Page 95 - Encyclopedia Of World History Vol V

1872 berkshire encyclopedia of world history

and getting as far west as Mediterranean world had long
Provence and Catalonia. Greek derived its essential vitality. It
culture was effectively estab- remained a world of cities,
lished along the Black Sea and especially Italy and the eastern
Anatolian littoral, western Mediterranean, for which mari-
Sicily, and along the south- time activity remained as
western Italian littoral. The Grand Canal in Venice in the critical as ever. Christian and
From the middle of the third 1990s, at one time the major port Muslim pilgrimage to Jerusa-
century BCE, the center of polit- for the Mediterranean trade. lem and Mecca was now an
ical gravity in the Mediter- additional feature of seaborne
ranean shifted gradually from traffic. Despite intermittent con-
the Levant to central Italy. At the beginning of the first flict between Muslim and Christian powers, Christian,
millennium CE, Roman legions had already conquered Jewish, and Muslim merchants could nearly always be
the entire Mediterranean world, making it their own sea found plying their trade in most Mediterranean port
(mare nostrum).The empire did not function as a coher- cities.Along the Red Sea and Indian Ocean, the Mediter-
ent economic system, but Roman dominion made ranean would also remain a vital channel for communi-
changes that were beneficial across the board: piracy was cations across the Islamic world system.
contained, merchants operated under one legal system,
and the Romans established a fully monetarized econ- The Rise of
omy. Marine archaeologists suggest that the relatively City-States
large number of discovered shipwrecks that date from The eleventh century witnessed the ascendancy of the
100 BCE to 300 CE point to trading activity on a scale Italian city-states, especially Venice and Genoa, which led
that would not be seen again until the late Middle Ages. the gradual revival of large-scale seaborne trade. Capi-
Ships of between 250 and 400 tons were common- talizing on the turmoil inflicted upon the Muslim and
place, with many servicing the city of Rome’s voracious Byzantine worlds by the Crusades (1096–1291),Venice
appetite for grain. Much of that grain supply was organ- and Genoa secured trading privileges and colonies that
ized and paid for by the state, otherwise Rome’s domes- provided a platform for Mediterranean trade hegemony.
tic and interstate trade was the preserve of private Their highly maneuverable long galleys and heavy cargo-
interests. Tellingly, the empire’s wealthiest and most carrying vessels gave them another advantage. More
vibrant cities and territories were located on, or near, the importantly, the Genoese and Venetian states played a sig-
Mediterranean coastline. nificant role in organizing maritime activities, regulating
For late antiquity and the early Middle Ages, the evi- practices, and orchestrating responses to challenges. In
dence for Mediterranean trade is patchy and inconclusive. the fourteenth century, for example, they oversaw the
Despite the rapid accumulation of new archaeological introduction of a range of cheaper, yet more efficient, gal-
data, scholars remain divided over the degree to which leys and cargo-carrying round ships that counteracted a
the Mediterranean world experienced a prolonged eco- cost crisis and effectively stimulated greater maritime
nomic depression. Certainly, large-scale trade continued activity. Moreover, the Italians developed ever more
through to the mid–sixth century and would not recover sophisticated means for financing and sustaining ongo-
until the tenth. However, it also appears that neither the ing commercial operations; by the fifteenth century large-
fragmentation of the Roman empire, the Arab conquests, scale commercial operations were supported by
the revival of piracy, or plague greatly disrupted the companies and banking institutions (e.g., the Medici
rhythms of localized trading activity, from which the family). Until the end of the fifteenth century,Venice and