Chapter 101: The Cyprus Accounts

The week went by much like every other day, one wall after another, with no city beyond worth the trouble to probe the regency’s patience.

Vito passed the hours drinking wine with merchants caught under the same restriction, men who had nothing left to trade except rumor while their ships sat idle beside his. Toffolo spent his hours at dice and lost often enough to make a more serious man ashamed, though he remained cheerful about it.

None of the rumors were valuable on this season, but there was plenty worth remembering for the future. Sicilian silk sat behind a regency too unsettled to trust with serious coin, at least for now, though a patient man could keep an eye on it.

A Ragusan captain, three cups into his wine and proud of every one of them, spent an evening boasting about Dalmatian timber and silver slipping out from under the Hungarian Crown’s nose.

More than one man mentioned Barcelona as well, where the Aragonese trade was growing faster than its ships had yet grown bold enough to claim it properly.

Vito turned all three possibilities over once, tucked them away for another season, and let them wait.

The real business had gone on almost entirely without him.

Alvise had meant what he promised, and within the week he brought forward several Greek merchant houses that had been trading from this island for decades. These were men who knew the price of a bezant better than they knew the birthdays of their own children.

The hundred and fifty-nine tons the fleet had brought in from Acre was ready for sale, and the cargo explained itself well enough. Forty-one tons of grain had remained mostly untouched, twelve tons of Cretan wine and ten of cotton sat beside it, still waiting for buyers who hadn’t shown themselves in Acre.

Wool came to eight tons, honey to seven, and wax to six. Fourteen tons of cheese and a ton and a third of the distillate spirit dubbed fire-wine remained from what Guibert and Walter had not taken.

The rest of the hold, pepper and cinnamon, sugar and alum, glass and Damascus silk, and a little Jordan Valley balsam, sat just as it had since the day it was bought, waiting for a market much farther west than this one.

Cheese sold first, and all fourteen tons went together at two bezants the measure. That brought in a little under two hundred and eighty bezants for goods that had already made a profit twice over since leaving Crete.

The fire-wine went next, every last flask of the ton and a third still aboard. Alvise’s uncertain guess of ten bezants a flask turned out to be closer to the fair price than even he had hoped, and the whole lot brought nearly six hundred and fifty bezants by itself.

Between the two, the luxury goods brought in about nine hundred and thirty bezants. Most ships in this harbor would have been pleased to see that much from an entire cargo.

Wool, honey, and wax followed, all three sold without an argument for the steady, ordinary prices such goods had always commanded. In the end, a hundred and twenty bezants for the wool, a hundred and five for the honey, and ninety for the wax.

The Cretan wine didn’t fare nearly so well. All twelve tons stayed where they were, exactly as warned. No merchant on Cyprus was going to pay premium for a common vintage when Commandaria was close enough to taste within a morning’s ride.

Cotton did no better. All ten tons remained aboard, Cyprus growing enough of its own to make Cretan cotton a surplus rather than a welcome addition.

Grain kept to its rather undignified record. It found no buyer in Limassol any more than it had in Alexandria or Acre, and now it served the crew’s suppers with much greater regularity than it had ever served the accounts.

Between the rare goods and the ordinary ones, Cyprus took a little over thirty-six tons off the fleet’s hands. About a hundred and twenty-three tons remained aboard, grain, Cretan wine, and cotton among them, with all the goods bought in Alexandria and Acre still sitting untouched beside them.

That left roughly a hundred and twenty-two tons of empty hold against the two hundred and forty-five tons they had loaded back at Candia’s pier in March.

Alvise’s Greek contacts filled that empty space just as he had promised.

Commandaria came first, and came heavy, nearly fifty-eight tons of it at roughly twenty-five bezants a ton. It was the largest single purchase of the voyage, and from everything Vito had heard since coming ashore, it was worth every coin.

Sugar followed at thirty-five tons, a trade still finding its feet on the island, bought at the more modest price of twelve bezants a ton.

Salt came last and cheapest, twenty-nine tons from Larnaca’s flats at four bezants a ton. It was not glamorous cargo, but it had the useful quality of taking up space and costing little.

Together, the three filled a hundred and twenty-two tons for just under two thousand bezants, and the naves were full again at last.

The trouble was that the coin to pay for it was not.

The fleet had the five hundred bezants over from Acre, plus nearly twelve hundred and forty-five earned from the cheese, fire-wine, wool, honey, and wax.

That left about seventeen hundred and forty-five bezants before the new cargo changed hands.

Commandaria, sugar, and salt cost nearly nineteen hundred and eighty-five. Alvise’s commission, a twentieth taken from everything bought and sold in Cyprus, added another hundred and eighty-five.

The business came to a little more than twenty-one hundred bezants, leaving a difference of just over four hundred. There was nothing mysterious about how a merchant closed such a difference. One coin became another.

Ten dirhams made one bezant on this sea, and five thousand dirhams still sat in the strongbox from that first season’s profit.

Those went across the table to cover the difference, leaving about seven hundred and fifty dirhams in reserve. The bezants themselves were gone by the time the last sack of salt crossed the gangplank.

The voice, perfectly content whenever a season ended without a disaster, laid the whole thing out plainly.

🦁 [TRADE OVERVIEW — CYPRUS, 1205]

Contacts, City : Established (Alvise Trevisan, Broker; House of Choniates, Merchants)

Goods Sold : Cheese, Distilled Spirits, Wool, Honey, Wax

Revenue : Approximately 1,745 Bezants

Goods Purchased : Commandaria, Sugar, Salt

Expense : Approximately 1,985 Bezants (Goods), 185 Bezants (Commission)

Cargo, Departing : 245 Tons

Next Port : Candia, Crete

A second display followed, counting the strongbox down to the last sort of coin.

🦁 [TREASURY — HELD CURRENCIES]

Grossi (Venezia) : 5,000 — ~2.2g Silver Each

Dirhams (Egypt) : 750 — ~2.9g Silver Each

Bezants (Crusader Kingdoms) : 0 — ~3.4g Gold Each

Vito read it once, found nothing wrong with it, and put the whole business out of his mind.

The holds were sealed that same afternoon.

All three naves sat as low and full as they had on the day they first pulled away from Candia’s pier. Two hundred and forty-five tons, right down to the last one, every plank of every hold had been accounted for.

There was nothing left on the island worth Vito’s time.

Restriction or no restriction, he had finished what he came to do. Whatever quarrel the Latin father and the Greek papas intended to keep having over the ships’ blessing, they could settle it between themselves.

The sea, for once, was the easy part.