ABSTRACT
Historians of Mediterranean trade have been more circumspect, but nevertheless the weight of academic opinion sees the merchants exercising their great jurisdictional and commercial rights to the detriment of Latin Syria in the late twelfth and thirteenth centuries. The possessors of the coastal towns, moreover, seem to have enjoyed a large proportion of their revenues in spite of the partial or complete exemptions from tolls and dues gained by many merchant communities. In the town markets a European merchant might well be absolved from the payment of his contribution to the duty on a purchase, but the man from whom he bought would not and the government would generally get at least half the theoretical sales tax. In Egypt the cargo of a merchant ship entering a port was involved in four processes: disembarkation, registration, storage and sale.
