The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World

by Paine, Lincoln

  made many voyages,

  this one repairs at the prow, this one at the stern

  another makes oars, another twists shrouds, another patches

  foresail and mainsail.

  In anticipation of wartime emergencies, the state required that all able-bodied men between the ages of twenty and sixty be registered in their home parish. All eligible parishioners were divided into groups of a dozen, one of whom, chosen by lot, joined a ship while the others contributed one lira per month toward his maintenance. (In extraordinary circumstances, the number drafted was much higher.) The state provided five lira per month per sailor, who could get out of service by paying the government six lira for someone to go in his stead.

  Around the same time that Venice was asserting its dominion of the Adriatic, and half a century before William the Conqueror invaded England, Norman knights began appearing in Italy where they hired themselves out to one or another rival Christian noble. The most infamous of these mercenaries was Robert Hauteville, called Guiscard (“cunning”). In 1059, the pope named him duke of Apulia, Calabria, and Sicily, provided he could wrest these territories from Byzantine and Kalbid control. Two years later, he and his brother Roger defeated a Byzantine army sent to enforce Constantinople’s claim to Apulia and Calabria. When the port of Reggio fell, the way was open for the Hautevilles’ invasion of Sicily. In 1060, the Normans landed virtually unopposed and made an alliance of convenience with one of several rival emirs. Palermo fell in 1072 followed shortly by the rest of Sicily, thus ending 250 years of Muslim rule on the island. The year before capturing Palermo, Guiscard seized the Adriatic port of Bari, the last Byzantine stronghold in Italy. A decade later, he crossed to Dyrrachium with about 150 ships intending to march on Constantinople, but he postponed his plan when the pope enlisted his help against the Holy Roman Empire. The Byzantines recouped their losses with Venetian help, and in 1085 Guiscard crossed the Adriatic a second time, but his sudden death eliminated the Norman threat to the Byzantines, and Emperor Alexius I was able to turn his attention to the threat posed by the Seljuq Turks.

  Even though Norman control of the Strait of Otranto posed a direct threat to Venetian interests, Alexius could only enlist Venetian support “with promises and bribes.” Laid out in a chrysobull (imperial decree) in 1082, these included acknowledging the Venetian doge and his successors as lords of Venice, Dalmatia, and Croatia, and granting them additional commercial advantages at the empire’s principal ports as far east as Antioch. This was the Byzantines’ first major concession to Venice as a commercial carrier and a significant step in the Venetians’ evolution from regional purveyors of salt, fish, and grain to a major Mediterranean power. Alexius has been criticized for selling out the empire, but the long years of warfare had forced the Byzantines to extreme measures and his immediate aim was to arrest the economy’s downward spiral. In this he seems to have been successful.

  In addition to opening Byzantine ports to Venetian traders, the chrysobull of 1082 set aside a quarter for them in Constantinople,

  from the ancient quay of the Hebrews as far as the Vigla, including the anchorages between these two points, not to mention the gift of much real property both in the capital and in the city of Dyrrachium and wherever else the Venetians demanded it. But the main reward was the free market [Alexius] afforded them in all provinces under Roman [Byzantine] control, so that they were enabled to trade without interference as they wished; not a single obol was to be exacted by way of customs duties or any other tax levied by the treasury. They were completely free of Roman authority.

  While these free trade provisions gave the Venetians a pronounced advantage in the commerce of the eastern Mediterranean, they were unable to carry all the empire’s trade. Genoese and Pisan merchants based in Constantinople took up the slack, although they had to pay tariffs of between 4 and 10 percent.

  Less than four hundred kilometers to the west of Venice, Genoa lies on the Ligurian Sea where the coast turns west toward France and the Iberian Peninsula. The hardscrabble Genoese faced the sea with their backs to the steep hills of the Apennines. They had few opportunities for agriculture, mining, or lumbering and limited access to the interior. To seaward, Genoa fronted on a narrow continental shelf where fish were scarce. Such success as the Genoese had at sea derived from their ability to exploit what is probably the best natural harbor between Barcelona and La Spezia. The fact that it is the northernmost harbor in the western Mediterranean gave them a favorable position for trade with central and northern Europe via the Po valley and the Alpine passes. (Pavia is 115 kilometers north of Genoa, much of the way through the mountains, and Milan is on the other side of the Po 35 kilometers beyond Pavia.) About seventy-five miles down the coast at the mouth of the Arno River, Pisa had better access to the markets and manufactures of Florence, but at the same time was more easily embroiled in the politics of Tuscany and the Italian interior.

  Genoese and Pisan merchants competed fiercely for the growing trade of the western Mediterranean, but although they spent much of the eleventh century at war with each other, they put aside their differences to evict the Muslim emir of Sardinia in 1015, and more memorably to attack Mahdia. When the Zirids broke with the Fatimids in midcentury, Ifriqiya had been plunged into a period of incessant warfare that severely disrupted Mahdia’s trade, which was taken up by Pisan and Genoese merchants, among others. For African gold, the Italians traded European slaves, furs, and tin, as well as wood and grain when these were in short supply. They used the gold, in turn, to buy silks, spices, medicinals, and other luxuries in Byzantine and Muslim markets to the east. Taking advantage of the Zirids’ weakness, in 1087 Pisa and Genoa joined forces to attack Mahdia. The most substantive account of the undertaking comes from a Pisan victory song that includes few details of the actual fighting, but whose religious overtones anticipate the more explicitly pious nature of the First Crusade. Just as the Venetians could not take full advantage of the privileges granted by the chrysobull of 1082, the outcome of the Mahdia campaign proved indecisive because neither Pisa nor Genoa had the wherewithal to seize the territory for themselves.

  The Crusades

  A decade after the Mahdia campaign, Alexius summoned western Christian rulers for military help against the Seljuqs. An earlier appeal had borne no fruit, but in 1095 he sent an embassy to Pope Urban II, whose response was to preach the First Crusade. The Crusades were holy wars sanctioned by the pope and undertaken by individuals “for the salvation of their souls and the liberation of the Church” in Jerusalem, and whom the pope promised to “relieve … of all penance imposed for their sins, of which they have made a genuine and full confession.” Acknowledging that some might take the cross for other reasons, Urban specified that absolution applied only to those who fought “for devotion alone, not to gain honour or money.” For the mass of crusaders, the prospect of attaining anything more than spiritual benefit was remote: most probably joined for religious reasons, or at least “In the name of God and profit.” If the Crusades were not undertaken for material gain, commercial shipping would prove the crusader states’ lifeline, to the great profit of Venice, Genoa, and Pisa. The armies of the First Crusade converged on Constantinople in 1097 before marching southwest across Anatolia. One contingent crossed the upper Euphrates to take Edessa (Urfa, Turkey), while the remainder took Jerusalem and, thanks to the timely arrival of twelve Genoese galleys at Port Saint Symeon (the ancient al-Mina), Antioch. The Genoese had taken the cross and came as crusaders, but for their services they received commercial privileges in the port, as did the Pisans who followed in 1099. Although last off the mark, by 1100 the Venetians had a fleet of some two hundred ships en route to the Levant, and over the long term they profited more from the crusader states than any of their maritime rivals.

  The relative ease with which the Italians were able to supply the Crusaders was due partly to the century-long decline of Muslim naval power in the Mediterranean. By the eleventh century, the Fatimid fleet theoreticall
y numbered between seventy-five and ninety galleys, five of them assigned to the Red Sea. More than half were stationed at Cairo and ports in the Nile delta, while perhaps twentyfive were distributed among Ashkelon, Acre, Sidon, and Tyre. Fleet administration was overseen by the emir of the sea (emir al-bahr, a title that entered European languages as “admiral”) and there was a standing force of about five thousand sailors and marines. In addition to being overstretched, the Fatimid forces were handicapped by the maritime geography of the eastern Mediterranean, where sources of freshwater were in short supply, especially as Levantine ports fell to the crusaders, and neither the place nor time of the Christian fleets’ coming were predictable. The loss of Cyprus and Crete to the Byzantines in the 960s all but ensured Egyptian naval forces had to fight defensively.

  The Fatimids also suffered from having the only standing navy in the eastern Mediterranean. The crusader states had neither ships nor the manpower to crew them, but an endless stream of armed shipping brought merchants, pilgrims, and crusaders to the Holy Land for two centuries. The fleets seldom coordinated with each other, so the Fatimids faced not a unitary navy that it might destroy root and branch in a single campaign, but a kaleidoscope of fleets from not only Venice, Genoa, and Pisa, but also the Byzantine Empire, Spain, France, Sicily, and even England and Scandinavia. Given these geographic, strategic, and logistical disadvantages, that the Fatimid fleet remained remotely effective for as long as it did is remarkable.

  As if to accentuate the importance of maritime power to the crusader states, the first to fall to a resurgent Islam was the landlocked county of Edessa, the loss of which prompted the Second Crusade (1147–49). This was not limited to the Holy Land, but included campaigns on the Iberian Peninsula and against the pagan Wends, Slavs living in what is now northern Germany. The eastern crusade was a fiasco, and the Baltic campaign fared little better although it did initiate a century-long period of eastward expansion. But the pressure on al-Andalus was considerable. At its greatest extent, the Umayyad Caliphate of Córdoba reached as far north as the mountains of Asturias and León, and it was here that the Iberian Reconquista took shape under Alfonso VI, king of León and Castile and self-styled emperor of all Spain. The caliphate had lost its monopoly on power in al-Andalus at the beginning of the eleventh century, and Christian kings took advantage of divisions among the roughly thirty or so Muslim taifas that had sprung up in its place. The starting point of the Reconquista is generally taken to be Alfonso’s capture of Toledo in 1085, news of which helped fuel the drive to reclaim the Holy Land from Muslim rule prior to the First Crusade. This also led the taifas to seek help from the North African Almoravids who defeated Alfonso in 1086 and consolidated their authority over al-Andalus, including the major ports from Cádiz to Almería and the Balearics. They were succeeded by a rival Berber dynasty, the Almohads, who had been active in the Atlantic Moroccan port of Salé and “who organized their fleet in the most perfect manner ever known and on the largest scale ever observed.” By midcentury, the Almohads had advanced into al-Andalus, where they made their capital at Seville, and after consolidating their control of Almoravid North Africa they ousted the Normans from Mahdia, Sfax, and Tripoli (in Libya), which they had controlled for less than a decade.

  The rulers of Norman Sicily had been conspicuous by their absence from the First Crusade. This was not due to a desire to placate Sicilian Muslims, although they comprised a significant proportion of the population. Muslims continued to raid Sicily into the 1120s, and the Norman kings of Sicily attempted to extend their control over parts of North Africa and fought the Almohads. However, the Normans had an emphatically pragmatic approach in their overseas relations, and as early as the raid on Mahdia they had declined to occupy the port on behalf of the Pisans and Genoese because they had come to an accommodation with the Zirid emir. At the same time, Genoese and Pisans were welcome as traders and furnished with letters of protection. As a result in part of this policy of forbearance, Norman Sicily was one of the most cosmopolitan and prosperous kingdoms in western Eurasia, with a cultural brilliance that reflected and harmonized the diverse origins and faiths of its Muslim, Orthodox, Latin Christian, and Jewish inhabitants.

  Following the pope’s call for an Iberian crusade, the Genoese negotiated with the king of Castile to support a campaign against Almería, in exchange for which they were promised one-third of the city. They received comparable concessions from the count of Catalonia for the capture of the Ebro River port of Tortosa. The campaign was an enormous undertaking for Genoa, which fielded more than 225 galleys and other vessels and twelve thousand men in addition to the ships’ crews. After taking Almería in October 1147, the bulk of the Genoese forces wintered at Barcelona before going on to take Tortosa. Unable to shoulder the expense of occupying such distant territories as a communal project, the city sold its interest in Tortosa to the count of Barcelona and leased its holdings in Almería to a wealthy Genoese merchant before Almohad forces recaptured the port, which remained an integral part of Muslim Spain for another three centuries.

  Inconclusive though its overseas campaigns were, involvement in the Second Crusade helped consolidate Genoa’s political position with respect to the Holy Roman Empire. When Frederick I, “Barbarossa,” marched into northern Italy in 1158 and demanded that the cities pledge fealty and pay tribute to him as emperor, the Genoese successfully pleaded for special consideration because they had brought an end to “the attacks and damages of the barbarians that used to vex the coastline from Barcelona to Rome every day,” and every Christian could “now sleep and rest securely under his fig tree and arbor.” Rhetorical flourishes aside, Genoese aspirations were not defined by religious politics, and in 1152 and 1160 the Genoese negotiated treaties with the North African ports of Bougie (Béjaïa, Algeria) and Ceuta, and began trading with Atlantic Moroccan ports to which gold caravans from West Africa had been diverted to avoid Bedouins blocking the way between sub-Saharan Africa and the Mediterranean.

  The Second Crusade in Iberia was not confined to Spain or the Mediterranean. Only a week after the fall of Almería, Portugal’s first king, Afonso I, captured Almoravid Lisbon with the support of about thirteen thousand northern European crusaders—from Flanders, Normandy, Scotland, England, and the Rhineland—who had sailed from England in a fleet of about 165 ships. Afonso urged them to join his assault on Lisbon, one of the most populous cities on the peninsula and “the richest in trade of all Africa and a good part of Europe.” Following prolonged negotiations over compensation, Afonso agreed that neither he nor his men would have any share in the booty that came from the sack of the city, and he exempted his allies and their heirs from paying duties on their goods and ships “from now henceforth in perpetuity throughout all my lands.” After a four-month siege, Lisbon fell in what contemporaries considered one of the few successes of the Second Crusade and what is now taken as a pivotal moment in the Reconquista.

  The main reason for the failure of the Second Crusade in the east was a poorly conceived decision to attack Damascus, the state least hostile to the crusader kingdoms and the defense of which united a host of otherwise fractious Muslim rulers. Nur al-Din emerged as the preeminent leader in Syria, and after routing the crusaders at Damascus in 1154 he rallied his coreligionists to oppose the crusaders elsewhere. He was succeeded by his deputy in Cairo, Saladin (Salah al-Din Yusuf), who founded the Ayyubid Dynasty (1169–1254) and became one of the crusaders’ most capable adversaries. But by this time the Egyptian navy had been weakened beyond repair. Saladin made recovery of the Levantine ports a priority, but this was accomplished from the land rather than the sea, and thanks to the fleet’s considerable shortcomings they were ceded again during the Third Crusade. Despairing over the loss of ten ships blockading Tyre, Saladin’s biographer wrote: “It became clear from this disaster … that the rulers of Egypt had not attended to the needs of the navy nor recruited suitable men for its service; instead they had collected obscure, ignorant, weak and untried men on a rando
m basis. It was therefore no surprise that when confronted with danger they were gripped with fear, and when ordered to obey they were unable to do so.” Saladin appealed to the Almohads of Iberia for naval support, but sources differ about whether they replied favorably. Even if 190 ships were sent, as a later author reports, they were of little help.

  During this period, the Byzantine Empire had been plunged into turmoil by a combination of military setbacks at the hands of the Seljuqs, conflict between the eastern and western Churches, and a succession crisis. In 1182, the future emperor Andronicus ordered the massacre of the Latin population at Constantinople. A contemporary estimate of sixty thousand dead seems high but testifies to the great number of foreign traders in the city and the violence unleashed by Andronicus. Revenge for the slaughter was swift, as Latin refugees fleeing Constantinople pillaged Byzantine ports throughout the Aegean, but it would reach its devastating climax two decades later.

  In 1198, Innocent III called the Fourth Crusade. Rather than attempt a direct assault on the Holy Land, the crusaders planned to invade by way of Alexandria—an objective that could be justified in the name of liberating its large Christian population—or Cairo, “because they could better destroy the [Ayyubid] Turks by way of Babylon [Cairo].” There was, however, a powerful commercial incentive for attacking Egypt, which was the chief terminus for the Indian Ocean trade and the richest state in the Muslim Mediterranean. Organizers planned to recruit thirty-five thousand soldiers, including forty-five hundred knights and their horses, to be carried in some three hundred ships supplied by Venice at a cost of eighty-five thousand marks—about twenty thousand kilograms of silver, or twice the yearly revenues of the kings of either France or England—payable in the spring of 1202. By the fall of that year, only a third of the crusaders’ army and funds had reached Venice. Determined to receive payment in full, the Venetians coerced the crusaders into raising the balance through plunder, the first victim being Zara (Zadar, Croatia). An attack on a Latin Christian city was anathema to many, but two hundred ships joined Doge Enrico Dandolo to take the port, and the stage was set for the next diversion of the Fourth Crusade from its original goal.