I'm continuing to read about alum and it's honestly fascinating how the concept of money, commodities, and power, shifts from culture to culture.
Europe had no silver circa 500-1500 AD. It was primarily exported in from Africa and through dealings with Persia, along with the Crusades. But throughout this time, the Catholic Church was still rich and powerful, and you have all the general European bickering at the time. If hacksilver was so common and valuable metal so rare, and defrauding so common, where were displays of wealth going?
The pope(s) used an effective monopoly on alum to wield power throughout Europe, threatening everyone who tried to mine their own alum with excommunication. After 1486, because England had no laws on the books to support the papal alum monopoly, they became a smuggling center, waylaying Spanish ships with Spanish alum by using the papal law to uphold the monopoly, then "commandeering" the alum cargo since it was now under English rule, and England had no legislative obligation to give it back to Italy, it was now theirs and could be used for English trade.
This was, obviously, extremely lucrative.
In 1503 the pope raised the price of alum, driving the Hapsburgs into (illegal) trade with England. They helped commission two massive Tudor gunships with the concession England supply them with alum. However, as this was going on, only the crown was able to sell alum and Henry VII fined private merchants and confiscated alum not brought by his own ships or from Tolfa, Italy. This netted him even more profit.
The pope(s) were obviously less than thrilled about this, and cut Henry VII out of their most recent crusading plans, as well as temporarily retracing their papal ambassador. Henry VII did not stop though, and set his son, Henry VIII up for stunning economic success.
... which he promptly squandered by restarting alum purchases from Italy, allowing them to boycott alum sales to England when his excommunication came due.
But all in all, there's this FASCINATING hole of economic history in alum that feels completely ignored! We think of pre-Renaissance era as (or, to be clear, I was taught that-) the pre-Renaissance era was a time of mostly miserable raids and crusading. Everyone was bickering for a seat at the table; there were a lot of popes and a lot of power-grabs. But the available commodity that was changing hands in Europe was alum and most of the power was tied up in paper and textiles.
We think of textiles as work that's been overshadowed since it was done by women, but it's not just that: it's economic power has been overshadowed too. When we see "yard of wool", we should still be thinking of all the processes and industry that went into dying that material, and alum is fundamental to that trade. England's power grew on their wool industry and alum privateering. Spain's influx of silver came from their colonies- but they also were part of England's back door alum trade that allowed the rest of Europe to slip from the church's grasp.
Mounier, Aurélie, and Floréal Daniel. “Some Papal Bull: 16th Century Alum Trade and English Royal Autonomy.” Summer Research, 2020, 379.
Günster, Andrea, and Stephen Martin. “A Holy Alliance: Collusion in the Renaissance Europe Alum Market.” Review of Industrial Organization 47, no. 1 (August 2015): 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1007/s11151-015-9465-0.
