The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean

by David Abulafia

  Naturally the Catalans wanted to challenge the Italian monopoly over the spice trade to the East. Yet their real strength lay in the network they created in the western Mediterranean. Catalans, Pisans and Genoese jostled in the streets of the spacious foreign quarter of Tunis, a concessionary area full of fonduks, taverns and churches. Access to the ports of North Africa meant access to the gold-bearing routes across the Sahara; into these lands, the Catalans brought linen and woollen cloths from Flanders and northern France and, as their own textile industry expanded after 1300, fine cloths from Barcelona and Lleida. They brought salt too, which was plentiful in Catalan Ibiza, and in southern Sardinia and western Sicily, but was in short supply in the deserts to the south, and was sometimes used there as a currency in its own right. As thirteenth-century Barcelona began to boom, they ensured that there were sufficient food supplies for a growing city. Sicily early became the focus of their trade in wheat, carried in big, round, bulky ships, and they were so successful that as early as the 1260s they began to supply other parts of the Mediterranean with Sicilian wheat: Tunis, which had never recovered from the devastation of the North African countryside by Arab tribes in the eleventh century; Genoa and Pisa, which might have been expected to look after their own supplies; the towns of Provence.34 A business contract of the late 1280s simply demanded that the ship Bonaventura, recently in the port of Palermo, should sail to Agrigento where it was to be filled up with ‘as great a quantity of wheat as the said ship can take and carry’.

  The Catalans specialized in another important cargo: slaves. These were variously described as ‘black’, ‘olive’ or ‘white’, and were generally Muslim captives from North Africa. They were put on sale in Majorca, Palermo and Valencia, and sent to perform domestic work in the households of their Catalan and Italian owners. In 1287 the king of Aragon decided that the Minorcans were guilty of treachery, declared the surrender treaty of 1231 void and invaded the island, enslaving the entire population, which was dispersed across the Mediterranean – for a time there was a glut in the slave market.35 The luckier and better-connected slaves would be ransomed by co-religionists – Muslims, Jews and Christians all set aside funds for the ransoming of their brethren, and the two religious orders of the Trinitarians and Mercedarians, well represented in Catalonia and Provence, specialized in ransoming Christians who had fallen into Muslim hands.36 The image of the young woman plucked off the shores of southern France by Saracen raiders was a stock theme in medieval romance, but the Catalans were perfectly ready to respond in kind; they muscled into the Mediterranean trade networks through piracy as well as honest business.

  Meanwhile, Majorcan ships kept up a constant flow of traffic towards North Africa and Spain. A remarkable series of licences issued to sailors intending to leave Majorca in 1284 reveals that ships set off from the island almost every day of the year, even in the depths of January, and there was no close season, even if business was livelier in warmer months. Some of these ships were small vessels called barques, crewed by fewer than a dozen men, able to slip quickly across to mainland Spain time and again. More typical was the larger leny, literally ‘wood’; lenys were well suited to the slightly longer run across open water towards North Africa.37 The Majorcans were pioneers, too. In 1281 two Genoese ships and one Majorcan vessel reached the port of London, where the Majorcan ship loaded 267 sacks of fine English wool, and the Majorcans continued to trade regularly with England well into the fourteenth century. The Phoenicians had never had much difficulty in escaping through the Straits of Gibraltar, bound for Tartessos, but medieval ships battled with the incoming flow from the Atlantic and the fogs and contrary winds between Gibraltar and Ceuta. They also battled, literally, with the rulers of the facing shores – Marinid Berbers in Morocco, the Nasrid rulers of Granada in southern Spain. These were not hospitable waters, and the opening of the sea route out of the Mediterranean was as much a diplomatic as a technical triumph. Raw wool and Flemish textiles could now be brought directly and relatively cheaply from the north straight into the Mediterranean, bound for the workshops of Florence, Barcelona and other cities where the wool was processed and the textiles were finished. Alum, the fixative most easily obtained from Phokaia on the coast of Asia Minor, could be ferried to cloth workshops in Bruges, Ghent and Ypres, avoiding the costly and tedious trek by road and river through eastern France or Germany. The navigation of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic began slowly to be tied together, even if there were constant crises, and Catalan war fleets often patrolled the Straits. By the early fourteenth century, Mediterranean shipbuilders were imitating the broad, round shape of the northern cogs, big cargo vessels that tramped the Baltic and the North Sea – they even adopted the name, cocka. Down the coast of Morocco, too, Catalan and Genoese ships found markets full of the grain they craved, where the inhabitants were keen to acquire Italian and Catalan textiles; by the 1340s these boats had penetrated as far as the Canary Islands, which the Majorcans tried (and failed) to conquer.38

  Predictably, the Majorcan merchants, subject to their own king after 1276, decided they wanted their own consuls and fonduks. This was one of many sources of tension between the two brothers, Peter of Aragon and James of Majorca, who divided up James I’s realms. Sailors and merchants were not slow to exploit these tensions. In 1299 a scoundrel named Pere de Grau, who owned a ship, was accused of stealing a tool box from a Genoese carpenter in the western Sicilian port of Trapani. Tit-for-tat, Pere insisted that in fact the carpenter had stolen his longboat. The matter was brought before the Catalan consul, but Pere scathingly stated: ‘this consul does not have any jurisdiction over citizens of Majorca, only over those who are under the dominion of the king of Aragon’.39 As fast as the Catalans extended their trading network across the Mediterranean, it threatened to fragment into pieces.

  IV

  This fragmentation extended across the Mediterranean. In the mid-thirteenth century dramatic political changes once again altered the regional power balance. Crusading expeditions vainly tried to protect the fragile, narrow coastal strip ruled from Acre that called itself the kingdom of Jerusalem. The smaller it became the more it was contested between baronial factions, for the monarchy was very weak and other contentious forces, including the Italian communes and the Military Orders of the Hospital and Temple, were very strong. Western rulers were well aware of the danger Egypt posed to the kingdom, and a series of ship-borne crusades targeted Egypt: the Fifth Crusade briefly gained control of Damietta in the Nile Delta, in 1219–21; Louis IX of France also invested Damietta in a disastrous crusade in 1248; on both occasions, the crusaders hoped to trade their Egyptian conquests for Jerusalem, or even to hold both Egypt and the Holy Land, a vain dream. Increasingly, though, Christian kings were distracted from crusading by quarrels nearer home, such as the battle for Sicily that will be discussed later in this chapter. There was plenty of crusading rhetoric, and there were small naval expeditions, but after 1248 the age of large-scale expeditions to the Holy Land came to an end.40 Military commanders of slave origin seized power in the Ayyubid dominions, controlling Egypt and Syria from 1250 to 1517; these Mamluks perpetuated the commercial arrangements between the Italian merchants and the Egyptian government, but they were also determined to wipe the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem off the map. Acre fell to the Mamluks in 1291 amid horrific massacres, though many refugees crowded on to the last departing ships and found safety in Cyprus. Acre disappeared as a centre of international trade, and Latin rule in the East became confined to the kingdom of Cyprus.

  We have already seen that one legacy of the Fourth Crusade was a weak Frankish regime in Constantinople, which the Greeks of Nikaia recovered with Genoese help in 1261 – the reward for Genoa was handsome trading privileges that included access to the grain, slaves, wax and furs of the Black Sea. There was also violent change in Sicily, where Frederick II revived and reinvigorated the Norman system of government; one of his achievements was the rebuilding of the Sicilian fleet, which he launched on a camp
aign against Jerba in North Africa, in 1235.41 When the papacy opposed his combined rule over Germany, Sicily and parts of northern Italy, Frederick put his fleet to good use in 1241, capturing an entire delegation of cardinals and bishops as they travelled aboard Genoese ships to Rome to attend a papal council.42 Ironically, Frederick’s admiral was another Genoese, Ansaldo de’ Mari, for the Genoese were as divided as ever about whether to support or oppose Frederick. While the bitter wars between Frederick and the papacy are not strictly part of the history of the Mediterranean, the years following his death in 1250 had major repercussions for the Mediterranean as a whole. In 1266–8, Frederick’s heirs in Sicily and southern Italy were defeated and all but exterminated by the papal champion Charles, count of Anjou and Provence, and brother of the crusading king of France, Louis IX.

  Charles attempted to create a Mediterranean empire, not just for himself but for his Angevin heirs. At the centre of it, he envisaged the kingdom of Sicily and southern Italy, surrounded by a maritime cordon sanitaire ensuring control of the waters between Sicily and Africa and between southern Italy and both Albania and Sardinia. As a young man he had already snatched Provence away from the Aragonese, by marrying one of the heiresses to the county; under his rule the rebellious patricians of Marseilles were forced to accept his authority, and its port became his great arsenal.43 He plotted to ensure that his son Philip was elected king of Sardinia in 1269, in the face of the opposition of King James I of Aragon.44 He bought the title to the shrinking kingdom of Jerusalem from Princess Maria of Antioch in 1277, even though the king of Cyprus possessed a widely recognized counter-claim. Charles saw himself as a crusader against the Muslims, whether in Tunis or the East, but his primary concern in the East was the former Byzantine Empire. He claimed lands acquired in Albania by the Hohenstaufen, and seized Dyrrhachion; then, with the approval of a number of Albanian warlords, he assumed the title ‘king of Albania’.45 Following the restoration of the Greeks to Constantinople, he dreamed of setting the Frankish dynasty back on the imperial throne it had seized after the Fourth Crusade, and of winning the hand of the Frankish emperor for his daughter. He was convinced that the Greek emperor, Michael VIII Palaiologos, was not seriously interested in the reunification of the Greek and Latin Churches under papal control. For him, the only way to bring the schismatic Greeks under the authority of Rome was by force.

  Charles planned to send a great fleet against Constantinople, in conjunction with the Venetians; Dyrrhachion would provide a base from which he could penetrate deep into Byzantium along the Via Egnatia. The old battle plans of Robert Guiscard and William the Good were taken out of a drawer and dusted off. Charles committed half of his very plentiful revenues to the building of his fleet of fifty or sixty galleys and maybe thirty auxiliary vessels. These galleys were magnificent ships, large, sturdy and supposedly capable of staying afloat in high seas.46 Operating such a fleet would cost at least 32,000 ounces of gold, possibly 50,000 ounces.47 It was an extraordinary misjudgement of what his heavily taxed subjects would tolerate. The pressure cooker exploded. In Palermo, descendants of the Latin settlers who had been migrating to the island since the late eleventh century turned on Charles’s Angevin soldiers in the great uprising of the Sicilian Vespers, of March 1282.48 Their cry was ‘Death to the French!’, but just as important a focus of their hostility was the group of bureaucrats from Amalfi and the Bay of Naples who, having been pushed out of Mediterranean trade by the Genoese and Pisans, now placed their skills in accounting at the service first of Frederick II and then of Charles I.49 Their enthusiasm for the minutiae of the tax system helped antagonize the island elites. The rebels rapidly conquered the island in the hope of creating a federation of free republics there. Rebuffed by Charles’s great ally the pope, to whom they naively appealed for support, they turned instead to the husband of Frederick II’s granddaughter, the last survivor of the Hohenstaufen dynasty: King Peter III of Aragon, the son of James the Conqueror.

  In August 1282, Peter and his fleet happened to be close by, campaigning on what Peter insisted was a holy war against the North African town of Alcol. Whether this was a façade, and he was really plotting to seize Sicily, has been much debated. The events in Palermo, beginning with riots after a French soldier made sexual advances to a young Sicilian housewife, seem quite uncoordinated, even chaotic. When Peter arrived in September, he, or rather, his wife Constance, won the support of most of the Sicilian elite. He came, after all, to vindicate her claim to Sicily, and would have seized southern Italy as well if its inhabitants had joined in the rebellion and if he had possessed the resources to defeat Charles of Anjou’s well-funded armies (Charles benefited from the loans of the Florentine bankers, whose support guaranteed supplies of Apulian grain to the growing city of Florence).50 The Angevins persuaded the French king to invade Aragon in 1283 (a disaster for France); the Aragonese supported the anti-papal factions in Italy, providing a focus of loyalty in the internecine strife of pro-Angevin Guelfs and pro-Aragonese Ghibellines within the Tuscan and Lombard cities.51 The result was stalemate: by 1285, when both Peter III and Charles I died, the Aragonese king held Sicily and the Angevin king held southern Italy, but both called themselves ‘king of Sicily’. (The mainland kingdom is often conveniently referred to as the ‘kingdom of Naples’.) Despite papal attempts at mediation in 1302 and after, the rivalry between Angevins and Aragonese continued throughout the fourteenth century, consuming precious financial resources and occasionally exploding outwards.

  The conflict was fought out on the sea as well as on land. Charles of Anjou probably regarded the smaller Catalan fleet as a puny rival. This was a mistake, particularly after King Peter appointed Roger de Lauria, a nobleman from Calabria, Admiral of the Fleet. He was one of the greatest naval commanders in the history of the Mediterranean, a new Lysander.52 In contrast to the compact, well-run Catalan fleet, Charles’s navy was impressively equipped but lacked cohesion; it was a motley assortment of south Italians, Pisans and Provençaux. In October 1282 Roger de Lauria overwhelmed Charles’s fleet off the coast of Calabria, at Nicotera, capturing twenty Angevin and two Pisan galleys, and forcing Charles on to the defensive in mainland southern Italy.53 However, if Charles were ever to recapture Sicily, he would also need to gain mastery over the Sicilian Straits dividing the island from Africa. Here again he was stymied by Roger de Lauria, and the battleground was the waters around Malta, which was contested between an Angevin garrison and an Aragonese invading force. In June 1283 a Provençal fleet of eighteen galleys arrived in what was to become the Grand Harbour of Malta, but it was pursued there by Lauria’s fleet of twenty-one galleys. The two navies fought all day, and by nightfall the Angevins had been forced to surrender many of their ships and to scuttle several others. No less serious were the Angevin casualties: perhaps 3,500 Angevin troops were slaughtered, and the Aragonese took several hundred captives, including noblemen. Most of the victims were probably from Marseilles, which may have lost nearly one-fifth of its population in the battle.54 When the French launched their invasion of Catalonia in 1283, Catalan fleets were also on hand, capturing half the French fleet off Roses. Roger asserted: ‘no galley or ship, nor even, I believe, any fish goes about on the sea unless it carries the arms of the king of Aragon’.55

  The Angevins were now unable to defend the shores of southern Italy from constant Catalan raids, and their loss of mastery over the Tyrrhenian Sea was confirmed in June 1284, when Charles I’s son, Charles, prince of Salerno, was foolhardy enough to lead an Angevin fleet against Roger de Lauria’s ships off Naples. Many Neapolitan sailors knew better than to engage with the Catalans, and had to be forced at sword-point to embark. This time disaster took a different form. The Neapolitan fleet was not destroyed, but several Provençal galleys were captured, and on board one of them was Charles of Salerno.56 He was to remain an Aragonese captive until 1289, even though his father died in 1285 and (at least in Angevin eyes) he then became king of Sicily and count of Provence. In the years that follow
ed, the Catalan fleet impudently extended its operations across the Mediterranean, raiding Kephalonia (a Neapolitan possession), the Cyclades and Chios; Jerba and Kerkennah, off the coast of Tunisia, were brought back under Sicilian control. No one could withstand Roger de Lauria. His unbroken series of naval victories ensured that Sicily remained in Aragonese hands.

  Majorca was a different problem. Peter III had from the start resented his father’s division of his lands between the king of Aragon and the king of Majorca. When his younger brother, James II of Majorca, treacherously embraced the Angevin cause, Peter invaded Roussillon, marched into the royal palace in Perpignan, and, finding himself locked out of his brother’s bedroom, hammered on the door in frustration while James escaped down a filthy manhole and fled across country. He won back his crown only in 1298, following papal mediation.57 Yet Peter made a similar decision to his father when he divided the newly conquered island of Sicily from his other lands, bequeathing it to his second son as a separate entity. This recognized an awkward fact: the Sicilians had not been fighting for the house of Barcelona but for the house of Hohenstaufen. Moreover, Sicily was far from home and difficult or impossible to control from Barcelona. Yet the island was enormously desirable. Well before the Vespers, Catalan merchants were coming en masse to Palermo, Trapani and other ports, seeking grain and cotton. Peter’s aim was, however, to redeem his wife’s dynastic claim, not to defend the interests of his merchants. After Peter’s death, opportunities for the merchants were compromised by strife among the three Aragonese kings – the rulers of Aragon-Catalonia, Majorca and Sicily.