Acordes y desacuerdos. Navegación y comercio de las galeras mercantiles de Venecia y Florencia en el Mediterráneo ibérico desde una perspectiva comparada

Abstract

For two centuries and a half (14th-16th centuries) Venice developed a State galley system that has been unanimously regarded as the most perfect achievement in public navigation in the late medieval Mediterranean. After the conquest of Pisa (1406) and the acquisition of Porto Pisano (1421) Florence built its own galley system, which operated from 1422 to 1478, taking the Venetian mude as a model. A wide, heterogeneous and even irregular bibliography has studied the subject from different points of view, as the introduction to this paper shows. But in underlying the similarities of the routes, particularly in the Western Mediterranean, which connected Venice and Florence with England and Flanders in the North Sea (Ponente), Southern France and the Crown of Aragon (Aigues Mortes/Catalonia) and the Maghreb (Berberia), the differences had passed unnoticed. Thus, the present paper centres its focus precisely not in the coincidences, but in the divergences. The result is unheard of, showing that, actually, Venice and Florence did not really rival each other, at least in the Iberian Mediterranean, for several reasons: the importance of each line was different for the economy and the navigation system of each mercantile republic; and the ports of call foreseen had a different hierarchy in each voyage, both in terms of navigation and trade. A further analysis of the goods loaded and unloaded in the galleys, with origin and destination in the ports of the Crown of Aragon (mainly Barcelona, Mallorca and Valencia) and the Nasrid Kingdom of Granada (Almeria and Malaga) adds new evidences in favour of this new vision. And so does the study of the role played by the galley convoys carrying Muslims from the Iberian Peninsula to the Maghreb and vice versa. Finally, from the Iberian point of view it is clear that both navies played a complementary role in its international commercial politics.