The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean

by David Abulafia

  Some areas of the western Mediterranean were off-limits. Around 1340, command of the Straits of Gibraltar was disputed between the Genoese, the Catalans and the Marinids of Morocco.22 The problem was compounded by fears of a Moroccan invasion of southern Spain, a reprise of the invasions from Morocco that had posed such a threat to the Christian kingdoms of Iberia in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Fortunately for the Christian powers, the Muslim kings of Granada were generally as anxious to avoid Marinid domination as were the Christians, but in the late 1330s they allied themselves with the Moroccans, greatly endangering passage through the Straits. Not for the first time, the king of Castile attempted to win control of the Straits by besieging Gibraltar, but was himself besieged by Muslim forces and reluctantly pulled back.23 In 1340 the Castilian fleet was defeated by a renascent Moroccan fleet off Gibraltar, losing thirty-two warships. The shock of the defeat of fellow-Christians prompted the Aragonese to make peace with the Castilians, with whom they had long been squabbling. The king of Aragon hoped to equip at least sixty galleys, but he had to beg his parliaments or Corts for funds; the Valencian Corts offered twenty galleys and even the quarrelsone king of Majorca offered fifteen. Meanwhile, the Moroccans were free to enter Spain, but the Castilians, this time with Portuguese help, crushed a Moroccan army at the battle of Salado in southern Spain, in October 1340. The captured Marinid battle-standards can still be seen in the treasury of Toledo Cathedral. The victory did not end the war, however, and squadrons of ten or twenty galleys were repeatedly sent to the Straits. This was rather little by comparison with the Moroccans, who had somehow managed to float 250 ships, including sixty galleys, in 1340.24 The war came to an end in 1344 when King Alfonso XI of Castile marched into Algeciras, with the result that a Christian king held the northern side of the Straits, even though Gibraltar next door remained unconquered.25

  Muslim naval activity revived in the eastern Mediterranean, too. To some degree this was in response to Christian successes in the waters off Turkey. In 1310 the Knights Hospitallers, displaced from Acre nearly two decades earlier, set out from their current base in Cyprus and seized Rhodes, which for several years had been the target of Turkish raids and lay under nominal Byzantine suzerainty.26 The Hospitallers now made Rhodes their base, building a large fleet and engaging actively in piracy. They also negotiated endlessly with western rulers – the kings of France, Naples and other lands – in the hope of securing the help of a massive crusading fleet. But the target of this fleet was no longer just the Holy Land and the Mamluk state in Egypt and Syria. Increasingly, attention turned to the Turks, whose arrival on the shores of Asia Minor changed the rules of the game: the Turks had broken through the long-established Byzantine cordon that confined them to the Anatolian plateau, and, just as the Hospitallers adapted to the sea, so did the Turks, with the help of Greek manpower drawn from the imperial navy. Michael VIII had disbanded the Byzantine fleet in 1284 to save money, thinking that the Italian navies would protect him and that he was now safe from Charles of Anjou, who was tied up fighting the rebels in Sicily. A number of small Turkish principalities emerged along the coast of Asia Minor, most importantly the emirate of Aydın, which bordered the Aegean. Fortunately for the Christians, these Turkish emirates spent as much time quarrelling among themselves as they spent raiding Christian lands. Even so, Aydın was becoming a severe nuisance to its Christian neighbours by 1318, when its emir, Umur Pasha, entered into an alliance with Catalan mercenaries who had gained control of Athens a few years earlier and placed themselves under the nominal authority of the Aragonese king of Sicily.27 A curious alliance came into being between these Catalans and the Turks of Aydın, to the intense irritation of the Venetians – the island of Santorini, which was the feudal possession of a Venetian nobleman, was attacked twice, and the Venetians feared that the allies would next threaten Crete.28

  The solution to the Turkish threat seemed to lie in a properly equipped, well-funded naval crusade in which the Hospitallers, the Italian navies, the Angevins of Naples and the French would work together to establish complete mastery over the Aegean. This was compromised by the ambitions of the Venetians and the Genoese, whose primary concern was the protection of their trade routes and of the lordships they possessed in the region. A ‘Holy League’ of western navies, to which Venice eventually adhered, temporarily cleared the Aegean of pirates in 1334.29 But the problem did not go away and the pope eagerly promoted another crusade which managed to seize Smyrna from Umur Pasha in 1344. The Smyrna crusade was only superficially a success. The Christians had succeeded in collecting a fleet of only about thirty galleys: western enthusiasm had been more theoretical than real.30 Having occupied the citadel, which, remarkably, they held until the great Timur captured it in 1402, the crusaders failed to conquer the hinterland, and a valuable trading centre was transformed into a beleaguered garrison town. The truth was that the crusaders were under-resourced. Rulers such as Robert the Wise, the Angevin king of Naples, had long been raising crusade taxes and even equipping crusade fleets, which then magically turned in the other direction, being put to use in the king’s wars against the Genoese Ghibellines or the Aragonese of Sicily.

  The instability of this region was enhanced by the strengthening of the Genoese presence, following the conquest of Chios by a Genoese joint-stock company in 1346; the island was shared out among the Genoese investors and administered by the company or Mahona. Their main sources of profit were alum, mastic and dried fruits, and they were not keen on further adventurism by western fleets; even the Hospitallers gradually lost their crusading fervour and capitalized on the superb position of Rhodes on the trade routes. Just to the east, the defeat of Aydın left a power vacuum in Anatolia that was rapidly filled by a parvenu group of Turks tucked away in the north-west. The Osmanlı, or Ottoman, Turks were enthusiasts for the holy jihad against Byzantium (they conquered Nikaia in 1331), but, like all the Turks of this period, they were also willing to offer their services to Christian rulers in need of mercenaries. So it was that the Greek emperor John VI Kantakouzenos allowed them to settle on the European side of the Dardanelles, at Gallipoli, their first Balkan bridgehead.

  The ascendancy of the Christian fleets thus did not remain unchallenged, even as late as the middle of the fourteenth century. The Catalans struggled to mobilize fleets of the size they would need if Muslim contenders for domination of the Straits of Gibraltar were to be held in check. Even so, the alliance of the king of Aragon with the Catalan merchants had created a well-integrated network capable of supplying the western Mediterranean lands with both necessities and luxuries. Despite minor interruptions and many moments of foreboding, peace was maintained between Venice and Genoa from 1299 to 1350. Genoese admirals in search of a good war found other clients. They had already served Frederick II in the thirteenth century; by 1300 they were teaching the Castilians how to mobilize fleets in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, and they laid the foundations of the Portuguese fleet. But they were incapable of resisting another murderous invader which returned to the Mediterranean after seven or eight hundred years.

  IV

  The Black Death has sometimes been seen as a natural check on the excessively rapid expansion of the economy of Europe and the Mediterranean lands in the high Middle Ages: population grew so fast that intolerable pressure was placed on the land, forcing up grain prices, and forcing out the production of up-market foodstuffs such as eggs and chickens. Marginal lands that produced poor yields were brought into cultivation; every stalk of grain counted. Famines occurred more and more often, especially in highly urbanized areas such as Tuscany, though the shortages were far worse in northern Europe, especially the Great Famine of 1315 onwards, which had little effect south of the Alps.31 Yet a more optimistic picture can also be painted. By 1340, population had peaked, at least in western Europe and Byzantium. Between 1329 and 1343 the urban population of Majorca shrank by 23 per cent, and similar figures can be produced for towns in Provence and elsewhere.32 Greater spec
ialization stimulated trade networks, bringing vital necessities to the cities in return for commercial products. As early as 1280, the Pisans abandoned indifferent grain lands in the mouth of the Arno to sheep; they traded leather, meat, cheese and wool for grain from overseas, for there is hardly a part of a sheep that cannot be put to good use. The little Tuscan town of San Gimignano, specializing in commercial crops such as saffron and wine, was able to support a population denser than at any time before the twentieth century. Its commercial network extended into the Mediterranean, where, as has been seen, its merchants traded local saffron as far east as Aleppo. This trend to ‘commercialization’, visible also in northern Europe, anticipated many of the developments that followed the Black Death.

  Whether or not the economy was emerging from a crisis around 1340, the Black Death knocked Europe and the Islamic world off balance. The death of up to half of the population of the lands around the Mediterranean was bound to have dramatic effects on the social, economic, religious and political life of the peoples of the Mediterranean. It was a psychological shock as much as an economic one.33 Yet the plague did not induce a long Dark Age comparable to the bleak periods that marked the end of the Bronze Age and the collapse of Roman unity in the Mediterranean. The coming of the plague had accentuated the troubles of the late Roman Empire and had delayed recovery, but it was not the sole cause of the massive recession that occurred. But the plague of the fourteenth century was the main agent in transformations within the Mediterranean and the lands beyond that led to the creation of a new order.

  The Genoese were unwittingly responsible for the arrival of the Black Death in the Mediterranean. Bubonic plague was brought to their trading base at Caffa in the Crimea not by merchants but by Mongol armies, who besieged Caffa in 1347.34 Several Italian ships managed to flee from the war in the Crimea; their route took them to Constantinople, but, even if they were not infected, there were stowaways on board who were – black rats, who relished the grain that filled the holds of the Black Sea fleets, and who carried plague fleas, which also found a home in bales of cloth in the cargo hold. By September 1347 bubonic plague was raging in the Byzantine capital, and as its citizens began to flee they carried the infection with them. A slave ship set out for Alexandria from the Black Sea, carrying over 300 people; according to the Arab historian al-Maqrizi only forty-five were still alive when the ship reached Egypt, and all soon died.35 It is no surprise that Alexandria became a hub from which bubonic plague spread across the eastern Mediterranean, infecting Gaza in spring 1348. The first port in the western Mediterranean to be infected was Messina. A Sicilian chronicler placed the blame for the arrival of the disease on twelve Genoese galleys fleeing from the East, which arrived in October 1347. The inhabitants of Messina fled all over their island, carrying the germs with them, and the infection crossed the Straits to Reggio as well, reaching Naples by May 1348.36 By spring 1348 the Black Death had gained a firm grip on Majorca, and from there it spread along the classic trade routes across the Catalan world, towards Perpignan, Barcelona and Valencia, and down into the Muslim kingdom of Granada, reaching Almería by May 1348.37 In the same month, the citizens of Barcelona processed with their relics and statues beseeching divine intercession to end the plague; such processions naturally did more to spread the disease than to end it.38 Tunis was infected in April 1348, most likely from Sicily, while a further source of infection lay in the Catalan ships travelling down to the ports of Morocco and Algeria from Majorca.39 The urban boom of the twelfth to fourteenth century meant that the western shores of the Mediterranean were just as susceptible to plague as the teeming cities of the Middle East. Everywhere, it carried away astonishing numbers of people: a third to a half of the population, possibly as much as 60 or 70 per cent in some parts of the western Mediterranean, such as Catalonia.40 As it spread it intensified, taking on a pneumonic form that could kill within hours of breath-borne infection.

  The loss of up to half of the population of Europe and the Mediterranean had dramatic effects on economic relationships. Demand for foodstuffs contracted greatly, even though in the immediate aftermath of the plague many went hungry as fields in Sicily and elsewhere were left uncultivated, since the labour force was dead or dispersed. The population of the great trading cities collapsed, for the disease spread easily down the alleyways and canals of Genoa, Venice and other trading towns.41 The Black Death was not a single occurrence: recurrent bouts of plague in the late fourteenth century pushed the overall population down again just as it was poised to recover; new plagues hit the young particularly hard, for the older generations had lived through plague years and had built up some resistance. In the century after the revolt of the Vespers Sicily may have lost 60 per cent of its population, falling from 850,000 to 350,000 inhabitants; two events of capital importance were the plague of 1347 and a further plague that erupted on the island in 1366.42 Nothing could be the same again after the devastations and horror of the Black Death. Yet the plague, though it had transformed the Mediterranean, had not produced a lasting recession. Old institutions such as the merchant fonduk remained in place; the Genoese, Venetians and Catalans continued to snipe at one another; Christians drew up elaborate plans for crusades against the Mamluks, whose power remained for the moment firm. Underneath all this, there were subtle but important changes in the way that the old networks operated, and the first signs emerged that a rival trading zone was emerging beyond the Straits of Gibraltar. Out of this recovery the Fourth Mediterranean was born at the end of the fourteenth century.

  PART FOUR

  The Fourth Mediterranean,

  1350–1830

  1

  Would-be Roman Emperors,

  1350–1480

  I

  Following the arrival of the plague, and the dramatic fall in population, pressure on food supplies within the Mediterranean diminished. This did not mean that the old Mediterranean grain trade withered. In fact, it flourished: as inferior lands were abandoned and turned over to pasture, and as other areas became dedicated to products such as sugar and dyestuffs, the economic life of the lands bordering the Great Sea became more varied. As specialization increased, trade in all manner of goods was stimulated. The Mediterranean economy began to take on a new shape. Local contacts came to the fore: products such as timber were ferried down the coasts of Catalonia; wool was sent across the Adriatic from Apulia to the burgeoning towns of Dalmatia, and from Minorca (famous for its sheep) to Tuscany, where around 1400 the ‘Merchant of Prato’, Francesco di Marco Datini, obsessively ensured that every bale was recorded and every piece of correspondence was preserved – about 150,000 letters – to the great advantage of historians.1 One of his agents in Ibiza complained: ‘this land is unhealthy, the bread is bad, the wine is bad – God forgive me, nothing is good! I fear I shall leave my skin here.’2 But the demands of business came before personal comfort.

  The Merchant of Prato also had Tuscan agents based in San Mateu on the Spanish coast, where they could collect the best Aragonese wools, while deep within the Spanish interior sheep were conquering the Meseta, as millions of animals grazed the high ground in summer and the plateau in winter. Datini’s reach extended to the Maghrib and eastwards to the Balkans and the Black Sea. In the 1390s, he was involved in the slave trade, at a time when Circassians from the Black Sea and Berbers from North Africa were being sold in the slave markets of Majorca and Sicily.3 From oriental lands beyond the Mediterranean he obtained indigo, brazilwood, pepper, aloes, zedoary and galingale, as well as cotton, mastic and refined sugar from within the Great Sea. From Spain and Morocco, he imported, besides vast amounts of raw wool, ostrich feathers, elephant ivory, rice, almonds and dates. He ordered a dinner service from Valencia, decorated, as was common practice, with his coat-of-arms, and was irritated when he made a repeat order a few years later and no record of the design had been kept.4

  Datini was an oligarch, and not typical of late fourteenth-century businessmen, but his career provides an excellent illu
stration of the continuing vitality of trade and exchange. He managed to conduct business in the most adverse circumstances, even while the duke of Milan prowled around Tuscany in 1402, sweeping under his belt every major city apart from Florence. Mediterranean merchants had always known how to profit from war as well as peace. Yet there was one very significant change. In the early fourteenth century, the three great Florentine banks of the Bardi, Peruzzi and Acciaiuoli had built close ties to the kings of Naples, the Knights of Rhodes and rulers deep within Europe, who relied all too heavily on the credit they provided; but the banks crashed on the eve of the Black Death when it became obvious that they had accumulated too many toxic debts (notably loans to the English king). The international banks that eventually replaced them were careful not to over-extend themselves and were more modest operations; this was true of the Medici Bank despite the political power and fame of the controlling family.5 Greater caution ensured stable profits. Ambitions were more modest, too: the Catalans sent fewer galleys all the way to Flanders and England, and Marseilles, once an important trading centre, faded in significance. Thus new structures emerged, bound together with new mental attitudes.6 Urban life was stimulated not just by the increasing specialization, reflected in the development of craft guilds, but by the migration into the towns of country-dwellers whose villages had ceased to function through lack of manpower. In Egypt, abandonment of the soil led to neglect of the irrigation works that had maintained the ecological stability of the Nile Delta. The Delta became impoverished, and wages fell, whereas on the European shores they tended to rise in reponse to the limited availability of labour.7 However, city populations grew, in many cases recovering to pre-plague levels by 1400, and this encouraged the Genoese, Venetians and Catalans to continue to explore the granaries of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea.