The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean

by David Abulafia

  And, oh God, oh God, my Lord, the little boy! Concern yourself with him in accordance with your religious observance, which is so well known to me. When he becomes stronger, let him pass time with a teacher.19

  The Genizah documents are rich in information about shipping. Most shipowners were Muslim. It was a good idea to board early and to keep a close eye on one’s cargo before the vessel sailed; it was customary to board a day before sailing, and to spend the night before departure immersed in prayer and writing last-minute letters and instructions. Of course, timetables were inconceivable, and ships might be forced to stay in harbour as a result of storms, news of pirates or even government interference, as when a ship in the port of Palermo which was about to leave for Spain at the end of the sailing season was seized by the government, and all the passengers were stranded for the entire winter. One complained that he was stuck in Palermo ‘with my hands and feet cut off’ – not to be understood literally. The length of a voyage was also unpredictable; in 1062 a ship travelled from Alexandria to Mazara in seventeen days, but another letter describes a good week spent hopping from point to point as a merchant named Perahya Yiju tried to sail from Palermo to Messina (which he deeply disliked and found filthy). A small vessel took over two months to reach Almería from Alexandria; another ship took fifty days to sail as far as Palermo, but thirteen days was also possible.20 Passengers carried their own bedding, cutlery and crockery, and sometimes slept on top of their cargo, which, if it consisted of flax, may not have been too uncomfortable; there were no cabins, and the voyage was spent on deck. Little information is provided in the letters about food, which was probably very simple.21 Goitein’s impression was that shipwrecks were uncommon – they have been seized on by historians because descriptions of them are inevitably graphic. Ships did arrive and the people of the Genizah were not scared of the sea. It was probably no more dangerous than travelling by land. Captains tried to stay in sight of land when navigating the North African coast, and there were watchtowers that monitored the movement of ships, apparently for their own good and not simply to control customs dues. Messages were sent back to Alexandria confirming shipping movements, and businessmen seized on the news that their shipments were properly under way.22

  There is plentiful evidence for the movement of books and scholars, in the nature of the evidence Jewish ones, revealing how the trade routes carried ideas as well as flax. Around 1007, a query about a point of religion was sent from Morocco to Baghdad with Muslim merchants travelling eastwards by camel caravan.23 What was possible for Jews was also very easy for Muslims, and texts of works of Greek medicine and philosophy filtered through to southern Spain across the wide expanse of the Mediterranean. It is true that no one understood the medical text of Dioskorides when it reached tenth-century Córdoba, though the caliph’s physician, the Jew Hasday ibn Shaprut, is said to have worked with a Greek monk, and together they produced a version in Arabic. Some degree of economic, cultural and religious unity had been achieved along the line linking Spain to Egypt and Syria. The lands of Islam, despite the sectarian division between Shi’ite and Sunni and the political divisions between Umayyads, Fatimids and Abbasids, interacted in trade and culture. This was aided by the constant movement of Muslim pilgrims across the Mediterranean on their way to Mecca, just as much as by the activities of merchants of several faiths. Those who were largely left out were the inhabitants of Christian western Europe. In the tenth and eleventh centuries the Latin merchants of Italy and Provence still ventured cautiously into these waters. Only a small number of Christian cities sent their ships into Muslim seas, knowing that the secret of success was collaboration with the Muslim enemy. One of these cities was Venice, whose early history has been examined already. Another was the no less remarkable port of Amalfi, in its improbable position clinging to the mountains of the Sorrentine peninsula.

  III

  Amalfi is one of the great mysteries of Mediterranean history. If any town to the south of Rome were to emerge as a great Italian trading centre, it would surely be the teeming city of Naples, with its linen industry, its access to the interior and its sheer physical size; moreover, Naples had a continuous trading history, having suffered recession but not collapse during the sixth and seventh centuries. And yet during the centuries of Amalfitan ascendancy, roughly between 850 and 1100, Amalfi surpassed Naples as a centre of international trade, even though it was a town without any past history, growing up around a watchtower in the sixth and seventh centuries.24 With a single main street winding upwards, and tiny alleyways that duck under and through its buildings, Amalfi seems an unpromising rival to Venice.25 It was almost impossible to catch a wind in the morning, and this must have constrained navigation quite significantly.26 This has led some historians to speak of the ‘myth of Amalfi’, and to reject the consistent description of Amalfi by Christian, Jewish and in particular Muslim writers as the great entrepôt of the West in the tenth and eleventh centuries. An Italian historian has portrayed Amalfi as a city ‘without merchants’: in this view, the Amalfitans cultivated their vineyards and gardens on the rocky slopes, and saw trading just as a way of gaining some additional income.27 Yet building ships capable of reaching other continents was an expensive business, and created the momentum for commercial expansion.

  Tiny Amalfi is only part of the story. The label ‘Amalfitan’ was really a brand name, applied generically to a mass of merchants and sailors from all over southern Italy, especially the inhabitants of a host of tiny towns that clung to the vertices of the Sorrentine peninsula. Hanging above Amalfi, without ports of their own, Ravello and Scala sent their own merchants across the sea in ships of Amalfi; Atrani is five minutes’ walk from Amalfi, from which it is separated by an outcrop; Maiori and Minori lie on the short coastal route to Salerno; Cetara became the base of a fishing fleet. In short, the whole southern shore of the Sorrentine peninsula, from Positano to the great monastery of the Santissima Trinità at La Cava, founded in 1025, was ‘Amalfi’. The analogy with Venice in its marshes is closer than may at first appear. Venice had originated as a congeries of little communities, separated by sea water rather than by steep mountains and sheer precipices, all of which conferred a sense of impregnability. Both communities believed themselves to have originated as sanctuaries for refugees from the barbarian invasions. Amalfi, under its dukes, who like the doge very loosely recognized remote Byzantine authority, formed a scattered, fragmented city. In an age of Saracen raids from North Africa, this dispersal gave it similar strength to the dispersal of the Venetians across the lagoons.

  The first signs that the Amalfitans were able to launch a navy can be found as early as 812, when, along with sailors from Gaeta, another town that became active in Mediterranean trade, they were summoned by the Byzantine governor of Sicily to resist Muslim incursions that reached as far as the offshore islands of Ischia and Ponza. The danger grew as Muslim armies invaded Sicily, and as Muslim navies impudently raided as far as Rome, sacking both St Peter’s Basilica and St Paul’s-without-the-Walls; three years later a south Italian fleet managed with difficulty to defeat the enemy in a naval battle off Ostia, and for centuries this event was seen as the salvation of Rome – it was commemorated in Raphael’s frescoes in the Vatican palace, for his patron, Leo X, shared his name with the pope at the time of the victory, Leo IV.28 The pope tried to win Amalfi to his side, and granted it free access to the ports of Rome. But what use, its merchants must have asked themselves, was trade with Rome when they needed first of all to penetrate to Sicily, Tunisia and beyond in search of the luxury goods the papal court in Rome still craved? So the Amalfitans and Gaetans made a deal with the Muslims, despite papal threats of excommunication, and this brought material if not spiritual salvation. By 906 the consul of Gaeta possessed gold, silver and bronze coins, jewels, silk and marble fittings for a church, as well as land and animals, all described in his will.29 The Amalfitans also supplied the great mother-abbey of the Benedictine order at Montecassino in the south Itali
an interior, acting as its agents as far away as Jerusalem. They were the patrons of a Benedictine monastery situated amid the holy convents of Mount Athos, at a time when the Greek and Latin churches retained some semblance of amity.

  Distant Constantinople was happy to issue grandiloquent letters conferring titles such as protospatarius (notionally, the title of a military commander) on the duke and leading citizens of Amalfi.30 However, there was one family, the Pantaleoni, who gained the emperor’s ear. During the eleventh century one of the Pantaleoni brought magnificent sets of bronze doors to the abbey of Montecassino, Amalfi Cathedral and St Paul’s-without-the-Walls.31 These were only the most magnificent of the many luxury items the Pantaleoni brought from the East. The Amalfitans wanted bases on Byzantine soil from which they could trade, and possessed wharves and warehouses in Constantinople during the tenth century.32 Across the Adriatic, they, along with the Venetians, were the main inhabitants of the mightily fortified Byzantine stronghold of Dyrrhachion.33 Both Venetian and Amalfitan traders were keen to take advantage of the great road that ran from Dyrrhachion through Thessalonika to Constantinople.

  Amalfi left a lasting imprint further east, in Fatimid territory. Men of Amalfi established a hospice in Jerusalem, a city which offered little commercial advantage beyond the trade in increasingly improbable relics. But, as agents of the abbey of Montecassino, they made it possible for the Benedictine monks to provide care for the pilgrims who in growing numbers set out from Europe – often by way of the ports of southern Italy – for the Holy Land. From its small beginnings this hospice developed into the Hospitaller Order of St John of Jerusalem and its fighting monks later defended Rhodes and Malta from the Turks. A continuous line stretches from the eleventh century to the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, now based in Rome.34 A legend reports that Amalfitans were within Jerusalem when it was besieged by the armies of the First Crusade in 1099. Ordered by the Muslims to throw stones at the crusading rabble, they were forced to comply; miraculously, the stones were transformed in mid-air into bread rolls, and fed the famished Christian army. The truth was, of course, that the Amalfitans flourished when they avoided taking sides in conflicts between Christians and Muslims.

  In the tenth century an Amalfitan colony existed in Fustat; in 996 its members were accused of setting fire to the shipyards of the Fatimid caliphs, and up to 160 Italian merchants were killed in the riot that followed.35 Living in Fustat, the Amalfitans struck up relations with Jewish merchants, and a place called ‘Malf’ appears now and again in the Genizah letters. Genizah merchants travelled to Amalfi to sell pepper. The link with the Fatimids, the pogrom notwithstanding, made the fortune of the Amalfitans.36 They were able to mint a gold currency created out of the melted-down profits of their trade in Africa.

  Recovery was under way in the West, producing profits for those like the Amalfitans who were willing to do a deal with the Muslim enemy. Two other Italian cities, Genoa and Pisa, were, however, beginning to demonstrate that a more aggressive policy paid even higher dividends.

  3

  The Great Sea-change,

  1000–1100

  I

  The rise of Pisa and Genoa is almost as mysterious as that of Amalfi, and the mystery is compounded by the startling success of these cities in clearing the western Mediterranean of pirates and in creating trade routes, sustained by colonies of merchants and settlers, as far east as the Holy Land, Egypt and Byzantium. Pisa and Genoa had strikingly different profiles. Genoa had been the seat of a Byzantine governor in the seventh century, but after that two or three hundred years of quiet descended, savagely interrupted by the sack of the city by Saracen raiders from North Africa in 934–5.1 It has no obvious resources; it perches by the side of the Ligurian Alps and is cut off from grain-producing plains. The favoured products of its coastline are wine, chestnuts, herbs and olive oil, and it was out of its herbs and oil that Genoa perfected the basil sauce known as pesto, a product that speaks for poverty rather than wealth. Its harbour became adequate by the end of the Middle Ages, after many centuries of improvements, but its ships were best protected from the weather by being beached along the sandy shores to east and west of Genoa itself, and it was there that most of them were put together.2 Genoa was not a centre of industry, with the exception of shipbuilding. The Genoese had to struggle to survive, and came to see their trading voyages as the key to the city’s survival. As their city grew, so did their dependence on outside supplies of wheat, salted meats and cheese. From these modest beginnings emerged one of the most ambitious trading networks in the pre-industrial world.

  Pisa looked quite different. The city stands astride the river Arno, several miles from the sea; the final muddy, marshy exit of the river into the sea deprived Pisa of a good port. Its obvious assets lay in the flat fields stretching down to the coast, sown with grain and, closer to the shoreline, inhabited by the sheep that supplied Pisa with wool, leather, meat and dairy products. The citizens of Pisa had less reason to worry about how they might feed themselves than those of Genoa. On the other hand, the low-lying Tuscan coast was more exposed than rocky Liguria to sea-raiders from Muslim hideouts in Provence and Sardinia, and, by the time Pisa’s navy first appeared, its prime enemy had become the Muslims. In 982 Pisan ships accompanied the army of the German emperor Otto II as he marched far south into Calabria, hoping to suppress Muslim raids from Sicily. During the next century Pisa and Genoa concentrated on clearing the Tyrrhenian Sea of Saracen pirates. The obvious way to achieve this was to establish command positions in Sardinia, and Pisa and Genoa responded with precocious vigour to the arrival in Sardinia of the army and navy of the Spanish Muslim warlord Mujahid, ruler of Denia and Majorca, in 1013.3 Mujahid’s power almost certainly reached no further than some coastal stations in Sardinia, whether or not he aspired to conquer the whole island. Chasing Mujahid out of Sardinia by 1016 greatly enhanced the credentials of the Pisans and Genoese as exponents of Christian holy war against the Muslim enemy. The power balance between Christians and Muslims was slowly changing; as central power in the Muslim lands became more fragmented, the fleets of Pisa and Genoa seized their opportunity.

  II

  The better the two cities came to know Sardinia, the more they saw that it was valuable in its own right. The island had a vast sheep population, and by the twelfth century the Pisans and Genoese began to see Sardinia as an extension of their own countryside or contado. There was plenty of grain, of middling quality; there were big lagoons in the south that could be turned into saltpans; the Pisans and Genoese also had no compunction about enslaving Sards, whom they regarded as primitive folk. These Sards spoke a form of late Latin, preserved in curious estate documents listing the sheep, cattle and horses of a society that had changed remarkably little since the days of the nuraghi. Sardinia remained a pastoral society that looked away from the sea: it was insular but not really Mediterranean. The political and religious institutions were archaic. Petty kings or ‘judges’ had emerged in the tenth century as the last representatives of now vanished Byzantine authority. But Byzantium lingered in another form. The churches of the island followed a version of the Greek rite, and before 1100 some at least of them were built in the cruciform Greek style. The papacy inveighed against these customs, and supported the arrival of monks from the mainland, including Benedictines from Montecassino.4 All these changes helped transform life in Sardinia; members of the leading families, the so-called maiorales, took Genoese and Pisan wives or husbands, and they could now easily buy the products of the mainland, for even pots and pans were imported. But the standard of living of Sardinian peasants, suffering from disease, poor diet and high mortality, remained extremely depressed. This meant fewer mouths to feed, and more grain to export. There is only one word for the way Pisa and Genoa treated Sardinia: exploitation.

  During the twelfth century the Genoese regularly sent ships to the island, whose cheap but vital products ensured a safe return on investments. Anyone with a little spare cash – widows with
a modest inheritance, for instance – could quite safely invest five or ten pounds of Genoese silver money in a trading expedition to Sardinia and hope to receive six or twelve pounds back a few months later.5 Sardinia gave Pisa and Genoa their first colonial experience. The two cities attempted to maintain control by securing the loyalty of the judges. In the years around 1100, this was often achieved through the agency of the great churches of the two cities. Mariano Torchitorio, judge of Cagliari in the south, gave the cathedral of San Lorenzo in Genoa lands in southern Sardinia. But he was a far-sighted man, because he also ensured that Pisa received some gifts.6 Even so, playing off one side against another achieved only short-term results. Pisa and Genoa were too powerful to be resisted. The Pisans built cathedrals and convents in the striking Pisan style of architecture, their exterior covered in bands of black and white marble; no clearer statement could be made of Pisan ascendancy. The abbey of Santa Trinità di Saccargia, built at the beginning of the twelfth century, is a typical northern Sardinian example of this architecture, with its zebra façade and flanks. It was the Pisans and Genoese who built the first well fortified towns since the days of the nuraghi: in the judgeship of Cagliari the Pisans occupied the steep hill simply known as Castello that still hangs over the city of Cagliari, surrounding it with high walls and making out of it a Pisan enclosure, where their soldiers and merchants could abide in safety. The Doria family of Genoa is credited with founding Alghero, in north-western Sardinia, around 1102. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries Genoa and Pisa were able to consolidate their hold on Sardinia, despite attempts by popes and Holy Roman Emperors to insist that it was (at least in theory) their own property. Yet what mattered was who was there on the ground. The problem was that Genoa and Pisa both aspired to dominion over as much of the island as they could grab for themselves. Bitter conflict between the two cities was the result. It was Sardinia, rather than disagreements in the Italian mainland, that brought them most often to war. By 1200, the waters around Sardinia were largely clear of Muslim pirates; but Italian pirates abounded – Pisans preying on Genoese, and vice versa.