The following year, the crusaders sailed to Constantinople to help restore the beleaguered Isaac II, who resumed the throne with his son Alexius as co-emperor. The two prevailed upon the Franks to remain at Constantinople, but when they reneged on their debt to the crusaders, including “200,000 silver marks, and provisions for every man in your army,” the Franks declared war.a Isaac and Alexius were murdered by their own subjects, and the Franks looted the city of “so much, indeed, that no one could estimate its amount or its value. It included gold and silver, table-services and precious stones, satin and silk, mantles of squirrel, fur, ermine and miniver. And every choicest thing to be found on this earth,” including the four gilded bronze horses of the Basilica of St. Mark in Venice. The value of the crusaders’ spoils was put at a staggering four hundred thousand marks.
Baldwin of Flanders was elected emperor of what is known as the Latin Empire of Constantinople (1204–61), which comprised about a quarter of the late Byzantine Empire. The doge of Venice became “lord of a quarter and of a half [of a quarter; that is, three-eighths] of the Roman Empire,” including the ports of Dyrrachium, Ragusa, and Corfu on the Adriatic; Corone and Modone in the Peloponnese; Rhodes and Negroponte (Euboea); Gallipoli; and Rhaedestus and Heraclea on the Sea of Marmara—all important links in the Venetians’ lengthening chain of trade. Venice also claimed three-eighths of Constantinople itself, and unlike any of the other participants in the campaign, she did not have to pledge fealty to Baldwin. The remainder of the old empire was divided between the empire of Nicaea under Theodore Lascaris, which ran from the Black Sea to the Aegean; the Seljuqs; and, on a narrow strip of eastern Asia Minor bordering the Black Sea, the Orthodox empire of Trebizond (Trabzon).
To all intents and purposes, the Most Serene Republic monopolized Byzantine trade and dominated the sea route to the Levant, but the Venetians were not without competitors. Although the Latin Empire effectively excluded Genoese merchants from their traditional trading quarter in Constantinople and banned them from the most profitable Aegean trade, Genoa was experiencing an economic boom: Genoese bankers were lending money to the crusader states, the pope, and individual crusaders; their trade in the western Mediterranean was expanding; and in 1252 Genoese and Florentine bankers began minting gold coins. Outside of the Byzantine Empire, Sicily, or Iberia, the latter two having inherited the practice from their Muslim predecessors, these were the first gold coins issued in Europe since the early eighth century. More than a symbol of Latin Europe’s economic rejuvenation, gold coins were also essential for its future prosperity.
Their mutual expansion put the rival cities on a collision course and open warfare between Genoa and Venice erupted in 1257. Hostilities were limited initially to the waters around Acre and Tyre, but the calculus changed with the Treaty of Nymphaeum (1261) between Genoa and the empire of Nicaea. For the right of passage into the Black Sea and other considerations, the Genoese agreed to provide Michael VIII Palaiologos with fifty armed ships for his campaign against the Latin empire of Constantinople. This naval force tipped the balance in Michael’s favor and he entered Constantinople the same year. The treaty notwithstanding, the Venetians remained the most important carriers in the Aegean, but as such they were a favorite target for pirates. Theodore Lascaris had sponsored pirates to harass Venetian and Latin shipping, and conditions worsened after Michael’s capture of Constantinople. A Venetian-Byzantine treaty addressed the problem of Venetian pirates operating against imperial interests, and vice versa, as well as abuses by Byzantine customs officials. But the fatal flaw of Byzantine policy was that with no fleet of its own, the empire had to leave the suppression of piracy to foreign powers—essentially asking the foxes to guard the henhouse. This weakness was exacerbated by the threat of attack from the ousted Franks, whose machinations led to the War of the Sicilian Vespers, the longest and best documented naval conflict of the period, although in the end it hardly involved the Byzantines at all.
The Norman kingdom of Sicily had come to an end at the close of the twelfth century, when control of the island passed ultimately to Charles I, duke of Anjou (in France), who hoped to use Sicily as a springboard for a campaign against Constantinople. The Byzantine emperor Michael enlisted the help of Peter III of Aragon, who drove Charles out of Sicily. (In so doing Peter laid the groundwork for a Spanish Mediterranean empire encompassing the Balearics, Corsica, Sardinia, and, for more than four centuries, Sicily. The crowns of Sicily and Aragon remained joined until the end of the War of the Spanish Succession in 1712.) Chief architect of the Aragonese naval success was the Calabrian admiral, Roger of Lauria, “a man of inestimable worth” in Boccaccio’s words, who between 1283 and 1305 won six major naval engagements in which he displayed a strategic and tactical ability apparently unique in the age of medieval galley warfare. Lauria’s approach to manning his ships was distinct from that of contemporary naval powers, for he commanded a polyglot collection of warriors and crews without regard to nationality or religion. People from different regions specialized in different types of warfare. Lauria’s oarsmen were generally Sicilian; the crossbowmen Catalan (their reputation second only to that of the Genoese); and the corps of almugavars (“footsoldiers skilled in the use of lances, missiles, and shields, and who range far and wide by day and night,” not unlike modern special forces), as well as heavy and light cavalry, were Aragonese. Initially Roger relied on the compulsory service required of the subjects of the crown of Aragon, but as the size of the fleet and duration of the war increased, so did resistance to the crown’s prerogatives. Conscription was tried, but the better solution was to offer incentives in the form of pay competitive with wages in the merchant fleet, a share of booty from raids and warfare, and forgiveness of debts. The conflict spread to the western Mediterranean and in 1285 naval power proved decisive against a Franco-Angevin invasion of Aragon, when Philip III led eight thousand knights across the Pyrenees. These could only be supported by sea, and when Lauria defeated a French fleet in a night battle off the Spanish coast and then took the port of Rosas, the French withdrew. But it was the deaths of Charles, Peter, and Philip in 1285–86 that brought the war to a close.
The Mediterranean Breakout
Only a decade before, the Genoese had opened a new epoch in the history of the Mediterranean and Europe, if not the world, with the establishment of regular sea trade between the Mediterranean and the North Sea. The earliest record of a direct voyage from Genoa to Flanders is that of Nicolozzo Spinola in 1277. It is hardly surprising that the Genoese initiated this route: they had been active on the Atlantic coast of North Africa as far south as Salé and Safi for a century; they were employed as shipwrights and sailors in Galician ports on the Bay of Biscay; and they were past masters in the overland trade to northern Europe. Much has been made of the obstacles presented by the winds and currents that flow through the Strait of Gibraltar from west to east, but these are overblown. Ships have routinely sailed through the Strait of Gibraltar since before Cádiz was Gadir. Although it is on balance easier to enter the Mediterranean than to leave it, easterly winds prevail five months of the year—in March, July to September, and December—and coastal currents flow toward the Atlantic.
Shortly after its conquest by Ferdinand III of Castile in 1248, Seville was awash in shipping from around the Mediterranean and northern Europe. According to the Estoria de España,
ships come up the [Guadalquivir] river every day from the sea, including naves [ships], galleys, and many other seagoing vessels. They stop under the [city] walls, and bring in all kinds of merchandise from all over the world: from Tangiers, Ceuta, Tunis, Bougie, Alexandria, Genoa, Portugal, England, Pisa, Lombardy, Bordeaux, Bayonne, Sicily, Gascony, Catalonia, Aragon, other parts of France, and many other regions of the sea, both Christian and Muslim.
That is to say, medieval mariners perceived the Strait of Gibraltar as neither barrier nor boundary. The chief obstacle to regular navigation between the Mediterranean and northern European ports was a lack of comm
ercial incentive, not inadequate ships. However, the growth of the Iberian and northern European economies helped make the sea route competitive with the transalpine routes between Venice and Genoa and northern France, while the decline of trading opportunities in the Levant compelled merchants to seek out alternative outlets for their energy and capital.
The search for new business ventures received additional impetus in 1291 when the Mamluk sultanate that ruled Egypt and Syria completed the Muslim Reconquista of the Levant with the capture of Tyre and Acre. In response, some Genoese wanted to invade Egypt in alliance with the Mongols, who since 1259 had controlled the continental silk road all the way to the Black Sea. That the Genoese sought commercial advantage from a campaign in Egypt is seen from two other efforts made in 1291. The first was their negotiation with the Ilkhans of Persia to build a fleet to divert Indian Ocean trade from the Red Sea to the Persian Gulf, a plan that fell victim to civil unrest in Genoa. Better known was the attempt by Ugolino and Vadino Vivaldi to reach the Indian Ocean by sailing around Africa, an undertaking that if successful would have enabled the Genoese to bypass Egypt altogether, much as Eudoxus had sought to circumvent the Ptolemies 1,500 years before. The Vivaldis fared no better than Eudoxus, and after passing through the Strait of Gibraltar they were last reported somewhere on the coast of West Africa roughly opposite the Canary Islands before they sailed into history, two centuries before Portugal’s Vasco da Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean.
Any prospect for a revival of the Italians’ Levantine trade disappeared when the Mamluks decided that the only way to safeguard the coast against attack from the sea was to raze virtually every port from the Sinai to the Gulf of Alexandretta (or Iskanderun). The Levant’s maritime vitality was eliminated as thoroughly as it had been by the Sea People at the end of the Bronze Age. The destruction was not accompanied by the same violence, but the consequences were far more enduring. Beirut and Tyre eventually recovered, but most Levantine ports remained dormant until the twentieth century, and the heirs to millennia of maritime commercial expertise simply sat out the most dynamic centuries of oceanic trade.
As the Levantine ports atrophied, Indian Ocean merchants began avoiding the Red Sea, sailing instead to Hormuz at the mouth of the Persian Gulf. From there, caravan routes ran west and north, with one branch leading to the Mediterranean port of Ayas, in Cilician Armenia, and the other to Trabzon, on the Black Sea. The Venetians had had access to the Black Sea since the Fourth Crusade, but the Genoese were the first to really profit from the trade, and their merchant colonies ringed the coast from Constantinople to the Crimea and around to Sinop. The Crimea was among the most polyglot places in the world, where Turks, Mongols, Catalans, Venetians, Genoese, Syrians, Jews, Armenians, Arabs, and traders from central Europe came together to trade everything from grain, hides, and slaves to silks and spices. Caffa (Feodosiya, Ukraine) was as impressive an entrepôt as Theodosia had been in antiquity, and the fourteenth-century traveler Ibn Battuta commended the “wonderful harbor with about two hundred ships in it, both ships of war and trading vessels, small and large, for it is one of the world’s celebrated ports.” But the best situated port was Tana (Azov, Russia), only a short portage from the Volga River and the trade of the Caspian Sea, Persia, and the silk road.
Black Sea merchants profited not only from the decline of the Levantine ports but from the prosperity and stability of the Pax Mongolica that descended on Central Asia in the mid-1200s. Trade was generally beneficial for all concerned, but there were hidden hazards. At some point in about the 1330s, a plague had erupted in China, from where it spread westward across the Eurasian steppes. In 1347 a Genoese ship carried the disease from Caffa to Europe. So long as it had remained land-bound, the disease made its way slowly, but once injected into the arteries of western maritime trade, the Black Death moved with horrific speed. In the words of a Byzantine chronicler: “A plague attacked almost all the sea coasts of the world and killed most of the people. For it swept not only through Pontus, Thrace and Macedonia, but even Greece, Italy and all the islands, Egypt, Libya, Judea and Syria.” After incubating over the winter, the disease continued on to other centers of maritime trade: Genoa itself, Pisa, Venice, Marseille, Bordeaux, and Bayonne; from the south of France to England, Calais, Cologne, Copenhagen, Bergen, Lübeck, Novgorod; and from these ports via river into the heart of Europe. Had it not been for the Genoese initiative in beginning regular galley trade between the Mediterranean and Flanders in the 1200s, the plague’s effects on Europe would have been dramatically different. Maritime trade was not the only vector of the disease, but it was the most efficient.
The Black Death had mortality rates as high as 90 percent in some parts of northern China, and killed perhaps twentyfive million people in Europe alone—between a third and a half of the total population—although local losses could be far worse: the population of Venice fell by 60 percent. Despite the agonizing and terrifying personal losses throughout Eurasia and North Africa, Europe’s economy recovered quickly. Labor shortages led to higher wages for workers, whose numbers were increased by peasants leaving the land in search of work in cities, and higher wages led to an increase in consumption and improved living standards, which in turn stimulated trade. Industry also advanced as people developed new devices to compensate for the sudden shortage in manpower. Venetian and Genoese commerce recovered, too, even on the Black Sea.
The Hanseatic League and the Trade of Northern Europe
Even without the convenience of Genoese shipping, the plague would have found its way into Europe from the east. Yet its spread along a clockwise circuit from the Mediterranean to the ports of Europe’s Atlantic, North Sea, and Baltic coasts testifies to the rapid expansion of northern European trade following the Italians’ opening of the sea route from the Mediterranean to Flanders. Here, trade was dominated by German merchants of what came to be known as the Hanseatic League. Prior to this, northern European trade had been in essence a regional commerce. Compared with the exotic trades and interplay of mature and mutually emulous cultures in and around the Mediterranean, northern Europe’s economic strength rose from a dull base. Traffic in high-value, low-volume goods represented only a fraction of total commerce on the Mediterranean, but it had even less of a role in the North and Baltic Seas. Nonetheless, Danes, Germans, Flemings, English, and others enriched from the carriage of bulk commodities were gradually narrowing the gap between the relatively impoverished north and the prosperous south, and more immediate exposure to southern trade hastened the process.
The initiative for this came not from France and the British Isles, the kingdoms closest to the Mediterranean, but from Flanders and the Baltic. Following the dynastic struggle for the English throne in 1066, the North Sea became a relatively peaceable arena of long-distance trade as merchants sailed between Bergen, Ribe, Hamburg, Bremen, Utrecht, and Flanders; up the Rhine to Cologne; along the coast of France; and to a variety of Scottish and English ports from Berwick in the north to Bristol on the Irish Sea. By the twelfth century the most active merchants hailed from Scandinavia and Flanders, but German merchants from the Rhine valley, especially Cologne, and Bremen began to join their numbers. At the same time, German merchants grew increasingly involved in the trade of the Baltic. This new orientation was linked directly to Germanic migration across the Elbe into central and eastern Europe. This accelerated in the tenth century but it was not until the twelfth century that growing population coupled with economic opportunity and crusader zeal propelled the Saxons into Mecklenburg and Pomerania (western Poland). In 1143 Henry III, “the Lion,” duke of Saxony, founded the city of Lübeck on an island between the Trave and Wakenitz Rivers. This location, about twenty kilometers from the Baltic and sixty-five kilometers east of Hamburg, on the Elbe, gave its merchants easy access to the North Sea, the Rhineland, and central Germany.
As was true in the Mediterranean, the line between commerce and crusade was frequently indistinct. A contempor
ary of Henry the Lion wrote that “during all the campaigns which he undertook as a young man into the land of the Slavs”—probably a reference to the disastrous Baltic theater of the Second Crusade—“there was never a mention of Christianity, but only of money.” More successful spiritually and otherwise was the Livonian Crusade preached at the time of the Fourth Crusade in support of a church founded on the Western Dvina. In 1201, the capital of the see was moved to the new city of Riga at the mouth of the Dvina, which opened the Christian east to military support and trade from Lübeck. German crusading and colonization of coastal Prussia began in the 1230s and despite many setbacks it was complete half a century later. The relationship between trade and crusade found succinct expression in the letter of a Reval merchant who in 1274 wrote a colleague in Lübeck: “Our two towns belong together like the arms of Christ crucified.”
Seal of the city of Lübeck from 1280. The Hanseatic merchants of Lübeck sought explicitly to marry “across sand and sea” the distinctive expertise of seafaring and overland merchants, identified here by their characteristic dress. While the hull has the double-ended form and quarter rudder typical of the Vikings’ ships, the lack of oarports identifies this as a cog dependent entirely on sails for power, although one steered with a firrer rather than a centerline rudder. From Ernst Wallis’s Illustrerad Verldshistoria (Chicago, 1894).
More important, the establishment of Lübeck signaled a new development in the conduct of trade in northern Europe, one that sought explicitly to marry “across sand and sea” the distinctive expertise of seafaring and overland merchants in partnerships that furthered their mutual interests. Maritime trade always depends to a greater or lesser degree on a combination of inland and sea routes, but the Lübeckers were apparently the first to recognize the benefits that would accrue from an exploitation of the local knowledge unique to each. The oldest extant Lübeck city seal, of 1224, shows a cog—the principal cargo ship of the day—carrying two men, one dressed in a landsman’s traveling coat, the other, at the helm, in seaman’s attire. This simple illustration identified Lübeck as the meeting place of seafaring merchants of the Baltic and beyond and overland merchants from the Rhineland. Mariners benefited from their inland counterparts’ familiarity with markets in the interior, while the Westphalian merchants profited from the sailors’ knowledge of the Baltic and North Seas. Because they could coordinate their purchases on the basis of what would be most profitable, they were able to maximize their earnings.
The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World Page 46