the mediterranean and the atlantic 415
Christian conquests throughout most of Mediterranean and Atlantic Iberia. Ferdinand
III (1217–1252), king of Castile and León, conquered Córdoba in 1236 and Seville
in 1248. His son, Alfonso X (1252–1284), took Cádiz and Puerto de Santa María
(both on the Atlantic) and Murcia (on the Mediterranean) in the first decade of his
rule. Jaume I (1213–1270), king of the Crown of Aragon, gained the great city of
Valencia and its eponymous kingdom in 1238, marking the eastern kingdom’s last
serious participation in the work of the reconquest and the beginning in earnest of its
Mediterranean expansion (O’Callaghan, 1975: 331–427; MacKay, 1977).
By 1300, Muslim presence in the peninsula had been limited to the kingdom of
Granada, though Islam held precariously to Gibraltar, Algeciras, and Málaga. This
would come to an end, at least for the first two locations, in the mid-fourteenth
century when Alfonso XI (1312–1350) won an impressive battle at the River Salado,
the high point of a series of energetic campaigns to recover the Spanish region
around the Straits of Gibraltar. These political changes and the wane of Muslim
power on the European shores of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic adjacent to the
Straits of Gibraltar had important consequences for trade and navigation between
the two regions in the late Middle Ages and afterwards. This is not to say, of course,
that Christian control of one shore of the Straits was the sole reason for the
increase in trade. It was not. The conquest of Seville in 1248 had led to the settle-
ment of a large number of Genoese merchants and bankers in the city and to the
formalization of trade routes between northern Europe and Italy. And the Genoese
were not the only Italian merchants involved in the Atlantic–Mediterranean connec-
tion. Merchants from Pisa, Florence, and even Venice benefitted from the new
opportunities to sail across the Straits and, far more important, to have bases on the
Atlantic side of the Straits to refurbish their ships and as launching points toward
northern waters and markets.
Shortly after 1300 and beyond, the traffic between the Mediterranean and the
Atlantic increased dramatically. The reasons for this increase in commerce between
the two seas did not arise all of a sudden. These mercantile links had been in the
making for a while. The rise of textile manufacturing in Italy, rivaling that of Flanders,
increased the need for wool and other commodities. Mediterranean merchants, mostly
Italians from Genoa, Piacenza, and other points on Italy’s western coast, maintained
permanent trade routes into the Atlantic, establishing commercial links with England,
Atlantic Spain, and Flanders. The Genoese, who as we have seen above, had settled an
important mercantile and banking outpost in Seville shortly after the Christian con-
quest of the city in 1248, became important players in the trade that linked Iberia to
the North Atlantic and the Mediterranean (Collantes de Téran Sánchez, 1977).
As a result of complex geopolitical factors at work toward the end of the Middle
Ages, there was already a noticeable shift in the making from the Mediterranean to
the Atlantic as the focus of western European commercial life. This shift was not
immediate or perhaps even fully apparent to those most affected by this transforma-
tion. Braudel’s influential book still places the Mediterranean at the heart of Europe,
describing it as an expansive commercial world that reached, though a series of roads
and fluvial networks, northern Europe (Braudel, 1972–3). The nature of the Atlantic–
Mediterranean trade was a complicated one, having its roots in previous medieval
political and economic changes. The connections may not always be obvious, but they
were there. For example, Ferdinand III’s conquest of Seville had depended, to a large