Medieval writers of Western Europe had long known about Africa, as too did their predecessors of antiquity. Yet, the Portuguese are often most credited as being the first Europeans to engage with Sub-Saharan Africa, with the ‘discovery’ of safe passage via Cape Bojador by Gil Eanes in 1434 oft-cited as the turning point (notwithstanding the mention of the endeavours of passing the Cape by Jacme Ferrer in 1346 on the 1375 Catalan Atlas). All following European enterprises thus owed any success to these early Portuguese pioneers. This is, however, a false representation of early Afro-European interaction within Sub-Saharan Africa itself. Not only does this narrative erase the African role in mediating and disseminating knowledge to aid in successful European navigation of the African coastline, it also presupposes that Africans were mere bystanders, though the role of Africans in guiding the success of the Portuguese navigations is a topic for another day. Instead, this post wants to highlight the role of medieval Italians, particularly the Genoese, in trade and what can be revealed about African markets.

The Italian mercantile interest in Sub-Saharan Africa appears to have been the product of a thirteenth-century boom in trade between Africa and Europe.^[1] Antonio Malfante has long been considered the first named Italian merchant to engage in Sub-Saharan trade thanks to a letter surviving from his stay at Tuat (west-central Algeria) to his benefactors at the Centurione Bank in Genoa in 1447. The next named individual that we are currently aware of is Benedetto Dei, who set up a shop in Timbuktu in c.1470 to trade in Lombard fabrics on behalf of the Florentine Portinari Bank. In fact, the first named individuals that are known are the Vivaldi brothers, Vadino and Ugolino, who set sail from Genoa in 1290 towards West Africa only to be never heard from again.^[2] Multiple myths developed about the fate of these brothers over the subsequent centuries but what does their attempted voyage mean when set within the bigger picture? The brothers were certainly not the only Italian merchants who tried to benefit from the trade boom. A legend on the portolan of Giovanni Carignano (fl. c.1314-29) relates Genoese (januensi) merchants at Sijilmasa, along with the addition that these Genoese merchants acted as the sources for Carignano’s knowledge about the region, such as the connection between Sijilmasa, Walata, and Guinea. Later maps further reflect upon engaged trade with West Africa. Italians were active in trans-Saharan trade many years before Malfante.

The scale of the Italian merchant presence in Africa is limited by the complete focus on surviving mercantile records on affairs and trade at North African ports. Nevertheless, Dei’s shop shows a market for European fabrics within Sub-Saharan Africa, a market that the Portuguese did not engage directly with, and whose interest and desire may have expanded into neighbouring markets too.^[3] Even earlier, Genoese merchants were noted in key trans-Saharan trading hubs in the immediate aftermath of the increase in trade with Europe. Such trade also poses further questions for African hospitality to outside merchants and how this mercantile activity was conducted. African commodities are most often thought of in the trading relation with Europe (gold, ivory, rock crystal, salt, pepper, amongst others), yet what about the reverse? For example, in addition to Dei’s Lombard fabric, the Portuguese were keen to trade Aljaravias (North African djellabas – a long, loose-fitting tunic) to Central Africans, seemingly as a result of a local desire via otherwise unknown trade links far north, and tried to trade their own glass beads in East Africa before realising local traders would only buy Indian Ocean-sourced beads. Much more can be said on this topic and it offers many new avenues for further study. Africans were market-drivers themselves and their proactive, rather than reactive, influence in trade patterns should not be underestimated.

Adam Simmons received his PhD from Lancaster University in 2019 and has subsequently undertaken research and teaching at the University of Manchester, the Ruhr Universität Bochum, and Nottingham Trent University. From September 2020, he will be a Leverhulme Early Career Fellow at Nottingham Trent University conducting a research project entitled 'Africa, Africans, and Portuguese Knowledge Strategies, c.1415-c.1550'. His research interests centre on the global connectivity of Africa and African diasporas during the fourth to sixteenth centuries. His upcoming monograph, under contract with Routledge, will discuss the early influences which informed the later fifteenth-century Latin European concepts of a continental Africa which developed as a result of the African role during the Crusades and the Crusades' impact on Africa, specifically following engagements with Nubians and Ethiopians, which provides the foundation for his Leverhulme project.

Image: A camel caravan for salt transportation in Afar Region, Ethiopia. Available from Wikipedia

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[1] Sarah Guérin, ‘Exchange of Sacrifices: West Africa in the Medieval World of Goods’, The Medieval Globe 3:2 (2017), 97-124.

[2] Francis M. Rogers, ‘The Vivaldi Expedition’, Annual Report of the Dante Society, With Accompanying Papers, 73 (1955), 31-45.

[3] Recent work on glass beads by Abidemi Babatunde Babalola et al found in Nigeria has offered new insights on regional trade networks. Perishable commodities such as fabric, may well have been traded along similar networks, possibly producing a very southern terminus for the trade of European fabric: see Abidemi Babatunde Babalola, Laure Dussubieux, Susan K. McIntosh, and Thilo Tehren, ‘Chemical Analysis of Glass Beads from Igbo Olokun, Ile-Ife (SW Nigeria): New Light on Raw Materials, Production, and Interregional Interactions’, Journal of Archaeological Science 90 (2018), 92-105.