Amalfi, Pisa and the Islamic World before the Crusades : Cities on the Sea

Drawing on textual, art historical and archaeological evidence, this book shows how Italian merchants peacefully entered trade relations with the Islamic world by adopting its conventions, its practices and even its clothing.

Using sources from both Italy and the Islamic world, and the Jewish sources preserved in the Cairo Geniza, David Romney Smith reveals that the Italian trade network in the era of the crusades was structurally the same as the world created by Muslim and Jewish merchants of the 10th and 11th centuries, and that far from setting out as conquerors of the Mediterranean, the Italians contended with a disadvantageous position which obliged them to cooperate with prevailing norms. The book demonstrates what this meant for the two chief (at the time) maritime cities of western Italy, Amalfi and Pisa; how they encountered the greater Mediterranean and its wealth, and the transformations they undertook to adapt to its exotic vistas.

Amalfi, Pisa and the Islamic World before the Crusades convincingly contends that only the coincidence of calamitous instability in Islamic regions, caused by climatic and other extrinsic factors, enabled the Italians to reposition themselves as dominant players in the Mediterranean, a process facilitated by the open nature of the Islamic-Jewish trade network which offered opportunities to all comers. As a consequence, Romney Smith compellingly interprets the First Crusade not as a novel excursion, but rather the military consolidation of a growing economic advantage, and the great expansion of medieval Italian maritime cities as a continuation of systems originating in the so-called ‘Golden Age of Islam’.