Download PDF | Studies on the Levantine Trade in the Middle Ages-Variorum Reprints (1978).
386 Pages
PREFACE
Scholars specialising in medieval history and general readers interested in the history of the trade of the Levant still have recourse to the work of W. Heyd, first published almost exactly one hundred years ago in 1879, then in an enlarged edition, translated into French by F. Raynaud, in 1885/6.
This book is based on the texts of commercial treaties, travelogues, some medieval Merchant Guides and similar sources. However, the author did not have the chance of working in the rich archives of the Mediterranean countries, and he could only elaborate on notes provided by G. M. Thomas and other scholars who were familiar with them. Even the Diaries of Marino Sanuto, a true treasure of historical information, were not fully available as only eleven volumes had been published by the time Heyd handed over his revised text to Raynaud. But the fact that he had no access to the archives in Italy, Southern France or Catalonia was not the only handicap he suffered from in his scholarly enterprise; as important perhaps was his approach to the subject.
For he viewed the Levantine trade as a phase in the relations between East and West during the Middle Ages, and neglected, mainly due to lack of information, its purely economic aspects. Furthermore, for Heyd, as for many scholars after him, the Levantine trade and the expansion of the Italians, the Catalans and other Southern European nations in the later Middle Ages was a phenomenon belonging to European history. What they did not appreciate was that this expansion would have been impossible without changes in the social and economic life of the countries of the Near East, and that its history cannot be traced without taking that background into account.
Nevertheless it cannot be disputed that Heyd, who was certainly an unusually gifted historian, produced a work that stands out as an admirable achievement of modern scholarship, and which will be of value for many generations to come. There remains, of course, scope for much additional research and many of the pages of the history of the trade of the Levant will in time be rewritten.
For, since the end of the nineteenth century, a great quantity of documents hidden in the archives of Italy, Southern France, Yugoslavia and Catalonia have been brought to light and made accessible. Some of these, whose existence was virtually unknown at the time when Heyd worked, such as those of the ‘‘Merchant of Prato”, have proved to be unbelievably rich stores of information. A wealth of accounts, commercial letters, bills of freight, price lists etc. referring to the activities of those trading with the Levant have been discovered. Thanks to the untiring endeavours of the late Federigo Melis, the examination of the rich archives of Prato has begun, while even before that, the great American scholar F. C. Lane had launched an exploration of the records in the Venetian archives. The common feature of the new research into these documents is that an attempt is being made at an economic evaluation of the Levantine trade, in particular of its impact on the economic life of the Mediterranean world.
The papers collected in the present volume are essays written in preparation for a new History of the Levantine Trade. They are based on materials gathered during many years of research in the archives of Venice, Genoa, Prato, Ancona and Palermo and other Sicilian towns, and deal with some of the fundamental problems of this trade, such as, for instance, the crucial question of measures of weight and the price curves of the articles traded by the Levantine merchants as seen against the background of the general movement of prices in the Near East. In addition to the documents from Italy, I have made use of data from Arabic sources, and have attempted to treat the European expansion in the later Middle Ages as a phenomenon also belonging to Oriental history and to sketch its course from that point of view. However, whereas Heyd’s work ranges over the whole of Western Asia, the papers here deal only with the Arabic Near East in the period subsequent to the Crusades.
The index at the end of the volume makes no claim to be exhaustive, and in particular rarely contains the names found in the notes, but within these limitations it includes all those that are relevant to the subjects dealt with.
E. ASHTOR
Venice October 1977
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