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The View from the Customs House 229
Mediterranean community in the control of such access points
was only the biggest prize in a sequence which started with the
only sheltered beach on the most unpromising island, and it is
vital to acknowledge the whole sequence if we are to understand
any part of it. Some of these gateways are interior to a recognizably
Mediterranean world: but an interesting and important
group—major transition points such as Palmyra, Pelusium, or
Zarai, or the zone from the Pyrenees to the Alpine passes which
was the object of the Roman tax of the Quadragesima Galliarum—derived
their significance from their role in mediating
the world of Mediterranean production and consumption to the
ecologically distinct regions which abut the Mediterranean to
north, east, and south. 79 In this sense, the whole Mediterranean
region functions on the largest of scales like the microregions of
which it is composed, offering its surpluses in return for those
of its neighbours; neighbours which can however, through this
logic, be seen as essentially different from the Mediterranean
world. 80
This difference is apparent in the tax morphology which we
are discussing. No one can deny that the states of west and south
Asia beyond the Mediterranean or those of northern Europe in
the Middle Ages, taxed mobility. But there is a difference in the
place of this exaction in the fiscal scheme and in the economic
history of the regions, a difference which the Greeks already
recognized in making a schematic distinction between poliseconomies
and ‘satrapal’ ones. In the well-known economic
taxonomy of pseudo-Aristotle, there are four types of fiscal
system: royal, satrapal, city, and individual. In the satrapal
there are six kinds of revenue, in order of importance, from
land, the tithe; from materials, gold, silver, and bronze; from
trade; from overland trade and market dues; on pasturage,
called epikarpia or tithe; and on persons. 81 In the city there
79 Customs duties and the boundary of the Mediterranean: the arabarchia,
with IGRR 1, 1183, the Coptos tariff of ad 90. France, Quadragesima.
80 For the ways in which the highly complex and variable edge of the
Mediterranean region promotes its inherent fragmentation and interdependency,
see Purcell, ‘The Boundless Sea’.
81 Pseudo-Aristotle, Oec. 1426 a. On the satrapal mode of taxation,
Andreades, History of Greek Public Finance. See also some extremely helpful
pages by C. Nicolet, Tributum: Recherches sur la fiscalité directe sous la