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.
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 travelled 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:
And, oh God, oh God, my Lord, the little boy! Concern yourself with him in accordance with your religious observance, which is so well known to me. When he becomes stronger, let him pass time with a teacher.19
The Genizah documents are rich in information about shipping. Most shipowners were Muslim. It was a good idea to board early and to keep a close eye on one’s cargo before the vessel sailed; it was customary to board a day before sailing, and to spend the night before departure immersed in prayer and writing last-minute letters and instructions. Of course, timetables were inconceivable, and ships might be forced to stay in harbour as a result of storms, news of pirates or even government interference, as when a ship in the port of Palermo which was about to leave for Spain at the end of the sailing season was seized by the government, and all the passengers were stranded for the entire winter. One complained that he was stuck in Palermo ‘with my hands and feet cut off’ – not to be understood literally. The length of a voyage was also unpredictable; in 1062 a ship travelled from Alexandria to Mazara in seventeen days, but another letter describes a good week spent hopping from point to point as a merchant named Perahya Yiju tried to sail from Palermo to Messina (which he deeply disliked and found filthy). A small vessel took over two months to reach Almería from Alexandria; another ship took fifty days to sail as far as Palermo, but thirteen days was also possible.20 Passengers carried their own bedding, cutlery and crockery, and sometimes slept on top of their cargo, which, if it consisted of flax, may not have been too uncomfortable; there were no cabins, and the voyage was spent on deck. Little information is provided in the letters about food, which was probably very simple.21 Goitein’s impression was that shipwrecks were uncommon – they have been seized on by historians because descriptions of them are inevitably graphic. Ships did arrive and the people of the Genizah were not scared of the sea. It was probably no more dangerous than travelling by land. Captains tried to stay in sight of land when navigating the North African coast, and there were watchtowers that monitored the movement of ships, apparently for their own good and not simply to control customs dues. Messages were sent back to Alexandria confirming shipping movements, and businessmen seized on the news that their shipments were properly under way.22
There is plentiful evidence for the movement of books and scholars, in the nature of the evidence Jewish ones, revealing how the trade routes carried ideas as well as flax. Around 1007, a query about a point of religion was sent from Morocco to Baghdad with Muslim merchants travelling eastwards by camel caravan.23 What was possible for Jews was also very easy for Muslims, and texts of works of Greek medicine and philosophy filtered through to southern Spain across the wide expanse of the Mediterranean. It is true that no one understood the medical text of Dioskorides when it reached tenth-century Córdoba, though the caliph’s physician, the Jew Hasday ibn Shaprut, is said to have worked with a Greek monk, and together they produced a version in Arabic. Some degree of economic, cultural and religious unity had been achieved along the line linking Spain to Egypt and Syria. The lands of Islam, despite the sectarian division between Shi’ite and Sunni and the political divisions between Umayyads, Fatimids and Abbasids, interacted in trade and culture. This was aided by the constant movement of Muslim pilgrims across the Mediterranean on their way to Mecca, just as much as by the activities of merchants of several faiths. Those who were largely left out were the inhabitants of Christian western Europe. In the tenth and eleventh centuries the Latin merchants of Italy and Provence still ventured cautiously into these waters. Only a small number of Christian cities sent their ships into Muslim seas, knowing that the secret of success was collaboration with the Muslim enemy. One of these cities was Venice, whose early history has been examined already. Another was the no less remarkable port of Amalfi, in its improbable position clinging to the mountains of the Sorrentine peninsula.
Amalfi is one of the great mysteries of Mediterranean history. If any town to the south of Rome were to emerge as a great Italian trading centre, it would surely be the teeming city of Naples, with its linen industry, its access to the interior and its sheer physical size; moreover, Naples had a continuous trading history, having suffered recession but not collapse during the sixth and seventh centuries. And yet during the centuries of Amalfitan ascendancy, roughly between 850 and 1100, Amalfi surpassed Naples as a centre of international trade, even though it was a town without any past history, growing up around a watchtower in the sixth and seventh centuries.24 With a single main street winding upwards, and tiny alleyways that duck under and through its buildings, Amalfi seems an unpromising rival to Venice.25 It was almost impossible to catch a wind in the morning, and this must have constrained navigation quite significantly.26 This has led some historians to speak of the ‘myth of Amalfi’, and to reject the consistent description of Amalfi by Christian, Jewish and in particular Muslim writers as the great entrepôt of the West in the tenth and eleventh centuries. An Italian historian has portrayed Amalfi as a city ‘without merchants’: in this view, the Amalfitans cultivated their vineyards and gardens on the rocky slopes, and saw trading just as a way of gaining some additional income.27 Yet building ships capable of reaching other continents was an expensive business, and created the momentum for commercial expansion.
Tiny Amalfi is only part of the story. The label ‘Amalfitan’ was really a brand name, applied generically to a mass of merchants and sailors from all over southern Italy, especially the inhabitants of a host of tiny towns that clung to the vertices of the Sorrentine peninsula. Hanging above Amalfi, without ports of their own, Ravello and Scala sent their own merchants across the sea in ships of Amalfi; Atrani is five minutes’ walk from Amalfi, from which it is separated by an outcrop; Maiori and Minori lie on the short coastal route to Salerno; Cetara became the base of a fishing fleet. In short, the whole southern shore of the Sorrentine peninsula, from Positano to the great monastery of the Santissima Trinità at La Cava, founded in 1025, was ‘Amalfi’. The analogy with Venice in its marshes is closer than may at first appear. Venice had originated as a congeries of little communities, separated by sea water rather than by steep mountains and sheer precipices, all of which conferred a sense of impregnability. Both communities believed themselves to have originated as sanctuaries for refugees from the barbarian invasions. Amalfi, under its dukes, who like the doge very loosely recognized remote Byzantine authority, formed a scattered, fragmented city. In an age of Saracen raids from North Africa, this dispersal gave it similar strength to the dispersal of the Venetians across the lagoons.
The first signs that the Amalfitans were able to launch a navy can be found as early as 812, when, along with sailors from Gaeta, another town that became active in Mediterranean trade, they were summoned by the Byzantine governor of Sicily to resist Muslim incursions that reached as far as the offshore islands of Ischia and Ponza. The danger grew as Muslim armies invaded Sicily, and as Muslim navies impudently raided as far as Rome, sacking both St Peter’s Basilica and St Paul’s-without-the-Walls; three years later a south Italian fleet managed with difficulty to defeat the enemy in a naval battle off Ostia, and for centuries this event was seen as the salvation of Rome – it was commemorated in Raphael’s frescoes in the Vatican palace, for his patron, Leo X, shared his name with the pope at the time of the victory, Leo IV.28 The pope tried to win Amalfi to his side, and granted it free access to the ports of Rome. But what use, its merchants must have asked themselves, was trade with Rome when they needed first of all to penetrate to Sicily, Tunisia and beyond in search of the luxury goods the papal court in Rome still craved? So the Amalfitans and Gaetans made a deal with the Muslims, despite papal threats of excommunication, and this brought material if not spiritual salvation. By 906 the consul of Gaeta possessed gold, silver and bronze coins, jewels, silk and marble fittings for a church, as well as land and animals, all described in his will.29 The Amalfitans also supplied the great mother-abbey of the Benedictine order at Montecassino in the south Italian interior, acting as its agents as far away as Jerusalem. They were the patrons of a Benedictine monastery situated amid the holy convents of Mount Athos, at a time when the Greek and Latin churches retained some semblance of amity.
Distant Constantinople was happy to issue grandiloquent letters conferring titles such as protospatarius (notionally, the title of a military commander) on the duke and leading citizens of Amalfi.30 However, there was one family, the Pantaleoni, who gained the emperor’s ear. During the eleventh century one of the Pantaleoni brought magnificent sets of bronze doors to the abbey of Montecassino, Amalfi Cathedral and St Paul’s-without-the-Walls.31 These were only the most magnificent of the many luxury items the Pantaleoni brought from the East. The Amalfitans wanted bases on Byzantine soil from which they could trade, and possessed wharves and warehouses in Constantinople during the tenth century.32 Across the Adriatic, they, along with the Venetians, were the main inhabitants of the mightily fortified Byzantine stronghold of Dyrrhachion.33 Both Venetian and Amalfitan traders were keen to take advantage of the great road that ran from Dyrrhachion through Thessalonika to Constantinople.
Amalfi left a lasting imprint further east, in Fatimid territory. Men of Amalfi established a hospice in Jerusalem, a city which offered little commercial advantage beyond the trade in increasingly improbable relics. But, as agents of the abbey of Montecassino, they made it possible for the Benedictine monks to provide care for the pilgrims who in growing numbers set out from Europe – often by way of the ports of southern Italy – for the Holy Land. From its small beginnings this hospice developed into the Hospitaller Order of St John of Jerusalem and its fighting monks later defended Rhodes and Malta from the Turks. A continuous line stretches from the eleventh century to the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, now based in Rome.34 A legend reports that Amalfitans were within Jerusalem when it was besieged by the armies of the First Crusade in 1099. Ordered by the Muslims to throw stones at the crusading rabble, they were forced to comply; miraculously, the stones were transformed in mid-air into bread rolls, and fed the famished Christian army. The truth was, of course, that the Amalfitans flourished when they avoided taking sides in conflicts between Christians and Muslims.
In the tenth century an Amalfitan colony existed in Fustat; in 996 its members were accused of setting fire to the shipyards of the Fatimid caliphs, and up to 160 Italian merchants were killed in the riot that followed.35 Living in Fustat, the Amalfitans struck up relations with Jewish merchants, and a place called ‘Malf’ appears now and again in the Genizah letters. Genizah merchants travelled to Amalfi to sell pepper. The link with the Fatimids, the pogrom notwithstanding, made the fortune of the Amalfitans.36 They were able to mint a gold currency created out of the melted-down profits of their trade in Africa.
Recovery was under way in the West, producing profits for those like the Amalfitans who were willing to do a deal with the Muslim enemy. Two other Italian cities, Genoa and Pisa, were, however, beginning to demonstrate that a more aggressive policy paid even higher dividends.