The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean

by David Abulafia

  Control of Sicilian waters passed into the hands of north Italian pirates. The Genoese and Pisans decided to make real some of the generous promises Emperor Henry had made when he lured them into an alliance. The Genoese had been promised possession of Syracuse and so, in 1204, a Genoese pirate, Alamanno da Costa, took charge there as ‘count of Syracuse’. Pisan shipping was subject to constant raids by Genoese pirates in Sicilian waters, who acted with the approval of the Genoese Commune.34 Meanwhile, Alamanno’s Genoese friend Enrico Pescatore (‘the fisherman’), installed himself as count of Malta. Henry, count of Malta, was one of the most dangerous privateers on the high seas, with his own flotilla and broad ambitions – in 1205 he sent two galleys and 300 Genoese and Maltese sailors to raid Greek waters, where they seized two Venetian merchantmen bound for Constantinople laden with money, arms and 200 bales of European cloth. Having created one international incident, they then penetrated as far as Tripoli in Lebanon, where they besieged the town until its Christian count came to terms, promising trading rights for the Genoese in return for aid against the Syrian Muslims.35 Henry’s achievements were celebrated in verse by the great troubadour Peire Vidal, who served in his entourage:

  He is generous and intrepid and chivalrous, the star of the Genoese, and makes all his enemies tremble throughout the land and the sea … And my dear son Count Henry has destroyed all his enemies and is so safe a shelter to his friends that whosoever wishes may come or go without doubt or fear.36

  Even when pursuing private ambitions, then, the Genoese pirates tried to produce benefits for their mother-city, which was unlikely to abandon them if they were thought to be working in the republic’s interests.

  Henry’s next venture, his attempt to conquer Crete, followed the collapse of yet another great power in the Mediterranean. After the death of Manuel I Komnenos in 1180 succession disputes consumed the political energies of the Byzantine aristocracy; these energies were further sapped by a great Turkish military victory at Myriokephalon in Asia Minor four years earlier, from which Manuel had been lucky to escape alive.37 Italian pirates acquired bases in the Aegean; Corfu fell into the hands of a Genoese pirate who was now free to raid Venetian shipping as it passed through the Adriatic exit.38 The Pisans and Genoese were keen to wreak revenge on the Greeks for the massacre of their citizens in Constantinople in 1182, which was mentioned earlier in this chapter.39 One of the worst outrages was committed by the Genoese pirate Guglielmo Grasso, who was in league with a Pisan pirate named Fortis. After raiding Rhodes with impunity in 1187, they attacked a Venetian ship sent by Saladin to Isaac Angelos, the Byzantine emperor; as well as Saladin’s ambassadors it carried wild beasts, fine woods, precious metals and, as a special gift from the sultan, a piece of the ‘true cross’. The pirates killed everyone on board, apart from some Pisan and Genoese merchants, and Fortis gained possession of the relic, which he carried off across the Mediterranean to the rock-girt town of Bonifacio, in southern Corsica, then held by his fellow-Pisans. The Genoese were convinced they had a better claim to the true cross, and raided Bonifacio, capturing both the relic and the town, which they held thereafter and used as a base for their trading operations in northern Sardinia.40 Western regrets at the attack on Saladin’s envoys were few, for their journey was seen as proof that the Byzantines and the Ayyubids were in league against the kingdom of Jerusalem.

  Crisis afflicted Byzantium on all fronts. In south-eastern Europe, Byzantine power was challenged by warlords in Bulgaria and Serbia. Members of the Komnenos family, which had lost control of the imperial crown, set up states of their own in Trebizond on the Black Sea and in Cyprus. Byzantium was fractured even before it was conquered. When a new crusade to the east was planned in 1202, it was assumed that its target would be Saladin’s economic power base, Alexandria. If Alexandria could be captured, it could then be traded for the lost cities of the kingdom of Jerusalem, or used as a forward position from which to destroy Ayyubid power. The story of the Fourth Crusade has been told many times: how the crusaders hired ships in Venice; how they could not pay the fees demanded of them, how the Venetians persuaded them to help capture Zara (Zadar) on the Dalmatian coast in part-payment; how the crusaders then agreed to head for Constantinople in the hope of installing their own protégé, Alexios Angelos, on the imperial throne; how the relations between the crusaders, in particular the Venetians, and the Greeks turned sour during 1203 as hostility to Alexios increased among the Greeks; how Alexios IV was overthrown and the crusaders responded with an assault on Constantinople; and how in April 1204 the great walls of the city were scaled and the previously impregnable city was taken and then sacked in a matter of days.41 The Venetians filled the treasury of the church of St Mark with jewelled bowls, rock-crystal ewers, gilded and enamelled book covers, saints’ relics and other gorgeous loot from the imperial palace and the great city churches. Many of these objects are still in St Mark’s, most notably the lifesize bronze horses from the Hippodrome of Constantinople. The city of St Mark was now the new Constantinople as well as the new Alexandria.42

  The most obvious beneficiaries of the fall of Constantinople were the Venetians, who gained control of the trade routes of Byzantium and could exclude their rivals at will. The empire was carved up: Thessalonika and the title to Crete were granted to a leading crusader, the north-west Italian aristocrat Boniface of Montferrat, while the crown of Constantinople went to Baldwin, count of Flanders. Greek princes continued to resist in Asia Minor, at Nikaia (Nicaea), and in the western Balkans, in Epeiros. Emperor Baldwin had to spend much of his time fighting the Bulgarians, with limited resources. The Greek rump states fought tenaciously to recover the Byzantine heartlands, and the impoverished Latin empire of Constantinople was finally dismantled by Michael Palaiologos, ruler of Nikaia, who recaptured Constantinople in 1261.43 Venice, on the other hand, proclaimed itself ‘lord of a quarter and half a quarter of the empire of Romania’ (that is, the Byzantine Empire). The Venetian share grew, at least in theory, when Boniface, who was under as much pressure as Emperor Baldwin, decided to raise 1,000 silver marks by selling Crete to the republic. He did not actually control the island, so Venice would have to take possession. Its excellent reasons for wishing to do so were that it lay astride the routes to the East, and that it was a source of grain, oil and wine, already known to Venetian merchants.

  Before the Venetians could act, Henry, count of Malta, launched an ambitious naval attack on Crete, seeking to make himself king of the island, and the Genoese, excluded from the booty of the Fourth Crusade, surreptitiously backed him. In 1206 he occupied Candia (Heraklion) and fourteen strongholds on the island. He boldly sent an envoy to Pope Innocent III, asking to be made king of Crete, though the pope demurred. Genoa had pretended not to be involved in Henry’s great enterprise, but began to take a direct interest from 1208, supplying him with ships, men and food, and before long they were promised warehouses, ovens, baths and churches in the towns of the island. After a slow start, the Venetians riposted with men and arms; a member of the great Tiepolo family was appointed duke of Crete, a post that would often serve as an apprenticeship for the office of doge of Venice. The Genoese had no appetite for a long war with Venice, and concluded a treaty in 1212, though it took another six years to suppress piracy by the Genoese counts of Malta and Syracuse.44 After that, Henry blithely offered his services to Frederick, king of Sicily and (from 1220) Holy Roman Emperor, becoming his admiral; the poacher had turned gamekeeper.

  The importance of this brief conflict should not be underestimated. It was the first major confrontation between Genoa and Venice, which became rivals along the routes to Acre where, as has been seen, they squabbled viciously between 1256 and 1261. The Genoese deeply resented Venetian control over the trade of the former Byzantine Empire, and it is no surprise that they offered their naval support to Michael Palaiologos when he recaptured Constantinople in 1261, in return for handsome favours. But after 1212 Crete passed into Venetian hands, and the Venetians found themselves
masters of a Greek population that had no great love for the republic (there was a great rebellion in 1363). On the other hand, Venice had secured its supply lines in the eastern Mediterranean; gradually, Greeks and Venetians learned to cooperate, and a mixed culture developed on the island, as Venetians married native Cretans – even the boundaries between Catholic and Orthodox Christian were blurred.45

  IV

  Despite these local interactions within Crete, the importance of the Italian communities in cultural developments within the Latin East or across the Mediterranean is hard to measure. Several illuminated manuscripts from the thirteenth-century kingdom of Jerusalem have been identified, proving that artists in the East borrowed Byzantine imagery in ways similar to those working in Tuscany and Sicily. The fall of Constantinople in 1204 injected more Byzantine objects into the West, strengthening Byzantine influence on Italian art, as well as creating a means by which Venetians interested in classical texts could obtain and study them.46 Islamic motifs were of decorative interest, and appeared in Venetian and south Italian buildings, but curiosity about the culture that produced them was very limited. Interest in Eastern cultures was largely practical. There were one or two Pisan interpreters in twelfth-century Constantinople, whose attempts to translate works of Greek philosophy extended beyond what must have been their main task – rendering official correspondence to and from the West into or out of Latin. Jacob the Pisan acted as interpreter for the emperor Isaac Angelos in 1194.47 The Pisan Maimon, son of William, whose name suggests mixed parentage, helped negotiate with the Almohads of North Africa; Pisan scribes corresponded with the Almohads in Arabic. The Pisans even learned some useful lessons in accounting from North Africa. The Pisan merchant Leonardo Fibonacci lived for a time in Bougie, and wrote a famous treatise on Arabic numerals at the start of the thirteenth century.48 But innate conservatism among notaries meant that calculations were still a wearisome task conducted in Latin numerals.

  The Mediterranean trade routes may also have carried a very different set of ideas that would set alight southern France for decades after 1209. During the eleventh century, the Byzantine emperors had actively suppressed the Bogomil heresy, which preached a dualist view of the universe in which a good God of the spiritual realms was battling against Satan, who controlled the world of the flesh. Historians have argued that crusaders passing through Constantinople on the First and Second Crusades, or Italian merchants from Pisa and elsewhere, made contact with the Bogomils and exported their beliefs to Europe, where they developed into the Cathar heresy of twelfth-century Languedoc.49 Italian Cathars, generally more moderate in their views, seem to have fallen under the influence of heretics in the Balkans who brought their ideas across the Adriatic, by way of Dubrovnik and its neighbours. However, the difficulty with the argument that these ideas reached western Europe along the main maritime trade routes is that they did not implant themselves in the port cities: Montpellier was an important centre of Mediterranean trade, but was considered generally clean of heresy, and it is very hard to find Genoese Cathars. Genoese and Venetians make unlikely Cathars. The Genoese were too busy making money and immersing themselves in the world of the flesh – Genuensis, ergo mercator, as the saying went, ‘Genoese, therefore a merchant’.

  7

  Merchants, Mercenaries and Missionaries,

  1220–1300

  I

  The collapse of empires in the central and eastern Mediterranean was matched in the far west by the disintegration of Almohad power. The caliphs lost their enthusiasm for the extremist doctrines of Almohadism, and were accused of betraying the principles of their movement. Following military defeat at the hands of Christian kings of Spain at Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212 the caliph is said to have been strangled by one of his slaves. The Almohad territories in Spain and Tunisia fell into the hands of a new generation of local kings who only paid lip-service to Almohadism. The Hafsid rulers who gained control of Tunis proclaimed themselves successors to the Almohad caliphate, though more as a way of asserting their legitimacy than out of deep commitment to Almohad beliefs. The Berber Marinids broke Almohad power in Morocco in the mid-thirteenth century, after a long struggle. At the same time the Nasrid dynasty established itself in Granada, where it would last until 1492; it adhered strictly to Sunni Islam, not Almohadism. The thirteenth century also saw a major transformation in the Christian western Mediterranean: Pisa’s rivalry with Genoa for mastery over the waters around Corsica and Sardinia culminated in Pisan defeat at the battle of Meloria and the loss of iron-rich Elba in 1284.1 Although the Pisans did not yet lose control of the large areas of Sardinia they ruled, and even recovered Elba, a new rival to both Pisa and Genoa emerged, not a maritime republic but a group of cities led by Barcelona and backed by the growing power of the king of Aragon and count of Catalonia, James I ‘the Conqueror’.

  The Mediterranean vocation of the kings of Aragon was not obvious before the thirteenth century. Lords of a small, mountainous kingdom that only toppled the Muslim emirate of Saragossa in 1118, they dissipated much of their energy in attempts to interfere in Christian Castile and Navarre. But in 1134 King Alfonso ‘the Battler’ of Aragon died, having failed to produce an heir; his brother, a monk, was forced out of his convent in order to breed. A daughter was born who eventually married the count of Barcelona. As a result, the county of Barcelona and the kingdom of Aragon remained joined together from the middle of the twelfth century onwards, but the union was a personal one, embodied in the ruler, who remained a count (notionally under the overlordship of the king of France) in Catalonia, and a king only in highland Aragon. Moreover, the count of Barcelona was distracted by regional conflicts within Catalonia, where he was at best the first among equals. The count’s horizon did extend further than Catalonia, though, since he had a number of allies and vassals across the Pyrenees in Languedoc and Roussillon. In 1209 the involvement in southern French affairs of the count-king of Aragon-Catalonia (as he is often called) dragged him into the great crusade preached by the papacy against the Cathar heretics, the Albigensian Crusade. Although several of his southern French vassals were accused of protecting the heretics, or even being heretics themselves, the count-king, Peter II, placed his obligations as overlord first and came to their aid against the northern French army of invasion led by Simon de Montfort. Peter was killed in battle at Muret near Toulouse in 1213, leaving a young heir, James, in Montpellier; these events further destabilized Catalonia.2

  Barcelona was still, in the days of Benjamin of Tudela, ‘a small city and beautiful’, though he insists that around 1160 it was visited by merchants from Italy and all over the Mediterranean.3 This was a low point in the city’s fortunes, however, for if there was one Spanish city on the shores of the Mediterranean that had seemed, in the eleventh century, to be on the verge of a boom it was Christian Barcelona.4 Under its energetic and warlike counts, who enjoyed making threats against and raiding the Muslim kingdoms dispersed through southern Spain, vast amounts of tribute were received, pumping gold into the economy and encouraging prosperous businessmen like Ricart Guillem to invest in vineyards, orchards and other properties on the western edge of Barcelona (close to the modern Ramblas). Ricart, the son of a castellan, was a rising star in Barcelona: he fought against the troublesome mercenary El Cid in 1090 and travelled to Muslim Saragossa to trade silver for gold. But this first flowering of Barcelona was brief and was followed by a long winter; tribute payments dried up at the end of the eleventh century after the Almoravids established themselves in southern Spain.5 Then, with the rise of Genoa and Pisa, Barcelona was sidelined, because it lay a little way from the routes Italian ships took when bound for such desirable havens as Ceuta and Bougie: they preferred to descend past Majorca and Ibiza and make contact with the Iberian coast at Denia, on its spur a little to the south of Valencia. Barcelona did not have a fine port, for what seems today such an excellent harbour is modern. The Catalans still had to rely on the Genoese navy when their army attacked Tortosa in 1148. Yet the
Catalans began to build their own small fleets, setting up a shipyard by the Regomir Gate in Barcelona, the southern portal of the city, where the road running down from the cathedral debouched on the beach (this is now well within the city, in the southern reaches of the ‘Gothic Quarter’).6 Barcelona was also a capital city, in which the count-king’s palace dominated its north-eastern quarter. For, although Barcelona developed a well-regulated system of government, it was never a free republic, and the city fathers lacked the freedom of manoeuvre the Pisans and Genoese possessed.7 But that was one of the reasons for Barcelona’s success. In the thirteenth century, the interests of its patricians and of the count-king increasingly converged. They all began to see the benefits of overseas trade and of naval campaigns right across the Mediterranean.