21 MARITIME ACTIVITY BETWEEN MALTA, SICILY AND NORTH AFRICA ALTHOUGH CENTALLY LOCATED BETWEEN SICILY AND the North African coast, medieval Malta and Gozo were largely peripheral to maritime activity passing through the central Mediterranean. Archaeological data suggests that in Byzantine times Malta may have functioned as an emporium for the regional redistribution of commodities arriving from the eastern Mediterranean, but this role presumably faded away with the growing threat of Arab-Muslim incursions into the western Mediterranean in the Late Byzantine period. Meanwhile the scant survival of material and documentary evidence from the Muslim period makes it diicult to assess to what degree, if at all, the islands participated in the substantial commercial exchanges between Sicily and North Africa at that time. 1 By the mid- twelth century, with the Normans irmly in control of Sicily and increasingly inclined to intervene in the political and economic afairs of what are now eastern Algeria, Tunisia and western Libya, the Maltese Islands may well have exploited their geographical location along the Tripoli-Sicily route. 2 Later Medieval Malta, which provides the context for this study, did not lie on any important sea routes so that most ships that frequented Maltese ports did so to serve local needs. A substantial proportion of that activity was intended to keep the islands supplied with Sicilian grain and a handful of other commodities such as wine and legumes. Understandably, a signiicant part of this economic activity took place with Sicily but commercial ventures to Muslim North Africa were not as rare as one may think. Finally, the proximity to the North Maritime activity between Malta, Sicily and North Africa in the Late Middle Ages MARK ALOISIO