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Christianity. The conquest of Corsica (1091), Sardinia (1022) and Sicily (1058-90) took from the Saracens bases of operations they had held since the ninth century and which had enabled them to blockade the West. In 1097 a Genoese fleet sailed to Antioch bringing reinforcements and supplies. Two years later Pisa sent out vessels under orders from the Pope to deliver Jerusalem. From that time on the whole Mediterranean was opened to western shipping. As in the Roman era, communications were re-established.
Genoese and Pisan ships kept these routes open. They were constant patrons of eastern markets where the products of Asia came by caravan and ship from the Red Sea and the Persian Gulf, and they frequented the port of Byzantium.
At the same time, there were incursions into the Mediterranean by the descendants of Vikings, such as the Normans.
These northern merchant-pirate adventurers aroused the ire of the Italian powers that had already begun to establish themselves. The Normans became a major mercantile and military power in the south of Italy and adjoining regions.
This stirred Venetian jealousy. Venice at this moment was merely a rising new power on the eastern seas, but it would brook no rivalry. In the spring of 1100 a Venetian squadron ambushed the Pisan fleet from Jerusalem at Rhodes. Thus began eternal strife between the rival sea powers, both on ship and on land, culminating in open war.
By the twelfth century, sea commerce reached France and Spain. After long stagnation, the old port of Marseilles took on new life. The Spanish ports Catalonia and Barcelona - out of which the kings of Aragon had driven the Moors - profited in turn.
Inland, passes such as the St Bernard and the Brenner opened to the North. Italian merchants were present in Paris in 1074, and at the beginning of the twelfth century, the fairs of Flanders were also drawing numerous Italian traders.2
Trading vessels were instrumental in spreading sugar, that most significant cultural item. Crops were traded from Egypt and were being grown in Cyprus in the tenth century, and from there were taken to Sicily in the eleventh. Henry the Navigator brought the magic granule to Madeira, and thence it was planted throughout the Atlantic islands.3
The islands played a similar role in the dissemination of silkworms and some related cultural movements.
"It was by way of Cyprus and the sumptuous court of the House of Lusignan, that there came to the West, more slowly than the light of some stars reaches the earth, the costumes of the ancient bygone China of the T'ang dynasty"
Fashions, the barometer of cultural change, which travelled these routes included the long pointed shoes and the hennins (pointed hats) that had been fashionable in China in the fifth century. These same items did not become the height of fashion in Europe until the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries.4
Alexandria and the Syrian settlements were the place where Western traders, following on the heels of the Crusaders, collided with another world.
Here they met Arabs who brought spices from India: Tunis was the terminal for caravans bringing gold across the Sahara from Palola; Caffa and Tana in the Crimea were where Italians traded with Russians and brought Chinese silk from Mongolian cameleers. Italian merchants preferred not to venture further than this, despite the claims of Marco Polo that it was safe.5
Through trading ports such as this poured the nectar of trade that was to play a major role in awakening the lives of European women to almost forgotten possibilities of luxury and variety.
FAIRS AND MARKETS
In order for women to benefit from this awakening of commerce, there had to develop a means by which they could obtain produce for their daily use. Long before there were shopping malls or supermarkets, women bought the produce of the world at their own doorstep, in fairs and markets.
The fair is to be distinguished from a market. The former was a periodical gathering of merchants to sell particular items. Markets were regular and localised more or less permanent selling centres. Both of these ways of marketing produce were very vulnerable in the face of social upheaval.
The women of Europe relied on a tough, hard working, hard fighting, adventurous, and not too scrupulous sub culture of merchants to bring the goods to market. Rapidly, after the First Crusade, the numbers of merchants increased, as did the size and frequency of their markets and fairs, and the range of goods they sold increasingly included materials drawn from the Middle East.
A picture of the life of such a merchant is in Reginald of Durham's story of the life of St Godric of Finchale (d.1170), who earned his first money as a beachcomber. He then joined a merchant company trading in the North Sea. Buying a ship from his earning, he went abroad as captain. Favoured by luck, he acquired shares in other vessels. Then he settled in a port and sent others in his place. Late in his life, he surrendered his wealth and became a hermit.
St Godric achieved fortune after beginning life in poverty, due to his constant hard work, quick wit, and according to Reginald, his unfailing piety when turning a coin. Reginald describes him as vigorous and strenuous in mind, whole of limb and strong in body, medium height, broad shouldered and deep chested, with a long face, grey eyes, clear and piercing, a handsome nose, a pointed chin (covered by a long, thick beard). Godric had a short, thick neck, knotted with veins and sinews, slender legs, and his whole skin was rough beyond the ordinary, until softened by old age.6
The continued refinement of culture introduced by the returning Crusaders relied on such men trading goods through the fairs and markets of Europe
But according to Professor de Roover, the development of these means of exchanging produce presents no uniform picture.7
During the Dark Ages, trade did not disappear altogether, although it fell to a low ebb. Thus, the Muslim ambassador Ibn Yaqub who visited Germany and France in 953 is
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