official route and the “back door.” The official route, under the control of the Spanish crown, ran west over the mountains to the port of Arica on the coast, a journey by pack animal that took two and a half months. From the coast of Peru it was shipped north to Panama, whence Spanish ships carried it across the Atlantic to Cadiz, the port serving Seville, the center of the world silver trade. The back door route was technically illegal but so profitable that it siphoned off as much as a third of Potosí’s silver production. This route went south down to the Rio de la Plata, the River of Silver, into Argentina, the Land of Silver. It arrived in Buenos Aires, where Portuguese merchants transported it across the Atlantic to Lisbon. There it was exchanged for commodities that were in demand in Peru, particularly African slaves. Much of the silver that reached Lisbon and Seville moved quickly to London and Amsterdam, but it did not tarry for long there. It passed through them and on to its final destination, the place that Europeans would later call “the tomb of European moneys”: China.

  China was the great global destination for European silver for two reasons. First of all, the power of silver to buy gold in Asian economies was higher than it was in Europe. If twelve units of silver were needed to buy one unit of gold in Europe, the same amount of gold could be bought for six or less in China. In other words, silver coming from Europe bought twice as much in China compared to what it could buy in Europe. Adriano de las Cortes makes this point when he describes sixty-eight ceremonial stone arches spanning the main street of Chaozhou in his record of his year of captivity in China. He expects his reader to be astonished at the lavishness of this scene, then explains that the cost in silver of building them is much lower in China than in Spain (“the largest of them did not cost more than two or three thousand pesos”) precisely because the purchasing power of silver in China is much higher than in Spain. Compound this advantage with generally lower production costs in China, and the profits to be gained from taking silver to China and buying commodities to sell in Europe were enormous.

  The second reason for China’s being the destination for silver was that European merchants had little else to sell in the China market. With the exception of firearms, European products could not compete with Chinese manufactures in quality or cost. European manufactures offered little more than novelty. Silver was the one commodity that did compete well with the native product, for silver was in short supply there. China had silver mines, but the government severely restricted production, fearing that it could not control the flow of silver from the mines into private hands.2 It also declined to mint silver coins, restricting coinage to bronze cash in the hope that this would keep prices low. These measures could do nothing against the economy’s need for silver, however. As that economy grew, the demand for silver grew. By the sixteenth century, prices in China for anything but the smallest transactions were calibrated by weight of silver, not by unit of currency—which is why Chinese would immediately have understood what Catharina Bolnes was doing in Woman Holding a Balance. Weighing silver was part of everyday economic transactions in China.

  The Chinese thirst for silver was so strong that most of the Spanish reals that Dutch merchants brought into the Netherlands simply went out again in the direction of Asia. The demand was for pure silver, but reals were circulating as something like an international currency in Southeast Asia, and Chinese merchants were happy to take them. The coins were trusted because Spanish mints kept their silver content steady at 0.931 fineness, though the ultimate fate of the reals that reached China was to be melted down. Only when war and embargo strangled the flow of reals to Holland did Dutch governments mint their own coins. The silver ducat on Catharina’s table was introduced in 1659 to meet just this sort of shortfall.

  The Dutch shipped a vast amount of silver to Asia during the seventeenth century. On average, the VOC sent close to a million guilders’ worth to Asia every year (roughly ten metric tons by weight). That annual volume tripled by the end of the 1690s. The cumulative value was stunning. In the half century from 1610 through 1660, the headquarters of the VOC authorized the export of just slightly under fifty million guilders—almost five hundred tons of silver. It is hard even to imagine such a mountain of silver. Add to this an equivalent volume of silver that the VOC was shipping from Japan to China in the three decades after 1640, and the mountain of silver grows by at least half as much again.

  What did all this silver buy for the Dutch? It paid for commodities unavailable in Europe that sold well in the home market: chiefly spices in the early years, which were edged aside by textiles later in the seventeenth century, and supplemented by tea and then coffee in the middle of the eighteenth. Looking into Dutch paintings of the seventeenth century, we see it also bought beautiful things such as porcelain bowls. One of the puzzles of this trade is that the invoice value of the goods officially returning in the holds of VOC ships (which of course fails to account for “private” cargo such as the ceramic load of the White Lion) was a quarter of the value of the silver going out. This shortfall did not dismay the Company, for the VOC sold what came back to Europe at prices that amply repaid the original investment. The rest of the silver was used in part to pay for the huge costs of running the Dutch colonial empire in Southeast Asia, and in larger part to buy commodities that the Company sold elsewhere within Asia for a profit. The bulk of the silver, in other words, was the capital that the VOC used to buy its way into the Asian market, stimulating intraregional as well as global trade. Who could have guessed that silver from Potosí would gain such power—and end up on Catharina’s table?

  Silver flowed east from Potosí to Europe and then from Europe to Asia, but that was not the only route it took to China, nor even the most important. Twice the volume of silver that went east also went west, first to the coast and then up to Acapulco, from where it crossed the Pacific to Manila in the Philippines. At Manila, the silver was traded for Chinese goods and then shipped to China. A river of silver linked the colonial economy of the Americas with the economy of south China, the metal extracted on one continent paying for goods manufactured on another for consumption on a third.

  The flowing river worked to the advantage of many Spaniards and many Chinese, but not all. Spanish royal officials regularly complained that “all of this wealth passes into the possession of the Chinese, and is not brought to Spain, to the consequent loss of the royal duties.” To staunch the flow, King Philip imposed restrictions on the amount of silver that could be sent across the Pacific. What defeated Philip was the fact that the profit on purchases made in Manila was far higher than the profit on goods brought from Spain. There was a political imperative to strengthen Spain’s ties across the Atlantic, but there was an economic imperative driving silver across the Pacific. And so Manila became the nexus where the European economy hooked up to the Chinese economy: the place where the two hemispheres of the seventeenth-century globe join
ed.

  When the Spanish first arrived in Manila in 1570, they found a trading port there under the control of a Moro rajah named Soliman. The Moros were a seaborne Muslim trading community that had moved up from the south over the preceding half century, expanding their control of trading ports throughout insular Southeast Asia. This made them the chief rivals of the Spanish. The first Spanish commander who went to Manila tricked Soliman into granting him territory at Manila. He used an old ruse, borrowed from the Aeneid, of asking for a piece of land no bigger than an ox hide. As a Chinese writer indignantly reports the story several decades later, “The Franks tore the ox hide into strips and joined them end to end to a length of a dozen kilometers which they used to mark out a piece of land, and then insisted that the rajah fulfil his promise. He was surprised but could not go back on his word as a gentleman and had to grant permission.” Shortly thereafter the Spanish assassinated Soliman and burned the rest of the Moros out of Manila. The phrase “losing the country for one ox hide” entered the Chinese lexicon as a shorthand for being swindled by Europeans; it was still in use in the nineteenth century.