The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean

by David Abulafia

  III

  One reason the Pisans and Genoese were able to launch their own fleets was the collapse of central authority in northern Italy. The ‘kingdom of Italy’ had little more than a notional existence, and its ruler was, since the tenth century, the German king, who was also entitled to claim the crown of the western Roman Empire, revived in 962 with the papal coronation of Otto I. The power of the local imperial viscounts withered; the day-to-day government of these and other towns fell into the hands of the local patricians. By the beginning of the twelfth century they began to organize themselves into self-governing communities – historians use the terms ‘commune’ and ‘city-republic’, but they adopted a variety of terms including, in Genoa, ‘company’ (compagna), which literally meant ‘those who break bread (pane) together’. Indeed, the government of Genoa after 1100 was very like the management of a business partnership. The compagna was formed for a limited period of a few years, to resolve a specific problem such as the building of a crusade fleet, or political tensions that, in Genoa, sometimes resulted in assassinations and street-fighting. The commune was in some respects a public institution, embracing the whole community, but in other very important respects it was a private league, though the distinction between ‘public’ and ‘private’ was not clear in the minds of twelfth-century Genoese. The city was littered with private enclaves, the property of monasteries and nobles, little pieces of exempt territory that were only very gradually brought under the control of the presiding officers of the compagna. These officers took the resounding title of ‘consul’, proving an awareness of the Roman republican model, though there were as many as six consuls when the first compagna came into being.7 As in ancient Rome, the system of election was carefully manipulated by those with real power, and in this period they were always drawn from the patrician class.8

  These patricians created the trading empire of Genoa, and similar developments occurred in Pisa. The difficult question is who they were – not their names, such as Doria and Spinola at Genoa, or Visconti and Alliata at Pisa, which are recorded again and again – but whether their wealth and power originated in trade or from the land. The Italian city communes brought together the petty nobility of the region around the town, who had long been accustomed to taking up residence there, and a body of relatively newly made men whose status depended on the wealth derived from commerce, textile workshops or banking. By the early twelfth century, in Pisa and Genoa, these groups were well mixed together, by marriage alliances that brought new money into old families in need of extra cash. The prestige of entry into families whose members had earned a record on the battlefield or in naval combat appealed to the richest members of the merchant community. A new solidarity emerged. This patriciate was certainly not willing to share its power with the artisans and sailors who made up a large part of the citizen body. The rise of the commune did not indicate that the cities had become democratic republics; rather, it indicated that oligarchy had triumphed – hence, indeed, the bitter struggles between factions on the streets of Genoa. Between these outbreaks of violence, however, there were opportunities to make money on an unprecedented scale. The elite invested in overseas trade directed to ever more distant destinations; they bought urban property and they continued to manage their country estates, even extending them by acquiring lands across the water in Sardinia. The city government interfered little in these activities, except when international alliances affected trade, and those alliances were determined by the same people who dominated trade.9

  These were trends that could be observed right across northern Italy in the years around 1100, though Pisa and Genoa were among the first cities to form an aristocratic commune. The growth of towns in the interior, particularly in the great Lombard plain, had an important effect on what was happening in the Mediterranean, because they became centres of demand for luxury goods from overseas, while their own elites organized the production of increasingly fine cloths and metal goods that could be carried across the Mediterranean in payment for the silks and spices they now demanded. Genoa and Pisa and, on the eastern side of Italy, Venice found themselves able to supply consumers with whom the older generation of merchants from Amalfi had not been able to make close and regular contact. Besides, these cities began to look beyond the Alps. Courts and cities in southern Germany welcomed goods that arrived by way of Venice, and in the twelfth century German merchants arrived there, laying the foundations for the German warehouse, or Fondaco dei Tedeschi, that would for many centuries act as the commercial agency of the German merchants based there.10 Genoese merchants began to wend their way up the Rhône towards the emerging fairs of Champagne, where they could buy the finest Flemish woollen cloths, for transport down the Rhône to the Mediterranean. A vast network was emerging, focused on the maritime trade of Genoa, Pisa and Venice, but with ramifications that stretched across western Europe.

  This commercial revolution was backed up by impressive developments in business methods and in record-keeping. Indeed, the reason so much is known about the economy and society of Genoa in this period is that, from 1154 onwards, large volumes survive containing contracts, wills, land sales and other transactions, recorded by the city notaries.11 The first of these notarial registers to survive is a bulky book written on thick, smooth paper imported from Alexandria by a certain Giovanni Scriba (‘John the Scribe’), whose clients included the most powerful families in mid-twelfth-century Genoa.12 Business methods became increasingly sophisticated, which was partly made necessary by the public disapproval of the Catholic Church towards anything that smelled of ‘usury’, a term whose meaning varied enormously, from extortionate rates of interest to simple commercial profits. Mechanisms had to be developed to escape ecclesiastical censure, which in its sternest form could lead to excommunication. Loans could be made in one currency, to be repaid in another, so that interest was hidden in the exchange rate. Often, though, merchants engaged in what they simply called a societas, or ‘partnership’, where a sleeping partner would invest three-quarters of the total and his (or her) colleague would invest one quarter, while also agreeing to travel to whichever destination had been agreed, and to trade there. On his return, the profits would be divided in half. This was a good way for a young merchant to begin to build up capital, but another arrangement became even more common: the commenda, where the travelling partner invested nothing apart from his skills and services, and received a quarter of the profits. These arrangements helped to spread wealth beyond the patrician elite; a busy, ambitious merchant class was developing, unafraid of the dangers of the sea and of ports in foreign lands.13 The Genoese and Pisans looked across the Mediterranean and saw opportunities in every corner.

  IV

  Mastering the waters near home was the essential prelude to more ambitious ventures in Byzantium and the Islamic lands. Venice needed to clear Muslim fleets from the Adriatic while Bari was held by Muslim emirs (between 847 and 871); in 880 it was rewarded for its efforts with a privilege from the grateful Byzantine emperor. In 992 Venice once again came to the help of Byzantium, and on this occasion received a grant of trading rights.14 The Pisans and Genoese did not possess as powerful a patron as the Greek emperor, and relied on their own efforts. In 1063 a Pisan fleet raided the port of Muslim Palermo, destroying some enemy ships and seizing the great chain that stretched across the harbour to keep away intruders such as themselves. They did not penetrate beyond the quayside, but they still carried off vast amounts of booty.15 They used their profits to glorify God, for they donated part of them to the great cathedral of Santa Maria that the Pisans were beginning to construct, and if anything was a sign of the city’s growing prosperity it was this magnificent marble church.

  These forays generated a sense that they were engaged in a holy struggle against the Muslims. God would reward their efforts with victory, with booty and with what were as yet ill-defined spiritual benefits. There was no sharp line dividing material and spiritual rewards. This is abundantly clear from the event
s of 1087, when the Pisans and Genoese launched an attack on the city of Mahdia on the coast of Tunisia.16 Standing on a promontory, Mahdia had been founded by the Fatimid rulers who eventually took charge of Egypt, and was one of the major towns through which passed the gold dust gathered in the bend of the river Niger, beyond Timbuktu; carried by caravan across the Sahara, it reached the Mediterranean and was pumped into the economy of the Islamic lands. Control of Mahdia might also be seen as the key to control of the Sicilian Straits, and therefore to free passage between the eastern and the western Mediterranean. Thus it would long remain the target of Christian conquerors – Norman kings in the twelfth century, French crusaders in the fourteenth. But in the late eleventh century it was at the height of its prosperity. It was frequented by the Genizah merchants, who sold products such as eastern pepper and Egyptian flax there.17 From 1062 to 1108 Mahdia was ruled by a single vigorous emir, Tamin, who enriched himself not just from trade but from pirate attacks on Nicotera in Calabria and Mazara in Sicily.18 He was a thorough nuisance to his close neighbours. The Fatimids foolishly unleashed Bedouin armies (the Banu Hillal and the Banu Sulaym) who, they thought, would bring Tunisia back to Egyptian allegiance. In the end the Bedouins merely increased the disorder, and damaged the countryside beyond repair, so that the inhabitants of North Africa became dependent on Sicilian grain, after so many centuries during which Tunisia had been a bread basket of the Mediterranean.19 According to an early thirteenth-century Arab writer, ibn al-Athir, the Christians tried to involve Roger, the Norman count of Sicily, in their campaign against Mahdia (he had spent the last quarter-century extending Christian control over the island); but ‘Roger lifted his thigh, made a great fart’ and complained about all the trouble that would result: ‘commerce in foodstuffs will pass into their hands from those of the Sicilians, and I shall lose to them what I make each year on grain sales’.20

  Even without Count Roger, the Italian allies were happy to press ahead in 1087. Pope Victor III welcomed members of the expedition in Rome, where they acquired pilgrims’ purses, showing they had visited the shrine of St Peter. This has excited modern historians of the crusades who have insisted, rightly, that from the preaching of the First Crusade in 1095 onwards, crusaders were treated as pilgrims: ‘pilgrimage and holy war were evidently drawing together’.21 As in Palermo, the Italians did great damage, raiding Mahdia, but did not take the city, and probably never expected to do so. With their spoils they were able to pay for the construction of the church of San Sisto in Cortevecchia in the heart of Pisa, whose façade they decorated with ceramics seized from Mahdia.22 In addition, the Pisans commissioned a victory poem in Latin. The ‘Song about the victory of the Pisans’ (Carmen in victoriam Pisanorum) is full of biblical imagery recalling the struggle of the Children of Israel against their heathen neighbours. The Mahdians, Madianiti, were transformed in the poet’s version into ancient Midianites, while the Pisans saw themselves as the heirs of the Maccabees and, even more, of Moses: ‘Lo! Once again the Hebrews despoil Egypt and rejoice in having defeated Pharaoh; they cross the Great Sea as if it is the driest land; Moses draws water out of the hardest stone.’23 The poem conjures up a febrile atmosphere in which the holy cause of fighting the Infidel supersedes merely commercial considerations.

  That the relations between Pisa and the Muslims were not always antagonistic is demonstrated by the Islamic ceramics used by the Pisans to decorate their churches.24 These ceramics, highly glazed and colourfully decorated, were quite different in style to the plainer wares produced in western Europe, and, when inserted in church exteriors, they glistened in the sun like jewels.25 The large bowls, or bacini, inserted in the towers and façades of churches in Pisa tell an intriguing tale not just of war but of trade and of fascination with objects from the East. Churches constructed in the eleventh century displayed fine Egyptian ceramics on their exterior. There were pots from Sicily and Tunisia before and well after the Mahdia campaign; Morocco sent to Pisa large amounts of rather plainer pottery in green and brown, covered with a bluish glaze. The Pisans became so accustomed to this type of decoration that they continued to insert bacini in church towers long after they had developed their own glazed ceramics industry, in the thirteenth century. For it was not just the pottery that the Italians acquired from the Muslim world; they also borrowed the technology, laying the foundations of the maiolica industry of Renaissance Italy.

  A bowl inserted in the façade of the church of San Piero a Grado near Pisa displays a three-masted vessel with triangular sails, a sharply curved prow and a steep poop; this is a ship from Muslim Majorca, and the design is very stylized.26 Even so, the image conveys a blurred impression of the sort of bulky sailing ship that carried goods between Spain, Africa and Sicily in the days of Islamic hegemony in the southern waters of the Mediterranean. It matches the description in the Genizah letters of very capacious ships, known as qunbar, that carried both heavy cargoes and passengers.27 Another bowl shows a smaller boat furnished with oars as well as a sail, side by side with a two-masted ship, and this could be a representation of a fast, long, low, sleek galley.28 Once again, the Genizah letters come to our aid. There, light galleys called ghurabs appear; the word signified the sharp edge of a sword, in view of their ability to cut through the waves. Alternatively, the long low boat could be a qarib, a sea-going barge, capable of travelling all the way from Tunisia to Syria.29

  V

  The challenges to Muslim domination of the Mediterranean became critical at the end of the eleventh century. Christian expansion into the Muslim Mediterranean was well under way in the 1060s, following the invasion of Sicily by the armies of Robert Guiscard and his brother Roger de Hauteville, Norman knights who had already carved out for themselves dominions in the Lombard and Byzantine territories in southern Italy. In 1061, ten years before they took control of Bari, the capital of the Byzantine province known as ‘Longobardia’, they were tempted to cross the Straits of Messina and to intervene in the bitter quarrels among the three emirs who dominated Sicily, and were largely oblivious of the Norman threat. One of these emirs, ibn al-Hawas, held his own sister in protective custody in the hilltop city of Enna; she was the much abused wife of the powerful and unlovable emir of Catania, ibn ath-Thimnah, whose attempts to win her back by force failed. In desperation, ibn ath-Thimnah begged the Normans to come to his aid, and Robert and Roger de Hauteville agreed to do so. They arrived, outwardly at least, not as invaders but as military support for the emir of Catania, and used this alliance as the basis for their gradual takeover of the entire island, beginning with the capture of Messina and continuing with the capture of Palermo in 1072 (though the conquest was not complete till Noto fell in 1091). Their ability to move men and horses across the Straits of Messina is impressive. Roger became count of Sicily and married a noblewoman from Savona, in north-western Italy; she was followed to Sicily by large numbers of settlers from Liguria and other parts of Italy, who became known as the Lombardi. With this immigration the slow process of the Latinization of Sicily began, and speakers of dialects related to Ligurian Italian could still be found in several eastern Sicilian towns in the twentieth century.30

  Still, the island’s character did not change quickly. For much of the twelfth century Sicily remained home to a mixed population of Muslims, in the majority around 1100, Greeks, only a little less numerous, and Jews, perhaps 5 per cent of the whole population, with the Latin settlers, whether Norman or ‘Lombard’, accounting for less than 1 per cent. The Greeks were concentrated more in the north-east of Sicily, in the area round Etna known as the Val Demone, and in particular in Messina, which became the main shipyard of Norman Sicily. Each group was allowed considerable autonomy: freedom to practise its religion, which had been enshrined in the ‘surrender treaties’ conferred on conquered towns such as Enna; its own law-courts for cases between co-religionists; a guarantee of the count’s protection, subject to payment by Muslims and Jews of the gesia, or poll-tax, which was simply a continuation of the Muslim jiz
yah tax payable by the Peoples of the Book, except that now Christians were exempt and Muslims were liable.