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The View from the Customs House 213
mere handful of ports of this size in the entire south-west of
Britain; Caunus was one of dozens. 34
But it is to the western Mediterranean that I wish to turn for
more detailed comparison of ancient and medieval. The late
antique tariffs of Anazarbus and Carales resemble in detail
and in spirit a body of material from six hundred years later
that has recently been interestingly displayed by Silvia Orvietani
Busch. 35 Her work compares two Mediterranean coastlines
in the twelfth century—the Catalan litoral from Roussillon to
the mouth of the Ebro, and the Tuscan shore on both sides of
the mouth of the Arno. The evidence for the ports of Catalonia
in this period is particularly rich, and includes quite detailed
regulations for the customs dues of ports such as Collioure at
the end of the Pyrenees, Barcelona itself, for which a particularly
detailed regulation or lleuda survives, and the little port of
Tamarit, further to the south. 36 What is especially important
about the material and this analysis of it is that it does not
concern a single port, understood necessarily in isolation, or as
part of a duet with a partner on the other side of the sea, as one
finds in the contemporary trading treaties between the Italian
republics and the principalities of the Maghreb, interesting as
they are. 37 Here we have evidence for the working of an entire
façade maritime, in which the warp of long-distance coastwise
cabotage and the weft of the exchanges between ports and their
34 For an overview of the system, N. S. B. Gras, The Early English Customs
System: A Documentary Study of the Institutional and Economic History of the
Customs from the Thirteenth to the Sixteenth Century (Cambridge, Mass.,
1918).
35 S. Orvietani Busch, Medieval Mediterranean Ports: The Catalan and
Tuscan Coasts, 1100 to 1235 (Leiden, 2001).
36 For Barcelona, J. Sobrequés i Callicó, and S. Riera i Viader, ‘La lleuda
de Barcelona del segle XII’, Estudis universitaris catalans 26 (1984), 329–46.
David Abulafia adduces further eloquent examples from the same coastline.
Abulafia, ‘Industrial Products: The Middle Ages’, in Prodotti e tecniche
d’Oltremare nelle economie europee, secc. XIII–XVIII. XXIX Settimana dell’Istituto
internazionale di storia economica ‘F. Datini’ (Florence 1998),
333–58; repr. in Mediterranean Encounters, Economic, Religious, Political,
1100–1550 (Aldershot 2000), v. 347 (lezde of Collioure and Perpignan); 348
(of Tortosa).
37 For these see the extraordinary compilation of J. M. J. L. Mas Latrie,
Traités de paix et de commerce et documents divers concernant les relations des
chrétiens avec les Arabes de l’Afrique septentrionale au moyen âge (Paris, 1866).