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Mediterraneans 75
combination of nautical and commercial skills, whereas the
Jews could only offer the latter.
3. neighbouring mediterraneans:
the saharan mediterranean desert
The Jews are often seen as experts in the trade of a neighbouring
‘Mediterranean’ which needs consideration at this point, in
view of its close interrelationship with the Classic Mediterranean:
the Sahara Desert. A network of contacts enabled Jewish
merchants to make payments in Sijilmasa for purchases as far
away as Walata, and Walata, deep in the interior, was a transit
post in a great sandy sea with a similar entrepôt function to, say,
Majorca in the western Mediterranean. These were critical
stages, islands if you like, along the caravan trade routes that
brought gold northwards and salt and textiles southwards.
Sijilmasa was the home of the famous Jewish merchant Solomon
ben Amar, who was favoured with privileges by King
James I of Aragon, and came to live in newly conquered Majorca,
where his business deals are well reflected in the notarial
registers of the years around 1240. The Sahara was a true
Mediterranean in the sense that it brought very different cultures
into contact, and across the open spaces they brought not
merely articles of trade but ideas, notably religious ones, and
styles of architecture appropriate to the Muslim culture they
implanted on the northern edges of Black Africa. There they
established trading centres which were sometimes physically
separate from the ceremonial cities of the Black African kings,
as in Mali, whose emperor Mansa Musa went on a great trek to
Mecca in the fourteenth century, literally scattering gold on his
way. The double entities consisting of trading city and ceremonial
city were sometimes also distinguished by religion, however,
and the penetration of Islam into Black Africa was a slow
process, not helped by an occasionally disdainful attitude
among the northern visitors to their Black interlocutors. Yet
Timbuktu, with its Muslim religious elite and madrasas,
became a major centre of Muslim learning, and its libraries
still survive, dating back to the fourteenth century; here, on
the north bend of the River Niger, it was possible to tap into the
gold reserves of the lands to the south of the Sahara. In the same