This interest in the system of fairs and markets makes it thoroughly credible that tribes of herdsmen respected existing market places in their sphere of influence to such an extent that they suspended the exertion of the political means so completely as not even to exercise “dominion” over them. The story told by Herodotus is inherently probable, though he was astonished that the Argippæans had a sacred market amidst the lawless Scythian herdsmen, and that their unarmed inhabitants were effectively protected through the hallowed peace of their market place. Many similar phenomena make this the more easily believable.
“No one dare harm them, since they are considered holy; and yet they have no arms; but it is they who allay the quarrels of their neighbors, and whoever has escaped to them as a runaway may not be touched by any other man.”[76] Similar instances are found frequently: “It is always the same story of the Argippæans, the story of the ‘holy,’ ‘unarmed,’ ‘just,’ bartering, and strife-settling tribelet in the midst of a Bedouin-like, nomadic population.”[77] Cære may be taken as an example of a higher type. Strabo says of its inhabitants: “The Greeks thought highly of their bravery and justice, because although powerful in a great degree, they abstained from robbery.” Mommsen, who quotes this passage, adds: “This does not exclude piracy, which was engaged in by the merchants of Cære as well as by all other merchants, but rather that Cære was a sort of free harbor for the Phœnicians as for the Greeks.”[78]
Cære is not like the fair of the Argippæans, a market place in the interior of a district of land nomads, but is in the midst of a domain of sea nomads, a port endowed with its own peace. This is one of those typical formations whose importance, in my estimation, has not been appreciated at its real value. They have, it seems to me, exercised a mighty influence on the genesis of maritime states.
Those reasons by which we saw the land nomads forced to preserve, if not to create, market places, must with even more intensity, have coerced the sea nomads to similar demeanor. For the transportation of loot, especially of herds and of slaves, is difficult and dangerous on the trails across the desert or the steppes: the slow progress invites pursuit. But with war-canoe and “dragon-ship” this transportation is easy and safe. For that reason, the Viking is even much more a trader and merchant than is the herdsman. As is said in Faust, “War, Commerce, and Piracy are inseparable.”
(c) THE GENESIS OF THE MARITIME STATE
In many cases, I believe, trade in the loot of piracy is the origin of those cities around which, as political centers, the city-states of the antique or Mediterranean civilization grew up; while in very many other cases, the same trade coöperated to bring them to the same point of political development.
These harbor markets developed from probably two general types: they grew up either as piratical fortresses directly and intentionally placed in hostile territory, or else as “merchant colonies” based on treaty rights in the harbors of foreign primitive or developed feudal states.
Of the first type, we have a number of important examples from ancient history which correspond exactly to the fourth stage of our scheme, where an armed colony of pirates plants itself down at a commercially and strategically defendable point on the seacoast of a foreign state. The most notable instance is Carthage; and in like manner, the Greek sea nomads, Ionians, Dorians and Achæans, settled in their sea castles on the Adriatic and Tyrrhenian coasts of Southern Italy, on the islands of these seas, and on the gulfs of Southern Gaul. Phœnicians, Etruscans,[M] Greeks, and according to modern investigation, Carians, all about the Mediterranean, founded their “States” after the same type, with identical class division into masters and servile peasantry of the neighboring territory.[79]
[M] Whether the Etruscans were immigrants into Italy by land who took up piracy after having made war successfully on land, or whether as sea nomads they had already settled the country along the sea named after them, has not been determined.
Some of these states on the coast developed into feudal states of the type of the territorial states; and the master class then became a landed aristocracy. The factors in this change were: first, geographical conditions, lack of good harbors, and a wide stretch of hinterland cultivated by peaceful peasants; and secondly, very probably, the acquired organization into classes taken with them from their original homes. In many cases, they were fugitive nobles, the vanquished of domestic feuds, or younger sons, sometimes an entire generation of youth of both sexes, who thus started “on the viking,” and having at home had lands and serfs, as petty lords, they again sought in foreign lands what they regarded as their due. The occupation of England by the Anglo-Saxons, and of Southern Italy by the Normans, are examples of this method; so too are the Spanish and Portuguese colonizations of Mexico and of South America. The Achæan colonies of Greater Greece in Southern Italy furnish additional and very important instances of this development of territorial feudal states by sea nomads: “This Achæan League of cities was a true colonization. The cities were without harbors—Croton only had a fair roadstead—and were without any trade of their own; the Sybarite could boast of his growing gray in his water town between his home bridges, while buying and selling were carried on by Milesians and Etruscans. On the other hand, the Greeks in this region not only controlled the fringe of the shore, but ruled from sea to sea; ... the native agricultural inhabitants were forced into a relation of clientage or serfdom, and were required to work the farms of their masters or to pay tribute to them.”[80] It is probable that most of the Doric colonies in Crete were similarly organized.