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Mediterraneans 71
and the Islamic shores remained rather limited. And yet the
development of urban life in the Islamic lands was closely
related to the lack of sufficient agricultural resources to feed
the cities; towns in the arid lands of the eastern Mediterranean
needed to buy in grain and other vital goods, and as they
expanded so did the scale of the trade in primary goods. Indeed,
agriculture itself became increasingly specialized, as exotic
goods could be exported for high profit (later, the crops themselves
were transplanted westwards: asparagus, artichokes,
lemons, bitter oranges, sugar, rice). When Christian conquerors
overwhelmed lands such as Sicily and Majorca their instinct
was to turn away from the production of specialized crops,
back to the wheat and other grains they knew so well as sources
of rent in cash and kind. The result was a diminution in production
of sugar, indigo, and henna in thirteenth-century
Sicily, and appeals by its ruler, Frederick II, to the Jews
of north Africa to bring back the forgotten agricultural
knowhow.
Despite the existence of large grain estates in parts of the
eastern Mediterranean—in large tracts of Byzantine Greece,
as well as along the Nile—it was in western Europe that reasonably
self-sufficient grain-based local economies had always
predominated; they were not a by-product of the ‘fall of the
Roman Empire’, though the loss of foreign markets and political
confusion undoubtedly led to urban contraction in the
western Mediterranean, leaving only a few centres trading
actively with the East by the eighth century. Naples and
Marseilles had never ceased to function as intermediaries between
East and West, joined later by the new trading centres
established at Amalfi south of Naples, and by the nominally
Byzantine inhabitants of a marshy set of lagoons in the Upper
Adriatic, whose many settlements coalesced by the tenth or
eleventh century into a city built around the Rialto or ‘high
bank’. The skills of the settlers as fishermen and salt-makers
provided a sound basis for the creation of a great trading empire
linked to Constantinople, the mother-city that was soon to be
effectively a colony.
This interaction between a lightly urbanized West and a more
heavily urbanized East raises a theoretical question of some