The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean
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Transformations in the West,
1391–1500
I
While the Ragusans benefited from their special relationship with the Turks, the Genoese and Venetians were more cautious in building ties to the Ottoman court. The sultan was anxious not to turn them away, but they viewed the eastern Mediterranean as increasingly dangerous. Difficulties were compounded by occasional arguments between the Venetians and the Mamluk sultans of Egypt, who required ever larger amounts in taxes in order to prop up their regime. The Mamluks were also a regional threat. In 1424–6 they invaded Cyprus and carried away its king, Janus, along with 6,000 captives; a ransom of 200,000 ducats had to be paid before Janus was restored to the throne, and it is said that he never laughed again. In 1444 they besieged Rhodes. In 1460 they supported a claimant to the throne of Cyprus, sending eighty ships against the island, to the horror of Christendom, for no one could understand why James of Lusignan, a bastard, would wish to enlist Egyptian aid in a bid for a throne to which he was not entitled.1
As Ottoman and Mamluk pressure on these areas became intolerable, the Genoese and their rivals increasingly turned their attention towards the West, buying sugar in Sicily and Spain and grain in Sicily and Morocco. The mid-fifteenth century saw a veritable economic renaissance in Genoa, at first sight against all the odds: the city was still consumed by internal strife, but large segments of the population were able to benefit from trade and investment, and the city boomed. Especially attractive were shares in the new public bank, the Banco di San Giorgio, which eventually acquired dominion over Corsica.2 The loss of easy access by the Genoese to the alum mines of Phokaia in Asia Minor was compensated by the discovery in 1464 of alum mines on the doorstep of Rome itself, at Tolfa; Pope Pius II described the discovery as ‘our greatest victory against the Turk’. It reduced dependence on ‘the Turk’, and yet it did not reduce dependence on the Genoese, who switched their attention to central Italy, and built a new alum monopoly there. The technology of sugar production travelled westwards ahead of the merchants, and the eastern sugar industry began to decline.3 Sophisticated sugar-mills, or trappeti, were developed in Sicily. In Valencia, the furthest north sugar cane could be made to grow, businessmen from as far away as Germany set up plantations; the need for ceramic vessels used in processing raw sugar stimulated the local pottery industry as well, bringing further fame to Valencia in the form of its ‘Hispano-Moresque’ pottery that can be found in many modern museums.4 The drive to the west was so powerful that it continued through the Straits of Gibraltar, reaching Madeira in the 1420s, and then the Azores, the Canaries, the Cape Verde islands and São Tomé – most of these were Portuguese acquisitions, but the capital and know-how came from the Genoese, while the first sugar-stocks in Madeira are said to have come from Sicily.5
Stopping-points on the way out to the Atlantic acquired new importance. Granada, though a Muslim state until 1492, became a centre of operations for Genoese, Florentine and Catalan businessmen, who regularly visited Almería and Málaga, buying silk, dried fruits and ceramics. It is hard to see how the Nasrid sultans of Granada could have maintained themselves in power (or built the Alhambra palaces) without the financial support they gained from the Christian merchants. They liked to think it was their fervent Islam that held Granada together, but foreign funds were no less important.6 Granada was further neutralized by the occasional success of the kings of Castile in imposing tribute payments on the sultans. Border warfare between the Castilians and the Granadans did not cease, though it took on the character of a long-running tournament, and was more successful in generating Spanish ballads about beautiful Moorish princesses than in winning territory.
This fragile stability was placed at risk in August 1415 when the Portuguese sent 100 ships against Ceuta and captured the city after a brief siege in which the king’s son Henry, later known as ‘the Navigator’, earned his spurs. It was a remarkable victory: the Portuguese showed little understanding of the complex currents in the Straits and their fleet was battered by summer storms, so that part of it was blown back towards Spain. This allowed the governor of Ceuta time to summon Moroccan reinforcements, though he then stupidly cancelled his request. The Portuguese dithered about whether to follow their original plans or whether to attack Gibraltar, on Granadan territory, instead; in many ways Gibraltar was the obvious choice, because it had been tossed back and forth between Fez and Granada, following a rebellion on the rock in 1410. But Ceuta was larger, far richer and stands in a less forbidding position, astride a narrow peninsula connecting the low eminence of Monte Hacho to the African continent. Its conquest astonished contemporary Europeans. No one could quite understand what was in the mind of the Portuguese court. The astonishment was compounded by the secrecy of the Portuguese: everyone knew they were building a fleet and hiring foreign ships, but it was widely assumed they planned to attack Granadan territory, despite Castilian insistence that attacks on Granada were reserved to Castile.7
Thus the Portuguese arrived in the Straits as an unwelcome fourth force alongside Marinid Morocco, Nasrid Granada and Castile. Even if the Portuguese aspired to the wealth of Ceuta, they failed to secure it: Muslim merchants avoided the city, which became an empty ghost town inhabited mainly by a Portuguese garrison and by convicts sent there as punishment. The Portuguese presumably hoped that their capture of Ceuta would open up access to the wheatfields of Atlantic Morocco, but the campaign had exactly the opposite effect. Ceuta became a millstone around the necks of the Portuguese. Yet they were too proud to relinquish it and even hoped to gain more Moroccan lands: in 1437 the Portuguese attempted to seize Tangier, and met with ignominious failure (much later, in 1471, they did occupy the town). Prince Henry’s brother Fernando was sent to Fez as a hostage, to be released after the Portuguese handed back Ceuta; Henry agreed and then, to his eternal shame, reneged on the agreement, so that his brother was left to die in prison.8 The long-term result was that Ceuta has remained in Portuguese and, since 1668, Spanish hands.9 Since the sixteenth century, when Luis de Camões wrote his great epic of Portuguese expansion, the Lusiads, the conquest of Ceuta has been seen as the first step towards Portuguese expansion along the coast of Africa:
A thousand swimming birds, spreading
Their concave pinions to the winds,
Parted the white, turbulent waves
To where Hercules set his pillars.10
Evidently, though, the Portuguese could not yet predict the opening of the trade route round Africa to India – the possibility of entering the Indian Ocean from the Atlantic was strenuously denied in Ptolemy’s Geography.
The Mediterranean, not the distant oceans, was the immediate target of Portuguese sailors.11 One of the features of the great restructuring that followed the Black Death was the emergence of new centres of business and new groups of traders; visitors to the Mediterranean from the Atlantic, such as the Portuguese, became more frequent. Much of this trade was confined to short, regular routes, intensively exploited. The Portuguese, Basques, Cantabrians and Galicians plied their trade in salted fish as far as Valencia and Barcelona.12 There were some more ambitious long-distance voyages too: an English ship is recorded at Ibiza in 1412; in 1468 King Ferrante of Naples entered into a commercial pact with Edward IV of England.13 The most ambitious English expeditions were launched by merchants of Bristol. In 1457 Robert Sturmy sailed with three vessels for the Levant, but on the return voyage the Genoese attacked his ships off Malta, sinking two of them. When news of this attack reached England, there was a great outcry against the Genoese for blocking north European attempts to compete in the trade of the Mediterranean. The mayor of Southampton summarily arrested all the Genoese he could find.14 These were the violent beginnings of the ties between England and the Mediterranean that would transform the sea in later centuries.
It is no surprise that French ships attempted to create a niche for themselves in the spice trade to Alexandria, launching ships from ports on the Mediterranean.15 J
acques Cœur of Bourges, the son of a prosperous furrier, travelled from Narbonne to Alexandria and Damascus in 1432, and became fascinated by the trading opportunities in the Levant. He entered royal service, where his great talents were quickly recognized; he served King Charles VII as quartermaster, or argentier, responsible for the supply of goods, including luxuries, to the royal court; in the 1440s and 50s he began to fulfil his dream of building ties between France and both Egypt and North Africa. He operated at least four galleys, and, according to a contemporary writer, he was ‘the first of all the French of his time to equip and arm galleys that, loaded with woollen garments and other products of the workshops of France, travelled up and down the coasts of Africa and the East’.16 He began to see Aigues-Mortes, stuck in its stagnant pools near Montpellier, as the obvious base for an ambitious programme of shipbuilding; the city council of Barcelona was worried that he was diverting the spice trade there, and trying to establish a French royal monopoly. Indeed, it is not entirely clear whether the French galleys were owned by the king of France or his hugely ambitious argentier; perhaps it was a matter of little consequence, for the king and his financier shared the profits. Jacques Cœur’s network of agents was bolstered by attempts to gain favours from the Mamluk sultans of Egypt, permitting him to trade on preferential terms. He has been seen as a prototype mercantilist, well attuned to the political advantages of an active trading policy within the Mediterranean.17 His success brought envy, while his contacts with foreign powers as varied as the Mamluk sultan and René of Anjou, ruler of Provence, seemed to suggest he was conducting his own foreign policy. In 1451 his enemies turned against him; he was arrested on charges of peculation and treason, tortured and exiled. Although this trading network did not survive his arrest, the career of Jacques Cœur amply illustrates the new opportunities that ambitious businessmen were able to seize in the mid-fifteenth-century Mediterranean.
II
All the traffic through the Straits of Gibraltar had to work its way past the great rock itself. Castilian adventurers were determined to recover the town, which had been briefly held by their compatriots in the fourteenth century. In 1436 the count of Niebla was drowned with forty companions while retreating from a failed attack on Gibraltar; his remains were ignominiously displayed in a wicker basket, or barcina, which still gives its name to one of Gibraltar’s gateways. Finally, the duke of Medina Sidonia captured the rock in 1462, taking advantage of the absence of its leading citizens, who had gone to pay homage to the sultan in Granada. Enormously powerful nobles, operating their own war fleet, the dukes of Medina Sidonia took the view that they could do what they wished with the rock, including replacing its inhabitants with a new population. In 1474, 4,350 conversos, New Christians of Jewish origin, settled in Gibraltar; they hoped to escape the tribulations they had experienced in their native Córdoba, and they offered to maintain the town garrison from their own resources. However, the duke soon became convinced that the conversos would offer the town to the king and queen, who were regarded as sympathetic to conversos. He had been planning an expedition against Portuguese Ceuta (such was his love for his Christian neighbours), but he diverted his flotilla against Gibraltar instead, which he easily recovered. This time it was the conversos who were forced to leave. The rock remained in the hands of the Medina Sidonia family until 1501, when Queen Isabella of Castile insisted that so important a strategic position had to lie under royal control.18
Castile had only a limited Mediterranean coast, mainly consisting of the old Muslim kingdom of Murcia, conquered in the thirteenth century. During the fifteenth century, both Castile and Aragon experienced periods of intense internal strife, culminating, during the 1470s, in a struggle between Isabella and the king of Portugal for control of the Castilian Crown. By then, Isabella was married to Ferdinand II, king of Aragon and Sicily. The Crown of Aragon, like Castile, had only recently emerged from a period of civil war. Alfonso V of Aragon, who died in Naples in 1458, regarded his south Italian kingdom as disposable property and bequeathed it to his illegitimate son Ferrante; all the other lands – those on the Spanish mainland, the Balearic islands, Sardinia and Sicily – passed to Alfonso’s brother John, who was already king of Navarre by marriage. He refused to cede Navarre to his popular heir Charles, prince of Viana, whose supporters within Navarre and then within Catalonia held him up as their hero, all the more so when he died in suspicious circumstances, possibly poisoned. Civil war in Navarre was the prelude to civil war in Catalonia. The causes of this conflict lay in social tensions within town and country that were rooted in the great economic transformations that resulted from the Black Death.19
In Barcelona, the popular factions, known as the Busca, demanded lower taxes, participation in the city government, tighter limits on the fees charged by lawyers and physicians, and restrictions on the importation of foreign cloths and on the use of foreign ships.20 Their message (which appealed to the cash-strapped monarchy) was summed up in the single word redreç, best translated as ‘economic recovery’. The Busca gained power on the City Council, but proved unable to solve the problems of Barcelona. By the time of Alfonso V, the Busca was constantly jockeying for power with the Biga, which was a loose party of old patrician families; at the outbreak of the Catalan civil war in 1462, the city was still a divided community. Majorca too was a divided society. During the fifteenth century, there were repeated political explosions, expressed in the rivalry between the inhabitants of the capital and the forenses (‘outsiders’) who inhabited the rest of the island. While Alfonso was absent from his Spanish lands conflict became very intense; Majorca City was placed under siege by the forenses. In addition, plague continued to afflict the island throughout the second half of the fifteenth century (in 1467, 1481 and 1493).21
Yet the picture is not as bleak as all this suggests. In Majorca, wealthy patrons were commissioning impressive works of art. This was the period in which the citizens of Majorca, Valencia, Barcelona and Perpignan erected impressive llotjas, or loggias, which acted as seats of the commercial tribunal known as the Consulate of the Sea, and in which all sorts of commercial business was conducted – the registering of insurance contracts for overseas voyages, the sale of bonds, the exchange of currency.22 The llotja in Majorca, erected in the 1430s, was the work of the eminent Catalan architect Guillem Sagrera, who also designed Alfonso’s great hall in the massive fortress of Castelnuovo in Naples, carrying the late Gothic styles of Spain across the Mediterranean. His breathtaking design for the llotja, with its soaring columns, was partly followed when Pere Compte erected the no less impressive llotja in Valencia between 1483 and 1498. A remarkable Latin inscription running around the top of the inside walls of the llotja in Valencia states:
I am an illustrious house built in fifteen years. Fellow-citizens, rejoice and see how good a thing is business, when it does not give rise to lies in speaking, when it keeps faith with one’s neighbour and does not deceive him, when it does not dedicate money to usury. The merchant who acts in this way will prosper galore and eventually will enjoy eternal life.
At first sight it does not seem that this was an age when the lands of the Crown of Aragon could ‘prosper galore’.23 Banking failures in the 1380s dampened financial initiatives, and Italian capital, largely discouraged in earlier decades, began to dominate the trade of the Spanish seaboard.24 The Barcelona business elite tired of trade, with all its dangers, and increasingly preferred to invest in bonds with reasonably safe returns; this was stimulated further when a new public bank, the Taula de Canvi (‘table of exchange’), was established in the llotja of Barcelona, hard by the waterfront, in 1401. On top of this, the king’s financial demands, made in order to sustain Alfonso’s Mediterranean campaigns, drained funds out of his Spanish lands. And yet there was also good news. The commercial networks of the Crown of Aragon did not disintegrate; if anything, they experienced new vitality. Ships set out for the eastern Mediterranean from Barcelona nearly every year between 1404 and 1464, and most of them we
re Catalan, not foreign. In 1411 eleven Catalan ships sailed to the Levant, in 1432 seven, in 1453 eight. The numbers may appear small, but these were vessels sent to collect high-value items such as spices, which were traded in small quantities. Having built up their Levant trade with care over many decades, the Catalans took third place in the great Levant trade behind the Venetians and the Genoese; they traded in Beirut and maintained a consulate in Damascus.25 There were also regular departures (mainly by foreign ships) for Flanders and England.26
These were the prestige routes followed by the great galleys, but there was an especially lively trade in the sturdy round cogs that carried grain, dried fruits, oil, salt and slaves. Records survive of nearly 2,000 voyages from Barcelona between 1428 and 1493, about a quarter to Sicily, about 15 per cent to Sardinia and over 10 per cent to southern Italy – in other words, to the Italian possessions of the Crown of Aragon. Rhodes was visited by large numbers of Catalan ships too (129 in this period), for it was not simply the fortress of the Knights; it also served as the hub of a distribution network that gave access to Turkey, Egypt and Syria.27 Catalan control of the textile trade of southern Italy owed much to the patronage of King Alfonso. After he captured Naples in 1442, he expelled the Florentine merchants who had dominated the city’s business under the Angevin kings. The Catalans leaped at the opportunity to replace their rivals. By 1457 Aragonese Naples teemed with Catalan merchants, who exceeded all others in numbers.28 They were so successful in flooding the south of Italy with cheap woollen cloths that King Ferrante of Naples, even though he was the nephew of the current king of Aragon, tried to ban their import in 1465.29