142 david abulafiasense of the term; that would apply to the famous Jewish merchants from Egypt
whose documents were preserved in the Cairo Geniza, people who had to rely on the
favors and protection of Muslim, and occasionally Byzantine, rulers if they were to
gain access to markets that stretched right across the Mediterranean, particularly the
waters stretching eastwards from Sicily and Tunisia (Goitein, 1967; Goldberg, 2012).
Another good example is Dubrovnik (Ragusa), whose merchants possessed what was
probably the largest merchant fleet in the late sixteenth-century Mediterranean, but
who acquired no territory beyond their small and rather arid patch of homeland in
Dalmatia; indeed, the secret of their success was that they were neutral, paying tribute
to the Ottoman sultan in return for his protection, and generally recognized in the
west as non-belligerent (Harris, 2003). It will be suggested in a moment that the early
Phoenician traders probably fitted into the same mold, commercial pioneers who did
not have strong political support in the western Mediterranean until Carthage took
charge of their trading network. The question whether trade comes before the exercise
of naval power is perhaps a chicken and egg problem, but in any case the origins of
thalassocracies within the Mediterranean now need to be considered.Origins
The link between trade and piracy has been observed again and again. Homer actually
preferred pirates, who were men of action, to double-dealing merchants—he had in
mind the Phoenician traders who had become a familiar sight along the coasts of Ionia
and Greece (Homer, Odyssey: 14.289, 15.416). But the distinction was a false one:
why in one of the Homeric Hymns (no. 8) would Tyrsenoi, a term often used for
Etruscans, attempt to capture Dionysus, whom they failed to recognize as a god, were
it not that they wished to sell him as a slave? And what did pirates do with the booty
they captured if not sell it? The towns of Rough Cilicia were a bargain hunter’s para-
dise filled with goods of dubious origin before Pompey the Great launched his cam-
paigns against piracy in the Mediterranean during the first century bCe. For Karl Marx,
it was Italian piracy that created the resource base upon which the city republics were
able to establish their vibrant commercial networks right across and even beyond the
Mediterranean in the Middle Ages (Das Kapital book 3, section 4). The earliest
Genoese mariners were probably pirates battling against Muslim corsairs in the
Tyrrhenian Sea. Still, we are back to the chicken and egg problem: the substantial
resources needed to build a powerful ship had to be obtained by the pirates from
somewhere; there was no point in pirates setting sail unless there was some form of
booty to capture and sell, which means that a certain level of commercial traffic
needed to be functioning. A study of muggers in Central Park, New York, has dem-
onstrated that if muggers are too active they clear the mugging zone of prospective
victims; they know how to maintain the right level of imagined safety so that victims
will continue to pass their way. Achieving the correct balance seems to have been the
aim of the Barbary corsairs between the fifteenth and the nineteenth centuries: intim-
idation, expropriation, enslavement were means to secure more advantageous trade
agreements with traders who sailed to the North African ports from as far away as
England, Denmark and eventually the United States. On the other hand, licensed
privateering offered favored-nation status to allies and denied it to rivals, and amounted
to a low-level war of attrition, often waged between enemies such as the Angevins and0002063951.INDD 142 2/17/2014 11:36:30 AM