The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean

by David Abulafia

  Propaganda was matched by action. In 1147–8, at the time of the Second Crusade, he turned his attention to the Byzantine Empire. The crusade was summoned by the pope in 1147, following the fall to the Muslims of the crusader principality of Edessa in northern Syria; Roger offered his fleet, but under pressure from his enemy the German ruler, Conrad III, the offer was rejected. Roger had other uses for his fleet. In 1148 he took advantage of the fact that Manuel Komnenos, the Byzantine emperor, was distracted by the passage of the armies of the Second Crusade through his lands. Roger’s navy seized Corfu and attacked Corinth and Athens, while his troops penetrated inland, carrying away from Thebes dozens of Jewish silk-weavers, who were put to work in his palace ateliers. A Byzantine chronicler eloquently remarked of the returning Sicilian galleys:

  If anyone had seen the Sicilian triremes laden with so many beautiful objects, and submerged down to the oars, he would truly have said they were not pirate ships but merchant ships carrying goods of every sort.4

  Not surprisingly, there was a backlash. The Venetians, alarmed that Roger now controlled the Adriatic exit, sent naval aid to Manuel Komnenos, who had no option but to renew the trade privileges that he already considered excessive. His distrust of the Venetians strengthened when he received reports of how they spent their time during the siege of Corfu: making fun of Manuel’s swarthy features, they dressed a black African in magnificent robes, installed him on one of the imperial flagships, and mockingly acted out the sacred ceremonies of the Byzantine court.5 Unwittingly, Roger was forcing the Byzantines and the Venetians to realize how much they disliked one another. Roger’s attacks on Greece were lightning raids, but he attempted to create a lasting empire overseas as well, in North Africa.6 He ably exploited political and economic disorder there: during a period of severe famine, Sicilian grain was used to pry recognition of his authority from one African emir after another, and he sent a fleet against Tripoli in 1146, capturing it without difficulty.7 Two years later, when al-Hasan, the emir of Mahdia, proved insubordinate, he launched a fleet under the command of Admiral George of Antioch, a highly mobile and exceptionally able Greek Christian who had earlier served the ruler of Mahdia. Off the little island of Pantelleria the Sicilian fleet encountered a Mahdian ship and discovered that there were carrier-pigeons on board. George forced the captain to send a message to Mahdia telling the emir that, while it was true a Sicilian fleet had sailed, it was bound for the Byzantine Empire. Al-Hasan thought this was highly plausible, and was horrified when he saw the Sicilian ships crossing the horizon at dawn on 22 June 1148. Al-Hasan fled; the city was taken with ease, and George allowed his troops two hours in which to pillage.

  After that, he extended royal protection to the Mahdians, and even arranged loans to local merchants so that business could resume as quickly as possible. Judges were appointed from among the local community, to ensure that the Muslims could continue to live under their own laws; foreign merchants arrived; prosperity returned. Roger saw this series of conquests as the first stage in the establishment of a partly rechristianized ‘kingdom of Africa’. He attempted to settle Christians in Mahdia, for Christianity had gradually disappeared over the past five centuries.8 But he also had a wider strategic plan, aiming to gain control of the seas around his kingdom – in 1127 he had already reoccupied Malta (first occupied by his father in 1090), and he was keen to establish his influence over the Ionian islands off western Greece.9 Possession of all these points would enable him to create a naval cordon sanitaire around his kingdom, ensuring that enemy fleets – whether Venetians in the service of Byzantium, or Pisans in the service of the German emperor – could not lead an invasion of his lands. He took an interest in plans for naval campaigns off the coast of Spain. By the time he died in 1154, he was thus on the verge of creating a great thalassocracy.10 Roger did not sail with his fleet but placed it under the command of his chief administrator George of Antioch, who now flaunted the title ‘emir of emirs’. Later, in 1177, a certain William of Modica was appointed emir, or amiratus, ‘of the fortunate royal fleet’, and it was in this specifically naval sense that the word amiratus, or ‘admiral’, came to be used in France, Spain and elsewhere in the thirteenth century. It was a term of Sicilian Arabic derivation that reflected the supremacy of the Sicilian navy in the twelfth-century central Mediterranean.11

  After 1154, Roger’s son William ‘the Bad’ was far less successful in holding together the fabric of the kingdom than his father. Faced with a Byzantine invasion of Apulia, to which the Venetian navy lent its support, William probably showed good judgement when he accepted that the African possessions were untenable. The North African cities sensed the difficulties William faced at home, and linked their fortunes to the rapidly expanding Almohad movement in Morocco; the Almohad caliph himself led the assault on Mahdia in 1159. In January 1160, the Almohads breached its walls, offering its Christians and Jews the choice between death and Islam.12 William was roundly blamed for this great reverse, but in fact he (or his advisers) showed some skill in foreign relations. William defeated the Byzantine invasion and came to terms with Manuel Komnenos, the first time a Byzantine emperor gave grudging recognition to the kingdom’s legitimacy.

  Just when the Genoese, Pisans and Venetians gained control of the elongated routes carrying goods and pilgrims between west and east, the Sicilians established control over the vital passage-ways between the Tyrrhenian Sea and the East, and between the Adriatic and the East. Sicilian naval supremacy in these waters presented the north Italians with a dilemma. Unless they wished their ships to be at the mercy of the Sicilian navy, they had to make friends with the court in Palermo. Yet they were constantly pulled in other directions by their wish to placate the Byzantine and German emperors. In 1156 the Genoese made a treaty with King William I, of which the city chronicler wrote: ‘it was for a long time and widely said by wise people throughout the world that the Genoese received greater and better things than they gave’.13 King William needed an assurance that the Genoese would not allow their fleet to be used by his enemies in an invasion of his kingdom.14 The Genoese were granted reduced taxes on cargoes carried from Alexandria and the Holy Land through Messina, for the treaty was concerned with the security of the routes to the East as much as it was with the right to take certain goods out of Sicily. Equally, the Genoese needed the produce of Sicily. The city had to feed itself as it grew, and Sicilian wheat was more plentiful and of higher quality than Sardinian, for which, in any case, the Genoese competed with the Pisans. The treaty describes how the Genoese would acquire wheat, salted pork (from north-western Sicily, a largely Christian area), wool, lambskins and cotton (mainly from the area around Agrigento).15 For centuries Genoa would depend on the grain of Sicily, which could be bought cheaply and carried at low cost to their booming home-town; and by bringing large quantities of raw cotton from Sicily to northern Italy, the Genoese laid the basis for a cotton industry that would flourish throughout the Middle Ages.16 Some of the best cotton came from Malta, which was ruled by the king of Sicily, and Maltese cotton is already recorded in Genoa in 1164.17 Gradually, the trade of Sicily was being turned around, so that the traditionally close links to North Africa were replaced by close links to northern Italy. Under Norman rule, Sicily was entering the European economic network. For the moment, it was still an exotic land where merchants could find not just grain but sugar and indigo, traditional products of the Islamic Mediterranean that went out of fashion after 1200 to be replaced by yet more wheat, as their Muslim cultivators declined in numbers. As the Genoese brought increasing amounts of Italian and even Flemish woollen cloth south to Sicily, to help them pay for their wheat, cotton and other goods, the bonds between North and South became increasingly close, and a complementary relationship between northern and southern Italy began to develop, in which Sicily provided raw materials and foodstuffs, and northern Italy provided finished goods. The ruler of Sicily, as master of large grain estates in Sicily, was able to draw great wealth from his humble but
vital assets.18

  King William II ‘the Good’ (1166–89) took a strong interest in wider Mediterranean affairs, capitalizing on the existence of a large and powerful fleet. He extended his authority across the Adriatic, bringing under his protection the Dalmatian town of Dubrovnik (Ragusa), which was beginning to emerge as a port of significance.19 But he was looking far beyond the Adriatic. In 1174 he launched a massive attack on Alexandria in Egypt; in 1182 he set his sails in the direction of Majorca, though his fleet achieved nothing. Three years later Byzantium was his target, and when he died he was planning to send help to the beleaguered crusader states. He saw himself as a fighter for Christ against both the Muslims and the Greeks. His most ambitious campaign, in 1185, took the Sicilian fleet deep into the Byzantine Empire. He could hope for support from the Italian merchants for, in 1182, in an ugly outburst of violence openly encouraged by the new emperor, Andronikos Komnenos, the Latins in Constantinople were massacred. News spread when a Venetian ship entering the Aegean encountered other Venetian ships off Cape Malea, whose crews shouted: ‘Why do you stop here? If you do not flee you are all dead, for we and all the Latins have been exiled from Constantinople.’20 Yet most victims were Pisans and Genoese – the Venetians were still embroiled in one of their perennial arguments with Constantinople, and were not much in evidence there.

  By 1185 William had the excuse he needed: a wandering impostor had arrived at his court, claiming to be a deposed emperor, and William took on the noble task of restoring this unconvincing figure to the imperial throne.21 When the time came for action, his fleet followed the pattern laid down by Robert Guiscard a century earlier: Dyrrhachion was taken, and an army landed; it penetrated as far as Thessalonika, which was captured and sacked with the help of the royal fleet, sent all the way round the Peloponnese. The fall of the second city in the Byzantine Empire electrified the Greeks.22 The Sicilians proved unable to hold Thessalonika, but their attack only deepened Byzantine hatred for westerners.23 While William’s ambitions embraced the entire Mediterranean, what was missing was lasting success. Here the north Italians performed much better.

  II

  The final years of the twelfth century and the beginning of the thirteenth saw a series of political cataclysms that changed the political geography of the Mediterranean in enduring ways, even though the Italian maritime republics exploited these changes to gain an increasingly secure hold over the Mediterranean sea passages. In 1169 the king of Jerusalem, Amaury, made a serious miscalculation in allying himself to Manuel Komnenos with the aim of attacking Fatimid Egypt. Manuel was to provide a massive Byzantine fleet, which suggests that when they had the willpower the Byzantines could still put together a large navy. Amaury would summon the Frankish army, and together they would attack the Nile Delta and Cairo. In the event, a Frankish army did reach Cairo, but its attempts to establish a puppet government there led to a popular backlash. The Fatimids were toppled and Egypt became not a submissive ally but the focus of opposition to the Latin kingdom.24 Before long a new Ayyubid sultan, Saladin, a Sunni Muslim of Kurdish origin, would see in the struggle for the third holiest city of Islam a cause that would unite the Muslims of the Middle East against the Franks.25 The threat to Frankish Jerusalem was all the greater since Saladin combined rule over Muslim Syria with control of Egypt, throwing off balance the traditional Frankish strategy of playing off the rulers of Syria against the Fatimids. His massive defeat of a badly managed Frankish army at the Horns of Hattin, near Tiberias, in 1187 led to the capture of Jerusalem and the seizure of the coast of Palestine, including the great port of Acre; only Tyre held out.

  The western reaction was decisive, but failed to secure its objectives. The Third Crusade, launched in 1189, relied heavily on sea power: ships of Marseilles helped transport the army of Richard I, king of England and duke of Normandy, to the Levant by way of Sicily, where his interference (largely connected with sordid attempts to recover the dowry of his wife, who had been married to the late King William II) caused upheaval and fighting between Greeks and Latins in Messina. Richard did succeed in capturing Cyprus, which was in the hands of a rebel member of the Komnenos dynasty, and in the end Acre was recovered, together with a sliver of land along the coast of what is now Israel and Lebanon, but not Jerusalem. Acre’s streets teemed more than ever with Italian sailors and merchants: their desperate need for naval support prompted the Frankish rulers to shower foreign merchants with commercial privileges in Acre and Tyre – the merchants of Marseilles, Montpellier and Barcelona were granted the ‘Green Palace’, a building in Tyre, as their base, as well as exemption from customs dues.26

  Acre became a city divided among many masters, who insisted heavily on their rights: there were self-governing quarters for the Venetians and the Pisans close to the harbour, and a substantial Genoese section was tucked behind these enclaves. By the middle of the thirteenth century the Venetian quarter, enclosed by walls, contained churches dedicated to St Mark and St Demetrius; there was a palazzo for the governor, or bailli, of the community, a cistern, a fonduk with sixteen shops on the ground floor, storerooms on three levels, and living accommodation for the priest of St Mark’s church. The Italian quarters were very crowded – the Genoese may have had about sixty houses.27 Armed conflict between the different communities erupted: the War of St Sabas (1256–61) started with a quarrel over the boundaries between the Genoese and Venetian districts that flew out of control and resulted in the evacuation of Acre by the Genoese. They transferred their headquarters to Tyre, while the Venetians, previously dominant in Tyre, ensconced themselves even more firmly in Acre. The rival republics became so obsessed with one another that they seemed to be ignoring the constant threat from the kingdom’s Muslim enemies, though in this they were no worse than the quarrelsome Frankish nobility of the Latin East. The Military Orders of the Temple and Hospital (or St John) also possessed large quarters in Acre, and they too insisted on their political autonomy.28 Allowing for the lands of the patriarch of Jerusalem and other lords, there was not a great deal of Acre left for the Frankish king, but what he did have was the booming income from trade taxes – even the exempt merchants had to do business with merchants from the interior who paid the full rate of taxation, including a standard tax at the rather odd rate of 11 per cent. Medieval Mediterranean rulers well understood that lowering taxes would stimulate trade, earning them more, not less.29

  Saladin was as keen as his Frankish rivals to encourage Italian visitors. They were simply too valuable as a source of revenue – and, when no one else was looking, of armaments.30 Egypt was buying more and more European goods, especially fine cloths from Lombardy and Flanders. Demand was not simply generated by a wish to dress in luxurious and (for an Egyptian) exotic clothes, often made with the finest and softest English wools and coloured with expensive eastern indigo or Spanish grana, a red dye similar to cochineal. The industries of the Middle East were in decline. Why this should have happened is not clear; the Islamic Mediterranean was still heavily urbanized, and several cities such as Cairo, Damascus and Alexandria were massive. What is, however, clear is that the Italians seized the advantage.

  Pisa acted as the portal for other Tuscan traders, who could live in Pisan quarters overseas so long as they submitted to Pisan judges and paid the taxes required of Pisan residents there; they then counted as Pisans and could enjoy whatever exemptions the local ruler had conferred on Pisa itself. One city that was well placed to sell its produce in the East was the many towered town of San Gimignano, in the Tuscan hinterland, which was the greatest centre of saffron production in the West. Saffron, made from the fragile stamens of a species of crocus, was a rare example of a spice that could be produced to higher quality in the West than in eastern lands. It was used as a dyestuff, condiment and drug, and its production was very labour-intensive, with the result that it was extremely expensive.31 Men from San Gimignano carried this product to Acre, and then crossed into Muslim territory, reaching as far as Aleppo. The commercial revolution
initiated by Genoa, Pisa and Venice was beginning to encompass the inhabitants of other towns away from the Mediterranean coast. Florence was also very successful: its merchants hawked fine French and Flemish textiles that were finished off in its workshops, and, later, they began to produce their own excellent imitations of these cloths. Florentine businessmen started to accumulate large quantities of gold from their trade in Tunis, Acre and elsewhere, not just from cloth sales but from the exchange of gold for silver, more suited to medium-value payments but in very short supply in the Islamic West. In 1252 both the Genoese and the Florentines had a large enough stockpile of gold to start minting their own gold coins, the first to be produced in western Europe (apart from Sicily, southern Italy and parts of Spain) since the days of Charlemagne.32 By 1300, the presence of the florin of Florence in every corner of the Mediterranean demonstrated the primacy of the Italians and the increasing integration of the Great Sea into a single trading zone.

  III

  Even more dramatic than the fall of the Fatimids was the collapse of the kingdom of Sicily. While Saladin was able to maintain the old system of government, including the exercise of lucrative monopolies, Sicily and southern Italy fell prey to rapacious barons in the 1190s, creating enormous instability in the central Mediterranean. In the face of bitter opposition from most Sicilian barons, the German emperor, Henry VI of Hohenstaufen, invaded the kingdom, which he claimed in right of his wife (Roger II’s posthumous daughter), with the opportunistic support of fleets from Pisa and Genoa.33 He was only able to enjoy his conquest for three years, between 1194 and 1197, all the while planning a crusade and a war for the conquest of Constantinople. Then his widow Constance attempted, in the year of life that was left to her, to return Sicily to its old equilibrium, but disintegration had begun: the Muslims were in revolt in western Sicily, and would remain in rebellion for a quarter of a century. After she died her small son Frederick became the plaything of competing factions in Palermo, and the barons and bishops on the south Italian mainland seized the opportunity to take over crown lands without serious opposition.