86 dominique valérian
who organized their own trade networks in the hinterlands of the Mediterranean. The
ports of the Maghreb and the Near East then became strategic points of contact, where
the actors from these different networks could meet and trade.
The consequence of this economic integration of the Mediterranean’s main ports
into wider networks was the close interdependence of the economies of the
Mediterranean lands, along with a flexibility that allowed these networks to adapt
quickly to conjunctural changes in any of the connected regions. The crisis of the
fourteenth century is a good example. A dramatic effect of this first globalization, the
Black Death came from Central Asia to Genoa’s Black Sea colonies, spreading within
a few months to all shores of the Mediterranean and then inland, helping to plunge
the economy, already showing signs of difficulty from the beginning of the century,
into a terrible crisis. Contrary to what Janet Abu-Lughod (1989) writes, however, the
world economy did not collapse, but was only reorganized: the closure of the Mongol
road through Central Asia was compensated for by the papacy’s re-authorization of
trade with Mamluk Egypt and Syria, which led to an explosion of trade with ports
such as Alexandria and Beirut, connected with the spice routes from the Indian Ocean.
In the western Mediterranean, the slowdown in trade resulted in a rise of piracy and
an “economy of ransom” which appeared as a response to the trade’s crisis—and did
not prevent the Mallorcans from developing an active trade with Maghrebi ports.
When the economic situation again became favorable at the beginning of the fifteenth
century, trade resumed on a larger scale than before, with even greater integration of
Mediterranean networks, already tightly connected to the dynamic Atlantic economy.
But European merchants no longer accepted the obstacle that the Maghreb and
Mamluk territories presented their networks: the Portuguese explored the Atlantic
coasts of Africa in order to buy gold from beyond the Sahara directly, opening the way
for the circumnavigation of the continent to the Indian Ocean, whereas Christopher
Columbus dreamed of circumnavigation through the Atlantic Ocean to find oriental
spices in the West and to open a second front for the conquest of Egypt and the Holy
Land (see also Ruiz, this volume).
The production of a “Mediterranean normativity”In this medieval Mediterranean that became a border between Islam, Greek and
Latin Christendom, no power was recognized as hegemonic. Some powers tried to
impose their dominion over certain portions of the sea (Venice over the Adriatic, for
example), but none was able to impose its law on the Mediterranean as a whole. It
remained a free sea, shared by people living in Muslim or Christian lands, and thus
recognizing different laws. From this plurality of normative systems arose the diffi-
cult problem of regulating relationships in the Mediterranean (both in times of peace
and times of war); the Middle Ages is the period when these rules were invented and
progressively accepted and shared, most persisting into modern times. The same
problem, of course, also arose between Christian states, but it assumed a particular
dimension when Muslims and Christians were involved: first, because of the greater
differences between Muslim and Christian laws, and second, because of the ideo-
logical and religious dimension of the confrontation between the two religions.
What was at stake was the guarantee of freedom and security for the circulation of