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Mediterraneans 79
royal campaigns, under the banner of crusades, established
trading bases such as Porvoo (Birka) and brought Scandinavian
culture to a land that offered furs and amber. Intensive exchanges
with Norway also characterize this region: German
merchants brought grain to Bergen, in return for which they
were permitted to export fish; English merchants likewise, for
the intensity of Anglo-Norwegian commercial and cultural exchanges
must not be underestimated well after the Viking
period.
The hinge around which this network turned was the large
and wealthy city of Bruges, a centre of textile production and
later of high finance without equal in late medieval northern
Europe, the seat of countless warehouses catering to the needs
of Scottish, Portuguese, Florentine, Genoese, and many other
merchants. The crucial point is that Bruges was also the major
link between this Mediterranean of the North and the Classic
Mediterranean, for, as Fernand Braudel made plain in his great
work on the Mediterranean in the age of Philip II, the terminal
point of the great medieval trade routes leading up from the
Mediterranean was this Flemish city. The interaction between
the Mediterraneans of North and South was of critical importance
in the take-off of the medieval European economy, for
northern textiles conveyed by land and river to Italy were
then diffused widely through the Mediterranean by Genoese,
Venetian, Tuscan, and Catalan merchants. Once again, we can
see a process at work by which navigators began to sideline the
traditional trade routes, at first sight similar to the sidelining of
the Saharan trade routes visible during the phase of Portuguese
exploration of the Guinea coast. However, the opening of the
Atlantic sea routes past Gibraltar actually reaffirmed the ties
between the two Mediterraneans, by making easier the bulk
transfer of wool into the Classic Mediterranean and of alum
into the Northern Mediterranean, with the result that textile
industries were further able to expand in Tuscany, Catalonia,
northern and southern France, Flanders, and eventually England.
Again, this relationship was of considerable cultural importance,
for the transfer of artistic methods and even exact
iconographic themes between Flanders and Italy (or the other
way) was a marked feature of fifteenth-century painting; one
could cite the debt of the Neapolitan painter Colantonio to very