thalassoCraCies 143Aragonese in the late-medieval Mediterranean at times when their land conflicts were
in stalemate. In what follows, attempts by pirates and others to create local, island-
based dominion over small stretches of the Mediterranean have largely been left out
of account, and this essay is concerned with rather larger configurations.
Within the Mediterranean, making trading agreements with partners across the
water was, then, fundamental if one wished to lessen the risk of expropriation. Even
then it often failed to provide long-term security. The famous example of Venetian
relations with the Byzantine Empire between the late eleventh century, when Venice
received extraordinary trading privileges, and 1204, when the Venetians wreaked
revenge for all the insults and even deaths they had suffered at Byzantine hands,
shows how unstable these relationships could be even when the traders were nomi-
nally subject to the overlordship of those who granted them their commercial rights
(Ağir, 2009). But, although it is shrouded in murkiness, there is every reason to
suppose that the emergence as a trading power of little Amalfi in the ninth and tenth
centuries owed a great deal to the willingness of Muslim rulers in North Africa and
Sicily to welcome into their ports Christian merchants who perhaps had not much to
bring, but who were keen to pay good money for exotic goods that princely courts in
Italy and further north increasingly craved; and the Muslims themselves, partly for
religious reasons, preferred not to spend time on Christian soil, while accepting the
presence of foreign Christian merchants on their own soil (Skinner, 2013: ch. 9).
Agreements between merchants and rulers no doubt preceded the use of writing,
at any rate by all parties to an agreement. But there is very early evidence of commer-
cial agreements between, for example, the Romans and the Carthaginians in c. 500
bCe, around the same time as the Carthaginians were enjoying close relations with
Thefarie Velianas, king of the great Etruscan city of Caere; here the evidence includes
three gold tablets, two in Etruscan and one in Phoenician, commemorating the dedi-
cation of a temple to Uni (the Roman Juno) and Astarte (the Phoenician goddess
who was regarded as one and the same) (Bonfante and Bonfante, 2002: 65–68).
Trade links between the Etruscan cities and Carthage waxed and waned, but the cru-
cial point is that two overlapping networks, that of the Etruscan traders and that of
the Phoenician/Carthaginian traders, had become closely intertwined by the start of
the fifth century bCe. And this was only possible because the rulers of these different
shores played a mediating role. Does this mean that either side had created what
might be called a thalassocracy? In this period Carthage operated quite independently
of its mother city Tyre, on the coast of what is now Lebanon; all the same the
Carthaginians liked to call themselves bene Tzur, sons of Tyre, or more literally “sons
of the rock.” Increasingly, over the following centuries, Carthage created its own
commercial network in which not the produce of the exotic East, brought by real
Tyrian merchants, but the agricultural goods of the countryside of what is now
Tunisia, were the focus of trade—North African figs could be on the tables of noble
Romans in three days. The Phoenicians had created small settlements along the coast
of Mediterranean Spain, for instance at Málaga, and tapped into the silver deposits
mined in the fabled land of Tartessos (possibly the biblical Tarshish); but the
Carthaginians were more ambitious, thanks to the determination of the family of the
great general Hannibal, who created a dominion of their own in south-eastern Spain.
Carthage established its mastery over towns in western Sicily such as Panormos
(Palermo) and in parts of Sardinia (notably Nora, west of Cagliari); there was a0002063951.INDD 143 2/17/2014 11:36:30 AM