The Economy Of Latin Greece 209
land region or at neighbouring insular and continental points. Cabotage and
tramping are well illustrated by Venetian compensation claims submitted to
Byzantium in 1278 and 1324, by Genoese claims shortly before June 1294, and
especially by notary charters and Venetian official documents. These tradi-
tional types of traffic always fulfilled a major function in maritime trade, espe-
cially in the Eastern Mediterranean with its numerous islands. They involved
mixed cargoes and indigenous as well as imported commodities. The latter
were partly re-exported to finance purchases abroad.
Direct sailings are illustrated by shipments of grain and other commodities
from Crete to the Peloponnese in the 13th and 14th centuries. The compensa-
tion claims submitted by Venice to Byzantium in 1278 record the import of a
large variety of goods to Negroponte both from Aegean islands, namely Andros,
Naxos and Crete, and continental ports in a region of the Balkans extending
between the Peloponnese and Thessalonica, Makre on the Aegean coast of
Asia Minor, and even more distant locations of the Eastern Mediterranean
such as Cyprus and Acre. Attacks on ships between Crete on the one hand,
the islands of Naxos and Seriphos and the Peloponnesian ports of Modon and
Glarenza are also mentioned. Fourteenth-century commercial contracts reveal
that small ships leaving Candia, the capital of Venetian Crete, often anchored
at Sitia or Mirabello, also along the northern coast of the island, in order to
load between 15 and 30 metric tons of cheese produced around these locali-
ties. The vessels stopped for two days at Paphos and again at Limassol, on
the southern coast of Cyprus, to enable sales, and proceeded to Famagusta.
Unsold Cretan cheese was re-exported, in 1306 to Ayas in Cilician Armenia, and
in other instances to Egypt. In 1369 a vessel engaged in cabotage on its return
voyage from Attaleia, on the southern coast of Asia Minor, anchored in Rhodes,
Keryneia on the northern coast of Cyprus, Paphos and Limassol, before reach-
ing Famagusta.45
45 David Jacoby, “The Eastern Mediterranean in the Later Middle Ages: An Island World?,”
in The Late Medieval Eastern Mediterranean World: Between Byzantines and Turks, ed.
Jonathan Harris, Catherine Holmes and Eugenia Russell (Oxford, 2012), pp. 100–03;
Guillaume Saint-Guillain and Oliver Schmitt, “Die Ägäis als Kommunikationsraum im
späten Mittelalter,” Saeculum: Jahrbuch für Universalgeschichte 56 (2005), 219–20; Silvano
Borsari, L’Eubea veneziana (Venice, 2007), pp. 84–88; Mario Gallina, “La navigazione
di cabotaggio a Creta nella seconda metà del trecento (dai registri notarili candioti),”
Thesaurismata 38 (2008), 23–102; Charalambos Gasparis, “The Trade in Agricultural
Products in the Eastern Mediterranean and the Regional Sea Routes from Thirteenth to
Fifteenth Century,” in Handelsgüter und Verkehrswege. Aspekte der Warenversorgung im
östlichen Mittelmeerraum (4. bis 15. Jahrhundert), ed. Ewald Kislinger, Johannes Koder and
Andreas Külzer (Vienna, 2010), pp. 93–104.