10 - The structure of trade in the late Norman period

Summary

On extracting from the lengthy sequence of Genoese contracts for the 1180s and 1190s those that refer to merchandise or to foreign merchants, several themes stand out, each closely related. In the first place, the presence of merchants from Lucca and Liège attracts attention. These were major cloth-producing centres; and, to be sure, the evidence for the career of Jean de Liège or the Lucchese merchants concerns the sale and pledging of cloth. Moreover, textile contracts directed to trade in Sicily often cite prices in ounces of tari, that is, in Sicilian gold instead of, or as well as, Genoese silver pounds. They are complex documents that range in catchment area from the North Sea to the central Mediterranean; and, equally, they reveal an institutional and financial sophistication that the evidence of the 1150s and 1160s does not appear to display. They raise the crucial issue of when, or how, the merchants of the north began to substitute, for payments in bullion, payments effected through the sale of northern industrial items imported into Sicily. Of course, this question has implications that range beyond a study of the Norman Regno, and concern Genoese trade with North Africa, Syria and other major markets as well. However, the case of Sicily, an exporter of agricultural items above all else, is of especial interest. This chapter is concerned not with the commercial exchange of luxury merchandise of one type for luxury merchandise of another, but with an overall change in the manner of purchase of basic foodstuffs and of raw fibres.