Mediterranean Sea Trade

10 Key excerpts on "Mediterranean Sea Trade"

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  European Regions and Boundaries

  A Conceptual History

  • Diana Mishkova, Balázs Trencsényi, Diana Mishkova, Balázs Trencsényi(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Berghahn Books

    (Publisher)

  It is characteristic that although the term “Mediterranean Sea” ( mare mediterraneum ) was introduced as early as the mid-third century BC and attested in the sixth century, it would not be imposed as a universal designative term before the nineteenth century. At the beginning of the seventeenth century, members of the London Trinity House, the authority responsible for providing navigational information and shipping aid, had not designated a common name for the Mediterranean (Matar 2013), while in the second half of the eighteenth century, Comte de Buffon in his Natural History used the term “mediterranean” in adjective form to enumerate “toutes les mers méditeranées” (Ruel 1991, 7). The Mediterranean 81 Ancient geographers seem to support the argument of those scholars who insist on the absence of any regional conceptualization of the Mediterranean in antiquity. In the ancient cosmologic perception of the world that promoted the division of the earth into climata, the Mediterranean was not considered a distinct region, but was intersected by different zones. This perception traverses the Middle Ages and is apparent in the fourteenth century, in Ibn Khaldūn’s famous classification of the universe along latitudinal climatic zones (Shavit 1988, 99). At the opposite pole of cosmologic geographical thought, however, a prac-tical topographical knowledge of the Mediterranean was developed as result of the centuries-long practice of long-distance trade and shipping (Horden and Purcell 2000, 29–30). This found its expression in the literary genre of periplous (circumnavigation)—a listing of ports and other landmarks that a ship could expect during the navigation of the coast ( Johnson 2012, 1–3)— which in the Middle Ages developed into the cartographic genre of portolan that remained in use until the end of the seventeenth century (Campbell 1987; Tolias 1999).

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  The Sea in the Middle

  The Mediterranean World, 650–1650

  • Thomas E Burman, Brian A. Catlos, Mark D. Meyerson(Authors)
  • 2022(Publication Date)
  • University of California Press

    (Publisher)

  Much of this move- ment was driven by trade, as well as the will to conquer, but religion and intellectual impulses spurred the circu- lation of pilgrims and missionaries. With either Jerusa- lem or the Holy Cities of Arabia imagined as the center of this ever-broadening world, the Mediterranean remained both conceptually and practically the crossroads of Africa, Asia, and Europe. Routes and Kingdoms The notion that European civilization somehow uniquely embodies curiosity and the enterprise of exploration is a modern Anglo-European myth. During the caliphal period intrepid (mostly Muslim) travelers not only criss- crossed the Dar al-Islam and Mediterranean shores but struck deep into Africa and Central and East Asia and fanned out across the Indian Ocean to Southeast Asia. A handful journeyed to Latin Europe, but this was an inhos- pitable land, with little to offer them, given that Latin and Jewish traders came south with northern goods. Muslim scholars relied on the worldview of Ptolemy of Bologna Avignon Florence Milan Naples Bijaya Ceuta Seville Tangiers Tudela Zara Valencia Granada Montpellier Tunis Marrakesh Lisbon Barcelona Toledo Zaragoza Rome Thessaloniki Crete AEGEAN SEA M E D I T E R R A N E A N S E A A L P S PYRENEES S A H A R A B A L K A N S A D R I A T I C S E A Paris Fez Genoa Venice Palermo Sijilmassa France Granada Hafsids Kingdom of Mallorca Kingdom of Sicily Serbia Papal States Bulghar K. of Naples Crown of Aragon Provence Navarre Hungary Castile-le ó n Mallorca Malta Sardinia Kingdoms/ Counties etc. Regions Peoples, Dynasties, etc. Battles AQUITAINE Arabia Franks Ifriqiya al-Maghrib P o r t u g a l BYZANTINE H O L Y R O M A N E M P I R E (Venetian) (Venetian) (Venetian) (Venetian) (Venetian) (Venetian) M a r i n i d s MAP 6.2 The Mediterranean, ca. 1300.

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  Human Mobility and Technological Transfer in the Prehistoric Mediterranean

  • Evangelia Kiriatzi, Carl Knappett(Authors)
  • 2016(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  The answers to this first question should prove of some interest to Mediterranean archaeologists and historians, but also advance the goals of an explicitly comparative ‘thalassology’ that sets out to explore the roles of seas in general as effective conveyors of people and culture (on a thalas- sology of the ancient Mediterranean, see Horden and Purcell 2006). With some working ideas as to why the Mediterranean is so productive in this regard established, this chapter moves on to investigate the growth of tech- nologies of mobility over time in the Mediterranean, from the Pleistocene My warmest thanks to Evangelia Kiriatzi and Carl Knappett for the invitation to participate in an exceptionally stimulating workshop in Athens, and for their patience thereafter. 19 The Transmitting Sea 19 to the Iron Age, both those with a direct impact on movement (primarily shipping) and some of those less directly but still intimately implicated in mobility and transmission. Finally, this chapter advocates a demographic perspective on such questions, at a pan-Mediterranean level, but also a microcosmic scale, and with special regard for the typically modest, indeed often tiny, groups, highly selectively sub-sampled from their parent popula- tions, that undertook much of the contact and exchange that drew the early Mediterranean world together and brought it into being. Mediterranean Advantages Several elements in fact combine to make the Mediterranean an unusu- ally favourable theatre for interaction and transmission, as well as their archaeological analysis.

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  Trade and Money

  The Ottoman Economy in the Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries

  • Elena Frangakis-Syrett(Author)
  • 2010(Publication Date)
  • Gorgias Press

    (Publisher)

  In essence, it included all maritime trade that was carried out within its territorial boundaries. It was distinct from, although closely related to, the external maritime trade of the Empire. The latter was carried out primarily with Europe through the Mediterranean to the west and with the Far East through the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean to the east. Due to the considerable distances involved, even when taking into account only the Mediterranean — given that the Empire covered nearly two thirds of the Mediterranean coastline — Ottoman coastal trade, by necessity, included some deep-sea navigation. This was the case for ships that crossed the Mediterranean but still remained within home waters. Thus the definition of coastal trade as internal maritime trade was the most apt for the Ottoman case. The term most used in the primary sources at the time to denote Ottoman coastal trade, particularly in the Mediterranean, was caravane maritime? In secondary literature, which is often francophone, both the terms grand and petit cabotage are used to denote longer and shorter distance coastal trade although here, too, caravane maritime is the term most used to define Ottoman coastal shipping. Given the geographical expanse of the maritime regions of the Empire, and the considerable body of water thus covered, there was bound to be a proliferation of traffic patterns and ports of call if one were to include all the Given the paucity of direct data, one way of measuring the rate of economic growth is through the trading activity of the great port-cities of the Empire with France, its most important trading partner.

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  The Western Mediterranean and the World

  400 CE to the Present

  • Teofilo F. Ruiz(Author)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Wiley-Blackwell

    (Publisher)

  Indeed, as I will note in another chapter, the thousands of protests against the sea represented only a small percentage of 28 T HE I MPERATIVES OF G EOGRAPHY AND C LIMATE crossings and stood in contrast to the many more thousands of Mediterranean crossing that did not meet with storms, bad weather, or maritime disasters. The very frequency of these reports is convincing evidence that the sea remained, certainly until the development of railroads, the fastest, most economical, and safest way to transport people and commodities from one region to another within the Middle Sea. The lively north-south commercial exchanges across the sea from the end of the Roman Empire in the West to the present are ample testimony to those many days (especially in summer months) when the sea was easily navigable. As far as we know, the western Mediterranean did not undergo the environ-mental crisis experienced in the eastern parts of the sea during the eleventh and twelfth centuries, well illustrated by Roni Ellenblum ’ s book. Strikingly, those same centuries (and the succeeding ones) witness a dramatic increase in trade in the western Mediterranean. These commercial exchanges – once described as the “ commercial revolution ” – led to enduring trade patterns after the demise of Roman power in the West. In the eleventh and twelfth centuries, Genoese and other Italian merchants from Piacenza, Lucca, and elsewhere led naval activities. Moreover, the period also witnessed the high point of the Muslim world ’ s enduring trade connections between Fustat (in Egypt), North Africa, and Sicily. Such continued activities provide a correction to my depiction of the Mediterranean as a cruel sea, though the Mediterranean surprised merchants with unexpected storms and bad weather at times. 14 C LIMATE In summer 1990, I drove from Madrid to Rome at the end of June and returned a month later following more or less the same route.

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  The Making of the Modern Mediterranean

  Views from the South

  • Judith E. Tucker(Author)
  • 2019(Publication Date)
  • University of California Press

    (Publisher)

  74 In this respect, they were much unlike the British, who, early in the sev-enteenth century, decided to name (or to agree on a name for) the sea the “Mediter-ranean Sea”; the British gave it a name because their ships and fleets had already 26 early modern “mediterranean” roamed that sea. Thus, in March 1620, Trinity House merchants declared that “The Mediterranean Sea . . . [begins] at the Strait of Gibraltar or Morocco and extends to Malaga, Alicante, the Isles of Majorca, Minorca, Zante, Candy, Cyprus, Sacnda-rowne, Tripoli and Alexandria, and is called the Levant Sea, and has ever been so known to navigators of those countries.” 75 Power over the sea empowered the nam-ing of the sea as a single unit—so writers from William Shakespeare to John Donne began to use “Mediterranean,” even if they were not fully aware of its geographic location. Only those with power could impose unity on the sea and name it, and only those with sturdy ships could make connectivities across that sea. The Arabs had neither power nor European-like ships, and, therefore, they could not furnish a uniform name or conceive of a uniform sea. Thus, travelers and geog-raphers from the Arabic-speaking lands gave many names to the sea, or, very often, no name at all. This absence of both conceptualization and naming, and the fact that Arab authors viewed the Mediterranean as a sea of separation (and feared it as a zone of Rūmī dangers), should not obscure the fact that there were constant contacts among Muslims, eastern Christians, Jews, and western Christians around the shores of that sea. Indeed, the sea (or seas) was commercially and economically important to the peoples of Barr al-ʿ Arab . There may also have been some cultural borrowings—after all, the story told by al-Tamjrūtī about the man and the sea oar was long before told about Odysseus. 76 And in the world of trade and com-merce, there was a significant jurisprudence aimed directly at the seas: fiqh al-bih .

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  Maritime Networks in the Ancient Mediterranean World

  • Justin Leidwanger, Carl Knappett(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  A DEEP HISTORY OF MEDITERRANEAN MARITIME INTERACTION? By adopting a specifically network approach to the archaeological and histor- ical evidence for seaborne communication and exchange in the Mediterranean world, this volume examines the predominant model of maritime connectivity with analytical tools that can shed light on continuity and discontinuity of mobilities across periods and areas. What long-term and interregional trajec- tories can we identify in the networks that guided movement, communication, and exchange? The Mediterranean offers an unparalleled diachronic case study for maritime network structures across millennia from before the Neolithic up to the early modern era; here our focus is squarely on the pivotal period extending from the Bronze Age into the early medieval world, though many of the themes and perspectives have much broader temporal and spatial rele- vance. The region has attracted much large-scale multi-period research, focused, however, predominantly on environmental angles (e.g., Vita-Finzi 1969; van der Leeuw 1998; Leveau et al. 1999; Grove and Rackham 2001; Butzer 2011). What is sorely needed now is the fuller integration of different social variables as active agents, which in turn bring their own challenges as scholars attempt to bridge multiple disciplines, principally archaeology, Classics, and history. Drawing together a range of experience among researchers in these allied fields, the contributions collected here advance network approaches to mar- itime connectivity and mobility in the ancient world. In particular, we aim to MARITIME NETWORKS, CONNECTIVITY, AND MOBILITY 9 promote applications of diverse network thinking as well as methodologies that investigate the motives, behaviors, and experiences of seaborne movement and exchange by proposing and testing specific models of the Mediterranean archaeological and historical record (see also Leidwanger et al. 2014).

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  The Ottoman Empire

  Myths, Realities and 'Black Holes' (Contributions in Honor of Colin Imber)

  • Eugenia Kermeli, Oktay Özel(Authors)
  • 2012(Publication Date)
  • Gorgias Press

    (Publisher)

  MEDITERRANEAN BORDERLANDS: EARLY ENGLISH MERCHANTS IN THE LEVANT Linda Darling Colin Imber's collected work reveals the wide range of his interests beyond the studies on the rise of the Ottomans for which he is best known, ranging from the Ottoman navy in the Mediterranean to women's issues, religious issues, and Islamic law. 1 In the context of the first and oldest of these interests, the current paper addresses the construction of Mediterranean contacts in conditions other than war. The Mediterranean is usually understood as a frontier between Christian and Muslim civilizations, a sort of early modern Iron Curtain. Those who live on either side of this frontier have branded each other as alien, separated by religion, culture, and language. Frontiers -whether real ones on the ground, such as oceans, rivers, mountains, and deserts, or imaginary ones, lines drawn on a map- are ways to separate us from them. They are the boundaries of our existence, the borders of our lives, the frontiers between the known and the unknown, civilization and savagery, safety and danger. Frontiers hem us in or challenge us to go beyond them, to dwell in the wilderness or to reclaim it, to make it known, to see what lies on the other side. 2 The Mediterranean, in contrast, has been throughout its history a porous boundary. Despite the polemics of hatred between the two religions and civilizations on its shores, people transgressed the boundaries between them more often than we may realize. Merchants, migrants, mercenaries, missionaries, conquerors, refugees, and slaves moved permanently or crossed repeatedly to the other side, while goods and ideas were briskly exchanged. In a frontier paradigm, these border crossings are anomalies, considered less important than warfare, propaganda, exploration, or other boundary-defining activities.

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  The Routledge Handbook of Maritime Trade around Europe 1300-1600

  Commercial Networks and Urban Autonomy

  • Wim Blockmans, Mikhail Krom, Justyna Wubs-Mrozewicz, Wim Blockmans, Mikhail Krom, Justyna Wubs-Mrozewicz(Authors)
  • 2017(Publication Date)
  • Routledge

    (Publisher)

  The Levantine trade had been dominated by patricians, but from the sixteenth century on, patricians travelled abroad less often, relying on agents to do their work in faraway ports. But maritime trade was increasingly in the hands of non-patrician merchants from the Venetian mainland and maritime domains, including Jews from Venice, its colonies and the Ottoman realms. 78 These merchants faced increasing competition from English and Dutch merchants, many of whom worked in partnership with Greeks from Venice’s colonies. 79 These shifts in shipping and trade patterns meant that the networks linking the mainland and maritime regions together passed less frequently through Venice and the markets of the Rialto: Ragusan, Greek and Armenian merchants came to the cities of the mainland to purchase wool fabrics produced there, as did merchants from Corfu, Cyprus and Crete. 80 Wool fabrics from Bergamo, Vicenza, Verona and Padua exported to southern Italy, Germany and the Balkans, but by the sixteenth century they were highly desired in Egypt and Syria. 81 Conversely, merchants from Bergamo as well as from Venice’s Greek territories formed part of the Venetian merchant community in Constantinople in the sixteenth century. 82 By the end of the sixteenth century, the majority of Venetians present in England were Greek subjects. 83 p.116 At the turn of the sixteenth century, Venice was not only among the four largest cities in Europe, it was the most prominent centre of Mediterranean trade, superseding other maritime ports in the reach of its hinterland, the size of its fleet and its control of the most extensive commercial network. It also demonstrated the greatest institutional specialization, particularly with regard to the administration of the state-owned galleys, and the most closely interwoven relationships between commerce and politics

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  Trade and Civilisation

  Economic Networks and Cultural Ties, from Prehistory to the Early Modern Era

  • Kristian Kristiansen, Thomas Lindkvist, Janken Myrdal(Authors)
  • 2018(Publication Date)
  • Cambridge University Press

    (Publisher)

  Consequently, this trend brought about an increase in long-distance Afro-Eurasian trade. The increase in long-distance trade was linked to changing conditions. For instance, technology and the organization of trade both changed. The transi- tion to the sea route has been given particular attention due to the role the Europeans came to play in maritime shipping. A geographical organization of trade meant that trade was incorporated into the progressively stronger states taking shape across Eurasia. European trade then had to either submit or to destabilize and establish vassal states, as did the aforementioned Pedro Álvares Cabral. This sketch depicts a dialectical movement, where a crisis shapes the prerequisites for a new expansion on a higher level (for regional examples connection to this theory see Bois 1984; Myrdal 2011, and in general about the role of crises, see Tainter 1987). Expanding trade and an increasingly extensive and dense network also had another effect. The focus was turned to the core areas. According to the medieval Europeans, the Holy Land and Jerusalem were the center of the world, which is evident from the medi- eval maps known as “T-maps” (Brotton 2012: 82–113). Europe was instead regarded as a periphery in the northwestern corner. The Atlantic Ocean in the west was the outer border of the world and, therefore, of no substantial interest in terms of exploration. Europe was looking to the east, with its back to the west. WHY NOT AMERICA? The transformations in the world around 1500 are often associated with the so-called discovery of America. The attempts to find a sea route from the Iberian Peninsula to India, culminating in Columbus landing on Guanahani in the Bahamas, are the reason that the year 1492 has been ascribed such signifi- cance in world history.

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