The Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean

by John Julius Norwich

  Many remained abroad for the best part of their lives, in the Order’s local commanderies, but all without exception were bound to return instantly to Rhodes when summoned.

  As the fourteenth century wore on, it is not altogether surprising that the Knights began to compromise on some of their early ideals. Although their hospital continued to flourish and to attract patients from all over the eastern Mediterranean, their own steadily increasing wealth–combined, perhaps, with the near-perfect climate in which they lived–led to a gradual relaxation of their once austere monastic habits. But they never neglected their military duties. They continued to police the narrow seas; their consuls in Egypt and Jerusalem watched over the interests of the Christian pilgrims; and they kept up the pressure against the Turks, substantially delaying their development as a first-rate naval power. In 1348, in alliance with Venice and Cyprus, they took Smyrna (lzmir), successfully defending it against a Turkish counter-attack ten years later; and in 1365 they participated in the last effort ever made to rescue the Holy Land from the infidel.

  Their ally and inspiration on this occasion was King Peter I of Cyprus, the first monarch since St Louis to be fired with a genuine Crusading spirit. In 1362 he set out on an extended tour of the west to seek support for his plans. Pope Urban V in Avignon, the Emperor Charles IV in Prague, John II of France and Edward III of England all promised help, and there was a useful naval contribution from Venice. The expedition assembled in Rhodes in August 1365, with a navy estimated at some 165 ships, including 108 from Cyprus–by far the largest combined force since the Third Crusade. Only after the whole fleet had set sail was it announced that the first destination was Alexandria. The Crusaders landed there on 9 October; two days later the city was theirs.

  What followed was a massacre–a massacre worse, if anything, than that by the soldiers of the First Crusade in Jerusalem in 1099 or that by the Franks in Constantinople in 1204. The slaughter was indiscriminate. The important Christian and Jewish communities suffered as much as the Muslim majority; churches and synagogues as well as mosques were put to the torch. Five thousand prisoners were captured and sold into slavery. King Peter, horrified at the turn events had taken, did his best to restore order and to hold what was left of the city, but the army, having possessed itself of all the plunder it could carry, was impatient to be off before an avenging Mameluke army arrived from Cairo. The King had no course but to order his fleet back to Cyprus. Even then he hoped to sail back on a second expedition to the east, but on arrival at Famagusta the entire army disintegrated, knights and foot-soldiers alike thinking only of returning home with their loot as quickly as possible.

  This was the last Crusade, and the most shameful of them all; it set back the cause of progress in the Mediterranean by the best part of a century. When it took place, the Franks and the Mamelukes had been at peace for fifty years and more. Pilgrims were travelling freely to the Holy Places; trade was flourishing between the west and the Muslim world. Now, at a stroke, all the old enmities were revived: native Christian communities began once again to suffer persecution, and the Church of the Holy Sepulchre was once again closed to pilgrims. To the Mamelukes of Egypt, the Christian Kingdom of Cyprus was once again their arch-enemy. Sixty years later they were to have their revenge.

  It would be unfair to attach too much of the blame for this catastrophe to the Knights of the Hospital. Their lives were, after all, dedicated to the saving of life rather than to the taking of it; their vow of poverty ruled out any form of looting; and they had lived long enough in the east to understand the principles of coexistence. There can be little doubt that they were as shocked as anyone by the behaviour of their allies, and they would certainly have done their best to exercise a moderating influence; their guilt, such as it was, was guilt by association only. Nonetheless, the massacre at Alexandria signals the low point of their history, and marks their record with its blackest stain. For the rest, idle and ineffectual as they frequently were, it remains a fact that throughout their 213-year residence in Rhodes and for much of their 268-year occupation of Malta which followed it, the Knights Hospitaller of St John of Jerusalem were to be a beneficial–and occasionally dramatically decisive–force in Mediterranean affairs.

  The palace of the Alhambra at Granada is one of the most superb Islamic buildings remaining anywhere in Europe. No visitor can fail to be seduced by the grace of its architecture, the delicacy of its carving, the play of sunshine and shadow in its courts and gardens. The horseshoe arches, the swirling Arabic calligraphy, the stalactite vaulting, all radiate the spirit of Islam at its elegant best. Then, suddenly, there comes a surprise. In three of the alcoves of the Sala de los Reyes – it is sometimes known as the Sala de la Justicia–are some extraordinary ceiling paintings. They are painted on leather, which might be thought unusual enough, but what makes them more remarkable still is their subject. In the central alcove ten men of Moorish appearance are sitting at a council meeting, while to each side there are scenes of hunting, fighting, chess-playing and the making of courtly love, all in the manner of Christian Europe in the later Middle Ages. The style suggests the mid-fourteenth century, so they must be virtually contemporary with the palace itself, which was completed in about 1350; but how did they come to be painted? The tenets of Islam strongly discourage figurative art in any form, and particularly representations of the human figure;109 and Muslim Granada still had a century and a half to go. We can only conclude that an Islamic ruler commissioned a Christian artist to provide them, which in turn suggests that at this time at least the two religions had achieved a happy and harmonious coexistence.

  One reason for this is that by the third quarter of the thirteenth century the Reconquista had run out of steam. King Pedro III of Aragon was fully occupied with his Sicilian adventure, while his contemporary Alfonso X ‘the Wise’ of Castile, cultured and erudite as he may have been, was far more interested in negotiating for the crown of the Holy Roman Empire and establishing his dynastic claims to Gascony than he was in smiting the infidel. As for Alfonso’s son Sancho IV and Sancho’s grandson Alfonso XI–whose long minority led to civil war and thirteen years of chaos until the cortes of Castile declared him to be of age in 1325–they had more than enough to do in repelling invasions by the Berbers of Morocco; their successes were welcomed rather than lamented by the Muslim rulers of Granada.

  With the accession to the Castilian throne of Alfonso XI’s son Pedro I–better known by his well-deserved appellation of Pedro the Cruel–in 1350, it looked for a moment as if Christian–Muslim coexistence might again be threatened. But Pedro was in the early part of his reign primarily concerned with his domestic life: imprisoning his unfortunate wife, Blanche of Bourbon, almost certainly murdering her (though only after contracting a bigamous marriage), and later being himself kept under restraint by his enemies in the palace. Free again in 1356, he perpetrated a whole series of further murders before in 1360 finding himself faced with a civil war led by his bastard half-brother, Enrique of Trastamara. In the efforts of both sides to acquire international support Castile was suddenly swept up into the Hundred Years War, with Pedro being backed by the English–notably Edward the Black Prince–and Enrique by the French. The English alliance did not last long; Edward, revolted by Pedro’s faithlessness and brutality, soon afterwards returned to England, sick of the disease that was to kill him a short time later. Pedro, left on his own, was soon overpowered by Enrique and his ally, the famous French knight Bertrand du Guesclin. On 23 March 1369 Enrique stabbed Pedro to death in du Guesclin’s tent, simultaneously becoming King Enrique II of Castile. As Pedro’s successor, he could only be an improvement.

  In 1371 there was forged one of Spain’s few familial links with England, when Edward III’s oldest surviving son, John of Gaunt, Duke of Lancaster, married Constance, Pedro’s illegitimate daughter, and in absentia styled himself King of Castile. It was another fifteen years before he set foot in Spain to claim his inheritance; finally, on 7 July 1386, accompanied b
y his wife and two daughters, he sailed from Plymouth with an army of 20,000 men. A month later he landed at Corunna and soon made himself master of most of Galicia, in the northwest corner of the country. Then, in the spring of 1387, he joined forces with his son-in-law King John I of Portugal (now married to his daughter Philippa) for a joint invasion of Castile. The expedition was a failure: disease spread rapidly through the camp, the Duke himself was stricken, the conquered territories were lost again and the army was forced to retire across the Pyrenees. At last in 1389 Gaunt signed a treaty surrendering his claim to the throne in exchange for a payment of 200,000 crowns, a generous annual pension and the marriage of his daughter Catherine to the future Enrique III of Castile. Altogether, he had gained a good deal more than he deserved.

  Throughout this time the Muslims of Granada lived happily and in comparative peace. The same could not, alas, be said for the Jews. Financially, Enrique relied on them as did everyone else, but during the civil war he had deliberately stirred up hatred against them, and as the century progressed so anti-Semitism intensified, finally bursting out in 1391 like a forest fire. It began in Seville on 6 June. Many of the Jewish population fled for their lives; many others, as synagogues were forcibly Christianised, submitted unwillingly to conversion. From Seville the flames spread quickly, first through Andalusia and thence to the rest of the peninsula, even beyond the Pyrenees as far as Perpignan. After a while, inevitably, there came a lull; but the fires continued to smoulder throughout the century that followed, until in 1492 Ferdinand and Isabella were to sign the fateful edict banishing all Jews from the territory of Spain.

  At the beginning of Boccaccio’s Decameron, ten young people flee Florence because of plague. That plague, better known as the Black Death, hangs like a baleful miasma over the second half of the fourteenth century. It had first appeared in Constantinople in the spring of 1347, brought almost certainly by ships escaping from the already plague-ridden Genoese trading colony of Caffa (now Feodosiya in the Crimea), which was then under siege by the Mongols. The city had suffered many similar visitations over the centuries, but never one so virulent or on such a scale. The fatal bacillus was–as we now know–introduced by fleas which were in turn usually (though not invariably) carried by the rats that infested all ships coming from the east. Curiously enough, these rats were themselves relatively new arrivals in Europe, the first of them having probably been brought in on ships carrying Crusaders back from Palestine; but they were rapid and indefatigable breeders, and by mid-century there were more than enough of them to propagate the disease throughout the European continent. We need not necessarily believe the anonymous contemporary chronicler from the Italian town of Este, who claims that in Constantinople plague accounted for eight-ninths of the entire population; to the Byzantines, however, it must have seemed the final proof of what they had suspected for so long: that the Holy Virgin, their patron and protectress, had after more than 1,000 years at last deserted them.

  The Mediterranean proper had its first taste of the Black Death early in October 1347, when twelve Genoese galleys arrived in Messina. They too had probably come from Caffa; it was certainly from there that yet another Genoese fleet was to transmit the infection, in January 1348, to Genoa, Venice and Sicily. From there it spread north to Corsica and Sardinia, south to Tunis and North Africa, west to the Balearic Islands, and thence to Barcelona and Valencia on the Spanish coast, and, inevitably, across the straits to south Italy, whence its progress up the peninsula was swift.

  Of all the Italian cities, Florence suffered most. Contemporary assessments are famously unreliable, but there is good evidence to show that out of a total Florentine population estimated at some 95,000, between 50,000 and 60,000 were dead within six months of the outbreak. Boccaccio himself provides us with an unforgettable description: the headlong flight of whole populations from the cities and towns, abandoning their houses and possessions; the way in which the sick–even sick children–were left to their fate, with no one daring to approach them; the mass burials in hurriedly dug trenches; the untended cattle wandering free through the countryside. In Venice, when the epidemic was at its height, 600 citizens a day were said to have perished; in Orvieto, out of every family of four, one of the parents and one of the children could statistically expect to die; in Siena–where the deaths were estimated at 50,000, two-thirds of the population–they were in the process of building the cathedral, which was to be one of the greatest in Christendom. The workmen all died; construction was abandoned, and although activity was resumed towards the end of the century the building has not to this day been completed as planned. As for Italy as a whole, to say that it lost a third, or slightly more, of its total population would probably not be very far wrong.

  In France the story was much the same. The plague began, predictably enough, in Marseille. A few weeks later it had reached the Pyrenees, and by August 1348 it was raging through Bordeaux. To the east, it struck papal Avignon in March, killing at least half the population, including every single one of the English community of Austin Friars in the city. Pope Clement VI himself retired to his private apartments, where he received no one and spent the entire day and night roasting himself between two blazing fires. (The treatment proved successful; he survived.) Meanwhile, the pestilence sped up the Rhône valley to Lyons, and by June was working its way through Paris itself.

  Wherever it struck, the more pious of the population withdrew to pray; particularly in the major cities of the north, however, the predominant reaction to imminent death seems to have been a feverish and frenetic gaiety. And why not? If God had deserted his people, why should his commandments be obeyed? If their lives were to be so cruelly cut short, let their last days be devoted to pleasure, whether that of the table, the bottle or the bed–or, ideally, all three. In Paris–where such delights have never been undervalued–there seems to have been what amounted to an almost complete breakdown in morality, both private and public.

  Across the length and breadth of the Mediterranean, the story was much the same. In Cyprus, where the onset of the plague coincided with a severe earthquake and tidal wave, it led to a panic-stricken massacre by the landowners of all their Arab slaves, for fear that they might take advantage of the prevailing chaos by staging a revolt. On the Dalmatian coast, the citizens of Salona (Split) had a different hazard to endure: packs of ravening wolves, descending on the city from the mountains and attacking both sick and survivors alike. Such was the mortality that piles of unburied corpses were left in the streets for weeks at a time.

  In Spain, having first appeared in the coastal cities, the plague moved slowly but persistently through the Kingdom of Aragon. Its king, Pedro IV, somehow survived; but he lost first a daughter, then a niece, and finally in October his second wife, Eleanor of Portugal. The scourge then spread, first to the Muslim lands and thence to the army of Castile, at that time engaged in a vigorous campaign of reconquest in the south under the leadership of King Alfonso XI himself. In 1344 he had taken Algeciras; he was now before Gibraltar. The besiegers of the Rock–unlike its defenders–remained unaffected throughout the summer of 1349, but early in March 1350 the dread sickness struck. Alfonso’s generals implored him to withdraw into isolation until it should have run its course, but he refused to leave his men. He died on Good Friday, 26 March, the only ruling monarch to fall victim to the Black Death. Joanna, daughter of Edward III of England, died at Bordeaux on the way to her wedding with Alfonso’s son, Pedro the Cruel. The territory of Castile itself, though it did not escape entirely, certainly got off lightly–thanks, it was widely believed at the time, to the eagerness of the landowning classes to make over their property to the Church. When the emergency was past, it was found that they had done so on such a scale as seriously to upset the economic balance of the country; in 1351 King Pedro I was obliged to order the ecclesiastical authorities to make full restitution of all that they had received.

  The Black Death took a greater toll of life than any known war or epidemic in
previous history. Its effect on international trade was dramatic, but relatively short-lived; more lasting was the alarming reduction of the amount of land under cultivation, owing to the deaths of so many labourers. This compelled the landowners drastically to increase wages, which in turn brought a weakening of the formerly rigid stratification of society as the working people began for the first time to travel about in search of employment or higher pay. In the arts–particularly painting and sculpture–there was a greater preoccupation with death than before; in matters spiritual, the obvious inefficacy of prayer and the powerlessness of the Church against the plague shook the faith of many Christians. After 1350 Europe would never be quite the same again.

  When the Roman Emperor-elect, Lewis IV of Bavaria, marched down into Italy in 1327 for his imperial coronation, it was with an attitude very different to that adopted by his predecessor, Henry of Luxemburg.110 This time there was no idealism, no pretence at impartiality, no nod in the direction of Avignon. Lewis arrived at the invitation of the Ghibellines of Italy, bringing with him the most formidable of all the anti-papalists of his time, Marsilius of Padua. Only two years previously this ex-Rector of the Sorbonne had published his Defensor Pacis, in which he argued that the whole edifice of papal domination and canon law was contrary to the basic principles of Christianity. Such company was unlikely to increase Lewis’s popularity at Avignon, and long before he reached Rome he had incurred a double sentence of excommunication and deposition from Pope John XXII; but by this time the papal prestige in Italy had sunk even lower than the imperial, and the decree went largely unheeded. When Lewis was crowned by Sciarra Colonna, representing the people of Rome, at St Peter’s in January 1328 and three months later formally pronounced the Pope heretic and deposed, it almost looked as though he might re-establish imperial control; but when he advanced south into Neapolitan territory King Robert of Naples, grandson of Charles of Anjou, proved a far more serious adversary. Robert was his military match, and on returning to Rome Lewis found that the pendulum had swung. He realised, too, that he could never hope to establish a stable order in Italy until he was certain of Germany, where the situation was fast deteriorating. The year 1330 saw him back beyond the Alps. He too had learned his lesson: Italy had outgrown imperialism, even if she was not yet ready for a unity of her own making.