(^54) Chapter Two
confiscatory taxation and robbery by finding refuge in one or another
port of call along the caravan routes and seaways, where local rulers
had learned not to overtax the trade upon which their income and
power had come to depend.
Thus, after about 1100, what had previously been a smoldering fire,
bursting out only sporadically into intenser flame, began to escape
from official control and gradually turned into a general conflagration.
Eventually, in the nineteenth century, market behavior flamed so high
that it melted down the inimical command structure of the Chinese
empire itself, although it took nine centuries before this catastrophe
to Confucian China became possible.
In its initial stages this commercial transformation seemed of little
importance to chroniclers and men of letters generally. Hence histo
rians can only reconstruct what occurred by using scattered sources,
painstakingly piecing together a general picture of what happened
from merest fragments. This has been done for medieval Europe—
mainly during the past thirty to forty years—but not elsewhere. As a
result, historians know a good deal about how western Europeans
developed trade relations among themselves and with Moslems of the
eastern Mediterranean shoreline. It was precisely in the eleventh
century, when Chinas conversion to cash exchanges went into high
gear, that European seamen and traders made the Mediterranean a
miniature replica of what was probably happening simultaneously in
the southern oceans.^62 A systematic shift from piracy to trade oc
curred at almost the same time along the Atlantic face of Europe,
where Vikings had previously raided Christian Europe.^63 These sepa
rate sea networks were then combined into one single interacting
whole after 1291, when a Genoese sea captain seized control of the
straits of Gibraltar from a Moslem ruler who had previously inter
dicted through passage for Christian vessels.^64
Thus, if one takes a synoptic view of the rise of commerce in the
Old World, the multiple linkages within China between north and
south that arose through improvements of inland waterways were
matched, though on a somewhat smaller scale, by a similar develop
ment in the Far West some centuries later. European rivers, and the
open seas connecting them, provided a network of natural waterways
- Cf. William H. McNeill, Venice: The Hinge of Europe, 1081–1797 (Chicago, 1974),
pp. 1–39. - Cf. Archibald R. Lewis, The Northern Seas: Shipping and Commerce in Northern
Europe, A.D. 300–1100 (Princeton, 1958). - Robert Lopez, Genova Marinara nel Duecento: Benedetto Zaccaria, ammiraglio e
mercanti (Messina-Milan, 1933).