Imperial strategy and political exigency: the Red Sea spice trade and the Mamluk Sultanate in the fifteenth century.

• Author: Meloy, John L.

INTRODUCTION

A salient issue in Mamluk history of the fifteenth century A.D./ninth century A.H. is the relationship of economic conditions to the formulation of the Sultanate's policies. In a landmark study, "England to Egypt, 1350-1500," Robert Lopez, Harry Miskimin, and Abraham Udovitch explained why economic development across Eurasia came to a "dead stop" in the fourteenth century, leading to stagnant economic conditions that continued through the fifteenth century. (1) This characterization in general remains valid. Indeed, the Mamluk Sultanate of Egypt and Syria faced especially severe difficulties. The Black Death, which had swept across the Eurasian landmass in the middle of the previous century, recurred in Egypt over a period of a century and a half and led to a sustained population loss of between one-quarter and one-third. (2) By the turn of the fifteenth century, civil conflict in Egypt which resulted in the political ascendancy of the Circassian sultans and Timur's invasion of Syria compounded the economic difficulties the Sultanate continued to face. Udovitch, whose contribution to this study dealt with Egypt, concluded that Mamluk policy during this period of "readjustment and recovery" was directed fundamentally at responding to economic exigencies. (3)

If imperial activity is taken as a sign of a state's vitality, however, the reign of the Mamluk Sultan al-Ashraf Barsbay (r. 1422-38/825-41) stands out as an interlude of concerted initiative in a time of depleted resources. Although Barsbay was not able to reinvigorate the Sultanate's economy, he consolidated the new political order of the Circassians, established by his predecessors, and, to the extent that he was able to expand Cairo's imperial power to Cyprus and the Hijaz, he overcame the limitation of reduced agricultural and industrial wealth. These apparently contradictory tendencies of imperial ambition and economic stagnation require that we adopt a more nuanced view of Barsbay's rule, in order to refine the broadly drawn "contour map" provided by Udovitch and his coauthors. (4) Although the agricultural sector had been hit hard by demographic decline caused by the plague, the trade in spices, and pepper in particular, constituted a vital part of the Mamluk economy. In terms of the transit trade between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean world, Richard Mortel has found evidence in sources from Mecca of an increase in the commerce that passed through the Red Sea starting in the middle of the fourteenth century. Using a broader range of sources, Archibald Lewis estimated that "commerce reaching the Red Sea was four or five times more important than that reaching the Persian Gulf." (5) Ahmad Darrag concluded that Egypt, at least during the reign of Barsbay, was in effect subsisting solely off its spice imports to Europe. (6) Barsbay's interference in this commerce, however, should be seen, not simply as a response to economic constraints, but rather as one element in his imperial strategy to expand the Mamluk state.

This sultan is perhaps as well known for his attempt to dominate the commerce and industry of Egypt as for his expansionist foreign policy. Indeed, to a great extent his "monopolies"--his monopoly of the spice trade in particular--have come to characterize his reign. However, there are some aspects of those interventions that remain problematic and which demand further investigation, especially if they are taken to signify the economic decline of the later medieval Near East as a whole. In regard to the latter tendency, for example, Eliyahu Ashtor associated these actions with "the ruin of the upper stratum of the Levantine bourgeoisie," which precipitated "the decline of their countries, with their economic and political submission to the Western powers." (7) One key question concerns the exact dates of Barsbay's actions. Ashtor, for example, admitted that scholars have failed to reach agreement about the beginning date of the spice trade monopoly. Ashtor himself argued for 1426, (8) Weil, Heyd, and Darrag for 1428, (9) Labib for 1429, (10) and Wiet for 1432. (11) Moreover, Lane's and Ashtor's studies of the Mediterranean spice trade, based on evidence from the Italian archives, demonstrated that Barsbay's attempt to control the spice trade in the eastern Mediterranean was not successful. (12) Ashtor nevertheless regarded the interventions as destructive to the upper strata of the commercial classes.

The question of Barsbay's monopolies also brings up the issue of the intention of such a policy. Ahmad Darrag's depiction of the sultan in his exhaustive L'Egypte sous le regne de Barsbay emphasizes the role of his personality in the development and implementation of the regime's policies. While Darrag demonstrated that Barsbay's domestic and military policies must be considered in tandem, he nevertheless relied on concepts of "cupidity" and "venality" to explain the sultan's actions. (13) This view, of course, has not gone unchallenged. Abraham Udovitch, in the study cited above, arguing in opposition to the explanation of Darrag, stated that the dire economic conditions "impelled [the Mamluks] to increasingly blatant intervention in the urban economy in the form of taxes, confiscations and finally, in the 1420's and 1430's, to the late medieval equivalent of nationalization of the spice, sugar, and other trades." (14) Jean-Claude Garcin recently proposed that Barsbay's "policies showed a great coherence which cannot be reduced to a single trait of character." (15) Garcin argued that Barsbay established measures during the years 1425-27 to ensure the Sultanate's exclusive control over the trade route through the Red Sea. Because Ashtor and then Garcin could posit successively earlier starting dates for these interventions and, since the latter also identified a range of years, an accurate understanding of this problem should rest on the assumption that, rather than a fixed policy, the state employed a dynamic approach to controlling trade. While Barsbay was compelled to cope with the constraints of a stagnant economy, his commercial policy was founded on imperial expansion. On this basis we can reach the more detailed understanding of the coherence of Barsbay's actions with respect to commerce, as called for by Garcin.

During the period in question, the main emporium for pepper and other spices was the port of Calicut on the Malabar (southwestern) coast of India. Calicut's hinterland produced the pepper. The city also served as an important trans-shipment port for goods moving across the Indian Ocean in either direction. (16) The primary trade route between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterranean passed from Bab al-Mandab, at the southern end of the Red Sea, to Jedda, Mecca's seaport, where goods were trans-shipped to vessels that made their way north against the prevailing northerly winds or, alternatively, to caravans that followed the pilgrimage route in the Hijaz to destinations in Egypt and the Levant. Trans-shipment ports on the African side of the Red Sea, Aydhab and Qusayr, had by this time fallen out of use due to insecurity in the Nile valley. (17) Local conditions adversely affected the transit trade through Upper Egypt, as they did with this commerce in the region of Mecca and Jedda. Given the importance of the Red Sea trade route and the Hijaz in particular during the fifteenth century, it is necessary to understand in some detail political affairs in Mecca and Jedda and the nature of Mamluk hegemony in the Hijaz. Not surprisingly, the Italian sources used so successfully by Lane and Ashtor have little to offer about conditions and events in the Red Sea. The available Yemeni sources have also been relatively unhelpful in assessing the actions of Barsbay. Fortunately, a number of narrative accounts produced in Mecca during the fifteenth/ninth century supplement the better-known chronicles produced in Cairo and the other metropolitan centers of the Mamluk state. (18) These local Meccan sources are a manifestation of the Holy City's emergence as an urban center of some significance, due to the commercial wealth that then passed through the city and its Red Sea port of Jedda.

The coherence of Barsbay's interference in the Red Sea spice trade is evident when we view it as a process within his larger imperial strategy, particularly in respect to his general interest in the Hijaz. By adopting a view of the Mamluk state as seen from Mecca, we can distinguish between the fiscal monopoly of spice trade revenues in the Hijaz and the commercial monopoly on spice trade transactions in general. Moreover, we can understand the relationship between these two means of control. A review of the sources from both sides of the Red Sea shows that the Sultanate implemented both kinds of intervention gradually, commencing with the channeling of trade exclusively through Cairo. It was an effort that complemented a Mamluk attempt to integrate the Hijaz into the Sultanate. However, as will be argued below, the Sultanate failed to dominate the Hijaz politically and fiscally. As a consequence, to compensate for the state's failure, the sultan imposed much more restrictive conditions on the merchants who conducted this trade. But such interventions were not arbitrary actions imposed to satisfy his greed. Rather they were a deliberate response to the reduced political choices available to him as a ruler whose overriding concern was increasingly to centralize power. What have been interpreted as acts of cupidity and avarice are instead evidence of the expansion of a state that had surpassed the economic resources available to support its military and political aspirations. Barsbay exploited this commerce by disrupting the activities of merchants, but he did not have the resources to sustain a permanent monopoly. Ultimately, the sultan's exclusive hold on the transit trade in the Red Sea was compromised by the need to rely on...