As the strength of Byzantium began to ebb under the
pressure of the advancing hordes of Turkomans, the rebelions of
small war-lords, and the never ceasing efforts of the western
church to gain control over religion, the Democracies of Venice
and Genoa began to establish footholds on the Greek Aegean islands.
The Venetian galleys were plowing the Aegean with their hauls
ladden with spices and silk which was arriving on camels from
the East.
The islands of Euboea, Naxos, Tinos, Paros, and in
the Northern Aegean, Limnos, Imbros and Tenedos became safe heavens
for the Genoan and Venetian captains who brought their galleys
to anchorages under the protection of the castles.
Egypt which had been the granary of Rome and Byzantium,
continued to produce sufficient cereals for its population but
other sectors of its agriculture began to decline. Studies of
documents in archives in southern France, the Italian archives
and Catalonia indicate that a great volume of foodstuffs were
imported from southern Europe into Egypt and Syria during the
fourteenth and fifteenth centuries.
Olive oil was most prominent among the imported goods.
In earlier centuries Egypt had imported oil from Tunisia and Syria.
During the Mamluk period, however, the production of oil in Syria
must had decline so much that merchants began to import it from
south Europe. The Cretan Emmanuel Piloti wrote during the third
decade of the fifteenth century about the tremendous amounts of
olive oil imported to Egypt from Andalusia and Majorca. He also
mentions the import of Greek olive oil.
Olive oil was also imported from southern Italy,
both from Apulia and Campania. Merchants were marketing oil in
Egypt through agents, while the Venetians were also exporting
oil to the Muslim Levant.
Other merchants from cities like Naples, Amalfi and
Gaeta were also exporting oil to Egypt, while the Genoese exported
oil from Naples and Provence.Traders, Traded Goods, and Trade Zones in the Levant.
Conquest is a relative term and could include seizing
of lands and legal claims of entitlement, physical occupation
of space with the seizing territory and the garrisoning of troops,
control of crucial centers and routes, and even the leverage to
collect taxes and levy troops. And the economies of trade in the
Levant both mirrored and drove the economies of conquest. Military,
naval, and diplomatic action were geared to protect the provisioning
of cities as much as to acquire control over agricultural lands
and the positions of trade.