The Islamic Ethics of the Wine Tax

Between 1288 and 1300 European merchants competed with one another to obtain the right to collect duties on wine shipments to the port of Tunis on behalf of the Hafsid caliph who ruled the city. Winning bids ranged between 18,000 and 34,000 bezants – at around the same time, a large merchant ship and all its cargo was valued at just over 20,000 bezants. Referred to in Latin sources as the gabella vini (from the Arabic qabala, ‘to receive’) this was a form of tax farming: a common and ancient practice for states across the Mediterranean, whether applied to land or other sources of wealth. In exchange for a lump sum payment, merchants had the right to collect and keep all or most of the tax revenue for a set period of time.

Holding the wine gabella in Tunis was an attractive investment for a merchant. A major Mediterranean port city in 1300, Tunis was home to thousands of European merchants, mercenaries, and missionaries. Many of the merchants lived in or near large, multi-story buildings known as fondacos (fanādiq in Arabic) built for each trading nation: the fondaco of the Venetians, of the Genoese, of the Marseillais, and so on. Such fondacos often included taverns where wine was sold. Wine was also highly sought after by ship captains; contemporary Genoese and Venetian law codes required ships to carry ample supplies of it in large barrels for daily consumption by the ship’s crew. Finally, as Arabic and Latin sources reveal, many of the inhabitants of Tunis also liked wine, whether they were Muslim, Jewish, or Christian.

For a Muslim dynasty like the Hafsids, however, the fiscal benefits of the wine trade had to be weighed against the norms of Islamic law and tradition, which prohibited Muslims from consuming, handling, or selling wine. This posed a dilemma for the Hafsid officials who administered the wine tax. In principle, one of the foundations of legitimacy of a Muslim dynasty was its ability to uphold the Shari’a. While rulers often disregarded the Shari’a in any number of ways, they had to at least keep up some appearances, or risk rebellion. The medieval Maghreb saw several successful rebellions motivated, in part, by stricter observance of Islamic law. Indeed, the Hafsids themselves first came to power as lieutenants of the Almohads, a Masmūda Amazigh confederation from Morocco united by the charismatic reformer Ibn Tūmart, who, according to tradition, first caused a stir in the 1110s by smashing wine jugs and breaking musical instruments.

Between the 12th and 14th centuries Muslim reformers in the Maghreb often criticised the open sale and consumption of wine. Both Hafsid rulers and rebels against their authority made a point of sporadically demolishing shops and fondacos where wine was sold, often replacing them with a mosque or Sufi lodge. They also periodically renounced state revenues from the sale of wine. A significant portion of the religious elite believed that such money was tainted by its origins in sinful commerce.

The Hafsids also faced criticism by Muslim scholars for their reliance on other forms of immoral taxation. Tolls (maghārim or mukūs) levied on individual commodities such as salt or grain, or on physical access to markets were especially hated by merchants and urban dwellers, for whom they posed serious burdens to trade. Such criticisms did, on occasion, break through to the powerful. According to one 15th-century chronicle, a cleric named al-Sadafi (d.1342), observing tax inspectors in the marketplace, wrote on a piece of paper ‘May he who eats his food from the market tolls reflect on what his punishment will be’, and sent it to the caliph. Upon reading this, the caliph reportedly abolished the tolls. As the story suggests, the efficacy of the critique was based, in part, on the broader belief that one’s income and livelihood needed to be morally pure. As historian Megan Reid argued in 2013, this attitude was relatively common among ascetics and scholars in Ayyubid and Mamluk Egypt and often took the form of extreme scrupulousness about the food they ate or the sources of their income, to the point where ‘eating was political’.

Of course, both clerics and state officials found creative ways to rationalise the use of illicit money. In 1289 the Genoese merchant Bertramino Ferrari paid 18,000 bezants to the court for the wine gabella, only for the court to earmark his cash payment to be used as the salary of its Christian mercenaries. This was, perhaps, a way of ensuring that wine-tainted money went to Christians, not Muslims.

By the time the Italian merchants sought the wine gabella in the 1290s, the Hafsids were recovering from a decade of civil war. It was nearly impossible to collect taxes in the countryside without an army, and the state thus relied heavily on taxation in cities, such as the mukūs, which included the wine tax. However, as the Venetian Senate recognised in 1300, for European tax farmers to make a profit, they had to encourage the import of as much wine as possible. This raised suspicions among the customs officials, who engaged in aggressive policing efforts when the amount of wine flowing through the port became suspiciously high. Over a ten-year period, customs agents raided the shop of a Genoese tax farmer, revoked a Venetian merchant’s right to hold the farm, and threw a Pisan merchant in prison while he held it. The travails of their fellow citizens became a recurring problem for Italian diplomats, who were constantly complaining of arbitrary enforcement of the trade. This struck a discordant note in the otherwise successful commerce between Tunis and the northern Mediterranean, and created problems for Italian diplomats in bilateral treaties. The problem was especially felt in Venice, which relied on revenues from the wine trade in Tunis to offset the cost of its consul’s expenses there.

Taking this into consideration, in 1320 the Venetian Senate decided that the wine trade’s connection with state finances was damaging the Republic’s relationship with Tunis. In that year, it revoked its consul’s right to draw his salary from the profits of a tavern in the fondaco, reasoning that ‘many bad and shameful acts have been committed there’. The wine trade would continue in private hands, but the Republic had decided that its local officers should not be involved in it. Just because a commodity was profitable did not mean it was worth a moral and political hangover.

Joel S. Pattison is Assistant Professor of History at Williams College, Massachusetts.