Las relaciones diplomáticas y comerciales entre la Corona de Aragón y los Estados norteafricanos durante la Baja Edad Media

Abstract

Peace treaties are included into a characteristic context of relationship between «Christian» countries and «Moslem» countries, whose principal peculiarity is a permanent state of war; an state of war just interrupted by the declaration of a truce strictly limited to a fixed number of years. From a theoretic viewpoint, the validity of a peace treaty would suppose an advantageous period to develop business dealing while the breaking-off or, simply, the non renewal of a truce would mark the suspension of business connections as well as the legality of piratical and corsair actions. This is the hypothesis. However, the question is not so simple. First, it is necessary to insist chat political «accidents» have a relative influence on the dynamic trade, but they cannot get to paralyze interchanges if diplomatics relations between the two states are non-existent, excepting the limited chronological spaces of hostilities and open confrontation. In fact, there are a lot of adaptation mechanisms to every position originated by the political situation. Then the problem is to know the sense of the treaties and their repercussion in business dealing. Between 1387 and 141O we have the chapters of a truce agreed in 1403 between Martin the Human, king of Aragon, and Martin the Young, king of Sicily, on one hand, and Abû Fâris, king of Tunis, on the other. In a parallel way, we know the existence of some consensus politics or negociation attempts of some other treaties by means of analyzing the contents of treaties and also by a chronological seriation. A comparison of the conclusions obtained through the commercial flow resulting from the study of official and private sources will permit us to discern the possible concordances and divergences between politic and economic levels. Finally, it is a question of confirming if a direct relation can be established or not between stages of war/stages of recessión and stages of peace/stages of expansion, always from a commercial point of view.