Commercial deceit: fraudulent trade from the ports of Cilicia and Cyprus to the Mamluks

Abstract

The article aims to examine the deceitful practices employed by traders in the eastern Mediterranean. It investigates three principal types of deception that Italian merchants in the Kingdom of Cilician Armenia and in Cyprus used in order to conceal prohibited products and their routes to Mamluk ports between 1260 and 1310. The papacy issued several decrees that prohibited Christian merchants from trading in various strategic items, such as timber, iron and slaves, in the harbours of Islamic states. However, despite these bans, Christian merchants continued trading in such items by devising methods to conceal this traffic. Current literature has so far focused on the items that were shipped across the eastern Mediterranean and their destinations; however, there is a gap in knowledge about who these merchants were and the methods they used to circumvent the prohibitions while shipping the goods. This research aims to fill this gap by answering questions about the conditions of the trade and the covert methods used for the transportation of prohibited goods to Mamluk ports.