There were other subtle but important changes in the character of Catalan trade during the fifteenth century. Well-integrated local trade networks became increasingly important; ships generally travelled less far, seeking out supplies in convenient destinations close at hand. There was a constant traffic between the little town of Tossa (with perhaps 300 inhabitants) and Barcelona, carrying large amounts of timber from the Catalan forests to Barcelona.30 An even more important source of wood was Matarò, whose church contained a remarkable model of a round ship, or nau, now preserved in Rotterdam; it provides unique testimony to the shipbuilding skills of the Catalans in the fifteenth century.31 Another active line of trade, humble but important, was the transport of fish. Tax records for 1434 show how salted sardines were carried in vast numbers from the Bay of Biscay to Barcelona during Lent; Barcelonans were also eager consumers of hake, tuna and eels. Along the Spanish coasts came oil, honey, wood, metals, leather, skins, dyestuffs – a whole range of local products which provided the basis for economic recovery after the assaults of the plague.32
The ten years after 1462 saw the trade of Barcelona crippled by the Catalan civil war, but after 1472 recovery was surprisingly fast.33 During the 1470s, consuls were nominated to look after Catalan affairs in ports large and small all over the Mediterranean, including Dubrovnik and Venice in the Adriatic, Trapani, Syracuse and Malta in the kingdom of Sicily. German and Savoyard merchants came to Barcelona.34 Opportunities once again abounded. Majorca, too, remained surprisingly buoyant, despite internal crises. Ships fanned out from Majorca towards North Africa, Barcelona, Valencia, Naples, Sardinia, and even occasionally as far as Rhodes and Alexandria. Out of nearly 400 voyages between Majorca and North Africa recorded in the first half of the fifteenth century, 80 per cent of the ships were Majorcan. As in previous centuries, Majorca was a focal point for Catalan trade with North Africa, a highly desirable market because of its access to gold supplies. In Majorca, the Jewish businessman Astruch Xibili did lively business as an insurance broker for trade with the Spanish mainland, southern France and North Africa.35 Here, as in Barcelona, maritime insurance was taken increasingly seriously, reflecting the realities of the time: Muslim piracy aimed at Christian shipping, conflicts between Christian states, upheavals within towns. Yet what is striking is the resilience, indeed optimism, of those who did business across the sea in this period.
One city in the lands of the Crown of Aragon was a veritable boom town: Valencia. The eminent British historian John Elliott has written that ‘for Valencia the fifteenth century was something of a golden age’, an appropriate term if one takes into account its gold coinage, which remained ‘as steady as a gyroscope’ during the fifteenth century.36 The city was the favoured residence of Alfonso V before he abandoned Spain for Italy, and this is reflected in the large number of works of art produced within the city and in ambitious building programmes. Valencia played an important part in the development of commercial institutions. Inside the magnificent llotja the Consuls of the Sea, who had the status of royal judges, met to determine cases in maritime and commercial law. They were to be drawn from ‘the most able, the most competent and the most experienced’ members of the merchant community, and they were to issue their judgments speedily and without pompous ceremonies, impartially doing justice to both the rich and the poor. However, they preferred out-of-court settlements, for the aim was to promote harmony in the community rather than to encourage confrontation.37 The Valencian consulate became particularly famous because its highly comprehensive law-code was printed in the city in 1494, and was widely diffused.
The code addressed age-old problems in maritime law:
If any property or merchandise is damaged by rats while aboard a vessel, and the patron had failed to provide a cat to protect it from rats, he shall pay the damage; however, it was not explained what will happen if there were cats aboard the vessel while it was being loaded, but during the journey these cats died and the rats damaged the cargo before the vessel reached a port where the patron of the vessel could purchase additional cats. If the patron of the vessel purchases and puts aboard cats at the first port of call where such cats can be purchased, he cannot be held responsible for the damages since this did not happen owing to any negligence on his part.38
During a storm, the master of a vessel was required to call together the merchants on board his ship if he was convinced it would sink unless some of the cargo was jettisoned. He was to proclaim:
‘Sirs, merchants, if we do not lighten the load we will find ourselves in danger and expose all on board, plus the cargo and other merchandise and possessions, to a total loss. If you, gentleman merchants, consent that we reduce the load we have aboard, we will be able with the aid of God to save all the people on board as well as most of the cargo …’ It is obviously more sensible to get rid of some of the cargo than to sacrifice human life, the vessel and all the cargo.39
The fundamental principle that shines through the often meticulous legislation of the Consulate of the Sea is that responsibilities must be recognized and that all parties to an agreement must be protected. Thus if the ship’s master tells a prospective passenger that he is leaving at a later date than in fact happens, the full fare will have to be returned, along with compensation for consequential damages. Passengers also had their responsibilities, not least the observance of these customs and regulations.40 Since Valencia exported high-quality ceramics (including dinner sets for King Edward IV of England and the Medici of Florence), it is no surprise that careful attention was paid to the hiring of skilled stevedores who knew how to load pottery on board. If they did a good job, and there were still some breakages, the merchants and not the shipowner were liable.41 Sailors were guaranteed meat on Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays, with a stew on the other days; each evening they were to receive ship’s biscuit with cheese, onions, sardines or other fish. There was a wine ration too, and this could be provided from wine manufactured on board from raisins or even figs (steeped in water, to produce a sweet mud-coloured brew).42
Valencia benefited from the difficulties in Barcelona – the banking crises, the political strife between Biga and Busca, and, above all, the frequent attempts by the Barcelona patriciate to exclude foreign bankers from the city.43 It also benefited from its more advantageous position along the trade routes linking northern Italy to the Atlantic.44 Genoese and Florentine galleys would head down past Ibiza, bypassing Barcelona. Calling in at Valencia, they could load the up-market agricultural produce that was a speciality of the still substantial Muslim population of the Valencian horta, or countryside: dried fruits, sugar and rice, much favoured at the English court, where rice was mixed with minced chicken and sugar in a white concoction known as blancmange.45 Foreign capital dominated Valencia, stimulating the economy and increasing its advantage over the more xenophobic Barcelona. There were lively communities of Genoese, Milanese, Venetians, Tuscans, Flemings and Germans who used Valencia as their base in the western Mediterranean.46 The Milanese imported armaments and other metal goods. Merchants from Languedoc took an interest in the large quantities of wool that were brought down from the Castilian plateau, a trade partly conducted by the Jews of Toledo.47 Muslim merchants from Valencia traded with the Nasrid kingdom of Granada.48 King Ferdinand’s greedy attempts to extract higher taxes from the city slowed growth at the end of the fifteenth century.49 Still, the balance sheet for the Crown of Aragon is remarkably positive, even more so if recovery in the Italian possessions is taken into account: Sicily, rich in wheat and sugar, Sardinia, rich in wheat and salt.50 The Catalan-Aragonese commonwealth flourished, and benefited from the radical restructuring of the economy that followed the Black Death.
III
There was one oddity in the success of Valencia: the lack of practising Jews. A unique feature of the fifteenth-century Iberian kingdoms, by comparison with other western European states, was the presence in each of them of Christians, Jews and Muslims. Within Spain, day-to-day relations between Jews
, Christians and Muslims were sometimes cordial, with Christians attending Muslim and Jewish weddings, and Muslims and Christians setting up joint workshops in Valencia. But by the late fourteenth century convivencia had been replaced by an atmosphere of mistrust. The spread of the Black Death was blamed on the Jews, leading to violent attacks on Jewish quarters in Barcelona and elsewhere.51 One effect of the plague was the emergence of a new middle class, whose members sometimes looked upon the Jews as business rivals. In the late fourteenth century, Ferran Martínez, archdeacon of Ecija in southern Spain, preached with intense passion against the Jews, attempting to demolish synagogues and to despoil them of their scrolls and books. The Castilian Crown proved unable to restrain the forces he unleashed, and in 1391 popular riots in the archdeacon’s support began in Seville and then spread northwards and eastwards into the lands of the Crown of Aragon, accompanied by slaughter of the Jews and mass conversions.
The infection spread across the western Mediterranean, leading to attacks on the Jews in Aragonese Sicily during 1392.52 In Valencia City the Jewish quarter ceased to exist, for only about 200 professing Jews survived the killing or conversion of the remaining 2,500 Jews of the city. The shock was as great in Barcelona, where Jews had lived since the eighth century. The Jewish quarter or Call, in the north-west corner of the old city, was invaded and devastated. In Majorca a rural protest against the lieutenant-governor grew out of control: failing to break into Bellver Castle outside Majorca City, the peasants turned on the Call, which they invaded, murdering many of those they found. Further pressure came from above when King Ferdinand I of Aragon and Pope Benedict XIII organized a public disputation between Jews and Christians at Tortosa in 1413–14. This was not a debate between equals but an opportunity to bully many Jewish leaders into conversion.53 The numbers professing Judaism within the lands of the Crown of Aragon shrank, though among the converts there were many who maintained their ancestral religion behind closed doors. Secrecy was to become even more important by the 1480s, with the re-establishment of the Inquisition within the Spanish kingdoms. Jewish life in the Crown of Aragon seemed to be drawing to an end, not as a result of a mass expulsion but because of intolerable pressures within Iberia.
The mass conversions of 1391 and 1413–14 seemed to suggest that, under pressure, most Jews would convert. After Ferdinand II acceded to the throne of Aragon in 1479, he gradually reverted to the tough policies of his grandfather and namesake. In order to address the issue of converted Jews who kept up their old religious practices (often known as ‘Marranos’), he revived the Aragonese Inquisition, and extended it across Spain, where it was seen as a tool of royal interference even by Old Christian families.54 The Dominican friars who manned the Inquisition convinced Ferdinand that its job would never be done unless converts and Jews were totally separated, by the removal of all professing Jews from Spain.55 Ferdinand’s great hope was that most of the Jews would convert rather than depart (he had no antipathy to people of Jewish descent and favoured sincere conversos). Yet the decrees led to a mass migration. Very many Jews – perhaps 75,000 – abandoned Spain, though the great majority, by now, were Jews from Castile, given the disappearance of so many Catalan and Aragonese communities after the convulsions of 1391. Still, it was from the ports of the Crown of Aragon that many Spanish Jews from both Aragon and Castile set out in search of refuge.
The refugees were sometimes treated quite well and sometimes execrably: there is no reason to disbelieve stories of shiploads of Jews who were thrown into the sea by captains and crews.56 The sultan of Morocco did not want them, so the nearest Muslim land was a poor option. Although many of the ships that carried them were Genoese, Genoa was unwelcoming, for it had never encouraged Jewish settlement within the city: the Jews who landed there were confined to a spit of land full of discarded rocks and debris; facing a harsh winter many were tempted to convert.57 It made more sense to head for new homes in southern Italy, where Ferdinand’s cousin Ferrante welcomed them with open arms, ensuring that his officials checked each immigrant to see what that person’s special skills were as a craftsman or merchant, and insisting that the Jews should be treated humanamente. A few months later Ferrante welcomed a second surge of Jewish immigrants from Aragonese Sicily, from which they had also been expelled, despite the objections of the city council of Palermo, which feared for the economic effects.58 Ferdinand remained passionate about expelling Jews as he conquered new lands across the sea – banishing them from Oran in 1509 and from Naples in 1510.59
More important than their number is the impact the exiles had on the wider Mediterranean world. They moved through southern Italy and then, as they were expelled from there, they fanned out: some went a little way north, reaching the courts of friendly princes in Ferrara and Mantua; others penetrated the Ottoman lands, where the sultan could not believe his good fortune in acquiring their skills as textile-workers, merchants and physicians. A sixteenth-century French agent at the Ottoman court wrote that the Jews
have among them workmen of all artes and handicrafts most excellent, and specially of the Maranes of late banished and driven out of Spain and Portugale, who to the great detriment and damage of the Christianitie, have taught the Turkes divers inventions, craftes and engines of warre, as to make artillerie, harquebuses, gunne powder, shot and other munitions; they have also there set up printing, not before seen in those countries, by the which in faire characters they put in light divers bookes in divers languages as Greek, Latin, Italian, Spanish and the Hebrew tongue, being to them naturell.60
The Ottomans, ruling over vast areas where Muslims were a minority, were easy in their minds about the presence of the Jews in their domains, subject to the usual limitations imposed by dhimmi status. Salonika (Thessalonika) became a particular focus of settlement.
Many of the exiles saw the expulsion from Spain as a sign that the tribulations of Israel were not about to increase but that they would soon end, with the redemption of the Jews under the leadership of the Messiah. In this spirit, some headed for the land of their distant ancestors, settling in Safed in the hills of Galilee, where they were also eager to set up weaving workshops and other enterprises. At the same time they immersed themselves in kabbalistic texts and produced liturgical poetry which was widely diffused across the Mediterranean and beyond. One of their rabbis, Jacob Berab, had made his way from Maqueda, near Toledo, to Fez, then to Egypt and finally to Safed, where he dreamed of re-establishing the ancient Jewish council of sages, the Sanhedrin, as a prelude to the Messianic Age.61 As the exiles travelled eastwards, they carried with them memories of Spain or, in Hebrew, Sepharad. Many of these Sephardic Jews continued for centuries to speak fifteenth-century Spanish, which they spread within the Jewish communities of the Ottoman lands and North Africa – the language often called ‘Ladino’, though it acquired vocabulary from other languages as well, such as Turkish. The widespread adoption of Ladino among the Mediterranean Jews was part of an act of cultural imperialism that also saw the Sephardim impose their liturgy and practices on the Jews of Greece, North Africa and much of Italy. For the Sephardim insisted that they were descended from the Jewish equivalent of hidalgos, and that they were the aristocracy of the Jewish people who had lived in Spain in splendour. Had not the prophet Obadiah referred to ‘the exile of Jerusalem that is in Sepharad’?
The year 1492 also saw the final extinction of Muslim rule in Spain, when, on 2 January, Boabdil, king of Granada, surrendered his city to Ferdinand and Isabella after a long and painful war, which helped to confirm Isabella’s dubious claim to the throne of Castile. The surrender treaty preserved the right of the Muslims to stay in their former kingdom; if they did wish to leave, their shipping costs would be covered by the king and queen. They were expelled from Granada and all the Castilian lands only in 1502, following an uprising in the Granadan Sierra three years earlier. Yet nothing similar happened in the lands of the Crown of Aragon, whose Muslim population was concentrated in the kingdom of Valencia and in southern Aragon.
Maybe a third of the population of the Valencian kingdom was Muslim in the fifteenth century, diminishing as Christian settlement advanced and as Muslim families converted to the dominant faith. The famous water tribunal which still meets every Thursday outside Valencia Cathedral to adjudicate the distribution of water in the fields outside the city perpetuates some of the principles and methods of the Muslim farmers of the late Middle Ages.62 But isolation from the Muslim world and the loss of their elite meant that the Muslims of Aragon and Valencia struggled to maintain their knowledge of Islam or, in some areas, of the Arabic language.63 Ferdinand was a canny ruler who realized that the expulsion of the Muslims would lead to depopulation and economic chaos in kingdoms whose prosperity had already been placed at risk by the civil war under his father. It was only in 1525, nine years after he died, that an attempt was made to convert every Spanish Muslim to Christianity, and it was only from 1609 onwards that the ‘Moriscos’, as they became known, were ruthlessly expelled en masse from Spain.64
IV
Within Castile and Granada, Ferdinand possessed near-equal status with his wife Isabella, though she was only queen consort in Aragon. But after her death in 1504, Ferdinand was denied the regency of Castile by the Cortes for several years, prompting him to turn his attention more decisively towards the Mediterranean, and the revival of his uncle Alfonso’s Mediterranean empire. His concern became the fortunes of the Crown of Aragon, and he assumed that Castile and Aragon would once again go their separate ways after his death. With the help of the ‘Great Captain’, the brilliant military commander Fernando González de Córdoba, he restored direct Aragonese rule over Naples in 1503, after a short struggle with the French, who had returned to Italy under King Louis XII, less with the intention of crushing the Turks than in the hope of anchoring down Louis’s claim to the duchy of Milan.65 As with Alfonso, Naples was not an end in itself: Ferdinand, whose politics often had a strong Messianic flavour, aspired to lead a crusade for the defeat of the Turks and for the recovery of Jerusalem, and a few expeditions headed eastwards, such as a flotilla sent under the Great Captain’s command to Kephalonia – not, admittedly, very far from the heel of Italy.66 These daydreams were further stimulated by the insistence of an eccentric Genoese sailor, Christopher Columbus, that he would find enough gold in the Indies to pay for everything Ferdinand’s heart desired.67
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