416 teofilo f. ruiz
extent, on Ramón Bonifaz’s naval expertise. Bonifaz was a merchant of Burgos
(a trading city in the center of Castile) engaged in trade with northern Europe. At the
command of the king, he organized a fleet in the Bay of Biscay area (composed mostly
of ships from that area engaged in trade with Flanders and England), and sailed
around the Iberian peninsula to the mouth of the Guadalquivir River, leading to
Seville. There Bonifaz defeated a combined North African and Andalusi fleet, besieged
the city from the river until it surrendered, and played a crucial role in the surrender
of Seville. Many years ago, Robert S. Lopez, the great economic historian who coined
the phrase “the commercial revolution,” argued that Ramón Bonifaz had Genoese
origins. Whether he did or not, the links between the Bay of Biscay Castilian ports,
northern Europe, Seville (or Cádiz), and the Mediterranean–Italian manufacturing
centers were a reality. Before Columbus, there were Genoese merchants already
actively engaged in the opening of the Atlantic trade or as interlocutors in a complex
web of trading and sailing that brought the Mediterranean and the Atlantic into
enduring economic exchanges (Ruiz, 1976). Moreover, as Olivia Remie Constable
has persuasively shown, this was precisely the period in which Iberian trade experi-
enced a dramatic repositioning, shifting away from being part of the commercial
networks that linked Spain and the western Mediterranean to Dar-al-Islam into a
pattern of economic exchanges that connected southern Iberia to the north
(Constable, 1994).
Castilian merchants from Cantabrian and Basque ports carried Italian luxury cloth,
such as purple fabric from Venice, gold brocade from Lucca, or textiles from
Montpellier, to Castile’s southern Atlantic ports for distribution by land throughout
the kingdom. Castilian merchants also carried wool on behalf of the Bardi and Peruzzi
banking houses from England to the Italian textile centers in the first half of the fif-
teenth century (Ruiz, 1994: 212). In 1338, John Bussyns, a merchant of Piacenza,
received a safe conduct from the English monarch, Edward III, to go to Wynchelse
“to recover goods and merchandise lately put on board a ship of Spain [by which they
meant Castile] which had been carried away by men of Wynchelsea.” Similar grants
were issued to merchants of Chieri (or Cheiri), Piacenza, and Asti (Calendar of the
Patent Rolls, 1338–40, 3). Diagus (Diego) Lopes de Arbo Lanchia, Lopes Sanches de
Bassurco, and other merchants of Bilbao received royal protection from the English
Crown in 1337 to “trade in Gascony, Brabant, Ireland and other lands friendly to
England, and passing to and from Lombardy and their own ports.” On November
20, 1337, Sebastian of Nordyncho of San Sebastian on the Basque coast hired his ship
la Seint John to merchants of the Bardi society to carry 600 sacks of wool to Lombardy.
A ship from Bermeo (on the Cantabrian coast of Castile) also carried wool to Italy
that year for the Bardi, while a ship from Santander did the same for the Peruzzi in
- Genoese merchants, not just from Florence’s great trading and banking houses,
also played an important role in this Mediterranean–Atlantic trade. Ships sailed out of
the Mediterranean carrying Italian goods, stopped in Seville or Cádiz, made their way
to Gascony, England, and Flanders, and came back following the same route in reverse
(Ruiz, 1976: 184).
The beginning of the Hundred Years’ War brought greater opportunities for
merchants, as well as added risks. Although war and plague eventually led to the
English defaulting on their debt to Italian banks, signaling the collapse of the power-
ful Bardi and Peruzzi societies, war also offered the opportunity for profit. While