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72 Mediterraneans
importance. To what extent did trade alter the character of the
societies in western Europe that were visited by Italian and
Catalan merchants bearing either luxury goods or raw materials
they had acquired from the Mediterranean islands and coasts?
(Of course, most of the spices came from much further away, as
far away as Indonesia; but access to the Red Sea was closed to
the Italians and they had to obtain these goods in Alexandria
and other Levantine towns). Cotton from Sicily, Malta and
Egypt undoubtedly fed the looms of the Lombard, Tuscan,
and Catalan cities. Grain from Sicily, Sardinia, Crete and,
eventually, the Black Sea, undoubtedly fed the stomachs of
those who worked the looms, at least in Barcelona, Genoa,
Pisa, and Florence. Mediterranean trade enabled these and
other cities to grow: not just the luxury trade in fine dyestuffs,
silks, slaves, and gold, but the more modest trade in wheat and
wine from the Italian South, which also sustained Tunis, itself
home to a massive population of Italian and Catalan traders. We
can thus see the trade of the Mediterranean in this period as a
source of wealth both to an expanding group of western merchants
based in the Mediterranean towns of Italy, Spain, and
southern France, but also as a source of livelihood to the artisans
of those cities and satellite towns in the hinterland. The
‘commercial revolution’ began on the seaboard, but had a
knock-on effect inland: the greatest exponent of this effect was
Florence, a city some way from the sea that still came to depend
significantly on grain brought to Tuscany by sea from Apulia,
Sardinia, and Sicily, and a city whose woollen cloth (partly
made of fibres also imported by sea) became a prized article of
trade throughout the Mediterranean.
Still, we must be careful about interpreting these developments
as the emergence of a ‘bourgeoisie’, as a middle-class
revolution: the elites in the Italian cities were generally formed
out of old landed families who intermarried with bankers and
wealthy traders to form an aristocratic mercantile upper class
unlike anything in the Islamic world, possessing political power
and passing on wealth and property within the extended family;
the key to survival was, indeed, to vary one’s portfolio, to
combine trade and banking with the purchase of tax farms and
bonds, the management of cloth workshops, urban property,