Untitled - UTSC Humanities Research Projects server - University of ...

Mediterraneans 73
lands in the countryside. If the commercial revolution produced
a middle class, it was more properly the skilled artisans who
were the rank and file of the guilds; but even the guilds were
often dominated by the patrician families. Thus, rather than
trying to apply a Marxist framework to the effects of trade on
the society of Mediterranean western Europe, it is more helpful
to emphasize the very distinctive forms of social structure that
emerged in the Italian city-states, structures that fit uneasily
into any preconceived models. All the more so, indeed, when
one turns to Barcelona, whose trading elite seems to have been
much more town-based, much less rooted in an out-of-town
petty aristocracy, than was the case in Italy. This, in any case,
was a capital city for rulers who came to dominate much of the
western Mediterranean in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries,
the seat, as well, of a substantial Jewish community which,
contrary to the easy stereotype, had no special interest in overseas
trade or in large-scale moneylending. And finally there is
Venice, whose patriciate was once again not significantly
wedded to the land (apart from urban property) until the fifteenth
century, and whose plebs was apparently so convinced of
the manifold economic benefits of good government by aristocrats
that the city largely avoided the social tensions rampant
elsewhere in northern Italy.
A significant characteristic of the merchants who dominated
Mediterranean trade was that, although Christian in the main
(there were some Jewish merchants active in Provence and
Catalonia, but very few in Italy), the merchants were riven
apart by disputes between cities, trading companies, and family
loyalties; rivalry between clans and political factions, notably
Guelfs and Ghibellines, was one of the less savoury exports
from the Italian cities, other than Venice. On the ground, in
places such as Tunis and Alexandria, even this did not prevent a
remarkable degree of cooperation between, say Pisans and
Genoese when it seemed advantageous for profit, or because
of personal ties that transcended the rivalries. Yet the city
governments which claimed the right to protect the merchants
were jealous of others who appeared to have gained better
trading privileges in overseas ports, while merchants themselves
could occasionally solve the problem of the appearance