preliminary remarks 21
wares were to compete on the european market against similar goods
which had come via the sea route through the Indian ocean and the red
Sea. one tactic which the merchant handbooks recommended was to
trade in the wares known as merces subtiles, light, low-volume goods with
high unit value (silk, precious stones and metals, pearls etc.).65 It was not
only the merchants who were forced to keep an eye on transport costs;
their partners, the Mongol khans, also had their own economic interest in
keeping the wares moving. one excellent indicator of the Golden horde’s
commercial policy clearly shows how well they understood the unchang-
ing laws of market forces: the tartar customs at tana at the mouth of the
Don, where the so-called tartar route linking the Black Sea to central
asia and china ended, never exceeded 3–5% by value of goods,66 while
the Mamluk sultans could afford to impose rates several times higher in
alexandria,67 on the wares brought via the red Sea and the nile.
Many more such observations could be made, and these all tend to
yield another “law”; that water transport makes goods cheaper whilst
overland transport makes them more expensive. It is self-evident, then,
that states with access to sea and river routes for trade could build up
much greater concentrations of capital, much more quickly, than states
which were land-locked, and this had immense effects not just in the eco-
nomic sphere but also politically, socially and culturally. along with the
well-known merchant maritime republics, especially Venice and Genoa,
we might also include athens in the same category, unimaginable without
piraeus just as rome is unimaginable without ostia.68
It was not just the sea that brought these benefits: so too did the great
waterways, when used to transport wares. this category includes the
Khazar state, Kievan rusʼ and the tartar horde of the eurasian steppe,
along with the succession of unifying powers that arose in the great cul-
tures of china, Mesopotamia and egypt.69
65 It was these goods that set the “great wheels of history” turning (h. İnalcık), as I shall
examine on another occasion.
66 See below, chapters 4.2.5 and 4.2.6.
67 See above, note 47.
68 pirenne, Mahomet, pp. 1, 3: “De tous les caractères de cette admirable constuction
humaine que fut l’empire romain, le plus frappant et aussi le plus essentiel est son cara-
ctère méditerranéen. [.. .] La mer, dans toute la force du terme la Mare nostrum, véhi-
cule des idées, des religions, des religions, des marchandises. [.. .] Sans ostie, rome est
incompréhensible.”
69 In this last case, the obvious question is whether the pharaohs financed the con-
struction of the pyramids through the same means—duties on transit trade—as the Mam-
luk sultans used to fund their slave purchases.