Trade and Religious Boundaries in the Medieval Maghrib: Genoese Merchants, their Products, and Islamic Law

By deploying Italian notarial evidence alongside Islamic legal sources and Arabic literary evidence, this dissertation shows that the relationship between medieval Genoa and the Maghrib developed under the influence of Islamic legal norms governing trade between Muslims and Christians. Genoa was a powerful and wealthy medieval city, at the center of the economic expansion of Europe during the Middle Ages, whose assets included a far-flung series of colonies, enclaves, and legal privileges from London to Iran. The city's relationship with the Muslim world was crucial in establishing Genoa as a trade hub. Both Muslim legal experts and Christian merchants favored institutions that regulated and limited interactions between Christians and Muslims in the port cities of Tunis, Bijāya, and Ceuta during the thirteenth century./nHistories of Christian-Muslim relations in the medieval Mediterranean have long focused on multi-confessional societies such as Iberia, Sicily, or the various Christian and Muslim polities of the Eastern Mediterranean. The Introduction discusses the Genoese presence in the Maghrib in light of the existing literature on alterity, conflict, and co-existence, and argues for the relevance of non-state actors such as merchants and religious scholars in defining Christian-Muslim interactions. Chapter One discusses the varied source bases available to investigate the relationship, from Latin notarial documents produced in medieval Genoa, to chronicle evidence, to merchant manuals. Genoese notarial sources were overwhelmingly concerned with recording sales, legal actions, and so on, but can be read in aggregate to understand Genoese investment preferences, reactions to events, and social lives regarding the Maghrib trade. Available Arabic sources include late-medieval fatwā compilations, chronicle evidence, and letters. While these sources are not always in explicit dialogue with each other, they can be used to answer similar questions: what were the important items in trade? Where did trade take place? Who controlled the terms of trade?/nChapter Two reviews the major political and economic history of the Maghrib and Genoa during the thirteenth century. Over this period, the political unity of the Maghrib was lost as the Almohad empire collapsed, with local rulers establishing a variety of different regimes in the port cities of the region. Genoese merchants thus faced the challenge of negotiating terms of trade and settlement in a changing political environment, and were not above taking advantage to raid or even contemplate outright conquest when conditions seemed right. Nonetheless, relationships between Maghribi cities and Genoa were resilient and survived violent disruptions, with the Maghrib accounting for a significant proportion of all Genoese foreign investment before the 1260s and the opening of the Black Sea trade./nIn Chapter Three, the dissertation turns to the physical and conceptual spaces in which trade took place, with particular emphasis on the fondaco, the suq, and the customs-house (diwān). Muslim legal experts and Christian merchants alike favored limiting exchange to certain zones where transactions could be witnessed, goods protected, and translation services made available. Another important impetus came from Muslim jurists' desire to limit Christian interactions with Muslims in certain spaces, such as the city market, based on their assumed violations of Islamic legal norms governing the sale and manufacture of certain items. Chapter Four offers an analysis of the people and social groups who were active in the Maghrib trade, showing how the category of "merchant" in fact obscures the very wide range of Genoese society that was involved in both trade and travel, including artisans, legal professionals, sailors, and servants, men and women. Furthermore, free Maghribi Muslims and Jews were also present in Genoa alongside a sizeable slave population, and their activities were not limited to large-scale trade, but included small loans, labor in the port, and ransoming slaves./nChapter Five explores the material aspect of trade, by reviewing what physical objects changed hands and why some items created more problems than others. Goods such as wine, wine by-products, and certain textiles gave rise to concerns among Muslim religious elites about impurity, and led to a discourse about necessity, public utility, and privacy in the consumption of potentially suspect commodities and "Christian" products. Comparison with Genoese notarial documents suggests that many material concerns that appear in the fatwās (pork lard, cream of tartar, wine) were well represented in the Maghrib trade./nMedieval Genoa has long been understood as a capitalist or proto-capitalist society characterized by merchant entrepreneurs, individualists, and pragmatists who established institutions that became influential in the modern economy. The dissertation shows how the Genoese trade diaspora in fact functioned within and depended on religious legal principles governing trade across religious boundaries, and highlights the importance of material culture in understanding how those boundaries were constructed.

Advisor: Miller, Maureen C