The Domain in The Towns

Abstract

Palestine’s economy was dominated by its towns, not only because they were markets for local produce,¹ but also because the ports among them were important stations on the international trade routes and were increasingly busy from the 1180s onwards, following the stability brought to the Near East by the conquests of Nur ad-Din and Saladin.² As a commercial centre Acre came in the thirteenth century to rival Constantinople and Alexandria. Its dealers handled every imaginable drug and spice:³ from the East came aspic, brazil wood, cardamon, cassia, ammoniacum, arsenic and yellow arsenic, cloves, borax, cubebs, galengal, galega,⁴ camphor and the much more rare and valuable root of camphor, gariophyllus, ginger, frankincense, lavender and spikenard, libanus, myrobalans, musc, sarcocolla, senna, terebinth, indigo, zedoary, aloe wood and above all cinnamon and pepper; from Europe and the Mediterranean basin came liquorice, black-currants, mastic and saffron. Acre was not only a great spice market, trading with Ayas in Cilicia and most of the Italian and south French ports; it also exported much of the sugar consumed in Europe, which was locally produced in large quantities and was sold in loaf or powdered form or in lengths of cane.⁵