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Mediterraneans 69
tyrant Hieron off Cumae in 474 bc, even while Attic products
were ever more keenly favoured in the markets of Etruria.
Trade engendered trade wars then and later; but trade wars
often engendered truces and treaties that enabled free commerce
to resume, generally on better terms than previously.
However, part of the interest of the often debated argument
that the disintegration of the Roman Empire in the West and
the rise of Islam shattered the unity of the Mediterranean lies
precisely in the fact that the Mediterranean had possessed such
a high measure of unity for well over a millennium already, ever
since long-distance trade linked the shores of Lebanon to the
Qart Hadasht or ‘New City’ known now as Carthage, and then
moved further west to reach the Mediterranean shores of Spain
and even Cádiz beyond the Straits of Gibraltar. In other words,
the extreme antiquity of commercial networks in the Mediterranean
is not in doubt.
Bearing this in mind, any discussion of the unity of the
Mediterranean in post-classical times has to confront two
problems. One is that of the confrontation between Islam and
Christendom in the Mediterranean, which was generally characterized
by intense conflict and wars of conquest. The other
problem is the difference in the character of the economies of
the western and eastern Mediterranean, a distinction that also
has some significance for our understanding of the conflict
between Islam and Christendom. Yet even the conflict between
the two religions needs to be re-examined from the perspective
of trade; here we see continuing contacts, even, for example, in
the twelfth century, between the aggressive Almohads of north
Africa and Spain and unlikely partners, the Italian merchants,
at a time when the Almohads were busily suppressing Christianity
and Islam in their own lands. Papal fulmination against
Italian and Catalan merchants who sold armaments, or raw
materials for the arms industry such as iron and pitch, provides
(of course) the surest evidence that contraband trade was regular
and easily arranged. Piracy interfered with free intercourse
between the Christian merchants and their Muslim business
partners, but, seen in the round, piracy was also a profitable and
even well-controlled part of the Mediterranean economy, by the
end of the Middle Ages. Pirate states such as Piombino, on the
Tuscan coast, maintained a delicate balance in their relations