Geography made Italy the commercial outpost of Europe, linking it with the luxury-producing Byzantine and Islamic economies. The commercial links of Venice and Amalfi to Byzantium long predate the great economic changes of the twelfth century. Venice virtually controlled Constantinople’s western trade after 1080. On the west coast, Pisa dominated Tuscany in banking, finance, and overseas trade until its harbour silted up in the late thirteenth century and Florence surpassed it. Pisa’s main interests were in the central Mediterranean and southern Italy and Sicily, colliding with the Genoese over interests in the Tyrrhenian Sea (see Map 2). The Genoese merchants, who like the Venetians were always supported by their city government, concentrated on the Ligurian coast and contested Sardinia and Sicily with the Pisans until 1284, when the Genoese navy crushed its rival. With the north Italian coast thus secured, Genoa then tried to prevent merchants from the south French cities of Narbonne, Montpellier, and Marseilles from trading directly with the kingdom of Sicily, insisting that their boats should dock at Genoa instead.
The crusades had some impact on Italian economic fortunes. There can be no doubt that commercial contacts quickened in the twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The Genoese and Pisans, then the Venetians and other Italian cities, established merchant colonies (fondachi) in the crusader cities and along the north African coast, as well as in the East. These quarters were considered overseas extensions of the home city and were governed by its law. Thus, while before 1000 most recorded contacts between western and eastern merchants were on an individual basis, regular commercial contacts involving large groups of persons, and substantial cargoes with large values, developed during the central Middle Ages. The later crusades were financed by using banks to transfer funds to the Holy Land, thus accelerating the drain of bullion from West to East. It is most unlikely that bullion seized on even the First Crusade compensated for these losses.
Even before Pisa’s decline, Venice and Genoa were the great rivals for control of Constantinople, which involved both control of the oriental goods coming through Constantinople and provisioning the city itself with grain and Western-manufactured goods. The capture of the city during the Fourth Crusade (1202-4) inspired and financed by the Venetians, forced Genoa to concentrate on trade with Egypt. But the re-establishment of the native Greek Palaeologus dynasty at Constantinople in 1261 was an anti-Venetian reaction, and Genoa, with Palaeologus support, was able to found colonies at Pera, across the Golden Horn from Constantinople, then at Caffa on the Black Sea itself. Yet increasingly from the late thirteenth century Genoa was oriented towards the Atlantic and the Mediterranean islands. Genoese capital financed much of the economic expansion of Castile, particularly Seville, its leading port.
The trade of Aragon-Catalonia is another aspect of the Christian Mediterranean economic expansion in the thirteenth century. Its expansion in the western Mediterranean came at the expense of the Muslims of northern Africa and created the base for Barcelona’s growth. The Catalans also established important outposts in Greece and seized Malta in 1284. Their trade was in alum, Mediterranean dried fruits, oil, and leather; the Barcelonese exported their own and Flemish cloth to the eastern Mediterranean and northern Africa in exchange. After Sicily fell to Aragon in 1282, the island became Barcelona’s granary. Aragon then seized Sardinia from Genoa in the second quarter of the fourteenth century.
Most Mediterranean trade was in ‘spices’. This term includes not only the edible flavouring spices, most of which came from the Far East (pepper, the most prized, was also grown in Africa, but of an inferior quality to Asian), but also dried fruits, drugs, cotton, silk, and other luxury fabrics, alum, and dyes. Western Europe produced only madder and pastel. The Italian network of colonies is critical. Each spice was brought overland to a particular export depot on the coast or on an island, where western maritime powers vied for influence, but it was thus a very diffuse trade. The Zaccaria family of Genoa got an alum mine monopoly at Phocaea in Asia Minor from the Byzantines in 1275. This gave Genoa a new commodity and helps to explain the start of the voyages to Flanders and the increased tonnage of Genoese ships; for alum, a mordant for fixing dyes, was critically important for the luxury cloths of the north. Cotton was much more important for western textiles than was once thought, but the best grades were grown in the Middle East: Venice sent a ‘cotton fleet’ to northern Syria, the plain of Antioch, and Asia Minor,20 and northern Europeans had to obtain their supplies through Italians.
While the Italian coastal ports did a thriving trade with the East even in the early Middle Ages, the cities of interior Italy remained farm markets, with a considerable trade in provisioning the households of nobles and bishops and transmitting the goods imported through the coastal emporia to the interior. Their economic growth in the thirteenth century is associated with banking, and the great population upsurge that accompanied the expansion of urban industry, as Florence, for example, developed a thriving textile industry within the city and consequently tried to hinder weaving in its contado.
World History
