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

76 Mediterraneans
way, Catalan and Genoese merchants arriving in, say, Bougie
on the Algerian coast were able to tap into the caravan routes
that crossed the Sahara and buy the gold dust that had been
brought from the Niger. In the middle of the fifteenth century
there were one or two brave attempts by Italians to penetrate
deep into the Sahara, and Antonio Malfante crossed to Timbuktu
in 1447. However, this was largely a closed ‘sea’, dominated
by the Tuareg nomads who knew how to navigate it and
live off its resources.
The contact between the Maghrib and Black Africa was not
all one-way, since slaves were brought from the south and there
was a degree of ethnic mixing in the Maghrib. Indeed, we can
see the Maghrib as a fascinating example of a territory caught
between two Mediterraneans, and well able to make use of the
resources of both, a bridge between worlds. Thus in the thirteenth
century cowrie shells from the Indian Ocean, in demand
as currency in Black Africa, passed into the Mediterranean, as
far as Marseilles, then down via Majorca into north Africa,
whence they weighed down the camels bound for the ‘Sudan’,
the land of the Blacks. These interrelationships did, however,
begin to change when the routes leading to the southern Sahara
were diverted around the outer edges of this ‘Mediterranean’,
after the Portuguese opened up the Atlantic sea routes and
began to extract gold, slaves, and forest products out of Black
Africa through their trading bases at Elmina and elsewhere.
This did not mark the end of the trans-Sahara trade, by any
means; but it marked the beginning of fundamental changes in
the nature of the relationship, political and economic, between
Black Africa and southern Europe, which no longer depended
on Berber, Jewish, Catalan, and Genoese intermediaries passing
goods to one another.
4. the mediterranean of the north
This relationship between the Classic Mediterranean and the
Saharan Mediterranean calls to mind another example of Mediterraneans
that interacted strongly in the late Middle Ages. The
eminent historian of medieval Genoa, Roberto Lopez, described
the North Sea and Baltic, taken together, as a ‘Northern
Mediterranean’, with boundaries set by Britain, Flanders,