“Dragomans and the Cultivation and Use of Trust in Thirteenth-Century Mediterranean Commerce”

The medieval Mediterranean has emerged in recent years as a laboratory for studying intercultural relations. Historians have moved away for the most part from the binary oppositions that so often served as the analytical context for communications across and throughout the Middle Sea. As the Mediterranean has become almost synonymous with intercultural contact, numerous studies have centered on those who facilitated contact between members of the Christian, Muslim, and Jewish communities. Dragomans played an essential role in binding this world together: finding and connecting merchants, witnessing transactions, translating letters, and negotiating differences. I argue that dragomans relied on a kind of trust capital similar to that which bound commercial relations in far-flung business networks. As actors who operated in the interstitial spaces of the medieval Mediterranean, dragomans used language, cultural knowledge, and their own reputations as tools in facilitating the international language of commerce.