The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean

by David Abulafia

  One group of adventurous, multilingual Jewish merchants known as the Radhaniyyah, or ‘Radhanites’, was described by the ninth-century Arab writer ibn Khurdadbih.12 He listed four routes along which these merchants travelled, some overland through Gaul and past Prague to the kingdom of the White Bulgars that stretched over vast open spaces north of the Black Sea, others by sea from Provence to Egypt and then down the Red Sea to India, or from Antioch in the Levant to Iraq, India, Ceylon and by sea once again to the Far East. Some, however, set out from Spain and made their way to the Levant by following the North African coast, a route easier to follow by land than by sea, because of shoals and contrary winds and currents.13 Radhanite merchants returning from the Nile Delta might take ship for Constantinople, or they might find a route back to Gaul. These descriptions of their routes cast the Radhanites in the role of spice merchants, carrying condiments, perfumes and drugs, though their northern contacts enabled them to bring iron weapons, furs and slaves down to the Mediterranean, where Muslim buyers were short of iron and glad to purchase swords from the north.14 Alongside the Radhanites there were many other slave traders, Christian and Muslim; by 961 there were 13,750 Saqaliba, Slav slaves, living in Muslim Córdoba. Warfare between Germanic and Slav peoples in the Wendish lands in what is now eastern Germany ensured a plentiful and regular supply of captives, and the terms sclavus and ‘slave’ recall the Slavonic origin of very many of these slaves. Slaves from the Slav borderlands arrived in Syria and Egypt as well, along with Circassians brought down from the Black Sea.15 Though horrible, the fate of these slaves, even those who survived the trauma of castration, was not always comparable to the fate of the slaves carried in such vast numbers across the Atlantic towards the Americas in later centuries. Strong-looking young men were not emasculated but entered the emir’s guard in Córdoba, sometimes rising to a high military command. On the other hand, women might enter the closed world of the harem; and handsome boys fell into the possession of pederast princes. One merchant who fits the Radhanite label well was Abraham of Saragossa, a Spanish Jew who benefited from the personal protection of the Frankish emperor Louis the Pious. He was active around 828 and was exempt from the payment of tolls; he was explicitly permitted to buy foreign slaves and to sell them within the Frankish lands, but in 846 Jewish merchants were accused by the archbishop of Lyons of looking no further than the cities of Provence for their source of supply, and of selling Christian slaves to buyers in Córdoba.16

  Whereas Roman naval power had been based on the extinction of piracy, Muslim naval power was based on the exercise of piracy. It was this that made service in Muslim fleets palatable to the Greeks, Copts, Berbers and Spaniards who undoubtedly manned the ships. Western shipping was freely targeted by pirates in the service of Muslim rulers. A ninth-century Arab writer described how Christian ships in the Mediterranean could be treated as a legitimate target for Muslim pirates when the ships were heading for other Christian lands; if a ship was seized and its captain insisted that he was travelling under the protection of a Muslim ruler such as an Andalucían emir, written proof could be demanded.17 Although the invasion of Spain by Arab and Berber armies in 711 had involved few naval operations – apart from the crucial one of crossing the Straits of Gibraltar – the rest of the eighth century saw Muslim fleets gain in confidence in the western Mediterranean. An outburst of piracy after the fall of Carthage in 698 was suppressed easily enough by the Byzantine navy, but the Byzantine loss of effective control of the seas west of Sicily allowed Muslim fleets a free hand off the islands and coastlines that still acknowledged, even if remotely, Byzantine overlordship: the Balearic islands, Sardinia, the Ligurian coast.18

  The safety of this region deteriorated seriously around 800. Naval skirmishes erupted all over the surface of the western Mediterranean. These events are generally presented as a struggle to hold back Arab invaders who were trying to gain mastery of the Mediterranean islands. Often, though, the Muslim navies were more intent on grabbing booty (including captives, whom they would put on sale), than in trying to extend the dominion of Islam. The Christians too were keen to take slaves and to win booty, even though they were more obviously on the defensive. Moreover, precisely because there was now a great power in the west willing to fight back against the Muslim navies, tension increased and the pirates became ever more daring. In 798 Arab navies attacked the Balearic islands, which had not been a target of the original invasion of Spain. Knowing that Constantinople was incapable of offering any help, the islanders turned instead to the ruler of Gaul and northern Italy, Charlemagne, whom they acknowledged as their new overlord. Charlemagne sent some forces and the Arabs were repelled the next time they raided the islands.19 He ordered his son Louis to build a fleet for the defence of the Rhône delta, and he commissioned new coastal defences to protect the ports of southern France and north-western Italy. Hadumar, the Frankish count of Genoa, led a fleet against Arabs invading Corsica, and was killed in the fray. Fighting continued off both Corsica and Sardinia, and a Frankish admiral named Burchard destroyed thirteen enemy ships. Meanwhile, the Venetians (of whom more shortly) patrolled the waters off Sicily and North Africa and they or other ships in Byzantine service scored notable victories against ships from al-Andalus, Islamic Spain. Thirteen Arab ships that attacked the small but strategically valuable island of Lampedusa, between Sicily and Africa, were wiped out by the Byzantines in 812. Before long the North Africans decided that events had gone far enough, and they arranged a ten-year truce with Gregorios, the governor of Byzantine Sicily.20 Christian navies were now in command west of Sicily, while the Byzantines had gained a much needed respite in the central Mediterranean – the Arab raids on Sicily and Calabria had caused great damage to the exposed coastal towns and villages.

  Unfortunately for the Byzantines, the Muslims decided that they wanted more from Sicily than slaves and booty, launching an invasion in 827 which slowly brought the entire island under the rule of the Aghlabid emirs of North Africa. They renewed their raids on Sardinia and Corsica, to which the Franks responded with an ambitious naval attack on the African coast. The problem was that the Frankish navy had no permanent base, and, even after winning a succession of engagements, a single defeat at Sousse was enough to force the Franks out of Africa. In any case, the Frankish empire had passed its peak with the death of Charlemagne in 814, and his successor Louis the Pious was distracted from the western Mediterranean by internal rivalries. In the 840s, the Arabs were free to raid Marseilles, Arles and Rome. To the extreme embarrassment of both the Byzantines and the Franks, who each claimed dominion over southern Italy, a Muslim navy captured the seaport of Bari in 847, establishing an emirate that lasted until 871, when finally the Franks and the Byzantines learned to work together long enough to expel the Muslims.21 After tentative moves in the ninth century, Arab pirate bases were established in the tenth century along the coast of Provence, and a little way inland at Fraxinetum (La Garde-Freinet). Arab piracy gravely endangered Christian trade out of Provence, while providing the Muslims with a supply of slaves and war booty.22

  III

  The Byzantines enjoyed mixed success in the face of the Muslim advance. Having held back the Arabs at the walls of Constantinople in 718, they mobilized their fleets in the Mediterranean in the early eighth century, and yet local revolts, particularly in Sicily, endangered their control of the sea routes across the Mediterranean. Since the sixth century the Byzantine navy had been dominated by the dromôn, a variant on the war galley that grew in size over time but became the standard warship used throughout the Mediterranean until the twelfth century; its characteristics included the use of a lateen instead of a square sail, banks of oars placed beneath the main deck and (possibly) skeletal hull construction instead of shell construction. Originally rowed by a small crew of fifty oarsmen, one on either side (making them ‘monoremes’), they evolved into biremes, with each oar manipulated by pairs of rowers numbering up to 150 men.23 Muslim fleets, equipped with similar ships, faced a g
reat difficulty: the shoals, rocks and sandbanks of the North African shore made east–west movement along the coastline difficult. Shipping was forced to choose island-hopping routes further to the north, and this, as well as piracy and slaving, was a good reason why Muslim navies intruded into the waters around the Balearic islands, Sardinia and Sicily.24 To say that these navies ‘held waters’ provides only a shorthand description of the way fleets operated: it was vital that galleys had access to friendly ports where they could take on supplies, if they were to patrol an area of sea effectively. Remote control in the form of fleets sent out from the heartlands of Byzantium was impossible, and the best option was to establish Byzantine bases on the maritime frontier.25 The Byzantines managed to hold the waters north of Cyprus and Crete (which they lost for a time to the Arabs). This enabled them to maintain communications in the Aegean and a little way beyond, but the situation was more parlous on the fringes of the Byzantine Empire, notably in the Adriatic.

  Their difficulties in this zone began not with the Arabs, whose seizure of Bari came relatively late, so much as with the Franks, rulers by the end of the eighth century of large tracts of Italy including (in 751) the former Byzantine province, or Exarchate, whose capital lay at Ravenna. Frankish armies were still active close to the Adriatic in the 790s, when Charlemagne crushed the great, wealthy empire of the Avars, annexing to his empire vast tracts of what are now Slovenia, Hungary and the northern Balkans. In 791 the Franks took charge of Istria, the rocky peninsula at the top of the Adriatic that was still under nominal Byzantine rule.26 These campaigns brought Frankish and Byzantine interests into collision. Ill-feeling between the Franks and the Byzantines was compounded by the coronation of Charlemagne as western Roman emperor on Christmas Day 800 in Rome, even if the new emperor laughed off this event as of minor importance. Byzantium remained deeply sensitive about its claim to be the true successor to the Roman Empire until its fall in 1453. Reports that Charlemagne thought he might like to take over Sicily added to the unease. He even seemed to be conspiring with the Abbasid caliph of Baghdad, Harun ar-Rashid, who sent him an elephant as a sign of his esteem, along with the keys to the church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, over which the Byzantines claimed protective authority.

  From Constantinople, the Adriatic was seen as the first line of defence against hostile armies and navies that sought to penetrate the Byzantine heartlands. The defence of the Via Egnatia that ran from Dyrrhachion to Thessalonika had a military rationale, quite apart from its importance as a trade route.27 The Byzantines therefore expended energy defending the Dalmatian and Albanian coastline from Franks, Slavs, Arabs and other invaders and raiders. Despite the survival of magnificent early Byzantine mosaics in towns such as Poreč, in Istria, this was a region where the Latin Church was dominant and where a form of Low Latin was spoken, developing into the now vanished Dalmatian language.28 Byzantine influence also extended to the Italian side of the Upper Adriatic, stretching in a great crescent across the lagoons and marshes of Grado and down the Italian side past a series of sandbanks, or lidi, to the port of Comacchio, not far north of Ravenna. For the loss of the Exarchate of Ravenna had not entirely deprived Byzantium of an Italian dominion, and, even if it was inhabited more by fish than by humans, and produced more salt than wheat, it proved to be an unsuspected asset.

  This was an unstable world in which water and silt jostled for control. It was here that the Piave, the Po and the Adige, as well as numerous smaller rivers, dumped their deposits. According to the sixth-century writer Cassiodorus, the early inhabitants of these marshlands lived ‘like water birds, now on sea, now on land’, and their wealth consisted only of fish and salt, though he had to admit that salt was in one sense more precious than gold: everyone needs salt but there must be people who feel no need for gold. Cassiodorus idealized the marshlanders, claiming that ‘the same food and similar houses are shared by all, so they cannot envy each other’s hearths, and they are free from the vices that rule the world’.29 The barbarian invasions transformed this area, not by conquering the lagoons but by making them into a refuge for those escaping from the armies of the Germanic people known as the Lombards. This immigration did not happen all at once, but a number of villages emerged at Comacchio, Eraclea, Jesolo, Torcello, and a cluster of small islands around the ‘high bank’, or Rivo Alto, later abbreviated to Rialto. There were glass workshops in the little community of Torcello, going back to the seventh century. Comacchio received privileges from the Lombard rulers, perhaps as early as 715. One island, Grado, became the seat of a grandly titled patriarch whose ecclesiastical authority extended over all the lagoons, though individual bishops proliferated – every settlement of any size possessed one, and impressive churches began to be erected in the eighth and ninth centuries, strongly suggesting that trade was prospering.30 As in Dalmatia, the bishops followed the Latin rite even though political allegiance was directed towards Constantinople. Before the fall of the Byzantine Exarchate, the inhabitants looked to Ravenna for immediate political guidance and military protection, and as early as 697 the Exarch appointed a military commander, or dux, to guard the lagoons.31 After the fall of the Exarchate in 751, the value of the lagoons lay, paradoxically, in their remoteness. They were an assertion of the continuing presence of the true Roman Empire in northern Italy.

  Following the arrival of the Franks in Italy in the late eighth century, the inhabitants of the lagoons were tempted to defect to the new Roman emperor Charlemagne. His armies were close by and he could lure them with promises of trading privileges in Lombardy and beyond. Moreover, the Franks had made themselves respectable with their interest in classical culture; they had begun to smooth the rough edges of their barbarian identity. Pro-Frankish and pro-Byzantine factions emerged in the lagoons and in Dalmatia. At the start of the ninth century, the Byzantines were determined to hold their position and sent a fleet to the Upper Adriatic, clashing with the Franks in these waters. In 807 the Byzantines recovered most of the lagoons, and two years later they besieged Comacchio, still loyal to the Franks. This had the unfortunate effect of drawing a Frankish army and navy towards the region, led by Charlemagne’s son Pippin, king of Italy. Pippin scared the Byzantine fleet away, which left the lagoons dangerously exposed, and he laid siege to the lido at Malamocco, hoping to break through to Rivo Alto and the settlements within the lagoon; accounts vary, but he seems to have failed. The fourteenth-century chronicle of Doge Andrea Dandolo described how the inhabitants bombarded the Franks with loaves of bread to prove that the siege was not hurting them and that they still had plenty to eat, a tale associated with so many sieges that it need not be believed.32 Both the Franks and the Byzantines regarded this war as a distraction from more important issues, and had an appetite for peace. Charlemagne realized that if he made concessions he could secure grudging recognition as emperor from the Byzantines. In 812 a formula emerged that respected Byzantine claims to suzerainty over the lagoons, while expecting the inhabitants to pay the Franks an annual tribute of thirty-six pounds of silver and to provide naval help against the Slavs in Dalmatia. The tribute payment was no great burden, because peace brought privileged access to markets in Italy, and this corner of the Adriatic was able to function as a channel of communication between western Europe and Byzantium, enjoying the protection of the empires of East and West. This was a unique position, of which merchants took full advantage.

  Out of the lagoons, and out of the Adriatic war with Charlemagne, emerged the city of Venice, as a physical, political and mercantile entity. The conflict with the Franks encouraged the scattered people of the lagoon to gather in a defensible group of islands, protected by a long lido from sea invaders, but far enough from the coastline to deter land invaders. Gradually the Venetians spread across the islands closest to Rialto, driving deep wooden piles into the sodden earth and constructing wooden houses out of timber brought from Istria. Early Venice was not a city of marble, and did not even possess a bishop of its own – the nearest bishop resided
on the island of Castello, on the eastern fringe of the settlements around Rialto.33 The Venetians were as expert in navigating barges and punts through the Po delta as they were in sailing the Adriatic, but several families emerged that kept tight hold of the office of dux, or Doge, mainly families owning farms on the mainland, for Venice was not yet so dominated by trade that its elites had lost interest in cultivating the soil.34

  Yet even before Venice began to coalesce into a single town, trading links with far afield had begun to develop. While the trade in salt, fish and timber must not be underestimated, the Venetians found a role as entrepreneurs in the limited luxury trade between East and West. Competitors were few: by the eighth century even Rome was receiving few goods from across the Mediterranean. The volume of luxury imports was small but the profits were high, because of the risks and because of the rarity of the articles the Venetians carried: silks, jewels, gold artefacts, saints’ relics.35 They sold these goods on to Lombard princes, Frankish kings and luxury-loving bishops, mainly in the Po Valley and neighbouring areas. Byzantine and occasionally Arab coins have been found on sites around the Upper Adriatic. A hoard of coins dating from the time of the Frankish–Byzantine naval war was discovered near Bologna, by the river Reno, one of the water-courses that debouches into the lagoons. It is a mixed bag of Byzantine, south Italian and Islamic gold coins; the Byzantine coins are from Constantinople, and the Islamic gold includes pieces from Egypt and North Africa. This suggests that the money was being carried on a river-boat by a merchant with connections across the Mediterranean. Venetian ships were sometimes commissioned to carry ambassadors back and forth to Constantinople.36 Now that Marseilles was in decline, Venice had become the main port through which contact with the eastern Mediterranean was maintained – commercial, diplomatic, ecclesiastical.