The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean

by David Abulafia

  Of all the travellers who reached Venice from the East by far the most important was a long-dead Judaean named Mark who was credited with authorship of one of the books of the Gospels and with founding the Church of Alexandria. In 828–9 some Venetian merchants in Alexandria stuffed his stolen remains into a barrel, covered the bones with pork and smuggled their cargo past Muslim customs officials who refused to poke beneath the pork – if a theft of relics succeeded, this was a sure sign that the saint approved.37 St Mark was deposited in a chapel built next to the Doge’s residence, though it was only in the eleventh century that the chapel was vastly enlarged to create the great basilica which until the nineteenth century was not a cathedral but the chapel of the Doge. This did not simply make Venice into a centre of pilgrim traffic, at the expense of Alexandria; it also meant that Venice was appropriating part of Alexandria’s ancient identity as one of the patriarchal seats of Christianity.38 By virtue of its close links with Constantinople, Venice also sought to uphold Byzantine culture amid the vanished glories of the western Roman Empire. The Venetians were beginning to create not just a distinctive city built in the water, but a distinctive culture and a distinctive polity, suspended between western Europe, Byzantium and Islam.

  IV

  The fact that Venice and a little later Amalfi became the principal centres of limited communication between East and West reveals the degree to which continuity had been broken. These were new towns. The scale of collapse in the late Roman Empire had been so great that the ancient trading centres of the western Mediterranean vanished off the commercial map. This was not true of the eastern Mediterranean, where Alexandria survived the sixth-century crisis and remained a vigorous centre of trade after the Islamic conquest of Egypt. By the late eighth century there are signs of general recovery in Byzantium, but the West was slow to recover, and what was lost was the intense trans-Mediterranean contact that had flourished when Rome ruled the entire sea. Under Rome, that contact had been more than commercial: religious ideas had flowed from the East towards the imperial capital; artistic styles had been copied; soldiers and slaves had arrived far from their place of birth. In the ‘Dark Age’ the slaves still moved back and forth, though in lesser quantity, but cultural influences from East to West took on an exotic character, as gifts from the court of Constantinople were passed across unsafe seas to reach the court of a barbarian king, pirates and leaking ships permitting.

  When historians have tried to calculate the flow of traffic across the Mediterranean at this time, they have had to admit that there was far less movement in the eighth century than in the ninth, and this does not seem to be simply the result of the disappearance of written sources from the eighth century, since the evidence of shipwrecks is also less rich during that time.39 Of 410 recorded movements in these two centuries, only a quarter date from the eighth century, and these include voyages by missionaries, pilgrims, refugees and ambassadors, often engaged in special journeys. Only twenty-two merchant voyages can be identified; Muslim merchants did not want to enter infidel lands, and the merchants we hear about are either Jews or Syrians, even if these may eventually have become generic terms meaning little more than ‘merchant’.40 Ambassadors were sent back and forth between western Europe and Byzantium in the hope of opening up contacts, political, commercial, ecclesiastical and cultural, not because these contacts were already flourishing. Although Arab coins from the eighth and ninth centuries have been found in western Europe, they arrived in greater quantities at the end of the eighth century, when Charlemagne was carving out his new Frankish dominion that stretched into northern Spain and southern Italy, and Byzantine coins began to appear in quantity only from the middle of the ninth century.41 In fact, many of these Arab coins were themselves European, produced in Muslim Spain.

  The restoration of contact between the western and eastern Mediterranean lands, and between the northern and southern shores of the Mediterranean, would depend on the activities of groups of merchants who found it possible to move unhindered across the seas. Any number of factors would determine their ability to do this: their religious identity, the legal mechanisms they employed to control risk and to ensure profit, their ability to communicate with one another across vast spaces. By the tenth century such groups emerged both in the Islamic lands and in parts of Italy.

  2

  Crossing the Boundaries between Christendom and Islam,

  900–1050

  I

  The enlargement of Muslim domination to include Morocco, Spain and eventually Sicily meant that the southern half of the Mediterranean became a Muslim-ruled lake, offering splendid new opportunities for trade. Jewish merchants emerge most prominently from the records. Whether this is an accident of survival, or whether they were more successful than Coptic and Syriac Christians or Muslim townsmen of North Africa, Spain and Egypt is uncertain. There are grounds for thinking that non-Muslim merchants had a distinct advantage. Muslims were constrained by legal rulings that forbade them from living or even trading in infidel lands. Over the centuries this meant that the rulers of Muslim cities in the Mediterranean opened their doors to Christian and Jewish traders, but their Muslim inhabitants were wary of venturing to Italy, Catalonia or Provence.

  The reason so much is known about the Jewish traders is that hundreds of their letters and business documents have survived in the collection known as the Cairo Genizah. In the mid-seventh century, the Arab invaders of Egypt established their base at Fustat (meaning ‘the Ditch’) on the edge of modern Cairo, and only later moved their capital to the surroundings of the great citadel of New Cairo.1 Old Cairo, or Fustat, became the base for the city’s Jewish and Coptic population; in the eleventh century one group of Jews rebuilt the Ben Ezra synagogue, incorporating on the upper floor a storeroom, or Genizah, accessible only by ladder, into which they threw and stuffed their discarded papers and manuscripts. They wished to avoid destroying anything that carried the name of God; by extension they did not destroy anything written in Hebrew characters. It has been well said that the Genizah collection is ‘the very opposite of an archive’, because the aim was to throw away documents without destroying them, in effect burying them above ground, rather than to create an accessible room that could be used for systematic reference.2 These manuscripts came to the attention of scholars in 1896 when a pair of Scottish women brought to Cambridge what appeared to be the Hebrew text of the Wisdom of Ben Sira, or Ecclesiasticus, previously known only from the Greek version preserved in the Septuagint, and consigned by the Jews (and later by the Protestants) to the non-canonical Apocrypha. Whether this was a lost Hebrew original, or a Hebrew translation from a Greek original, it was still a great discovery. In Cambridge, the Reader in Talmudic, Dr Solomon Schechter, was so excited that he travelled to Cairo and negotiated the sale of the contents of the synagogue storeroom, bringing back about three-quarters of all the manuscripts, often tiny scraps of torn, trampled, crumpled texts, jumbled together in a state of chaos that it has taken a hundred years to sort out (other fragments had already been sold piece by piece in the marketplace and ended up scattered from St Petersburg to New York).3 The Genizah contained a vast number of merchant letters (often, alas, undated), as well as correspondence in the hand of many of the great figures of medieval Jewry, notably Moses Maimonides, the Spanish philosopher, and Judah ha-Levi, the Spanish poet.4

  Until the merchant letters in the Genizah began to be examined, information about economic life in the medieval Islamic world had to be garnered from references in chronicles, records of legal cases and the evidence of archaeology. As important, therefore, as the discovery and preservation of this material was the decision by Shlomo Dov Goitein (who lived in Israel and then at Princeton) to explore this material in the hope of reconstructing the social and economic life of what he called ‘a Mediterranean society’. This phrase begs the question of how typical the ‘Genizah Jews’ were of the trading societies of the Mediterranean world in the period for which most evidence survives, roughly 950
to 1150. It is not even certain that the members of the Ben Ezra synagogue were typical of Egyptian Jewry. Their synagogue followed the old ‘Palestinian’ liturgy, the ancestor of the liturgy later used by Jews in Italy and Germany. Another synagogue served the needs of the ‘Babylonian’ Jews, who included not just Iraqi Jews but all those who followed this rival liturgy, not least the Sephardic Jews of Iberia. There were also many Karaite Jews in Egypt, who rejected the authority of the Talmud, and there were some Samaritans. Still, by showering them with honours, the Ben Ezra Jews persuaded many wealthy Tunisian Jews living in Fustat to join their synagogue as well. This may explain why the Genizah documents are richer in information about links across the Mediterranean to Tunisia and Sicily than about links to Spain or Iraq.

  II

  The Genizah documents do not simply record the life of those who lived within Fustat. These Jews corresponded with family, friends and business agents across most of the Mediterranean, including al-Andalus, Sicily and Byzantium, though contact with the cities of the Christian West was limited.5 There are many references to Muslim merchants, who were often entrusted with goods being sent overland (there was heavy land traffic along the North African coast); this was because many Jews had scruples about travelling by land on the Sabbath, which was difficult to avoid when accompanying a caravan. Travelling by sea on the Sabbath was less complicated, so long as one did not set out on the Sabbath day itself.6 Perhaps it was this simple fact, their religious preference for sea travel, that made the Genizah Jews into such enterprising merchants willing to traverse the Mediterranean. They created a closely interwoven society with its own elites and its customs, forming bonds with one another right across the Mediterranean – marriage alliances were made between families in Fustat and Palermo, and some merchants possessed houses, and even wives, in a number of ports. The range of these contacts is indicated by an eleventh-century letter sent from Fustat. A certain ibn Yiju wrote to his brother Joseph in Sicily, offering the hand of his daughter to Joseph’s son and announcing that his only son had died while ibn Yiju was far away in Yemen.7 This was, then, a distinctive Mediterranean society, but it also looked beyond the Mediterranean, for Egypt functioned as the bridge between the Mediterranean trading sphere and that of the Indian Ocean, to which it was linked by a short overland route to the Red Sea port of Aydhab. Merchants managed extended trading networks linking the western Mediterranean to Yemen and India. Eastern spices were pumped into the Mediterranean through Egypt.

  The Genizah Jews were superbly situated to take advantage of the new prosperity that was developing in the Muslim parts of the Mediterranean. Egypt was the economic powerhouse of the region. Alexandria revived as a centre for trade and communication across the sea; Cairo boomed as the central link in the chain connecting Alexandria, by way of the Nile and the desert, to the Red Sea. Cairo also became a capital city when the Fatimid dynasty moved its power base eastwards from Tunisia to Cairo in 969, where they ruled as caliphs, challenging the claims of rival Abbasid caliphs in Baghdad and Umayyad caliphs in Córdoba. The Fatimids were Shi’ites but were aware that they ruled over a population that included rather more Sunni Muslims and many Christian Copts and Jews, all of whom they generally handled with consideration. When they flew the Shi’a flag it was to assert themselves against their Sunni rivals in the Mediterranean and in the East. The Fatimids gained primacy in the Middle East by channelling trade up the Red Sea through Egypt and drawing off handsome profits, reflected in their fine gold coinage. This was achieved at the expense of the Abbasids, who had in the past lived luxuriously off the trade routes that led up the Persian Gulf to the Tigris and Euphrates, and now saw their gold coins deteriorate as their profits contracted. It was these Red Sea routes that the Genizah merchants were able to exploit when they sold eastern luxury goods to their clients in the Mediterranean.8

  These Jewish merchants specialized in certain goods; they did not involve themselves significantly in the grain trade. Yet there must have been a very lively grain trade, because one of the major effects of the creation of the Islamic world was that the cities of the Levant and North Africa began to revive – indeed some of them were brand new foundations, garrison cities such as Fustat and Qayrawan, ports through which the gold of the Sahara passed such as Mahdia (al-Mahdiyyah) and Tunis. Large numbers of townsfolk relied on outside supplies of basic foodstuffs and raw materials, including the textile fibres and metals they needed for their industries. Specialized groups of artisans flourished in the cities, manufacturing goods for export and buying in foodstuffs from far away. The Tunisians came to depend on Sicilian grain, but they (or the Genizah merchants acting on their behalf) exported linen and cotton textiles, themselves often made from raw cotton purchased in Sicily. This symbiosis between lands separated by the Mediterranean was found all over the sea: Islamic Spain derived grain from Morocco, and sold the Moroccans its finished goods – textiles, pottery, metalwork. When conditions allowed, the Egyptians turned, as they had in past centuries, to Byzantine Cyprus and Asia Minor for the wood they sorely lacked.9

  The Genizah merchants took full advantage of the opportunities created by economic expansion. Unsatisfied by the commercial instruments whose use was prescribed in Jewish law, they generally followed Muslim commercial practices, which assigned the risk in a trading venture to the sleeping partner back home, rather than to the travelling agent, as required by the rabbis.10 This meant that younger merchants could make their career as agents or factors of leading traders without fear of complete ruin if their venture miscarried.11 Sophisticated methods were employed to transfer payments across the Mediterranean: types of credit note, bills of exchange and cheque were known, which were vital if travelling merchants were to settle debts, acquire goods when needed and cover expenses.12 They traded vigorously in flax and in silk, and bolts of silk were often used as a form of investment, stored away in a drawer until the time came to raise some cash. Flax came from Egypt and was sent to Sicily and Tunisia, while silk sometimes came from Spain or Sicily; in Sicily imitations of Persian silk were made – the practice of imitating the original trade mark was common in the Islamic world, and should be seen not as forgery but as a mark of respect.13 The Genizah merchants were masters at distinguishing different grades of silk, and knew that the best Spanish silk could fetch 33 dinars per pound-weight at the port of entry into Egypt, while poor-quality Sicilian silk could sink below 2 dinars per pound.14 Flax was traded in much larger quantities, both spun and unspun, and there was a type of cloth made partly of linen that was actually named after Fustat – ‘fustian’, a term Italian merchants would adopt for linen and cotton weaves made anywhere, even Germany, and that would pass into modern European languages.

  The world of the Genizah stretched to the western edges of the known world. Although al-Andalus, Muslim Spain, was not a major focus of the business conducted by the Genizah merchants, there are still plenty of references to colleagues who originated in Spain. Some, given the labels al-Andalusi or ha-Sefardi, ‘the Spaniard’, moved around the Mediterranean, like the family of Jacob al-Andalusi, which was living in Sicily, Tunisia and Egypt in the middle of the eleventh century.15 The great merchant Halfon ben Nethanel was in Spain in 1128–30, then in India between 1132 and 1134, returning to al-Andalus in 1138–9.16 Sicily was one of the hubs of the Genizah network. When it was conquered by the Muslims in the ninth century, the first town to fall to the invaders was Mazara in the west of the island. It became the grand terminal for shipping bound from Egypt, and small boats would ferry goods across from Mahdia and other Tunisian ports; once in Mazara, the goods were loaded on to bigger vessels for despatch eastwards. Some of the ships that travelled between al-Andalus, Sicily and Egypt were large; around 1050 ten large ships, each carrying about 500 passengers, reached Palermo from Alexandria. There was a famous market for Egyptian flax in Mazara, and traders in Egypt anxiously awaited news of the flax prices there so that they would know how much flax should be sent westwards. In the other direction tr
avelled silk, used extensively in the trousseaux of Egyptian brides, along with many other fine textiles: pillows, bed covers, carpets and an object called a mandil, or mantilla, to cover the bride’s hair.17 Sicily had large areas given over to pasture, and it is no surprise that good-quality leather, sometimes gilded, and sheep’s cheese were among prized exports from the island.18 The cheese was carried as far as Egypt, even though some of it was young and fresh.

  This is not to suggest that all was calm in Muslim Sicily; there were Byzantine attacks on eastern Sicily (the emperor was determined to recover this jewel for Constantinople) and there was fighting between rival emirs. A poignant letter sent to Egypt in the early eleventh century describes the miserable experiences of a certain Joseph ben Samuel at a time of renewed Byzantine attack on Sicily. He was born in Tunisia but lived in Egypt, where he married; he possessed a house in Palermo as well. Shipwreck threw him naked and penniless on the shores of North Africa. Fortunately he found a Jew in Tripoli who owed him some money, with which he bought new clothes and set out for his house in Palermo, only to find that a neighbour had pulled it down. He complained that he did not have the funds to take this man before the law-courts. All the same, he was able to send ten pounds of silk to Egypt as well as a handful of gold coins. He was willing to run the gauntlet of Byzantine navies; he wanted to go back to Egypt to collect his wife and son and bring them to Palermo, but he wondered whether she would agree to this, or whether he might have to divorce her instead. It was customary for travelling merchants to make out a conditional bill of divorce in case they died without witnesses and their wives were left in limbo, prevented by Jewish law from remarrying. This divorce could, if she wished, be put into effect now, but Joseph protested that he did love his wife and had written the bill of divorce only out of fear of God and the fate that might await him overseas. He plaintively continued: