still made tribute payments in the form of spices and money, as did the merchants from the southern cities of Salerno, Gaeta, and Amalfi. It was not merely within the city that the power of the Pavia officials extended, for the document provides a list of ten customs houses on the Alpine passes controlled by the city; only those travelling as bona-fide pilgrims to Rome were to be exempted. Towns on the routes south of the passes such as Vercelli, Asti, Verona, and Cremona also expanded.

By the year 1000, however, the role of chief trading town of Lombardy had been taken over by Milan. Geographical factors played a part, but the main impetus came from political activity such as the granting of trading rights to the 'Church of St Ambrose' by the Emperor Otto I in 951. From such small beginnings, the city soon became the major trading town of northern Italy and the revenues from trade a cause both of the emergence of civic wealth and of political interference from outside political powers.

Towns further to the south gained wealth from seaborne trade. Two of them, Amalfi and Venice, were already trading widely before the year 1000. Much of our evidence for their prosperity comes from the works of Arab travellers and geographers, usually to be relied upon because they shared the Muslim interest in trade and commerce. The writer Ibn Hawqal , in his Book of the Routes and the Kingdoms, written c. 9 77), commented that Amalfi was 'the most prosperous town in Lombardy [in this case, southern Italy], the most noble, the most illustrious on account of its conditions, the most affluent and splendid'. Amalfi's prosperity was based on its trade with the Muslim world; in 996 it was reported that some two hundred Amalfitan merchants had been attacked in Alexandria after a Muslim fleet, being prepared for an attack on Byzantium, had been burned there. Though the figure may be something of an exaggeration, it reflects a considerable trading presence.

Trade within the Byzantine Empire formed the basis of the prosperity of Venice, though her merchants, too, were also to be found in Alexandria as early as the ninth century and were the subject of a complaint by the Byzantine Emperor John Tzimisces in 971 because of their willingness to export arms to

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