Aspects of Trade in the Western Mediterranean During the Eleventh and Twelfth Centuries: Perspectives from Islamic Fatwās and State Correspondence

The eleventh and twelfth centuries were a time of momentous change for the Muslims of the western Mediterranean. Considerable Islamic territory in Iberia had been lost to Christian reconquest during this period, a situation that provoked the annexation of Muslim Spain by a powerful confederation of North African Berbers known as the Almoravids.¹ At the same time that the Almoravids were annexing Islamic Iberia to their North African empire, the region known as Ifrīqīya² appeared increasingly under threat, initially from the Italian city state of Pisa, which launched an assault on the Tunisian coastal city of Mahdia in 1087, and subsequently from the Normans who, having successfully wrested control of Sicily from Muslim rule in 1091, embarked on a campaign to occupy Tripoli and Mahdia, both important terminal points for the lucrative trans-Saharan trade. Alongside these external threats, the inhabitants of Ifrīqīya fell victim in the mid-eleventh century to a series of ruinous Bedouin invasions, culminating in the destruction of the venerated city of al-Qayrawān in 1057.³ They found themselves some four decades later in the difficult position of absorbing the growing number of Muslim refugees arriving from Norman-ruled Sicily, and of determining the legality of maintaining commercial relations with that land, now lost to the fold of Islam.

The aim of the following essay will be to flesh out the consequences that these reversals had on commercial activity in the Muslim lands of the western Mediterranean during the eleventh and twelfth centuries. More specifically, it will address a host of issues that bore directly on trade during the period of Almoravid and Almohad rule, a time when the balance of power in the western Mediterranean began to shift palpably from Islam to Christendom. The issues that will be examined include the dilemmas posed by the circulation of multiple currencies in a single region, the nature of commercial relations with Sicily following the completion of the Norman conquest in 1091, the Muslim response to Pisan piracy along the North African coast, the characteristics of trade agreements with Christian powers, and the treatment of non-Muslim merchants residing in Ifrīqīya in the final decades of the twelfth century. Each of these issues will be situated within the broader context of changing power relations in the western Mediterranean during a time that witnessed a rather remarkable expansion of Christendom into lands formerly under Muslim control. The measures taken by the Muslim rulers of this region either to resist or accommodate this foreign presence, especially as it impinged on trade networks, will be a particular focus of concern. Of specific interest in this regard will be the fatwā, a formal Islamic legal opinion, and the discussion that follows will underscore at several points the pivotal role this legal instrument played in the Muslim effort to come to grips with the growing influence Christendom exerted on trade in the western Mediterranean. The essay will also rely on state correspondence from the Almohad era, and the series of epistles examined herein will form a significant part of our analysis of various trade agreements that were concluded with Christian powers in the latter twelfth century, Pisa in particular. The degree to which this correspondence reflects the effort of Muslims of the western Mediterranean to accommodate, and indeed profit from Christian merchants residing in their midst will likewise come in for consideration.

There are two Muslim jurists who will figure prominently in the following discussion. The first of these, Ibn Rushd al-Jadd (d. 1126),⁴ was the grandfather of the eminent Andalusī philosopher Averroes, and he served as the chief jurist of Cordoba for several years during the period of Almoravid rule of Islamic Spain in the early twelfth century. The second jurist, Abū ‘Abd Allah al-Māzarī (d. 1141), was a contemporary of Ibn Rushd and lived in the Tunisian city of Mahdia.⁵ Al-Māzarī was well placed to observe the effects of the Norman conquest of Islamic Sicily, the influx of...