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212 The View from the Customs House
thought to be a decisive differentiator: in the papyrus 42 ships
are registered during the year, which does not seem very many,
for all the richness of their cargoes. Figures from the strazzetto,
the tax exclusively on transit goods, at Genoa in 1445, however,
rather similarly refer to 70 voyages made by 52 Genoese and 12
foreign boats. 32
Or take the case of a prosperous port in the south-west of
England, Exeter, where the customs records are unusually well
preserved. 33 Over a period of 55 years at the end of the fourteenth
century, 641 arrivals of 302 individual ships (half based
in Devon) with dutiable cargoes were recorded (a considerably
smaller number per annum than the anonymous port of the
Canopic mouth in 475 bc). Imports were overwhelmingly
more important than exports; a rough breakdown by yield of
the commodities taxed is manufactured goods 6%, raw materials
7%, materials for the textile industry 10%, foodstuffs 24% (including
some notable imports of cereals, as the period in question
covers some notable years of dearth in local cereals), and
wine 53%. The goods were already in the possession of, or
would be bought by, the civic elite, who intended to retail
them at a profit; the duties provided 8–9% of the city’s revenue.
This was no Antwerp; but it was fairly typical of the ports of the
narrow seas at this period. Much of the detail is perfectly
plausible for an archaic Aeolic Kyme, a Roman Caunus, or a
Byzantine Carales. The way in which immunities were made
available to certain shipowners to articulate a network of mutual
cooperation within networks of more or less privileged ports is
very suggestive of Mediterranean practice. But two things are
quite un-Mediterranean—the asymmetry of export and import,
so alien to the banal economic viewpoint of ancient observers
like ‘Hippodamos’; and the density of the network. There was a
resemblances to the Middle Ages in the Roman western Mediterranean,
especially Arles.
32
P. Gourdin, ‘Présence génoise en Mediterranée et en Europe au milieu
du XVe siècle: L’implantation des hommes d’affaires d’après un registre
douanière de 1445’, in M. Balard and A. Ducellier (eds.), Coloniser au
Moyen âge (Paris, 1995), 14–35.
33
For what follows, see M. Kowaleski, The Local Customs Accounts of the
Port of Exeter, 1266–1321 (Exeter, 1993).