The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean
Page 45
Even if the coming of the plague stimulated a sense that Christians needed to repent of their sins, these sins clearly did not include fighting one another: Venice and Genoa were at each other’s throats in 1350–55, and again in 1378–81 (the War of Chioggia). On both occasions the cause of conflict was disagreement over access to the Black Sea from the Aegean. During the first conflict, the Venetians entered into an alliance with the king of Aragon, who was competing with the Genoese for control of Sardinia. The Venetians sent their fleet into the western Mediterranean, scoring a victory against the Genoese off Alghero in northern Sardinia in 1353, while the Catalans sent a fleet as far as the Bosphorus, losing one of their admirals in battle. Yet the war brought benefit to neither side: Venice was forced to accept the loss of the duchy of Dalmatia to Hungary after 350 years, and Genoa descended into civil strife – the city fell under the dominion of the Visconti lords of Milan, who decided that Genoese resources were exhausted, and made peace with an equally exhausted Venice in 1355.8
When war broke out again in 1378, attention focused initially on the small island of Tenedos, dominion over which was thought to guarantee mastery over the route through the Dardanelles. A couple of years earlier a Byzantine usurper had donated the island to the Genoese, in return for their aid, but Venice secured promises from one of his rivals that it could take control of the island.9 The willingness of Genoa and Venice to fight is all the more surprising since the Black Death had greatly reduced available manpower, and the Venetians had to recruit large numbers of oarsmen from Dalmatia. There were other serious troubles, too. In between these wars, the Venetians faced a rebellion in Crete in 1363, in which not just the native Greeks were implicated but also some Venetian nobles, such as members of the great and ancient Gradenigo family.10 The rebellion placed in doubt the Venetian supply network, for Crete was exploited – or, as these events suggested, over-exploited – for its grain, wine, oil and vegetables, compensating for the lack of a sufficiently extensive hinterland in north-eastern Italy. During the two wars Venice was placed at severe risk in a different and even more perilous way, when Genoa and Venice clashed within the Adriatic, which Genoese navies had rarely dared enter. In 1378–80 Venice was dangerously exposed, now that the king of Hungary controlled the eastern flank of the Adriatic. Venice faced the constant problem that its imperial ambitions in the eastern Mediterranean could be guaranteed only if the seas closest to Venice were dominated by the republic.
When the Genoese were able to call on aid from the king of Hungary and Venice’s close neighbour, the Carrara lord of Padua, Venice found itself surrounded. In 1379, the Genoese burned the villages that lay along the Venetian Lido and the allied forces stormed the town of Chioggia, at the southern end of the Venetian lagoon. The allies boasted that they would not rest until they had bridled the four bronze horses that stood over the portico of St Mark’s Basilica. The city faced its greatest danger since the Carolingians had besieged the lagoons at the start of the ninth century. Venice managed to hold out under siege; eventually it was the Genoese who felt under siege, as their provisions became exhausted. By June 1380 the Genoese realized that their position was unsustainable, and made peace. One important feature of this confiict is that the Venetians made extensive use of gunpowder, using cannon mounted on the forecastles of their ships. The Genoese commander, Pietro Doria, died when a cannon-ball hit a tower that collapsed on top of him.11
Historians of Venice would like to classify the War of Chioggia as a Venetian victory, but the arrival of the Genoese on the sandbanks of the Lido was an enormous humiliation. Venice lost Tenedos, failed to recover Dalmatia, had to recognize Genoese rights in Cyprus (and therefore the Genoese role in the sugar trade), and even had to hand its mainland dependency of Treviso to the Austrian duke, thereby losing such grain lands as it possessed in north-eastern Italy – a Habsburg shadow would fall over parts of north-eastern Italy until the end of the First World War.12 From both the war of 1350 and the war of 1378 Venice lost more than it gained, in territory and reputation. But, serious as these conflicts were, they were dramatic interruptions in otherwise reasonably peaceful relations, as the ships of the two cities traded side by side in the Aegean, through Constantinople, and onwards to the grain lands of the Crimea. After 1381, the two cities took care to avoid entanglements by defining their trading spheres and commercial interests with care: Venice remained the prime centre of the Levant trade, sending its galleys to Alexandria and Beirut in search of spices; the Genoese laid more emphasis on bulk goods carried in round ships – alum, grain and dried fruits – searching out these products in Asia Minor, Greece and the Black Sea; ‘currants’ took their name from Corinth, while the independent Greek state of Trebizond, on the southern shores of the Black Sea, was the unrivalled source of hazelnuts. Ambitious trading ventures which, around 1300, had sent Genoese and Venetian travellers deep into Persia and even as far as China were no longer pursued; merchants decided to concentrate on restoring vital links across the sea.13
One element of stability was the efficient Venetian shipbuilding industry, the largest industry in the city and perhaps the best organized one in the entire Mediterranean. The Arsenal, which stood alongside the great rope workshop known as the Tana, was already well established in the early fourteenth century, when Dante heard in its dark depths the echoes of Hell itself.
As in the Arsenal of the Venetians
Boils in the winter the tenacious pitch
To smear their unsound vessels o’er again,
For sail they cannot; and instead thereof
One makes his vessel new, and one recaulks
The ribs of that which many a voyage has made;
One hammers at the prow, one at the stern,
This one makes oars and that one cordage twists,
Another mends the mainsail and the mizzen …14
There was an Old Arsenal with docking space for twelve galleys and a New Arsenal three times larger. By the late fourteenth century an efficient system of production under an admiral had evolved: the Arsenal could produce about three large merchant galleys a year, which may not seem many, except that the size of galleys had grown significantly as sailings to the Levant and Flanders became more regular from the 1340s onwards. These great galleys were lateen-rigged triremes that could load up to 150 tons of cargo, though they also carried very large crews of maybe 200 sailors. Only Venetian citizens could load goods on these ships, which travelled in convoy, often accompanied by smaller armed galleys, along routes carefully approved by the Senate; it took twenty-five years to qualify for citizenship, and, as has been seen, the most profitable voyages, handling silks and spices, were dominated by the investments of Venetian noblemen. For more modest goods, the Venetians used round merchant cogs with square sails, constructed in private shipyards and subject to less restriction on design. The largest cog known from the fifteenth century was nearly thirty metres long and displaced 720 tons.15 Skills in shipbuilding were matched by skills in navigation, and Venice vied with Genoa and Majorca as a major centre of cartography. Venetian sailors thus had plenty of exact information about the coasts of the Mediterranean. Moreover, with the increased use of compasses it was possible to navigate with greater confidence and to extend the sailing season across most of the year.16
II
One business enterprise that kept sailors busy was ferrying pilgrims to the Holy Land. The loss of the last Christian outposts in Palestine did not put an end to pilgrimage; the kings of Aragon vied with others to secure vague rights of protection over Christian sanctuaries in the Holy Land, and the Mamluk sultans knew that they could play the Holy Land card when negotiating political and commercial agreements with western rulers. Pilgrimage was, and was supposed to be, physically demanding. Felix Fabri was a Dominican friar who travelled from Germany to the Holy Land in 1480, and left a vivid account of the smells, discomfort and squalor on board ship: meat swarming with maggots, undrinkable water, vermin everywhere. His return voyage from Alexandria, ou
t of season, exposed him to the winds and waves that had battered earlier pilgrims such as ibn Jubayr. He learned, though, that the best place to sleep was under cover, on top of the hard bales of spices.17 But, at least for a scholarly minority, pilgrimage was taking on a new shape. In 1358 Petrarch was invited by a friend, Giovanni Mandelli, to travel with him to the Holy Sepulchre. Deciding that it was immeasurably safer to stay behind, he favoured Mandelli with a little book in which he described the route across the Mediterranean. He noted all the places that had been visited by Ulysses; he pointed out the temple of Juno Lacinia in Crotone, in the far south of Italy; he observed that Cilicia was where Pompey had defeated bands of pirates; he paused briefly to contemplate the place of the crucifixion of Christ (‘you would not have undertaken such an arduous labour for any other reason than to see with your own eyes … the things that you have already seen with your mind’); but he finally left Mandelli standing not in Jerusalem but in Alexandria, and not among sacks of spices but by the tomb of Alexander and the urn of Pompey.18 Cultural tourism around the sites of classical antiquity was about to begin. Over forty manuscripts of Petrarch’s Itinerary survive, showing how popular it was, above all in fifteenth-century Naples, for Mandelli was showered with information about classical sites along the coasts of southern Italy, and it was this (rather than interest in the holy places) that appealed to readers.
Petrarch’s classical tourism was turned into reality in the 1420s by a merchant of Ancona who found himself transfixed by the sight of classical monuments, first in his home city and then around the Mediterranean. Cyriac of Ancona had political motives too: he made himself known to the Ottoman sultan, who did not realize that one of Cyriac’s aims was to collect information that could be used in a crusade against the Turks. But he took a genuine delight in physical remains from the classical past, travelling to Delphi where, to the amazement of the inhabitants of a greatly overgrown site, he spent six days in 1436 enthusing over what he wrongly believed to be its main temple and over the theatre and stadium, copying inscriptions and drawing plans.19 Although most of those who interested themselves in the classical past would remain comfortably in their armchair, like Petrarch, Cyriac’s career indicates that the allure of Mediterranean travel was no longer exclusively religious or commercial.
A very few of those who travelled ‘went native’, immersing themselves in the religion and customs of the peoples who lived on the opposite shore. There is the extraordinary Anselmo Turmeda, a Majorcan friar who discovered the teachings of Islam in Bologna, travelled to North Africa, where he converted and became a noted early fifteenth-century Muslim scholar under the name of ‘Abdallah at-Tarjuman; his tomb still stands in Tunis. A century later the scholar and diplomat al-Hasan ibn Muhammad al-Wazzan, or Leo Africanus, who was of Granadan birth, was captured by Christian pirates, taken to Rome and became a protégé of the Pope Leo X, and wrote a geography of Africa: here we have someone who could also convey to western audiences the physical realities of the Islamic world way beyond the Mediterranean, and who switched back and forth from Islam to Christianity and back to Islam.20
III
The fortunes of the kings of Aragon, and of the many kingdoms under their rule, provide an excellent guide to the wider fortunes of the Mediterranean in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Catalan influence extended right across the Mediterranean, as far as the marketplaces of Alexandria and Rhodes; and, at the end of the century, the king of Aragon was a dominant figure both in the Iberian peninsula and in wider European politics. Martin the Younger, the son and heir of King Martin of Aragon, married the heiress to Sicily after she was to all intents kidnapped and despatched to Spain, giving him ample excuse to invade the island in 1392; in the fifteenth century the island was ruled by viceroys held to account by island parliaments, and the separate line of increasingly ineffective Aragonese kings of Sicily disappeared. Peace was obviously good for the Sicilians, and it was also good for those who wanted to buy their grain. Catalan nobles began to acquire extensive estates in Sicily and to settle there.21 The final achievement of Martin the Younger, before he was felled by malaria in Sardinia, was the recovery of Catalan-Aragonese control over large swathes of that island as well, after which Catalan cultural influence dominated, for instance in the arts.22
The new assertiveness of the rulers of Aragon was demonstrated most forcefully by Alfonso V, who succeeded to the throne in 1416 and was to become one of the great monarchs of the fifteenth century.23 The male line of the house of Barcelona had died out, and Alfonso came from Castile; nonetheless, he looked outwards to the Mediterranean, and his schemes encompassed the entire sea. Like all the Aragonese kings he earned a sobriquet, and Alfonso’s, ‘the Magnanimous’, perfectly expresses his desire to be seen as a generous patron, endowed with the princely qualities he read about in the works of his fellow-Spaniard Seneca, the philosopher of the ancient Roman emperors, for he was a passionate student of classical texts, with a strong interest in heroic accounts of ancient warfare. He knew that two of the most successful Roman emperors, Trajan and Hadrian, were Spaniards.24 Alfonso aspired to restore the Roman Empire in the Mediterranean, in the face of the growing Turkish threat. Early in his reign he attacked Corsica, which the papacy had offered to the kings of Aragon at the same time as Sardinia, far back in 1297. He failed to secure much beyond the stronghold of Calvi, but his campaign reveals that his ambitions were by no means limited to the lands he had inherited in Spain. Pursuing his Roman imperial dreams, he looked towards Italy, and offered his services to the confused queen of Naples, Joanna II, even securing a promise that she would nominate him as her heir (despite a colourful private life she had no sons). Unfortunately she also promised to leave her increasingly turbulent kingdom to the duke of Anjou and count of Provence, René of Anjou. Le bon roi René shared with Alfonso a passion for chivalric culture and the patronage of the arts; he also shared a wish to accumulate kingdoms, though by the end of his life in 1480 he was left with none, compared to the six or seven kingdoms and one principality over which Alfonso ruled when he died in 1458.25 The intermittent battle with René for control of southern Italy took over twenty years, and consumed royal resources, for maintaining a powerful fleet was extraordinarily costly. The financial reserves of the monarchy were perilously low, and Alfonso was therefore forced to go cap-in-hand to his parliaments, giving them a chance to bargain for the privileges they valued most.26 Fortunately, René of Anjou was even poorer, but he did manage to mobilize the Genoese fleet: Genoese hostility to the Catalans had not waned since the Catalan invasion of Sardinia over a century earlier.
Alfonso faced moments of intense danger. In 1435 he led his fleet against the Genoese off the island of Ponza; he was defeated, captured and carried off to Genoa. The Genoese then found themselves obliged to hand their prisoner over to their overlord, the duke of Milan, Filippo Maria Visconti, who was charmed by Alfonso and turned events upside down when he decided to enter into an alliance with him. The duke of Milan even contemplated bequeathing his duchy to Alfonso, whose plans for the domination of Italy distracted him from Iberian affairs. The long and costly war with René culminated in Alfonso’s capture of Naples by tunnelling under its walls, in 1442. Even after his expulsion from what he always regarded as his own kingdom of Naples, René maintained pressure on the conquering Aragonese, and Genoa remained the base for hostile expeditions into southern Italy well into the 1460s.27 Nor did Italian campaigns cease with the fall of Naples. In 1448 Alfonso was knocking at the gates of the small but strategically valuable statelet of Piombino, which incorporated the iron-rich island of Elba, and which had its own fleet, trading and raiding as far as Tunis.28 From Piombino he could exercise control over the movement of ships between Genoa and Naples, while the town also provided a springboard for the invasion of Tuscany. Piombino proved too hard a nut to crack, though the lord of Piombino wisely began to render an annual tribute, in the form of a golden goblet, to assure himself of Alfonso’s goodwill, and over the years
bases along the coast either side of Elba fell under Aragonese and, in the sixteenth century, Spanish control.29 By the middle of the fifteenth century most of Italy was divided between five great powers: Milan, Florence, Venice, the papacy and the king of Aragon. Although the king of Aragon controlled much the largest territory (even vaster if the two Italian islands are included), he was forced to abandon his dream of domination over the peninsula when the four other powers adhered to the Peace of Lodi in 1454, to which Alfonso added his signature early the next year. This treaty guaranteed peace (with some notable interruptions) for the next half-century, and one of its aims was to divert the energies of the signatories to the urgent task of fighting the Turks.