The Era of Chinese Predominance, 1000–1500 55
that needed rather less artificial improvement than was the case in
China. By the later fourteenth century, wool, metal, and other raw
materials from the north and west came to be exchanged for wine, salt,
spices, and fine manufactures from the south; and an ever more elabo
rate grain trade supplemented by expanding fisheries everywhere
sustained urban populations. The intra-European market, in turn,
hitched up with Moslem-managed trade networks of the Middle East
and North Africa, and with the commerce of the southern oceans. The
same Italian cities that organized Europe’s interregional exchanges
were the main trade partners with Moslem and Jewish merchants of
the eastern Mediterranean. These Levantines, in turn, were connected
with deeper Asia and Africa by commercial links that tied all the
diverse peoples of the ecumene more and more closely together be
tween the eleventh and the fifteenth centuries.
A more or less homogeneous organizational pattern and level of
technique apparently established itself as a lubricant for trade
throughout the southern seas, all the way from the south China coast
to the Mediterranean. Regular use of a decimal system of numerical
notation and of the abacus was one conspicuous and important accom
paniment of this growth of trade. The value of such systems for
facilitating calculations of all sorts is difficult to exaggerate and can
be compared only to the cheapening of literacy that the invention
of alphabetic writing had allowed some twenty-three hundred years
earlier.
In addition to this fundamental simplification of numerical calcula
tion, the long-distance trade of the southern seas depended on a clus
ter of institutional conventions. Rules for partnerships, means for
adjudicating disputed contracts, and bills of exchange that allowed
settlement of debts across long distances with a minimal transport of
hard currency probably had an ecumenical scope. The same applies to
rules for managing ships—how to divide profit among those aboard,
organize responsibility, insure against loss, and the like. Moslem and
Christian practices in these matters were nearly identical; what little is
known of how the Chinese managed long-distance sea trade seems to
match up quite exactly.^65
- For the Mediterranean, Robert S. Lopez and Irving W. Raymond, Medieval Trade
in the Mediterranean World (New York and London, 1955), is a useful starting place. For
the Indian Ocean, Michel Mollat, éd., Sociétés et compagnies de commerce en orient et dans
l'océan indien: Actes du huitième colloque internationale d’histoire maritime, Beyrouth, 1966
(Paris, 1970) is the best available summary of what little is known. For China, Shiba,
Commerce and Society in Sung China, pp. 15–40. For interesting sidelights on the India
trade, and its congruence with Mediterranean patterns, see S. D. Goitein, Studies in
Islamic History and Institutions (Leiden, 1968), pp. 329–50.
