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214 The View from the Customs House
hinterlands may both be discerned, and their connections plotted.
Above all, what we see here is the piecemeal welding
together of a complex system out of the opportunities for taxation
of a policy on the part of the rulers of this coastland, the
Counts of Barcelona.
Texts of this kind come from both sides of the religious
divide. 38 Indeed, the most remarkable is a document concerning—once
again—the ports of the Nile delta, in the reign of
Saladin, towards the end of the twelfth century, the Minhaj of
al-Makhzumi, edited, translated and luculently interpreted 25
years ago by Claude Cahen. 39 The regulations for the ports of
Tinnis, Damietta, and Alexandria are set out at a period when a
new phase of change in fiscal institutions in the Mediterranean
of the later Middle Ages was only beginning, and they are
remarkably redolent, as Cahen observed, of Byzantine and ancient
practice. 40 So much so, one may remark, that it is startling
to find a distinction between large and small ships being observed
for which Cahen could find no medieval parallel but
which now evokes in the most vivid way the practice attested
in these same waters in the fifth century bc in the Elephantine
palimpsest. 41 It is no part of a comparativist vision to pursue
continuities, but this coincidence reminds us forcibly that bureaucracies
are palimpsestic too, and the most insignificant foibles
of administrators may outlast ideologies and sceptres.
From the comparative perspective too we may be unsurprised
to find that the Fatimid state was not remotely interested
38 Anecdote of the civet merchant at Oran; R. Brunschvig (ed.), Deux récits
de voyage inédits en Afrique du nord au XV siècle (Publications de l’Institut
d’études orientales de la Faculté des lettres d’Alger, VII) (Paris, 1936), 130–3.
39 C. Cahen, ‘Douanes et commerce dans les ports méditerranéens de
l’Égypte médiévale d’après le Minhadj d’al-Makhzumi’, Journal of the Economic
and Social History of the Orient 7 (1965), 217–34.
40 Ibid. 220: ‘nous sommes en une période et une région où l’élaboration
des institutions et usages qui caractériseront le commerce Méditerranéen de la
fin du Moyen Age n’a pas encore détruit entièrement les traditions qui
peuvent, par l’intermédiaire de Byzance, remonter jusqu’à l’Antiquité.’ The
document also mentions in passing the refuge ports of Rosetta and Nastaru.
Backward-looking elements include the presence of traders from Sardinia
(p. 235) and Gabala (North Syria); and we note the ‘piggy-back’ presence of
lower value trade in ships conveying higher value goods (pp. 233–4).
41 Ibid. 234–5.