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HOUSING THE STRANGER IN THE MEDITERRANEAN WORLD
Lodging, Trade, and Travel in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages
The Greek pandocheion, Arabic fundug, and Latin fundicum (fondaco) were ubiquitous in the Mediterranean sphere for nearly two millennia. These institutions were not only hostelries for traders and travelers, but also taverns, markets, warehouses, and sites for commercial taxation and regulation. In this highly original study, Professor Constable traces the complex evolution of this family of institutions from the pandocheion in late antiquity to the appearance of the fundug throughout the Muslim Mediterranean following the rise of Islam. By the twelfth century, with the arrival of European merchants in Islamic markets, the fundug evolved into the fondaco. These merchant colonies facilitated trade and travel between Muslim and Christian regions. Before long, fondacos also appeared in southern European cities.
This study of the diffusion of this institutional family demonstrates common economic interests and cross-cultural communications across the medieval Mediterranean world, and provides a striking contribution to our understanding of this region.
OLIVIA REMIE CONSTABLE is an associate professor in the History Department at the University of Notre Dame. She is the author of Trade and Traders in Muslim Spain: The Commercial Realignment of the Iberian Peninsula 900-1500 (1994) and Medieval Iberia: Readings from Christian, Muslim, and Jewish Sources (1997).
Acknowledgments
It is a curious fact that when one turns one’s attention to something, the object of interest suddenly appears, as if out of nowhere, in all sorts of likely and unlikely places. For instance, once one has decided to purchase a house, “for sale” notices seem to pop up along every street. The same has been true of my decision to find out more about the institutions of the pandocheion, fundug, and fondaco. Once | began to look for them, these hitherto inconspicuous commercial buildings turned up everywhere: in chronicles, legal texts, pilgrim accounts, notarial contracts, diplomatic treaties, royal charters, merchant letters, geographical treatises, and other types of sources from all areas of the medieval Mediterranean world.
I rapidly came to realize that these commercial spaces for lodging, storage, and trade were ubiquitous in cities throughout the region, in both Muslim and Christian spheres. A traveler in 1300, or a few centuries before or after, would have encountered these facilities in almost every port that he or she visited. I too found them mentioned in all kinds of texts, in many languages and from many different contexts. In some cases, these references were in books that it would never have occurred to me to consult, in manuscripts from archives that I could not visit, or in languages that I did not know. Because of this, I owe many debts to colleagues, students, librarians, and numerous other friends who have provided help along the way.
This book is the result of a long process of hunting and gathering. Once people found out that I was working on this project, they began to pass along references that they had run across in their own work. I am deeply grateful for their assistance and generosity, and their names appear in footnotes throughout the book. I am likewise indebted to those who pointed me toward new questions, problems, and resources for my work. This book is the richer because of their contributions. Inevitably, however, gaps will remain in a project of this size. There will always be more pandocheions, fundugs, and fondacos waiting to be discovered in the archives and elsewhere, as well as a number that have not been cited in this text simply because they fit into broader patterns or were duplicated by other citations. More is not always better. Eventually, one must choose and buy a house, or finish writing a book.
As well as acknowledging those who helped me gather my material, many others also deserve special thanks. Among those who read the manuscript, at various stages, particular appreciation is due to Thomas Noble, David Abulafia, Michael McCormick, Teofilo Ruiz, James Powell, Giles Constable, and to my husband, Matthew Bell. I am also indebted to those people who gave guidance and advice along the way, when questions came up in their areas of expertise, and to the colleagues and students who assisted with translations from Greek, Hebrew, Turkish, and Syriac. The names of advisors and translators are cited in footnotes. I likewise received valuable comments and suggestions from those who attended papers and seminars at which I presented sections of my project, or who listened to me talk about it in more informal settings. I am particularly grateful to the School of Historical Studies at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, which provided a stimulating yet peaceful setting in which to write a first draft of the manuscript, and to the group of colleagues with whom I worked during that year.
This project was supported by funding from the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, the Medieval Institute at the University of Notre Dame, the Institute for Scholarship in the Liberal Arts at Notre Dame, and the Notre Dame History Department. I acknowledge their assistance with deep gratitude. My thanks are also due to the museums and libraries that gave permission for the reproduction of pictures (their names are noted in the credits to each illustration), and to Eliza McClennon, who drew the maps for this volume. Warm thanks are also due to Cambridge University Press, and particularly to William Davies and Mary Starkey.
Finally, my love and thanks to my husband, for his support of both me and my work. Invariably, he finds a tactful way to improve my writing and to arrange my arguments in a more logical fashion. Also to my two sons, Owen and Sam, who have lived with my “medieval hotels” for much of their lives. Now we can move on to other things.
INTRODUCTION
A culture of travel: words, institutions, and connections
In the late fifteenth century, a German pilgrim visiting Alexandria became lost in the city’s unfamiliar twisting streets. After wandering for a period, he appealed to a local Muslim for guidance, using Latin because he knew no Arabic. “Fontico Cathalano” he said, probably speaking loudly and clearly as travelers often do in a foreign land, asking to be taken to the Catalan fondaco, the hostel in which he was lodging with other European pilgrims.’ To his great relief, he was immediately conducted to the desired location since the word he used — fontico — was very similar to the Arabic term, fundugq, designating the same place. In fact, the two were cognates, and shared a long heritage going back to the classical Greek word pandocheion, an inn or hostelry.
This book traces the history of these closely related words and, more importantly, of the institutions to which they refer, from late antiquity until the eve of the early modern period in the Mediterranean world. It examines their evolution across time, space, and culture, looking at both continuities and changes. What happens to a family of institutions that endures for such a long period, in so many different places? Why does it survive, and what does this survival reveal about the thing itself and the world in which it existed? These questions can only be answered through analyzing these words and institutions within their particular cultural and chronological contexts.
This family of institutions (pandocheion, fundugq, fondaco) \ends itself particularly well to these questions because there is data from so many different periods and places in the Mediterranean world. There are very few words or institutions outside the realm of scientific and philosophical terminology that have left a more extended record of their progress across linguistic, cultural, and religious frontiers. It is relatively easy to trace the one-step adoption of many words from Greek into Arabic, or from Arabic into Latin. In the economic realm, for example, one might cite the relationship between diwan and douane/dogana; apotheke and bodega; denarius and dinar; not to mention the countless proper names for foodstuffs and commodities. However, the evolution of pandocheion, fundug, and fondaco is longer and more complex, since we can trace connections from Greek into Arabic, and then from Arabic into Latin and other western European languages over a period of many centuries.
Pandocheions, fundugs, and fondacos (in some form) were ubiquitous in the Mediterranean sphere for nearly two millennia. These protean institutions had common ties, yet they took many forms, serving not only as hostelries, but also as commercial depots, warehouses, emporia, taxstations, offices, taverns, prisons, and brothels.” A late medieval traveler in the Mediterranean sphere would have encountered fondacos in most cities around the sea — whether Venice, Ragusa, Damascus, Alexandria, Tunis, Palermo, Seville, Barcelona, Marseille, Pisa, Naples, or elsewhere. Before this, in the early medieval period, the funduq had taken root throughout the Muslim world following the rise of Islam in the seventh century. During late antiquity, there were cognate terms in Aramaic, Hebrew, and Syriac, not to mention the original Greek version. The earliest references to the Greek pandocheion date to the Athenian world of the fifth century BCE. The long-term survival of this institutional family, and its adoption and adaption over the centuries by distinct yet closely related Mediterranean societies, testifies to its ongoing utility, familiarity, and relevance.
The continuity of the fundug and its cousins in the Mediterranean world not only indicates the importance of these particular institutions, but it also speaks to the nature of their milieu. From its earliest history, the Mediterranean has been the realm of travelers — merchants, warriors, pilgrims, sailors, ambassadors, and vagabonds — moving by land and sea from one region to another. Even for periods once thought stagnant, recent work has revealed a profusion of movement and communication across and around the Mediterranean.> In this region, like anywhere else, travelers needed shelter, food, security, and other amenities to make their voyages possible. As Fernand Braudel has succinctly observed, “there would be no routes if there were no stopping places.”* Around the Mediterranean, travelers’ needs were accommodated, at least in part, by the ubiquitous presence of pandocheions, fundugs, and fondacos.
These facilities both exemplified and facilitated the existence of a coherent Mediterranean world in the period between the decline of Roman power and the rise of early modern empires. This group of closely related forms demonstrates not only the commonalities of cultural origins, circumstances, needs, and understandings in the Mediterranean sphere between the second and the sixteenth centuries, but also the evolution of new religious and political divisions, commercial rivalries, and conceptions of self and other in this period. As the institution shifted from one realm of political, religious, and linguistic dominance to another — from the pagan, Jewish, and early Christian milieu of the late Roman period, into an Islamic context, then later into the Latin Christian sphere of southern Europe — it was both a point of common understanding across cultures and mediation between them.
This family of institutions illustrates the synchronized cultural rhythms of the Mediterranean, so compellingly depicted in the work of Braudel, yet also demonstrates the importance of context and contingency in creating change. Analysis of the pandocheion, funduq, and _fondaco reveals a consistency to the late antique and medieval Mediterranean world that would largely disappear — along with this particular institutional group — in the early modern period. The longevity and ubiquity of these facilities before the sixteenth century, in contrast to their relative lack of importance after this period, is a measure of the rift between the medieval and early modern periods. Shifts in the role of these commercial spaces are evidence that the early sixteenth-century Mediterranean of Philip II and Sulayman the Magnificent was a world on the brink of change.
The geographical diffusion of the fundug and fondaco coincided closely with the shores of the Mediterranean, yet these facilities also served universal needs. A medieval traveler venturing far from the sea — to London, Novgorod, Baghdad, or Sijilmasa — would have encountered other types of accommodation, with similar functions but dissimilar names and different histories. In the terms of economic anthropology, facilities of this type are characteristic of ports of trade or gateway communities throughout the world.’ Philip Curtin has also drawn attention to the fact that specialized hostels for lodging wayfarers and merchants, and for promoting trade, can be found wherever there was long-distance travel and commerce.® Thus, the fondacos and their cousins in the Mediterranean world had contemporary parallels in the Hanseatic establishments in London and the Baltic, and later ones in the warehouses established in ports in the Caribbean and China Sea.” Yet the convergence of form and utility does not obscure regional distinctiveness. Although they conformed to a widespread pattern, fundugs, fondacos, and other members of this institutional group had their own unique family history.
It is difficult to hit a moving target, or to identify and describe a subject that constantly shifts its name and form. Even when something went by one widely recognized name, as with the late Roman pandocheion, contemporary references indicate a diversity of understandings of the term. Although this word was always applied to a place where travelers lodged, in return for money, some were simple hostels hosting a variety of respectable guests, while others doubled as taverns, brothels, gaming houses, and haunts for murderers and thieves. Some were in town centers; others were located along rural routes. Some were established by the government for lodging employees on official business; others were in private hands. Not unlike the modern word “hotel,” one can envision a spectrum of rather different facilities all going by the same name.
The problem of identity becomes more complex when one word splits into several variants, reflecting its adoption into new linguistic and cultural contexts. Sometimes, these were coeval with their original, as with Aramaic references to pundags in Palestine in the second century. If a contemporary Greek speaker had encountered one of these hostels, he would have recognized it as a pandocheion. In other instances they were sequential, either directly (as when Byzantine Syria came under Umayyad rule in the seventh century and the Arabic fundug replaced the pandocheion, or when Christian armies conquered Muslim cities in Spain and local fundugs became known as alhéndigas or fondechs), or indirectly (as with the appearance of fondacos in Italy not long after Italian merchants encountered fundugs and fondacos in Egypt and North Africa). In these sequential examples, it is often — but not always — clear that contemporary people would have acknowledged the connections between the originals and their evolved forms. Unlike medieval observers, we have the advantage of a broader view that permits us to discern the links across time and space between both contemporary and sequential versions of the institution.
In many cases, these connections are based on the terminology used to refer to particular institutions in different settings. Words are important, and tracing a spreading network of cognate terms is more than merely an exercise in philology. People use words to indicate specific things and to convey ideas. Thus, the use of a particular word — and especially the adoption and integration of a word from one language and context into another — demonstrates its utility and relevance as a referent. At the same time, the regular choice of a particular word, especially a new or imported word, indicates a contemporary function and understanding of the thing to which it refers. Throughout this study, I assume that when medieval writers used a particular word, without further explanation, they expected most of their readers to recognize what it meant, even when its meaning was multivalent.
Words matter because most of the data for this project come from written sources. Mention of pandocheions and their later cousins in anecdotes, hagiography, geographical literature, letters, chronicles, contracts, inscriptions, law codes, and other texts situates these hostels within both the everyday reality and the thought-world of their period. Wherever possible, material sources have also been employed to shed light on the history of the pandocheion, fundugq, and fondaco. Art, archeology, and the architecture of surviving buildings all add detail to the story told by written texts.
The connections created by words and language are valuable tools for comparative history. Tracing the word pandocheion and its cognates provides a rare opportunity, since it allows the comparison of institutions that were genuinely related to each other rather than merely similar. The simple observation of likeness, as between hostelries in the Baltic, the Mediterranean, and the China Sea, can only be pressed to a certain point, and rarely results in more than a somewhat vague — though often intriguing — catalogue of analogies. In contrast, the comparison of institutional cousins with ties to a common ancestor is much more fruitful. The analysis and comparison of their relationships, similarities, differences, and evolution can lead not only to a deeper understanding of the institutions themselves and their individual settings, but also to a comprehension of their broader common context, and of the process of intercultural contact and transfer in history.
Cross-cultural exchange — of both words and things — will occur wherever two groups come into contact, but it is most evident in areas where there is long-term contact or some degree of shared heritage. The more that is held in common, despite dissimilarities and even hostilities, the greater the chance of meaningful adoption. The medieval Mediterranean world provided an ideal scenario for such exchange. Communications and ongoing contact around the sea were fostered by a shared heritage of both monotheism and Greco-Roman culture. It is no accident that both the Arabic fundugq and the Latin fonticum sprang from a Greek root, and that the latter came into Latin by way of Arabic, not directly from Greek.® Both medieval institutions shared aspects inherited from their classical ancestor, but their form and function were influenced by their subsequent use, heritage, and circumstance.
It is important to consider context and agency, since words and ideas cannot move from place to place on their own. Instead, they are transferred, borrowed, and adapted by people who find them useful. For example, after western Christian merchants and other travelers encountered fundugs and fondacos in Islamic cities, and brought the idea back to their home cities, people in Europe found it worthwhile to recreate local versions. Even within one region, it is unlikely that an institution will survive over time, especially through periods of political and cultural upheaval, unless it has ongoing relevance. Thus, fundugs in the early Islamic milieu came to be somewhat different from preexisting pandocheions, yet they also preserved many similarities. People in Syria in the seventh and eighth centuries were evidently familiar with the Greek institution, and they found it sufficiently valuable to maintain and adapt it in the new Arabic and Islamic context.
What was so useful about this family of institutions, and which aspects were preserved over the centuries? The lodging of travelers was the first and most universal point of long-term continuity and utility, but even this changed over time. By the later middle ages, for example, fondacos tended to store goods rather than house people. Second, the provision of space for commerce and storage was another highly durable characteristic from the early Muslim period onward. Merchant activity became central to the fundugq, but had been less vital to the late antique pandocheion. A third common feature was the frequency of intervention by local governments in the function and administration of these facilities. Medieval rulers and governors in both southern Europe and the Islamic world rightly perceived them as serviceable and lucrative assets. They incorporated fundugs and fondacos within their fiscal policies. Hostels, commercial sites, and warehouses were often established and overseen by local administrations in order to facilitate official communications, to monitor the movement of people and goods, to collect taxes and fees, and to profit from trade. Together with linguistic ties, the common features of lodging, trade, and intervention provide vital clues for tracing connections between related institutions over time and space.
Alongside these common themes, the story of this institutional group is filled with diversity and variation. In order to tell this tale, chapters in this study are organized both chronologically and regionally. Chapter 1 addresses the complex role of the pandocheion, and its shifting identity in late antique life and imagination. In the period from the first to the seventh centuries, these inns were utilized by pagan, Jewish, and Christian travelers in the eastern Roman Empire. The word itself — pandocheion — means “accepting all comers.” References in Greek, Hebrew, Aramaic, and Syriac indicate that pandocheions provided paid lodging for all sorts of people, as well as being notorious as sites for drinking, revelry, prostitution, and crime. Although they certainly lodged merchants, they were not designed as commercial facilities; unlike their later counterparts, there was little emphasis on security or storage. Indeed, their open doors and seedy reputation may have discouraged commercial travelers.
With the arrival of Islam, in the seventh century, the pandocheion merged into the Islamic sphere as the fundug. This became a characteristic facility in Muslim cities from Syria to Spain, and served the lodging, commercial, and fiscal needs of traders, pilgrims, and rulers. Chapters 2 and 3 examine the evolution and dissemination of fundugs in the southern Mediterranean world from the Umayyad to the Ayyibid periods (seventh to thirteenth centuries). While the fundugq preserved important functional aspects of its Greek predecessor, it also evolved to fill new charitable and mercantile roles in the Islamic world. People from all walks of life stayed in fundugqs, but these hostelries increasingly catered to the needs of commercial travelers, often becoming associated with certain groups of traders and particular types of goods.
At the same time, rulers and local governors took an interest in these facilities, seeing not only their fiscal capacity as points for the control of trade and collection of taxes, but also their charitable and religious potential as sites for lodging pilgrims and poor wayfarers. These shifts are evident not only through the many references in Arabic and Judeo-Arabic texts, but also in archeological and architectural data. Meanwhile, pandocheions became less common in regions still under Byzantine rule. In the eleventh century, however, a new commercial and regulatory facility called the foundax appeared in Byzantium. This was modeled on the contemporary Arabic funduq rather than on the earlier Greek pandocheion, and it demonstrates the ongoing ability of words and institutions to be transferred back and forth across linguistic and cultural borders.
Western European merchants encountered the funduq when they began to do business in Muslim markets in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. As discussed in chapter 4, the arrival of foreign Christian traders led to the development of specialized facilities (fondacos), modeled on the fundug, to accommodate, regulate, and segregate western business in Islamic ports. These new fondacos facilitated commercial exchange, profit, and taxation, provided space for foreigners’ lodging and storage, ensured security for both Europeans and local communities, and gave foreign communities autonomy under the oversight of Muslim authorities. Although fondaco buildings were owned and maintained by local administrations, western merchants were allowed to practice their faith, follow their own customs, and even drink wine within fondaco walls. At the same time, their movement was restricted outside these buildings, and both European merchants and their goods were locked inside the fondacos at night.
Western fondacos in Muslim cities were critical elements in enabling the cross-cultural exchange that fueled the medieval commercial revolution in Europe, and their presence helps to explain why European Christians were able to operate in an Islamic context, while Muslims rarely visited Christian ports. Because of their access to fondacos, Christian traders found it both profitable and congenial to do business in Muslim markets. The system allowed western merchants in Alexandria, Damascus, Tunis, or other Islamic ports to lodge with fellow Europeans, while enjoying their own food-ways, languages, habits of hygiene, legal traditions, and religious rites. In contrast, European cities were not well adapted to providing for the needs of non-Christian traders. With few exceptions, a visiting Muslim in Mediterranean Europe would have had nowhere to stay that was acceptable both to himself and to the local population, nor any of the religious and dietary facilities necessary to make his visit comfortable.
Starting in the eleventh century, at the same time as Christian commercial growth in the Mediterranean world, Christian political and military expansion in Spain, Sicily, and the Latin east brought Islamic cities and their urban institutions (including the fumdug) under new Christian governments. Christian rulers, like their Muslim counterparts, immediately perceived the utility of fundugs and judiciously preserved elements of their fiscal and regulatory function. Chapter 5 details this process in the Iberian Peninsula through the late thirteenth century, when Ferdinand HI and Alfonso X of Castile, and their contemporary James I of Aragén, incorporated alhéndigas and fondechs within the economic administration of their newly expanded kingdoms. Chapter 6 takes up the story of this phenomenon in the central and eastern Mediterranean. Similar integration occurred in the wake of political change in Sicily and south Italy, where rulers from Robert Guiscard to Frederick II took advantage of preexisting fundugs by reforming them to fit current needs. In the Crusader states too, fondes and fondacos in Acre, Tyre, Antioch, and other cities played an important role in the commercial and fiscal administration of the realm.
In regions still under Muslim rule, fundugs for Muslim merchants continued to flourish in the later middle ages, as did fondacos for western Christians. Nevertheless, changes in trade routes, merchant interests, and state oversight of commerce, particularly under the Mamluk regime in Egypt and Syria (thirteenth to fifteenth centuries), led to the advancement of other facilities for commerce and lodging. Although fundugqs continued to be popular in the late medieval Maghrib, they gradually lost ground to rival commercial spaces — especially wakdlas — in Mamlik realms. When the new port region of Cairo, Bulag, was developed in the fifteenth century, Egyptian merchants almost universally chose to build wakélas rather than fundugs to accommodate their business activities.
Meanwhile, the burgeoning success of the fondaco system was fueled by growing numbers of European merchants seeking access to Muslim markets. Over time, this solidification of the fondaco would erode the traditional identity of the funduq. The shifting array of commercial spaces, new and old, in the late medieval Muslim Mediterranean is the subject of chapters 7 and 8.
The final chapter, chapter 9, examines the fondaco as it took root in southern Europe in the later middle ages (twelfth to fifteenth centuries). Although preexisting local institutions had been adopted in the wake of Christian military conquests in Spain, Sicily, and south Italy, in other regions of Mediterranean Europe the fondaco was imported from abroad through trade and diplomacy. This was particularly evident in cities in southern France, northern Italy, and the Dalmatian coast, where new fondacos for lodging, commerce, and storage began to appear by the twelfth century. Merchants, urban administrators, and diplomats were instrumental in introducing the word and the idea into its new European context.
In most cases, these transplants quickly shed their association with hospitality, in part because the lodging needs of traveling merchants were already accommodated by other indigenous facilities. Instead, late medieval European fondacos became more concerned with securing commodities than people, and they served as warehouses and depots. In some regions, fondacos became important government tools for the control, taxation, and distribution of staple goods, while in others they were simply private merchant storehouses. By extension, the word was sometimes used for money held in an account, or for a branch of a merchant firm. Meanwhile, the locus of merchant daily life and business activity shifted to other structures, particularly the loggia. Both the heritage and the architecture of the /oggia emphasized openness and access, as opposed to the strong walls and locked doors of the traditional fundug and fondaco. The turn to the /oggia mirrors concurrent shifts in commercial practice toward greater freedom of trade.
In only a few European cities, most notably in Venice and Valencia, was the fondaco’s role in lodging and regulating foreign traders preserved. Here, politics, trade, and geography combined to create fondacos that were almost identical to their counterparts in Muslim cities. In both cases, this may have had ramifications for later urban institutions promoting religious segregation and for enhancing the identity of certain groups in these cities as “other.” These trends are evident in the continuation of Valencia’s Muslim quarter (moreria) in the fifteenth century, and in the development of the ghetto for Venice’s Jewish community in the sixteenth century.
There was a coherency and continuity in the evolution of the pandocheion, fundug, and fondaco in the late antique and medieval periods that disappeared in the early modern era. The same was true for the Mediterranean world in which these institutions had flourished. After 1500, the discovery of sea routes to India and the New World, the rise of new commercial powers in northern Europe and the Ottoman Empire, developments in maritime and military technology, more rigid conceptions of self and “other” in terms of both politics and religion, and the early manifestations of European colonial interests all combined to de-center the Mediterranean and diminish the relevance of longstanding Mediterranean ideas and institutions. The funduq and fondaco continued to exist, and variations still survive today in southern Europe, North Africa, and the Near East. But these modern versions have lost the importance, versatility, and ubiquity that they once enjoyed in late antiquity and the middle ages.
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