The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World

by Paine, Lincoln

  Following the battle of Dan-no-ura, power devolved on the Minamoto clan. Although the Minamoto shoguns gradually usurped many of the emperor’s prerogatives and wielded the real power in the land, the emperor and shogun remained distinct sources of influence, the former based in the capital at Kyoto, the latter in Kamakura. These multiple centers of authority fostered trade within Japan as well as with Korea and China. So great was the latter that a local Chinese history of 1259 made the exaggerated claim that “Lined up stern to bow, the Japanese cross the stormy sea and come to sell their merchandise” at Mingzhou. This commercial revival was fueled in part by the start of a money economy, the medium of which was copper cash imported from China; the Japanese did not begin to distribute their own coinage until the late 1500s. The development of financial instruments facilitated the transfer of funds between merchants, while artisans’ guilds—for sake brewers, cotton weavers, and moneylenders, among others—gave tradesmen and merchants a standing previously denied them. By the end of the fifteenth century, it is estimated that the volume of trade on Japan’s Inland Sea was equal to that of the Baltic in the same period, although the Baltic is forty times larger.

  The Mongols began seeking Japanese acknowledgment of their hegemony before the final elimination of Song resistance but without success. In 1266, Qubilai Khan sent an emissary to ensure Japan’s recognition of his supreme authority, only to be rebuffed. The obvious springboard for a punitive invasion was the Korean Peninsula, which the Mongols had conquered in the course of six campaigns between 1231 and 1270. Against the advice of the Koreans, who had no interest in fighting the Japanese, Qubilai ordered the construction of an invasion fleet. Korean resisters appealed for support to the Japanese, who dithered, and the invasion sailed in November 1274. In the traditional telling, the Mongol invasion included thirty to forty thousand soldiers and sailors; a more conservative estimate is that the Mongol host numbered only two or three thousand, and that they were met by a comparable force of Japanese warriors. The Mongols landed near Hakata on Kyushu, but after several battles they decided to return home. Their withdrawal coincided with a storm, although Chinese and Japanese sources differ as to its significance. The Mongols emphasized the power of the typhoon, thereby shifting the blame for their defeat to divine intervention, but Japanese writers mention the storm only in passing and none attributes it to the gods.

  While alarming, the Mongol invasion did not overawe the Japanese, who simultaneously began planning for a retaliatory invasion of Korea and erecting a coastal wall to forestall any future landings. They abandoned the Korean adventure, but the wall proved its worth when the Mongols invaded a second time in 1281. Again, tradition tells of an armada that embarked a hundred thousand or more soldiers and sailors, although a force of only ten thousand has also been suggested. Sailing from Korea, the Yuan force quickly overran the islands of Tsushima and Ike but could find no suitable landing place near Hakata because of the wall. A second fleet arrived from China about two months after the advance force, but the invaders were restricted in their movements and under constant harassment from the Japanese, who attacked them in their ships and on the islands. According to both Japanese and Mongol accounts, the Mongol fleet was partially destroyed by a typhoon as it prepared to sail away. However, the only writers to describe this phenomenon as a kamikaze, or “divine wind,” are Japanese courtiers and the term does not appear in accounts by participants in the actual fighting.

  Japanese vessels were probably much smaller than their Chinese counterparts and played a commensurately minor role in forestalling the Yuan fleet. At the battle of Dan-no-ura during the Genpei War, the Heike were said to have had “a few large Chinese-type vessels,” but there is no indication of what that means, and most of their vessels were likely small boats with as few as ten crew. Illustrations in the narrative scrolls of Takezaki Suenaga, a Japanese veteran of the Yuan invasions, show obvious differences between Chinese and Japanese vessels, as well as between the Korean oarsmen and Mongol warriors. The foreign vessels are decked, with oarports below, while the Japanese have open boats paddled or poled by crew in a standing position. None of the Chinese or Japanese vessels is depicted with masts or sails, but all have squared ends fore and aft, and centerline rudders. There is no way to judge the actual size of the vessels shown in the Takezaki scrolls, but it is unlikely that Japanese ships had a capacity of more than thirty tons (about fifteen meters long) before the mid-1300s. According to records of the port of Hyogo, only six of the sixteen hundred ships that called there a century on were greater than a hundred tons, perhaps a third the capacity of thirteenth-century Chinese merchantmen.

  Qubilai continued to press for the subjugation of Japan, but his attention soon turned to Southeast Asia, the scene of the Yuan’s most audacious maritime undertaking: an invasion of Java, twentyfive hundred miles from China. As was the case with Japan, Dai Viet, and other continental neighbors, Qubilai’s intent was to be recognized as overlord. That Java should be singled out for such consideration was an acknowledgment of its having become the primary carrier of the spice trade of the eastern Indonesian archipelago and its potential to threaten ships transiting the Strait of Malacca. In 1222, a local chief named Ken Angrok had usurped the throne of the Javanese kingdom of Kadiri (1045–1222) and founded the East Java kingdom of Singhasari. Ambitious successors capitalized on his consolidation of power and began an aggressive policy of overseas expansion, a process that would reach its apogee with the kingdom of Majapahit (1293–1528).

  Java was ideally situated to dominate the trade of island Southeast Asia. Its large rice surpluses gave it a valuable crop to trade with the Spice Islands, which were isolated from foreign traders by the Javanese fleet and commercial policies and by the monsoons. Java did not exercise effective control over the Strait of Malacca, which was exposed to attack by raiders from the region between Pagan and the Khmer Empire. Yet, Yuan officials considered Singhasari’s ambitious King Kertanagara a grave threat to the free transit of the strait. The Chinese belief that Java had a commanding hold on the trade of Southeast Asia is borne out by Marco Polo’s description, based on hearsay rather than firsthand observation: “The treasure in the island is beyond all computation. It is from this island that the merchants of Zaiton [Quanzhou] and Manzi [southern China] in general have derived and continue to derive a great part of their wealth, and this is the source of most of the spice that comes into the world’s markets.” Although it is unlikely that he sought to govern neighboring Sumatra, Kertanagara was probably just as eager as the Chinese to prevent the rise of rivals.

  In 1289, Yuan envoys sent to Java to discuss these matters returned from Kertanagara’s court with their faces disfigured and tattooed. In retaliation, Qubilai dispatched an expedition said to number twenty thousand soldiers. Anticipating this, Kertanagara ordered his fleet to intercept the Mongols, which they failed to do. In the meantime, Kertanagara was killed by Kadiri rivals, and when the Yuan forces reached Java, his son-in-law and heir, Raden Vijaya, promised to make himself a vassal of the Khan in exchange for their help avenging Kertanagara’s death. The combined Mongol-Javanese force conquered Kadiri, whereupon Raden Vijaya turned on his erstwhile allies and expelled them. Raden Vijaya founded the kingdom of Majapahit with his capital at Trowulan, on the Brantas River about fifty-five kilometers southeast of modern Surabaya. For the next two and a half centuries, Majapahit remained the dominant maritime trading power in Indonesian waters and exerted some degree of hegemony over much of the archipelago. According to the fourteenth-century History of the Kings of Pasai, written in northern Sumatra, “People in vast numbers thronged [Majapahit]…. There was a ceaseless coming and going of people from the territories overseas which had submitted to the king. From the east they came from the Banda Islands, from Seram … bringing their offerings of beeswax, sandalwood, massoia bark, cinnamon, cloves and nutmeg piled in heaps.”b With almost exclusive access to the Spice Islands, Majapahit prospered on the strength of expanding demand for spices
in East Asia, the Near East, and Europe.

  The Yuan may have lost, but the twenty thousand Chinese—a substantial number of whom may have remained in Southeast Asia as prisoners or deserters—introduced copper cash into the Javanese economy. Although the Javanese had struck gold and silver coins as early as the eighth century, in the years following the Yuan expedition the use of cash spread across the archipelago as far as the Philippines. China exercised considerable influence on political and commercial developments elsewhere in Southeast Asia as well. Yuan campaigns in northern Myanmar and Vietnam weakened the kingdoms of Pagan, Angkor, and Dai Viet and facilitated the growth of the Tai states. These in turn attracted the interest of Chinese merchants who became instrumental in the founding of the kingdom of Ayutthaya (1351–1767) on an island in the Chao Phraya River above modern Bangkok. Ayutthaya’s prosperity depended on a combination of Tai military ability, the appropriation of Angkorean administrative techniques, control of extensive agricultural and resources from the north, and the commercial advantages that came from easy access to maritime trade.

  The Yuan campaigns are notable for their aggressive ambition, and as is the case with naval campaigns generally, the logistical challenge of sending so many men and ships such great distances cannot fail to impress, even if the outcome fell short of the mark. These amphibious operations are not the only manifestation of the Yuan Dynasty’s exploitation of the sea, however. More notable in many respects was Qubilai Khan’s decision, in 1292, to send a Yuan princess betrothed to the Ilkhan of Persia not by land, as one would expect of heirs to the steppes at the height of the Pax Mongolica, but by sea. Fourteen ships were required for her entourage, which included the Venetian Marco Polo, who was returning home with his father and uncle after a quarter century in China. The prosperity and security of the Monsoon Seas at the end of the thirteenth century is obvious not only from the fact that Qubilai Khan entrusted the agent of an important matrimonial alliance to a fleet of ships. Equally telling, Marco Polo’s account of his passage home, which lasted twenty-one months, takes up about a quarter of The Travels. This was one of the most popular books in Europe in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries and because its account of the ports of the Indian Ocean and China Seas was the most detailed guide available, it served as a vade mecum for the pioneers of Europe’s age of expansion.

  The Written Sea

  Polo’s account was one of the first descriptions of Asia or the Indian Ocean to appear in any European language in the eight hundred years since Cosmas Indicopleustes visited Sri Lanka a century before the rise of Islam, and it ignited an inextinguishable curiosity about the east. Europeans’ collective ignorance of places remote from their immediate experience—essentially anything east or south of the Black and Mediterranean Seas—was greater than that of other people with whom they shared the Eurasian landmass. Yet Polo’s curiosity was characteristic of the spirit of the age, and around this time there was an outpouring of descriptive writing about the wider world by peripatetic authors from places as far-flung as Christian Europe, Moorish Spain, Morocco, Persia, and China.

  During the four centuries of the Song and Yuan Dynasties, Chinese knowledge about maritime Asia grew faster than at any time before or since. There is a venerable tradition of Chinese writing about the Nanhai, but the growth in sea trade with the south during the Song was a catalyst for the systematic acquisition and description of geographic and economic knowledge, as exemplified in such works as Zhao Rugua’s Description of Barbarous Peoples (or Records of Foreign Nations), written around 1225. The head of the shibosi at Quanzhou, Zhao Rugua had access to earlier geographical texts and dynastic histories, but thanks to his official position in what was probably the busiest port in the world, he was uniquely situated to report on China’s imports and exports, and the places her trade originated, and he is the first Chinese author to describe various parts of Africa, Southwest Asia, and the Mediterranean. Zhao’s work consists of a gazetteer of places and a glossary of goods. The latter details forty-three types of commodities, most of them raw materials, from camphor and frankincense to precious woods, spices, and animal products such as ivory, rhinoceros horn, and beeswax. The remainder are manufactured goods such as glass from India and “several of the countries of the Dashi [Arabs],” rattan mats from the Philippines, and both raw and finished cotton. Originally cultivated in India, by the late twelfth century cotton was grown in Hainan, Indo-China, the Philippines, and Indonesia. The gazetteer describes forty-six places with which China traded, either directly or indirectly, or otherwise known to Zhao Rugua. These range from the “Countries in the Sea” such as Japan, the Philippines, and Borneo, to the more distant countries of Southeast Asia, the Indian Ocean, and its tributary seas from Baghdad to the Somali coast, and a number of Mediterranean ports and regions including Alexandria, Sicily, and Andalusia.

  Although a handful of Christian emissaries and Italian merchants traded along the silk road across Mongol-dominated Asia, for most European Christians traveling east posed insurmountable problems. Not the least of these were the expense and difficulty of navigating the alien religion and languages of the Dar al-Islam, which stretched from the shores of the Atlantic to India, and beyond which there were Muslim communities on all the major land and sea routes to China. The most intrepid author to have taken advantage of this was the peripatetic Moroccan Ibn Battuta, who between 1325 and 1354 traveled from Tangier to China. Along the way he took side trips from the Red Sea to Mombasa, toured the most important western Indian ports, and served as a qadi (judge) in the Maldives, whose people had recently converted from Buddhism to Islam. From there he continued east to China via Sri Lanka and the Strait of Malacca. In an astonishing “small world” moment, Ibn Battuta writes that his host in Fuzhou asked him to receive a fellow merchant and

  when we conversed after our formal greetings it occurred to me that I knew him. I looked at him for a long time. He said: “I see you looking at me as though you knew me.” I said: “Which country are you from?” He said: “From Ceuta.” I said: “I am from Tangier.” He greeted me again and wept and I wept too. I said: “Have you been to India?” He said: “Yes, I have been to the capital Dihli.” When he said that to me I remembered him and said: “Are you al-Bushri!” He said: “Yes.”

  This chance meeting of compatriots from the Atlantic coast of Morocco in a port city on the Pacific coast of China nearly nine thousand sea miles away testifies to the scale and scope of the maritime networks that already bridged the seas of Africa and Eurasia centuries before the age of European expansion.

  Ibn Battuta, Marco Polo, and other travelers and geographers were no less conscious observers and recorders of the world than al-Masudi, Buzurg ibn Shahriyar, or Herodotus. They are well attuned to different cultures and cultural differences, but their works offer little insight into the day-to-day life of the merchant seafarers whose enterprise maintained the lines of communication strung the length of Eurasia in the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. The closest we can come to looking into the mind and business practices of the medieval seafaring merchant in the Indian Ocean, and the Mediterranean, is through the letters of the Cairo Geniza.

  Because Jewish tradition forbids the destruction of papers containing the name of God, hoards of documents and letters written by members of the Jewish commercial network centered on Cairo in the eleventh and twelfth centuries were secreted in the geniza (storeroom) of a synagogue. This correspondence occasionally alludes to storms and problems obtaining food for a passage—seafaring passengers were usually responsible for their own food, utensils, and bedding until the late nineteenth century—but little beyond that. To the extent that such letters color our fragmented picture of the world of the early medieval merchant, it is through their attention to the sorts of generic problems familiar to anyone who travels for a living today: plans fulfilled, last-minute changes to itineraries, unexpected windfalls, and missed opportunities. Many of the letters brim with the timeless and universal concerns about the wel
l-being of family and friends, anxiety about not receiving expected letters, and, occasionally, news of dramatic events ranging from shipwreck to piracy and war. But the authors focus primarily on business: the quantities of goods sold, at what price and to whom, and disputes arising from the complicated webs of consignment and trust upon which all merchants relied. The letters are replete with details about the conduct of trade through intermediaries and relations with foreign rulers.

  The majority of these documents pertain to the commercial life of the Mediterranean, but a substantial number were written by merchants who traveled between Egypt and India. Jewish merchants had long been active on the Indian Ocean, but by the turn of the millennium the wealth of the Fatimid Caliphate was drawing trade away from the fading markets of the Persian Gulf to the Red Sea, while Christian merchants were attaining an increasingly dominant position in the trade of the Mediterranean. With this dual motivation, Muslim and Jewish merchants alike turned their attention to the wealth of the Indian Ocean. While most of the Geniza documents were written by merchants active on the Mediterranean, it is on the newly revived but otherwise poorly documented commerce of the Arabian Sea that the Geniza letters cast the strongest light. They also show that two hundred years before Ibn Battuta, such encounters as he experienced in Fuzhou may not have been all that uncommon. The five Indian Ocean trading families most represented in the Geniza letters hailed from or were active in Morocco, Tunis, Cairo, Yemen, and the Malabar Coast of India. The career of Abraham ben Yiju seems not atypical. A native of Mahdia, in Tunisia, he built his business in Aden before sailing to India where he lived mostly in Mangalore as a merchant and proprietor of a bronze foundry. Shortly after arriving in India, he purchased and freed an Indian slave who became his wife. His eighteen-year stay in India—during which he sojourned in a few other Malabari ports and traveled to Aden—ended in 1149, and he eventually settled in Cairo.