MICRO FILM 4389
Keywords: Freight and freightage, Rates, Mediterranean Sea, Shipping, Commerce
Abstract
The study opens with a brief survey of the development of the maritime law of the medieval Mediterranean and of the persons involved in the maritime adventure. This provides a background against which the more technical aspects of the problem of freight rates and shipping practices can unfold. The contract for transportation is examined as the definitive statement of the agreements and obligations that existed between shipper and carrier. A brief and very basic description of the types of ships in use and their structure is provided in order to make comprehensible certain elements of shipping practice which were based upon the structure and limitations of the vessels used.
To ensure the safety of the enterprise, which, since trade often involved relatively few ships, was a matter of public concern, the state established limits beyond which the ships could not be loaded. This was the first general limit on the contractual freedom of the parties to the venture. For the same reasons as those concerning load lines the state intervened to limit the extent to which a ship could be tightly packed and to determine which places in the vessel had to be left free. These legal limitations on stowage are sometimes related to, but must be distinguished from, problems of freighting arising from differences in the physical nature of commodities. Since all goods do not have the same density some way of equitably determining the freight charges for different goods is required. In the Middle Ages systems of "freighting equivalents" were established to deal with this problem. This also had a bearing on the cost of transportation.
The cost of transportation is, so far as the public and the economy at large are concerned, the most important factor in the transportation of goods. It is a limiting factor in the economy, determining to a large extent which goods move and how far. Security played an important part in determining the rate structure. There was a division of labour between armed galleys and unarmed vessels. This division of labour was perfected by the fourteenth century. What amounted to a single rate structure encompassed both types of vessels. Expensive goods paid high freight charges to travel on the safer armed galleys while cheap goods were carried for less on unarmed vessels of a variety of types. Great round ships carried goods of all kinds over the great routes from Genoa and Venice to the Levant, Africa and Crete in the thirteenth century. Rates on these vessels were governed by complex customs and regulations concerning cargo shipped on both legs of the voyages. Freight rates and the rate structure of the armed galleys of the late thirteenth and early fourteenth century were even more closely regulated. For the Venetian and Genoese armed galleys to Romania, and the Levant and Flanders it is possible to make rough comparisons of the cost per ton/mile.
In sheer numbers of ships involved and in importance in the lives of ordinary people local trade was probably of much more importance than the glamorous trade routes. Certain representative short-distance routes with small vessels and ordinary goods are examined. Charters are studied with this group because, except for Crusades (hardly normal trade), most medieval charters were for small scale trade.
October 3, 2007
