The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (44 page)

Too few records survive to give us more than the occasional snapshot of trade over the centuries. The most exhaustive single list of goods commonly handled is found in the tenth-century Arabic
Treatise Concerning the Leasing of Ships,
which reels off a series of commodities, essential and luxury foodstuffs, animals, textiles, raw materials, slaves, precious stones, gold, and silver. Essential foods include various grains and beans, oil, honey, vinegar, dates, olives, raisins, and salt. Among the luxuries are rice, edible lupine, “
marmalades, concentrated juices, licit drinks, and that which is used for seasoning cheese, dried yogurt, rape, yogurt, butter, dried curd, and cottage cheese” as well as “fruits from trees … eaten for pleasure … walnuts, hazelnuts, pine nuts, and other dried and fresh fruits … fried meats, fish, pepper,
vegetables, seeds, and eggs.” These lists are complemented by the archaeological manifests from Yassi Ada, Serçe Limani, and other sites that have yielded an eclectic array of goods that reveals a more complex economic life than ordinarily encountered in written texts.

The natural and man-made hazards of
medieval seafaring notwithstanding, people from across a broad economic, religious, and geographic spectrum traveled by ship for any number of reasons. Merchants frequently accompanied their goods; ambassadors and other dignitaries shuttled between Constantinople and Venice or the Po valley,
Mahdia and
Palermo, or
Ceuta and Seville; and church officials frequented the route between Rome and Constantinople. A major reason for nonmerchants to travel was to make pilgrimages or collect relics, although this was sometimes incidental to trade in ordinary goods. Venice’s
Basilica of St. Mark was erected to house his body after merchants stole it from the evangelist’s church in Alexandria.

Regardless of one’s station, conditions aboard ship were onerous. Under Byzantine regulations, male passengers were allocated a
space of 3 cubits by 1 cubit (1.1 square meters), while “
Women on board are to have a space allowance of one cubit; and a boy … half a cubit.” While the ship carried water for the ship’s company, passengers were responsible for their own food, which they prepared themselves. Whether women were allowed to commingle with men in Byzantine ships is unknown, but Muslim practice encouraged the strict separation of the sexes by assigning men and women to different decks or at least ensuring that women had segregated toilets, “so that they are not exposed to view when they need to use them.” There are also instances of women sailing aboard ships in military operations. When the
caliph Uthman gave Muawiya permission to attack
Cyprus, he said “
If thou sailest with thy wife we allow thee to do so; otherwise not,” on the assumption that Muawiya
would not risk his wife’s life at sea. She and possibly her sister sailed with the fleet, while the wife of another officer is said to have praised the efforts of a subordinate for saving their ship.

Such consideration of course did not apply to slaves, few of whom wrote about their hardships. Nonetheless, there is an abundance of anecdotal evidence preserved by a number of writers from different backgrounds. Taken together these passages describe a floating hell inconceivable to anyone fortunate enough to have been spared the experience. According to
John Kaminiates, after sacking
Thessaloniki,
Leo of Tripoli shipped thousands of enslaved captives to
Tarsus in conditions that bear comparison with those of the later Atlantic slave trade:

While slavery was common within Europe, many European slaves were exported to al-Andalus, Africa, and the Near East. Venetian merchants were at the forefront of the trade, buying slaves at Rome for export to Africa as early as 748, even as the
pope was attempting
to end the traffic in Christians by purchasing and manumitting them. Efforts to curtail the trade continued but Venetian merchants (among others) continued to flout treaties and papal decrees limiting or banning the sale of Christians to Muslims for centuries.

At the same time, more scrupulous adherence to religious restrictions on usury led to significant changes in the way maritime trade was financed, not only among Christians but among Muslims and Jews as well. The Byzantine state acknowledged the considerable risks involved in travel by sea and allowed the highest
interest rates to be charged on maritime loans, starting at 12 percent per year in the sixth century and rising to 12 percent per voyage—about twice the rate for ordinary loans—by the ninth century. The considerable danger entailed made it difficult to amass capital for large-scale shipping ventures.
As a result, the drafting of ever more sophisticated commercial contracts and insurance was as important to the growth of maritime trade as were developments in politics, weaponry, or shipbuilding. Medieval law was essentially personal and religious rather than territorial and political; that is, people were bound by the law of their community rather than of the state. Muslims and Jews were governed generally by one or another school of law rooted in religious tradition, while Christian merchants operated under codes of laws promulgated by their own states and that owed more to Romano-Byzantine practice. Intracommunal disputes were handled according to the merchants’ religio-legal tradition, while intercommunal disputes were adjudicated under the religious laws of the host community. Yet over time, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim commercial contracts developed similar features. This is hardly surprising, for while merchants are competitive, they are also collaborative, sharing information and adapting to different modes of doing business so as not to jeopardize their ability to work at all.

Byzantine maritime law was codified in the so-called
Rhodian Sea Law, a name that harks back to the heyday of Rhodes as a maritime power in the third century
BCE
, although the law as it survives was probably codified between 600 and 800 ce. The underlying principles were shared by
Mediterranean maritime merchants throughout this period, and many of the law’s tenets are reflected in the Muslim
Treatise Concerning the Leasing of Ships
and the Claims Between (Contracting) Parties,
a collection of
responsa
on the subject of maritime law compiled by an Andalusian jurist in the tenth century. Broadly speaking both the Rhodian Sea Law and the
Treatise
treat five aspects of shipping: ships’ owners, the crew, and merchants; the carriage of goods; the laws of jettison and general average; the salvage of lost ships and cargoes; and commercial law and contracts.

The few substantive differences between Byzantine and
Islamic maritime law chiefly concern how and when people were paid for their services and questions of liability. Whereas Byzantine crews tended to work for a share of the profits of a voyage (a practice that continued in the heyday of the Italian maritime powers), Muslim sailors were paid in accordance with
Quranic principles: “
Whoever hires an employee, let him do the hire at a fixed wage and for a defined duration.” There were benefits and drawbacks to both systems. Sharing in profits gave sailors the incentive to ensure a voyage’s success, but offered no security in the event of failure. Fixed wages made life more predictable for the crew (and whoever was responsible for tallying the costs of the voyage), but wage earners had no vested interest in the voyage’s outcome, and owners no reason to pay more than absolutely necessary. As the changing nomenclature suggests, owners everywhere gradually prevailed, and sailors
went from being part of the ship’s “
company” who shared in the financial and physical welfare of the ship, to being poorly salaried “crew” exploited chiefly for their physical strength and routinely cheated.

A contract to transport goods via ship generally specified the vessel, including its name, rig, officers, and route. All traditions stressed the importance of checking a ship’s seaworthiness, and
load lines were marked on ships’ hulls to ensure they were not overloaded—a practice abandoned by the early modern period and not revived until the late nineteenth century. Major innovations in Muslim law were linking
freight charges to the distance covered and factoring in the difference in prices obtained if goods had to be sold at a port other than that stipulated in the contract. By the eleventh century, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim merchants employed essentially three types of commercial contracts—the
sea loan, the
societas maris
(association of the sea), and the
commenda
(something given
in commendam,
in trust)—which spread risk, created larger pools of potential investors while guaranteeing legal remedies for dishonest actions, and enabled people to profit from trade without resorting to usury. Islam,
Judaism, and Christianity all proscribed
lending money at interest to coreligionists, although there were no prohibitions on charging interest to people of other faiths.

In Byzantine law, a
lender
extended a sea loan to a merchant who contracted to repay it at a fixed rate of interest. The lender could not recoup his loan if the ship failed to reach its destination, but his profit was not diminished if the borrower had to sell his cargo at a loss. Although the interest charged was payable only upon the successful conclusion of a voyage and not if the capital was lost, in 1236 the
pope condemned sea loans on the grounds that such interest was a form of usury. The agreement known as a
societas maris
was a partnership of “
capital, labor or anything else: skill, knowledge or connections perhaps” in which the investors, whether of money, work, or goods, shared equally in the profits or loss of the venture. The
societas maris
was regarded as a consensual agreement rather than one in which an investment was handed over to one of the parties. Similar to this was the
isqa
of Jewish law, which envisioned a single lender of capital whose investment was “
a semi loan and a semi trust.” The loan carried no interest and had to be repaid regardless of the outcome of the voyage. If it was a success, the trust had to be repaid, together with any profits it generated, while if it failed, the trust was lost.

Unlike either the
societas maris
or
isqa
was the Muslim
qirad
, which combined aspects of the partnership with a hiring of labor, but without the taint of usury. In the
qirad,
money was not lent but transferred from a “sedentary” investor to a trading associate, or “labor-investor.” Any profit realized through manipulation of the investment was shared, at predetermined rates, between
the sedentary investor and the trader. Losses to capital were borne solely by the sedentary investor, the assumption being that if he failed to profit financially, the labor-investor had likewise lost his investment of time and labor. The
qirad
is widely believed to have been the precursor to the quintessential medieval maritime contract, the
commenda
.

Modern historians have described the
commenda
as an “
innovation of the highest importance [that] contributed greatly to the faster growth of maritime trade as compared to the slower progress of capitalistic forms in land trade” and “
the lynch-pin of the fantastic success of the
Commercial Revolution in the Mediterranean from the eleventh to the thirteenth centuries.” Broadly speaking there were two types. In a unilateral
commenda,
one or more
lenders loaned money to a traveling merchant who used the capital to trade. If the voyage was profitable, lender and merchant would share in the profits at a predetermined rate, usually three-quarters for the lender and one-quarter for the merchant. Bilateral
commendae
involved capital from both a lender and the traveling merchant, in which case the profits were shared evenly. Under a bilateral contract, both parties were liable in proportion to the amount of their respective contributions, but under a unilateral contract the borrower was not liable for any losses due to shipwreck,
piracy, or capture by a hostile power. In the words of the
Statutes of Marseille of 1253, if “
the ship … is broken up, wrecked, or captured on that voyage, from then on the said [borrower] or partner who went on the ship … or his heirs, may in no wise have action taken against him.” The similarities of the
commenda
to the
qirad
are striking and Jewish merchants referred to
commendae
as “
partnerships according to Muslim law.” Although the mechanisms involved in the transmission of the principles of the
qirad
from Muslim to Christian merchants cannot be divined, the fact that the
qirad
exercised greater influence on the development of commercial contracts in Europe than did agreements previously devised by Christian merchants demonstrates the intensity of cross-cultural contact among Mediterranean men of affairs.

Apart from contracts, one of the most complex issues to be considered in maritime trade was
jettison, the deliberate throwing overboard of goods to save a ship, normal practice in the face of storms, when a ship was leaking, or when fleeing a pursuer. In principle, the decision to jettison was a deliberative one involving the captain, crew, and merchants whose cargo was involved. If time allowed, the parties negotiated the compensation due to those whose goods were to be sacrificed. In an emergency, however, a captain could order cargo jettisoned without consultation. If this decision was challenged, the captain and crew had to present evidence to justify their actions. The
Rhodian Sea Law addresses jettison in cursory fashion, noting simply that everyone in
the ship shared in the risk so that all should lose in proportion to the
value of their cargo: “
if goods are thrown overboard in order to lighten the ship, what is sacrificed for the common benefit should be made good by a common contribution.” The
responsa
in the
Treatise Concerning the Leasing of Ships
go into greater detail, establishing the shares payable by those whose goods were not jettisoned and the basis for de
termining the value of goods that were, what is now known as general average loss, the principles of which remain essentially unchanged in modern maritime law.
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