1
Introduction
During the first two decades of the fourteenth century, the Florentine poet Dante
Alighieri (1265-1321) composed his famous Divine Comedy. In the poem, Dante described
Heaven, Purgatory, and Hell, the individuals found in those locations, and the earthly actions
that led to their varying fates upon death. For example, Dante placed those who committed
violent acts in Hell’s seventh circle. This includes a group that might not immediately seem
associated with violence. Observing this group, Dante described how
Despondency was bursting from their eyes;
this side, then that, their hands kept fending off,
at times the flames, at times the burning soil …
When I had set my eyes upon the faces
of some on whom that painful fire falls,
I recognized no one; but I did notice
that from the neck of each a purse was hung
that had a special color and an emblem,
and their eyes seemed to feast upon these pouches.
1
These tortured souls were usurers.
2
Though usury had long been reviled throughout the Latin
West, Dante’s placement of usurers in Hell was an articulation of the contemporaneous
hostility that existed towards the practice.
3
Indeed, Dante’s placing usurers in Hell can be
thought of as a natural culmination of “the intensified anti-usury campaign of the thirteenth
century” that existed throughout Latin Europe and that preceded the composition of his
poem.
4
During the thirteenth century, an immense number of philosophical, spiritual, and
less-studied legalistic tracts were composed decrying the practice of money lending at
1
Dante Alighieri, Inferno, trans. Allen Mandelbaum (New York: Bantam Books, 1995), 130.
2
Usury was considered a violent act by medieval theologians because, like robbery, it involved theft of another
person’s property.
3
Paolo Cherchi, “Canto XVII: Geryon’s Downward Flight; the Usurers,” in Lectura Dantis: Inferno, ed. Allen
Mandelbaum, Anthony Oldcorn, and Charles Ross (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1998), 231-33.
4
John H. Munro, “The Medieval Origins of the Financial Revolution: Usury, Rentes, and Negotiability,”
International History Review 23, no. 3 (2003): 522.
2
usurious rates.
5
But, as is evident by Dante’s placement of money lenders in Hell, usury
continued to be practiced throughout medieval Europe despite its numerous prohibitions and
the antagonism directed towards the practice. Both the act of usury and the cultural trends it
inspired were so dispersed that, despite these feelings, they remained a central component of
thirteenth-century European society. What directly propelled the widespread practice of
usury in thirteenth-century Europe, however, were events that occurred thousands of miles
away from the Latin West.
Nearly a century earlier, around the year 1235, the Empire of Mali was formed in
West Africa after Sundiata Keita (r. ca. 1235-55) defeated his personal rival and king of the
Sosso, Soumaoro Kante (d. 1235), at the battle of Kirina. The events surrounding the
founding of the Empire of Mali have subsequently been passed down via oral tradition in the
famous epic of Sundiata. Sundiata’s victory and the trials he faced leading up to that moment
are worthy subjects for the genre: after the battle and the establishment of Imperial Mali,
nearly two centuries of political instability absent a regional hegemon and characterized by
constant conflict between semi-autonomous states following the decline of kingdom of
Wagadu in the mid-eleventh century were concluded.
6
As the epic of Sundiata details, one of
the new emperor’s first acts following his victory was to hold a courtly reception attended by
representatives of all the peoples recently incorporated into his nascent empire. After this
audience assembled, Sundiata’s personal jeli, a type of poet who wields political power in
Mande society, recounted the deeds of his master, describing Sundiata’s victory as being of
far-reaching importance:
5
For discussion about how legal writings influenced public sentiment toward usury, see John F. McGovern,
“The Rise of New Economic Attitudes in Canon and Civil Law, A.D. 1200-1550,” Jurist 32, no. 1 (1972): 46.
6
For a succinct description of this period, see Robert Cornevin, Histoire des peoples d’Afrique noire (Paris:
Éditions Berge-Levrault, 1960), 246.
3
Peoples, here we are, after years of hard trials, gathered around our savior, the
restorer of peace and order. From the east to the west, from the north to the south,
everywhere his victorious arms have established peace … In the world man suffers
for a season, but never eternally. Here we are at the end of our trials. We are at peace.
May God be praised. But we owe this peace to one man.
7
Though grandiose, these words are not merely embellishments typical to panegyrics feting
kings. Rather, the idea that Sundiata established global peace was (and is) meant to be
understood literally. Still today, Mande cosmology maintains that the wielding of political
power by certain classes like blacksmiths, from which Soumaoro Kante descended, upsets
the universal order and throws it into chaos; similarly, it also holds that members of the
hunter class, from which Sundiata Keita descended, are best equipped to return the universe
to a stable state following its disruption.
8
Sundiata’s victory was understood by his subjects,
then, as not simply leading to a new secular political order. Instead, Sundiata’s ascension to
the emperorship of Mali constituted part of a larger cosmological process that witnessed him
literally restoring harmony to the entire universe, his influence thus reaching far beyond West
Africa.
Though seemingly separated by vast distances of both geography and time, Dante’s
placement of usurers in Hell was directly connected to Sundiata’s victory at Kirina. As the
world’s major supplier of gold between the tenth and fifteenth centuries—one estimate
holding that the region supplied two-thirds of the world’s gold—West Africa played a
significant role in the premodern world economy.
9
But, outside of studies about material
culture, the broader implications of premodern West Africa’s place in the global economy
7
D. T. Niane, ed., Sundiata: An Epic of Old Mali, trans. G. D. Pickett (Edinburgh Gate: Pearson, 2006), 74.
8
John William Johnson, “The Dichotomy of Power and Authority in Mande Society and in the Epic of
Sunjata,” in In Search of Sunjata: The Mande Oral Epic as History, Literature and Performance, ed. Ralph A.
Austen (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), 14.
9
A. G. Hopkins, An Economic History of West Africa (London: Longman Group, 1973), 82.
4
and role as primary supplier of the world’s gold have not been fully considered.
10
Discussions of West Africa’s role in the premodern global economy largely imagines
it as a static place, absent variables like political upheaval, where gold was mined and
exported on a consistent basis to sate the bullion needs of the rest of the world.
11
Of course,
this is incorrect, as West Africa was a dynamic region during the eleventh, twelfth, and
thirteenth centuries, and West African historical agents, like Sundiata Keita and Soumaoro
Kante, influenced both local and distant societies. Indeed, during this time the region
alternated between periods of political stability and instability, which “radically [altered it] as
a consequence.”
12
This had effects on its ability to supply gold to the world. As these varying
levels of gold exports waxed and waned, they also had additional cultural and social
reverberations for medieval Europe, like the development of cashless systems of payment
and the invention of theologies to allow for their use. When Dante placed usurers in Hell,
then, he was reacting to European economic innovations that developed partly due to
variations in West Africa’s ability to supply gold to the Latin West, processes that were
influenced by figures like Sundiata. Though perhaps remarkable when first recognized, this
kind of link between Dante and Sundiata was not unusual. During the eleventh, twelfth and
thirteenth centuries, political events in West Africa, driven by numerous African historical
10
For an example of the material culture approach, see Kathleen Bickford Berzock, “Caravans of Gold,
Fragments in Time,” in Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time: Art, Culture, and Exchange Across Medieval
Saharan Africa, ed. Kathleen Bickford Berzock (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2019), 29.
11
On the other hand, a significant number of historians have considered alternate potential variables in the gold
trade. The economic historian Eliyahu Ashtor asks if “political events such as the establishment of new masters
at the outlets of gold in northern Africa” had an effect on the supply of West African gold in the Mediterranean
region before concluding they did not. Ashtor, meanwhile, does not afford a similar consideration to West
Africa. See Eliyahu Ashtor, Les métaux précieux et la balance des payments du Proche-Orient a la basse
époque (Paris: École Pratique des Hautes Études, 1971), 17. Événements politiques tels que l’établissement de
nouveaux seigneurs aux débouchés de l’or en Afrique septentrionale.
12
Michael A. Gomez, African Dominion: A New History of Early and Medieval West Africa (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2018), 30.
5
agents, instigated innovative economic thought in the Latin West that fundamentally changed
European society and culture.
World(-)Systems Analysis and the Middle Ages
The standard regional perspective applied to Europe in the high and late Middle Ages
often proves inadequate for understanding the complete array of processes that drove social
and cultural trends of the era. Instead, the potential to produce more holistic scholarship
exists through the incorporation of methodologies like world systems theory into the cultural
and social histories of medieval Europe.
World systems theory is a sociological, anthropological, and historical framework
that proposes that global connections, seen and unseen, led (and continue to lead) to the
development of social systems in which all human action takes place.
13
As defined by the
sociologist Andre Gunder Frank and the political scientist Barry K. Gills, a world system is
present if “extensive and persistent trade connections” exist between regions; “persistent or
recurrent political relations” occur “with particular regions or peoples”; and if regions share
“economic, political, and … cultural cycles.”
14
Though world systems theory has
predominately been applied to global connections during the early modern and modern eras
that can be labeled as “capitalistic” without controversy, it is correct to imagine high and late
medieval Europe as also existing in a world system.
15
And, while twelfth- and thirteenth-
century West Africa is largely discussed as a peripheral region and most analysis does not
attempt to understand its broader, more profound, and non-materialistic links with the world,
13
Robert A. Denemark, Jonathan Friedman, Barry K. Gills, and George Modelski, “An Introduction to World
System History: Toward a Social Science of Long-Term Change,” in World System History: The Social Science
of Long-Term Change, ed. Robert A. Denemark, Jonathan Friedman, Barry K. Gills, and George Modelski
(London: Routledge, 2000), xvii.
14
Andre Gunder Frank and Barry K. Gills, “The Five Thousand Year World System in Theory and Praxis,” in
World Systems History, 5.
15
Ibid., 3.
6
it indeed shared a world system with high and late medieval Europe as a consequence of its
essential role in the world economy.
16
Within the last fifteen years, a scholarly trend has developed seeking to decenter the
Latin West and analyze the region as but a single part of a much larger Global Middle
Ages.
17
The primary aim through such studies is to deconstruct presumed premodern
European exceptionalism through comparative analysis, and to investigate long-range
interconnectivity both within Europe and between the West and other regions of the globe.
18
World systems theory thus naturally features heavily as a key methodological tool used in
these studies. Published in 2020, the sinologist Valerie Hansen’s Year 1000, for example,
takes an amalgamated world system and comparative approach to argue that globalization—
generally understood to be a modern phenomenon—began around 1000 CE.
19
Specifically
16
Even after the development and popularization of world systems theory, Eurocentric analyses remain the
norm, “systematically [ignoring Europe’s] predecessors, their achievements, and the nature of the system that
existed before European hegemony.” This thesis offers a corrective to this trend. For Eurocentrism in world
systems analyses, see Denemark, Friedman, Gills, and Modelski, “An Introduction to World System History,”
xx.
17
For an introduction to the Global Middle Ages, see Catherine Holmes and Naomi Standen, “Towards a
Global Middle Ages,” Past and Present 13 (2018): 1-44.
18
Ibid., 2. For an example of a comparative approach involving analysis of both sub-Saharan Africa and the
Latin West, see Anne Hauor, Rulers, Warriors, Traders, Clerics: The Central Sahel and the North Sea, 800-
1500 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). In her study, Hauor considers the meager archeological and
textual evidence of the medieval central Sahel region in light of similar but more robust evidence from the
medieval North Sea region to highlight “similarities in approaches and interpretations” (2). Hauor uses this
approach, for example, to argue that “large-scale territorial control” in the early medieval North Sea region and
medieval central Sahel was impractical and that princely power is “more fruitfully considered under the heading
of economically driven intervention” (60-61). Ultimately, Rulers, Warriors, Traders, Clerics is only
comparative in nature, though, with Hauor occasionally hinting at potential economic links between the two
regions in the eleventh- and twelfth-century Mediterranean slave trade (84).
For an example of an approach highlighting both the internal and external interconnections of the Latin
West, see Nahir Otaño Gracia, “Towards a Decentered Global North Atlantic: Blackness in Saga af Tristam ok
Ísodd,” Literature Compass 16 (2019): 1-16. In her article, Otaño Gracia proposes a new analytical paradigm of
the “Global North Atlantic” (2). Otaño Gracia’s motivations for developing this framework are to highlight
interconnectivity in the North Atlantic region (like through the dissemination of texts, and the appropriation and
adaptation of cultural forms), expand the regions commonly thought of as incorporated in the North Atlantic to
include Iberia, the Mediterranean and North Africa, and—most importantly—illuminate ways in which these
distant regions influenced North Atlantic culture. For example, Otaño Gracia undertakes a philological analysis
to locate potential later medieval Icelandic knowledge of Ethiopia in the fourteenth-century Saga of Tristam ok
Ísodd (7).
19
Valerie Hansen, The Year 1000: When Explorers Connected the World—and Globalization Began (New
7
for Hansen, combined economic and social developments on all continents of the world
around 1000 CE, theoretically connected directly through Norse expeditions to North
America, allows her to confidently state “it is fact … that a network of global pathway took
shape that year.”
20
Hansen’s argument is, essentially, Global Middle Ages scholarship
apotheosized: it develops a global historical narrative in the premodern era, sees Europe as
only one coequal member of the global whole, and is highly accessible.
21
Despite these specific, often explicit goals of Global Middle Ages scholarship,
however, sub-Saharan Africa (including gold-rich West Africa) occupies a peripheral space
in works in which the region could feature as an essential component. In the case of Hansen,
she argues that the West African gold trade reached its apogee in the fourteenth century due
to “European demand for gold” without considering West Africa’s ability to supply, or its
willingness to trade, the yellow metal.
22
The influence of medieval West Africa on the Latin
West thus remains a massive blind spot in the Global Middle Ages corpus. Tracing the
development of world systems theory and scholarly focus on the Global Middle Ages offers
answers for this analytical lacuna and provides strategies for producing more holistic
scholarship.
In its original form and without modification, world systems theory is explicitly
inapplicable to the European Middle Ages. Originally proposed in 1974 by the sociologist
Immanuel Wallerstein in his Modern World-System, world system theory in its earliest form
was deployed to explain the origins and evolution of the present-day global-capitalist
York: Scribner, 2020), 1-8.
20
Ibid., 25.
21
For example, Hansen’s argument maps with what Holmes and Standen believe the benefits of the Global
Middle Ages paradigm are. See Holmes and Standen, “Towards a Global Middle Ages,” 8.
22
Hansen, The Year 1000, 138.
8
economic superstructure.
23
Doing so, Wallerstein believes, also offers the opportunity to
locate the origins of Western global economic and political supremacy, and the inequalities
they have wrought around the world.
24
As defined by Wallerstein, then, a world system is an
interrelated group of separate capitalistic economies; “a world,” he explains by borrowing
language from Fernand Braudel, not so much “the world.”
25
Each capitalist world-system, as
Wallerstein further defines, is limited by rigid boundaries, with “core,” “semi-periphery,”
and “periphery” zones occurring within those borders.
26
Though he concludes that Europe
possessed neither the capitalistic economic policies nor the interconnectivity necessary to
satisfy his definition of a world-system until the 1500s, Wallerstein nevertheless offers the
interconnected “city-states of Northern Italy” and “city-states of Flanders and Northern
Germany” as examples of proto world-systems in high medieval Europe.
27
According to
Wallerstein, however, it was not until 1450 that two key features of the capitalist world-
system, a “‘world’-wide division of labor and bureaucratic state machineries,” were widely
dispersed enough throughout Europe for his modern world-system to begin to emerge.
28
Though it offers a new way to understand early modern global interconnectivity and
23
Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World System I: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European
World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (Berkley: University of California Press, 2011), xxvi-xxvii.
24
Ibid., 10.
25
Ibid., xviii. Emphasis the author’s.
This is also the cause for the compound adjectival use of “world” in Wallerstein’s concept of the
“world-system.” World-system in this sense is closer in meaning to “world-economy,” “Welttheater,” and
“Weltwirtschaft.” When “world system” appears in my analysis without the hyphen, it refers to something
different: a transregional network linking two or more areas of spatially distant regions of the globe. As I define
“world system,” the entire world or globe does not need to be incorporated into it, only regions traditionally
considered distant or unconnected from one another. The world system I analyze in this thesis, for example,
incorporates high medieval West Africa, the Mediterranean, and Northwestern Europe. Throughout this thesis, I
refer to this as the Western European/Trans-Saharan world system. The Western European/Trans-Saharan world
system was absolutely connected to and influenced additional regions of the globe, but those connections and
consequences are beyond the scope of this thesis.
26
Ibid., xxiv.
27
For discussion of the high medieval economy and city-states in a potential world system, see ibid., 36-37. For
further discussion of Wallerstein’s insistence on capitalism being present in his world-system (and, thus, the
absence of capitalism in Europe until the 1500s), see ibid., xxvi.
28
Ibid., 63.
9
economic innovations, Wallerstein’s world-system is thus nevertheless highly teleological,
temporally-limited, and fundamentally Eurocentric.
29
In 1979, only five years after the publication of The Modern World-System, Braudel
published his Perspective of the World in which he offered his own world systems analysis
and helpfully expanded upon, and corrected aspects of, Wallerstein’s thesis. Braudel
similarly understands world-systems as “fragment[s] of the world … [with] a certain organic
unity,” interconnected above all by economic exchange.
30
Like Wallerstein, Braudel’s world-
system also includes clearly observable boundaries, a well-defined hierarchy, and a city
serving as its center which exerts economical- and cultural-gravity.
31
Braudel deviates from
Wallerstein in two significant ways, however. First, he proposes that capitalism (and, thus, a
modern world-system) was present in Italy by the twelfth century, thereby pushing
Wallerstein’s model back four hundred years.
32
And, Braudel appreciates more explicitly
than Wallerstein that “an economy never exists in isolation,” instead additionally being
linked with a region’s culture and society.
33
As world systems include a push-and-pull
dynamic—with “the most advanced [regions of the world system] … dependent on the most
backwards and vice-versa”—Braudel’s world system model allows for connections to be
made between political events and cultural change in distant societies.
34
Still, Braudel
defaults to placing varying European cities at the center of his world system, and argues that
29
The Eurocentrism is an intended feature of Wallerstein’s analysis. When later arguing against Andre Gunder
Frank’s theory of a relatively stable 5000-year world system, for example, Wallerstein rejects his analysis by
labeling it “Sinocentric.” See ibid., xxviix-xxx.
30
Fernand Braudel, The Perspective of the World: Civilization and Capitalism, 15th-18th Centuries, trans. Siân
Reynolds (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992), 22.
31
Ibid., 25-26.
32
Ibid., 57. According to Braudel’s analysis, though, at this moment Italy existed as a sort of core in a semi-
formed Western European world-system, and in the periphery of a Mediterranean-centered Byzantine and
Muslim world-system. See ibid., 107-10.
33
Ibid., 45.
34
Ibid., 70.
10
the attendant fluctuations in power corresponding to these cities’ rising and falling fortunes
influenced peripheral regions, not the other way around.
35
Despite the positive improvements
to Wallerstein’s theory that Braudel provides, like applying world systems analysis to the
Middle Ages, the Mediterranean (and, as the early modern era progresses, Western Europe as
a whole) remains the gravitational force in its center, exerting considerable power over its
peripheral zones. In fact, Braudel explicitly names sub-Saharan Africa as a zone outside of
his medieval world-system, writing that “Black Africa [was separated] from White Africa”
by the Sahara, which acted like a “hard to penetrate” shell.
36
The sociologist Janet L. Abu-Lughod, in her Before European Hegemony, published
in 1989, most thoroughly described the high medieval world system and Europe’s position in
it. As Abu-Lughod explains, economic and cultural change in the Latin West allowed it to
integrate into a preexisting global network of commercial exchange around 1250.
37
For
approximately the century following 1250, Abu-Lughod believes that the Latin West was but
one of eight regions, interconnected through three larger and coequal trading networks,
involved in this pan-Eurasian system linking the Far West with the Far East.
38
Where
Wallerstein sees a fragmented world before 1500 later subsumed by European capitalism,
Abu-Lughod identifies a connected world in the later Middle Ages. According to Abu-
Lughod, Europe only emerged as the world’s premier economic and political force around
1350 due to social innovations in the West arising from the Black Death, and a decline in
Eastern commerce caused by the deterioration of Silk Road trade routes.
39
35
Ibid., 34.
36
Ibid., 26.
37
Janet L. Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony: The World System, A.D. 1250-1350 (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 1989), 12, 18.
38
Ibid., 33.
39
Ibid., 18; Janet Abu-Lughod, “Discontinuities and Persistence: One World System or a Succession of
Systems?,” in The World System: Five Hundred Years or Five Thousand, ed. Barry K. Gills and Andre Gunder
11
Abu-Lughod’s world system rightfully remains highly influential: it demonstrates the
wide dispersal and the impressive distances of high medieval global trade connections, in
turn deconstructing commonplace teleological narratives by arguing for the existence of a
pre-hegemonic Europe. There are significant issues with some arguments posed by Abu-
Lughod in Before European Hegemony, however, particularly as it relates to West Africa’s
position in her world system. For example, while acknowledging that gold coins were “the
preferred specie for international transactions” during this period in Europe and the Middle
East, Abu-Lughod nevertheless explicitly ignores West Africa (and, by extension, West
African gold) from her conceptualized world system.
40
Indeed, West Africa’s marginalized
position in Abu-Lughod’s world system is even represented visually, with the author
excluding the region on a map demonstrating the circuits of her world system (Fig. 1). Abu-
Lughod does attempt to justify this decision, however, arguing it is acceptable to neglect the
role of Africa in her analysis because “[its] merchants were largely local and African goods
seldom made their way to China or Europe.”
41
This is a significant oversight, greatly
underestimates the influence of high medieval West Africa on distant regions of the globe,
and requires correction.
Frank (Abingdon: Routledge, 1993), 278.
40
For the role of gold coins in international trade, see Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony, 13.
Scholars have previously noted the incompleteness of Abu-Lughod’s world system. Hauor, for
example, endorses Abu-Lughod’s general argument while noting that she “unfortunately … does not extend her
analysis to sub-Saharan Africa.” Similarly, Glen Dudbridge points out that close connections between China
and Japan in the period of Abu-Lughod’s world system means the latter should be included in her analysis, but
it is not. Despite these criticisms, as late as 2008 Abu-Lughod reaffirmed and restated her envisioned world
system, offering no corrective for West Africa’s exclusion. For Hauor’s comment, see Hauor, Rulers, Warriors,
Traders, Clerics, 102. For Dudbridge’s, see Glen Dudbridge, “Reworking the World System Paradigm,” Past
and Present 13 (2018), 299-301. For Abu-Lughod’s reaffirmation of her world system, see Janet Abu-Lughod,
“The World System in the Thirteenth Century: Dead-End or Precursor?,” in The Transnational Studies Reader:
Intersections and Innovations, ed. Peggy Levitt and Sanjeev Khagram (Abingdon: Routledge, 2008), 187-90.
41
Ibid., 36.
12
Fig. 1. Janet Abu-Lughod's world system. (Janet Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony:
The World System, A.D. 1250-1350 [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1989], 36).
Most Europeanists studying the premodern era have treated the potential economic
and cultural force of West African gold similarly. A recurring theme in works relating to gold
in the high European Middle Ages are questions posed by scholars that could likely be
resolved by investigating West African political history and incorporating it into their
analyses. Marc Bloch, for example, identifies two unanswered “problems of gold” in the
Middle Ages: minting of gold currencies’ cessation at a large scale in the ninth century, and
Genoa and Florence’s resumption of minting gold currencies in the mid-thirteenth century.
42
The role of West Africa does not feature in Bloch’s answer for the second problem, however,
as he instead proposes that unreliable silver currencies in the interior of Europe and the
42
Marc Bloch, “Le problème de l’or au moyen age,” Annales d’histoire économique et sociale 5, no. 19 (1933):
8.
13
necessity of gold for trade with the Near East impelled Italian merchant republics to mint
gold coinage without explicitly considering the region in which the metal originated in.
43
Braudel notes that gold in the Mediterranean basin during the high Middle Ages was “an
indispensable motor element for its economic life,” “without which Mediterranean activity,
and notably the rich and powerful commerce of the Levant, would have stopped or at least
been compromised.”
44
Braudel therefore pins the decline of Mediterranean trade in the late
Middle Ages on Portugal’s near-monopoly of West African gold beginning in the fifteenth
century, though he does not consider if similar processes occurred two centuries earlier.
45
Wallerstein, though in this instance publishing after Braudel, comes to a similar conclusion,
arguing that without Portuguese access to West African gold in the fifteenth century “Europe
would have lacked the collective confidence to develop a capitalist system.”
46
Wallerstein’s
entire argument, then, is contingent on Europe’s access to West African gold yet he follows
the lead of other scholars and does not consider the role of African gold in the high medieval
Western European economy.
In the authoritative work on gold in high medieval Europe, Robert Sabatino Lopez
both discusses European interest in West African gold and attempts to resolve Bloch’s
second question. But Lopez’s solution for why Genoa and Florence began minting gold coins
in 1252 is not that West Africa increased the amount of gold it exported, but instead that gold
flowed westward into Italy from low-yielding Bohemian gold mines opened in the thirteenth
43
Ibid., 23-25.
44
For the role of gold in the Mediterranean economy, see Fernand Braudel, “Monnaies et civilisations: de l’or
du Soudan a l’argent d’Amerique; un drame méditerranéen,” Annales 1 (1946): 13. Un élément moteur
indispensable à sa vie économique. For the potential consequences on the Mediterranean economy of an
absence of gold, see ibid., 12. Sans quoi l’activité méditerranéenne, et notamment le riche et puissant commerce
du Levant, serait stoppé ou pour le moins compromise.
45
Ibid., 13.
46
Wallerstein, The Modern World System I, 46.
14
century.
47
Anna Degler and Iris Wenderholm perceptively note that later medieval European
usage of West African gold to mint coins added “a political-colonial element” to the
preexisting “economic discourse of material,” but in so doing imply an unequal relationship
in which the Latin West was better suited to influence West African society.
48
Thomas
Walker comes closest of all scholars to recognizing the role of West African political history
on the European economy noting that “political fragmentation in both North and West Africa
may well have slowed the gold flow north.”
49
Walker stops short, however, observing that a
“Braudelian” undertaking would be necessary to both prove this hypothesis and reveal the
consequences such a slowed flow of gold would have had for the Latin West.
50
European Intellectual Traditions and West Africa’s “Unthinkable” Role as Global Power
A running theme thus exists in both the historiography concerning gold in the high
and later European Middle Ages and world systems analysis: West Africa’s role in the global
economy is continually ignored or marginalized, even when its inclusion would enhance
scholarship or solve seemingly inscrutable historical questions. Works begun with a desire to
decenter Europe and correct traditional teleological narratives of Europe’s rise to economic
supremacy, like Abu-Lughod’s and Wallerstein’s, are among those which fall into this trap.
51
Compounding this, valid critiques of this aspect of Abu-Lughod’s world system also frame
47
Robert Sabatino Lopez, “Back to Gold, 1252,” Economic History Review 9, no. 2 (1956): 233.
48
Anna Degler and Iris Wenderholm, “Der Wert des Goldes – der Wert der Golde. Eine Einleitung,” Zeitschrift
für Kunstgeschichte 79 (2016): 444. Eine politisch-koloniale Dimension … ökonomische Diskurs des Materials.
49
Thomas Walker, “The Italian Gold Revolution of 1252: Shifting Currents in the Pan-Mediterranean Flow of
Gold,” in Precious Metals in the Later Medieval and Early Modern Worlds, ed. John F. Richards (Durham:
Carolina Academic Press, 1983), 37.
50
Ibid., 30.
51
Abu-Lughod notes that a lesser utilized method to transform beliefs held as canonical is “by changing the
scale of what falls within its purview.” Similarly, Wallerstein cites his experiences witnessing inequalities in
late-colonial Africa as the inspiration for his work. For methods of knowledge acquisition, see Abu-Lughod,
Before European Hegemony, ix. For Wallerstein’s experiences in Africa, see Wallerstein, The Modern World
System I, 5.
15
the issue in a way that marginalizes West Africa’s role in the global economy. When Gills,
reflecting on Abu-Lughod’s legacy, notes her omission of West Africa, he argues it is only
an issue because the “exchange nexus [of the Mediterranean] played a key role in [the]
formation of West African cities and states of the medieval period.”
52
In essence repeating
the argument he is critiquing, as well as echoing Hansen and Braudel, Gills sees the Latin
West as more capable of influencing sub-Saharan Africa, rather than the two regions acting
as coequal members of the same world system. This paradox—the continual appearance of
this argument in works explicitly produced to decenter Europe—requires explanation.
No matter what the motivations are behind the production of works that utilize world
systems theory, they are part of a European intellectual tradition and dependent upon
Eurocentric norms and ideas.
53
As Dipesh Chakrabarty argues in his Provincializing Europe,
the academic tradition of studying history is rooted in progressivist thought begun during the
European Enlightenment and further developed by nineteenth- and early twentieth-century
social scientists like Marx and Weber.
54
Chakrabarty notes that continual use of this
“historicism is what made modernity or capitalism look not simply global but rather
something that became global over time.”
55
So, even highly conscious and self-reflective
histories that attempt to decenter Europe, but still rely on European models, concretize
Europe’s position as “the sovereign of all histories.”
56
Wallerstein’s search for the origins of
a global capitalist economy, Hansen’s locating the emergence of globalization with Viking
expeditions to North America, and Abu-Lughod’s implicit adherence to a teleological
52
Barry K. Gills, “Janet Abu-Lughod and the World System: The History of the World System and the
Development of World System History,” Journal of World System Research 20, no. 2 (2015): 178-79.
53
This includes the present work as well.
54
Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2000), especially 3-6.
55
Ibid., 7. Emphasis the author’s.
56
Ibid., 27-28.
16
narrative of eventual European hegemony are all firmly historicistic in the ways Chakrabarty
identifies and against which he warns. Adherence to this tradition at times appears almost
inescapable.
57
Following the publication of Before European Hegemony, its harshest review
offered the fair criticism that Abu-Lughod couched in Eurocentric norms and values her
determination of “winners” and losers, “success” and “failures” of the participants in her
world system.
58
Still, this same critic, while himself not pointing out Abu-Lughod’s omission
of West Africa, saved his most severe and pointed criticisms for differences in interpretation
of Weberian concepts, devoting three pages of precious review space to the subject.
59
The processes described by Chakrabarty would alone be enough to spur the
unintentional cloaking of West Africa’s role influencing high medieval European society.
European intellectual traditions, however, are also dependent on theories that consciously
worked to obscure sub-Saharan Africa’s position in global history, and these trends also
continue to influence the production of world system and Global Middle Ages scholarship.
As François-Xavier Fauvelle notes in The Golden Rhinoceros, a compendium of vignettes
demonstrating sub-Saharan Africa’s global dynamism in the Middle Ages, “Africa is a space
of knowledge repeatedly invented from the outside.”
60
Writing in his Invention of Africa, the
philosopher V.Y. Mudimbe describes how “anthropology and philology and all social
sciences [we can include history and the other humanities here] can be really understood only
57
As Chakrabarty notes, the academic profession of studying history developed concurrently with nineteenth-
century European colonization, and the process of colonization included the import of European university
systems. Therefore, “the globality of academia is not independent of the globality that the European modern has
created.” See ibid., 46.
58
Donald A. Nielsen, “After World Systems Theory: Concerning Janet Abu-Lughod’s Before European
Hegemony,” International Journal of Politics, Culture, and Society 4, no. 4 (1991): 485.
59
Ibid., 493-95. For Abu-Lughod’s reply to Nielsen (including a defense of her understanding of Weber), see
Janet Abu-Lughod, “Reply to Donald Nielsen’s ‘After World Systems Theory’,” International Journal of
Politics, Culture, and Society 4, no. 4 (1991): 499-500.
60
François-Xavier Fauvelle, The Golden Rhinoceros: Histories of the African Middle Ages, trans. Troy Tice
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018), 2.
17
in the context of their epistemological region of possibility.”
61
From this perspective, the
long genealogy of world systems theory and much Global Middle Ages scholarship, with
their inherent focus on the development of capitalism and materialistic connections, begins to
come into focus. Hegel’s remark in The Philosophy of History that Africa “is no historical
part of the World … it has no movement or development to exhibit,” appears to continue to
be highly influential.
62
This critique, entirely necessary, is not meant to denigrate the personal character of
scholars like Abu-Lughod.
63
Instead, it is meant to highlight that works written in the era of
Western colonialism or Western economic supremacy subconsciously utilize the normative
framework of those systems in their analyses. Scholarship like that of Abu-Lughod do not
consciously set out to employ or bolster the worst aspects of these frameworks. Rather, these
frameworks and the ideas they facilitate are so central to Western intellectual traditions that
they are difficult to avoid. Since, to borrow Mudimbe’s words, “knowledge essentially
functions as a form of power,” this is an intentional feature of these systems of thought.
64
Writing about Western anthropological ideas applied to Africa, for example, Mudimbe
further notes that “they are constrained [academic] discourses and develop within the general
system of knowledge which is an interdependent relationship with systems of power and
61
V.Y. Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and the Order of Knowledge (Bloomington:
Indiana University Press, 1988), 18.
62
Georg W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (Kitchener: Batoche Books, 2001), 117.
For the legacy of Hegel in the study of premodern African history, also see Toby Green, A Fistfull of
Shells: West Africa from the Rise of the Slave Trade to the Age of Revolution (London: Penguin, 2020), 8. Green
remarks that Hegel’s influence has caused “most historians [to be] painfully slow in pushing back against the
stereotypes regarding the ‘Africa’ of the nineteenth century and before.” Green goes further, characterizing this
as an “almost total failure of mainstream historians to take African kingdoms and their histories seriously when
writing about the birth of the modern world.” As this thesis details, this “almost total failure” extends into the
high and later medieval worlds as well.
63
For similar sentiments, see Simon Yarrow, “Economic Imaginaries of the Global Middle Ages,” Past and
Present 13 (2018): 217-18.
64
Mudimbe, The Invention of Africa, 27.
18
social control.”
65
Even the best-intentioned scholar can unintentionally produce scholarship
that elides with those systems, in turn emboldening and strengthening them.
Hansen’s discussion of sub-Saharan Africans in The Year 1000 demonstrates this
phenomenon. Globalization, the lens through which Hansen analyzes world history, is a
Western concept and an inherently passive process for the African subjects she examines. For
example, Hansen includes in her discussion of African historical developments a brief
section about the famous image of the Malian emperor Musa I (r. 1312-37) grasping a large
gold nugget found on the Catalan Atlas, produced in Majorca in 1375.
66
This image should
not be taken as an example of African history, however. Rather, it is Latin history relating to
how the West perceived, understood, and rationalized knowledge about sub-Saharan Africa
in the Middle Ages to fit its worldview. Despite scholars like Fauvelle and Mudimbe urging
against it, Hansen nevertheless conflates Western knowledge about Africa with African
history itself to locate the development of Western values in the region. In the study of the
Global Middle Ages, it is of fundamental importance to continue scrutinizing the ways in
which African history is ignored or marginalized in favor of Eurasian history. Hegel’s
comments, for example, that “Africa proper, as far as History goes back, has remained – for
all purposes of connection with the rest of the World – shut up; it is the Gold-land
65
Ibid., 28.
66
Hansen, The Year 1000, 144. Hansen also makes the peculiar decision to style Musa as “King Mansa Musa.”
This essentially equates to referring to him as “King King Musa” or “King Emperor Musa,” a needless
redundancy. Considering The Year 1000 is targeted towards both popular and academic audiences, referring to
Musa as a “king” rather than “mansa” is an appropriate choice. If this section of my thesis demonstrates
anything, it is that accessibility to works of global history are important to deconstruct pernicious historical
narratives, especially those about the Middle Ages. Similarly, I agree with Geraldine Heng that standard
stylistic choices in academic works, like non-European names over-encumbered with diacritical marks, can
potentially limit a work’s readership. Hansen’s “King Mansa Musa” construction, however, is either a
consequence of negligence—which is unfortunate given the subject matter and aim of the book—or an attempt
to simultaneously familiarize and exoticize Musa for her audience. For an example of “King Mansa Musa,” see
Hansen, The Year 1000, 152. For Heng’s commentary, see Geraldine Heng, The Invention of Race in the
European Middle Ages (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), 6.
19
compressed within itself … enveloped in the dark mantle of Night” has been (or would be)
rejected as ridiculous by any serious contemporary historian.
67
Still, this idea resonates quite
clearly with Braudel’s observation that the Sahara acted as an impenetrable shell, Abu-
Lughod’s omission of West Africa from her world system because its merchants remained
local, and Hansen’s dependence on a Western source when developing her image of the
region.
In the same way the intellectual traditions that some global historical frameworks are
grounded in implicitly foster the omission or marginalization of premodern West Africa in
analysis, the perception of sub-Saharan Africa as a location without history encourages
scholars to ignore the region as a potential source of answers to historical questions. As I will
demonstrate, Bloch’s ‘problem of gold’ and Lopez’s ‘return to gold’ have their solution and
origin in West African political history, a conclusion that neither scholar even begins to
consider. This apparent oversight is not the consequence of a personal failing of either
scholar, however. As the sociologist Michel-Rolph Trouillot reminds his readers in Silencing
the Past, “history is always produced in a specific historical context.”
68
When Bloch and
Lopez wrote in the middle of the twentieth century, the thought that West Africa and West
African actors could independently contribute so significantly to medieval European history
was not viable. As Trouillot writes, historical truths—no matter how obvious or logical—can
at certain times seem “unthinkable.” Trouillout explains: “The unthinkable [in
historiography] is that which one cannot conceive within the range of possible alternatives,
that which perverts all answers because it defies the norms under which the questions were
67
Hegel, The Philosophy of History, 109.
68
Michel-Rolph Trouillot, Silencing the Past: Power and the Production of History (Boston: Beacon Press,
1995), 22.
20
phrased.”
69
Indeed, the era in which Bloch and Lopez were writing was one where theories
about Hamitic conquest, the queen of Sheba building Great Zimbabwe, and people from
Atlantis sculpting the famous early modern Benin copper figures were all still in circulation
in some circles.
70
The works analyzed thus far that are part of the evolution of world systems
theory, as well as those by medievalists that detail the high medieval Latin West’s
relationship with gold, are all valuable and significant contributions. Still, the hindering of
analysis as comprehensive as possible by the historiographical and intellectual norms of the
eras they were produced in need to be confronted and understood. Thankfully, the ability
now exists to move past those legacies. Medievalists, whether they work in the Global
Middle Ages or not, can begin to offer correctives and produce more accurate scholarship.
Actor-Network Theory, and Other Paths Forward
Scholars working in the Global Middle Ages possess an earnest interest in developing
new methodological and theoretical approaches to better understand medieval societies and
culture.
71
Recent initiatives have included an emphasis on better understanding the
dissemination of “persons and ideas” in interregional medieval trading networks; producing
comparative studies of geographically-distant medieval societies to better understand politics
and economics in the Middle Ages; and introspectively considering aspects of the field, like
the application of the word “global” itself when describing the medieval past, to determine
what are the most suitable words to characterize the era.
72
These approaches are largely
69
Ibid., 82.
70
For an overview of these kinds of theories and their influence on the production of African historiography,
see Raymond Mauny, Les siècles obscurs de l’Afrique noire: histoire et archéologie (Fayard: Libraire Arthème
Fayard, 1970), 8-9.
71
For potential strategies to develop innovative methodologies, see Geraldine Heng, “The Global Middle Ages:
An Experiment in Collaborative Humanities, or Imagining the World, 500-1500 C.E.,” English Language Notes
47 (2009): 205-16.
72
For the transmission of people and ideas, see Jonathan Shepard, “Networks,” Past and Present 13 (2018):
116-57. For comparative approaches, see Yarrow, “Economic Imaginaries of the Global Middle Ages,” 214-31.
21
comparative, however, or the moments they analyze involve direct interaction and exchange.
Consequently, since direct links between the two regions were limited, no existing work of
historiography offers the exact framework or paradigm necessary to better understand the
extent of high medieval West Africa’s influence on the Latin West.
Terminologically, Catherine Holmes and Naomi Standen’s suggestion of a
“combinative” approach in the study of the Global Middle Ages is a fruitful starting point.
73
As Holmes and Standen describe, such an approach combines “examples that are
thematically cognate but which do not necessarily match precisely in terms of time, place or
formal characteristics” allowing the “discern[ment of] features of the Global Middle Ages
from insider positions.”
74
For instance, new interpretations and meanings can appear for both
the history of the Latin West and West Africa by combining both. Holmes and Standen’s
suggestion pairs well with the anthropologist A. L. Kroeber’s revival of a concept of a
cultural oikumene. Kroeber, fundamentally a structuralist, argues for the oikumene as a
“frame within which a particular combination of processes happened to achieve certain
unique results” to better facilitate comparative analyses.
75
Though Kroeber’s analysis,
published in 1945, is at times highly chauvinistic, he does include all of sub-Saharan Africa
in his oikumene and believes shared processes of culture formation can be located throughout
the globe.
76
My thesis modifies these two methodologies slightly: instead of focusing on
atemporal, “thematically cognate” examples, it combines apparently unconnected historical
developments—West African political history and changes in Latin society—to better
For use of the word “global,” see Caroline Dodds Pennock and Amanda Power, “Globalizing Cosmologies,”
Past and Present 13 (2018): 88-115.
73
Holmes and Standen, “Towards a Global Middle Ages,” 23-24.
74
Ibid., 24.
75
A. L. Kroeber, “The Ancient Oikumene as Historic Culture Aggregate,” Journal of the Royal Anthropological
Institute of Great Britain and Ireland 75, no. 1/2 (1945): 9.
76
Ibid., 18-19.
22
understand the far-flung consequences of both.
77
Utilizing actor-network theory in analysis of premodern world systems and the role of
gold in the Middle Ages helps reveal these connections and further facilitates the refinement
of Abu-Lughod’s, Bloch’s, Braudel’s, and Lopez’s work. Actor-network theory proposes that
the world is composed of a nearly limitless number of networks, with actors serving as nodes
of connection.
78
Consequently, it begins to produce an image of the world in which all actors
exist within networks, and those actors also serve as nodes of connection with other
networks. As described above, modified world systems approaches like Abu-Lughod’s
imagine regional trade networks as integrated into a larger world trade network. Applying
actor-network theory, however, demands appreciation of the additional social and cultural
networks, both domestically and internationally, that influenced one another. Or, to put it
another way, regional networks themselves were and are composed of an additional series of
networks.
79
Furthermore, these networks have a similarly reciprocal relationship of influence
with actors or actants, which includes all things, both human and non-human, material and
immaterial.
80
77
The methodology utilized in this thesis also shares much with the “California school” of economic history—it
is partly a synthesis of a variety of secondary sources and recontextualization of the data within them in an
attempt to produce a more complete understanding of the relationship between twelfth- and thirteenth-century
Western Europe and West Africa. This approach is similar to the one found in Kenneth Pomeranz’s The Great
Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making of the Modern World Economy. Pomeranz, in composing a
comparative economic study of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe and Asia, writes that “we cannot
understand pre-1800 global conjunctures in terms of a Europe-centered world system; we have [identified],
instead, a polycentric world with no dominant center.” Though focusing on West Africa’s influence on
medieval Europe (rather than medieval Europe’s influence on contemporaneous West Africa), this thesis
presupposes the existence of a more dynamic “polycentric world” during the period under consideration. For
“pre-1800 global conjectures,” see Kenneth Pomeranz, The Great Divergence: China, Europe, and the Making
of the Modern World Economy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 4.
78
Bruno Latour, “On Actor-Network Theory: A Few Clarifications,” Sozial Welt 47, no. 4 (1996): 370.
79
John Law, “After ANT: Complexity, Naming, and Topology,” in Actor Network Theory and After, ed. John
Law and John Hassard (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 1999), 7.
80
Latour, “On Actor-Network Theory,” 374. Latour defines an actor as “not the source of an action but the
moving target of a vast array of entities swarming toward it.” See Bruno Latour, Reassembling the Social: An
Introduction to Actor-Network Theory (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 46.
23
As the sociologist Bruno Latour, one of actor-network theory’s greatest advocates
(and critics!), describes, central to actor-network theory is the complete rejection of a “fixed
framework.”
81
In so doing, observers are no longer restrained by arbitrary boundaries from
understanding the many complicated ways actors and actants influence the world around
them.
82
Additionally, this restores the agency and potentialities of action to individuals that
neat delineations and definitions, like the eight clearly-defined trade circuits of Abu-
Lughod’s world system, implicitly hinder. Combined, such an approach ultimately allows for
the elucidation of “connections among [seemingly] unrelated elements.”
83
In the analysis to
follow, these “unrelated elements” are medieval Latin culture and West African political
events, with West African gold serving as the primary interregional actor. Demonstrating
these connections reveals unequivocally the economic and cultural links between West
Africa and the Latin West. I imagine these links as comprising its own world system, which I
refer to as the Western European/Trans-Saharan world system.
According to Abu-Lughod, West Africa’s role in the global economy was limited
because it was raw materials, like gold, that the region contributed to the world system she
identifies. Though she attempts to decenter Europe, Abu-Lughod nevertheless disregards
West Africa’s role in the world system and how its gold functioned locally. Gold’s value
during the global Middle Ages, however, was relative to specific temporal and geographic
contexts. To put it another way, Abu-Lughod utilizes a fixed reference for the value of gold
that does not work in pan-Afro-Eurasian contexts. For example, locally in West Africa
during the period under study gold was not used as currency.
84
Furthermore, even in a
81
Latour, Reassembling the Social, 24.
82
Ibid., 30.
83
Latour, “On Actor-Network Theory,” 375.
84
Philip D. Curtin, “Africa and the Wider Monetary World, 1250-1800,” in Precious Metals in the Later
24
specific context like individual high medieval European churches, gold could have varying
roles, from a means to buy goods for the poor to luxurious material used in the production of
sacral objects.
85
Not only was gold an “indispensable motor” for high medieval
Mediterranean trade, then, but it also held central roles for the cultural, social, and economic
life of all Western Europe. It follows that if the availability of gold varied in the Latin West
during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries, aspects of culture and society it was intimately
linked to varied as well: Europeans’ relationship with the metal necessarily evolved as its
availability rose and declined. To this end, Abu-Lughod notes that without preexisting world
economies, when “Europe ‘reached out’ [to them in the thirteenth century], it would have
grasped empty space rather than riches.”
86
As I demonstrate, Europe could not reach out
inter- or intra-regionally in the way it did without access to West African gold and the
innovations its absence compelled. Since Europe was part of a broader economic system that
depended on West African gold, political events in the region that affected the production
and export of that gold had the potential to significantly influence life in Europe. This was so
even if contemporaneous Europeans or West Africans could never appreciate that these
processes were occurring, or if it can never be directly located in the historical record.
Thesis Organization
I organize my thesis in two parts. Part one is a combinative history of eleventh-,
Medieval and Early Modern Worlds, 232.
The most widespread currency in use during the West African Middle Ages was cowrie shells.
Imported from the Maldives islands in the Indian Ocean, cowrie shells served a similar function in West African
societies as billon coins in Western Europe, predominately used for small payments. That cowrie shells found
their way from the Indian Ocean into West Africa first arriving at least as late as the eleventh century
reemphasizes that the region was a participant in the medieval world system. See J. S. Hogendorn and H. A.
Gemery, “Continuity in West African Monetary History? An Outline of Monetary Development,” African
Economic History 17 (1988): 128-29.
85
Elisabeth Vavra, “Ich Goldtschmid mach köstliche Ding: Organisation—Arbeitsbedingungen—Produkte,”
Das Mittelalter 21, no. 2 (2016): 276.
86
Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony, 12.
25
twelfth-, and thirteenth-century West African political history and concurrent European
cultural developments. Through my analysis of the available source material, I argue that the
period of political instability in West Africa following the advent of the North African
Almoravids in the region during the second half of the eleventh century led to a reduction in
the amount of gold exported into foreign markets, including Europe. This reduction in trade,
I further argue, lasted until the establishment of the Empire of Mali around 1235 by Sundiata
Keita. I confirm my argument by contextualizing my hypothesized decline of gold exports
with the long-lasting European bullion famine during the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth
centuries, and a sustained period of peculiar relationships between the Latin West and gold.
Finally, I further contextualize the economic and cultural innovations spurred by the bullion
famines—like the usury practiced by Dante’s sinners and the purgatory they found
themselves in—with West African history. This elaborates on the indirect links the region
had with the Latin West, and the role individual African historical agents played in the
development of European society.
Part two is a comparative analysis of the uses of gold in the Mediterranean basin by
Italian merchant republics and the Empire of Mali in the later Middle Ages. An end to the
political instability in West Africa in the thirteenth century and the increasing amount of gold
exported from the region impelled drastic changes to Europe’s relationship to the yellow
metal. Though most often analyzed by medievalists as instruments for trade and payment,
gold and gold coins in the later medieval Mediterranean basin possessed additional potential
functions. For the city of Florence, the production of gold florins beginning in 1252 provided
opportunities to imperialize their Latin rivals by usurping economic rights and
propagandizing their city through international trade networks. And, for Mansa Musa,
26
distributing gold in Cairo during his famous hajj in 1324 allowed him to demonstrate his
global powers to an international rival. Both Musa and Florence’s use of gold, I argue, are
best understood as intentional acts of imperialism, something that becomes most clear
through comparative analysis.
27
Part I: The West African Gold Trade and Its Influence on Latin Society
In his Book of Routes and Realms, the Muslim Iberian geographer al-Bakri (1040-90)
offered to his readers a brief description of the West African Kingdom of Wagadu and the
customs of its people. Located in present day Mauritania and Mali, and known in sources as
the Kingdom of Ghana due to its ruler’s title, al-Bakri’s source of information for Wagadu
was Muslim merchants involved in the trans-Saharan caravan trade.
87
From the information
collected from them, of particular note to al-Bakri was the immense and easily accumulated
gold wealth of the king of Wagadu. The anecdotes he provided about West African gold
remain as alluring to a modern reader as they surely were to his contemporary audience. In
fact, medieval Muslim geographers like al-Bakri generally only offered great amounts of
detail when they described locations they considered exotic, peoples who followed unusual
customs, or to relay important economic information.
88
With Wagadu, all three applied. He
wrote, for example, that “The nuggets found in all the mines of [the king’s] country [were]
reserved for the king, only [the] gold dust being left for the people,” continuing by noting
that “The nuggets may weigh from an ounce to a pound. It is related that the king owns a
nugget as large as a big stone.”
89
As al-Bakri further described, not only did this prerogative
enrich the king but there were so many nuggets of this kind available that his claim to them
also protected the local economy because “but for this [system] the people would accumulate
gold until it lost its value.”
90
And with so much gold available, the king of Wagadu used it to
scarcely imaginable ends: he wore “a high cap decorated with gold”; he held court “in a
87
When possible, throughout this thesis I refer to this kingdom as “Wagadu” rather than “Ghana.”
88
Emmanuelle Tixier du Mesnil, “Panorama de la géographie arabe médiévale,” in Géographes et voyageurs au
moyen âge, ed. Henri Bresc and Emmanuelle Tixier du Mesnil (Paris: Presses universitaires de Paris Nanterre,
2010), 22-23.
89
Al-Bakri, Book of Routes and Realms, trans. J. F. P. Hopkins, in Corpus of Early Arabic Sources for West
African History, ed. Nehemia Levtzion and J. F. P. Hopkins (Princeton: Markus Wiener, 2000), 81.
90
Ibid.
28
domed pavilion around which [stood] ten horses covered with gold-embroidered materials”;
he was often found surrounded by “pages holding shields and swords decorated with gold”;
and he even adorned his dogs in gold, as “round their necks they [wore] collars of gold and
silver studded with a number of balls of the same metal.”
91
Also reported to have taken place in the eleventh century, though occurring over 2500
miles north of Wagadu, the infamous king of England William the Conqueror (r. 1066-87)
had a starkly different experience with the yellow metal. In 1071 in the marshy area north of
Cambridge known as Ely, which was also the site of a cathedral and monastery, William
found himself forced to maintain a siege to subdue a rebellion that had arisen against him. As
described in the twelfth-century Liber Eliensis, after his opponents surrendered to him,
William carried out a violent retribution and “sentenced some to imprisonment, [and] some
to a deprivation of the eyes, the hands, or the feet.”
92
Following this, according to the Liber
Eliensis, William hastened to visit the shrine of St. Etheldreda (636-79) which was located in
Ely’s monastery. “At last coming to the monastery,” the chronicler reported, “standing a long
way from the holy body of the virgin he threw a marc of gold upon the altar not daring to
approach closer, fearing that a judgment from God would be brought upon him for the
wicked things which his men carried out in that place.”
93
Where the king of Wagadu
possessed so much gold that he could adorn his horses and dogs in the metal, his English
counterpart was only able to offer a single gold coin in a sincere attempt to avoid God’s
judgment, both in his present and afterlife.
91
Ibid., 80.
92
Liber Eliensis, ed. D. J. Stewart (London: Impensis Societatis, 1848), 245. Quosdam carcerali poenae,
quosdam oculorum, manuum, vel pedum privation addixit.
93
Ibid. Ad monasterium Denique veniens longe a sancto corpore virginis stans marcam auri super altare
proiecit, propius accedere non ausus, verebatur sibi a Deo iudicium inferri pro malis quae sui in loco
patraverant.
29
The scarcity of gold implied in the Liber Eliensis, contrasted so sharply with the
excess gold wealth of the king of Wagadu as described by al-Bakri, serves as an exemplar for
the Western European experience with gold between approximately 1050 and 1250. In 1054,
the North African Almoravids conquered the Sahelian trading entrepôt of Audoghast,
inaugurating a series of events that eventually led “to the ruin of Ghana,” culminating with
the Almoravids’ sacking of its most significant city Koumbi Saleh in 1076.
94
For nearly two
hundred years to follow, West Africa experienced a significant level of political instability.
By synthesizing historiography about gold in high medieval West Africa and the Latin West,
it is demonstrated that this period saw a severe reduction in the amount of gold exchanged
through trans-Saharan trade and, consequently, a decline in the amount of gold available in
Western Europe. Between 1050 and 1235, the sort of political security experienced by the
king of Wagadu in al-Bakri’s anecdote and, therefrom, the process of accumulating gold is
described in Arabic sources with significantly different terms. Similarly, Latin sources from
the same period indicate that William and his single marc of gold, the anecdote about which
was conspicuously written in the twelfth century (and during the pinnacle the gold famine
that events in West Africa created for the Latin West), was shared by many Western
European princes and merchants. It was only around 1250 in the Latin West, when Christian
polities began to resume minting gold coinage, that the famine ended.
Importantly, the experiences of the Latin West with gold in the eleventh, twelfth, and
thirteenth centuries were the consequence of decisions made by historical actors in sub-
Saharan Africa. Underlaying the evidence and examples to follow—whether it was a twelfth-
century English monk writing of a king’s meager oblation of a single gold coin, early
94
Raymond Mauny, “The Question of Ghana,” Africa: Journal of the International African Institute 24, no. 3
(1954): 208.
30
thirteenth-century Italian merchants developing cashless systems of pay to make up for the
lack of physical bullion, or mid thirteenth-century theologians reimaging purgatory to offer
those same merchants a path to salvation—were choices by sub-Saharan Africans.
Political Instability in High Medieval West Africa
Documents pertaining to West African history before the nineteenth century are
relatively rare and often epistemologically dubious. When using them in analysis, it is
necessary to remain mindful that they were overwhelmingly written by devout Muslims and
were thus anchored in a religious ideology.
95
Furthermore, they were almost always produced
thousands of miles away from the locations they were describing, with the authors relying on
information obtained from second- or thirdhand accounts.
96
But, in coordination with
archeological and sociological studies, these documents provide a foundation to begin
reconstructing the far-reaching consequences of political events that occurred in the region
during the high Middle Ages. Patterns emerge in the available Arabic sources describing
West Africa that both emphasize its great gold wealth and the precarity of the processes
involved with the production and exportation of gold.
Following the Muslim conquests of North Africa in the seventh and eighth centuries,
Muslim merchants began crossing the Sahara Desert and into West Africa, primarily
exchanging life-sustaining salt for gold.
97
As a result, the Kingdom of Wagadu was
recognized as far away as Baghdad as “the land of gold” by the early eighth century.
98
Though gold was and continues to be found throughout much of West Africa in small
95
Timothy Insoll, “The External Creation of the Western Sahel’s Past: The Use and Abuse of the Arabic
Sources,” Cambridge Archeological Review (1994): 41.
96
Ibid.
97
Gomez, African Dominion, 23. This process also led to the gradual spread of Islam in West Africa and its
syncretization with indigenous religions.
98
Nehemia Levtzion, “The Early States of the Western Sudan to 1500,” in History of West Africa, vol. 1, ed. J.
F. A. Ajayi and Michael Crowder (New York: Columbia University Press, 1972), 120.
31
deposits, most of Wagadu’s gold was obtained from the massive gold fields of Bambuk and
Bure located in modern-day Senegal and Guinea respectively.
99
Indeed, Wagadu’s hegemony
in the region stemmed not from direct control over these gold mines, but its ability to control
the flow of gold from Bambuk into the trading entrepôts along the Sahel grasslands on the
southern edge of the Sahara Desert, like the previously mentioned city of Audoghast.
100
By
the end of the tenth century, Wagadu was exporting “considerable quantities” of gold and
had emerged as a key member of the premodern world economy.
101
Even if the legends about
its wealth like those offered by al-Bakri seem unbelievable, Wagadu was in actuality an
exemplar medieval West African state, setting terms of trade with trans-Saharan merchants
and controlling the flow of gold northward from its southern hinterlands.
102
There is, however, very little evidence produced contemporaneously that offers an
accurate picture of the West African gold mining process, and much of the information about
its undertaking has been reconstructed from later sources and modern artisanal gold mining
techniques used in the region.
103
Thus, it is known that gold mining in premodern West
Africa was performed by “ordinary local farmers”—both men and women—as a “secondary
occupation” when they were not farming.
104
Overwhelmingly, miners collected gold through
pit mining, and some shafts were excavated twenty meters deep and included lateral
tunnels.
105
Mining was therefore undertaken during the annual dry season in the region, from
99
Ralph A. Austin, “The Sources of Gold: Narratives, Technology, and Visual Culture from the Mande and
Akun Worlds,” in Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time, 64.
100
Gomez, African Dominion, 32.
101
Peter Spufford, Money and its Use in Medieval Europe (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988),
163.
102
For this paradigm, see François-Xavier Fauvelle and Caroline Robion-Brunner, “Les routes de l’or Africain
au moyen âge,” in L’Afrique des routes: histoire de la circulation des hommes, des richesses et des idées à
travers le continent Africain, ed. Catherine Coquery-Balandier (Paris: Musée du Quai Branly, 2017), 86.
103
Austin, “The Sources of Gold,” 63.
104
Ibid., 65.
105
Ibid., 64.
32
late January at the earliest and into May, as the mines would otherwise flood with rain
water.
106
The entire difficult process did not provide the farmers with any great wealth, but
merely acted as a potential source for supplemental income.
107
Most likely, medieval gold
mining could only yield “one gram or less per worker per day.”
108
Though farmers acted as
miners, it was still a complicated operation requiring “a considerable degree of specialization
and coordination” to undertake.
109
Further, it required annual migrations by farmers into
especially gold-rich areas in order for the operation to occur.
110
Gold was also mined through
the less onerous process of panning alluvial streams but, nevertheless, mining gold in this
manner was a “time-consuming” process.
111
Above all, gold was only mined when “it could
be fitted into a more complex pattern of political order,” and it was therefore the sort of
operation that worked best when the local political situation was stable.
112
To this end, there
is some historiographical acknowledgment that periods of “settled government” in both
“North Africa and the Western Sudan” corresponded to a “flourishing” of the gold trade.
113
The stability provided to the region by the hegemony of Wagadu, however, declined
dramatically beginning in the late eleventh century. The conquests beginning in 1054 of
northern regions under Wagadu control by the Almoravids sent reverberations throughout
West Africa and caused the dramatic “demise … of a kingdom [once] so powerful.”
114
Almoravid supremacy in the region was itself short-lived, however, as its leader Abu Bakr
ibn Umar (r. 1056-87) was killed in a battle in 1087 and its North African and Iberian
106
Philip D. Curtin, “The Lure of Bambuk Gold,” Journal of African History 14, no. 4 (1973): 629.
107
Austin, “The Sources of Gold,” 64.
108
Curtin, “The Lure of Bambuk Gold,” 628.
109
Hopkins, An Economic History of West Africa, 46-47.
110
Austin, “Sources of Gold,” 65.
111
Hopkins, An Economic History of West Africa, 46.
112
Curtin, “The Lure of Bambuk Gold,” 629.
113
Hopkins, An Economic History of West Africa, 80.
114
Gomez, African Dominion, 38.
33
holdings were conquered by the North African Almohad dynasty in 1147.
115
Though rough
sketches of the era exist, broadly speaking West African history “is little known after
1076.”
116
What is known is that declining Wagadu power meant that “no single people
dominated the western Sudan” in the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries.
117
This created an
unstable political environment in West Africa absent a centralizing authority that allowed
peoples in the interior of the region to exert their independence.
118
This general trend is
confirmed by archeological analysis which demonstrates that the southern Sahel and Inland
Niger Delta region witnessed rapid urban decline during this time.
119
Of the peoples who developed autonomy absent a centralizing authority, the Sosso,
located in modern-day western Mali, were the most notable due to their role in the epic of
Sundiata. It is supposed that the Sosso themselves completed their own conquest of Wagadu
in 1203, enslaving its people in the process.
120
The fourteenth-century Arab historian Ibn
Khaldun (1332-1406) offered a brief narrative for this period of West African history and its
consequences for the region’s stability. According to Ibn Khaldun, “the authority of Ghana
waned and its prestige declined as that of the veiled people [meaning the Almoravids and
Almohads] … grew. These extended their domination over the Sudan … Then the authority
of the rulers of Ghana dwindled away, and they were overcome by the Sosso people … who
subjugated and absorbed them.”
121
115
Letvzion, “The Early States of the Western Sudan to 1500,” 130.
116
Tadeusz Lewicki, “Un État soudanais médiéval inconnu: le royaume de Zāfūn(u),” Cahiers d’Études
Africaines 11 (1971): 503. Après 1076 est peu connue.
117
Spufford, Money and its Use in Medieval Europe, 164.
118
Letvzion, “The Early States of the Western Sudan to 1500,” 131.
119
Roderick J. McIntosh and Susan Keech McIntosh, “From Siècles Obscurs to Revolutionary Centuries on the
Middle Niger,” World Archeology 20 (1988): 145.
120
Mauny, Les siècles obscurs de l’Afrique noire, 146-47.
121
Ibn Khaldun, The Book of Examples, trans. J. F. P. Hopkins, in Corpus of Early Arabic Sources for West
African History, 333.
34
While the Sosso had some lasting power, the instability in the region was so great that
small, short-lived kingdoms like that of Zafunu were able to carve out “its independence
from the conquest of Ghana by the Almoravids.”
122
Zafunu, a largely pastoral society likely
located in the southwestern Sahel and whose main city served as a trading entrepôt, offers an
intriguing example for this instability.
123
In his geographical work entitled The Dictionary of
Countries, the thirteenth-century Arab scholar and traveler Yaqut al-Hamawi (1179-1229)
described a near-contemporary meeting between a king of Zafunu and an Almohad prince in
Marrakesh. Despite ostensibly being under Almohad suzerainty, Yaqut nevertheless observed
that
The king of Zafun(u) is more powerful and more versed in the art of ruling than
[other West African princes]. And this is the reason for which the [people of] the Veil
Wearers [meaning, the Almohads] recognize his superiority, by demonstrating to him
their obedience and turning to him [in order to obtain his aid] in case of important
affairs of state. One year, while going on pilgrimage to Mecca, this king arrived to the
Maghreb, in the realm of the Veil Wearer al-Lamtuni, ‘prince of the Muslims.’ The
latter greeted the king on foot while the king of Zafanu did not dismount from his
horse [to greet him].
124
Despite soon after disappearing from the historical record, Zafunu grew to be powerful and
independent enough following the decline of Wagadu that its king refused to show even basic
courtesy to an Almohad prince while visiting their capital. Though the anecdote may read as
remarkable, these sorts of shifting power dynamics between Northwest and West Africa were
in fact quite typical in West Africa during the period under consideration.
125
122
Lewicki, “Un État soudanais médiéval inconnu,” 504. Son indépendance par suite de la conquête du Ġāna
par les Almoravides.
123
For the location of Zafunu, see ibid., 510. For the pastoral characteristics of its society, see ibid., 508-9.
124
Yaqut al-Hamawi, as printed in Lewicki, “Un État soudanais médiéval inconnu,” 504. Le roi d’az-Zāfūn(u)
est plus puissant que ces derniers et plus versé dans l’art de régner. Et c’est la raison pour laquelle les [peuples
de] Porteurs du Voile reconnaissent sa supériorité, en lui témoignant leur obéissance et en recourant à lui
[pour obtenir son aide] en cas d’importantes affaires d’État. Une année, en allant en pèlerinage à la Mecque,
ce roi arriva au Maghreb, chez le Porteur du Voile al-Lamtūni, ‘prince des Musulmans.’ Celui-ci accuelillit le
roi à pied tandis que le [roi de] Zāfūn(u) ne descendit pas de son cheval [pour le saluer].
125
Nehemia Levtzion, “Berber Nomads and Sudanese States: The Historiography of the Desert-Sahel
35
Arabic Sources and the Decline of the Gold Trade
At the very least, trade routes across the Sahara often changed during this politically
unstable time, making Europe’s ability to access gold more difficult and unpredictable.
126
Furthermore, even scholars skeptical about the extent of the Almoravid and Almohad
conquests in West Africa concede that “dislocation at the center reflected in a reduction of
Ghanaian influence on the periphery might actually have reduced the flow of gold” during
this period.
127
This process—political instability’s negative influence on the ability to move
gold—is present in the available sources, as well as allusions as to how it reduced the
capacity to mine gold in West Africa.
An oral tradition, for example, holds that the reason Wagadu ultimately declined was
that an evil snake cursed the region, causing “the cessation of the gold, which moved [outside
of the region under Wagadu control] … and to Bure on the Upper Niger.”
128
More
contemporary to these events in the twelfth century, the Sicilian geographer al-Idrisi (1100-
65) highlighted in his Book of Roger the difficulties involved in producing gold. Every
August, al-Idrisi wrote, gold was deposited on the island-country of “Wanqara,” often
Interface,” in Islam in West Africa: Religion, Society, and Politics to 1800, ed. Nehemia Levtzion (Aldershot:
Variorum, 1994), 5.
126
Spufford, Money and its Use, 168; Ashtor, Les métaux précieux, 21-22. Neither Spufford nor Ashtor makes
the connection that the shifting trade routes may have been a result of political events in West Africa.
Additionally, as Fauvelle and Robion-Brunner note, the control of trading entrepôts—specifically
Sijilmasa—was important for North African dynasties in order “to rule Morocco, its expansions into the Sahara,
or the Iberian Peninsula.” Consequently, nearly concurrent to the period under consideration in this thesis,
Sijilmasa itself experienced significant upheaval, going from an independent city-state, to sequentially
controlled by the Fatimids, Almoravids, Almohads, and Marinids. See Fauvelle and Robion-Brunner,“Les
routes de l’or Africain au moyen âge,” 89. Dominer le Maroc et ses extensions au Sahara ou en péninsula
Ibérique.
Beginning around 1100 CE, the Sahara also underwent “a phase of climatic unpredictability” which
forced the eventual universal adoption of the camel by Berber traders when crossing the desert, something that
also could have temporarily slowed the flow of gold from West to North Africa. For “climatic unpredictability,”
see Cynthia Becker, “The Sahara as a Cultural Zone,” in Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time, 94.
127
David Conrad and Humphrey Fisher, “The Conquest That Never Was: Ghana and the Almoravids, 1076. I.
The External Arabic Sources,” History in Africa 9 (1982): 45.
128
Letvzion, “The Early States of the Western Sudan to 1500,” 125.
36
described in Arabic sources simply as “the Island of Gold” and located an eight-day journey
from Wagadu, after the “Nile” River flooded it.
129
When the water receded, the inhabitants of
Wanqara “return[ed], flocking to that island in search [of gold].”
130
The archeologist Susan
McIntosh argues that the region Muslim geographers designated as Wanqara was not
understood literally by them to be a gold-producing island but instead a “place where gold
was procured for a wider market.”
131
Specifically as it relates to al-Idrisi, McIntosh believes
that the geographer was relaying distorted reports about a seasonal trading entrepôt in the
Inland Niger Delta region with his description of Wanqara.
132
This interpretation seems to
give a little too much credit to al-Idrisi: his topographical knowledge of areas distant from his
home of Sicily, whether it was West Africa or Northern France, was quite garbled.
133
Instead,
al-Idrisi, like other high medieval Muslim geographers, is best read as providing generalities
about the locations he described in his work.
134
At its most skeletal level, his brief passage
about Wanqara detailed certain difficulties in the process of obtaining gold, like the temporal
limitations of its procurement. And, even if McIntosh’s interpretation is wholly accurate,
such a seasonal market as she identifies in al-Idrisi’s passage, facilitated by a long-distance
diasporic trading community of Soninke people, would itself have been precarious and easily
disrupted in the challenging twelfth-century political climate.
135
Al-Idrisi’s assertion that an annual overflowing of the Nile River deposited gold on
129
Medieval Arabic authors believed the Niger and Senegal rivers were tributaries of the Nile.
130
Al-Idrisi, Book of Roger, trans. J. F. P. Hopkins, in Corpus of Early Arabic Sources for West African
History, 111.
131
Susan Keech McIntosh, “A Reconsideration of Wangara/Palolus, Island of Gold,” Journal of African History
22, no. 2 (1981): 147.
132
Ibid., 149.
133
Mauny, “The Question of Ghana,” 205.
134
Tixier du Mesnil, “Panorama de la géographie arabe médiévale,” 22.
135
For the role of the Soninke in the twelfth-century gold trade, see McIntosh, “A Reconsideration of
Wangara/Palolus, Island of Gold,” 154.
37
Wanqara appears to be an amalgamation of preexisting Muslim knowledge about the river
and West Africa. Many ancient western traditions relayed in sources later inherited by
Muslims, like the work of the Roman author Pliny the Elder (23-79), believed the Niger and
Senegal rivers were tributaries of the Nile because exotic fauna like hippopotamuses could be
found in both East and West Africa.
136
Further, before the eleventh century, most Muslim
intellectuals that wrote on the topic of the Nile adhered to the theory of the Greek author
Ptolemy (100-170) that the Nile had its original source at the Mountains of the Moon in East
Africa.
The eleventh-century Persian author al-Biruni (973-1048), for example, described
how he believed the Nile supplied gold to West Africa in his Conglomerate Book on the
Knowledge of Gems. When discussing the Nile’s source at the Mountains of the Moon, al-
Biruni wrote that “These mountains bear gold and are extremely high, so that the force of the
water carries down … big pieces of gold like ingots that resemble carrots.”
137
Comparatively,
al-Idrisi did not mention carrot-sized gold, and he wrote at a time when it was common
among Muslim geographers to believe that a branch of the Nile originated in West Africa
rather than that it flowed in that direction.
138
Still, al-Idrisi’s remark that all who collected
gold in Wanqara, “whether a large or small quantity,” were pleased because “both great and
136
Robin Seignobos, “L’origine occidentale du Nil dans la géographie latine et arabe avant le XIVᵉ siècle,” in
Orbis disciplinae: hommages en l’honneur de Patrick Gautier Dalché, ed. Nathalie Bouloux, Anca Dan, and
Georges Tolias (Turnhout: Brepols, 2017), 374.
137
Al-Biruni, Conglomerate Book on the Knowledge of Gems, trans. J. F. P. Hopkins, in Corpus of Early Arabic
Sources for West African History, 58.
138
“Seignobos, “L’origine occidentale du Nil,” 391-92.
Though believing the Niger and Senegal Rivers were eastward flowing tributaries of the Nile, al-
Idrisi’s work, including his map of the Nile River, was most often copied by scribes in Alexandria and Cairo.
Further, Egyptian intellectuals cited (or cribbed) al-Idrisi’s work in their own well into the sixteenth century.
See Jean-Charles Ducène, “Les Œuvers géographiques d’al-Idrīsī et leur diffusion,” Journal Asiatique 305
(2017): 35-36.
38
small [relied]” on it resonates with al-Biruni’s belief in a gold-soaked Nile.
139
The manner in
which gold found its way to West and Northeast Africa, much like the presence of
hippopotamuses in both regions, provided a kind of confirmation that the Nile extended
laterally across Africa. While this passage appears to hint at knowledge of the alluvial gold
mining process, more significant is al-Idrisi’s implicit acknowledgment that gold production
in the region was precarious and dependent on numerous external factors. Even though al-
Idrisi described the flooding as regularly occurring every year, he still maintained that the
amount of gold collected by those who lived in Wanqara ultimately depended on “what God
… [allowed].”
140
In Muslim sources, West African political turmoil is in fact sometimes described as
stemming from a combination of meteorological issues and divine caprice. Writing around
1252, the little-known North African author al-Dardjini reported that in 1179 “a polytheist
[king of Mali] … ruled over a vast realm … [and] possessed twelve mines, from where they
extracted raw gold.”
141
In that year, al-Dardjini continued, a “great famine” occurred, and
“the people complained about this tribulation with the king, who ordered that prayers be
made for rain … [but] the rain did not fall!”
142
Finding the power of his gods inadequate, the
king requested assistance and instruction on Islam from a Muslim merchant. After “both
spent the night making prayers and invocations,” a large cloud of rain appeared and “lasted
seven days and seven nights without stopping,” ending the famine, assisting the king, and
139
Al-Idrisi, Book of Roger, 111.
140
Ibid.
141
Al-Dardjini, “La conversion d’un roi de Mālī,” trans. Joseph Cuoq, Recueil des sources arabs concernant
l’Afrique occidentale du VIIIe au XVIe siécle, ed. and trans. Joseph Cuoq (Paris: Editions du Centre National de
la Recherche Scientifique, 1975) 471. Un [roi] polythéiste [de Mali] … régnait sur un vaste royaume … [et]
possédait 12 mines, d’où on extrayait de l’or brut.
142
Ibid. Grande disette … Le peuple se plaignait de cette épreuve auprès du roi, qui ordonna de faire des
prières pour la pluie … [mais] la pluie ne tombait pas!
39
leading to his and his subjects’ conversions to Islam.
143
The details in al-Dardjini’s anecdote
are quite different from al-Idrisi’s, particularly al-Dardjini’s explicit reference to a political
leader, but an overarching theme emerges in both: the flowing of water or its interruption is
directly related to gold wealth. According to al-Idrisi, gold could not be collected in West
Africa without a regularly anticipated deluge. Conversely, though as al-Dardjini wrote gold
was procured through more standard methods like “mining,” an absence of water led to a
miniature rebellion, threatening the political order and the king’s right to rule over his gold
mines. Ironically, if al-Dardjini’s anecdote is true, rain falling to such a degree might have
made gold mining impossible for that year. But, at its most skeletal level, the passage
describes the many different factors that played a role in the procurement of West African
gold.
Connections between economic prosperity, conversion to Islam, and the right to rule
in medieval West Africa also appears in the seventeenth-century Tarik al-Sudan, which
records some early oral traditions from the region in the process of describing the ascent of
the Songhay Empire. Though the anecdote under consideration concerns actions by a sultan
of the gold-trading entrepôt of Djenne at the end of the thirteenth century, the same general
concepts appear as in the earlier sources, hinting at broader themes in medieval West African
history and helping to solidify interpretations of al-Idrisi’s and al-Dardjini’s writings.
According to the Tarik’s author Abd al-Rahman al-Sa'di (d. after 1655), the sultan of Djenne
decided to convert to Islam around 1300. As described in the Tarik, “When [the sultan] made
up his mind to embrace Islam he ordered that all the Muslim scholars within the city should
be assembled … [then] he made a profession of Islam before them, and told them to call
143
Ibid. Tous les deux passèrent la nuit à faire des prières et des invocations … Le pluie dura sept jours et sept
nuits sans discontinuité.
40
upon God Most High to grant the city three things.”
144
After requesting that the scholars ask
God to protect foreigners in his city and to encourage immigration into it, the sultan’s final
request turned more explicitly economic: the sultan asked “that those who came to trade there
should lose patience and grow weary over selling their goods, and so dispose of them
cheaply, allowing the people of Djenne to make a profit.”
145
Al-Sa'di concluded the anecdote
by noting that the requests “were accepted by God,” and that “their efficacy [could] be
observed and witnessed” in his present day.
146
Though ostensibly a story about the divine rewards conversion to Islam could bring,
al-Dardjini’s and al-Sa'di’s anecdotes also utilized tropes found in the al-Idrisi passage about
Wanqara: all three emphasize that the health of West African polities with easy access to
gold, or at least the vigor of West African economies, was delicate and dependent on a
number of external and internal factors. For example, although the area around Djenne itself
did not produce gold, its trade did occur in the city. Al-Sa’di’s report that the sultan’s request
to God that foreign merchants get the worse end of commercial deals which occurred in
Djenne was similar in essence to al-Dardjini’s king praying for rain to fall to end a famine or
al-Idrisi’s remark that those who collected gold in Wanqara thanked God for what they
procured.
147
In fact, the consistent allusions to religion in the reports of al-Idrisi, al-Dardjini,
and al-Sa’di appear to function more as a statement about the precarious nature of rule in the
eras they were describing than potential benefits for those who converted to Islam. Generally
speaking, medieval Muslim authors who used secondhand sources were hyper conscious
144
Al-Sa’di, Tarik al-Sudan, trans. John O. Hunwick, in Timbuktu and the Songhay Empire: Al-Sa’di’s Tarik al-
Sudan Down to 1613 and Other Contemporary Documents (Leiden: Brill, 2003), 18-19.
145
Ibid., 19.
146
Ibid.
147
Djenne is generally understood now to have experienced significant decline around 1300.
41
about the deficiencies of those reports.
148
They were also suspicious about the piety of
recently converted Muslims in foreign lands, fearful that indigenous religions or non-Islamic
customs still present in syncretized religions (like those of West Africa) could lead to recent
converts apostatizing.
149
Rather than examples for the faithful to follow, religion is used by
the authors in the three reports to show how insecure and tenuous their subjects’ successes
were: though the West Africans who became Muslims were given divine rewards for doing
so, abandoning their faiths would be the end of those rewards. For an author like al-Idrisi or
al-Dardjini, this was a conservative message to develop when writing about events they were
unable to verify.
It was not until 1235 and the victory by the legendary founder of Mali, Sundiata Kieta
(c. 1217-1255), in the battle of Kirina over his personal rival and king of the Sosso, Sumaoro
Kante (d. 1235), that the political situation in West Africa began to settle. Indeed, the
combined oral and written sources celebrate Sundiata’s victory as the end of “a high level of
disorder, of chaos” in the region.
150
Much like Zafunu, “the origins of [Mali] were very
humble: truly a small chiefdom,” and Mali is nearly absent from the available sources prior
to the reign of Sundiata.
151
But, because of the lack of a unifying state in the region, Mali
developed into an empire and grew to be larger and more centralized than the kingdoms that
preceded it. The major innovation that empire brought to the region was direct control of the
two major mining grounds of Bambuk and Bure, the discovery of new mines, and control of
148
Michaël Cousin, “La perception des minoritiés religieuses dans la récits des voyageurs musulmans à
l’époque médiévale,” in Identité religieuse et minorités: De l’Antiquité au XVIIIe siècle, ed. François Brizay
(Rennes: Presses Universitaires Rennes, 2018), 145.
149
Ibid., 149-51.
150
Gomez, African Dominion, 68.
151
Mauny, Les Siècles Obscurs de l’Afrique Noire, 154. Les origins de [Mali] furent très humbles:
vraisemblablement une petite chefferie.
42
the trading entrepôts on the southern Sahel like Timbuktu and Gao.
152
Indeed, the period in
which the Empire of Mali was supreme in the region corresponded with “a flourishing time
for trade on the Saharan routes.”
153
Archeological data offers confirmation for these
developments as it demonstrates that Malian sultans used permanent capitals during their
reigns—generally understood as evidence indicating a consistent flow of commercial goods
through a region—becoming the first polity to do so since the decline of Wagadu in the mid-
eleventh century.
154
All these developments were at times also reflected less ambiguously in the sources.
The fourteenth-century Egyptian historian Shihab al-Umari (1300-84) drew direct links
between political upheaval in the region and a decline in the gold trade when describing
imperial Mali. “The kings of [this region] have learned by experience,” al-Umari wrote, “that
as soon as one of them conquers the gold towns … the gold there begins to decrease and then
disappears while it increases in the neighboring heathen countries.”
155
Unsurprisingly, then,
the pinnacle of the West African gold trade was reached explicitly during a time of low
conflict.
The Gold Famine in the High Medieval Latin West
West Africa was thus politically unstable between the late eleventh and mid-
thirteenth centuries. The available near-contemporaneous written sources and oral traditions
indicate that the era’s political instability led to a decline in the production and export of
152
Letvzion, “The Early States of the Western Sudan to 1500,” 133. For Mali’s control of Goa, see Mamadou
Cissé, “Goa, a Middle Niger City in Medieval Trade,” in Caravans of Gold, Fragments in Time, 141.
153
Hopkins, An Economic History of West Africa, 80.
154
David C. Conrad, “A Town Called Dakajan: The Sunjata Tradition and the Question of Ancient Mali’s
Capital,” Journal of African History 35, no. 4 (1994): 360.
155
Shihab al-Umari, Pathways of Vision in the Realms of the Metropolises, trans. J. F. P. Hopkins, in Corpus of
Early Arabic Sources for West African History, 262. Though al-Umari was describing West Africa during a
period in the fourteenth century in which the Empire of Mali was continuing its program of solidifying control
of the region, the anecdote nevertheless describes how gold production could be influenced by political events.
43
gold. Additionally, sub-Saharan trade routes were also disturbed during this time. These
processes appear to be confirmed by the results of metallurgic analyses on Egyptian Fatimid
dinars which indicate an over 100% decline in the use of West African gold in the minting of
gold coins between the periods of 909-1047 and 1048-1171.
156
This was followed by a
further severe debasement of Egyptian dinars during the reign of Saladin (r. 1174-1193) after
his capture of Cairo and his establishment of the Ayyubid dynasty.
157
Essentially, polities
nearer to West Africa witnessed a decline in their ability to access the region’s gold. But,
much of the world was dependent on West African gold; the same decline in its trade that
effected North Africa and Egypt also had effects on medieval Europe’s economy.
As it was, the sustained period of political instability in West Africa corresponded
with a period of drastic shortage of precious metals throughout Europe which featured a
number of “bullion famines.”
158
Precious metals were so relatively scarce during the
thirteenth century that some principalities attempted to institute “bullionist” economic
policies that legally prohibited the export of precious metals outside of their states’
borders.
159
Beginning around 1222 in England, for example, Henry III (r. 1216-72) made the
trade and exchange of bullion a royal monopoly, though it most likely was not as successful
in practice as he desired.
160
Still, without the importation of precious metals through
international trade “not many countries in Europe would have possessed a coinage” at all due
156
Ronald A. Messier, “Almoravids: West African Gold and the Gold Currency of the Mediterranean Basin,”
Journal of Economic and Social History of the Orient 17 (1974): 39.
157
Andrew S. Ehrenkreutz, “The Crisis of Dinar in the Egypt of Saladin,” Journal of the American Oriental
Society 76, no. 3 (1956): 180-82.
158
Markus A. Denzel, “The Role of Institutions in Financial Crises: Fairs, Public Banks, Stock Exchanges (13th
to 18th Century),” in The Financial Crises: Their Management, Their Social Implications, and Their
Consequences in Pre-Industrial Times, ed. Giampiero Nigro (Florence: Florence University Press, 2016), 429.
159
Munro, “The Medieval Origins of the Financial Revolution,” 543-44.
160
Ibid., 548.
44
to an absence of domestic mints and mines.
161
The bullion available in Europe until the mid-thirteenth century was overwhelmingly
silver. Though silver had been the standard currency throughout Europe since the reign of
Charlemagne (r. 768-814), the “real start of a money economy in western Europe” began in
the late tenth century following the exploitation of silver mines in the Harz mountains in
Northern Germany.
162
But by the thirteenth century, European silver currencies had greatly
deteriorated in purity and weight and were no longer a viable form of payment for large
transactions.
163
Instead, what was necessary for international trade was gold currency. As
Braudel writes, trade in the Mediterranean would not be possible for Latins without access to
“the providential gold of the [Western] Sudan.”
164
This was especially true for trade with the
entire Muslim world, in which gold was “the basis of all currency systems” by 1164.
165
Trade
between Christians and Muslims in the Mediterranean basin during the eleventh, twelfth, and
thirteenth centuries followed a general pattern: Christians would transport silver and goods to
North Africa and exchange them for gold; Christians would then transport that gold to the
Near East and exchange it for luxury wares like spices, silk, and dyes.
166
161
Pamela Nightingale, Trade, Money, and Power in Medieval England (Aldershot: Ashgate Variorum, 2007),
370.
162
Spufford, Money and its Use, 98.
163
Lopez, “Back to Gold, 1252,” 219.
164
Braudel, “Monnaies et civilisations,” 11. L’Or providential du Soudan.
Writing about the mid to late fifteenth century, Jacques Heers similarly notes that “One is able to say
that, from the point of view of monetary exchanges, the global economy was dominated by the gold of Africa.”
See Jacques Heers, “Le Sahara et le commerce méditerranéen à la fin du moyen-age,” Annales de l’Institut
d’etudes orientales 16 (1958): 248. On peut dire que, du point de vue des échanges monétaires, l’économie
mondiale est dominée par l’or d’Afrique.
165
Andrew M. Watson, “Back to Gold – and Silver,” Economic History Review 20, no. 1 (1967): 4. Numismatic
data indicates that Almoravid dinars were the primary gold currency used in the Levant by the Genoese, for
example. See Messier, “Almoravids: West African Gold and the Gold Currency of the Mediterranean Basin,”
33.
166
For trade with North Africa, see Watson, “Back to Gold – and Silver,” 14. For trade with the Near East, see
David Abulafia, “Trade and Crusade, 1050-1250” in Mediterranean Encounters: Economic, Religious,
Political, 1100-1550, ed. David Abulafia (Abingdon: Routledge, 2000), 15.
45
For these reasons, beginning with the First Crusade in 1098 crusaders also likely took
as much gold with them as possible to the Near East, utilizing treasure hoards and
repurposing precious objects crafted with gold, further draining Europe’s supply of the
metal.
167
Indeed, Latins in the Levant clearly had access to gold, but were forced to use it
locally rather than export it to Europe. Many expensive Latin projects in the Near East were
paid for with gold. This included both Latin purchases of Cyprus, each costing 100,000
Byzantine bezants, and the ransoming of the army of Louis IX (r. 1226-70) for 800,000
Muslim dinars.
168
Still, a 1962 survey of twelfth- and thirteenth-century crusader coin hoards
found only one gold coin compared to over 2000 silver coins, demonstrating the imbalance in
available metals to Latins.
169
Domestically in Europe between 1150 and 1250 gold held a similar monetary value,
priced approximately nine or ten times its weight in silver.
170
However, the very few gold
coins minted in Christian Europe during the first half of the thirteenth century—as well the
relatively few gold coins that reached Europe from the Byzantine Empire—were of poor
quality or reputation.
171
For example, the Holy Roman Emperor and King of Sicily Frederick
II (r. 1198-1250) had enough gold to begin minting augustals—coins imitating imperial
Roman issues—in 1231. The coins were nevertheless considered to be of low quality
167
Watson, “Back to Gold – and Silver,” 7. Though not considering the concurrent political situation in West
Africa, Watson locates this process as the cause of the high medieval gold famine. But his own analysis seems
to serve as further evidence of a reduced amount of West African gold during this period, as he concedes that “a
greater part of the gold used by the crusaders [meaning, those already established in the Near East] … seems to
have been of eastern origin.” See ibid., 9.
168
Ibid., 8-9.
169
Ibid., 8.
170
Spufford, Money and its Use, 178.
171
Lopez, “Back to Gold,” 219. New bezants stopped being minted following the conquest of Constantinople in
1204, only to be resumed (in much lower quality form) in the 1220s. See B. J. Cook, “The Bezant in Angevin
England,” The Numismatic Chronicle 159 (1999): 273.
46
throughout Europe.
172
Even in Sicily there appears to have been hesitancy to use augustals,
necessitating Frederick’s deployment of strong-arm tactics on his subjects to enforce his
monetary policy. The thirteenth-century chronicler Richard of San Germano (1165-1244)
recorded how this process worked in his city. Richard noted that in 1232 “one Thomas from
Pando, citizen of Scala, brought to San Germano the new gold coin, called the augustal, to be
distributed through out the entire abbey and San Germano, so that men may use this coin in
their buying and selling, according to the value for it by imperial foresight.”
173
As the
chronicler noted, that “imperial foresight” also included forethought about the coin’s
potential unpopularity, because failure to use coins would bring persons “under the penalty to
persons and goods recorded in” a letter from the emperor “that the said Thomas brought” at
the same time he distributed the augustals.
174
Though freshly minted, the reputation and
quality of augustals were such that Frederick had to impel his subjects to use them under
threat of law. It is no surprise then that to facilitate large-scale and international trade in the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries, Latin Europe depended on, and preferred, gold currencies
minted beyond its borders.
Of the gold currencies in circulation in Europe between the twelfth and early-
thirteenth centuries, the preferred denominations were minted with West African gold.
175
Gold coins minted with West African gold took circuitous routes to the Latin West,
172
Spufford, Money and its Use, 176.
173
Richard of San Germano, Chronicle, in Quellenbuch zur Münz- und Geldgeschichte des Mittelalters, ed.
Wilhelm Jesse (Lubeck: Scienta Verlag Aalen, 1983), 84. Quidam Thomas de Pando civis Scalensis novam
monetam auri que augustalis dicitur ad Sanctum Germanum detulit distribuendam per totam abbatiam et per
Sanctum Germanum, ut ipsa moneta utantur homines in emptionibus et venditionibus suis, iuxta valorem ei ab
imperiali providentia constitutum.
174
Ibid. Sub pena personarum et rerum in imperialibus litteris quas idem Thomas detulit annotate.
175
Messier, “Almoravids: West African Gold and the Gold Currency of the Mediterranean Basin,” 33. As
Messier notes, this reputation about West African gold—specifically that which was minted into Almoravid
dinars—even existed in twelfth-century China, where mercantile documents noted their high quality. See ibid.,
34.
47
predominately through trade with Christian and Islamic states in Iberia, and Islamic states in
North Africa and the Levant. Genoese mercantile history in the high Middle Ages
demonstrates this preference for African gold. Beginning in the twelfth century, Genoese
ships explored the western Moroccan coast searching for direct access to West African
gold.
176
In the beginning of the thirteenth century, supposedly pure West African pailoa gold
was mentioned with increasing frequency in Genoese notarial documents.
177
Other Genoese
documents began to distinguish between debased Sicilian gold coins and gold coins minted
with pailoa.
178
And, specifically to have direct access to West African gold, in the first half
of the thirteenth century the Fieschi banking family of Genoa began investing in trade with
the port city of Safi on the western Moroccan coast, which at the time served as the southern
terminus for Saharan trade caravans.
179
This Latin preference for African gold is also
reflected in the popular literature of the era. In a thirteenth-century Sicilian poem, a young
man desperately in love brags to his desired about his vast treasure of lower quality
augustals. He is rebuked, however, by the woman he is pursuing who tells him that she is
worthy only of Almohad gold, meaning that she considers herself as high quality as a foreign
gold coin, not the ersatz ones minted by Frederick II.
180
Within the boundaries of Latin
Europe, however, the bullion shortages of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries—
176
Robert Sabatino Lopez, The Commercial Revolution of the Middle Ages, 950-1350 (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1976), 112.
177
Ashtor, Les métaux précieux, 24.
178
Spufford, Money and its Use, 170.
179
Lopez, “Back to Gold,” 231.
180
Ibid., 227.
There is some irony that Muslim coins minted with West African gold had such a high reputation: they
were often of lower quality than Muslim coins minted with Asiatic or East African gold. West African gold
truly was and is of a higher natural purity, approximately 92% pure even when raw. Comparatively, East
African or Asiatic gold is naturally 80% pure. This high purity of West African gold, therefore, allowed minters
confidence to produce coins without first refining the metal, leading to coins that were often only 92% fine,
while minters who used East African or Asiatic gold would often refine it first, producing coins with higher
gold content. For discussion about this process, see Messier, “Almoravids: West African Gold,” 37.
48
corresponding with periods of political instability in West Africa—appear to have included
foreign gold coins as well, making gold “no more than a rare and particularly highly-valued
and desirable commodity.”
181
The Example of England
The lack of a presence of gold coins during the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries
in England offers a helpful paradigm to demonstrate the scarcity of gold throughout Europe.
Gold coins were occasionally minted upon request in early medieval England, like when a
king or bishop wanted to reward their followers with special gifts, but the practice ended in
the mid-eleventh century during the reign of Edward the Confessor (r. 1042-66).
182
Some
chronicles also indicates that there was gold available in the country during the reign of
Henry I (r. 1100-35), but more generally speaking “the amount of gold entering England …
declined in the second half [of the twelfth century] and still further by its end and into the
thirteenth century.”
183
In governmental documents, references to Almoravid or Almohad
dinars—known as “obli de Musc” in English records—only appear three times between 1190
and 1238.
184
As of 2014, only eight Muslim or imitation Muslim gold coins minted in Iberia
and dating to between the twelfth and mid-thirteenth centuries have been discovered in
181
Spufford, Money and its Use, 176.
182
Mark Blackburn, “Gold in England During the ‘Age of Silver’ (Eighth to Eleventh Centuries),” in Silver
Economy in the Viking Age, ed. James Graham-Campbell and Gareth Williams (New York: Routledge, 2007),
61-65.
183
For the presence of gold in England during the reign of Henry I, see Marion M. Archibald, “Islamic and
Christian Gold Coins from Spanish Mints Found in England, Mid-Eleventh to Mid-Thirteenth Centuries,” in
Early Medieval Monetary History: Studies in Memory of Mark Blackburn, ed. Rory Naismith, Martin Allen,
and Elina Screen (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2014), 388. For its absence in the late twelfth and early thirteenth
centuries, see ibid., 394.
184
Philip Grierson, “Obli de Musc,” The English Historical Review 66 (1951): 75-76. Containing approximately
2.3 grams of gold per coin, obli de Musc were “relatively small gold coins.” See Philip Grierson, “Muslim
Coins in Thirteenth-Century England,” in Near Eastern Numismatics, Iconography, Epigraphy, and History:
Studies in Honor of George Miles, ed. George Carpenter Miles and Dickran Kouymjian (Beirut: American
University of Beirut, 1974), 387.
49
archaeological sites in England.
185
Additionally, no gold hoards dating to this period have
been located in England.
186
This lack of dinars and imitation dinars in England puzzles
numismatists and economic historians alike, with one remarking that “an explanation is still
required to account for [their] absence.”
187
As a consequence, the monetary history of
England during these centuries is easily reconstructed, and “it is usually accepted that there
was relatively little money apart from that represented by the English silver coinage.”
188
Due to their scarcity because of West African political events, if gold coins served
any sort of social and cultural role in England before the mid-thirteenth century, it was
largely performative. Though debts were often recorded in the Pipe Rolls as being owed to
the government in Byzantine gold bezants, from the mid-twelfth century forward those debts
were recorded as being paid with silver instead.
189
Only Jewish money lenders and merchants
were expected to pay their debts and fees in gold, likely because they had greater access to
gold coins.
190
A single bezant also had ceremonial roles in high medieval England,
exchanged to conclude assorted contracts.
191
A register from Old St. Paul’s Cathedral dating
to 1295 describes a similar ceremonial role for foreign gold coins as gifts to churches, one
that resonates with William the Conqueror’s use of a marc of gold at the shrine of
185
Archibald, “Islamic and Christian Gold Coins from Spanish Mints,” 379.
186
Martin Allen, “Coin Finds and the English Money Supply, c. 973-1544,” in Money, Prices, and Wages:
Essays in Honor of Professor Nicholas Mayhew, ed. Martin Allen and D’Maris Coffman (New York: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2015), 15-19.
187
Archibald, “Islamic and Christian Gold Coins from Spanish Mints Found in England,” 394.
188
Paul Latimer, “Money and the English Economy in the Twelfth and Thirteenth Centuries,” History Compass
9, no. 4 (2011): 248.
189
Cook, “The Bezant in Angevin England,” 258-59. Cook interprets the available evidence to mean that
physical bezants were used when they are recorded in English documents. Contextualized within the evidence
offered in this thesis, however, the use of “bezant” in high medieval English documents was almost certainly as
a kind of money of account. As Cook concedes, “bezant” could also serve as shorthand for two shillings.
Ultimately, he further concedes that his broader argument “is impossible to prove.” For the bezant’s equivalent
in shillings, see ibid., 262. For Cook’s concession about his argument, see ibid., 264.
190
Ibid., 264.
191
Ibid., 265.
50
Etheldreda. At the time of the register’s production, St. Paul’s feretory of St. Lawrence was
“with four golden rings attached, and with one maravedí [a Spanish dinar or imitation dinar],
and two gold obli de Musc, similarly attached.”
192
The register also records that this practice
was done to the church’s feretory of St. Ethelbert, as “on one side, ten obli de Musc, and two
rings of gold are attached.”
193
Comparable charitable uses of gold coins existed among the
aristocracy as well, and it was a common practice of Henry III to distribute Muslim gold
coins in displays of public almsgiving.
194
Among the general population, brass replicas of
dinars were worn as talismanic brooches.
195
The Latin West’s Relationship with Gold After Sundiata’s Victory at Kirina
This relationship to gold in Western Europe changed dramatically in the mid-
thirteenth century, corresponding with the emergence of the Empire of Mali in 1235 and the
increase in gold exported from the region that logically followed. For example, the Kingdom
of Castile—perhaps owing to established links to West Africa via Iberian Muslim states—
began minting a gold coin in 1240, though they failed to take hold in Europe.
196
More
significantly, the Italian merchant republics of Genoa and Florence had enough gold (and
access to gold) by 1252 for both to mint their own pure gold currencies that year, the
genovino and florin respectively.
197
In 1284, Venice followed the lead of Genoa and Florence
and also began minting gold ducats, and “one state after another [in Europe] followed suit in
introducing new gold coins.”
198
192
“1295 Register of St. Paul’s,” in William Dugdale, History of Saint Paul’s Cathedral (London, 1818), 313-
14. Cum quatuor annulis aureis affixis, et uno marbodino, et duobus obolis de Marchia aureis, similiter affixis.
193
Ibid., 314. Affiguntur in una parte x. oboli de Marchia, et duo annuli aurei.
194
Spufford, Money and its Use, 183-84
195
Allen, “Coin Finds and the English Money Supply,” 386.
196
Spufford, Money and its Use in Medieval Europe, 169.
197
Ibid., 176. The processes attendant with this resumption of minting gold coins are described in detail in part
II of this thesis.
198
For Venice’s minting of gold coins, see ibid., 178. For the minting of gold coins by other states, see Lopez,
51
These trends are clear in England. Where earlier in the century gold had been
exceedingly rare, the greatest amount of obli de Musc coins appear in Henry III’s wardrobe
records for 1244.
199
In fact, beginning in the 1240s, enough gold was in circulation that
Henry began accumulating it with increasing intensity to fund various proposed international
projects, like a crusade in the Near East and an invasion of Sicily.
200
Rather than accept silver
as the payment for fees as had been custom earlier in his reign, in the late 1240s Henry began
insisting on gold as payment.
201
In the years of 1251 and 1252, in fact, the total percentage of
fees paid in gold were 83% and 98% respectively, where even in 1250 the percentage was a
meager 8.3%.
202
And, Henry had so much gold available to him by 1257 that he began
minting his own gold coins.
203
This project was, however, a disaster, and Henry’s flooding
his country with gold severely devalued the metal.
The thirteenth-century Chronicle of Mayors and Sheriffs of London offers an
humorous anecdote demonstrating how rapidly the circumstances surrounding gold changed
in England. As the Chronicle noted, Henry summoned the mayor and citizens of London to
his court in 1257 to ask, “whether or not, according to their conscience … [his] coin would
be useful and for the common benefit of his kingdom.”
204
The citizens, “having taken counsel
and consulted among themselves, came before the king saying that great financial harm could
“Back to Gold,” 223. Perhaps also indicating a greater availability of gold in Europe, the late-thirteenth and
fourteenth centuries witnessed innovations in Latin goldsmithing, like the application of translucent enamel and
the use of water-powered polishing mills. See Vavra, “Ich Goldtschmid mach köstliche Ding,” 280-81.
199
Grierson, “Obli de Musc,” 77. Grierson, who earlier in his article states that “in 1238 Henry III seems to
have become suddenly aware of the existence of obli de Musc,” hypothesizes these coins were meant to be
melted down and used in the creation of a new shrine for the relics of Edward the Confessor. For Grierson’s
comments about Henry’s potential ignorance about gold coinage, see ibid., 76.
200
D. A. Carpenter, “The Gold Treasure of King Henry III,” Thirteenth-Century England 1 (1985): 61.
201
Ibid., 67.
202
These figures are adapted from data provided in Carpenter, “The Gold Treasure of Henry III,” 67.
203
Lopez, “Back to Gold,” 252.
204
Chronicle of Mayors and Sheriffs of London, in Quellenbuch zur Münz- und Geldgeschichte des Mittelalters,
86. Secundum conscientiam eorum si … [sua] moneta foret utilis at commune commodum regni sui an non.
52
come to his kingdom by this coin, and chiefly to the poor of his kingdom,” particularly
because many of their “chattels are not worth a single gold coin.”
205
And, due to the greater
quantities of gold available, the citizens complained that “gold leaf, which always used to be
worth ten marks, is now worth only nine or eight marks.”
206
Comparing West African political history with European economic history makes it
clear that the cause for the emergence of gold currencies in Latin Europe was the
stabilization that the founding of the Empire of Mali brought to West Africa. This link,
however, has not yet been made in the historiography of either subject. There is
acknowledgement that during the fifteenth century and on the eve of the Columbian
exchange, Genoa, Florence, and Venice received the majority of their gold through trade with
North Africa.
207
Additionally, there is an acknowledgment in historiography concerning
money in medieval Europe that “monetary history must always have a place in explanations
of economic and social change,” but the broad view necessary to draw these connections
between West Africa and Europe in the high Middle Ages has not been applied.
208
This
includes the foundational work of historiography on the transition to gold currencies in 1252
by Lopez. In the work, Lopez remarks that “the economic and political circumstances that
brought one European mint after another back to gold have not yet been fully determined.”
209
As a solution, Lopez proposes that Florence and Genoa began to import gold from newly
opened mines in Central Europe.
210
But Lopez also notes that the total annual amount of gold
205
Ibid. Habito consilio et colloquio inter se venerunt coram rege dicentes quod per illam monetam posset
magnum dampnum pervenire regno suo et maxime pauperibus regni sui, quorum plurimorum catalla non valent
unum aureum.
206
Ibid. Aurum de folio, quod semper solebat valere decem marcas, nunc non valet nisi novem marcas vel octo.
207
Marian Malowist, “Quelques observations sur le commerce de l’or dans le Soudan occidental au moyen
âge,” Annales 25, no. 6 (1970): 1630.
208
Nightingale, Trade, Money, and Power in Medieval England, 389.
209
Lopez, “Back to Gold,” 220.
210
Ibid., 233.
53
collected from those mines circa 1252 was approximately 200 pounds.
211
By applying world
systems theory—and fully appreciating Latin Europe’s place in the thirteenth-century global
economy—an explanation begins to appear. It is estimated, for example, that gold production
in West Africa reached unprecedented levels beginning in the mid-thirteenth century;
compared to a paltry 200 pounds being mined in Central Europe, West African mines were
exporting northward as much as 3300 pounds annually.
212
Sundiata Keita’s Invention of Latin Purgatory
Periods of political instability and stability in West Africa during the twelfth and
thirteenth centuries, then, directly correspond to periods of bullion scarcity and plenitude in
Latin Europe. This comparative approach confirms that the period of West African history
between the decline of Wagadu and the rise of Mali saw a reduction in the export of gold into
international markets. Furthermore, these shared fates of two distant regions incontrovertibly
demonstrate that West Africa was a member of the high medieval world system. More
importantly, it was choices made by West African historical actors that upset both the world
system and material conditions in the Latin West. But, as application of actor-network theory
forces one to appreciate, there were many more consequences beyond the immediate
availability of gold.
There exists an understanding that the bullion shortage shaped contemporaneous
European economic developments because “long-term fluctuations in the supply of coin
influenced the broad, expansionary, and deflationary phases in the economy of medieval
Europe and contributed to the structural change that accompanied them.”
213
Thus, to fully
211
Ibid.
212
Curtin, “Africa and the Wider Monetary World,” 240.
213
Nightingale, Trade, Money, and Power in Medieval England, 387.
54
situate West Africa and Europe within the same networks of connections, the way in which
these developments in the region influenced the Latin West’s culture and society must also
be considered. As described above, the lack of West African gold in Europe during the
twelfth and thirteenth centuries did have some obvious cultural effects, from similes
employed in Sicilian love poems to brass brooches worn in England. But the shortage was so
severe—and West Africa’s role in medieval Europe’s world system so great—that more
profound consequences for European cultural and social life can be deduced. Indeed, because
of its effect on the European economy, the political instability in West Africa from the
twelfth to the mid-thirteenth century can also be attributed as a direct cause of economic
innovations concerning credit in Europe and the widespread antagonism against usury that
new forms of credit inspired.
The history of money lending in Europe predates the twelfth century, but merchants
were given new impetuses to develop innovative sources of capital and cashless payment
systems beginning in that century because of the bullion shortage.
214
As the historian Jacques
Heers notes, these developments specifically “allowed” merchants and bankers “to
economize metal pieces.”
215
To this end, “settlement and payment techniques that did not
require the use of currency” were present at “all” high medieval trade fairs.
216
Credit was
necessary at these fairs to facilitate the exchange of goods for most individuals, who did not
have immediate access to cash.
217
Further, to protect their limited bullion, Italian merchants
developed the concept of a “bill of exchange” in the latter half of the twelfth century,
214
Lopez, The Commercial Revolution of the Middle Ages, 72.
215
Heers, “Le Sahara et le commerce méditerranéen à la fin du moyen-age,” 249. Qui permettaient
d’économiser les pièces metalliques.
216
Denzel, “The Role of Institutions in Financial Crises,” 430.
217
Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony, 53.
55
allowing the transfer of funds from one party to another without the use of cash.
218
Large
Italian merchant companies could not reasonably operate (and thus act as trade intermediaries
between the Mediterranean and northwestern Europe) without “a continuous flow of
payments back and forth” in the form of bills of exchange.
219
This dramatically increased the
amount of capital available for interregional commerce in Europe.
220
By the beginning of the
thirteenth century, “the letter of exchange became the most widely used instrument of credit”
in part because “its advantages to hide interest charges became more obvious.”
221
Additionally, continuous public debt emerged in Italy during the mid-twelfth century and
became widespread by the thirteenth century.
222
These novel systems of exchange that
emerged around the beginning of the thirteenth century were so dispersed and innovative that
they are considered fundamental to the ‘commercial revolution’ that occurred during the
European Middle Ages.
223
These developments were so sophisticated and innovative, arising
in reaction to the lack of gold exported from West Africa, that they are also in part credited
with spurring a golden age of scientific learning in the fourteenth century as natural
philosophers were often required to interact with them in their daily lives.
224
Though operating in the same world system as Mediterranean Muslim and Jewish
merchants, these were uniquely Latin innovations reacting to the specific circumstances of
the European bullion famines. Twelfth-century Cairo genizah documents, for example,
produced in a location that received gold from both West and East, record the practice of
218
Munro, “The Medieval Origins of the Financial Revolution,” 543.
219
Lopez, The Commercial Revolution of the Middle Ages, 104.
220
Peter Spufford, Handbook of Medieval Exchange (London: Boydell and Brewer, 1986), xxxiii-xxxiv.
221
Lopez, The Commercial Revolution of the Middle Ages, 104.
222
Munro, “The Medieval Origins of the Financial Revolution,” 514.
223
Ibid., 506.
224
Joel Kaye, “The Impact of Money on the Development of Fourteenth-Century Scientific Thought,” Journal
of Medieval History 14, no. 3 (1988): 254.
56
traveling with bags of cash to pay for goods.
225
In North Africa, where the amount of
available gold would also have been reduced but still much greater than that available in
Western Europe, Malakite juridical proscriptions completely prohibited the use of non-
usurious forms of cashless pay.
226
These Latin innovations were also developed during a sustained period of intense and
sophisticated anti-usury campaigns conducted by clerical figures in Latin Europe.
227
In
earlier centuries money was attacked on moral grounds with “notably irrational” language,
like the trope of money being akin to excrement.
228
But, these arguments were much more
nuanced by the end of the twelfth century as scholastics and theologians became hyper-
focused on the subject of money.
229
Writing in the 1190s, for example, the Parisian canon
lawyer and future cardinal Robert Courçon (c. 1160-1219) declared that “usury is to be
permitted under no circumstance and laws which allow it have not been canonized.”
230
Despite this sweeping declaration, Courçon still found certain applications of usury
acceptable, like when it was done to perform a good deed. To this end, Courçon noted that
“[Saint] Jerome said, ‘It is better that your treasure be exposed to interest on a loan than a
poor person to a storm,’” and that “blessed Paula accepted interest so that she might feed the
poor.”
231
But, Courçon still believed that usury was dangerous, and described this danger in
225
Eliahu Ashtor, “Banking Instruments Between the Muslim East and the Christian West,” Journal of
European Economic History 3, no. 1 (1973): 566.
226
Ibid., 569.
227
Munro, “The Medieval Origins of the Financial Revolution,” 507.
228
Lester K. Little, Religious Poverty and the Profit Economy in Medieval Europe (Ithaca: Cornell University
Press, 1978), 178.
229
Gérard Sivéry, “La notion économique de l’usure selon saint Thomas d’Aquin,” Revue du Nord 86 (2004):
700.
230
Robert Courçon, De Usura, in Le traité “De Usura” de Robert de Courçon, ed. and trans. Georges Lefévre
(Lille: l’Université de Lille, 1902), 11. Lefévre’s edition has both a Latin and French version of De Usura. The
English translations in this paper are my own using the Latin version. In nullo casu permittenda est usura et
leges qui eam permittunt non sunt canonizatae.
231
Ibid., 19. Ait Hieronymus, ‘Melius est ut thesaurus tuus exponatur ad usuram quam pauper ad imbrem …
beata Paula accepit usuram ut pasceret pauperes.
57
metaphorical terms. “Just as, when a very beautiful girl passes through the village and you
are drawn into sin,” he wrote, “this is not to be charged to her passing by but to you.
232
Compared to earlier centuries, there is much nuance here: it was the conscious decision to be
greedy through usury, according to Courçon, that was sinful.
The writings of Courçon and other scholastics, however, did not deter moneylenders.
In fact, the relationship between new types of money lending and cultural hostility towards
usury was reciprocal; increased money lending meant increased hostility and new regulations
against usury, which itself spurred the development of new forms of technically non-usurious
credit.
233
Thus, part of the reason bills of exchange were invented was to facilitate “legal
usury” by disguising interest rates in exchange rates.
234
Concurrently in Northern Europe,
rente contracts, which were a kind of mortgage, began to be employed to similar ends and for
similar reasons.
235
And, even though princes enacted laws against usury, loans were
necessary for most thirteenth-century governments to remain solvent.
236
Though the papacy
issued new decrees against usury at the Third Lateran Council in 1179, the practice remained
so widespread—in part thanks to emerging forms of innovative money lending—that in 1208
Innocent III (r. 1198-1216) requested in correspondence to the Bishop of Arras that he not
enforce rules against usurers because there were so many of them that it would cause
232
Ibid., 19, 21. Sicut si pulcherrima virgine transeunte per vicum, scandalizaris in ejus formam, hoc non ei
transeunti sed tibi imputandum est.
233
Munro, “The Medieval Origins of the Financial Revolution,” 506. As Hans-Jörg Gilomen notes, even in the
present-day businesspeople are quite apt at finding legal solutions for seemingly “verbotene” economic goals.
See Hans-Jörg Gilomen, “Christlicher Glaube und Ökonomie des Kredits im Spätmittelalter,” in Ökonomische
Glaubensfragen: Strukturen und Praktiken jüdischen und christlichen Kleinkredits im Spätmittelalter, ed.
Gerhard Fouquet and Sven Rabeler (Wiesbaden: Franz Steiner Verlag, 2018), 122.
234
Munro, “The Medieval Origins of the Financial Revolution,” 545.
235
Ibid., 518. In 1251, most rente contracts were declared non-usurious by Innocent IV (r. 1243-54). See ibid.,
523.
236
Ibid., 514.
58
churches to shut down for a lack of parishioners.
237
Courçon even anticipated such potential
issues. Rhetorically, Courçon wrote that
when moneylenders everywhere offer to build churches entirely or in part from usury,
such as windows, or dormitories, or hermitages, or hospitals, or leper houses, one
must ask what the bishop who has the ability to demolish these is to do, when it has
been established unto him that all such are from usury. Does he not understand that
temples of this sort are just like temples of Baal? Therefore, how can those who live
there have a pure conscience knowing that these are tabernacles of sinners and have
been built from sins, and that in them they scarcely eat anything except from
robbery?
238
The solution Courçon offered was a little more extreme than Innocent’s to the Bishop of
Arras:
It does not seem to us that such great destruction can be purged completely except by
the convocation of a general council of all bishops and princes under the lord pope,
where the Church and princes together might proclaim to all under the pain of
excommunication and condemnation that anyone might labor either spiritually or
physically and that each one might eat his own bread, that is, [the fruit] of his labor.
So that, just as the Apostle commanded, there might be no meddlesome or lazy ones
among us. And in this way all usurers and rebels and thieves might be removed, and
alms could be given and the fabric of churches built, and all things would thus be
brought back to a pristine condition.
239
These concerns were necessarily central for theologians like Courçon. In fact, no institution
depended quite as much on usury as the papacy which utilized Italian merchants, bankers,
and their innovative systems of pay to transfer funds “from and to the remotest corners of
237
Francesco L. Galassi, “Buying a Passport to Heaven: Usury, Restitution, and the Merchants of Medieval
Genoa,” Religion 22 (1992): 314.
238
Courçon, De Usura, 35. Cum foeneratores passim offerant ecclesiis, construendo eas totas vel in parte de
foenore, ut vitreas vel dormitoria, vel eremitoria vel hospitalia aut domos leprosorum, quaeritur quid faciat
praelatus qui habet potestatem diruendi haec, cum constiterit ei quod talia sunt ex foenore. Nonne intelligit
quod hujus modi templa sunt tanquam templa Baal? Quomodo ergo possunt ibi viventes habere mundam
conscientiam scientes quod haec sunt tabernacula peccatorum et ex peccatis constructa, et quod in illis vix
aliqua comedunt nisi ex rapina.
239
Ibid. Non videtur nobis quod tanta pernicies plene possit purgari nisi convocato generali concilio omnium
episcoporum et principum sub domino papa, ubi Ecclesia simul et Principes indicerent omnibus sub poena
excommunicationis et condemnationis ut quilibet laboraret aut spiritualiter aut corporaliter, et ut unusquisque
panem suum, id est sui laboris manducaret [sicut praecepit Apostolus] et ne aliqui essent curiosi aut otiosi inter
nos. Et sic tollerentur omnes foeneratores et seditiosi et raptores, et sic possent fieri eleemosynae et fabrica
ecclesiarum, et omnia sic reducerentur ad pristinum statum.
59
Europe.”
240
By the thirteenth century the situation became untenable for the Church. New
theologies about confession were developed in reaction to merchants’ use of new financial
instruments, especially usury.
241
Highly specific definitions for what type of quasi-usurious
economic actions were not actually usury, like those developed by Raymond of Pennaforte
(ca. 1175-1275), began to be theorized.
242
Though their methods involved the exploitation of
others, canonists began to discuss merchants as being central to the functioning of society
and casuist theological positions were developed for their trade.
243
Thomas Aquinas (1225-
74) developed a similar argument, writing that merchants could make profit through various
means if they were not exploitative and if it served a communal good.
244
And, at the council
of Lyon in 1274, purgatory was officially defined in part to offer money lenders a way to
continue practicing their socially necessary sin without fearing eternal damnation.
245
Though,
as demonstrated above, there was more physical money in circulation in medieval Europe by
the time the council of Lyon took place, medieval creditors felt more confident lending
money with the additional physical money available because it meant a greater likelihood
that they would receive a return on their loan.
246
So, while the bullion shortage necessitated
both the broader use of money lending and the development of innovative methods to loan
money in Latin Europe during the twelfth and early thirteenth centuries, the influx of African
240
Lopez, The Commercial Revolution of the Middle Ages, 104.
241
Jacques Le Goff, “Au moyen age: temps de l’Eglise et temps du marchand,” Annales 15, no. 3 (1960): 429,
431.
242
Gilomen, “Christlicher Glaube und Ökonomie des Kredits im Spätmittelalter,” 133-34.
243
Hans-Georg Hermann, “Eigennutz und Übervorteilung: kanonistische Sichtweisen auf eine prekäre
Optimierungsstrategie im Vertrag,” in Der Einfluss der Kanonistik auf die europäische Rechtskultur, ed. Orazio
Condorelli, Franck Roumy, Mathias Schmoeckel (Cologne: Böhlau Verlag, 2016), 210.
244
Sivéry, “La notion économique de l’usure selon saint Thomas d’Aquin,” 701.
245
Galassi, “Buying a Passport to Heaven,” 313.
246
Nicholas Mayhew, “Modelling Medieval Monetisation,” in A Commercialising Economy: England 1086 to
c. 1300, ed. Richard Hugh Britnell and Bruce M. S. Campbell (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 1995), 67.
60
gold into Europe after the founding of the Empire of Mali helped give creditors confidence
when loaning money, which itself propelled further usury.
Conclusion
A recapitulation of the arguments presented thus far is necessary: West Africa was
politically unstable between the late eleventh and early thirteenth centuries; the available
sources indicate this period of instability had a negative effect on the West African gold
trade; this led to an era of extreme gold shortage in the Latin West; the lack of bullion
necessitated the widespread use of credit in Europe, which had long-term cultural
consequences like the Church officially defining Purgatory in 1274 to allow money lenders a
way into heaven, and—even if obliquely—Dante’s eventual placement of usurers in his
seventh circle of hell. Additionally, the establishment of the Empire of Mali in the mid-
thirteenth century brought stability to West Africa and led to an increase in the amount of
gold reaching Europe. This both brought about the minting of gold coins in the Latin West
and gave money lenders the confidence to offer more credit, spurring further anti-usury
sentiments.
The relative lack of available sources concerning West Africa from the late eleventh
to mid-thirteenth centuries presents difficulties when attempting to reconstruct political
events from the era and their consequences on the gold trade. Similarly, as the corpus of
historiography on the use of gold in Latin Europe emphasizes time and again, there are
apparent difficulties explaining the causes of Western Europe’s gold shortage during the
same period of time and the Latin West’s decision to return to gold currencies around 1250.
But, imagining the Latin West and West Africa as participants in a Western European/Trans-
Saharan world system offers explanations for both phenomena: the lack of gold in Europe
61
during the twelfth and thirteenth centuries indicates a concurrent decline in gold production
in West Africa; additionally, Europe’s minting of gold currencies demonstrates an increase in
the production of West African gold. This also confirms that high medieval Latin Europe
shared a world system with West Africa because “if distant parts of Afro-Eurasia experience
economic expansions and contractions nearly simultaneously, that would be evidence that
they participate in the same world system.”
247
With this understood, the further application of actor-network theory reveals the ways
in which these interconnectivities between West Africa and Western Europe had larger
consequences. High medieval merchants, the members of the Church that helped define
purgatory in 1274, and Dante writing in Florence in the early fourteenth-century shared
multiple, non-temporally-limited networks and nodes of contact with Sundiata, and the
latter’s victory at Kirina sent massive reverberations through them.
Poetically, this idea is expressed in one version of the epic of Sundiata. As this
version relays, Sundiata Keita was weak as a child and could not stand or walk. However,
when he was seven years old, he was given a kingly scepter made of thin reed and gained the
ability to walk, foreshadowing his right to rule. After Sundiata gained the ability to walk, his
personal jeli celebrated by playing his balafon and singing the following prophetic verse:
“You have come bringing joy to the world. Sundiata has come to make the world happy. You
have come bringing joy to the world.”
248
This is remarkably close to the truth. Thousands of
miles away, through Sundiata’s founding of the Empire of Mali in 1235, he significantly
influenced European culture and society. But he was not unique in this regard and was only
one of many West Africans during the eleventh, twelfth, and thirteenth centuries that had a
247
Frank and Gills, “The Five Thousand Year World System in Theory and Praxis,” 5.
248
Ed., Roland Bertol, Sundiata: The Epic of the Lion King (New York: Thomas Y. Crowell, 1970), 51.
62
similar effect on the Latin West. The decisions by polities like that of the Sosso or Zafanu to
exert independence, or peasants refusing to participate in seasonal gold mining like those
mentioned in al-Umari’s anecdote, all played crucial roles in these historical processes.
63
Part II: Gold and Economic Imperialism in the Mediterranean Basin
Mansa Musa (r. 1312-37), emperor of gold-rich Mali and purported wealthiest man to
ever live, undertook his famous hajj to Mecca in 1324. Included in his journey were two
months-long stays in Cairo, and his time spent in the city is legendary: “‘The man flooded
Cairo with his benefactions [of gold],’” al-Umari reported an eyewitness to the event telling
him in his Pathways of Vision in the Realms of the Metropolises.
249
Though al-Umari’s
source described his gifts as benefactions, given the centrality of gold to the medieval Near
Eastern economy, Musa’s largesse eventually proved to be unwanted.
250
Indeed, as a
consequence of his dispersion of most of the estimated eighteen tons of gold which he took
with him on his journey from West Africa to Cairo, Musa’s presence led to the ruin of the
city’s economy.
251
As the eyewitness explained to al-Umari, Musa brought a veritable
goldrush with him to Egypt, with its attendant highs and lows: “‘The Cairenes made
incalculable profits out of him and his suite in buying and selling and giving and taking,’”
though their fortunes quickly changed as they “‘exchanged gold until they depressed its value
in Egypt and caused its price to fall.’”
252
The native Cairene al-Umari was himself able to
confirm the aftermath of Musa’s visit, writing that “Gold was at a high price in Egypt until
[Musa and his retinue] came in that year … from that time its value fell and it cheapened in
price and has remained cheap till now … [and] this has been the state of affairs for about
twelve years until this day.”
253
Musa’s apparently uncritical use of gold—“his crazy generosity”—is characterized in
249
Al-Umari, Pathways of Vision in the Realms of the Metropolises, 270.
250
For the role of gold in the medieval Near East, see Ashtor, Les métaux précieux et la balance des payments
du Proche-Orient, 13.
251
For an estimation about the amount of gold Musa took on his hajj, see Gomez, African Dominion, 106.
252
Al-Umari, Pathways of Vision in the Realms of the Metropolises, 270-71.
253
Ibid., 271.
64
both contemporaneous Arabic sources and some modern historiographical works as a
symptom of sub-Saharan African naivete when interacting with the broader world.
254
Musa’s
activities in Cairo, however, are better thought of as conscious acts of imperialism. By
flooding Cairo with gold, a decision made after a humiliating experience during an audience
with the Egyptian sultan al-Nasir (d. 1341), Musa demonstrated his ability to negatively
influence the region’s economy—the very fulcrum of Abu-Lughod’s hypothesized world
system—whenever he so wished.
255
Musa’s gifts of gold, then, were not so much benefices
as they were weapons. Though this interpretation deviates from standard historiography, it
nevertheless fits better with broader trends relating to the use of the metal in the late
medieval Mediterranean basin.
Two years before Musa flexed his economic might and threw the sultan’s economy
into disarray, a similar process occurred at the papal court in Avignon. As discussed in part I
of this thesis, in 1252 Genoa and Florence became the first Western European states to mint
gold coins with any sustained success since the decline of the Roman Empire.
256
These gold
coins, especially the Florentine florin and later the Venetian ducat, developed into a
standardized currency for the late medieval Mediterranean economy and were necessary for
Latin participation in international trade and other large payments in the region. Thus, in
1322 Pope John XXII (r. 1316-44) found himself in a position akin to al-Nasir in 1324 and
many other Western princes in the later Middle Ages, with the health of his treasury
indirectly beholden to a foreign power. The Avignon papacy, which still looked eastward
towards Italy as its primary theater of political action, required access to a currency accepted
254
For an example, see Mauny, Les siècles obscurs de l’Afrique noire, 157. “Sa folle générosité.”
255
For Cairo’s role as a fulcrum in the high medieval world system, see Abu-Lughod, Before European
Hegemony, 149.
256
Spufford, Money and its Use, 176-77.
65
everywhere in southern Europe like the florin to pay for expenses and function.
257
In 1322,
then, John took the dramatic step of ceding the papacy’s monetary policy to the Florentines
in order to keep the papacy solvent. In a letter, John ordered his mint masters at the castle of
Pont-de-Sorges to follow the instruction and guidance of three Florentine merchants to begin
production of the papacy’s own florins with the same weight and purity as the real coin.
258
Essentially, the papacy’s thirst for gold florins was such that it began to manufacture its own
imitations of the coin. Where Musa could ruin an economy by flooding it with gold, the
reputation of the florin had developed to such heights, and its centrality to the southern
European economy had become so great that papal projects were in danger of ceasing for
mere want of the currency.
As detailed in the introduction and first part of this thesis, gold currencies in the later
Middle Ages had clear practical applications, and most relevant historiography approaches
the subject from that perspective. To help understand the full panoply of effects that the
large-scale resumption of minting gold coinage carried for the Latin West, however, gold in
the fourteenth-century Mediterranean basin can be analyzed beyond its instrumental
economic functions. Though distinct in important ways, both Musa’s use of raw gold in
Cairo and the Florentines cultivation of international dependence on their florin were acts of
imperialism.
259
Gold provided the few polities that could marshal large quantities of it with
257
Ibid., 183.
258
August Coulon, ed., Lettres secrètes et curiales du Pape Jean XXII (1316-1334) relatives à la France,
extraites des registres du Vatican (Paris: Bibliothèque des Écoles Françaises d’Athènes et de Rome, 1906), 177-
78.
259
I understand “imperialism” to be the action by which one polity usurps the governmental and/or economic
sovereignty of another. Though imperialism often includes the development of geographic empires, that is not
an aspect of the processes I identify in this part of my thesis. For a survey of the many historical definitions of
“imperialism” which helped shape my own, see Ray Kiely, Rethinking Imperialism (London: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2010), 2-3. For the necessity of using words like “imperialism” and “colonialism” when discussing
political developments in the Middle Ages, see Merril Jensen and Robert L. Reynolds, “European Colonial
Experience: A Plea for Comparative Studies,” in The Medieval Frontiers of Latin Christendom: Expansion,
66
the ability to both usurp the economic sovereignty of rivals and increase their own prestige
through propagandistic techniques specifically relating to uses of the metal.
That these actions are clearly identifiable as imperialistic is a critical step in
understanding West Africa’s role in the later medieval Western European/Trans-Saharan
world system. As Braudel describes in Perspectives of the World, the center of a world
system
always … [features] an exceptional state, strong, aggressive and principled, dynamic,
simultaneously feared and admired … [They are strong governments] capable too of
asserting themselves abroad: it is to these governments, who never hesitated to
employ violence, that we can readily apply, at a very early date and without fear of
anachronism, the words colonialism and imperialism.
260
West Africa’s position in the high medieval world system should be incontrovertible at this
point. But that Musa could both travel to foreign lands and, in the process, imperialize rival
states demonstrates that the region assumed a new, more powerful position in the world
system following Sundiata’s victory at Kirina in 1235 and in the years that followed. This
development occurring concurrent with the simultaneous rise of Florence as an economic
superpower is also to be expected according to Abu-Lughod’s model. As she explains, “when
there was a period of congruence among upward cycles of related regions, these cycles
moved synergistically. Upturns were the result … of the linkages each region managed to
forge with other parts of the world system.”
261
In this instance, the strength of Abu-Lughod’s
theory demonstrates areas where her model could be improved. Both the longer-term
example of the development of Florence and the shorter-term example of Musa dumping
gold into Cairo evidence that new cores of the Western European/Trans-Saharan world
Contradiction, Continuity, ed. James Muldoon and Felipe Fernández-Armesto (Farnham, UK: Ashgate, 2008),
39-40.
260
Braudel, Perspectives of the World, 51.
261
Abu-Lughod, Before European Hegemony, 358-59.
67
system evolved as a consequence of West Africa’s ability to export more gold beginning in
the mid-thirteenth century. World systems “restructure,” Abu-Lughod writes, when “players
who were formerly peripheral begin to occupy more powerful positions in the system and
when geographic zones formerly marginal to intense interactions become foci and even
control centers of such interchanges.”
262
The previous section elaborated upon the dramatic
consequences that could follow after access to one of the Western European/Trans-Saharan
world system’s cores was limited; the analysis that proceeds from this point concerns the
cultural and social consequences of the flourishing of that same core.
To this end, it is necessary to resituate the argument in actor-network theory and
appreciate that the Florentines were only able to develop their many uses of the florin
following an increase to the amount of gold exported from West Africa in the mid-thirteenth
century. Elaboration on these processes further illuminates the obscured links between West
Africa and the Latin West described in the previous section, and how individual actors in the
two regions shared networks and could influence each other’s societies. More directly,
medieval West African history played a significant role in the development of medieval
Western European history; without the successes of Sundiata and the political stability
maintained by his successors, there would have been no gold florin to cause John XXII
anxiety or serve as a model for nearly all other gold coins minted in Europe beginning in the
late thirteenth century.
Modern Perceptions of Medieval Gold and the Gold Trade
The possibility for gold coins to act as an instrument of imperialism has not been
directly addressed in historiography about money or gold in the Middle Ages. At the least,
262
Ibid., 367.
68
early theories as to the West’s return to gold like that of Lopez propose that a “desire to
uphold and enhance the prestige of the state” may have been a reason Italian merchant
republics (and the principalities that followed them) decided to start minting gold currencies
beginning in the thirteenth century.
263
Further, more contemporary scholars like Degler and
Wenderholm accurately note that, whether or not its stated as such in the sources, later
medieval European usage of West African gold to mint coins added “a political-colonial
dimension” to a preexisting “economic discourse of materials.”
264
And, though preceding the
work of these scholars, Bloch comes close to syncretizing the two lines of thought by
proposing that an innate cultural desire begun in the Middle Ages to accumulate “this
‘fabulous’ metal” is “one of the reasons that [Europeans] have subjected or exploited the
world” into the present day.
265
These hypotheses can be built upon. Degler and Wenderholm’s idea, for example,
implies as a central component to the medieval gold trade an unequal relationship between
North and South wherein Mediterranean states levied their will on West Africa.
266
Instead, as
François-Xavier Fauvelle notes, it was “African political and economic elites who,
controlling gold fluctuations, succeeded in imposing themselves on foreign markets as
powerful and reliable economic partners.”
267
Reapplying Fauvelle’s argument to Western
Europe, it was because Florence had access to gold markets that thus allowed the city to also
263
Lopez, “Back to Gold, 1252,” 236-37.
264
Degler and Wenderholm, “Der Wert des Goldes – der Wert der Golde,” 444. Eine politisch-koloniale
Dimension … ökonomische Diskurs des Materials.
265
Bloch, “Le problème de l’or au moyen age,” 8. Ce ‘fabuleux’ métal … une des raisons qui [Européens] ont
fait soumettre ou exploiter le monde.
266
This is a fairly typical view from Europeanists. See Robert S. Lopez, “Trade of Medieval Europe: The
South,” in Cambridge Economic History of Europe, vol. 2, ed. Michael Postan and Edwin Ernest Rich
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1952), 289.
267
François-Xavier Fauvelle, “Trade and Travel in Africa’s Global Golden Age (AD 700-1500),” in Global
Africa: Into the Twenty-First Century, ed. Dorothy L. Hodgson and Judith A. Byfield (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 2017), 18.
69
impose themselves economically on their near neighbors. Indeed, where Bloch locates
modern European colonial impulses in later medieval appetite for gold, the paradigm can also
be flipped and gold understood as a tool which, when deployed strategically, European states
could use to “subject and exploit” other Europeans. In fact, merely minting gold coins did not
guarantee that they would be successful for high medieval polities, and the list of states that
attempted but failed to introduce their own gold coins in the second half of the thirteenth
century, like France and England, is notable.
268
As it pertains to Florence, prestige was only
gained from minting gold coins thanks to a combined program of shrewd economic policy,
the development of propaganda that glorified their new gold coin, and conscious
mythmaking surrounding the origin of the florin.
Gold’s success as a tool for imperialism in the fourteenth-century Mediterranean
basin was as much a consequence of its intrinsic value as it was conscious actions by those
who wielded it for those ends. The era in which the use of all types of coinage became
widespread throughout Western Europe coincided with the end to the era of internal Latin
expansion through conquest and colonialism, and which thus necessitated new methods to
develop hegemony. This era also overlapped with the second stage of the medieval
commercial revolution, with exchanges of money taking the place of traditional feudal
services and dues.
269
These concurrent trends presented new possibilities for the states that
identified them. Due to their small size, for example, Italian merchant communes could not
wield the same sort of tools for expansion as large kingdoms. Instead, Lopez writes, “their
weapons of strength included embargoes, piracy, … discriminatory tariffs, and the
268
Spufford, Money and its Use, 182, 185.
269
Lopez, “Trade of Medieval Europe,” 291.
70
construction of new routes.”
270
Coins, specifically gold coins, were an additional “weapon of
strength” that should be included on Lopez’s list.
Beginning in the high Middle Ages, Italian merchant republics had to be highly
conscious of the monetary policy of their rivals, and the introduction of particularly
successful coins could impel rival states to follow their lead. For example, due to an influx of
silver from Fourth Crusaders paying for passage to the Levant, Venice began minting very
large and pure silver grossi coins in 1201, which forced Genoa to follow suit and mint similar
coins because the purity and weight of the grossi were popular throughout the
Mediterranean.
271
In 1254, a group of seven smaller north Italian cities, including Parma and
Pavia, agreed to mint a sort of international currency in limited quantities to develop a certain
level of economic independence in the face of encroaching cities in the region like Milan and
Florence.
272
And when Venice began minting gold ducats in 1284 they did so at the same
weight and fineness as gold florins.
273
Importantly, though, Venice also granted rights to
merchants that would use ducats internationally as they feared that introducing the coin
locally would upset the systems of exchange used in the Adriatic region.
274
Markets were
precarious, and tastes as to preferred coinages used in trade could quickly change—or be
manipulated—through economic policies.
Coins, however, could represent more for medieval states than merely a tool to
facilitate trade. Relating them to the complete array of techniques used by the high medieval
Latin West to expand territorially and politically, Robert Bartlett notes that the “power” of
270
Ibid., 300.
271
Spufford, Money and its Use, 226-27.
272
Lucia Travaini, “Mint Organization in Italy between the Twelfth and Fourteenth Centuries: a Survey,” in
Later Medieval Mints: Organization, Administration and Techniques, ed. by Nicholas Mayhew and Peter
Spufford (Oxford: British Archaeological Reports Publishing, 1988), 44.
273
Spufford, Money and its Use,” 178.
274
Ibid.
71
coins, like charters, “[did] not reside in a purely material efficacy.”
275
Instead, Bartlett
argues, “Their power [lay] … in the way they [objectified] human relationships.”
276
Florence’s ability in the beginning of the mid-thirteenth century to mint gold coins with city-
specific insignia, disseminate them through recently developed merchant networks, and
encourage their use in international trade was a preeminent tool for the commune to exert
levels of economic control over rival states.
277
Where kings of France, England, and Castile
depended on military conquest and direct rule to expand their power, Florence could mint
gold coins and promote their use.
Gold Money, Medieval Political Theory, and Their Applications by Florence
Italian merchant republics did not enact these kinds of economic policies in a
vacuum, however, and contemporaneous works of political theory articulated and encouraged
similar ideas about the use of coins. Writing in his De regimine principum, for example,
Ptolemy of Lucca (1236-1327), a Dominican and contemporary of Thomas Aquinas, located
two primary benefits in coinage produced by the state: a standardized coin increased
revenues and could act as propaganda.
278
“[A prince’s] own coinage or money,” Ptolemy
wrote, “is an ornament for a king and kingdom, and for anyone’s rule, because the image of
the king is depicted on it, like Caesar’s.”
279
As a consequence, he believed that “so distinct a
memorialization of him [and, therefore, a city or state] can exist in nothing so much as in
coinage, because nothing pertaining to a king or lord is used so frequently by men’s
275
Robert Bartlett, The Making of Europe: Conquest, Colonization and Cultural Change, 950-1350 (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 1993), 286.
276
Ibid.
277
For the role of merchant networks in the early dissemination of the florin in Europe, see Peter Spufford, “The
First Century of the Florentine Florin,” Rivista italiana di numismatica e scienze affini 107 (2006): 426.
278
De regimine principum is sometimes attributed to Thomas Aquinas.
279
Ptolemy of Lucca, De regimine principum, in Opuscula Omnia Thomae Aquinatis (Venice: 1587), 304.
Nummisma, siue moneta propria, ornamentum est regis, et regni, et cuiuslibet regiminis, quia in ea
repraesentatur imago regis, ut Caesaris.
72
hands.”
280
The propagandistic utility of coins was so great, Ptolemy continued, that it even
explained the etymology of nummisma, the Latin word for coin: “Truly it is called nummisma
because … it is stamped with the names [nominibus] of princes and [their] likeness, whereby
it is manifestly apparent that the majesty of lords shines from coinage and therefore cities, or
princes, or prelates all procure this for their glory.”
281
Paired with this propagandistic value,
Ptolemy also saw a state’s ability to mint its own money as a means to exert economic
control on the local population and increase revenues: “his own coinage turns to the benefit
of a prince,” he wrote, “because by it are measured the tributes and whatever taxes that are
imposed on the people.”
282
For medieval princes and states, then, Ptolemy encouraged the
minting of coins to reinforce their power locally through semiotics on widely distributed
coins and to increase revenues by requiring their use in payments to the state. Whether
intentionally or not, beginning in the second half of the thirteenth century Florence followed
the steps laid out in De regimine principum with two major exceptions: the city applied these
principles not just domestically but internationally, and it outsourced much of the work
involved to other states.
As the availability of gold increased for Italian merchant republics in the second half
of the thirteenth century, Italian merchants and bankers possessed a remarkable ability to find
value in gold coinage beyond its means to facilitate trade. Certainly, gold coins were initially
minted for use in international trade. Before 1252, Latin merchants depended on gold, almost
exclusively in the form of coins minted by Muslim states, to purchase goods in the Near East.
280
Ibid. In nulla re tanta potest esse claritas memoriae eius, eo quod nihil sic per manus hominum frequentatur
quod ad regem, vel quemcunque dominum pertineat, quantum nummisma.
281
Ibid. Nummisma vero dicitur, quia nominibus principum effigieque designatur … per quod manifeste
apparet, quod ex nummismate maiestas dominorum lucet: et ideo ciuitates, siue principes, siue prelati hoc pro
sua gloria singulariter ab Imperatoribus impetrant.
282
Ibid. Nummisma proprium cedit in commodum principis … quia per ipsum mensurantur tributa, et
quaecunque exactiones quae fiunt in populo.
73
With the advent of new, locally manufactured gold coins, Italian states were less-dependent
on foreign gold currencies and trade balances began to become more positive for Latin
merchants.
283
Coin hoards found in Aleppo and Acre, for example, indicate that by the 1270s
the florin was a commonly used coin in that part of Near East, and its significantly higher
purity compared to locally manufactured bezants, dinars, and imitation dinars created a
preference for them.
284
But in Italy, Florentines put their new gold money to use not just in
trade, but also as a cudgel to usurp economic rights of their rivals and provide security for
their city. A relationship developed between Florence and the Angevin monarchs of Naples
in which, in exchange for loans of gold florins, Florentine merchants assumed control of
important southern Italian industries and were granted lands. To help pay for his wars of
conquest in southern Italy—a theater in which gold was necessary for large payments—
Charles of Anjou (r. 1266-85) began taking on massive loans of florins from Florentine
bankers in 1265.
285
Generally speaking, kings and churchmen were not expert in economics
like merchants, making them easy targets for exploitation.
286
Indeed, though the loans seem
straightforward, Florentine bankers offered them to Neapolitan monarchs with the
expectation that they would never repay them in full. In lieu of gold, the loans were often
paid back through indirect means. This included the assumption of money-generating titles
283
Henry L. Misbach, “Genoese Commerce and the Alleged Flow of Gold to the East, 1154-1253,” Revue
internationale d’histoire de la banque 3 (1970): 84.
284
For discussion of coin hoards, see Robert Kool, “A Thirteenth Century Hoard of Gold Florins from the
Medieval Harbour of Acre,” Numismatic Chronicle 166 (2006): 316. For the varying fineness of gold coins
minted in Syria during the thirteenth century, see Misbach, “Genoese Commerce and the Alleged Flow of Gold
to the East,” 76. Florins, famous for their 24-karat purity, far outpaced contemporaneous coins produced locally
in the Levant and their 14- to 18-karat purities.
285
David Abulafia, “Southern Italy and the Florentine Economy, 1265-1370,” in Italy, Sicily, and the
Mediterranean, 1100-1400, ed. David Abulafia (London: Variorum, 1987), 379.
286
Edward Miller, “The Economic Policies of Governments: Introduction,” in Cambridge Economic History of
Europe, vol. 3, ed. Mark Potsan, Edwin E. Rich, and Edward Miller (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press,
1963), 281.
74
like tax and tariff collecting positions in Neapolitan ports on the Adriatic coast and exclusive
export rights of southern Italian goods, the most important of all being Sicilian and Apulian
grain.
287
Through loans of florins to kings of Naples, Florentine merchants and bankers
essentially displaced southern Italian merchants from their native theaters of operation.
288
In
an era in which the biggest economic concerns for Mediterranean governments were self-
sufficiency and having enough food for their citizens, these were remarkable gains by the
Florentines.
289
Located in a region of poor grain production, yet still needing to find a way to
feed their nearly 330,000 subjects—100,000 of which lived in the city proper—Florence
parlayed “regular loans” to kings of Naples in exchange for access to grain.
290
As good of a
deal as this was for Florence, it was similarly disastrous for its rivals. Florentine control over
Adriatic grain exports was a continual source of frustration to the Venetians.
291
This control
of grain exports was even maintained during the famines that afflicted Europe in the early
fourteenth century, sapping precious southern Italian grain northward into Tuscany.
292
These
processes, so beneficial to the city and so harmful to its rivals, began because of loans of
florins. Rather than seek repayment of the loans with gold, Florentine merchants and bankers
were content with gaining control over the trade of humbler (though essential) goods like
wheat, industries that had previously belonged to rival merchants.
This process—the complete infiltration of gold florins and Florentine machinations
287
Abulafia, “Southern Italy and the Florentine Economy,” 380.
288
Lopez, “Trade of Medieval Europe,” 301.
289
Carlo M. Cipolla, “The Economic Policies of Governments: The Italian and Iberian Peninsulas,” in
Cambridge Economic History of Europe, vol. 3, 400-401.
290
For demographics of Florence and areas under its control, see Lopez, “Trade of Medieval Europe,” 303. For
the scheme of exchanging loans for grain rights, see David Abulafia, The Great Sea: A Human History of the
Mediterranean (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 356-57.
291
Abulafia, “Southern Italy and the Florentine Economy,” 381.
292
Ibid.
75
into the economic policies of foreign countries—is evident in documents relating to the reign
of Charles II of Naples (r. 1285-1309). Documents collected by the nineteenth-century
historian of Florence Robert Davidsohn and pertaining to the single year of 1303 present a
brief illustration of Charles’s constant dealings with (and indebtedness to) the Florentines.
On May 13 of that year, for example, Charles was recorded discussing with Apulian officials
how to settle a debt of 2000 ounces of gold to the famous Bardi banking family of
Florence.
293
To resolve this debt, on May 28 Charles resolved to pay to the Bardi family his
half of the revenues he received from an export tax on food goods leaving Apulia for an
undetermined amount of time.
294
This was a significant concession, as already on June 16 a
tax of 213 ounces of gold was leveled on a single shipment out of Apulia containing 711
salme of grain, at a rate of thirty ounces of gold per every 100 salme (approximately 4,500
tons).
295
On July 1, Charles further ordered officials of Apulia to begin paying 1000 ounces
of gold from the money they collected to the Peruzzi banking family from Florence in order
to resolve a previous loan.
296
Then, on July 8, Charles named Catellinus Aldebrandini from
Florence as the master of the mint in Naples.
297
To help pay for the military activities of
count Charles of Valois (r. 1284-1325) in Sicily, Charles received another loan of 4200
florins (approximately 530 ounces of gold) from the Bardi family on July 15.
298
On August
23, two Florentines representing separate banks appeared at the king’s court in Naples to do
an accounting of his debts which he had owed to their companies beginning in the year
293
Robert Davidsohn, Forshungen zur Geschichte von Florenz, vol. 3, Regesten unedirter Urkunden zur
Geschichte von Handel, Gewerbe und Zunftwesen (Berlin: Ernst Siegfried Mittler and Son, 1901), no. 439.
294
Ibid., no. 443.
295
Ibid., no. 444.
296
Ibid., no. 445.
297
Ibid., no. 446.
298
Ibid., no. 449
76
1301.
299
And, on December 28, Charles ordered the lord of Bari to pay 2000 ounces of gold
from collected revenues to the Peruzzi bank.
300
Like his father before him and Pope John XXII, Charles II was, simply, wholly
dependent on the Florentines. Without their cash his war in Sicily would have difficulty
continuing; without their technical expertise, his mint would have been without a master; and
without their presence, he would have been unable to constantly redirect revenue streams to
pay off past loans. Following increases in the amount of gold exported from West Africa, a
new core—Florence—thus developed in the Western European/Trans-Saharan World
system, imperializing its neighbors, its power radiating west- and southward.
How Florentines Understood the Florin
The shrewd use of loans of florins to imperialize the export of southern Italian
commodities like grain, while different from the use of gold currency in international trade,
still involved a direct economic use of the new gold coins. But, concurrent to these
developments in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries, Florentines involved in the
production of the florin seemed to sense non-economic, less tangible benefits to gold florins.
At the least, adhering to Ptolemy of Lucca’s ideas about the semiotic functions of coins, use
of the florin throughout the Mediterranean basin meant that the iconography on the coin that
represented Florence, the fleur-de-lis and the image of John the Baptist, also spread.
According to Caroline Leroy, use of these standardized symbols inaugurated in 1252 might
have been a conscious decision by the commune to raise the profile of the city. Specifically,
Leroy argues that these “iconographic representations … reflect [a] wish of universalism
299
Ibid., no. 452.
300
Ibid., no. 455.
77
claimed by the city of Florence for its circulating currency.”
301
To Leroy, Florence even
“seems to have anticipated the popularity of its money through its typological choices.”
302
Whether Florence possessed the sort of prescience Leroy ascribes to it, every exchange
involving florins throughout the Mediterranean basin—every time a coin passed through the
hands of men, to borrow Ptolemy’s language—knowledge about the city increased and its
standing was elevated.
303
The florin also carried benefits for those Florentines that were able to cultivate a
personal association with it. In 1317 the Libro della zecca began to be compiled. In the
Libro, masters and workmen of the Florentine gold mint, as well as the unique mintmarks
which those masters applied to gold florins during their tenures, were registered for posterity.
The book begins with a prologue that explains its purpose which, when analyzed in full,
demonstrates a function beyond just being an introduction to an informational work.
304
This
is not wholly unexpected since “economic expansion [in the later Middle Ages] created new
social instruments,” but the Libro della zecca accomplishes this in interesting ways.
305
The
prologue reads:
At the time when … the distinguished and wise men Giovanni Villani and Gherardo
Gentile, citizens and merchants of Florence were, on behalf of the commune and
people of Florence, masters and officials of the mint of gold and silver, and of the
places at which coins are minted for the aforesaid commune; and the distinguished
men Bartolo Fey and Gano, son of Dietaiuto, were, for the said commune, smelters of
the aforesaid gold coin; and Morello Tommasini and Rosone, son of Juncta, were
301
Caroline Leroy, “Le trésor de Bruges (1877) et la circulation des florins d’or de Florence au nord des Alpes
de 1250 à 1350,” Revue belge de numismatique et de sigillographie 153 (2007): 94. Les représentations
icongraphiques … reflètent [une] volonté d’universalisme revendiqué par la cité florentine pour ses émissions
monétaires.
302
Ibid. Semble avoir anticipé par ses choix typologiques la popularité de son monnayage.
303
For discussion about how the image of John the Baptist elevated Florence’s standing, see Jean-Baptiste
Giard, “Le florin d’or au baptiste et ses imitations en France au xivᵉ siècle,” Bibliothèque de l’École des chartes
125 (1967): 101.
304
The prologue is composed in notoriously clunky Latin. See A. Carson Simpson, “Mint Officials of the
Florentine Florin,” American Numismatic Society Museum Notes 5 (1952): 118.
305
Miller, “The Economic Policies of Governments,” 287.
78
inspectors of the said gold coin; and Lapus ser Phillipi was, for the said commune,
assayer and approver of the silver coin or places: When the aforesaid Gherardo and
Giovanni, masters of the aforesaid mint, considered the honorable gold coin that is
minted and made in the city of Florence … and also considered the common
circulation that the said coin has throughout the entire world; and also when they
considered that there were many princes in the world in past times who desired to
remove the abovesaid gold coin from circulation, and the coin’s circulation always
increased; and when they attended and truly saw and heard from the querulous
complaints of many honest and expert men of the city of Florence that no memorial
that is clear for those individuals wishing to see it can be found in the aforesaid
commune of Florence concerning the masters and officials and stamps of the said
mint that existed and were appointed from the day of the coin’s origin, fabrication,
and regulation up to the present; and when the aforesaid masters saw that it would be
useful for a certain register to be made for the aforesaid commune, of the aforesaid
former masters, officials, and stamps and also of those who will be at any given time;
and when the aforesaid Gherardo and Giovanni, masters and officials of the aforesaid
mint, by the authority of their aforesaid office of the said mint, imposed upon and
commanded me Salvi Dini of Florence, notary and for the time being scribe for the
aforesaid commune, that the memorial below be made of the same masters, officials,
and stamps of the said mint.
Written below is the register and book containing the [record of the] masters
and officials of the said mint, who could be found, and the stamps that they made or
caused to be made on the aforesaid coin of gold or silver, and also of the stamps
found on the gold florins coined in the said mint at times for which no record can well
be found, nor the names of the masters and officials in whose time they were made.
And it was written by me the aforesaid Salvi, notary of the said mint, at the command
of the said masters, in the 1317th year of the Lord’s incarnation, in the fifteenth
indiction, in the month of March.
306
306
Il libro della zecca, in Le monete della Repubblica Fiorentina, vol. 1, ed. Mario Bernocchi
(Florence: Leo S. Olschki Publishers, 1974), 1-2. Tempore quo … discreti et sapientes viri Iohannes Villani et
Gherardus Gentilis, cives et mercatores Florentini, erant, pro comuni et populo Florentino, domini et officiales
monete auri, argenti et legarum, ad quas pro ditto comuni cuduntur monete; et discreti viri Bartolus Fey et
Ganus filius Dietaiuti erant, pro dicto comuni, rimettitores ditte monete auri; et Morellus Tommasini et Rosone
filius Iuncte erant sententiatores ditte monete auri; et Lapus ser Philippi erat, pro ditto comuni, sagiator et
approbator monete argenti seu legarum. Considerantibus predittis Gherardo et Iohanne, dominis monete
preditte, honorabilem monetam auri que cusa est et fatta in civitate Florentie … considerantibus etiam
comunem cursum, quem habet ditta moneta auri per universum orbem terrarum; considerantibus etiam quod
plures fuerunt in orbe principes, temporibus retroactis, qui cursum auferre voluerunt monete aure supraditte, et
eidem monete semper cursus adcrevit; et attendentibus et vere ex lamentosis querelis quamplurium proborum et
expertorum virorum de civitate Florentie videntibus et audientibus quod, de dominis et officialibus et signis
ditte monete, qui a die ipsius initiate, fatte et ordinate monete usque in diem presentem fuerunt et fatti sunt,
nulla in comuni Florentie supraditto reperitur memoria, que singulis ipsos videre volentibus pateat; videntibus
etiam dominis supradittis quod utile fore, de predittis dominis, officialibus et signis preteritis ac etiam de illis
qui erunt pro tempore, fieri, pro comuni preditto, quoddam registrum; prenominatis Gherardo et Iohanne,
dominis et officialibus monete preditte, vigore eorum officii supraditti, imponentibus et mandantibus michi Salvi
Dini de Florentia, notario et presentialiter scribe, pro comuni preditto, ditte monete, de ipsis dominis,
officialibus et signis memoriam fieri infrascriptam.
Infrascriptum est registrum et liber continens dominos et officiales ditte monete, qui reperiri
potuerunt, et signa que fecerunt seu fieri fecerunt in moneta auri vel argenti preditta, ac etiam signa reperta in
79
This introductory passage—in form and content—is essentially a founding charter typical of
the high medieval era. Written sixty-five years after the inauguration of the minting of gold
florins, the prologue first offers cachet to the current mint officials at the time of the book’s
production, who in the prologue act as quasi-signatories or witnesses for the creation of the
Libro della zecca. After the prologue, the book then lists the first sixty-five years’ worth of
previous mint masters, which, much like “ancient rights” won through medieval charters or
land grants, carried benefits for their descendants. Many of the early mint masters, for
example, came from upper-class families that would later develop into important noble
families in the city.
307
Indeed, mint masters with surnames like Medici, Boccaccio,
Machiavelli, and Vespucci make appearances in the full Libro della zecca.
308
Describing high
medieval origin stories that involved conquest, Bartlett notes that “those who were present at
these new beginnings were rapidly mythologized and given special standing in the collective
memory,” which led to benefits for their descendants.
309
Early association with the florin,
used in a specific sort of economic conquest, carried similar advantages. And individual
florins, of course, could not carry the image of mint masters in the same way they could a
king, but the Libro della Zecca offered an alternative way for them to gain the kind of
prestige Ptolemy of Lucca said could be won through coins. As the prologue notes, after all,
it was two mint masters—Giovanni Villani and Gherardo Gentili—who took it upon
themselves to order the production of the Libro for the benefit of their commune.
florenis auri coniatis in ditta moneta, de quorum tempore et dominis et officialibus, quorum tempore fatti sunt,
non bene potest reperiri memoria, et scriptus per me iamdictum Salvi, notarium monete predicte, de mandato
dominorum predictorum, sub anno dominice incarnationis millesimo trecentesimo septimo decimo, indictione
quinta decima, de mense martii.
307
Simpson, “Mint Officials of the Florentine Florin,” 115.
308
Ibid., 116.
309
Bartlett, The Making of Europe, 93.
80
When describing the process of its own creation, the prologue further functions like a
charter by conferring benefits. As the author of the prologue wrote, it was because of “the
common circulation that” the florin had “throughout the entire world” and because of the
“querulous complaints of many honest and expert men” in Florence that the Libro della zecca
was produced. Since the prologue mentioned that many princes used and desired the florin, a
document like the Libro was necessary to assure any prestige gained from the spread of the
coin was ultimately returned to the commune. The Libro, then, conferred intangible securities
for the city through the process of also conferring knowledge about the history of the mint.
And, like many charters, the prologue’s author also discusses it as being essentially the first
written record of preexisting knowledge. To this end, although the author of the prologue
describes some of the evidence for the earliest mint masters as incomplete, he nevertheless
recorded what was available. A prologue qua charter of this nature was unnecessary when
gold florins were first minted; after their use and reputation became widespread in the
Mediterranean basin, however, there were benefits to be had through association with its
origin for both the commune and mint officials.
Mythmaking and origin stories surrounding the creation of the florin appear in
Florentine sources beyond the prologue to the Libro della zecca. The same Giovanni Villani
(1280-1348) who ordered the creation of the Libro also produced a chronicle of Florentine
history in which he included accounts describing the beginning of the minting of gold florins
in 1252. While sometimes analyzed as being a mostly true story, Villani’s version of events,
written nearly seventy years after they were said to occur, is highly dubious. Villani began
his anecdote by describing how with the
new florins having begun to circulate through the world, they were carried to Tunis
… and being brought before the king of Tunis, who was a worthy and wise lord, they
81
pleased him much … and finding them to be of fine gold, he much commended them,
and having caused his interpreters to interpret the imprint and legend on the florin, he
found that it said: St. John the Baptist, and on the side of the lily, Florence. Perceiving
it to be Christian money, he sent to the Pisan merchants who were then free of the city
and were much with the king … and asked them what manner of city among
Christians was this Florence which made the said florins. The Pisans answered
spitefully through envy, saying: ‘They are our inland Arabs,’ which is to say, ‘our
mountain rustics.’
310
The king of Tunis, however, not believing the Pisan merchants, sent for a Florentine
merchant instead to provide him with more information about his city. This merchant
explained “how Pisa in comparison was neither in power nor in inhabitants the half of
Florence, and that they had no golden money, and that the florin was the fruit of many
victories gained by the Florentines over them.”
311
Pleased by both the information he had
learned from the merchant and the quality of the florin, the king of Tunis “made the
Florentines free of the city, and allowed them a place of habitation and a church in Tunis, and
he gave them the same privileges as the Pisans.”
312
Villani’s story offers more information for how Florentines in the fourteenth century
thought about and understood the florin than how the florin was actually received outside of
Florence in 1252. Approximately twenty years before Villani, for example, the Florentine
chronicler Paolino Pieri (d. 1340) offered information contrary to Villani’s, writing that the
florin was little used in the early years of its minting.
313
Pieri’s description does indeed fit
better than Villani’s with broader trends relating to Mediterranean gold coins. For example,
the entry for 1252 in the Annales Ianuenses, the chronicle of Genoa, described its own city’s
310
Giovanni Villani, Croniche Fiorentine of Giovanni Villani, trans. Rose E. Selfe, ed. Philip H. Wicksteed
(London: Archibald Constable and Co., 1906), 161-62.
311
Ibid., 162.
312
Ibid.
313
William R. Day, Jr., “Early Imitations of the Gold Florin of Florence and the Imitation Florin of Chivasso in
the Name of Theodore I Paleologus, Marquis of Montferrat (1306-1338),” Numismatic Chronicle 164 (2004):
188.
82
minting of gold coins in quite different terms. Rather than a celebration of the gold coins like
that found in Villani’s Croniche or the Libro della zecca, the chronicler only provided a
laconic passage spanning six Latin words: “in this same year the gold coinage of Genoa was
minted.”
314
Indeed, given the failures of many other gold currencies begun in the thirteenth
century, the approach of the Genoese chronicler was the logical and cautious one. To this
end, records also indicate Venetian counsellors were not hopeful about the future of the gold
ducat when they first began minting them in 1284.
315
Both the Florentine merchant in Tunis and the king of Tunis’s purported reaction to
the currency seem at odds, then, with general trends relating to the advent of gold currencies.
But, more telling to Villani’s purpose in relaying the story, it does not elide with the
circumstances of trade between the Latin West and North Africa in the mid-thirteenth
century. Crucially, gold currency was not used for trade by Latin merchants in Tunis when
Villani’s story is said to have taken place. Instead, Europe shipped massive amounts of silver
into Tunis and North Africa, where it was then exchanged for gold, itself later transported to
the Near East and used to purchase luxury products.
316
North African merchants were so
particular about the precious metals they accepted as currency that enterprising Christians
minted imitation Muslim silver dirhams specifically to expediate trade in the region.
317
This
included the Genoese in 1253, one year after they began minting their gold genovinos.
318
Further, this practice persisted until the 1270s despite papal attempts to shut down Christian
mints that produced these coins imprinted with Islamic sayings and despite the great
314
Annali Genovesi di Caffaro de’ suoi continuatori (Rome: Tipografia del Senato, 1926), 10. Eodem anno
nummus aureus Ianue fabricatus.
315
Day, Jr., “Early Imitations of the Gold Florin of Florence,” 188.
316
Ashtor, Les métaux précieux et la balance des payments du Proche-Orient, 23.
317
Spufford, Money and its Use, 175.
318
Ibid., 173.
83
inconvenience that transporting thousands of silver coins to North Africa—rather than
ingots—would have entailed.
319
By the time Villani was writing, however, the gold florin
was indeed a popular coin used internationally and, as discussed above, a means through
which Florence usurped the economic rights of their rivals. Many nationalistic origin stories
produced in the high medieval era relied on the motif of a legendary conqueror to explain
their present-day successes and national character.
320
Villani’s story shares similar qualities,
making Florentine economic successes through the use of the florin in his contemporary
times appear inevitable. Much like the prologue to the Libro della zecca, then, Villani’s
anecdote is a product of its time, not so much intended to convey factual information about
the past but to offer an origin story for the florin that mapped onto his present reality.
To maintain these various intangible benefits, the mint in Florence needed to produce
florins of a consistently high quality. Part of the reason, for example, the florin or genovino
became a standard currency in distant regions like the Near East was because of the continual
debasement of coins produced locally in those regions. To safeguard against the devaluing of
their money and other potential negative incidents, the Florentine mint drafted a constitution
with rules attempting to limit the possibility for these things to occur. Produced around 1310
and known as the Constitutum artis monetariorum civitatis Florentiae, the document
stipulates by what practices the mint’s workers were meant to abide and the punishments
they could face should they violate them. As described throughout the document, a constant
concern for its framers was guaranteeing that the currency the mint produced reliably
remained at an exceptionally high quality. In fact, after an opening preamble, rules for
electing new mint officials, and a statute banning all workers from blaspheming “God and his
319
Ibid., 174.
320
Bartlett, The Making of Europe, 85.
84
mother, the blessed Virgin Mary, or any male or female saints of God, or the heavenly court”
in the mint, the very first regulation concerns the potential debasing of money.
321
According
to this statute, if any minter should diminish the value gold or silver coin,” he was to be
“expelled from the mint, and condemned to the loss of forty silver denarii in his wages.”
322
This punishment, the most expensive of its kind in the Constitutum, was significant as mint
workers generally did not earn high wages.
323
The Constitutum also contains an ordinance
banning “theft or fraud” [furtum vel falsitatem] in the mint: “It established and ordained that
if any minter should commit theft or fraud in matters pertaining to the mint, or existing in the
mint, he is to be charged therewith by the bailiff or the minters before the lords and masters
of the mint and expelled from the mint.”
324
The florin, central to familial and personal
prestige as described in the Libro della zecca, as well as communal prestige as described in
Villani’s anecdote, required certain protections that the Constitutum sought to provide. In
essence, in order to imperialize their neighbors, the florin had to remain of a high, reliable
quality. As I discuss later, however, it was only the florin and their imitations which the
Florentines sought to protect. Indeed, Florentines who worked in foreign mints did not
always adhere to similar rules as outlined in the Constitutum—for their commune’s benefit,
they were selective regarding which coins they protected from debasement.
The Example of the Avignon Papacy and Western Europe
Use of the florin was so widespread in Europe by the 1320s, and its non-economic
321
Constitutum artis monetariorum civitatis Florentiae, ed. Piero Ginori Conti (Florence: Olshki, 1939), 3.
Deum et beatam Virginem Mariam matrem eius, vel aliquem sanctum, aut sanctam Dei, vel curiam celestialem.
322
Ibid. Statutum et ordinatum est quod si aliquis moneterius diminueret monetaggium monete auri, vel argenti,
sit expulsus de moneta, et condempnetur in soldis quadraginta florenorum parvorum.
323
Travaini, “Mint Organization in Italy,” 47.
324
Constitutum artis monetariorum civitatis Florentiae, 5. Statutum et ordinatum est quod si aliquis moneterius
faceret furtum vel falsitatem de rebus pertinentibus ad monetam, vel in moneta existentibus, sit inde per
prepositum vel moneterios accusatus coram dominis et magistris monete et de moneta expulsus.
85
functions so ingrained in the coin, that the processes described above became self-driving
and perpetuating, with foreign governments inadvertently assisting in this process of
Florentine economic imperialism. A closer examination of John XXII’s order to mint
imitation florins demonstrates the role foreign states played in this process. Consider, not
only did John put Florentine merchants in charge of developing the program for minting
imitation florins, but he also explicitly depended on the commune, requesting help and access
to necessary technology like weights and measures to produce imitation coins as true as
possible to those already in circulation.
325
Comparatively, numerous princes before John,
though not following the lead of Genoa and Florence, spectacularly failed in their attempts to
mint gold coins of their own.
326
As Bloch notes when discussing failed gold coinages of the
thirteenth century, since “all money is founded on confidence … and in a large measure on
habit,” “plagiarism was” a monetary program like the papacy’s “only resource.”
327
Confidence and habit were, indeed, the main reasons that the papacy minted imitation florins
rather than striking their own gold coinage, especially in the years following 1322 when John
needed dependable and widely accepted currency to finance his wars in Italy.
328
Additionally,
there were relatively limited risks and non-material costs transporting florins and imitation
florins compared to silver currencies. With florins, taxes or dues owed to the papal camera by
individual monasteries or churches could be discreetly transported by a single traveler—1000
florins, for example, only weighed approximately 5.5 pounds.
329
Due to the extent of the
325
William R. Day, Jr., “Antiquity, Rome, and Florence: Coinage and Transmissions Across Time and Space,”
in Rome Across Time and Space: Cultural Transmission and Exchange of Ideas, c. 500-1400, ed. Claudia
Bolgia, Rosamond McKitterick, and John Osborne (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2011), 246.
326
Spufford, Money and its Use, 168-69; Lopez, “Back to Gold, 1252,” 238-39.
327
Bloch, “Le problème de l’or au moyen age,” 24. Toute monnaie est fondée sur la confiance … [et] dans une
large mesure, sur l’habitude … plagiat était … seule ressource.
328
Spufford, Money and its Use, 183.
329
Marc Bompaire, “Voyageurs, convoyeurs, et réseaux financiers à la fin du moyen âge: quelques exemples
Français,” Revue Belge de numismatique et de sigillographie 152 (2006): 70.
86
Avignon papacy’s bureaucracy, and the regions it primarily focused on politically,
widespread adoption of the florin offered a number of solutions to its economic problems.
These papal motivations carried clear benefits for Florence and its merchants.
Assisting with the production of the papal imitation florins (and other imitation florins to
follow) further caused the currency to be standard throughout Western Europe and reduced
the opportunity for counterfeit currencies to succeed.
330
Additionally, success of John’s
imitation florin led to similar programs being successfully adopted by other Latin princes,
further expanding the prestige of the currency and strengthening its reputation.
331
To this end,
during the reign of Clement VI (r. 1342-52) the association between the papacy and the florin
was so thorough that the curia distributed over three and half million florins to the French
king Philip VI (r. 1328-50) to help pay for his expenses during the early stages of the
Hundred Years War.
332
This use of florins as a form of payment during the Hundred Years
War led to the even further development of mints that produced imitation florins in France
and the Low Countries to expediate payment for supplies and to soldiers.
333
Much like the
mint of John and Charles II, these mints also required experts to produce acceptable
imitations, and Florentine mint workers were sought to run them.
334
In order to ensure these
florins were of high quality, rights were often granted to attract Florentines to serve as mint
masters. At the papal mint in Avignon during the reign of Clement, for example, Florentine
mint workers were granted legal privileges, like exemptions from papal taxes and some
330
Day, Jr., “Antiquity, Rome, and Florence,” 248.
331
Spufford, Money and its Use, 185.
332
Spufford, Money and its Use, 278n2. Simultaneous to this, Florentine bankers also provided the English king
Edward III (r. 1327-77) with loans of 1.5 million florins for his own preparation for war with France. See ibid.,
277.
333
Ibid., 278.
334
Travaini, “Mint Organization in Italy,” 49.
87
ability to choose which judge would serve in court cases they were involved in.
335
This development of new mints and the disbursement of these Florentine mint
masters throughout Europe naturally coincided with an explosion in the number of florins
produced on the continent: in 1338, in addition to 350,000 florins minted in Florence, another
100,000 imitation florins were minted in Ghent under the auspices of a Florentine mint
master, and an additional 35,000 florins were minted as far afield as Lübeck.
336
And, of
course, many of these imitation florins bore the images of the lily and John the Baptist
ubiquitous to the coin, including those papal coins that ordinarily would have included an
image of Peter or Paul.
337
Of all developments of this kind, the most spectacular was John XXII’s decision—
now having a personal stake in the reputation of the florin—to issue a bull in 1324 banning
the counterfeiting of the currency by Florentine rivals.
338
In a similar manner to how
Florence parlayed loans of florins to kings of Naples into trade rights and privileges, the
numismatist Ulrich Klein believes that Florence’s decision to send assistance to John’s mint
was part of a transaction that concluded with his issuing of the bull.
339
This sort of direct
exchange is difficult to divine from the sources, but, at the least, the bull known as In
delictorum diversorum was a major victory for the Florentines: it cast their economic rivals
as greedy, threatened them with anathematization if they did not cease the production of
imitation florins, and essentially endorsed the florin as the standardized currency in the Latin
335
Guillaume Mollat, “Les papes d’Avgnon et leur hotel des monnaies a Sourgues,” Revue numismatique 12,
no. 4 (1908): 255-56.
336
Leroy, “Le trésor de Bruges,” 114.
337
For a description of one of John XXII’s florins, see Giard, “Le florin d’or au baptiste et ses imitations,” 99.
338
Day, Jr., “Early Imitations of the Gold Florin of Florence,” 198.
339
Ulrich Klein, “Der Florentiner Goldgulden und seine Imitationen,” in Faux-contrefaçons-imitations: Actes
du quatrième colloque international du Groupe Suisse pour l’étude des trouvailles monétaires, ed. Anne-
Francine Auberson, Harald R. Derschka, Suzanne Frey-Kupper (Belfort: Éditions du Zèbre, 2004), 137.
88
West. Indeed, the bull begins not by discussing negative consequences of counterfeit money
on economies, but by using florid language to cast those involved in the production of illicit
florins as money-obsessed sinners, similar in nature to Dante’s usurers, placing profit before
both divine and secular law. “There are … some who,” the bull begins,
forgetful of their own salvation, not content with common and ordinary
transgressions, bursting towards improprieties and forbidden things, are sunk down
by damnable desirable for profits and the inexhaustible pit of profits in such a way
that while they satisfy their gluttonies, toward which they gape, rashly plunging
themselves into illicit gains, or rather spiritual losses, they prefer wicked takings and
illicit profits to the honor of God and the salvation of souls, and to both imperious
edicts of sacred canons, to and common laws.
340
The bull continued by becoming specific—alluding to the rivals of Florence that “prefer
wicked takings and illicit profits to the honor of God and the salvation of souls”—and noting
the tradition that is violated by the production of imitation florins:
Public report has been made … that there are some in parts of upper Lombardy and of
the Genoese march, who with the reins of rash permissiveness slackened, presuming
that crimes are allowed to them, they strike and mint, or they cause to be struck or
minted florins of gold, following the form and mark and dye and the lettered borders
of those which have been accustomed to be struck and minted in the city of Florence,
from a time beyond memory, and also at present are struck and minted.
341
Though the bull ostensibly sought to rectify personal failings and prevent others from
committing sin, its aims eventually turned economic:
And although the said florins have been minted similar to the true florin from
Florence, they are deficient in the true and typical value of the florin; those florins
however (in a copied imitation of true florins) deceive common people … and also at
340
John XXII, In delictorum diversorum, in Die Ausgaben der apostolischen Kammer unter Johann XXII, ed.
Schäfer, K. H. (Paderbord: Ferdinand Schöning, 1911), 138-39. Sunt … nonnulli, qui propriae salutis
immemores, delictis communibus et vulgaribus non contenti, ad profana et vetita prorumpentes, sic damnata
cupiditate lucrorum ac inexhausta eorum voragine devoluuntur, quod dummodo suas ingluvies ad quas inhiant,
expleant se lucris illicitis, immo iacturis spiritualibus temere immergentes, honori Dei et animarum saluti, ac
sacrorum canonum et imperialibus edictis et iuribus communibus, capturas nefarias et lucra illicita anteponunt.
341
Ibid. Relatio … publica … effecit … nonnullos esse in Lombardiae superioris et Marchiae Ianuensis
partibus, qui licentiatae temerariae laxatis habenis licere sibi praesumentes illicita cudunt et fabricant, seu cudi
et fabricari faciunt florenos auri, secundum formam et signum et coinum ac circunferentias litterarum, qui in
civitate Florentiae (a tempore cuius non extat memoria) cudi et fabricari sunt soliti, et cuduntur et fabricantur
etiam in praesenti.
89
the same time experts in matters of this kind, and they expose themselves to financial
losses and to the ruin of people, when they accept them as true florins.
342
The production of counterfeit florins needed to cease, In delictorum diversorum ultimately
argued, because of the confusion it was causing in economic exchanges—Florence’s
domain—and in princely treasuries—John’s primary concern.
What the bull emphasizes and highlights elides with both Florentine economic
policies and resonates with the political philosophy of Ptolemy of Lucca. The counterfeit
florins, the bull related, were deceitful and could cause damages when they were used in
buying and selling. Similarly, they looked exactly like the real deal, to the point that, as the
bull describes, “most did not have the skill to discern between florins and false florins of
such similarity.”
343
If money, as Ptolemy wrote, was the means through which people most
often came into contact with their lord and how those lords consequently gained prestige,
unreliable money could also derail those processes. Indeed, these concerns are also partly
why the Constitutum specifically banned the debasement of the florin. Though perhaps not
intentional, Florentine efforts to make princes in the Latin West reliant on their currency
clearly paid major dividends when they cultivated this reliance at the court of John XXII. No
matter how effective In delictorum diversorum was in preventing the counterfeiting of
florins, it still represents one of the highest authorities in all of Christendom intervening on
behalf of Florence and the city’s money for its benefit.
The Example of Central Europe
Imitation florins spread throughout central Europe in the first half of the fourteenth
342
Ibid. Et quamvis dicti floreni ad veram florenorum de Florentia similitudinem fabricati, in vero et solito
florenorum valore deficient; ipsi tamen (simulata eorum effigie) personas … et quandoque etiam in huiusmodi
rebus expertas decipiunt, ipsasque rerum et periculis personarum exponent, dum pro veris florenis ipsos
recipient.
343
Ibid. Plurimi non habeant inter florenos et florenos tantae similitudinis peritiam discernendi.
90
century at a similarly frenetic pace, and in a similarly cascading manner, as they did in
Western Europe. John the Blind (r. 1313-46), king of Bohemia, was the first prince outside of
France during this period to mint a gold currency, ordering the production of imitation florins
in 1325.
344
Partly due to the yields from recently opened native gold mines, Charles I of
Hungary (r. 1301-42) began minting his own gold currency in 1328, using the florin as a
paradigm for his coin’s weight, fineness, and type.
345
In fact, the production of these
imitation florins was even preceded by a meeting between Charles and John in which the two
kings agreed to a shared system of currency in their neighboring principalities, with florins,
produced locally or otherwise, designated as the standard gold piece.
346
The use of the florin
in central Europe was so dispersed that by 1340 Louis IV of the Holy Roman Empire (r.
1328-47) began to grant specific rights and privileges pertaining to their minting, including to
the city of Lübeck.
347
Not long after in 1354, the elector-princes in the Rhineland also
decided to use florins as a standard currency and mint their own imitations. This decision
possessed massive ramifications for money in central Europe and led to the production of
even further imitations, “because all other German, Netherlandish, and Lothringian gold
money oriented itself to the coinage of the elector-princes.”
348
These trends pertaining to both
the spread of florins and the varying polities that began to mint them are also reflected in data
from rediscovered coin hoards in central Europe. Among the coins found in a treasure from
344
Johannes Abdullahi, “Die erste Goldmünze Böhmens: Die Münzpolitik Johanns des Blinden zwischen
Kapitalbedarf und repräsentativem Herrschaftsstil,” in Heilige, Helden, Wüteriche: Herrschaftsstile der
Luxemburger (1308-1437), ed. Martin Bauch, Julia Burkhardt, Tomáš Gaudek, and Václav Žůrek (Cologne:
Wien Böhlau Verlag, 2017), 150.
345
Spufford, Money and its Use, 268.
346
Ibid., 269.
347
Klein, “Der Florentiner Goldgulden und seine Imitationen,” 137.
348
Konrad Schneider, “Prägung und Umlauf von Dukaten im Rheinland: Erste hochfeine Florene und Dukaten
und ihre Verdrängung durch die rheinischen Goldgulden” Jahrbuch für westdeutsche Landesgeschichte 32
(2006): 94. Denn nach den Gulden der Kurfürsten richteten sich alle anderen deutschen, niederländischen und
lothringischen Guldenprägungen aus.
91
Limburg and dating to no earlier than 1342, for example, are 136 total gold coins, including
120 florins, of which 84 were minted in Florence. Comparatively, a coin hoard from Mainz
and dating to approximately fifty years later and around 1390 contained 450 total florins,
including 185 minted in Hungary, sixty in Bohemia, and fifty-nine in Austria.
349
The role of the florin in John the Blind’s economic policies helps to further
emphasize the remarkable ways in which florins filtered into foreign economies and how
their associated prestige led to more benefits for the city. Much like John XXII and the
Angevin kings of Naples, John the Blind’s economic policy was essentially outsourced to
Florence and beholden to the city’s wishes and economic goals. Though a gold currency
could help finance John’s international wars, coined gold was not used locally in Bohemia as
a currency.
350
Like many other parts of Europe, silver was the standard metal of currency in
the kingdom. John was, however, innovative in his use of silver as a currency, minting
pennies with the metal that featured an exceptionally unique design showing his face in
three-quarters profile.
351
Given the preexisting prestige and international value of the florin,
however, John was unable to act in a similarly innovative way when minting his imitations,
which remained faithful to the original in design, purity, and weight.
352
Still, while noting
that John likely lost money by minting the coins, the numismatist Emanuela Nohejlová-
Pratová concludes his decision to mint florins was “an act of political representation, because
John needed the luster of gold in the luster of his own person.”
353
The economic historian
349
Ibid., 95.
350
For John’s need to pay for wars, see Abdullahi, “Die erste Goldmünze Böhmens,” 149-50. For the lack of
local applications of gold currency in Bohemia, see ibid., 161.
351
For the design of John’s silver penny, see ibid., 158-59.
352
For the quality of John’s imitations, see ibid., 160.
353
Emanuela Nohejlová-Pratová, as quoted in Abdullahi, “Die erste Goldmünze Böhmens,” 151. Ein Akt
politischer Reprasentation, denn Johann benotigte zum Glanz seiner Person auch den Glanz des Goldes.
92
Peter Spufford comes to a similar conclusion.
354
And, the historian Johannes Abdullahi
positions John’s decision to begin minting florins as a broader part of a propagandistic
program, akin to holding tournaments or patronizing poets and heralds.
355
Missing in these interpretations, however, is that this was prestige gained specifically
through association with Florence and their florin. Simply, John could not have been able to
participate in such an act of political representation without the years of work by Florentines
to imperialize Latin Christendom with their coins, nor would he have gone to the extents he
did without the direct encouragement of Florentines. The Bohemian chronicler Peter von
Zittau (1275-1339) offered a notable example of how this process worked. As the chronicler
reports, at a moment when “this king now [had] an intense desire to amass a heap of
treasure,” he “summoned from Florence certain Lombards highly skilled in the science of
turning money to profit.”
356
As previously described, the international reputation of the florin
caused Florentines to be sought out for technical advice for the production of coins and
general advice on economic policy. Indeed, John employed a Florentine as his own mint
master.
357
Though his imitation florins were detrimental to his finances and offered few
benefits outside of intangible prestige, these Florentine advisors nevertheless offered a
solution that would allow the florins to continue being produced: John should debase the
money used locally, they suggested, in a sense thus implying that the purity of his imitation
florins should not be tinkered with. As Peter von Zittau related, this suggestion proved to be
amenable to the king, and “on their advice he allowed cheap silver pennies to be minted in
354
Spufford, Money and Its Use, 269.
355
Abdullahi, “Die erste Goldmünze Böhmens,” 151.
356
Peter von Zittau, Chronicon Aulae Ragiae, in Fontes Rerum Bohemicarum, ed. Josef Emler (Prague, 1884),
284. Habet rex iste nunc intentum studium, ut aggreget cumulum thezaurorum … advocavit rex quosdam de
Florencia Lambardos in sciencia lucrandi pecunias valde gnaros.
357
Abdullahi, “Die erste Goldmünze Böhmens,” 152.
93
the public mint.”
358
This had a disastrous effect on the local economy, however, and
“because of this, a sizable protest began to be raised among the people, since their copper
material and corrupted form hindered the trade of all sellable goods.”
359
This advice by the Florentines in John’s employ is most remarkable when
contextualized in the evidence discussed above. First, debasing his silver coinage was an
unusual tack to take. In the first half of the fourteenth century, Bohemian silver mines
produced more bullion than any others in Europe, to the extent that under John’s predecessor
Wenceslaus II (r. 1278-1305) sent approximately 6.8 tons of silver annually to his mints.
360
Essentially, the decision was not made due to a want of silver. Furthermore, if the minters
who made the suggestion were located in Florence, the mere act of debasing the silver
currency would have resulted in the punishments spelled out in the Constitutum artis
monetariorum civitatis Florentiae. As also described in the Constitutum, Florentines with
knowledge of minting had to receive permission from the provost of the mint before working
outside of the commune.
361
And, the decision violated Ptolemy of Lucca’s advice to princes
about money, with coins featuring the name and image of John now debased and
unreliable—exactly what In delictorum diversorum sought to prevent for Florence.
Essentially, what the Florentines in John’s employ—who had to be deputized by their native
mint master to work in Bohemia—suggested to the king was the complete opposite of the
monetary policies of their city. In so doing, they both protected the value of an imitation
florin (in turn protecting the value of the true florin) and obliquely weakened the silver
358
Peter von Zittau, Chronicon Aulae Ragiae, 284. Ad horum consilium parvos denarios rex permisit in moneta
publica monetari.
359
Ibid. Cepit ex hoc clamor in vulgo non modicus elevari, quoniam cuprea materia et corrupta eorum forma
impediunt omnium venalium rerum fora.
360
Michael North, Das Geld und seine Geschichte: Vom Mittelalter bis zur Gegenwart (Munich: C. H. Beck,
1994), 18.
361
Travaini, “Mint Organization in Italy,” 46.
94
currency of a rival state.
By the 1330s, then, Florence had imposed its economic might on the rest of the Latin
West and the gold florin reigned as the premier currency in Europe. Networks of Florentine
merchants and bankers encouraged its use, and its uniformity and purity of gold was highly
valued for large payments and international trade in the West. The specific value of gold in
southern Europe allowed Florentine merchants to forge exploitative contracts with
Neapolitan monarchs, displacing foreign merchants and usurping rights over essential goods
like grain. As Villani’s improbable anecdote reveals, this accomplishment was recognized by
the Florentines themselves. Additionally, as demonstrated by the prologue to the Libro della
zecca, prestige and honor could be won for Florentines through association with the coin and
the mint that produced them. There was an added benefit for Florence with regards to this
prestige as much of it was earned at the expense of, or with the help of, rival states. The gold
florin was so central to European economic life that the papacy anathematized any who
would dare to counterfeit it, increasing confidence in both the currency and the city whose
name it bore. Imitations were, however, still allowed, though this also benefited the
Florentines, with foreign governments spreading the city’s fame through the use of their city-
specific insignia on their imitations and employing Florentine experts to run their mints.
The Later Medieval World System, Global Mali, and Economic Imperialism
Though Florence’s monetary policy outpaced that of its European competitors, the
city too was at risk of being imperialized and its economic policy was at risk of becoming
beholden to a foreign power. Indeed, Florence was not the only later medieval polity that
could wield gold as a tool for imperialism. As demonstrated in part one of this thesis,
variations in the amount of gold available to Western Europe had the potential to profoundly
95
influence Latin society and culture. Therefore, despite its firm position as a core in the
Western European/Trans-Saharan world system, Florence was still dependent on other actors
in said system to maintain its power.
To this end, the documents and scholarship pertaining to Florence analyzed thus far
allow for a clear picture to emerge about the ways in which gold could be used as a tool for
imperialism in the later Middle Ages. With this paradigm established, a comparative analysis
with Mansa Musa’s own similar use of gold while in Cairo can be undertaken, in turn
allowing these uses of the metal in the later medieval Mediterranean basin to come into a
sharper focus. Conscious decisions from Musa, which elided with broader goals of imperial
Mali, sent reverberations throughout the Mediterranean basin and influenced European
economies that had previously developed a dependency on gold as a currency.
By going on hajj, Musa naturally accrued spiritual benefits and political capital
which he could utilize locally in West Africa. Beyond this, however, Michael Gomez argues
that Musa possessed two economic and imperial motivations for his pilgrimage: to extend his
hegemony over territories within his immediate sphere of influence in order “to access and
control a larger share of commercial markets” so that he could “maintain imperium through
means other than military force,” and to establish Mali as a “transregional, if not global
power.”
362
Similarly, Nehemia Levtzion argues that Musa’s hajj was ultimately successful
because it encouraged Egyptian merchants to invest in direct trade with West Africa.
363
According to the available written sources—including the purported words of Musa
himself—these hypothesized goals do indeed fit with broader political trends and policies of
the Empire of Mali. As previously referenced in part one of this thesis, al-Umari, for
362
Gomez, African Dominion, 109.
363
Levtzion, “The Early States of the Western Sudan,” 152.
96
example, described how unrestrained conquest in West Africa led to a decline in the amount
of gold produced in the region. “If the sultan wished he could extend his authority over
[pagan gold-producing regions],” al-Umari wrote, “but the kings of this kingdom have learnt
by experience that as soon as one of them conquers one of the gold towns … the gold there
begins to decrease and then disappears, while it increases in the neighboring heathen
countries.”
364
In other words, emperors of Mali understood the dramatic risks to their
treasury that existed should they pursue imperium through military conquest. Consequently,
they developed non-militaristic methods to imperialize their neighbors. In Musa’s case, al-
Umari explains that he opted to cultivate a trading relationship with the gold-producing
pagan lands to his south, exchanging “crude copper” for gold at a rate of 100 to 66.6 units.
365
This was, in essence, the same strategy as the Florentines in southern Italy and Naples; but
where the city and its bankers traded florins for the right to control the southern Italian grain
market, Musa traded copper for gold. In Mali’s program of establishing and maintaining
imperium, shrewd economic policy and market manipulation were common and viable
methods to employ.
The sources similarly indicate that emperors of Mali envisioned their domain as
possessing a global-political role. Such ideas even appear fundamental to the self-conception
of emperors of Mali and were part of broader programs developed to demonstrate their right
to rule to both domestic and international audiences. As al-Umari described, for example,
while in Cairo Musa reported to one of the author’s sources that his predecessor outfitted and
personally led a fleet of 2,000 ships to “discover the furthest limit of the Atlantic Ocean.”
366
364
Al-Umari, Pathways of Vision in the Realms of the Metropolises, 262.
365
Ibid., 272.
366
Ibid., 269.
97
Despite the voyage’s presumed failure, both the story itself and Musa’s decision to relay it to
an international audience indicates Mali thought of itself as a global power, a self-conception
which Musa also felt the need to announce during his stay in Cairo.
Similarly, Ibn Khaldun reported that one of Musa’s later successors Mari Jata (r.
1360-74) completed a series of diplomatic exchanges with a sultan of Morocco by sending
him “a giraffe, a strangely-shaped and large-framed creature resembling various other
animals.”
367
As Ibn Khaldun further related, the arrival of the animal caused a great
spectacle, with a crowd gathering “until the space was too small for them and they climbed
upon each other in the press round the giraffe in amazement at its form.”
368
Though a distant
potentate, Mari Jata’s actions thus impelled a brief mania among inhabitants of Fez, in turn
demonstrating the various forms of non-military power he (and emperors of Mali more
generally speaking) wielded.
Gold, however, was the primary tool for emperors of Mali to use when developing
their global prestige. As discussed in the first part of this thesis, the Ghana’s abundance of
gold—possessing so much that he could purportedly adorn his dogs in the metal—caused an
international stir and was reported in al-Bakri’s geographical work. Similarly, Fauvelle
proposes that the golden orb held by the image of Musa on the famed Catalan Atlas of 1375
is perhaps an indication of European knowledge of a famous, massive gold nugget used to
articulate kingship in West Africa beginning with kings of Wagadu and appropriated by
emperors of Mali.
369
At the least, Ibn Khaldun considered shrewd use of gold by emperors of
Mali to be central to their ability as rulers. As he reported, Mari Jata was “a most wicked
367
Ibn Khaldun, The Book of Examples, 342.
368
Ibid.
369
Fauvelle, The Golden Rhinoceros, 197.
98
ruler,” an appraisal partly confirmed by his decision to sell a “boulder of gold which was a
prized possession” of emperors of Mali.
370
As one of Khaldun’s informative sources
described, the boulder weighed “twenty qintars” and was “regarded as the rarest and most
precious of treasures because its like [was] so scarce.”
371
Stewardship over gold, and politic
uses of the metal, were thus central to how West African rulers were perceived
internationally.
Reading the available sources about Musa’s hajj in Cairo absent this context and the
paradigm established through the study of Florence, it would seem he failed to either expand
Mali’s imperium or announce his empire as a global power. As described by one of al-
Umari’s sources, when Musa arrived in Cairo he was hesitant to visit al-Nasir in person
“‘because he would be obliged to kiss the ground and the sultan’s hand.”
372
Viewing himself
at least as an equal to the sultan, the idea of following the protocol expected of a supplicant
was insulting to Musa. Nevertheless, he was forced to visit the sultan’s court and kiss the
ground in front of him, justifying it by claiming he was “‘mak[ing] obeisance to God who
created [him]!”
373
On the one hand, the available sources say that, despite Musa’s initial
unwillingness to follow protocol, there was no further conflict between the two rulers. On the
other hand, Gomez writes that “the whole of the evidence [about the audience] suggests the
meeting was a major disappointment for Musa.”
374
Indeed, this moment leads Gomez to
conclude that Musa failed in his broader goals of demonstrating the global power of Mali.
375
After traveling thousands of miles only to be treated by al-Nasir as a subordinate, Musa
370
Ibn Khaldun, The Book of Examples, 335-36.
371
Ibid., 336.
372
Al-Umari, Pathways of Vision in the Realms of the Metropolises, 270.
373
Ibid.
374
Gomez, African Dominion, 117.
375
Ibid., 122.
99
apparently did not obtain his desired geo-political outcomes from his hajj.
Musa’s disappointment, however, should be understood as motivation for his actions
which followed the audience. In fact, such an interpretation fits with general patterns of
Musa’s rulership style. For example, the famous Muslim traveler Ibn Battuta (1304-68),
whose journeys took him to West Africa during the reign of Mari Jata, relayed an anecdote
about the largess Musa demonstrated when returning favors. According to Battuta, when
Musa was just a boy and it was uncertain if he would become emperor, a local man gave him
a gift of seven gold mithqals (akin to seven dinars).
376
Years later and after becoming
emperor, the man returned to court to request Musa’s help concerning a dispute. As Battuta
described,
Musa recognized [the man] and brought him so close to himself that he sat with him
… Then he made him admit the kindness which he had done to him and said to the
emirs: “What should be the reward of one who has done the good deed that he has
done?” They said: “For a kindness ten times the like thereof, so give him 70
mithqals.” Thereupon he gave him 700 mithqals.
377
Similarly, Ibn Khaldun reported that Musa sent al-Nasir a gift of 50,000 dinars in advance of
their meeting.
378
Of course, what al-Nasir offered Musa in return was not interpreted as a
gracious gesture, requiring from Musa a reaction in kind.
As already detailed, Musa followed his meeting with the sultan by flooding Cairo
with gold—discussed by his contemporaries and, perhaps, intentionally disguised by the
emperor as being benefactions—which led to severe, long-lasting consequences for the
Cairene economy. Though he was forced to follow protocol and genuflect in the presence of
the sultan, through his actions that followed Musa nevertheless exhibited his ability to exert
376
Ibn Battuta, Rihla, trans. J. F. P. Hopkins, in Corpus of Early Arabic Sources, 295.
377
Ibid., 296.
378
Ibn Khaldun, 323.
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his power globally. In fact, by flooding all of Cairo with gold, Musa essentially made his gift
to the sultan worthless. Neither the local economy nor al-Nasir appear to have benefited
financially from Musa’s visit. Still, Musa’s reputation appears to have remained positive in
the Near East following his hajj. Al-Umari wrote, for example, that when the author first
arrived in Cairo he found its citizens “eager to recount what they had seen of the Africans’
prodigal spending.”
379
When al-Umari wrote about Musa’s visit ten years later, he was not
merely reflecting on the opulence involved in Musa’s visit, but also the very real economic
consequences with which Cairo continued to contend.
Importantly, the Egyptians who witnessed the event believed, based on Musa’s own
words, that his spending did not have major consequences for his own treasury. While in
Cairo, Musa was asked by at least one Egyptian about a legendary gold-producing plant that,
among learned Muslims, was believed to be the source West Africa’s gold. In this
conversation, Musa did not deny or clarify the legend, but leaned into it, describing two
separate plants whose roots were made of gold. As al-Umari wrote, “Musa … [explained]
that gold was his prerogative and he collected the crop as a tribute.”
380
According to Musa
himself, acquiring gold was as easy as pulling it out of the ground or exchanging it for crude
copper; his supplies of the yellow metal were, from the perspective of the Egyptians,
limitless. Of course, this was false and Musa likely delayed going on his hajj in order to
accumulate enough gold for his trip. Furthermore, the sources do not indicate that his original
plan was to ruin Cairo’s economy. But when traditional diplomacy failed to produce the
results Musa desired, he turned to more aggressive, imperialistic methods to demonstrate his
personal influence and Mali’s position as a global power.
379
Al-Umari, Pathways of Vision in the Realms of the Metropolises, 269.
380
Ibid., 267.
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This decision by Musa had further reaching consequences than even he likely
appreciated: when Musa dumped tons and tons of gold into the Cairene gold market, he not
only upset the local economy but, as data indicates, crashed the western Mediterranean gold
trade, which naturally carried negative results for Florence’s gold-based economy. At the
exact moment Musa visited Cairo in 1324, for example, the gold florin was at its highest ever
value, with every florin of gold worth approximately a combined sixty-six silver Florentine
soldi and nine silver denarii.
381
Ten years later in 1334—contemporaneous to when al-Umari
reported that the value of gold was still depreciated in Cairo—the florin reached its lowest
value level since 1316, worth only fifty-nine silver soldi. This trend is locatable in the
exchange rates of gold to silver throughout Europe.
382
Further, in the decade following
Musa’s hajj, the Florentine mint produced the most gold florins it ever had or would produce,
manufacturing approximately 1315 kilograms worth annually, or over 360,000 individual
coins.
383
The ratio of gold to silver coins produced by the Florentine mint in that decade was
also dramatically high, with 16% more gold minted into coins compared to silver.
Comparatively, the 1340s saw 235% more silver minted into coins than gold.
384
So, Musa’s
visit to Cairo appears to have both devalued gold in Florence and increased the city’s overall
supply in the years that followed. As a consequence, the value of gold relative to silver
plunged even further in Italy during the 1340s; where in 1324 one gram of gold was worth
fourteen grams of silver on the peninsula, by 1349 one gram of gold was worth barely over
nine grams of silver.
385
The drop in the value of the florin was disastrous for the city,
381
Peter Spufford, Handbook of Medieval Exchange, 3.
382
Spufford, Money and its Use, 272.
383
Ibid., 415.
384
Ibid.
385
Spufford, Handbook of Medieval Exchange, lxi.
102
coinciding with a period of famine, plague, and the eventual bankruptcy of the commune,
problems which the city attempted to buy its way out of by minting so many gold florins.
386
The economic historian Peter Spufford argues in the concluding chapter of his Money
and its Use in Medieval Europe that, while impressive, large payments in the Latin West
“paled into insignificance against the tide of commerce.”
387
Whether they were for the
ransom of a king or to buy titles and lands, Spufford argues, payments of these sort “seen in
the perspective of decades … makes them seem small and ephemeral.”
388
Perspectives like
those of Spufford, however, conceal important functions of gold and gold currencies in the
later medieval Mediterranean basin. Through highly specific—even non-commercial—
usages of their gold currency, Florence was able to imperialize their rivals, opening up new
markets and increasing their prestige in the process. Similarly, Musa ruined both the gold
markets of Cairo and Florence after a hostile reception with the al-Nasir, the West African
emperor in the process announcing his status as a global monarch.
386
Leroy, “Le trésor de Bruges,” 102.
387
Spufford, Money and its Use, 392.
388
Ibid.
103
Conclusion
Fernand Braudel’s evaluation of gold’s role in the high and later medieval
Mediterranean, referenced at numerous points throughout this thesis, is noticeably laudatory
compared to other works of historiography. From characterizing gold as the “essential motor
element” for trade in the region, to portraying West African gold as “providential” for
Mediterranean economic life, Braudel’s comments are also quite expected given the source.
The role of trade connections is central to Braudel’s broader interpretations of historical
processes, perhaps second in importance only to geography; that he focuses on gold’s
significance is no surprise and allows him to appear quite prescient in his comments
published in 1949. Indeed, he comes closer than nearly every other scholar that preceded or
followed him—be it Marc Bloch, Janet Abu-Lughod (who explicitly devalues the role of
gold in her world system), or Michael Gomez—at revealing the profound links between the
histories of West Africa and the Latin West.
But even Braudel, seminal historian that he is, comes up significantly short. Like
many other historians who study the subject, Braudel identifies the advent of the Portuguese
in West Africa in the late fifteenth century as the primary cause for a precipitous decline in
the trans-Saharan gold trade. More unfortunately for his beloved sea, however, he also
identifies the same event as the cause for significant economic decline in the Mediterranean
basin. When he reaches this moment in his analysis, his tone even seems to become one of
anger at historians who have failed to recognize the significance of these developments. He
rhetorically asks, “What happened [with the arrival of the Portuguese in West Africa]?
Nothing. Nothing but a tiny insignificant fact, of which people have not wanted to see, until
now, repercussions on the profound life of the Mediterranean—and, therefore, on the entire
104
economy, on the entire history of Europe.”
389
Braudel’s anger is misplaced, however, and his analysis suffers from it. Much like the
processes in the earlier era analyzed in this thesis, West Africans needed to possess a desire
to trade with the Portuguese before they redirected the northwards flow of gold towards the
western coast. Indeed, that is what the inauguration of direct intervention by European
merchants brought to the gold trade—redirected trade routes—as gold outputs did not
increase from their premodern levels until the advent of industrial mining in the region in the
early twentieth century.
390
Though gold was an actant of fundamental importance in the
Western European/Trans-Saharan world system, then, it was not gold itself that was the
“essential motor element” in the high or later medieval Mediterranean basin. Application of
actor-network theory—that is, heeding Abu-Lughod’s advice and examining premodern trade
from the broadest possible perspective—instead necessitates the acknowledgment that the
fundamental cog in Mediterranean trade was the African historical agents that facilitated or
hindered the exportation of gold.
Before gold could act as the Mediterranean’s “essential motor element” in the high
and later Middle Ages, caravan traders needed to traverse the Sahara, transporting the yellow
metal to North Africa where it could be purchased by Christian merchants in exchange for
silver; before it could be transported to North Africa, it had to be transported northwards
from the southern gold fields to trading entrepôts on the southern Sahel, requiring strong,
centralized governments and political figures to encourage regular trade into these locations;
and before it was shipped to the southern Sahel, West African peasants had to undertake an
389
Braudel, “Monnaies et civilisations,” 13. Ce qui s’est passé? Rien. Rien qu’un tout petit fait insignifiant, dont
personne n’a voulu voir, jusqu’à présent, les répercussions sur la vie profonde de la Mediterranée – et, donc,
sur toute l’économie, sur toute l’histoire de l’Europe.
390
Curtin, “The Lure of Bambuk Gold,” 630-31.
105
annual migration to the gold fields, their ability to mine it dependent on a stable political (and
meteorological) order.
Whether it was William the Conqueror’s single marc of gold tossed at the shrine of
St. Etheldreda, cashless systems of payment developed by Italian merchants in reaction to the
high medieval bullion famine, the resumption of minting gold coins by Genoa and Florence
in 1252, or Dante’s placement of usurers in hell in the fourteenth century, medieval sub-
Saharan Africans continually made decisions that shaped Latin society and culture. It is not
hyperbolic or rhetorical to refer to Sundiata Keita as inventing Latin Purgatory: his victory at
the battle of Kirina in 1235 and the increase in gold exports from the region and into Europe
that followed further spurred the economic and theological innovations initially begun when
West African peoples like the Sosso decided to exert their independence following the
decline of Wagadu in the mid-eleventh century. Though the links are obscured and require
novel methodologies to reveal, the lives of Sundiata and Dante were intimately connected.
After 1235, gold entered Western Europe in greater amounts and truly did became the
“essential motor element” for the city of Florence to expand its own hegemony and
imperialize its rivals. Kings of France, Naples, and Hungary were dependent on the technical
expertise of the Florentines, as well as the reputation of their money, for their own economic
policies. The florin was so crucial to Western European economies that John XXII even used
his papal powers to anathematize any who would dare to counterfeit them. Through the
shrewd use of West African gold, Florentines thus usurped the economic rights of
neighboring Christian states and developed into a core of the fourteenth-century world
system. Still, when viewed from a broad perspective, it is clear the city’s power was
relative—the entire system depended on access to West African gold to mint coins of a high
106
fineness and international reputation. In fact, for one brief moment in 1324 during Musa’s
hajj, the Western European/Trans-Saharan world system was suddenly condensed, West
African gold flooded the Mediterranean basin in levels previously unseen, and Florence’s
economy suffered for it. Musa’s use of gold in Cairo shared some motivations with
Florence’s use of their gold coins, but his ability to upset the northern Italian city’s economy
in the process—something medieval Florence could never do to West Africa’s economy—
demonstrates where the true gravitational center lay in the early fourteenth-century Western
European/Trans-Saharan world system.
The overarching argument in this thesis significantly deviates from the very
historiography drawn upon to make it. From Georg Hegel in the nineteenth century to
Valerie Hansen in the twenty-first, deliberately or not scholars have continually marginalized
sub-Saharan Africa’s and Africans’ role in the development of global history. As
demonstrated in this thesis, the truth is far more interesting. The developments of usury,
purgatory, and universal currencies, all considered fundamental aspects of the high and later
medieval Latin West, were all dependent on historical processes that occurred thousands of
miles away in West Africa.
