which we all spring. As historians grow more subtle they will see more clearly the subtlety of life, and their histories will be more subtle. In our efforts during the past half-century to attain precision and impartiality, two indispensable qualities in every history worthy of the name, we have overlooked other qualities needed in any perfect work. For a while we were told with much stubborn assertion, that it makes no matter how a man writes, or how he presents his facts; if readers can discover all the facts in the historian's dump, his end was achieved. From this came the epigram: "If a book of history is interesting, it is not history." This doctrine of muddle, or slovenly writing, condemns itself, and though some still practise it, none praise it. Speech being the instrument through which human beings exchange thoughts, does anyone maintain that he speaks best who stammers most?

Let "Hospitality" be written over the gate which opens on our great domain of history. Let every worker, if he be earnest and true, be held in honor, and let each work according to his talents. and his choice. There must be distinctions-what is life but an unending series of distinctions-there must be great and small, but identity in purpose will bring all into a common equality of friendship.

WILLIAM ROSCOE THAYER.

GENOESE TRADE WITH SYRIA IN THE TWELFTH CENTURY

THE economic significance of the medieval Italian cities has received less attention from historians than it has deserved, perhaps because their political and artistic importance has been so striking. But the bonds of medievalism were material as well as spiritual. Life in the later Middle Ages was freer and richer not only because the spiritual bonds were being shattered but because physically men were more comfortable; because the new tastes could the more easily be gratified through the possession of greater material means. In the increasing interchange of commodities throughout the Mediterranean that assisted so much in this transformation of the Middle Ages, Florence, Venice, and Genoa played the dominant rôles. The first two, as centres of medieval civilization and trade, have justifiably received the greatest attention; with them Genoa failed to compete in any but the commercial field. The Genoese have not thought deeply nor built grandly. They never achieved the political coherence of Venice or the solid native industrial foundation of Florentine life. Yet in commercial and colonial exploitation no shore of the Mediterranean escaped Genoese influence, and in a large measure the peoples on its western shores for centuries were dependent on the Genoese merchants for most luxuries and many necessities. To the historian, moreover, Genoa should be particularly interesting, because the preservation of the archival records has been so nearly complete from the twelfth to the sixteenth century that the economic phenomena of the changing world can best be observed there in fine. detail.

Perhaps never since the ancient Phoenicians has a people been so exclusively maritime as the Genoese. About them on the east and north, behind them as it were, rose a mountain-wall as an obstacle to landward growth. To the south lay the whole Mediterranean, a field of activity promising the richest rewards, limited only by their own energy and perseverance. The physical situation predestined them to a maritime career. Their restless activity made that sea their own, not indisputably, but upon it no rival could with impunity disregard their will. With admirable restraint they extended their hegemony over Liguria but only within the safest of limits, so that no rival to sea power might arise near by. To the maritime and ( 191 )

mercantile motive all the hard strength of the folk was directed; even the factional rivalries that ravaged the internal life as in no other medieval Italian city, were hushed when the sea power was threatened, when the nerves of the commune, its commerce, were assailed, or when some great maritime enterprise was in prospect.1 It is not the purpose of this paper to trace this spirit throughout its course but to treat the period in which it first reached self-consciousness, looked into the future, formulated a plan, tried various experiments, with different degrees of success, and at last entered upon its own. The time roughly was the twelfth century, from the beginning of the Crusades to the capture of Constantinople by the men of the Fourth Crusade. The field was the whole Mediterranean, and the great success came in Syria. Within that period the commune was born, tried its strength, and at the close began its greater career.

All the foundations of Genoa's later triumphs were laid in the twelfth century. Once a Roman municipium, long under Byzantine rule, reduced by the Lombards in the seventh century to a defenseless village, pillaged again and again by the Saracens in the ninth and tenth, it was not until the eleventh century that the city was free and strong enough, in momentary alliance with Pisa, to attack the Saracens with some success, to dispute with her occasional ally their respective rights in Sardinia and Corsica,2 and to look far afield. for the realization of her destiny. As early as 1087-1093 the Genoese dreamed of conquests in Africa and Spain, but the strife of internal factions, grappling for the control of the government, then just escaping from the feudal domination of the Ligurian margraves, was not stilled until Urban II. gave the summons to the Crusade. The Genoese heard that call which so stirred Christendom and seized upon it as a means toward unity and power. At once they were launched on a career in the Levant that was to make their city the great emporium of the western Mediterranean, a point of exchange between East and West for many centuries.*

1 E. Heyck, Genua und seine Marine im Zeitalter der Kreuzzüge (Innsbruck, 1886), pp. 1-4.

2 H. J. Sieveking, "Genueser Finanzwesen mit besonderer Berücksichtigung der Casa di S. Giorgio ", in Volkswirtschaftliche Abhandlungen der Badischen Hochschulen, I. 3 (Freiburg i. B., 1898), pp. 1-2; A. Schaube, Handelsgeschichte der Romanischen Völker des Mittelmeergebiets bis zum Ende der Kreuzzüge (Munich, 1906), pp. 63-64.

3 Annales Ianuenses, in Fonti per la Storia d'Italia pubblicate dall' Istituto Storico Italiano, vols. XI., XII. (Rome, 1890), I. 13.

4 The belief in a thriving Genoese trade in the Levant previous to the First Crusade, founded almost entirely on fable and forgery, has persisted curiously. See W. Heyd, Histoire du Commerce du Levant au Moyen-Age (Leipzig, 1885),

In view of the lack of locally manufactured goods of high value. of the failure to produce sufficient food and materials for home consumption, Genoese trade could only be built upon profits gained from rare products of the Levant, the need of which throughout the West would furnish the economic force necessary to the attainment, first of independence, secondly of economic predominance. To this end the full strength of the people was directed, ignorant as they were of the economic law behind their efforts. To accomplish their object several things were essential. First of all political independence, primarily of the margraves, secondarily of the Empire; this was achieved in 1162. Next, the unquestioned leadership of the Ligurian coast, and control of the passes into Lombardy; this also Barbarossa recognized long after it had been usurped. Thirdly, the acquisition and retention of varied, numerous markets in the West; this necessity was the basic cause of the Pisan wars which have seemed to be the central thread of early Genoese history. That warfare persisted intermittently for nearly two centuries, but it was only a single feature of the general plan, the constant expression of an idea frequently disclosed in other ways. The crushing of Ligurian independence, the shrewd diplomacy that won the markets of southern France and northern Africa, the bold daring that sought a permanent foothold in Moslem Spain by the conquest of Almería and Tortosa, the attempt to erect a Sardinian puppet king, the haunting dream of the mastery of Sicily-all these were but expressions of the attempt to fulfill their economic destiny by securing the western complement to their Levantine prizes, not the futile struggles of unreasonable hatred and political incompetence.

5

From the religious and romantic impulse with which the Crusades began, the Genoese apparently were so free that to them the Crusaders were merely men to be carried to the East "certo naulo", maintained there by Genoese aid, in return for rewards and privileges of deep import. It would almost seem that to them, as later to the Venetians, the Crusade was a matter of indifference except as it affected their material prosperity. A foothold somewhere in the Levant was absolutely essential to their mercantile life; in Constantinople, despite mighty efforts, they were unsuccessful, outstripped I. 124; Schaube, op. cit., p. 65; C. R. Beazley, The Dawn of Modern Geography (London, 1901), II. 422. The only basis for assuming a Genoese connection with the Levant earlier than the Crusade, is that Caffaro the annalist, a participant in the First Crusade, accepts the possibility of a Genoese ship having gone to Alexandria some time earlier. Liberatio Orientis, in Fonti, XI. 99.

5 Heyck, op. cit., p. 2.

by the Venetians in Alexandria their trade prospered periodically as circumstances over which they had little control allowed' I: Syria their foothold was secure, not so assured as to be free from interruptions, caused either by their over-exertion in the West, or by the misfortunes of Christian dominion in Syria, but secure enough to supply the real basis of their growing commerce. By the fall of Constantinople in the Fourth Crusade the Genoese efforts were perforce concentrated in Syria, where a new epoch of commercial prosperity was opened to them. By that time the markets of the West had been acquired, and Genoa had become the leading centre of exchange west of the Adriatic. The era of experiment and transi tion was ended.

Viewing the century of Genoese effort from 1097 to 1205 as a whole, one may observe several distinct stages through all of which the Levantine trade runs as a dominant motive impelling the young commune to thought and activity, meeting advances and checks contingent upon the successes and failures to which it gave the impulse The first stage, from 1097 to 1154, is characterized by the exuberance of the first enthusiasm, producing most of the main lines of later development, but closing with five years of serious economic depression, the result of over-exertion. The second stage, 1154 to 1164, is that in which the revived trade with Syria prospered in accordance with the highest expectation and enabled the Genoese to throw their commerce like a great net over all the western sea. Like the earlier period it ended in a catastrophe, owing to a mad effort in Sardinia, which threw the commune into debt, a civil war, and a long struggle with Pisa. From those disorders Genoa had not yet recovered when the Lombard wars stilled all thought of extension abroad, to be followed by the collapse of the Christian power in Syria before the strength of Saladin. With the Third Crusade. into which the Genoese plunged with their full strength, that the source of their commercial prosperity might be regained and rebuilt, began the last stage, characterized by expansive tendencies which clearly foretold the triumphs of the thirteenth century.

While the notarial archives enable us to observe details best in the second and last stages, those of greatest activity, one may say that the first stage, from 1097 to 1154, was formative, a period of political organization at home, of conquest abroad. The period begins, under the stimulus of the First Crusade, with the formation of the commune itself just before 1097—a compagna of all the arms

• Schaube, op. cit., p. 228 ff.

7 Ibid., p. 148.