Between 1288 and 1300 European retailers competed with each other to acquire the best to gather duties on wine shipments to the port of Tunis on behalf of the Hafsid caliph who dominated town. Successful bids ranged between 18,000 and 34,000 bezants – at across the identical time, a big service provider ship and all its cargo was valued at simply over 20,000 bezants. Referred to in Latin sources because the gabella vini (from the Arabic qabala, ‘to obtain’) this was a type of tax farming: a standard and historical observe for states throughout the Mediterranean, whether or not utilized to land or different sources of wealth. In change for a lump sum cost, retailers had the best to gather and maintain all or many of the tax income for a set time frame.
Holding the wine gabella in Tunis was a horny funding for a service provider. A significant Mediterranean port metropolis in 1300, Tunis was house to hundreds of European retailers, mercenaries, and missionaries. Lots of the retailers lived in or close to massive, multi-story buildings often called fondacos (fanādiq in Arabic) constructed for every buying and selling nation: the fondaco of the Venetians, of the Genoese, of the Marseillais, and so forth. Such fondacos typically included taverns the place wine was bought. Wine was additionally extremely wanted by ship captains; up to date Genoese and Venetian legislation codes required ships to hold ample provides of it in massive barrels for each day consumption by the ship’s crew. Lastly, as Arabic and Latin sources reveal, lots of the inhabitants of Tunis additionally appreciated wine, whether or not they have been Muslim, Jewish, or Christian.
For a Muslim dynasty just like the Hafsids, nonetheless, the fiscal advantages of the wine commerce needed to be weighed towards the norms of Islamic legislation and custom, which prohibited Muslims from consuming, dealing with, or promoting wine. This posed a dilemma for the Hafsid officers who administered the wine tax. In precept, one of many foundations of legitimacy of a Muslim dynasty was its capacity to uphold the Shari’a. Whereas rulers typically disregarded the Shari’a in any variety of methods, they needed to not less than sustain some appearances, or danger rebel. The medieval Maghreb noticed a number of profitable rebellions motivated, partly, by stricter observance of Islamic legislation. Certainly, the Hafsids themselves first got here to energy as lieutenants of the Almohads, a Masmūda Amazigh confederation from Morocco united by the charismatic reformer Ibn Tūmart, who, based on custom, first brought on a stir within the 1110s by smashing wine jugs and breaking musical devices.
Between the twelfth and 14th centuries Muslim reformers within the Maghreb typically criticised the open sale and consumption of wine. Each Hafsid rulers and rebels towards their authority made some extent of sporadically demolishing retailers and fondacos the place wine was bought, typically changing them with a mosque or Sufi lodge. In addition they periodically renounced state revenues from the sale of wine. A good portion of the spiritual elite believed that such cash was tainted by its origins in sinful commerce.
The Hafsids additionally confronted criticism by Muslim students for his or her reliance on different types of immoral taxation. Tolls (maghārim or mukūs) levied on particular person commodities similar to salt or grain, or on bodily entry to markets have been particularly hated by retailers and concrete dwellers, for whom they posed severe burdens to commerce. Such criticisms did, every so often, break by to the highly effective. In keeping with one Fifteenth-century chronicle, a cleric named al-Sadafi (d.1342), observing tax inspectors within the market, wrote on a bit of paper ‘Could he who eats his meals from the market tolls mirror on what his punishment shall be’, and despatched it to the caliph. Upon studying this, the caliph reportedly abolished the tolls. Because the story suggests, the efficacy of the critique was based mostly, partly, on the broader perception that one’s earnings and livelihood wanted to be morally pure. As historian Megan Reid argued in 2013, this perspective was comparatively widespread amongst ascetics and students in Ayyubid and Mamluk Egypt and infrequently took the type of excessive scrupulousness in regards to the meals they ate or the sources of their earnings, to the purpose the place ‘consuming was political’.
In fact, each clerics and state officers discovered inventive methods to rationalise the usage of illicit cash. In 1289 the Genoese service provider Bertramino Ferrari paid 18,000 bezants to the court docket for the wine gabella, just for the court docket to earmark his money cost for use because the wage of its Christian mercenaries. This was, maybe, a method of making certain that wine-tainted cash went to Christians, not Muslims.
By the point the Italian retailers sought the wine gabella within the 1290s, the Hafsids have been recovering from a decade of civil battle. It was practically unattainable to gather taxes within the countryside with out a military, and the state thus relied closely on taxation in cities, such because the mukūs, which included the wine tax. Nevertheless, because the Venetian Senate recognised in 1300, for European tax farmers to make a revenue, they needed to encourage the import of as a lot wine as potential. This raised suspicions among the many customs officers, who engaged in aggressive policing efforts when the quantity of wine flowing by the port grew to become suspiciously excessive. Over a ten-year interval, customs brokers raided the store of a Genoese tax farmer, revoked a Venetian service provider’s proper to carry the farm, and threw a Pisan service provider in jail whereas he held it. The travails of their fellow residents grew to become a recurring drawback for Italian diplomats, who have been always complaining of arbitrary enforcement of the commerce. This struck a discordant observe within the in any other case profitable commerce between Tunis and the northern Mediterranean, and created issues for Italian diplomats in bilateral treaties. The issue was particularly felt in Venice, which relied on revenues from the wine commerce in Tunis to offset the price of its consul’s bills there.
Taking this into consideration, in 1320 the Venetian Senate determined that the wine commerce’s reference to state funds was damaging the Republic’s relationship with Tunis. In that yr, it revoked its consul’s proper to attract his wage from the earnings of a tavern within the fondaco, reasoning that ‘many unhealthy and shameful acts have been dedicated there’. The wine commerce would proceed in non-public fingers, however the Republic had determined that its native officers shouldn’t be concerned in it. Simply because a commodity was worthwhile didn’t imply it was value an ethical and political hangover.
Joel S. Pattison is Assistant Professor of Historical past at Williams School, Massachusetts.
