Eastern Trade and the Mediterranean in the Middle Ages

Pegolotti’s Ayas-Tabriz Itinerary and its Commercial Context

Thomas Sinclair

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• Print ISBN:
  9781032083407
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000752670
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

At the end of the High Middle Ages in Europe, with buying power and economic sophistication at a high, an itinerary detailing the toll stations along a commercial artery carrying eastern goods (from China, India and Iran) towards Europe was compiled, and later incorporated in the well-known trading manual of the Florentine bank official Pegolotti; Pegolotti was twice stationed in the city of Famagusta in Cyprus, which lay opposite the city of Ayas where the land route ended. The Il-Khanid capital, Tabriz in Iran, attracting expensive merchandise such as spices and silk from a variety of origins, was the road's starting-point.

To demonstrate the importance of the route in its own time, parallel and contemporary routes in the Black Sea and the Levant are traced and the effect of trade on their cities noted. To compare the Ayas itinerary (1250s to 1330s) with previous periods the networks of commercial avenues in the previous period (1100-1250) and the subsequent one (1340s to 1500) are reconstructed. In each period the connection of east-west trade with the main movements of the European economy are fully drawn out, and the effects on the building history of the three main Italian cities concerned (Venice, Genoa and Florence) are sketched.

Attention then turns to the Pegolotti itinerary itself. The individual toll stations are identified employing a variety of means, such as names taken from the Roman itineraries (Peutinger Table and Antonine Itinerary) and archaeological data; this allows the course of the track to be followed through diverse topography to the city of Sivas, then across plains and through passes to Erzurum and finally to Tabriz. A picture is drawn of the urban history of each major city, including Sivas, Erzurum and Tabriz itself, and of the other towns along the route.

Part A

Introduction

1 The documents and the routes

1. Date and significance of the route

The Pratica Della Mercatura of Francesco Balducci Pegolotti is a handbook for merchants which appears to have been compiled at the end of the fourth decade of the fourteenth century ad (perhaps over the years 1336–40). It includes a well-known itinerary from Ayas in the Armenian kingdom of Cilicia to the great commercial city of Tabriz in Iran; this crosses the Taurus northwards to arrive at Sivas, then turns eastwards to Erzincan and Erzurum before turning again southeast to Khoy and Tabriz. The kingdom of Cilicia, during the period (the 20 years up to and including 1335) at some point in which the itinerary was composed, although militarily weak and about to enter the period of its steepest decline in terms of political power, nevertheless enjoyed three-quarters of a century of prosperity, ending around 1335, owing precisely to the use of the commercial route we are about to trace.

Pegolotti was the agent in Cyprus of the Florentine banking operation the house of Bardi, which was responsible, among other things, for four chapels in the church of Santa Croce in Florence. Among these was the Bardi chapel (built by 1316), whose walls carry various cycles painted by Giotto, probably during the years 1310–16.¹ The Bardi were a holding company, not in fact confined to purely banking operations, with agents in such commercial centres as London and Antwerp as well as ones in the Mediterranean. In Florence, the capital of the European banking industry, they were the biggest of the banks, 50 per cent bigger than the nearest, that of the Peruzzi. The Bardi bank, most of whose partners were members of the one family, was a leading creditor of the city-republic of Florence, and the family was regularly represented in the city’s legislative and judicial institutions over the first four decades of the fourteenth century.²

The period of compilation of Pegolotti’s handbook, we argue later, perhaps started with his return from a stay of duty in Cyprus which seems to have included the month of January 1336.³ But the period of compilation of the handbook as a whole is likely to have started after the end of the period over which the information specifically on the route was gathered. In the text itself, reference is made to Abu Sa‘id (AD 1316–35) as the Il-Khan reigning over the territory entered as soon as one left the kingdom of Cilicia. Abu Sa‘id’s reign is the likely period during which information on the toll stations was gathered and at some point in which the itinerary was composed. In any case this period cannot go much beyond 1335, for the viability of the route as a whole was shattered a few years afterwards by the factional strife within the Il-Khanid empire.⁴

Pegolotti’s route is of the utmost historical significance. It represents a Golden Age in east–west trade, when demand was at its highest in the west and commercial exchange at its most intense. Within the period (mid-1250s to the Mamluk acquisition of Ayas in 1337) when the Ayas–Sivas–Tabriz line as a whole was in use, the line forms part of a relatively stable configuration of intercontinental trade flows along given routes. Apart from the Ayas–Tabriz line itself, these routes included the Inner Asian tracks, to be described later, between the northerly Black Sea ports and China, and the Alexandria–Red Sea line. But this relatively stable pattern of routes was both preceded by an equivalent but different network in the previous period and followed by yet another in the subsequent period. It thus forms the intermediate link in a chain of three; moreover, as the period of most intense trade, it constitutes a kind of peak between the preceding and following.

The first of these periods could be described as a fairly stable state representing a period of great prosperity in medieval and late medieval Europe. It developed in the late tenth and eleventh centuries ad, and was in full swing during the twelfth century and the early and mid-thirteenth century. During this period, merchants travelled along two different axes. Of these the first was the sheaf of routes from the Persian Gulf, ultimately India, and Baghdad to Aleppo and thence by sea to the Italian cities and others in the western Mediterranean (southern France, Spain, Sicily). In this first bundle of routes there figured routes through Mosul, Mardin and Ruha/Urfa, others across the Syrian desert and others, somewhat longer and more roundabout, attracted by “cross-routes” taking off northwestwards towards cities on the second and more northerly axis such as Kayseri and Sivas. The second axis, on which full-scale activity perhaps started somewhat later than on the first, came from Iran through the Rum Seljuk sultanate via Erzurum, Sivas, Konya and Kayseri and the port of Antalya, from which again goods were shipped to the western Mediterranean. The first of these axes was finally shattered by the Mongol pillage of Baghdad (1258) and destruction of Aleppo (1260). The second, or rather its westerly portion, that between Antalya and Sivas, fell out of use as a principal carrier of international trade by virtue simply of the Ayas–Tabriz route, a product largely of Mongol policy. We shall describe the configuration of trade flows in the period following that of the Ayas–Tabriz itinerary, i.e. starting in the late 1330s and early to mid-1340s, after elucidating some aspects of Pegolotti’s route and certain points of historical interest in connection with it.

Ayas’s activity as a port, first attested in 1255, started essentially because hostilities between Mamluk and Mongol forces in the basin of the river Euphrates (‘Ayntab/Gaziantep, Bir/Birecik and other cities) precluded any large-scale movement of commercial traffic between Baghdad, Upper Mesopotamian cities such as Amid and Mardin, and Aleppo. There followed the Mongol attack on Baghdad in 1258 and the catastrophic devastation of Aleppo in 1260; the latter in particular strengthened the need for the Ayas–Sivas–Tabriz route.⁵ Even if the grim and merciless warfare in Upper Mesopotamia were to cease, without Aleppo, Upper Mesopotamia (Ruha, Amid, Mardin, etc.) could not function as a trading corridor between Baghdad and the Persian Gulf on the one hand and the north Syrian ports, ultimately the Italian and southern French merchant cities, on the other. Antioch and the port of St. Siméon on the Syrian coast were no longer relevant as outlets to the west, and the same was true of other ports, mostly lying further south, on the Syrian coast.⁶ Although our first news of Ayas as a port seems to date to 1255, the first points at which the passage of goods for serious commercial purposes fall first in 1257, then in 1259 and 1261.⁷ By the time of Marco Polo’s visit in 1271, activity was already in full swing. The route described by Pegolotti may in fact have been taken by Marco Polo as far as Sivas and Aqshahr/Akşehir.⁸

The Mamluk/Il–Khanid border warfare was, it is true, one of the factors occasioning the development of the Ayas–Sivas–Erzurum route, but by the beginning of Abu Sa‘id’s reign (1316) the hostilities with the Mamluk sultanate had already ceased. On the other hand, the past hostilities and other factors, to be enumerated shortly, are an adequate explanation for the maintenance of the route along the same line during the period when the information on Pegolotti’s route was gathered. Political conditions could not be guaranteed in advance; facilities such as bridges, forts, toll stations, accommodation (in whatever form) and other services to travellers could not suddenly be transferred from one route to another, in whole or in part; Aleppo would have had to be reconstructed to the extent of being commercially functional. The great northern trading cities (Sivas, Erzincan, Erzurum) offered both links with other emporia (Sinop, Trebizond, cities in Georgia) and opportunities for exchange not available on the southerly route. Changes in the trade patterns supporting the northerly cities required time. These northern cities were also in the districts belonging to the province of Rum in the Il-Khanid empire, a province administered by powerful and increasingly independent governors: there was every reason to keep trade within them rather than allowing it to take a more southerly route through cities many of which were not controlled by the Il-Khanid empire at all (‘Ayntab, Ruha, etc.) or else were in the hands of Il-Khanid vassals (Amid, Hisn Kayfa, Bitlis, etc.).

But there is a more specific reason for the maintenance during Abu Sa‘id’s reign of the line established in the 1250s and 1260s. In 1315, Mamluk forces, far from evacuating Upper Mesopotamia and so leaving the more direct way between Aleppo and Tabriz clear for the resumption of commercial movement thereon, had pushed further north and taken Malatya.⁹ Given a passage of the Taurus via Geben, the most direct way to Erzincan was to turn east at Göksün and take a well-established line, on which a string of caravansarays already existed, to Malatya; this was the line, too, of an important Roman road. From Malatya another Roman road could b...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half-Title
• Series
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• List of Illustrations
• Author’s preface
• Markings, transliteration and symbols
• Part A Introduction
• Part B THE Ayas-Tabriz Itinerary
• Part C Conclusions
• Appendix I: Ottoman routes of the sixteenth to eighteenth centuries in the Sivas–Erzurum sector
• Appendix II: Coins
• Bibliography
• Maps
• Index