The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World

by Paine, Lincoln

  Faced with the growing problems of governing a sprawling empire, in 293 Diocletian divided the rule of the Roman Empire between two co-emperors, a move that ultimately led to the division of the state into eastern (Greek) and western (Latin) halves. The outer limits of the empire were seldom peaceful, and the so-called Pax Romana was a fiction. The Roman peace was enforced by pacification, all but endless warfare against barbarian tribes to the north, west, and south, and against more highly developed states of ancient lineage in the east. Rome’s security depended on the strength of the empire’s long, heavily fortified borders, especially along the Rhine and Danube Rivers. Ultimately, the armies and bureaucracy upon which the state relied proved unaffordable and unreliable, and probes by Germanic tribes climaxed with the Barbarian Migrations of the fourth and fifth centuries.

  For conservative contemporaries, a ready explanation for Rome’s problems was the rise of Christianity, which grew despite official persecution and internal schisms. The fates of religion and the empire were joined by Constantine, whose troops proclaimed him emperor of the west in 306. Six years later, he converted to Christianity, and in 324 he defeated his co-emperor, Licinius, at the battle of the Hellespont. This was the first major fleet engagement in the Mediterranean in 350 years. Constantine had 200 triaconters and penteconters against 350 triremes under Licinius. Whether Constantine’s victory was due to better commanders, who may have deployed only part of their fleet to ensure freedom of maneuver in the narrows, or to a storm that drove Licinius’s ships ashore on the second day of the battle, the defeat broke Licinius, who shortly thereafter was captured and executed.

  Constantine established his capital at Byzantium, which was officially renamed Constantinople in 330 and eventually became the sole capital of the empire known as Rum (Rome) to contemporaries, and as the Byzantine Empire by later writers. Situated on a peninsula at the southern end of the Bosporus where it meets the Sea of Marmara, Constantinople (now Istanbul) was at a major crossroads of trade and communication between Asia and Europe and the Black Sea and Mediterranean, and it was the first major European capital founded in a port. A major consideration in the choice of Constantinople was its geographical setting, which offered “the quiet shelter of harbours to navigators,” especially along the Golden Horn, a four-mile inlet north of the peninsula that provided “anchorage throughout its whole extent.” As important, there was more than enough waterfront to accommodate the merchant and naval shipping of the commercial, political, and economic center of empire. Just as all roads once led to Rome, all sea-lanes now led to the Byzantine capital. Growth was rapid, and by the sixth-century reign of Justinian I greater Constantinople was home to an estimated eight hundred thousand people. Even after the coming of Islam in the seventh century and the rise of the Italian maritime republics in the eleventh, Constantinople’s size and strategic location guaranteed its place in the first rank of European and Mediterranean cities.

  Within half a century of the founding of the new capital, barbarian tribes were overrunning the empire’s Rhine-Danube frontier and setting in train a series of events that would lead to the loss of the western empire and the rise of new states from Britain to North Africa. Visigoths crossed the Danube and sacked Rome in 410. Emperor Honorius was forced to withdraw the last Roman legions from Britain and enlisted Visigothic help in pushing the Vandals into Spain. In 429, Gaeseric led the Vandals across the Strait of Gibraltar into North Africa from where they became the first power to contest Rome’s control of the Mediterranean in five hundred years. Settling in rich but weakly defended Carthage, the Vandals took to the sea and established themselves in the Balearics, Corsica, and Sardinia, where they were well positioned to attack the Italian mainland, Illyria, and Greece. In 455, Gaeseric plundered Rome without retribution, and in 476 the last western emperor was banished to the Neapolitan villa built by the Roman general Lucullus after the Mithridatic Wars.

  By the start of the sixth century, the north coast of the Mediterranean was divided among the Byzantines, the Ostrogoths of northern Italy, the Visigothic kingdom of Toulouse in southwest France, and Vandal Spain. Byzantine relations with the Ostrogoths were generally good, but just as he sought to undermine Persian supremacy in the trade of the Indian Ocean, Justinian was eager to reassert imperial authority in the west to protect maritime commerce against the Vandals and Visigoths. In 533 Justinian’s general Belisarius sailed with ninety-two warships and five hundred transports to seize North Africa and Sardinia and in a single battle brought the Vandal kingdom to an end. Turning next to Ostrogothic Italy, Belisarius captured Sicily, Naples, and Rome before bogging down in the face of stiff resistance and Justinian’s refusal to send reinforcements, in part because he feared Belisarius’s popularity. By midcentury, however, the Byzantines had regained Italy, Sicily, and the coast of Visigothic Spain, including the Guadalquivir River ports of Seville and Córdoba, and Ceuta, across the Strait of Gibraltar. Apart from western North Africa and the Frankish and Visigothic coast from Saguntum to the Italian border, the Mediterranean littoral was again under a single rule. But the Byzantines’ comparatively strong commercial and naval presence in the Mediterranean was scant compensation for its weakness on land and their imperial revival was brief. By the early 600s, the Lombards from central Europe had overrun much of Italy, the Avars were camped at the gates of Constantinople, and in 624 the Visigoths expelled the Byzantines from Spain for the last time. Yet none of the new western powers was inclined to harness the maritime potential of the territories they controlled, which enabled the Byzantines to maintain sea-links to their central Mediterranean territories.

  Ideology and Conflict

  Maritime commerce carried Judaism, Christianity, and Islam around the Mediterranean, just as sea trade facilitated the spread of Buddhism from India and Sri Lanka to Southeast Asia and China. While religion could unite people across broad regions, sectarianism frequently undermined religious bonds. Christianity was the official religion of the Byzantine state, but highly politicized doctrinal differences led to persecution of Coptic and Nestorian Christians. As a result, when Sasanian Persia invaded the Levant in the 610s, Copts and Nestorians found the more tolerant Persian rule preferable to that of their fellow Christians in Constantinople. The Sasanians captured Damascus, Antioch, Jerusalem, and Alexandria, and in 626 they were encamped at Chalcedon (Kadiköy, Turkey), across the Bosporus from Constantinople. This proved the high-water mark of their advance. Three years later, the Byzantines seized the Persian capital at Ctesiphon on the Tigris, while their fleet reoccupied the ports of Syria and Egypt. With the defeat of the Sasanians, the Byzantines remained the largest and most coherent state in the Mediterranean basin.

  All but unnoticed in the struggle between the rival empires was the emergence of the prophet Muhammad, whose followers seized the great inland trading city of Damascus in 635 before overwhelming a Byzantine army at the battle of the Yarmuk River (between Jordan and Syria), thereby releasing the Semitic peoples of the Levant from nearly a thousand years of alien Hellenistic-Roman-Byzantine rule. Turning east, the Arabs captured Ctesiphon and by 642 Arab armies had reached the borders of greater India, a conquest worthy of Alexander and with far more enduring results. To the west, Amr ibn al-As established Fustat (later Cairo) at the head of the Nile delta and took the port of Alexandria.

  The capture of Mediterranean ports gave the Arabs access to ships and experienced mariners, which enabled them to attack the Byzantines by sea. Initially, the caliphs focused on conquering Byzantine territories around the eastern Mediterranean basin. Occupying Egypt and Syria, with their ports and naval professionals, made it possible to attack Cyprus and Constantinople itself. At the end of the century, Umayyad armies took the Byzantine province of Africa, which they called Ifriqiya and which became the point of departure for expansion into western North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula. Sicily was conquered in the ninth century, around the same time that exiles from al-Andalus established an independent emirate on Crete. Common to a
ll these developments was the replacement of Christian rulers by Muslim ones; but the Christian and Muslim worlds were both rent by political rivalries and confessional schisms that created ample opportunity for cooperation between Christians, Muslims, and Jews.

  Muslim maritime expansion began in 648 when, sailing at the head of a fleet of seventeen hundred ships, the governor of Egypt, Muawiya ibn Abi Sufyan, secured an annual indemnity from the people of Cyprus. When they lent ships to the Byzantines seven years later, he captured the island and in so doing touched off the first naval conflict between the empire and caliphate. Following the loss of Cyprus, Emperor Constans II marshaled a fleet of seven hundred to a thousand ships to seize the port of Phoenix, on the Lycian coast north of Cyprus. Surviving accounts of the engagement are often contradictory, yet on one point all agree: the Muslims scored a stunning victory at the battle of the Masts (Dhat al-Sawari), which Christian authors refer to as the battle of Phoenix. The outcome proved that Muslims could fight at sea; but domestic struggles within the caliphate prevented them from following up until after Muawiya became the first Umayyad caliph.

  In 678, the Umayyads initiated a decadelong siege of Constantinople during which they occupied a naval base on the Sea of Marmara but were unable to capture the Byzantine capital. The agreement ending the siege resulted in the demilitarization of Cyprus and obliged the Cypriots to remain neutral in any conflict between empire and caliphate. The island became a way station for merchants, passengers, naval fleets, and spies. Although the Cypriots remained Christian and in theory neutral, the island’s ambiguous status gave Muslim commanders a strategic advantage against the Byzantines, as both Muslim and Christian authors alike recognized. In his Taktika of around 900 the emperor Leo VI notes that “When the barbarians from Egypt and Syria and Cilicia are gathering for an expedition against the Romans [that is, the Byzantines], the commanders of the naval provinces must proceed with their squadron to Cyprus.” A tenth-century Arabic writer concurred, noting that the first stage of any naval expedition against the Byzantines was a rendezvous in Cypriot waters. Cyprus remained subject to condominium rule until the resumption of full Byzantine authority in 965.

  Even before the campaigns against Constantinople, Muslim armies had swept across North Africa—Bilad al-Maghrib, or Lands of the Sunset—as far as Ifriqiya.a In 695, Carthage fell to an Arab army but the new governor decided that the port was too exposed to attack from the sea and founded a new one in nearby Tunis, an almost impregnable site located on a lake separated from the sea by a narrow isthmus across which the Arabs dug a channel. The Byzantines made no attempt to retake Carthage due to domestic unrest at Constantinople, where seven emperors ruled between 695 and 717, when the Umayyads launched a major invasion. Their progress was unbroken until the ascension of Leo III, “the Isaurian,” who raised the walls at Constantinople, laid up supplies, and strung a chain across the mouth of the Golden Horn, the first time such a measure is known to have been taken there. Even with a fleet of eighteen hundred ships and a large army, the Umayyads were unable to block Constantinople’s access to the Black Sea granaries and they were forced to abandon the siege.

  The failure against Constantinople did not deter the Umayyad advance across North Africa. Following the establishment of Tunis, Musa ibn Nusayr led an Arab-Berber army to Tangier, and in 711 an army of twelve thousand under Tariq ibn Ziyad crossed the Strait of Gibraltar to land near the rock named in his honor, Jabal Tarik, or Gibraltar. Musa and Tarik pushed their armies north to the Tagus River, Toledo, Tarragona, and Barcelona, and established the capital of al-Andalus at Seville, about eighty-five kilometers up the Guadalquivir from the Atlantic. Although Córdoba became the capital forty years later, Seville remained a major commercial port and naval base under Muslim and, from the thirteenth century, Christian rule for nine hundred years. Remote as it was, al-Andalus was one of the first parts of the Muslim world to break decisively with the political authority of the caliphate. When Abu al-’Abbas as-Saffah established the Abbasid Caliphate in 750, he murdered most members of the Umayyad house except for Abd al-Rahman I, who fled west and founded the independent Umayyad Emirate of al-Andalus. Even without this overt split, al-Andalus was destined to follow a distinct historical arc thanks to its being the Muslim state with the most immediate and prolonged contact with Latin Europe, its position astride the Strait of Gibraltar, its encounter with Viking raiders, and its largely hostile relations with Ifriqiya and Muslim Sicily.

  Muslim forces first raided Sicily in 652, but the island was not hotly contested until the first half of the eighth century, when Ifriqiyan ships began raiding Sicily, Sardinia, and the Balearic Islands. At the end of the eighth century, Charlemagne responded to an appeal from the Balearics for help against Moorish attacks and for thirty years the archipelago was a base for Frankish ships patrolling between Italy, Sardinia, Barcelona, and the Frankish coast. The Franks’ interest in northern Italy accelerated following their overthrow of the Lombard kingdom, and Charlemagne’s attempt to incorporate Venice into his territories brought them into conflict with the Byzantines in 806. Nominally subject to Constantinople, Venetian merchants were eager to trade with the Franks, and a treaty of 812 confirmed Venice’s status as Byzantine territory while allowing its citizens to trade with the Franks and obliging them to support the Franks against pirates in the northern Adriatic. Under the de facto protection of the two great powers, Venetian naval and commercial power grew steadily.

  Although drawn ten centuries after Muslim armies under Tariq ibn Ziyad crossed from Ceuta, North Africa, to the rock named for him—Jabal Tarik—Carel Allard’s “The Bay and Strait of Gibraltar” clearly shows Gibraltar’s commanding position at the Mediterranean’s only outlet to the Atlantic Ocean. Allard’s map and its inserts illustrate the capture of the port by an Anglo-Dutch fleet in August 1704, during the War of the Spanish Succession. The insets depict a view of the rock of Gibraltar (top left); a map of southern Spain and North Africa (lower right); and a naval battle (below). Courtesy of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

  Frankish-Byzantine rivalry and the scaling back of the Byzantine naval presence in the west to deal with a Bulgar threat on the Black Sea opened the way for Ifriqiyan expansion in Sicily. In 800, the Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid had appointed Ibrahim I ibn al-Aghlab emir of Ifriqiya, the first of the autonomous Aghlabid emirs who would rule for a century. One of Ibrahim’s priorities was creating a fleet to protect Ifriqiya’s trade. The year after the resolution of the Venetian crisis, the Byzantine strategos of Sicily reached an agreement with Muslim ambassadors to ensure the rights of merchants in each other’s ports, and somewhat later the rulers of Christian Naples asked for Aghlabid support against the neighboring duchy of Benevento. The first Muslim forces on the Italian Peninsula raided Naples’s enemies on both coasts, gained control of the Strait of Otranto, and sent a fleet as far north as the mouth of the Po River and Istria (modern Slovenia), opposite Venice.

  The Aghlabids began raiding Sicily in the 820s but they did not establish a foothold on the island until invited to support a revolt by the Byzantine naval commander. An expeditionary force of seventy to a hundred ships and ten thousand troops sailed from Tunis in the summer of 829 and two years later the Aghlabids captured Palermo, which, renamed al-Madinah, became the capital, primary naval base, and commercial center of the new emirate. The conquest of the island took the rest of the century—Syracuse fell in 878, Taormina in 902—during which the Aghlabids continued their offensive in the Adriatic. Their 866 siege of Ragusa (Dubrovnik, Croatia) was thwarted by the unanticipated arrival of a hundred Byzantine ships that reached the Adriatic via the ancient diolkos over the Isthmus of Corinth, presumably to avoid Cretan and Aghlabid fleets in the Aegean and Strait of Otranto. Over the next three decades, Byzantine, Carolingian, and Aghlabid forces vied for control of southern Italy and the Adriatic, but by the early tenth century the Strait of Messina was the effective line of demarcation between Muslim Sicily and Christian Italy. Lying as they did o
n the front lines between the Aghlabids and Byzantines, Naples, Amalfi, and other southern Italian ports went out of their way to avoid hostilities with Muslim Sicily. With their long-standing trading privileges at Constantinople, between the ninth and eleventh centuries the merchants of Amalfi leveraged their city’s neutrality and its central location to become middlemen between the kingdoms of western Europe, Muslim North Africa—especially Egypt—and the Byzantine Empire. Amalfitans were “renowned across nearly the whole world,” while the port itself was celebrated as a meeting place of “Arabs, Libyans, Sicilians and Africans” and regarded as “the most prosperous town in Lombardy, the most noble, the most illustrious on account of its conditions, the most affluent and opulent.”

  In one view, Muslim power in the Mediterranean reached the high-water mark at the start of the tenth century, when one or another emirate or caliphate occupied in whole or part Cyprus, Crete, Sicily, Malta, the Balearics, and, in the Aegean, Paros and Naxos in the Cyclades north of Crete, Aegina near Athens, and Nea off the Dardanelles. Of the major Mediterranean islands, only Corsica remained subject to Christian princes. Yet while the Dar al-Islam had grown, Muslims were no more unified than Christians, a point of special relevance with respect to the naval balance of power in the Mediterranean. In the west, the Umayyads ruled in Spain, and augmented their gains by capturing the Balearics, which would remain under Muslim rule for three centuries. Several smaller emirates ruled over Morocco, while the Aghlabid governors of Ifriqiya exercised considerable freedom of action in North Africa and on Malta and Sicily. Farther east, the emirate of Crete was beholden to no one, and Cyprus was held in common with the Byzantines, while on the mainland the Tulunids ruled Egypt from 868 to 905.

  Within barely half a century, the picture had changed irrevocably as the Abbasid Caliphate fractured along sectarian lines. Syria was lost to the Shiite Hamdanids of Iraq in 906, Ifriqiya to the Shiite Fatimids three years later, and Egypt, for the second time, to the short-lived Ikhshidids (935–969), who were, like the Abbasids, Sunni. To the west, meanwhile, Abd al-Rahman III made a definitive break with the rest of the Muslim world by styling himself caliph, or successor to Muhammad, rather than emir, a mere commander or prince. The Umayyad Caliphate of Córdoba did not long survive him, and by the end of the century political power in al-Andalus and the Balearics had devolved on some thirty independent statelets called taifas. Of all these developments the most consequential was the emergence of the Fatimids, who toppled the Aghlabids in Ifriqiya and Sicily. In 921, they founded a new capital about ninety miles south of Tunis at the port of Mahdia, which became a staging ground for raids on Italy, France, Spain, and islands from Malta to the Balearics. They went on to conquer Egypt and much of the Levant, and their new capital at Cairo (al-Qahira, “the triumphant,” established in 969) quickly eclipsed Baghdad as the commercial and political center of the Muslim world, with profound effects for trade in the Mediterranean and on the Monsoon Seas. Despite this relocation of the center of power in the Muslim world from the head of the Persian Gulf and Baghdad to the eastern Mediterranean, and the Fatimids’ maritime orientation while in Ifriqiya, on the sea-lanes of the Mediterranean the rise of Fatimid Egypt resulted not in triumph but catastrophe.