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The View from the Customs House 221
the economic fortunes of the waterway. 59 More generally, it is
nearly twenty years since Braudel formulated a similar point
about early modern economies in general. 60
We may also observe that one of the most interesting data
derived from the Caunus inscription is the revelation that local
customs dues did not greatly affect the caboteur. 61 The trader did
not usually pay duty on goods in transit. Even unsold goods that
he had clearly intended to sell were usually not liable, if his stay
was a relatively short one. This principle, which finds close
parallels in commercial treaties of the Middle Ages, mitigates
the problem of how the normal commercial activity of ancient
time, the basso continuo of cabotage, of coastwise tramping trade,
in small boats with mixed cargoes hopping from one anchorage
to the next, survived both the notorious unpredictability of route
in Mediterranean navigation, and the propensity of every harbour,
however small, to charge customs dues. 62 There is clear
59 T. Scott, Regional Identity and Economic Change: The Upper Rhine,
1450–1600 (Oxford, 1997), 293–5, following U. Dirlmeier, ‘Mittelaltliche
Zoll- und Stapelrechte als Handelhemnisse’, in H. Pohl (ed.), Die Auswirkungen
von Zöllen und anderen Handelshemnissen auf Wirtschaft und Gesellschaft
vom Mittelalter bis zum Gegenwart (Vierteljahrschrift für Sozial- und
Wirtschaftsgeschichte Suppl. 80) (Stuttgart, 1987), 19–39.
60 Braudel, Civilization and Capitalism, 289–90.
61 The phrase is paragogimon phortion. The issue discussed by Cicero, Att.
2. 16. 4, the portorium circumvectionis in Asia, may be related. His researches
found no reason why this duty should be payable—which would not necessarily
prevent him from pleading the cause of the publicani. It looks as if the
latter had opportunistically attempted, perhaps in some specific context, to
impose this extra duty, damaging, as Cicero perceives, to both negotiatores and
the Graeci of the whole province. E. M. Harris, ‘Notes on the New Grain-tax
law’, ZPE 128 (1999), 269–72, postulates that we are dealing here with a
diagoge or transit tax, a specially interesting instance of harbour dues. For
the distinction between exagoge (import–export tax) and diagoge, Vélissaropoulos,
Les nauclères, 205–31.
62 In recent papers, David Abulafia has presented a number of cases which
demonstrate how essential the notably complex world of cabotage is to our
understanding of high commerce in the later Middle Ages. D. Abulafia,
‘Industrial Products’; and above all id., ‘L’economia mercantile nel Mediterraneo
occidentale (1390 ca—1460 ca): Commercio locale e a lunga distanza
nell’età di Lorenzo il Magnifico’, Schola Salernitana 2 (1997), 21–41: repr. in
Mediterranean Encounters (Aldershot, 2000). He also makes clear how important
it is to study the exchanges of smaller centres: id., ‘East and West:
Comments on the Commerce of the City of Ancona in the Middle Ages’, in