The Rational Optimist_ How Prosperity Evolves - Matt Ridley [83]
Later, by adopting two Chinese inventions, the lateen sail and the sternpost rudder, the Arabs extended their commercial tentacles deep into Africa and the Far East. A dhow that sank off Belitung in Indonesia in AD 826 was carrying objects of gold, silver, lead, lacquer, bronze and 57,000 ceramics, including 40,000 Changsha bowls, 1,000 funerary urns and 800 inkpots – mass-produced exports from the kilns of Hunan for the wellheeled consumers of Basra and Baghdad. Not coincidentally, the free-trading Arabs exchanged ideas as well as goods and culture thrived. As they spilled out of their homeland, Arabs brought luxury and learning to an area stretching from Aden to Cordoba, before the inevitable imperial complacency and then severe priestly repression set in at home. Once the priesthood tightened its grip, books were burned, not read.
The merchant of Pisa
In due course, these Muslim gains from trade began to lift Europe out of its self-sufficiency thanks largely to Jewish traders, who in the tenth century abandoned the increasingly oppressive court of the Abbasids in Baghdad for the more tolerant regime of the Egyptian Fatimids. Settling along the southern shores of the Mediterranean and in Sicily, these Maghribi traders developed their own rules of contract enforcement and punishment by ostracism, quite outside the official courts. Like all the best entrepreneurs, they thrived despite, rather than because of their government. And it was they who began to trade with the ports of Italy. Italian peasants started to discover that instead of dividing their land among impoverished heirs they could send sons to town to trade with Maghribi Jews.
Northern Italy, because of a stand-off between the Holy Roman emperor and the pope, was temporarily favoured by an absence of greedy rent-seeking kings. When Arab piracy and papal plunder paused under the influence of the first Otto, the towns of Lombardy and Tuscany found themselves free to set up their own governments, and since towns were there because of trade, these governments became dominated by the interests of merchants. Amalfi, Pisa, and above all Genoa began to flourish on the back of the Maghribi trade. It was a Pisan trader living in north Africa, Fibonacci, who brought Indian–Arabic decimals, fractions and the calculation of interest to Europe’s notice in his book Liber Abaci, published in 1202. Genoa’s trade with North Africa doubled after an agreement for the protection of merchants was reached in 1161, and by 1293 the city’s trade exceeded the entire revenue of the king of France. Lucca acquired a strong position in the silk trade and then in banking. Florence became wealthy through weaving wool and silk. Milan, gateway to the Alpine passes, flourished as a market town. And Venice, long independent in the safety of its lagoon, gradually became the epitome of the trading state. Despite competing and often warring with each other, republican city states, run by merchants, not only took care not to tax or regulate trade into extinction, but did everything they could to encourage it: in Venice, for example, the government built and leased ships and arranged convoys.
Italy’s prosperity was felt in northern Europe, too. Venetian merchants crossed the Brenner pass into Germany in search of silver and began to appear at Champagne fairs in Flanders – another no man’s land between kingdoms – bringing silk, spices, sugar and lacquer in exchange for wool. In the early 1400s, for instance, Giovanni Arnolfini settled in Bruges as an agent for his family silk business in Lucca, and was immortalised in the famous painting by van Eyck. Although a small percentage of the European population in the Middle Ages would have even encountered silk