Fewer ship remains survive from the east, where there is no indication that the Varangian Rus influenced the construction of native Slav craft, which were built for rivers rather than seas. According to Constantine VII, as part of the tribute due their Kievan overlords, the Slavs built logboats called monoxylon (“single wood”), which could be easily portaged around the ten sets of rapids that interrupted a seventy-kilometer stretch of the Dnieper below Dnipropetrovs’k. Monoxyla could also be rigged; traders would put in to the river in June and when they reached the Black Sea, fitted “such tackle as is needed, sails and masts and rudders, which they bring with them,” before following the coast to the ports of the Bulgar Empire and the Bosporus. Monoxyla were adequate for trade, but they were no match for the Byzantine fleet with its larger ships, better organization, and superior weapons. Nor did the Rus ever develop a blue-water naval capability either on the Black Sea, where they exercised little power, or on the Baltic, where their trade was carried by others.
As the eleventh century drew to a close, the unfettered spirit of the Viking age was clearly spent. Except in Iceland, local chieftains were incapable of maintaining their autonomy against increasingly centralized monarchies and urban centers. While the Norman Conquest of 1066 is often taken as the end of the Viking age, that date applies only to England and France. An event of comparable significance in the east would be the death of Yaroslav the Wise in 1054, after which Kievan Rus adopted an increasingly Byzantine orientation. Coincidentally, this is also the date of the east-west schism in the Christian Church. Iceland was independent from 1000 to 1264, when it was brought under the Norse crown, and in the fifteenth century the Orkney and Shetland Islands passed from Norse to Scottish control and the Greenland settlements died out.
Extensive though the Vikings’ trade was, virtually all of it was in prestige, luxury, or highly specialized items and in this respect it was not unlike that of the Frisians and others who preceded them. With few exceptions there was virtually no bulk commerce in northern Europe before the eleventh century. Farmers lacked the surplus capacity for an export trade and the only agricultural products shipped in bulk with any frequency were wine, that of Burgundy and the Seine being shipped via river and coastal waters to the Rhine delta, and wool. The bulk trades characteristic of the maritime commerce of the later Middle Ages—in grain, fish, and wood, as well as wine—were all but unknown. When population and agricultural and artisanal output began to expand, trade was organized around guilds and free associations of merchants whose use of bigger ships of distinctly novel design forced radical changes in the organization of maritime transportation and the conduct of war at sea. Such adaptations were by no means unique to western Eurasia, and similar approaches to long-distance trade could be found in southern India from where they spread across the Monsoon Seas.
a The exceptions that prove the rule are Agri Decumates, a small province that occupied a triangle of land between the upper Danube and upper Rhine, and Dacia, north of the lower Danube. These were the last provinces established, in 106 ce, and the first abandoned, in the next century.
b In the twelfth century, the inundation of the Aelmere formed the Zuider Zee. In the twentieth century, Dutch engineers enclosed and divided this “Southern Sea” into the Ijsselmeer and Markermeer to protect the Netherlands from further flooding.
c The remains originally identified as Wreck 4 turned out to be part of Wreck 2. This was not discovered until later, and the fourth and fifth ships have always been known as Wrecks 5 and 6.
Chapter 10
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The Silk Road of the Seas
The history of Eurasia in the seventh and subsequent centuries is dominated by the advent of the Muslim caliphates and the resurgence of a unified China, and understandably so. Within little more than a hundred years, Islam was the dominant religion across an arc of Asia and Africa from Portugal to Kazakhstan and the Indus. In Central Asia it butted up against the western border of Tang China, whose armies had simultaneously pushed the Middle Kingdom’s borders west across two thousand miles of desert and steppe. Yet at the very moment of immediate contact, upheaval within the Dar al-Islam and in China directed merchants’ attention away from the silk road across Central Asia to the silk road of the sea. Bustling maritime markets at either end of this maritime trade route from Southwest to Northeast Asia drew merchants and mendicants from around the Monsoon Seas and helped give their respective empires a cosmopolitan flourish. Segments of this commercial network had been in place for hundreds of years, but by the seventh century, mariners on the Monsoon Seas were gaining ever more confidence and expanding the scope of their voyaging, and local rulers in whose territories they stopped, such places as Srivijaya and the Chola kingdom, were able to amass the wealth and prestige necessary to build durable and influential states of their own. So was born a virtuous circle in which the transmission of goods and culture benefited local and regional rulers whose more powerful and stable states in turn drew the attention of merchants from ever greater distances.
Muslim Mariners in the Indian Ocean
At the start of the seventh century, Southwest Asia was divided between the Byzantine and Sasanian Empires. The Byzantines controlled most of Asia Minor, the Levant, and Egypt, while the Sasanians ruled Iran, Iraq, and parts of eastern Asia Minor. On the Arabian Peninsula they controlled the adjacent mainland territory of al-Bahrayn as well as the island of Bahrain and the coast from Kuwait to Qatar; Oman, at the southeast corner of the peninsula; and Yemen, with its port of Aden on the Arabian Sea. Other parts of Arabia lay beyond the reach of imperial rule—the Hejaz, which borders the Red Sea and includes the holy cities of Mecca and Medina; Hadramawt, on the south coast between Yemen and Oman; and Yamana, an inland territory in northern Arabia. Islam’s advance in the east mirrored its westward expansion in speed and extent. In 634, Muslim armies took the great Syrian trading city of Damascus, which became the capital of the caliphate for more than a century, and Persia was conquered in 643, a year after the capture of Alexandria. By the start of the Umayyad Caliphate in 661, Islam held sway across the Arabian Peninsula, Mesopotamia, and eastern Asia Minor, and Muslim armies had advanced into the Caucasus Mountains. East of the Caspian Sea, between 694 and 714 al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf ath-Thaqafi, viceroy of al-Iraq, campaigned into Afghanistan and across the Amu Darya (Oxus River) to the Syr Darya, about 325 kilometers to the north, and many of the Persian and Turkic people of Transoxiana (the heart of modern Uzbekistan) began converting from Zoroastrianism, Buddhism, and Christianity to Islam. Transoxiana was a commercially and strategically important region through which the western approaches to the silk road passed en route to Kashgar and the Taklimakan Desert, where they merged with routes from Afghanistan and India. At midcentury, Muslim expansion into Central Asia slowed. Although Abbasid forces defeated the Chinese at the battle of the Talas River in modern Kazakhstan in 751, Tibetan tribes moving north checked their eastward advance. At the height of their expansionist phase, the Tibetans fought the Chinese and Arabs. Although the Tibetans were eventually contained by Muslim and Chinese armies acting simultaneously, though not in concert, their disruptions forced merchants to exploit more fully the sea routes between the Persian Gulf, India, Southeast Asia, and China.
Muslim armies reached the head of the Persian Gulf in 635, where they established a military encampment at Basra. Within a decade, the Sasanian Empire had fallen, and by the start of the eighth century Islam had spread as far east as the Indus River and its adherents included many Persian and Omani mariners who carried their new religion with them on trade routes that flourished as the Muslim state consolidated. The increase in trade without an accompanying extension of political authority led to an increase in piracy in the Arabian Sea between the Indus delta and Gujarat. In an effort to restore order, the viceroy al-Hajjaj ordered Muslim armies into the Indian subcontinent in 711, a year before Tariq ibn Ziyad landed at Gibraltar to begin the Muslim conquest of the Iberian Peninsula. Although this could be consi
dered a natural extension of al-Hajjaj’s campaign in Transoxiana and Afghanistan, the casus belli was quite specific. According to the ninth-century historian al-Baladhuri,
the king of the island of Rubies [Sri Lanka] sent to al-Hajjaj some women who were born in his country as Moslems, their fathers, who had been merchants, having died. He wanted to court favour with al-Hajjaj by sending them back. But the ship on which they were sailing was attacked by some of the Meds of ad-Daibul [Banbhore, Pakistan] in barks, and was captured with all that was in it.
Al-Hajjaj authorized a series of punitive expeditions the last of which, led by Muhammad ibn-al-Kasim, was reinforced by “ships laden with men, weapons and supplies.” Ibn-al-Kasim conquered the port of Daybul, slew its king, and forced the submission of Sind, an area roughly coterminous with modern Pakistan. Many of the Buddhist inhabitants converted to Islam, and the conquest helped restore order to the shipping routes that skirted northwest India and the coasts of Konkan and Malabar south to Sri Lanka. But Sind would prove the eastern limit of Islam’s territorial expansion in South Asia for three hundred years.
Despite their great progress in spreading Islam, the Umayyad caliphs in Damascus suffered the strains of ancient tribal factions overlaid with theological schisms and tensions between Arab Muslims and foreign converts. Tensions were especially acute between Arabs and Persians, whose cultural and imperial identity had far deeper and broader roots than those of anyone else inundated in this first wave of Arab conquest. When a collateral descendant of Muhammad named Abu al-’Abbas as-Saffah rebelled against the Umayyads, troops from northern Persia supported him and he was proclaimed caliph in 749. Abu al-’Abbas established himself at al-Kufah, on the lower Euphrates, but his brother and successor Abu Jafar al-Mansur erected a new Abbasid capital at Baghdad, on the west bank of the Tigris, in 761–62. The transfer of the administrative machinery of state 750 kilometers east of Damascus spelled the end of Syrian predominance in the Muslim world and turned the caliphate’s focus from the Mediterranean and North Africa to Central Asia and the Indian Ocean, with enormous repercussions for the trade of the Monsoon Seas.
According to the ninth-century geographer al-Yaqubi, the site of Baghdad had been revealed to al-Mansur, who predicted that it would become “a waterfront for the world. Everything that comes on the Tigris [up] from Wasit, al-Basrah, al-Ahwaz, Faris, Uman, al-Yamanah, al-Bahrayn, and the neighboring places, can go up to it and anchor at it. In the same way whatever is carried on boats on the Tigris [down] from Mosul, Diyar Rabiah, Azerbaijan and Armenia, and whatever is carried on boats on the Euphrates from Diyar Mudar, al-Raqqah, Syria, the Frontier, Egypt and North Africa, can come to this terminus and unload here.” A further advantage was that it was easily defended. Two centuries after al-Yaqubi, the geographer al-Muqaddasi recalled the advice given to al-Mansur, which in his rendering noted that Baghdad was “in a place between rivers so that the enemy cannot reach you except by ship, or by bridge, by way of the Tigris or the Euphrates.”
Within fifty years of Baghdad’s founding the population had swollen to perhaps half a million people, making it the largest city in the world outside China; in the west, its nearest rivals were Constantinople, Alexandria, Damascus, and Basra. The city’s swift rise owed much to its location on the Tigris at a point where the river comes to within fifty kilometers of the Euphrates. Here, in central Iraq, it lay astride the continental trade routes between Persia, Central Asia, and India in the east, and Syria, the Mediterranean, and North Africa in the west. The riverbanks were lined with shipping, from round reed quffas sent downriver from the hill country around Mosul, to seagoing ships fresh from voyages on the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean. Canals provided access to the Euphrates and the western trade, while Baghdad was a terminus of the pilgrim road from Mecca in the southwest. Although the capital was nearly five hundred kilometers upriver from the Persian Gulf, the Tigris did open Baghdad to the trade of the Indian Ocean world. So al-Yaqubi could declare: “This is the Tigris; there is no obstacle between us and China; everything on the sea can come to us on it”—a claim that echoes Sargon’s boast about the dock of Akkad, although mariners now sailed farther than Dilmun, Magan, and Meluhha. By the tenth century, Baghdad was possibly the busiest port in the world, while its outports—among which contemporaries counted those of southern Iran and the island of Socotra—were described as “the frontier of India.”
Although their prosperity declined in the final decades of the Sasanian Empire, the Persian Gulf ports of Ubulla, Basra, and Siraf remained active in long-distance trade during the transition from Sasanian to Muslim rule. Al-Baladhuri asserts that before the start of the Islamic era Ubulla was preeminent. As one of two capitals of the Umayyad province of Iraq (the other was al-Kufah), Basra quickly eclipsed Ubulla, although its success owed more to politics than geography. The original military camp was on the site of the ancient Charax Spasinou, but it was fifteen kilometers from the Shatt al-Arab and functioned as a port only thanks to a canal that connected it to Ubulla.a Nonetheless, Basra attracted shipping from around the Muslim world and beyond. Well before it became a port of entry for Baghdad, which was founded more than a century later, Basra flourished in its own right and at its peak during the eighth and ninth centuries it was home to more than two hundred thousand people of many faiths and ethnicities, and it was noted for its manufactures, agriculture (dates in particular), and its vibrant literary, artistic, and religious communities.
Basra’s primary rival was Siraf, on the Persian shore about 375 miles from the head of the gulf. Founded by the fourth-century Sasanian king Shapur II, Siraf had a spacious roadstead that accommodated deeper-draft ships more easily than the ports of the northern gulf, but it was situated in an otherwise hostile environment subject to extreme heat and lacking sufficient water to sustain a large population, much less agriculture. The latter problem was overcome by the construction of cisterns and freshwater canals that fed luxuriant gardens cultivated by the wealthy merchant elite, which prospered from the trade of Baghdad and of Shiraz, the capital of the Persian province of Fars 225 kilometers to the northeast. The port’s praises were sung by geographers and historians throughout the Abbasid era, and with good reason: its merchants could be found sailing as far as China, while they imported teak and other woods from India and East Africa for constructing houses, mosques, ships, and navigation towers called khashabs. Comparing Siraf with Shiraz, the tenth-century Persian geographer al-Istakhri noted, “Siraf nearly equaled Shiraz in size and splendour; the houses were built of teakwood brought from the Zanj country [East Africa] and were several stories high, built to overlook the sea.”
The Abbasids blazed brilliantly for barely a century before rebels and autonomous governors on the periphery of the caliphate began challenging Baghdad’s rule. Closer to home, the caliphate faced dissent across the social spectrum, from merchants to slaves. As in many states with a substantial slave population, the caliphates were plagued by uprisings. The earliest revolts occurred in the 680s, but Zanj unrest culminated in a fourteen-year insurrection (869–883) that began as a revolt rooted in economic grievance but quickly metastasized into an assault on the authority of the caliph in which hundreds of thousands—more than half a million in some estimates—died. The Zanj received support from Persian Gulf merchants who resented the caliphate’s interference in their trade. Together they seized Ubulla, Abadan, and, in 871, Basra, the fall of which was the government’s biggest defeat. Basra’s loss benefited Siraf, Suhar, and other ports over which the Abbasids exerted only nominal control—and sometimes none at all—and which were quick to capitalize on Baghdad’s weakness.
In the tenth century, the Abbasid caliphs were reduced to the status of puppets under the political control of Persian Shiite emirs called Buyids who exercised almost absolute power at Baghdad and along both shores of the Persian Gulf. The rise of the Buyids coincided with the Fatimids’ relocation from Ifriqiya to Cairo and the ensuing revival of the Red Sea trade, which had been seconda
ry to that of the Persian Gulf since the end of Byzantine Egypt. In 976, Siraf was wracked by a weeklong series of earthquakes. This was not a defining event in and of itself, but it was a portent of the gulf’s commercial decline. Seljuq Turk invaders from Central Asia captured Shiraz in 1062 but established their capital at Isfahan, 750 kilometers north of Siraf, and took little interest in maritime trade. Unrest in southern Persia, the consequent emergence of a pirate state on the island of Kish in the Strait of Hormuz, and the continued growth of the Red Sea ports under the Fatimids all conspired to make the Persian Gulf less attractive to merchants.
At first blush it seems paradoxical that the Muslim capture of Egypt in the seventh century did not lead to an increase in traffic on the Red Sea, apart from the pilgrim and grain trade to Mecca. The Nile and Red Sea had been vital avenues for exchange between the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean since antiquity, but the establishment of Baghdad made the Persian Gulf the primary terminus of trade from the western Indian Ocean. Such commerce as flowed through the Red Sea before the Fatimid revival was in the hands of Persian Gulf mariners frequenting Jeddah and Aden where by the ninth century one could find “all the merchandise of Sind, Hind, China, Zanzibar, Abyssinia, Fars [Persia], Basra, Jiddah, and Kulzum.” In 646 the Orthodox caliph Uthman had designated Jeddah as the port of Mecca, about seventy-five kilometers to the southeast. Surrounded by salt flats and reefs through which ships can enter only via a narrow entrance, Jeddah was nonetheless one of the most important harbors in the Muslim world, especially during the hajj, when the bulk of grain and other supplies for the pilgrims—and in some periods a majority of the pilgrims themselves—came by sea via Qulzum (the ancient Clysma, now Suez). It was also a major entrepôt for goods bound to or from Egypt because it was more dangerous and less profitable for Indian Ocean ships to sail north of Jeddah. Red Sea traffic increased with the rejuvenation of Egypt’s commercial prosperity, and again after the Seljuqs captured the Sinai in the 1060s. With the normal overland route from North Africa to Mecca impassable, prospective hajjis traveling via Egypt embarked on a three-stage journey that took them by boat up the Nile to Qus or Aswan, where they joined a camel caravan that took three weeks to reach the humble port of Aydhab, which had a permanent population of only about five hundred. Aydhab’s shipmasters charged extortionate fares for the 150-mile passage to Jeddah as well as for any provisions pilgrims might be forced to buy. But the Aswan–Aydhab–Jeddah route remained practicable until the first Mamluk sultan of Egypt overthrew the crusader states of Palestine and in 1267/68 reopened the Sinai route to Mecca.
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