Reynolds Robert. In: Revue belge de philologie et d'histoire , tome 9, fasc. The debt which medieval commerce between the Mediterranean and the North owed to the enterprise of the Italian merchants has long been recognized. But save for a few chance references such as the one quoted, and a few documents, located in Italy and concerned with tolls upon « trans-Alpine merchants » or robberies suffered by those merchants,little trace of a parallel activity of the part of northerners has been preserved 3.
It may be that a one-sided conception of twelfth century commerce has resulted from this lack of documents. That trans- Alpine merchants, especially those of the chief city of Flanders, Arras. These documents in no way discount the energy and activity of the Italian merchants. On the contrary, they show in many ways that these latter had developed the scope of their operations and their business technique farther than is generally credited. Page after page in the entry books, the business affairs of the leading Italian caravan merchants, the men of Asti, are paralleled by the operations of the men of Arras.
And the concurrance of the Artesians was not in methods alone, because they controlled a considerable share of the gross volume of the whole trade. The first appearance of the merchants of Arras in Genoa must have been made a considerable time before their activities are recorded in the surviving notarial folios.
Sometime during the middle course of the twelfth century, at the latest, they must have extended their commercial enterprises as far as the port 3. There is no proof of this ; indeed, the silence of. But the very silence of Johannes upon nearly all aspects of the overland commerce of Genoa when such a commerce must have existed, weakens the argument from his silence on the business of the Artesians. It is chiefly from the circumstantial evidence in the notarial records themselves for the years after that an even earlier entry by the Artesians into Genoese markets seems probable.
In the last two decades of the century they suddenly appear in Genoa, in the most ancient of the remaining folios, conducting a regular, uninterrupted commerce of much importance. The city of Arras, month after month, is represented on the Genoese market by a considerable body of wealthy merchants who move with perfect familiarity in the commercial life of the port. It is most unlikely that this state of affairs was the result of an overnight rush for Genoese customers by the merchants of Arras.
