Asia, Africa and the Trade of Medieval Europe

Abstract

Introduction Distinctive features of trade in the Islamic world The medieval Islamic world, by comparison with western Europe, constituted a highly urbanised civilisation; and it combined distinctive regional specialities in industrial activity, agricultural production and cultural life. It was a civilisation whose great economic centres were tied together by successful and esteemed merchants, exploiters of the regional variety of the Muslim world; it was a civilisation which drew from the lands beyond its periphery – from Christian Europe, the spice islands and black Africa – many of the essential commodities upon which its wealth was constructed. Indeed, the economic dependence of the Islamic lands on non-Muslim regions helped to generate into life a new species of competitor: the mercantile republics of Italy and southern France, whose naval victories assured Christendom of command over the Mediterranean as early as 1200. The appearance of thriving communities of Christian merchants in western Europe only increased the commercial importance of the Islamic world, as the principal channel for the transmission of African gold and Indonesian spices to new centres of demand in the Latin West. In other words, the history of trade through the lands of Islam, towards Europe, becomes a dominant theme in the development of Muslim trade. In the late Middle Ages Egypt, Anatolia, Iraq all remained important consumers of the luxury articles which western merchants also required; but fluctuations in business, even the organisation of trade, were increasingly responsive to impulses from the West. Thus, a wealthy group of Egyptian spice traders, the ‘Karimi’ merchants, flourished partly in response to western demand for eastern spices on sale in Alexandria and other great ports.

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