The Contexts of Roman Society, part 3-Moving by Sea: Grain, Wine, and Small Ships
Moving bulk goods by sea was by far the most cost-effective method, if available. It was here that the great grain haulers plied their trade, alongside galleons loaded with spices, kaffos, porcelain, and the other exotic wares of the east. Constantinople, Thessaloniki, Smyrna, and Alexandria were all bustling busy ports, with peoples and goods from all across the Old World present, and even some from the New World as well. Antioch and Nicaea, both slightly inland, but well-connected with the coast, were also diverse and bustling as well.
The trade in exotic goods from both east and west gets the most scholarly attention. From the west on Spanish and Arletian ships came cargoes of sugar, cocoa, peyote, Mexican mushrooms, dyewood, and cochineal, the latter greatly in demand by the Roman textile manufacturers. These were profitable but also expensive ventures, requiring substantial capital investments and frequent cooperation between international merchants.
However, despite this and the attention lavished on the trade by historians, as a percentage of the Roman economy and trade value, this was actually extremely small, a percent or two at most. Regarding trade value and particularly volume, far more important was trade in bulk goods that were individually much less profitable than silks or spices, but were far more necessary to sustaining life and moved in vastly greater quantities.
The most significant of the bulk trade goods was grain. The huge grain haulers, many over 1000 tons, were instantly recognizable wherever they went and dwarfed anything else on the water except for the larger battle-line warships. Egypt, Scythia, and Vlachia were the main sources and where the biggest haulers went, but smaller grain ships could be seen elsewhere. An example would be the ships frequenting Varna, loading Bulgarian produce to be taken to Constantinople.
The grain trade, vital to the provisioning of the great cities, was a major responsibility of civic government. The Imperial government directly supervised the provisioning of Constantinople, a task that consumed much of its energy and resources and dominated its priorities. With large producers the state negotiated directly for produce, although for dealing with greater numbers of smaller producers the state would hire a middleman to organize purchases. Shipping was typically a private enterprise, the owners working on government contracts, although the White Palace provided subsidies for the construction and maintenance of the big haulers. The grain was then stored in government warehouses and sold to city bakers.
The same model operated in other Roman cities, although there it was managed by the resident Kephale or town council, rather than by Imperially-appointed bureaucrats. The importation and provision of other foodstuffs was also organized and supervised by governmental agents, although not to the extent of grain, and many of the provisions consumed by civic populations were imported and marketed by entirely private entities. Nevertheless it was a top priority of civic governments to ensure that a sufficient supply of staple foodstuffs was always on hand, with disorder guaranteed when (not if) such efforts failed.
Much of the trade movement, by both land and sea, was focused on filling the stomachs of the cities. Just as so much of the energies of France were diverted to filling the maw of Paris, and the energies of England diverted to filling the maw of London, much of the energies of the eastern Mediterranean were diverted to filling the maw of Rhomania’s major cities. Scythian and Vlach grain fed Constantinople, while Egyptian grain fed Antioch, Smyrna, and Thessaloniki.
The quantities involved were massive, especially when one factors in the limitations of the transportation technology of the day. In 1640, Constantinople imported 100,000 cattle, 500,000 hogs, 1.5 million sheep, (these were walked, not shipped to the market, for obvious reasons) 3500 tons of butter, 1800 tons of sugar, 600 tons of honey, and 70 million gallons of wine. The Queen of Cities consumed 300 tons of grain a day, while the White Palace alone used 6700 tons of firewood. [1] And these totals do not include vegetables, fruits, olive oil, herbs, seafood, and all other types of consumables.
Much of this was shipped on rather small vessels too. The great grain haulers were 1000+ tons, but these behemoths were quite rare. Grain, because of the vast bulk that needed to be moved, combined with its rather low per-unit value, made commercial sense to ship in such volume. However with more valuable cargo items, filling such a large ship could be extremely risky; if one of them went down with all its cargo, the loss in investment could be staggering. It was much safer to spread such risk over several smaller ships. Thus many trade vessels plying the waves between the major ports were in the 200-500 ton range.
Yet in terms of numbers, these mid-sized vessels were swamped by light craft covering the waves. Roman ports of this time, when recording the arrival of vessels, divided them into two broad categories, great ships and light ships. The dividing line was a mere 50 tons, with only the tonnage of the great ships recorded. On average light ships outnumbered great ships by a factor of 20-to-1.
The predominance numerically of light ships helps to illustrate an often-forgotten element of maritime trade. The big ships supplying the big ports dominate most historical accounts of the period, but much of the trade was decidedly smaller in scale. Smyrna with its 100,000+ inhabitants depended on a broad maritime network reaching as far as Egypt to sustain itself, but the rest of Thrakesia and its 2 million plus inhabitants sustained itself on local and regional networks, mostly carried by these smaller operators.
On land, the peddler with his cart of goods, moving from place to place, buying and selling whatever was available where opportunity promised, was a common sight. The sea saw a similar thing in these light vessels, hopping from port to port, buying and selling whatever cargoes were available. These sea-peddlers worked the smaller ports, selling everything from vegetables to firewood to metal goods, although they also bought and sold in the bigger cities as well.
The peddler, whether on land or sea, often worked that occupation part-time. Many were farmers with modest landholdings that weren’t enough to sustain them by their produce alone. At the most labor-intensive times of the agricultural cycle, they were at home working their fields. However during the slowdown, they left their wives and children to manage the holding and took to their boats and carts, peddling and transporting as a way to earn more money. One result was that shipping goods at certain times of the year was much cheaper than others, as there were many more boaters or carters available. If one wanted to send a package right at the time of the wheat harvest, one would have to pay well for the service.
Shipping by sea was overall faster and cheaper than by land, but it had its disadvantages. It was more dangerous, as evidenced by the allowance of maritime loans to have substantially higher interest because of the greater risk. In 1644 a storm that suddenly brewed up in the Sea of Marmara smashed a dozen great ships and over a hundred light ships within eyesight of Constantinople. That said, if one was willing to brave winter weather and got away with it, one could make a tidy profit by selling goods at high prices, given the market scarcity that usually prevailed due to the decline in shipping.
Sea transport could also be highly irregular in travel time. While strict timetables were not present in the mid-1600s, some passenger services on land in certain well-serviced areas such as Constantinople-Adrianople, Chalcedon-Nicaea, and Smyrna-Pergamon could follow a mostly-regular schedule with mostly-consistent travel times. Meanwhile the travel time of the mail-ship from Alexandretta to Constantinople could vary by a factor of 5, depending on winds.
Yet while much of this trade was decidedly humble and unglamorous, with fishing boats carrying small cargoes of wine, cheese, and cooking pots (and the same is true for the land; just replace fishing boat with mule or cart), there was a lot of it. The Aegean Sea was full of ships during the sailing season, and while many of the ships were only making small circuits, they knit the region together in an interconnected economic zone. The Aegean themes: the Thracian, Macedonian, Hellenic, Optimatic, Opsikian, and Thrakesian, contained the bulk of the Empire’s population. While there were huge regional variances in this zone, much of the Aegean basin was highly developed and urbanized by the standards of the mid-1600s. Sea transport alone did not make that possible, as the great cities still drew intensely from their local regions even as they imported Egyptian or Scythian grain, but the maritime links were still of crucial importance.
[1] Except for hogs, sugar, honey, wine, and firewood, the figures are derived from the OTL imports of Ottoman Constantinople in the mid-1600s, adjusted for population difference. The hogs are a change ITTL, since it is a predominantly Christian rather than Muslim city, with the hogs substituted for sheep on a 1:1 basis. Sugar and honey imports are adjusted totals for imports into Naples. Source: Fernand Braudel,
The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, Vol. 1, pgs. 347, 350-1.
Wine is population-adjusted for late 1700s Parisian imports. Source: Peter McPhee,
Liberty or Death: The French Revolution, pg. 7.
Firewood consumption is copied from the OTL Topkapi Palace’s consumption in this period. Source: Sam White,
The Climate of Rebellion in the early modern Ottoman Empire, pg. 31.
I must note some discrepancies regarding sheep consumption in my sources. Braudel lists OTL Constantinople as consuming 4 million sheep a year in the mid-1600s, while White lists only 1.5 million in the early 1600s. Furthermore, according to McPhee’s figures, OTL Paris in the late 1700s, of a comparable size to Constantinople 150 years earlier, only imported 400,000 sheep, plus 40,000 hogs, substantially less meat per capita than Constantinople. It is possible that the denizens of Paris were substantially less carnivorous than Constantinople, and note that the size of the sheep is unspecified (Mediterranean livestock in the early modern period was smaller than northern varieties), but even so the discrepancy is startling.
In short, treat these numbers like figures from an OTL early modern history. As exact figures they are suspect, but they can be useful references to understand the general scale of the process being described.