thalassoCraCies 149Infrastructures
The first piece of infrastructure was, of course, a port, though this could vary from a
simple roadstead, as in the case of most Etruscan cities, or as in the case of the outports
of medieval Pisa. Ancient Rome had to build its own Portus at Ostia to maintain its sea
trade. But home ports cannot be enough. Bases had to be established in overseas ports.
These might be places under the control of the imperial power: the British used Gibraltar
as a supply station and Mahón (Maó) in Minorca, with the largest natural harbor in the
world after Pearl Harbor, as a naval base. They adapted the magnificent fortifications of
Valletta and its suburbs to serve the needs of the British navy and the dockyards Britain
operated in Malta. The Phoenicians, much further back in time, created a settlement at
Motya off the western coast of Sicily, showing their usual preference for trading bases
that stood a little offshore and were easier to defend. Pithekoussai (Ischia, close to
Naples) was the first-known Greek trading base in the Tyrrhenian Sea, and again con-
sisted of an offshore island. Carthage was itself a colony established by Phoenician
merchants, though its population soon intermarried with the local population, and the
city was self-governing. And this model for ancient colonies, by which they should be
seen not as dependencies but as independent entities in their own right, also applied to
the Greek cities around the Mediterranean such as Syracuse, even if emotional bonds
sometimes existed to their forefathers back home (in this case the Doric Greeks, among
whom counted the Spartans); such bonds could influence the political orientation of
the cities, as events during the Peloponnesian War showed. Some of the cities founded
by the Greeks had a mixed population; it is not clear whether Spina, the great trading
center near Ferrara, was founded by Greeks or Etruscans, but it was clearly home to
both, and doubtless to many Italic settlers as well. This is only to speak of full-scale set-
tlements; there were also innumerable cases of small colonies inserted in existing ports.
It has been seen that Carthage had a presence at Pyrgoi, the port of Caere, and there
were probably long-term Phoenician inhabitants of Pithekoussai.
Creating such communities of foreign merchants became more problematic in
later centuries. In the Middle Ages and after the great difficulty faced by merchants
seeking to trade on the opposite shores of the Mediterranean was the religious
divide between Christendom and Islam. It has been seen that commercial agree-
ments were essential if trade was to be conducted in the reasonable certainty of
getting home again. By the twelfth century, we can see the emergence of an institu-
tion that lasted well into the nineteenth: the fonduk or inn where western merchants
trading in Muslim lands and Byzantium could be sheltered, with their goods, some-
times locked in at night by the Muslim authorities (as in Alexandria), but free to eat
what they wished, drink what they liked (as at the Genoese inn in thirteenth-century
Tunis), and pray in their accustomed manner (Constable, 2003). Importantly, they
subsisted under the direction of consuls or baillis who represented their community
to the sometimes capricious ruler. Tax exemptions encouraged trade, but in fact
there were great profits to be made from these fonduks, where the consuls might be
(in the Catalan case) appointees of the Aragonese king, for the king expected a
handsome rent from his fonduks in places such as Tunis, Bougie and Ceuta. In other
words, the king may not have gone out of his way to promote trade when he
initiated his conquests, but he knew how to make a fortune out of trade once his
merchants were in place, and the North African fonduks were as much part of his0002063951.INDD 149 2/17/2014 11:36:30 AM