The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World

by Paine, Lincoln

  Although the commercial and technological initiative for regular trade between the Mediterranean and the ports of France, England, and Flanders lay with the Italians at the end of the thirteenth century, cogs first appeared in the Mediterranean as early as the Fifth Crusade (1217–21). Mediterranean shipwrights began to adopt the cog as a model for their own designs in the early 1300s. Giovanni Villani, a Florentine chronicler, attributes the change to the economic advantage they offered:

  At this time, certain people of Bayonne in Gascony passed through the straits of Sevilla (Gibraltar) with their ships, called Bayonnese cogs [coche Baonesi], with which they pirated on this sea and caused much harm. Since then the Genoese, the Venetians and the Catalans have begun to employ cogs for their seafaring, and have abandoned the use of their larger ships [navi grosse] in order to secure the seaworthiness and lower costs of the cogs. This circumstance has constituted a substantial change in our concept of sailing.

  Villani’s navi grosse were wide, high-sided vessels with ample room for low-value bulk goods like grain and wine. Built for capacity and economy, those of ordinary size were easy prey for galleys, although the larger ones were built with high castles. The relative advantages of the galley and navi, or round ships (as medieval sailing vessels are known), can be seen in the report of a battle fought between Venetian and Genoese ships in 1264. Ordinarily, Venetian convoys bound for the Levant were escorted by galleys, but that year a convoy of round ships consisting of the Roccaforte, a large state-owned buss built for combat and commerce, and a number of smaller hundred-ton round ships called tarettes sailed for Syria unescorted. The Roccaforte was an exceptional vessel for her time, thirty-eight meters long, fourteen meters across, and more than nine meters from the keel to the top of the stern-and forecastles, and likely rigged with three masts. Her capacity of perhaps five hundred tons was more than twice that of the average large merchantman such as the tarettes in her convoy. A Genoese fleet of sixteen galleys under Simone Grillo ambushed the Roccaforte and her consorts off the island of Saseno (Sazanit, Albania). Although they could do little against the towering buss, the galleys were more than a match for the tarettes. The Venetians transferred the more valuable goods from the tarettes to the Roccaforte before scuttling three of the smaller vessels and setting the rest adrift to be plundered of their oil, honey, and other cargo.

  After looting the tarettes, Grillo offered the Venetians in the Roccaforte safe quarter, but the Venetian ship was all but impregnable to an assault from the low-slung Genoese galleys, and her commander offered the taunting reply “that if they [the Genoese] were stout fellows, let them come on, and that the ship was all loaded both with gold and the richest merchandise in the world.” Leaving the unscathed Roccaforte to proceed to Ragusa, Grillo’s galleys sailed off with the captured tarettes. There may have been no more than half a dozen ships as large as the Roccaforte in the Mediterranean at any point in the thirteenth century. Consequently, the ordinary merchantman was at the mercy of galleys, which could be even longer than the Roccaforte. One of the earliest and most complete specifications for war galleys comes from the chancery records of Charles I, the Angevin king of Naples ousted in the War of the Sicilian Vespers in 1282. These vessels were forty meters long and nearly four meters in beam and carried 108 oars. Unlike in antiquity or the early medieval period, when rowers were aligned in vertical files or more than one man was assigned to an oar, rowers now sat on benches angled toward the stern—a seating configuration called alla sensile (from the Spanish sencillo, meaning simple)—with one oar for each rower. In addition to the oarsmen, these Angevin galleys carried two masters, four helmsman, two ship’s boys, and thirty-six marines; a total complement of 152 people.

  By the end of the century, the Venetians had developed the “great galley,” the design of which was tailored to the routes for which they were intended—whether Trabzon, Alexandria, or, the largest, Flanders. The galley of Flanders was a response to the need for a large, stable merchant ship capable of withstanding the long oceanic passage to England and Flanders, a distance of about 2,500 miles. Longer, broader, and deeper than ordinary galleys, the earliest great galleys measured about forty meters on deck by five meters in beam, with a capacity of about 140 tons, but by the mid-fifteenth century the standard length was about forty-six meters, with a capacity of 250 tons. They had twentyfive to thirty rowing benches that sat up to three oarsmen, each of whom pulled a single ten-meter-long oar balanced with a lead weight. Yet great galleys were essentially sailing ships rowed only when the ship was in danger and when entering or leaving port, and captains frequently left most of the oars ashore, although the crews were kept to defend the ship.

  Although shipwrights steeped in the distinct traditions of northern and southern Europe now had direct exposure to one another’s designs and techniques, there was as yet relatively little exchange in terms of shipbuilding technology. Mediterranean shipwrights adopted the centerline rudder and some essential elements of the cog, and northern Europeans built galleys on Mediterranean lines. But northern ships were still built shell-first and set a single square sail while southern ships were built frame-first and were lateen-rigged, often on two or more masts. Another distinction was that Mediterranean merchant galleys dwarfed their northern competitors. Although the Bremen cog was small, with a capacity of about fifty tons, the largest cogs carried only three times as much, barely half as much as a tarette. Looked at another way, in 1439 a Venetian great galley sailing from Southampton carried 2,783 cloths and more than fourteen thousand tons of tin whereas a typical northern cog carried only 752 cloths.e

  For the moment, relatively slight changes to northern and southern shipping were sufficient to transform regional and interregional maritime commerce. Enlarged capacity, smaller crews, and the ability to sail long distances without stopping for provisions led to dramatic falls in shipping costs, which were already significantly lower than transport costs for goods moved by land. According to the Florentine merchant Francesco Balducci Pegolotti, in 1336 the cost of shipping a sack of wool seven hundred miles from London to the Gironde estuary was one-eighth that of taking the same sack of wool four hundred miles by road from the Gironde to the port of Aigues-Mortes. In this instance, transportation by land was fourteen times more expensive than by sea. Freight rates fell by about a quarter in the fourteenth century, and further still in the fifteenth. Pegolotti calculated that transportation accounted for nearly a quarter of the price paid for alum (a fixative for dyes), and 30 percent for woad (a blue dye), but less than a century later transport costs for the same goods represented only 8 percent of the price.

  In terms of shipboard comfort, there were no improvements. If anything, the increase in ships’ size and capacity probably led to worse conditions. Galley crews slept on their benches, while pilgrims and merchants slept below deck in unenviable discomfort. The thirteenth-century Statutes of Marseille required shippers to set aside a minimum of less than one square meter per passenger on pilgrim ships, and this remained the norm for hundreds of years. “The berths of the pilgrims are so arranged,” wrote Brother Felix Fabri in a 1483 account that could probably stand for most ships of the age, “that, for the length of the ship, or rather of the hold, one berth is alongside the next without any space in between, and one pilgrim lies by the side of the other, along both sides of the ship, having their heads towards the sides of the ship and their feet stretching out towards each other. Since the hold is wide, there stand along the middle of it, between the berths, chests and pilgrims’ trunks.” In Fabri’s ship, the only light below decks came through four hatches in the main deck, which were also the only source of fresh air. This did not provide much relief because “The whole galley, within and without, is covered with the blackest pitch, as are even the ropes, planks, and everything else, that they may not easily be rotted by the water.” Exacerbating the claustrophobic conditions was the stench of the bilgewater, which collected in a well around the mainmast. According to Fabri, “this well
does not contain human filth, but all the water which visibly and invisibly enters the galley filters through and collects in that well, and a most loathsome smell arises from it, a worse smell than that from any latrine for human excrement.” Such conditions were no worse than those found aboard round ships, and the speed and safety of the great galleys made them the preferred means of transportation for those who could afford them. Given the dismal conditions described by Brother Felix, it seems strange to modern sensibilities that not more people remarked on them. Yet accounts of shipboard life are rare, even in the correspondence of merchants whose occupations kept them at sea for long periods.

  Conducting Trade

  In the eleventh century, the merchant’s profession frequently passed from father to son, but partnerships with nonfamily members were common. Both formal and informal mechanisms were devised to ensure honest dealings among unrelated merchants. Although cooperation between merchants of different faiths was not unknown, especially in the Mediterranean, most partnerships were formed on the basis of a shared religion, each governed by its own laws. Regardless of their faith, however, merchants worked cooperatively as well as competitively, sharing information and looking after each other’s business when circumstances warranted. In the Dar al-Islam, the leader of the merchant community was known as the representative of merchants (wakil al-tujjar in Arabic), whose primary though by no means sole function was to represent his fellow traders in legal disputes. In addition, the representative of merchants acted as a banker, forwarded correspondence, and maintained a warehouse for his clients. These storage facilities, called fonduks in Arabic, were found in cities across North Africa and the Near East and served the same purpose as the quarters reserved for foreign merchants in Constantinople.

  All shippers arriving at Muslim ports were required to pay duties, but the amount varied according to one’s status: 1.5 to 2 percent of annual earnings for Muslims, 5 percent for non-Muslims living within the Dar al-Islam, and 10 percent for non-Muslims living outside the Dar al-Islam. The latter could trade in Muslim ports provided they had a written certificate of safe passage called an aman, which was valid in all ports within the Dar al-Islam. These passports guaranteed freedom of worship, testamentary rights, the right to provision and repair ships, abolition of the right of wreck, extraterritoriality, and permission to address the head of the Muslim community, among other things, and were the result of negotiations or a treaty between an imam and a Christian state. Armed with an aman, merchants could trade during periods of warfare between Christian and Muslim states, and Christian merchant ships were found in Alexandria and Damietta even at the height of Saladin’s naval operations against the crusader states between 1179 and 1187.

  Such guarantees helped ensure Christian access to Muslim markets, and while the extension of trade privileges between Christian states reflects a similar effort to open markets, no reciprocal policies evolved on the Christian side with respect to Muslims. Latin Europeans were generally hostile to people of other faiths, and Muslim jurists discouraged trade outside the Dar al-Islam on the grounds that exposure to alien laws and religion would result in spiritual corruption, at least in the Mediterranean. This prohibition was not absolute and there was a Muslim trading community in Constantinople from at least the late tenth century, and a treaty between Basil II and the Fatimid caliph Abu al-’Aziz Mansur stipulated that prayers would be said for the latter in the mosque at Constantinople. In 1189, Isaac II negotiated a treaty that allowed for the establishment of a second mosque. An ambassador, an imam, muezzins, and readers of the Quran sailed for the Byzantine capital and, according to Saladin’s biographer, “The day they entered Constantinople was a great day among the days of Islam; great numbers of merchants and travelers were present.” Western Europeans were appalled, but the Byzantines’ accommodation of Muslims was due in part to their shared resentment of western crusaders.

  As the numbers of individuals with an interest in maritime commerce increased, and as ships and their cargoes grew ever larger, investors developed new ways to safeguard their investments. Spreading risk through webs of commendae and other contracts offered people a hedge against the inherently insecure business of sea trade, and the great advance of the late medieval period was the development of insurance. Although some forms of primitive insurance existed—the sea loan is considered one—it was not until the fourteenth century that Italian merchants began issuing premium insurance. From the start, insurers assumed broad risks: “of God, of the sea, of men of war, of fire, of jettison, of detainment by princes, by cities, or by any other person, of reprisals, of arrest, of whatever loss, peril, misfortune, impediment or sinister that might occur with the exception of packing and customs,” according to a Florentine contract of 1397. Theft by officers or crew was not covered. As is true today, premiums varied according to the season and other considerations such as the length of the voyage, whether the ship had to sail through a region known for piracy, and the type of ship employed. (Galleys customarily paid lower premiums than round ships.) The premium on a policy written in 1350 for a ship sailing from Palermo to Tunis and back was 14 percent, and three other policies drafted at Palermo the same year insured cargoes at rates of between 15 and 20 percent. Rates trended downward over time—8 percent for a passage on the Atlantic from Cádiz to Sluys in 1384, and 6 percent for a run from Constantinople to Venice in the 1430s, between 12 and 15 percent for the long passage between London and Pisa in 1442, but only 5 percent for the comparable trip from Sluys to Pisa in the quarter century after 1450. Despite these exorbitant rates—ordinary premiums today are about one percent—insurers could lose considerable sums. By and large, however, commercial shipping in the late Middle Ages was increasingly productive and profitable, and merchants eagerly sought out new markets and opportunities for gain in an effort that would soon transform the world.

  Between the twelfth and fifteenth centuries, Europe underwent a metamorphosis. For thousands of years, the subcontinent had divided the Mediterranean from the North Sea and Baltic, but by the fourteenth century a combination of sea and river routes connected all shores of Europe and made it one of the most vibrant, if not yet the richest, trading networks in the world. The Varangian opening of the rivers of eastern Europe to continuous trade between the Mediterranean and Black Seas and the Baltic in the late first millennium was mirrored in the thirteenth by Genoese and Venetian merchants who pioneered the western sea route from the Mediterranean to the North Sea. This facilitated the transmission of goods, ideas, and, less desirable, disease. By the fifteenth century, the commerce of Europe was so interconnected that one could purchase Russian furs at Bruges from either Hanseatic merchants from the Baltic or Venetians fresh from Tana on the Black Sea.

  Although the commerce of the age was transformative, the total volume of trade carried to Venice during an entire year of the fifteenth century could probably fit in a single twenty-first-century cargo ship. Yet modern cargo ships are routinely run by crews of fewer than thirty and use facilities far removed from the center of the ports they serve. In medieval Europe, maritime commerce engaged huge amounts of capital and manpower and lay at the heart of civic identity for many cities. What ultimately made the commercial revolution of the European Middle Ages revolutionary was the quickening pace of interregional exchange and the allocation of resources and talent to the constant search for new markets, whether within the familiar realms of the Mediterranean and Europe, or in the fabulous lands of the Orient.

  a Orthodox authors generally referred to Catholics, and Muslim authors to Christians generally, as Franks, regardless of their place of origin.

  b Traditionally, sovereigns were entitled to any wrecked ship or cargo cast up on their shores. Abolition of the right of wreck made it possible for goods recovered from a wreck to revert to their original owners.

  c The pintle and gudgeon are pieces of hardware—the pintle with a pin, the gudgeon with a socket for the pin. Two or more gudgeons are attached to the sternpost (or tran
som), and a corresponding number of pintles to the leading edge of the rudder. These keep the rudder fastened to the hull while allowing the helmsman to maneuver it to turn the ship.

  d The windlass and capstan are mechanical devices for lifting heavy weights, the salient difference being that the barrel of the capstan around which the rope is wound is vertical and that of the windlass is horizontal.

  e A “cloth” measured two yards by twenty-four yards, about forty square meters.

  Chapter 13

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  The Golden Age of Maritime Asia

  By the eleventh century a steady stream of trade flowed along interlinked routes between the western and eastern extremes of Eurasia by sea and land. There are no reports at this time of individual goods, or even people, traveling from the Atlantic coasts of Morocco or Spain and the Pacific shores of China or Japan, or vice versa; but the possibility that this did happen is quite good and it was certainly happening by the fourteenth century. While the rise of Fatimid Egypt attracted trade to the Red Sea, Christian merchants and naval powers were in the ascendant on the Mediterranean. Jewish and Muslim merchants were driven into more marginal trades or abandoned the Mediterranean for the Indian Ocean, where they capitalized on the commercial relationships elaborated in the preceding centuries. In so doing, they helped sate Mediterranean and northern European appetites for spices and other eastern luxuries and thus complemented the efforts of Venetian, Genoese, and other western Christian merchants. By this time, long-distance seafaring and trade on the Monsoon Seas had entered a settled, mature phase. But this should not be equated with stagnation. The expansion of sea trade led to growth in the size and numbers of ships, attempts to exercise naval power over ever greater distances, and advances in navigational aids, including printed sea charts and the magnetic compass.