the rise of Acre as a Frankish commercial hub after Saladin’s death, or the slow shift of Norman Sicily away from links with Islamic markets to those of southern Europe.7 Even the most strident of our military accounts allow for the fact that warfare, even holy war, required the deft use of treaties and alliances, which themselves were often freighted with economic consequences. Many such treaties involved some form of condominium (munasafa, in Arabic usage) or division of lands, water sources, or harvests, for example, ratifying the economic interpenetration of the Frankish and Muslim worlds. As we have already seen, from almost the very beginning the Franks inserted themselves quite seamlessly into the political and diplomatic playing fields of al-Andalus, Sicily, and the Near East. And the use of alliances and treaties of mutual benefit continued even into the reign of Saladin, an era usually taken as a high point of Frankish-Muslim confrontation. Indeed such alliances and truces were produced despite the real gulfs that existed between Frankish and Muslim legal cultures that might otherwise have discouraged them; on the Islamic side expedients were even found to circumvent Islamic legal restrictions on, for example, the length of truces. From the first, local politics almost always trumped the needs of ideology. That such diplomatic activity appears to wane after Saladin’s time has more to do with the fact that the Muslim states in the region no longer considered the Frankish polities to be equals worth allying with or threatening enough to merit constant diplomatic massaging. Still, as we shall see, this did not prevent Saladin’s successors from making use of such diplomacy with their Frankish neighbors when particular circumstances, political or economic, dictated it.8 As in the merchant’s story, commercial interaction implies cultural interaction of some kind, and it is a relatively easy thing to trace Muslim-Frankish interchange through the commodities that they traded. Western merchants sought out the usual exotic Eastern luxuries, including spices and medicaments (such as pepper, ginger, and, that luxury of luxuries, sugar produced in the Jordan Valley), textiles, ivory, gold, and porcelain. But they also purchased basics like dyes, glassware, metalwork, metal ores, and raw goods like our merchant’s flax. In return, buyers in Islamic lands (Muslim or otherwise) purchased woolen cloth, some grains, silver, and above all wood, iron, and, as in our merchant’s second career, slaves. Such interaction is visible in the form of language, traceable most famously in the commercial terms of Arabic origin that entered into 172
The Race for Paradise