The Mediterranean Trades

The Mediterranean at the beginning of the sixteenth century was still very much a world of its own. It was still a large world, not yet dwarfed by comparison with the world of great oceans beyond Suez and Gibraltar. A ship – an ordinary merchant ship, with reasonable weather – took up to two months to make the passage, say, from Cartagena or Alicante to Alexandria; perhaps two or three weeks from Messina to Tripoli of Barbary; ten or twelve days from Leghorn to Tunis. There was plenty of space, plenty of elbow room; and the area as a whole was almost self-supporting. The sixty million or so people who inhabited the countries bordering the inland sea produced between them most of the food, many of the raw materials and almost all the manufactured goods which they consumed. They built their own ships and carried their own trade. The richest, liveliest and most varied economic activity of the region was concentrated in the relatively small area of northern Italy comprising Milan, Florence, Genoa, Venice, and their smaller neighbours and satellites. Florence and Milan were primarily manufacturing centres – Florence had little success in developing its own trading fleet, and Milan never possessed one – but Venice and Genoa, both great industrial centres, were also major naval powers and bases of great merchant fleets. Outside Italy, Ragusa specialized in very large ships for carrying bulky goods, grain, salt and wool. France, growing in unity and prosperity, attracted an increasing volume of Mediterranean traffic into the Rhone Valley by way of Marseilles, with its busy fleet of light lateen-rigged craft.