The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean
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Robert Guiscard’s conquest of the Byzantine province in southern Italy and the neighbouring Lombard principalities had, meanwhile, aroused the intense ire of the Byzantine emperor. The relationship between the papacy and the Greek Orthodox Church had been steadily deteriorating in the eleventh century, as the popes began to emphasize their authority over all Christendom, and the Norman victories threatened to draw southern Italy away from Greek ecclesiastical allegiance as well. Although the ‘Eastern Schism’ of 1054 is often seen as the decisive moment in the break between a Catholic West and an Orthodox East, the events of that year were another moment in a long catalogue of quarrels: the papal legate Humbert of Silva Candida slammed a bull of excommunication directed at the patriarch of Constantinople and his master, the emperor, on the high altar of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople. The Byzantines had adroitly balanced Latin and Greek in the coastal towns of Apulia, where Latin bishops were often keener to accept the authority of Constantinople, at least in political matters, than that of western rulers, including the pope. The arrival of the Normans turned Latin against Latin and Greek against Greek; the Norman conquest of the toe of Italy, Calabria, and then of Sicily, brought many thousands of Greeks under the rule of Robert’s brother Roger. After the fall of Bari in 1071 Norman enmity only became more intense, as Robert planned the invasion of the Byzantine territories facing Italy across the Adriatic. He saw Dyrrhachion and the Ionian isles as a gateway through which he could penetrate deeply into Byzantine territory, with the help of his son, the blond giant Bohemond. Robert’s excuse for campaigning against Byzantium was that he was acting on behalf of the deposed and exiled emperor Michael Doukas; he welcomed into his entourage a fugitive monk whom he declared to be Michael. He paraded this monk in imperial finery in front of the walls of Dyrrhachion, whereupon (the historian Anna Komnene insists) ‘Michael’ was immediately and raucously denounced as an impostor by the citizens ranged along the battlements. One might expect Anna to say this, as she was the daughter of the reigning emperor, Alexios Komnenos, founder of a vigorous dynasty whose military and political successes generated a great revival in the fortunes of Byzantium. Anna suspected, and it is hard not to agree, that Robert aspired to the throne of Constantinople. The attack on Albania was only the first stage in a war he intended to carry along the Via Egnatia to the very heart of Byzantium.
In 1081–2 Robert built a fleet of ships capable of carrying massive siege towers covered in animal hides, intending to launch a naval assault on Dyrrhachion while Bohemond would advance overland after disembarking at Valona further down the coast. It was summer and the seas should have remained calm, but Anna Komnene reported that God showed favour to the Byzantines by sending a great tempest that scattered and destroyed Robert’s fleet. As the clouds emptied themselves, the towers built on the ships were weighed down by the sodden hides and collapsed on to the deck. The ships were swamped and Robert and a few of his men were lucky to survive, cast up on the shore. Even in the face of such adversity the obstinate Robert Guiscard did not see this as divine judgment, but was determined to renew the attack.31 Robert gathered his remaining forces together and besieged Dyrrhachion, even bringing forward some more massive siege towers that topped the walls. These walls were so solidly built that two chariots could, according to Byzantine writers, pass one another on top – an image that owes more to Homer than to the realities of eleventh-century warfare, from which chariots had long since disappeared. For Dyrrhachion could only be won by treachery and deceit. Eventually, an Amalfitan merchant opened the gates of the city to the invaders.32
Alexios had a clever solution to the problem of how to manage a war with a potent foe at the western extremity of his empire. His fleet lacked the capacity to fight and win so far from home. Byzantine sea power was confined to the Aegean, and Byzantium had sufficient problems on land: Seljuk Turks attacking its eastern borders in Asia Minor, Slavs in the Balkans, not to mention faction fighting within Constantinople itself. The Byzantines preferred diplomacy to conflict, but clearly diplomacy alone would not tame Robert Guiscard. Instead, the diplomacy was directed elsewhere, to Venice, whose merchants lived in dread of conflicts that would make the Adriatic exit impassable. A Norman victory in Albania would enable south Italian fleets to control access to the Adriatic. Venice was always happiest if the power that controlled the western coast of the southern Adriatic did not control the eastern coast as well. So the Venetians agreed to provide naval help against Guiscard’s fleet off Dyrrhachion. They set sail carrying piles of heavy beams studded with nails, and they pounced on enemy ships, punching holes in them. In the end, the Byzantines recovered Dyrrhachion and Robert (facing trouble back home in Italy) was forced to withdraw, though Bohemond continued for a while to wreak havoc in Albania. When Robert returned to the attack he was old and sick, and he died on campaign in 1085, in Kephalonia, in the little port of Fiskardo that still carries his nickname of Guiscard, ‘the wily one’. Although Alexios and his court heard the news with relief, this was by no means the last attempt by the rulers of southern Italy to invade Byzantium through Albania.
Meanwhile, the Venetians sent messengers to Emperor Alexios, and in 1082 he issued a Golden Bull that showered them with gifts, while emphasizing that they were his duli, or subjects. The most precious and controversial of his presents was a grant of the right to trade free of taxation anywhere in the Byzantine Empire, excluding the Black Sea and Cyprus. The emperor wanted to preserve the special role of Constantinople as the link between the Mediterranean, from which it received spices and luxury goods, and the Black Sea, down which merchants brought furs, amber and other northern products. The Venetians were even granted bits and pieces of land by the Golden Horn, including a wharf and their own church (with its own bakery).33 The privilege of 1082 set a gold standard in the Mediterranean; and, whenever the Italian cities negotiated an alliance with a trading partner in need of naval assistance, they had a model to emulate.
There are different views about the extent to which the Byzantine economy came to be dominated by Venetian and other Italian merchants. In the longer term, the presence of the Italians probably stimulated the production of agricultural goods and of cloths for export.34 Clearly, in the years around 1100 the Venetian presence in Byzantium was still very limited. The main destinations of Venetian traders within the Byzantine world were surprisingly close to home: Dyrrhachion, once it was recovered from the Normans; Corinth, to which access could be gained without entering the Aegean, using the ancient port at Lechaion on the Gulf of Corinth. Thence the Venetians carried wine, oil, salt and grain back home to their booming city, where demand for these relatively humble foodstuffs was constantly increasing.35 For most Venetian traders, Constantinople, with its silks and gems and metalwork, lay over the horizon. But they began to think of realizing the full potential of the privileges they had been granted. This was a matter of entitlement, for they still saw themselves as inhabitants of a far-flung fragment of the Eastern Roman Empire, and took pride in their status as imperial subjects: no clearer indication of this can be found than the architecture and decoration of the Basilica of St Mark, which had been rebuilt in the second half of the eleventh century in an overtly Byzantine style, derived from the Basilica of the Apostles in Constantinople. St Mark’s was intended to recall a whole catalogue of eastern connections, for it also proclaimed with pride the link to Alexandria, the patriarchal seat of the saint whose bones it conserved.36
By the end of the eleventh century, then, Pisa and Genoa had taken up arms with increasing vigour to clear the western Mediterranean of Muslim pirates, and had carved out a dominion of their own in Sardinia; meanwhile, the Venetians had won what would become a unique position within the Byzantine Empire. Muslim domination of the Mediterranean could no longer be taken for granted, especially once the armies and navies of the First Crusade began to move.
4
‘The Profit That God Shall Give’,
1100–1200
I
In 109
5, preaching at Clermont in central France, Pope Urban II set in motion a movement that would transform the political, religious and economic map of the Mediterranean and Europe. His theme was the shame heaped on Christendom by the oppression of Christians in the Muslim East, the defeat of Christian armies fighting the Turks and the scandal that the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, the site of Christ’s crucifixion and resurrection, should now be in Infidel hands.1 What Pope Urban intended as a recruitment speech summoning southern French volunteers to go east and aid Byzantium against the Turks was understood as an appeal to the knighthood of Christendom to cease fighting one another (which they did in peril of their souls), and to direct their force against the Infidel, united in a holy pilgrimage, under arms, in the sure knowledge that those who died on the great journey would earn eternal salvation. Here was an opportunity to substitute for acts of penance imposed by the Church an act for which no one was better suited than the knightly class – warfare, but this time in the service of God. Only gradually did the concept of remission of all past sins for those who joined a crusading campaign become official doctrine. But popular understanding of what the pope had offered, in the name of Christ, leaped ahead of the more cautious formulations of the canon lawyers.
The principal route followed by the First Crusade bypassed the Mediterranean and took the army overland through the Balkans and Anatolia; many crusaders never saw more of the sea than the Bosphorus at Constantinople until, much reduced in numbers through war, disease and exhaustion, they reached Syria.2 And even in the East their target was not a maritime city but Jerusalem, so that its conquest in 1099 created an enclave cut off from the sea, a problem which, as will be seen, only Italian navies could resolve. Another force left from Apulia, where Robert Guiscard’s son Bohemond brought together an army. The Byzantines wondered whether he was really planning to revive his father’s schemes for the conquest of Byzantine territory, and so, when he reached Constantinople, he was pressed to acknowledge the emperor’s authority, becoming his lizios, or liegeman, a western feudal term that was used because Bohemond was more likely to feel bound by oaths made according to his native customs than by promises made under Byzantine law. When in 1098 he established himself as prince of Antioch, a city only recently lost by the Byzantines to the Turks, the imperial court made every effort to insist that his principality lay under Byzantine suzerainty. It was amazing that a vast rabble of men, often poorly armed, proved capable of seizing Antioch in 1098 and Jerusalem in 1099, though the Byzantines were more inclined to regard this as a typical barbarian stroke of fortune than as a victory masterminded by Christ. Seen from Constantinople, the outcome of the crusade was not entirely negative. Western knights had installed themselves in sensitive borderlands between Byzantine territory and lands over which the Seljuk Turks and the Fatimid caliphs were squabbling.
Bohemond’s religious motives in joining the crusade should not be underestimated, but he was a pragmatist: he saw clearly that the crusader armies would be able to retain nothing without access to the Mediterranean, and without naval support from Christian fleets capable of keeping open the supply-lines to the West. He would therefore need to build ties with the Italian navies. He could count on the enthusiasm that had been generated in Genoa and Pisa by the news of Pope Urban’s speech, conveyed to the Genoese by the bishops of Grenoble and of Orange. The citizens of Genoa decided that the time had come to bury their differences and to unite in a compagna under the direction of six consuls; the aim of the compagna was primarily to build and arm ships for the crusade. Historians have long argued that the Genoese saw the crusade as a business opportunity, and that they were hoping to secure trade privileges in whatever lands the crusaders conquered comparable to those the Venetians had recently acquired in the Byzantine Empire. Yet they could not foresee the outcome of the crusade; they were willing to suspend their trading activities and pump all their energy into the building of fleets that were very likely to be lost far away in battles and storms. What moved them was holy fervour. According to a Genoese participant in the First Crusade, the chronicler Caffaro, even before it, in 1083, a Genoese ship named the Pomella had carried Robert, count of Flanders, and Godfrey of Bouillon, the first Latin ruler of Jerusalem, to Alexandria; from there they had made their way with difficulty to the Holy Sepulchre, and had begun to dream of recovering it for Christendom.3 The story was pure fancy, but it expresses the sense among the Genoese elite that their city was destined to play a major role in the war for the conquest of Jerusalem.
Twelve galleys and one smaller vessel set out from Genoa in July 1097. The crew consisted of about 1,200 men, a sizeable proportion of its male population, for the overall population of the city of Genoa may have been only 10,000.4 Somehow the fleet knew where the crusaders were, and made contact off the northern coast of Syria. Antioch was still under siege, and the Genoese fleet stood off Port St Symeon, the outport of the city that had functioned as a gateway to the Mediterranean since the Bronze Age.5 After the fall of Antioch in June 1098, Bohemond rewarded the Genoese crusaders with a church in Antioch, thirty houses nearby, a warehouse and a well, creating the nucleus of a merchant colony.6 This grant was the first of many that the Genoese were to receive in the states created by the crusaders. In the early summer of 1099 members of a prominent Genoese family, the Embriachi, anchored off Jaffa, bringing aid to the crusader army besieging Jerusalem – they dismantled their own ships, carrying the wood from which they were built to Jerusalem for use in the construction of siege engines. And then in August 1100 twenty-six galleys and four supply ships set out from Genoa, carrying about 3,000 men.7 They made contact with the northern French ruler of the newly established kingdom of Jerusalem, Baldwin I, and began the slow process of conquering a coastal strip, since it was essential to maintain supply-lines from western Europe to the embattled kingdom. They sacked the ancient coastal city of Caesarea in May 1101.8 When the Genoese leaders divided up their loot, they gave each sailor two pounds of pepper, which demonstrates how rich in spices even a minor Levantine port was likely to be. They also carried away a large green bowl that had been hanging in the Great Mosque of Caesarea, convinced that it was the bowl used at the Last Supper and that it was made of emerald (a mistake rectified several centuries later when someone dropped it, and it was found to be made of glass).9 Since the bowl is almost certainly a fine piece of Roman workmanship from the first century AD, their intuitions about its origins were not entirely wrong. It was carried in triumph to the cathedral in Genoa, where it is still displayed, attracting attention as one of several candidates for the title Holy Grail.10
The green bowl was, for the Genoese, probably as great a prize as any of their commercial privileges, all of which were celebrated in the city annals as signs of divine bounty. The Genoese made friends with the rulers of each of the crusader states (Jerusalem, Tripoli, Antioch) that needed help in gaining control of the seaports of Syria and Palestine. In 1104 their fortunes were further boosted by the capture of the port city of Acre, with an adequate harbour and good access into the interior. For most of the next two centuries, Acre functioned as the main base of the Italian merchants trading to the Holy Land. The Genoese produced documents to show that the rulers of Jerusalem promised them one-third of the cities they helped conquer all the way down the coast of Palestine, though not everyone is convinced all these documents were genuine; if not, they are still evidence for their vast ambitions.11 They were even promised a third of ‘Babylonia’, the current European name for Cairo, for there were constant plans to invade Fatimid Egypt as well. To all this were added legal exemptions, extending from criminal law to property rights, that separated the Genoese from the day-to-day exercise of justice by the king’s courts.12 The Genoese insisted that they were permitted to erect an inscription in gilded letters recording their special privileges inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Whether or not this inscription was ever put in place, the demand for such a public record indicates how determined the Gen
oese were to maintain their special extra-territorial status in the kingdom of Jerusalem, which never developed a significant navy of its own.13
II
The Genoese had competitors. The Pisans were also enthusiastic about the crusade, sending out a fleet in 1099 under their archbishop, Daimbert. They were rewarded for their help in seizing Jaffa, in 1099, and were able to set up a trading base there.14 The slowest of the three Italian cities to provide aid to the crusaders was Venice. The Venetians were aware that the Byzantine emperor did not view with equanimity the arrival in Constantinople of hordes of western crusaders, hungry and ill-equipped. They also did not want to place at risk the Venetian merchants trading in Fatimid Alexandria. Yet, seeing what bounty the crusade had brought the Genoese, they eventually sent up to 200 ships eastwards. The first stop was the small, decayed town of Myra in southern Asia Minor, where they dug for the bones of St Nicholas, the patron saint of sailors. The Venetians were jealous that in 1087 a group of sailors from Bari had managed to steal away from Myra with the bones of St Nicholas, around which they erected a magnificent basilica of white stone. Thereafter Bari, which was well placed as a departure point for pilgrims wishing to reach the Holy Land, had become an important pilgrim centre in its own right. The Venetians found enough human remains to build the Church of San Niccolò around them on the Venetian lido.15 After Myra, they turned their attention back to the crusade. Their main task was to help the crusaders attack Haifa; its sack in 1100 was accompanied by horrific massacres of its Muslim and Jewish population.16 This gave the crusaders control of the whole bay curving round from Mount Carmel to Acre. Most of the coast of Palestine was in their hands by 1110, though Ascalon was held by the Egyptians until as late as 1153.17 Egyptian tenure of Ascalon actually served the interests of the Italians, since their navies were needed so long as enemy forces persisted along the coast of the Holy Land, and the greater the need for their fleets, the better the privileges they could hope to squeeze out of the royal court in Jerusalem.