The Crusades, the Genoese and the Latin East - DSpace at ...

war business could have been for the winner who managed to get hold of reasonably wealthy
merchants. Leona Bontommaso may have received the news in a letter from her husband with
explicit instructions, but her business approach to the problem was not untypical of the time. As
Yvonne Friedman phrased it, `in a society where slavery was accepted, setting a price for a
human being was a question of market value, not a moral quandary. '281 The estimation of the
ransom fee for the release of Rubaldo de Bontommaso is conspicuous in comparison to the cases
that Friedman discussed in her book. The prices requested for princes, lords, and other nobles
were much higher, certainly beyond the capabilities of simple merchants. Indeed, Rubaldo's
ransom was luckily not as expensive as the one demanded for Richard the Lion heart a few years
later. In fact, the price for Rubaldo's liberty was approximately 3300 times lower. 282
In the rough
scale of ransom drawn by Yvonne Friedman the price of the Genoese merchant was
approximately five times less than that of a nobleman in 1100, and 100 times less than the ransom
required for the Lord of Beirut in 1260. These figures make sense considering that Leona had to
raise this sum on her own, and to add a separate payment for Ansaldo de Castello, the family
friend and merchant who travelled to release her husband. 283 The 200 bezants demanded were
certainly a substantial sum, even for a wealthy merchant, but not an impossible sum for Leona to
raise; her own granddaughter's dowry was larger than that . 284
Unfortunately, there is no sign that Rubaldo de Bontommaso ever returned from
Alexandria. In the cartularies from the following decades, the activities of his brothers and son
are well documented, but there are no signs of his own commercial activities. For example, at the
beginning of the thirteenth century there is evidence that Rubaldo's son Oberto had his own
daughter married to the nobleman Filippo Spezzapietra (or SpezaPetra), who must
have been
related to the Genoese consul Spezzapietra (Spezapreda). The annals mention that Spezzapietra
took the cross in 1190 with other consuls from previous years, as well as other Genoese nobles
(which implies that they could have gone on the crusade together). 28' Three years after his
daughter's marriage, by October 1203, Oberto was also dead. His wife Anna carried on with the
business. Anna made contracts for the export of cotton and saffron to Ceuta with her own brother
and with Ingo de Castello, the brother of the same Ansaldo de Castello who tried to liberate
281 Friedman, p. 148.
282 In this rough calculation it is assumed that one marc equals 46s Genoese or £2.3 (see appendix 1) and
£1 Genoese equals 3 bezants, which seems to be the case over the period covered in this research (the
average exchange rate over 37 cases is 2.939; however, in eighteen of the 37 cases the rate was exactly 3
bezant to the pound). The ransom for Richard was 100,000 silver marks.
283 See Friedman, table 2, pp. 158-161.
284 See note 285 below.
285 Guglielmo di Sori, MS 102, p. 158, RI. Mabilia's dowry of £ 100 was invested in this contract in a
venture to Ultramare. Spezzapietra appears in the list of nobles from 1190. See Ann. Ian, vol. 2, p. 33.
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