Between 1288 and 1300 European retailers competed with each other to acquire the precise to gather duties on wine shipments to the port of Tunis on behalf of the Hafsid caliph who dominated town. Profitable 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 alternate for a lump sum fee, retailers had the precise to gather and maintain all or many of the tax income for a set time period.
Holding the wine gabella in Tunis was a sexy funding for a service provider. A serious 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 giant, multi-story buildings referred to as 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 usually included taverns the place wine was offered. Wine was additionally extremely wanted by ship captains; modern Genoese and Venetian regulation codes required ships to hold ample provides of it in giant barrels for each day consumption by the ship’s crew. Lastly, as Arabic and Latin sources reveal, most of the inhabitants of Tunis additionally favored wine, whether or not they had been Muslim, Jewish, or Christian.
For a Muslim dynasty just like the Hafsids, nevertheless, the fiscal advantages of the wine commerce needed to be weighed in opposition to the norms of Islamic regulation 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 usually disregarded the Shari’a in any variety of methods, they needed to at the very least sustain some appearances, or threat revolt. The medieval Maghreb noticed a number of profitable rebellions motivated, partly, by stricter observance of Islamic regulation. 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, in keeping with custom, first precipitated a stir within the 1110s by smashing wine jugs and breaking musical devices.
Between the twelfth and 14th centuries Muslim reformers within the Maghreb usually criticised the open sale and consumption of wine. Each Hafsid rulers and rebels in opposition to their authority made some extent of sporadically demolishing retailers and fondacos the place wine was offered, usually 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 non secular 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 reminiscent of salt or grain, or on bodily entry to markets had been particularly hated by retailers and concrete dwellers, for whom they posed critical burdens to commerce. Such criticisms did, now and again, break via to the highly effective. In line with one Fifteenth-century chronicle, a cleric named al-Sadafi (d.1342), observing tax inspectors within the market, wrote on a chunk of paper ‘Could he who eats his meals from the market tolls replicate on what his punishment can 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 primarily based, 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 frequent amongst ascetics and students in Ayyubid and Mamluk Egypt and infrequently took the type of excessive scrupulousness concerning 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 courtroom for the wine gabella, just for the courtroom to earmark his money fee for use because the wage of its Christian mercenaries. This was, maybe, a manner of guaranteeing that wine-tainted cash went to Christians, not Muslims.
By the point the Italian retailers sought the wine gabella within the 1290s, the Hafsids had been recovering from a decade of civil battle. It was practically not possible 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. Nonetheless, 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 attainable. This raised suspicions among the many customs officers, who engaged in aggressive policing efforts when the quantity of wine flowing via 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 had been consistently 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 palms, 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 price an ethical and political hangover.
Joel S. Pattison is Assistant Professor of Historical past at Williams Faculty, Massachusetts.
