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PatriciaSkinner, Medieval Amalfi and its diaspora, c. 800–1250 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. Pp. xix+280. ISBN 9780199646272 Hbk. £65)

2015; Wiley; Volume: 68; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1111/ehr.12119_21

1468-0289

David Abulafia,

Historical Studies of Medieval Iberia

Tiny Amalfi appears again and again in the literature on the medieval Mediterranean, assigned a precocious role, alongside Venice, in the creation of trade routes linking western Europe to the Levant, including the Byzantine Empire. Like Venice, the town had no Roman past, and yet, like Venice, early Amalfi enjoyed loose but valuable political ties to the Byzantine Empire. The lack of a coherent account of its history at the peak of its fame is a curious omission, and one well worth filling, especially since more focused studies—for instance, those on the Amalfitans outside their home city—have greatly enlarged our understanding of the city and its inhabitants. The problem is that everyone writing about the city has adopted a different perspective on its rise and decline, and even the notion of its decline has been forcefully challenged. A major contribution in the last 40 years has been that of Mario del Treppo and Alfonso Leone, Amalfi medievale (Naples, 1977). Del Treppo wanted to emphasize the bonds between Amalfi and the lands round about, characterizing the Amalfitans as keepers of vineyards more than as merchants and even calling Amalfi ‘a city without merchants’, which was surely going too far. Patricia Skinner has done much to redress the balance in her new book. At the heart of the discussion are the questions of what Amalfi was and who the Amalfitans were: beyond Amalfi lies a cluster of smaller towns, most famously Ravello high up on the cliffside, which also participated in the town's economic activities. Then there is the question of the Amalfitans scattered across southern Italy, who appear in places far away from the coast such as Benevento, and on the opposite coast of Italy, in the Apulian towns. So one begins to wonder whether the description ‘Amalfitan’ in Greek, Latin, and Arabic sources was a generic term for ‘south Italian merchant’, rather as Harold Wilson would characterize all foreign bankers as ‘the gnomes of Zurich’ during the 1960s. Skinner is a highly respected historian of southern Italy, and much more besides, who has already written an important monograph on a south Italian town that followed a similar trajectory to Amalfi, Gaeta. She stands very close to her documentation, and is very keen to use what there is (the survivals from Amalfi being quite uneven) in new and interesting ways, to tease out evidence for the social relationships of the Amalfitan elite, the dispersal of Amalfitans across southern Italy, and their presence overseas in Constantinople, Alexandria, Acre, and—much more doubtfully—Spain and the south of France. There are very few trade contracts similar to those found in contemporary Genoa or Venice; but Skinner has over a thousand published documents from the period 800 to 1250 with which to conjure up an image of the city's social structure and economic activities. She is able to reconfigure Amalfi in significant ways, stressing the need to provide a rounded ‘human history’ of the city and its people that takes into account evidence from physical remains and that questions the insistence of external sources on the special reputation of the Amalfitans as international traders based in a city brimming with luxury goods. By demonstrating the over-riding importance of kin networks, she shows that the successes of Amalfitans in Mediterranean trade were just that: successes by people who traced their origins back to Amalfi, rather than the successes of an Amalifitan polity with an extraordinarily long reach beyond southern Italy. She raises the important question of whether the trade of these Amalfitans was channelled through Amalfi itself, as Arabic writers tended to suggest, or whether the Amalfitan traders created networks beyond Amalfi, tying together their centres of operation in Sicily, North Africa, Byzantium, and Egypt. This is a major contribution to the history not just of medieval southern Italy, a relatively neglected area of the peninsula, but of the Mediterranean at a time when the Italian cities were establishing their mastery over the Mediterranean trade routes. As Skinner shows, the role of Amalfi cannot really be compared to that of Genoa, Pisa, and Venice, where vigorous city governments fostered trade in collaboration with local elites and by way of treaties with overseas rulers; moreover, many of the Amalfitan migrants who spread out across southern Italy by 1200 were less interested in commerce than in acquiring land. Later generations took advantage of the administrative reforms of Emperor Frederick II to offer their skill as literate and numerate subjects of the Sicilian Crown to the elaborate machine of government in southern Italy and Sicily. By seeing Amalfi in proportion, Skinner very successfully demythologizes a small city with a big reputation.