Profits from trade with the Levant in the fifteenth century

Abstract

To show how great were the profits in the medieval Levant trade may seem like bringing coals to Newcastle. The accounts of the strenuous efforts made to discover the sea route to India bear witness to the Europeans’ desire to get a greater share of these riches. Anybody passing by the old palaces along the Grand Canal of Venice becomes aware of the riches accumulated in the trade of the Indian spices. However, it goes without saying that the margin of profit changed in the course of time. Certainly they were very great in the period of the Crusades, both on the Red Sea and in the Mediterranean. In a Judaeo-Arabic letter written in 1134 in Aden by Abū; Zikrī Kōhēn, one reads: ‘If you would have come this year (to Aden), there would have been no need to journey to India. Youngsters came who had never travelled before, who have no knowledge of selling and buying, and those (of them) who had a hundred earned another hundred…and if he were a Muslim—a hundred and fifty’. The riches of the Kārim merchants, who specialized in the spice trade on the Red Sea, were fabulous, if one can believe the Arabic chroniclers. Judging from the Geniza documents, one would be bound to conclude that the profits in the spice trade were much greater than in other branches of trade. But in the later Middle Ages, when it had become a wholesale trade conducted on regular lines, did it still yield returns much greater than other branches of trade and industry? And if this was indeed so, how can one explain the fact that the Levant traders succeeded in maintaining high prices for the Indian commodities destined for mass consumption?