ABSTRACT
The international communities of interest that involved the medieval merchants and scholars of the Mediterranean region may not have stirred the imagination of contemporaries as much as the fellowship of knights, but they are perhaps of greater significance today. The multinational merchant classes of the western Mediterranean that were responsible for the evolution of commercial device were singularly successful in registering their concordant interests and ideas. The mingling of cultures which attended the historical developments in the western Mediterranean makes it difficult to identify the particular contributions that each component nation made to the progress of international commerce. Literate elites had been effective mediating agencies between different civilizations before the rise of the medieval Mediterranean societies. The chief credit for narrowing this gap between the Eastern and Western peoples belongs to the Jews. For the trading members of this widely dispersed nation were the first emissaries of the economically sophisticated Mediterranean world to penetrate Carolingian Europe.
