Splendid Exchange, A

by Bernstein, William L

  The sorry history of the Fourth Crusade illuminated not only the extent to which the Western obsession with retaking the Holy Land benefited Genoa and Venice, but also the bilateral trade in the two key commodities of the era: spices and slaves. At this point, one of the most remarkable players in human history, Enrico Dandolo, took center stage. About eighty years of age and nearly blind when elected Doge of Venice in 1193, he agreed to convey to the Holy Land on the republic’s galleys a Frankish force of 4,500 knights and their horses, 9,000 squires, and 20,000 foot soldiers—and all for a payment of just 84,000 silver marks (about $20 million in current value) plus half of the land and booty seized from Saladin.

  The leader of the Frankish force, Geffroi de Villehardouin, had no intention of attacking the Holy Land, for he had been told years earlier by the English king, Richard, to concentrate his attack at the weak point of the Muslim Empire in Egypt. Moreover, Villehardouin’s men were kept in the dark about their not actually being bound for the Holy Land. Dandolo not only was well aware of the Frankish leader’s true intentions, but was at that very moment negotiating a profitable trade deal with the Egyptians, that involved a promise not to invade.

  Dandolo had other plans, that included the capture of the Adriatic town of Zadar. The last thing he wanted was to invade Egypt, Venice’s wealthiest trading partner. What to do? Simple: he leaked to the crusade’s soldiers waiting on the city’s wharves their true destination. On hearing that they were not going to the Holy Land, the largely Frankish troops deserted en masse, and on the appointed day, only one-third of the planned force formed up for boarding. Worse, the funding for the Frankish force had also decamped along with its deserting troops. The Venetians, naturally, were not willing to embark their precious galleys without sufficient up-front payment.

  By the time the galleys finally cast off their anchors in November 1202, the crusaders had agreed to sack Zadar in lieu of further payment. As soon as this had been accomplished, Dandolo received an offer he could not refuse: in exchange for helping the deposed Byzantine emperor, Isaac Angelus, return to the throne in Constantinople, Isaac’s son-in-law King Philip of Swabia would foot the bill for the rest of the expedition to Egypt.

  Dandolo did not need to be told that this was his chance to sack the richest city in Christendom, and in the process frustrate the invasion of Egypt. The invasion forthwith sailed toward the Bosphorus. In the words of Villehardouin:

  The Doge of Venice, who was an old man and saw not, stood fully armed, on the prow of his galley and had the banner of Saint Mark before him; and he cried to his people to put him on land, or else that he would do justice upon their bodies with his hands.13

  After a long and fearsome siege, Constantinople was taken and stripped of its riches. The four huge bronze horses from Constantine’s hippodrome were taken to the Basilica of Saint Mark in Venice. (The animals looking out over the Piazza San Marco are copies; the originals are in the basilica’s museum.) Beyond the baubles, the Venetians also became the “Masters of a Quarter and a Half-quarter of the Roman Empire,” i.e., entitled to three-eighths of Constantinople proper plus a like amount of Byzantine territory. In addition, the peace terms included free passage throughout the empire’s former territories, plus the exclusion of Venice’s rivals, Genoa and Pisa, from trade with the empire. As Dandolo had hoped, the Fourth Crusade never made it to the Holy Land, thus preserving the Venetians’ trade with Egypt. Not bad for a now ninety-year-old blind man.14

  And what a trade Venice had with Egypt! Those crusaders lucky enough to return from the Holy Land greatly amplified the European demand for the exotic spices of the Orient to suffuse continental homes with the scents of status and wealth. German monks, for example, used to distribute a gingerbread known as Lebkuchen; after the crusades, they began to prepare it with pepper—the traditional Pfefferkuchen.15

  The stage was now set for one of history’s most momentous deals: the Europeans were mad for spices, the Muslims were desperate for conscripts to fight wars with the Mongols and crusaders, and the Italians now effectively controlled the straits through which the vital human cargo flowed.

  The first Arab Empire, that of the Umayyads, had little trouble filling its armies with the original converts to Islam: the proud, fiercely independent, militarily skilled bedouin. As the Muslims’ radius of conquest spread over the entire Middle East, Arabia’s tiny population could not provide the requisite numbers of these formidable desert dwellers for Islam’s ever-expanding armies.

  The inhabitants of the more agricultural, and thus “civilized,” newly Muslim lands bred farmers, not fighters. This was particularly true in Abbasid Mesopotamia and Fatimid Egypt. These settled subsistence farmers generally made poor soldiers, and it was equally difficult to turn a Cairo merchant or a Baghdad scribe, used to a relatively soft and prosperous existence, into a competent officer.16

  Like any other scarce commodity, soldiers had to be imported from places where they were hungry, ferocious, and abundant. The historian Daniel Pipes notes that these fighters would of necessity hail from “marginal areas” with no strong tradition of central government. The inhabitants of such places were forced by dire conditions

  to protect themselves by grouping together and reinforcing the bonds of mutual trust. . . . Elaborate codes of honor and vigilante acts developed to ensure order. The total effect was to sharpen each person’s wits and military capacity. Raiding for booty and feuding were endemic; for reasons of both defense and attack, every male practiced the martial arts from infancy, was trained as a soldier, and stayed in practice at all times.17

  Where were Pipes’s “marginal areas,” from which the Muslim empires drew their soldiers? Primarily in Anatolia and the Caucasus, whose mounted fighters periodically swept south and west to raid and conquer the more “advanced” inhabitants of the Middle East and Europe. The most desirable source of captives was Circassia in the Caucasus, whose male and female slaves were highly prized for their beauty.

  Prime among the “martial arts” practiced in Pipes’s marginal areas was archery, and its mastery served as well on the battlefield as on the hunting field. Another skill mastered at an early age by the inhabitants of the medieval steppe was the devastating combination of horse and stirrup. Probably invented in China in the fifth century after Christ, the stirrup spread slowly throughout central Asia to the Islamic world. By uniting the horse and rider into a single, powerful mass and allowing the mounted combatant to multiply the force delivered by his lance, sword, or club, this seemingly ordinary device revolutionized warfare.18

  As early as the mid-ninth century, the Abbasid army consisted primarily of slave soldiers from these areas. In Egypt, the Buyid Empire, which preceded the Fatimids, purchased large numbers of Turks; the Fatimids cast their net even wider, acquiring Turks, Slavs, and Berbers.

  This peculiar Islamic institution, the mamluk slave system, flowed naturally from the military, demographic, and political imperatives of the medieval Muslim world and the laws of human nature. During the medieval and ancient periods, slavery was not a racial phenomenon; as a practical matter, the mamluk system was largely a brown-on-white affair. In the words of one historian, “African slave markets were disregarded as far as Mamluk cadres were concerned.”19

  The females went into households and harems; the males were sent off to training camps and into military units where “they were turned from infidels into Muslims, from boys into grown men, from raw recruits into full-fledged soldiers, and from slaves into free men.” The age-old techniques of military bonding strengthened their élan, and the promise of freedom and riches from their trainers and commanders (themselves manumitted slaves) ensured their loyalty.20 According to the foremost modern scholar of the system, David Ayalon:

  Those mamluks who were bought and set free by the ruling sultan constituted the chief support of his rule. The Mamluk system of servitude instilled in the mamluk a feeling of profound loyalty toward his master and liberator on the one hand, and for his fellows
in servitude on the other. . . . The sultan and his mamluks formed a tightly-knit association, whose members were united by strong bonds of solidarity. There existed between the sultan and his mamluks a sort of double bond: they were in power only so long as he ruled, and he ruled only so long as his power was based on them.21

  As soldiers, the freed slaves rose through the ranks to positions of high command; soon enough, they began deposing the native sultans. The perquisites and luxuries of power eroded the martial instincts and skills of the most successful mamluks within a generation or two, leaving the way open to a new crop of lean and hungry slave-soldiers, fresh from the hinterlands of Circassia and their Egyptian training camps, to seize power from their soft, indolent masters. The new Mamluk sultan would then purge the top rank of the old sultan’s troops, the so-called “Royal Mamluks,” and replace them with his own followers, and the cycle began anew. The replacement in power of one group with another could be rapid or gradual; it could be done with the sword or with a pension. At any one time, it was not unusual for several generations of cashiered mamluks to coexist both in civilian life and in the lower hierarchy of the army.22

  The entire system was corrupted by a sense among the mamluks that the current sultan held power only through their grace. According to Pipes, “These soldiers considered the ruler in their debt and tolerated him only as an arbiter.”23 Before too long, the sultan, pressed by his “old friends,” would feel the need for “new friends,” unencumbered by the sense of entitlement felt by his current supporters. Where did these “new friends” come from? Naturally enough, from the training camps of the recently arrived slave-soldiers, who were offered freedom and power in return for their support.24 Toward the end of the Kurdish-led Ayyubid dynasty, a member of the royal court was said to have inquired of a colleague about the peculiar uniforms of the sultan’s mamluk guards. The answer, which would come true within less than a generation: “This is the dress of those who will conquer our country and will seize our property and treasures.”25

  The mamluk slave system, as already noted, began at most a century or two after the initial Arab conquests, then built slowly under the Abbasids, Buyids, and Fatimids, who thus had a constant and voracious appetite for fresh slaves. The Venetians, with their commercial instincts and newly won control over the Bosphorus, could supplement Egyptian needs during the first half of the thirteenth century.

  Prior to his 1187 conquest of Jerusalem, the Kurd Saladin had already toppled the last Fatimid ruler of Egypt and would establish his own short-lived Ayyubid dynasty. Besides being skilled horsemen, Saladin’s Turkish and Caucasian mamluks wielded the bow and arrow to devastating effect, especially during the crusades. At the Battle of Hattin, the predominantly mamluk archers were provided with four hundred loads of arrows, with reserves of additional missiles packed onto seventy camels and placed “in the thick of the fray.” Without their mamluk core, Saladin’s Kurds would surely not have dislodged the Franks from the Holy Land; even his legendary shock troops, the Halqa, consisted mainly of mamluk Turks.26 Further, without mamluk troops, Muslims would probably not have conquered the Byzantine Empire, India, or central Asia, and would likely be today a relatively small sect confined to tiny enclaves in the Middle East and northern Africa.27

  As the thirteenth century dawned, the Ayyubid Egyptian state founded by Saladin was still highly dependent on slave troops, shipped by local merchants overland in caravans south through Anatolia (present-day Asian Turkey) and Mesopotamia. The Egyptians soon found themselves under siege from the Mongols, and around 1243, Anatolia and Mesopotamia, through which the land route from the Transcaucasus to Egypt ran, came under Mongol control, threatening to strangle the Ayyubids’ supply of mamluk soldiers.28

  The Venetians, who had grabbed power in the eastern Mediterranean, Bosphorus, and Black Sea in the wake of the Fourth Crusade, and who had a virtual trade monopoly in these seas and straits, were only too happy to help out. Dandolo’s conquest of Constantinople in 1204 allowed Venice to supply slaves to the Ayyubids via the relatively Mongolproof maritime route. The Venetians had long traded with Egypt, even during the height of crusades, all the while supplying ships, troops, and arms to the various Christian kingdoms of the Holy Land, particularly those, such as Acre, that held large Venetian merchant communities. Saladin famously boasted to his caliph that the Europeans were happily selling him arms to use against other Europeans; soon enough, they would be selling his descendants soldiers as well.29

  At this critical juncture, in 1250, firmly entrenched Mamluk soldiers murdered the last Ayyubid sultan, Turan-Shah, and established an outright Mamluk dynasty, which was to last for more than 250 years, and whose soldiers would continue to be the mainstay of Egypt’s military until the nineteenth century.30

  The mid-thirteenth century was one of history’s great cockpits, featuring not only the birth of the Mamluk dynasty in 1250, but also the disastrous invasion of Egypt by King Louis IX of France in the same year, the destruction of Baghdad by the Mongols in 1258, the defeat of Hulagu’s Ilkhanid Mongols by the Mamluk Egyptians at Ain Jalut (probably located near modern Israel) in 1260, and the fall in 1261 of the Latin kingdom of Constantinople, the puppet state established by the Venetians and Franks after the Fourth Crusade. As David Ayalon put it, “In the battle of Ain Jalut, which had been fought out between the people of the same race, the infidels of yesterday had defeated the Muslims of tomorrow.”31 In other words, the Caucasian mamluks were closely related to the Mongols, the former having converted to Islam during their training whereas all the Mongol domains, save that of Kublai, would convert later. This series of events established the Mamluk Egyptians as the preeminent power in the eastern Mediterranean and put paid to Western ambitions in the Levant.

  Of all the Italian powers, the Genoese, who had long played second fiddle to the Venetians, were most affected by the defeat of the Mongols and the fall of the Latin kingdom at Constantinople. Initially, the defeat of the Egyptian expedition of Louis IX, which the Genoese had vigorously supported, not only weakened them militarily, but devastated them commercially as well, since they had been Louis’s shipbuilders. Then, just as abruptly, the tables turned in their favor; in 1261 their other major ally, the Byzantines, regained control of Constantinople from the Latin puppet state established by Dandolo and the Franks. The briefly resurgent Byzantines then tossed the hated Venetians out of the old imperial city and the vital straits through which they had previously held exclusive trading rights. Now, by virtue of prior treaties between the Genoese and the Byzantines, the monopoly of Black Sea trade passed to Genoa.

  The Mamluk Egyptians, badly in need of military slaves via the only way open—the maritime route—pursued friendly relations with the Genoese and Byzantines, and even with the Golden Horde, the Ilkhan’s northern Mongol neighbor, who actually controlled the slaves’ homelands in the Caucasus and Crimea. A number of formal treaties between the Mamluks and Byzantines specifically granted the right of free passage through the Bosphorus for Egyptian slaving vessels; in addition, the Mamluk Egyptians allowed the Mongols to establish a slaving funduq (warehouse) in Alexandria.32

  Despite the Mamluk Egyptian’s open access to the Black Sea, their maritime capacity could not meet the demand for slaves; for that, they would need Genoese ports and bottoms. Genoese ships loaded their slave cargoes at their Crimean port of Kaffa, which had been built at the site of the ancient Pontic grain port of Theodosia, itself purchased from the Golden Horde in the mid-thirteenth century. (The city has since reverted back to the Slavic pronunciation of the original Greek name, Feodosiya, and is now in the Ukraine.) For their part, the Genoese turned a blind eye toward the Mamluk Egyptian’s final assaults against the last crusader redoubts at Acre and Tyre, and may even have promised naval support to the Muslim attackers.

  Eastern Mediterranean Spice/Slave Trade, Circa AD 1250

  The slave-laden vessels proceeded on the southbound journey to Alexandria (one of whose entrances was called the Pepper Gate)
or to Cairo, where they filled their holds with pepper, ginger, cinnamon, nutmeg, and cloves brought by Arab traders from points east. This trade gave the Genoese a financial and strategic leg up against their Venetian rivals. The end of the crusader outposts in the Levant was clearly hastened by the slave-soldiers conveyed by the Genoese, who seemed to have little trouble choosing between God and Mammon. In the words of the historian Andrew Ehrenkreutz,

  When compared with all the materialistic benefits obtained from the businesslike relations with the Mamluks, the final humiliation of the Cross in the Levant was of small concern to the hard-headed Christians of Genoa.33

  Just as quickly as the demand for the Bosphorus–Black Sea slave route arose, it collapsed with the dissolution of the Ilkhan Mongol threat and the fall of Acre and Tyre in 1291. Not only was the need for mamluks greatly reduced by these events, but the retreat of the Ilkhans reopened the traditional slave caravan route through Anatolia and Mesopotamia. Despite Genoa’s loss of its maritime slave routes, the expertise, commercial contacts, and shipbuilding capacity it had accrued during the brief period of conflict among Mamluks, Mongols, and crusaders during the last half of the thirteenth century long outlived the war-driven maritime slave trade.

  The Italians were not the only ones to get fabulously rich from the spice trade. After the Genoese and Venetians had unloaded their slaves, glass, and textiles on the wharves of Alexandria and into the funduq of Cairo, they bought up all the spices they could find. At the eastern end of the supply chain, Indian and Malay Muslim traders purchased cloves, cinnamon, nutmeg, and mace at straits entrepôts such as Pase, Palembang, and later Malacca, where these products had been brought by local traders from their sources in the Spice Islands. These precious cargoes then sailed with Indian merchants across the Bay of Bengal to India on one winter northeast monsoon, then onward to Yemen on the next. There, the Indians were met by the Karimi, a guild of fabulously wealthy merchants who accompanied the ascension of the Mamluks; it would be the Karimi who wheeled and dealed with the Italians in the funduqs of Cairo and Alexandria.