In many cases, I believe, trade in the loot of piracy is the origin of those cities around which, as political centers, the city-states of the antique or Mediterranean civilization grew up; while in very many other cases, the same trade coöperated to bring them to the same point of political development.
These harbor markets developed from probably two general types: they grew up either as piratical fortresses directly and intentionally placed in hostile territory, or else as “merchant colonies” based on treaty rights in the harbors of foreign primitive or developed feudal states.
Of the first type, we have a number of important examples from ancient history which correspond exactly to the fourth stage of our scheme, where an armed colony of pirates plants itself down at a commercially and strategically defendable point on the seacoast of a foreign state. The most notable instance is Carthage; and in like manner, the Greek sea nomads, Ionians, Dorians and Achæans, settled in their sea castles on the Adriatic and Tyrrhenian coasts of Southern Italy, on the islands of these seas, and on the gulfs of Southern Gaul. Phœnicians, Etruscans,[M] Greeks, and according to modern investigation, Carians, all about the Mediterranean, founded their “States” after the same type, with identical class division into masters and servile peasantry of the neighboring territory.[79]
[M] Whether the Etruscans were immigrants into Italy by land who took up piracy after having made war successfully on land, or whether as sea nomads they had already settled the country along the sea named after them, has not been determined.
Some of these states on the coast developed into feudal states of the type of the territorial states; and the master class then became a landed aristocracy. The factors in this change were: first, geographical conditions, lack of good harbors, and a wide stretch of _hinterland_ cultivated by peaceful peasants; and secondly, very probably, the acquired organization into classes taken with them from their original homes. In many cases, they were fugitive nobles, the vanquished of domestic feuds, or younger sons, sometimes an entire generation of youth of both sexes, who thus started “on the viking,” and having at home had lands and serfs, as petty lords, they again sought in foreign lands what they regarded as their due. The occupation of England by the Anglo-Saxons, and of Southern Italy by the Normans, are examples of this method; so too are the Spanish and Portuguese colonizations of Mexico and of South America. The Achæan colonies of Greater Greece in Southern Italy furnish additional and very important instances of this development of territorial feudal states by sea nomads: “This Achæan League of cities was a true colonization. The cities were without harbors--Croton only had a fair roadstead--_and were without any trade of their own_; the Sybarite could boast of his growing gray in his water town between his home bridges, while buying and selling were carried on by Milesians and Etruscans. On the other hand, the Greeks in this region not only controlled the fringe of the shore, but ruled from sea to sea; ... the native agricultural inhabitants were forced into a relation of clientage or serfdom, and were required to work the farms of their masters or to pay tribute to them.”[80] It is probable that most of the Doric colonies in Crete were similarly organized.