The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World

by Paine, Lincoln

  The caliphate also maintained an arsenal at Akka (Acre) and a major naval base at Tarsus in Asia Minor. The founders of Tunis relocated a thousand Coptic shipwrights and their families from Alexandria, and it is they who are credited with enabling the Umayyads to establish a fleet that would redefine the balance of naval power in the central Mediterranean. South of Tunis, Susa (Sousse) was the site of an Aghlabid arsenal until it was superseded by the Fatimid capital at Mahdia. Situated on a narrow, kilometer-and-a-half-long peninsula separated from the mainland by a large wall, Mahdia offered excellent protection for the fleet inherited from the Aghlabids. Ports in the western Maghreb and al-Andalus antedated the coming of Muslim rule, but while Ceuta and Algeciras stood watch over the Strait of Gibraltar, it is unlikely that either was home to an arsenal until Abd al-Rahman II’s creation of a navy in the ninth century.

  By the 700s, governors of the coastal provinces of the caliphate had autonomous fleets of which the Egyptian, the best known, is likely representative. The three primary sources of support were payments in cash for the maintenance of ships and crews, the requisition of goods needed by the fleet, and drafting sailors from a nationwide levy. In the early stages of the Muslim expansion, most ships’ crews were Greeks and Egyptian Copts native to coastal areas formerly under Byzantine control. Uthman, the third caliph, is said to have decreed that Muslims could not be drafted to fight at sea against their will, yet the two groups who seem to have supplied most of the marines were descendants of Arab immigrants to Egypt (Muhajirun), and non-Arab converts to Islam (Mawali). Berber and Visigothic sailors and fishermen, transplanted Arabs, and perhaps Copts made up the crews of North African fleets. Villages, cities, and provinces were expected to provide seamen (and their upkeep) on the basis of the census. To ensure against desertion, elders or officials guaranteed that their sailors would “fulfill their expedition as sailors, without turning aside,” or going absent without leave. Alternatively, villagers could pay someone from another area to represent them, a practice that may have resulted in a fleet manned chiefly by professional sailors.

  Generally speaking, seafaring tended to attract only the poor. (Under the Umayyads, the Egyptian fleet had a three-part scale for paying sailors, the crew being the least well paid, followed by marines of non-Arab descent and then marines of Arab descent. The sailors’ bread was also said to be of inferior quality.) Even so, high-caliber crews could only be ensured by offering adequate compensation, which was generally forthcoming only in response to a crisis. As a Muslim historian observed after a Byzantine attack on Damietta in 853, “from this time [the government] began to show serious concern for the fleet, and this became an affair of the first importance in Egypt. Warships were built, and the pay for marines was equalized with that of soldiers who served on land. Only intelligent and experienced men were admitted to the service.” At the other end of the Mediterranean, when the Umayyads established a fleet in the ninth century, Abd al-Rahman II ordered that “men of the sea be recruited from the coasts of al-Andalus, who got good salaries.” In extreme cases, governments turned to impressment, and in Fatimid Ifriqiya prospective crew were sometimes jailed to ensure their availability at the start of the sailing season, a practice even some Fatimid officials criticized. Like the Byzantines, Muslim rulers also relied on mercenaries to man their ships, and Aghlabid and Kalbid rulers in Sicily apparently raised crews from among slaves, freemen, Jews, and Christians, and drew their officers from the ranks of free and enslaved Slavs.

  A striking difference between Muslim and Byzantine fleets was in the division of labor. Muslim crews tended toward greater specialization, whereas Byzantine sailors “were at the same time rowers as well as fighting men.” If they happened to be skilled in ship repair, for instance, they did this work in addition to rowing and fighting. Similarly, officers were supposed to be skilled in reading the weather and celestial navigation and qualified to lead their men in battle. A Muslim commander had broad responsibility for his ships starting with their building: “He should check the construction of ships, their components, assemblage of parts, and their proper removal and joining. He must try to find the best oars and select them carefully; he should also make the best selection of masts and sails.” But the crews under his command included caulkers who apparently had no other function, as well as specialist navigators, meteorologists, and surgeons, while separate officers commanded the oarsmen, who did not fight, and the marines, who did not row.

  Although Andalusian rulers depended on mariners to ensure communication and transportation with the Maghreb, the seafaring communities of the western Mediterranean do not loom large in the accounts of contemporary writers. This disjunction resulted from the fact that while Muslim and Christian states controlled the lands of the western Mediterranean, they made little effort to exercise dominion at sea. But seafarers were certainly there and by the end of the eighth century, Muslim and Christian authors alike distinguished between “Moors”; Berbers from western Algeria and Morocco; and “Saracens,” Arabs from the Umayyad Emirate of Córdoba. Such broad categories mask the fact that there was considerable mixing among these groups, and ignore altogether the survival of Christian Mozarab seafaring communities of whom rulers in both Spain and Morocco were suspicious and who raided and traded to Provence, Corsica, the Balearics, and Sicily on their own account. The emirate’s indifference to its maritime communities changed following raids by Danish Vikings in 844, in response to which Abd al-Rahman II devised a comprehensive approach to coastal defense from Lisbon to the Mediterranean and established arsenals at Seville, Almería, and Tortosa.

  Strategy, Tactics, and Weapons

  Neither the Byzantines nor the Arabs sought pitched engagements at sea unless the outcome was certain, which it rarely was. While some of the fundamentals for the strategic use of offensive sea power were in place, resources, cost, politics, geography, and difficulties of communication made naval operations problematic. Naval tactics were of considerable interest to both Byzantine and Muslim audiences, but surviving manuals were written by authors with little or no practical experience of naval warfare and who plagiarized ancient sources, which with their use of rams, for example, were irrelevant to medieval warfare. In addition to disabling ships with their ships’ spurs, fleet commanders had a variety of long-range weapons, including catapults for hurling stones, javelins, ceramic pots filled with poisonous insects and snakes or quicklime, and firepots. The most sophisticated weapon of the age was a kind of flamethrower known today as “Greek fire.” The inventor was a Syrian refugee named Kallinikos who “manufactured a naval fire with which he kindled the ships of the Arabs and burnt them with their crews” during the Muslim siege of Constantinople in the 670s. As a weapon system, Greek fire comprised a flammable liquid made from raw or distilled crude oil heated in a pressurized bronze container and sprayed through a nozzle attached to a pumping apparatus. Greek fire gave those deploying it an enormous psychological advantage. In addition to the fire itself, the bellows used to heat the liquid created a terrifying noise, and the nozzles through which the flames shot were fashioned in the shape of wild animals so that “The fire to be hurled at the enemy through tubes was made to issue from the mouths of these figureheads in such a way that they appeared to be belching out the fire.”

  Greek fire was one of the Byzantines’ most closely guarded secrets, handed down over centuries through the descendants of Kallinikos. In a tenth-century handbook of imperial administration, Constantine VII wrote that anyone who revealed details about the weapon should be stripped of his rank or office and “anathematized and made an example for ever and ever, whether he were emperor, or patriarch, or any other man.” Despite these threats and precautions, knowledge of Greek fire was already available to Muslim fleets by 835, when Aghlabid sailors used it in Sicily, and in the following decade Abd al-Rahman II armed his Andalusian ships with it. The Aghlabids bequeathed their expertise to the Fatimids, who brought it with them in their conquest of Egypt and quickly introduced
it to the south. The tenth-century geographer al-Muqaddasi claimed it was indispensible for transiting the Bab al-Mandeb where “Every ship … needs to carry armed men, and personnel to throw Greek fire.” Even before they acquired Greek fire, however, the Muslims developed protection against it. According to an eighth-century account, the head of the Egyptian arsenals invented “something which was never before heard of. He took cotton and some mineral substances; he mixed them all together and smeared the ships of the fleet with the mixture, so that when the fire was thrown by the Greeks upon the ships, they did not burn. And this I saw with my own eyes: the ships were struck by Greek fire and did not burn but the fire was at once extinguished.” In addition, there was fireproof clothing. One recipe called for dipping a cloak in a mixture of talc, alum, ammonium, hematite, gypsum, stale urine, and egg whites. Such garments were used to protect both soldiers and horses (Greek fire was also employed on land), though whether these were used at sea is unknown. For protection against traditional weapons, however, sailors did wear protective chain mail, cuirasses, and padded jackets.

  Throughout their centuries of conflict with Muslim powers, the Byzantines’ great advantage was that they never lacked for essential naval stores like wood, tar, hemp, and sailcloth. Shipbuilding timber was found on the coasts of Asia Minor, the Greek mainland, the Adriatic coast of Illyria, southern Italy and Sicily, and on Cyprus and Crete. The disadvantage of this embarrassment of riches was that regardless of which part of the empire they attacked, invaders were usually able to secure both the materials and expertise necessary to build or repair their own ships, and it was the quest for just these advantages that stimulated some of the earliest Muslim campaigns. Caliphs and emirs were under constant pressure to guarantee supplies of wood for shipbuilding, construction, and fuel for domestic and industrial uses like smelters and kilns, the need for which could not be satisfied by the comparatively meager forests of northern Syria, the Maghreb, or al-Andalus. The battle of the Masts was so named in Arabic chronicles because it was fought to procure mast timber from the wooded slopes above Phoenix, and Cyprus, Crete, and Sicily were as attractive for their forests and other natural resources as for their commanding position along the major east–west axis of Mediterranean trade.

  Commerce

  Archaeological and written records testify to the diversity of routes and goods in circulation around the Mediterranean, yet in the late Roman period a preponderance of shipping was dedicated to the annona, shipments of grain to be made into bread for free distribution to the masses—the bread of “bread and circuses.” This practice underwent drastic change in the fourth century when the Alexandrian fleets were redirected to Constantinople and those of Africa declined in significance as the population of Rome dwindled. In the sixth century, an estimated twelve hundred to eighteen hundred ships were involved in the annona trade, most of them making two round-trips in a season. In addition to these state-subsidized vessels, another six hundred to nine hundred independent traders were homeported at Constantinople. The annona stopped following the Persian capture of Alexandria in 617, and the Byzantines ended the free distribution of grain for good the following year. Any hope for the trade’s revival ended with the Arab capture of Egypt and Abd Allah’s reopening of the ancient canal between the Nile and the Red Sea to facilitate grain shipments to the ports of Jeddah, established in 646, and Yanbu, which served the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, respectively. This benefited not only the citizens of the Arabian ports, but also the growing numbers of pilgrims who performed the hajj. Improvements to the abandoned canal between the Nile and the Red Sea—the Canal of the Commander of the Faithful—made it navigable only when the Nile was in flood. Nonetheless, Alexandria’s loss of her largest Mediterranean trading partner caused the population to fall from an estimated eight hundred thousand people at its imperial peak to perhaps one hundred thousand in 860. Although it hardly compensated for Alexandria’s lost opportunities, trade did intensify along the coasts of North Africa, as well as between Ifriqiya, Sicily, and southern Italy, and between and along the coasts of the western Maghreb and al-Andalus. This was due both to the vitality of the Islamic state and also to Carolingian expansion into northern Italy and central Europe, which stimulated transalpine trade to satisfy the demand for Mediterranean goods in the north. The growth in the slave and lumber trades was a boon to Adriatic shippers, especially Venetians and Muslims, who were sometimes rivals but often worked in a symbiotic relationship.

  Too few records survive to give us more than the occasional snapshot of trade over the centuries. The most exhaustive single list of goods commonly handled is found in the tenth-century Arabic Treatise Concerning the Leasing of Ships, which reels off a series of commodities, essential and luxury foodstuffs, animals, textiles, raw materials, slaves, precious stones, gold, and silver. Essential foods include various grains and beans, oil, honey, vinegar, dates, olives, raisins, and salt. Among the luxuries are rice, edible lupine, “marmalades, concentrated juices, licit drinks, and that which is used for seasoning cheese, dried yogurt, rape, yogurt, butter, dried curd, and cottage cheese” as well as “fruits from trees … eaten for pleasure … walnuts, hazelnuts, pine nuts, and other dried and fresh fruits … fried meats, fish, pepper, vegetables, seeds, and eggs.” These lists are complemented by the archaeological manifests from Yassi Ada, Serçe Limani, and other sites that have yielded an eclectic array of goods that reveals a more complex economic life than ordinarily encountered in written texts.

  The natural and man-made hazards of medieval seafaring notwithstanding, people from across a broad economic, religious, and geographic spectrum traveled by ship for any number of reasons. Merchants frequently accompanied their goods; ambassadors and other dignitaries shuttled between Constantinople and Venice or the Po valley, Mahdia and Palermo, or Ceuta and Seville; and church officials frequented the route between Rome and Constantinople. A major reason for nonmerchants to travel was to make pilgrimages or collect relics, although this was sometimes incidental to trade in ordinary goods. Venice’s Basilica of St. Mark was erected to house his body after merchants stole it from the evangelist’s church in Alexandria.

  Regardless of one’s station, conditions aboard ship were onerous. Under Byzantine regulations, male passengers were allocated a space of 3 cubits by 1 cubit (1.1 square meters), while “Women on board are to have a space allowance of one cubit; and a boy … half a cubit.” While the ship carried water for the ship’s company, passengers were responsible for their own food, which they prepared themselves. Whether women were allowed to commingle with men in Byzantine ships is unknown, but Muslim practice encouraged the strict separation of the sexes by assigning men and women to different decks or at least ensuring that women had segregated toilets, “so that they are not exposed to view when they need to use them.” There are also instances of women sailing aboard ships in military operations. When the caliph Uthman gave Muawiya permission to attack Cyprus, he said “If thou sailest with thy wife we allow thee to do so; otherwise not,” on the assumption that Muawiya would not risk his wife’s life at sea. She and possibly her sister sailed with the fleet, while the wife of another officer is said to have praised the efforts of a subordinate for saving their ship.

  Such consideration of course did not apply to slaves, few of whom wrote about their hardships. Nonetheless, there is an abundance of anecdotal evidence preserved by a number of writers from different backgrounds. Taken together these passages describe a floating hell inconceivable to anyone fortunate enough to have been spared the experience. According to John Kaminiates, after sacking Thessaloniki, Leo of Tripoli shipped thousands of enslaved captives to Tarsus in conditions that bear comparison with those of the later Atlantic slave trade:

  [T]he barbarians put leg irons on all of us and stuffed and crammed each and every one into the ships for all the world like some piece of inanimate matter, not even allowing us to breathe the air freely but curtailing its circulation through sheer congestion and over crowding.�
� We were afflicted by many other unpleasant forms of constraint such as hunger and thirst and were black and blue from the overcrowding.… But the most painful constraint of all was the belly, which it was impossible to devise any means of dealing with, since the business of nature must needs take its course and swiftly find an outlet. Many people, preferring modesty to motion, tried to hold it in, and in their unavailing efforts to do so frequently put their lives at risk.

  While slavery was common within Europe, many European slaves were exported to al-Andalus, Africa, and the Near East. Venetian merchants were at the forefront of the trade, buying slaves at Rome for export to Africa as early as 748, even as the pope was attempting to end the traffic in Christians by purchasing and manumitting them. Efforts to curtail the trade continued but Venetian merchants (among others) continued to flout treaties and papal decrees limiting or banning the sale of Christians to Muslims for centuries.

  Contracts and Jettison

  At the same time, more scrupulous adherence to religious restrictions on usury led to significant changes in the way maritime trade was financed, not only among Christians but among Muslims and Jews as well. The Byzantine state acknowledged the considerable risks involved in travel by sea and allowed the highest interest rates to be charged on maritime loans, starting at 12 percent per year in the sixth century and rising to 12 percent per voyage—about twice the rate for ordinary loans—by the ninth century. The considerable danger entailed made it difficult to amass capital for large-scale shipping ventures. As a result, the drafting of ever more sophisticated commercial contracts and insurance was as important to the growth of maritime trade as were developments in politics, weaponry, or shipbuilding. Medieval law was essentially personal and religious rather than territorial and political; that is, people were bound by the law of their community rather than of the state. Muslims and Jews were governed generally by one or another school of law rooted in religious tradition, while Christian merchants operated under codes of laws promulgated by their own states and that owed more to Romano-Byzantine practice. Intracommunal disputes were handled according to the merchants’ religio-legal tradition, while intercommunal disputes were adjudicated under the religious laws of the host community. Yet over time, Jewish, Christian, and Muslim commercial contracts developed similar features. This is hardly surprising, for while merchants are competitive, they are also collaborative, sharing information and adapting to different modes of doing business so as not to jeopardize their ability to work at all.