and 1170s and led to growing anti-Latin feeling amongst the Byzantines.
Whilst Venetian ambitions were set upon exploitation of the eastern Mediterranean, the merchants of Genoa and Pisa developed lucrative trading links with the Muslim cities of North Africa. Genoese exports to North Africa through ports such as Bougia, mainly consisted of cloth--fustians brought to Genoa from Milan and Pavia by Lombard merchants, linens from Germany and Spain, and unspun cotton--dyestuffs for the weaving and leather industries, and precious stones, perfumes, and spices shipped onwards via Genoa from the east. In return, she imported skins and leather goods, grain and alum--used to fix dyes in cloth. Pisa, too, had fondachi (trading posts) in Africa. Both these cities had interests in the Holy Land, and, together with Venice, obtained trading rights and the establishment of communes in the cities reconquered from the Muslims in return for indispensable naval assistance to the crusading armies.
The phenomenon of long-distance trade was not confined to the Christian powers of the Mediterranean. Muslim writers delighted in enumerating the commodities which passed backwards and forwards through the Islamic world and beyond and although the Muslim world may have looked mainly to the east for its most profitable trade, Ibn Hawqal was able to report in the tenth century that Kairouan was the largest town of the Maghrib, active in the export of such commodities as silk, wool, and mulatto slave girls, whilst Sijilmasa, at the end of the caravan route from the Sudan, provided significant returns from tolls.
Muslim and Christian merchants were not often found within each other's territory and, in many respects, the Italian merchants simply fulfilled the function of a border market between continental Europe and the Mediterranean basin. Jewish traders were, however, active throughout the Mediterranean particularly in the slave and fur trades. In the ninth and tenth centuries the wars against the Slavs of eastern Europe provided a lucrative human booty to be traded to merchants in the slave market at Verdun and finally sold in the caliphate.
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