A Book Develops, Part III

I am deep into a book with the unprepossessing title of Trade and Institutions in the Medieval Mediterranean. It is, if I understand correctly, an adaptation of its author’s (Jessica Goldberg) Ph.D. thesis, and it is, for me, absolutely fascinating.

This is, in part, how the world – and sometimes the plots – of my books develop: I read a research book, and every few sentences I think, “Oh, I can use that!” There are four trade alliances in The Casillard Confederacy series (as I currently envision it): one based on the Hanseatic League, one on the Scandinavian Kalmar alliance , one (well, ok, this isn’t an alliance) based on a blend of the Italian city-states – think Genoa with some aspects of Venice – and one based in my equivalent of North Africa.

I had some varying degrees of knowledge about the Hanse and the city-states and the Scandinavian alliance. (They all still need research, though.) I had none at all about North African trade in the 11-13^th centuries, except to know, barely, it existed. But in the Empire series, I’d made my character Druisius’s family traders and merchants operating both in my Rome analogue, Casil, and from the southern coast of the Nivéan Sea, which is, of course, basically the Mediterranean.  The Casillard Confederacy is the same world, 500 years later, and the major characters are descendants of my original cast. Druisius’s family – some of them, anyhow – are still merchants and traders. Hence my need to learn about how trade worked in that period.

There are aspects of this book that don’t fit my fictional world – the focus is on the trade networks of Jewish merchants – the Maghribi traders – operating primarily in the eastern end of the Mediterranean (for an overview of the documents this detailed analysis is based on, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cairo_Geniza) – but the organization of trade, the commodities, the methods of communication and transport, the difficulties to be overcome, how merchant apprenticeships worked – I can use all these. (And tidbits like the fact Jewish bankers in Old Cairo in the 11th C were using a double-entry bookkeeping system, predating any known usage in the Italian city-state banking systems.  Maybe. If I can slip that in without it sounding like, look, I did my research!)

This is just one aspect of how I build both a world and a character. I immerse myself in the history – in this case the world of Mediterranean trade  that Goldberg has so masterfully laid out, and it becomes part of one or more character’s story. If I’m lucky, that transfer will happen naturally, shaping who the character is, how they think, their loyalties, their presumptions of how the world works, the conflicts and dissonances that happen when confronted with another way of thinking and doing business.

But it’s not the only aspect. People are shaped by their cultural environment, but as I alluded to in the last entry in this occasional series, they’re shaped by their landscape, too. That will require a different sort of research. Meanwhile, back to bales of indigo and flax, and the tribulations of weather, markets, and unreasonable customs charges.