The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean

by David Abulafia

  Despite the political divisions, and despite occasional embargoes within the Catalan-Aragonese world, the Catalans had carved out a place for themselves alongside the Italians. They entered the competition for mastery over the Mediterranean at the right moment: the Genoese, Pisan and Venetians had not yet gained complete control over the sea routes when Barcelona began to compete for access to Africa, Sicily and the East. The Catalans possessed impressive expertise in the arts of navigation, including cartography. But they also had one advantage their rivals entirely lacked: under the protection of the kings of Aragon, they gained easy access to the courts of rulers in Tunis, Tlemcen and Alexandria. Later generations would look back on the age of James the Conqueror and Peter the Great as the heroic age of Catalonia.

  8

  Serrata – Closing, 1291–1350

  I

  The fall of Acre in 1291 shocked western Europe, which had in fact done little to protect the city in its last decades. Plans to launch new expeditions abounded, and among the greatest enthusiasts was Charles II of Naples, after his release from his Catalan gaol. But this was all talk; he was far too preoccupied with trying to defeat the Aragonese to be able to launch a crusade, nor did he have the resources to do so.1 The Italian merchants diversified their interests to cope with the loss of access to eastern silks and spices through Acre. Venice gradually took the lead in Egypt, while the Genoese concentrated more on bulky goods from the Aegean and the Black Sea, following the establishment of a Genoese colony in Constantinople in 1261. But the Byzantine emperors were wary of the Genoese. They favoured the Venetians as well, though to a lesser degree, so that the Genoese would not assume they could do whatever they wished. Michael VIII and his son Andronikos II confined the Genoese to the high ground north of the Golden Horn, the area known as Pera, or Galata, where a massive Genoese tower still dominates the skyline of northern Istanbul, but they also granted them the right to self-government, and the Genoese colony grew so rapidly that it soon had to be extended. By the mid-fourteenth century the trade revenues of Genoese Pera dwarfed those of Greek Constantinople, by a ratio of about seven to one. These emperors effectively handed control of the Aegean and the Black Sea to the Genoese, and Michael’s navy, consisting of about eighty ships, was dismantled by his son. It was assumed that God would protect Constantinople as a reward for the rejection of all attempts at a union of the holy Orthodox Church with the unholy Catholic one.2

  The Genoese generally tolerated a Venetian presence, for war damaged trade and ate up valuable resources. Occasionally, as in 1298, pirate attacks by one side caused a crisis, and the cities did go to war. The battle of Curzola (Korčula) that year pitted about eighty Genoese galleys against more than ninety Venetian ones. The Venetians were on home territory, deep within the Adriatic. But Genoese persistence won the day, and hundreds of Venetians were captured, including (it is said) Marco Polo, who dictated his extraordinary tales of China and the East to a Pisan troubadour with whom he shared a cell in Genoa.3 The real story of the Polos was not simply one of intrepid, or foolhardy, Venetian jewel merchants who set out via Acre for the Far East, accompanied by the young Marco. The rise of the Mongol empire in the thirteenth century led to a reconfiguration of the trans-Asiatic trade routes, and opened a route bringing eastern silks to the shores of the Black Sea, although the sea-lanes through the Indian Ocean and Red Sea continued to bring spices to Alexandria and the Mediterranean from the East Indies. Once they had gained access to the Black Sea in the 1260s, the Genoese and Venetians attempted to tap into this exotic trans-Asia trade. True to form, the Venetians were more interested in the expensive luxury items, while the Genoese concentrated on slaves, grain and dried fruits, local products of the shores of the Black Sea. Good-quality wax was also in high demand, to illuminate churches and palaces across western Europe. The Genoese set up a successful trading base at Caffa in Crimea, while the Venetians operated from Tana, in the Sea of Azov. In Caffa the Genoese collected thousands of slaves, mostly Circassians and Tartars; they sold them for domestic service in Italian cities or to the Mamluks in Egypt, who recruited them into the sultan’s guard. The spectacle of the Genoese supplying the Muslim enemy with its crack troops not surprisingly caused alarm and displeasure at the papal court.

  The Genoese despatched Pontic grain far beyond Constantinople, reviving the Black Sea grain traffic that had helped feed ancient Athens. As the Italian cities grew in size, they drew their grain from further and further afield: Morocco, the shores of Bulgaria and Romania, the Crimea, Ukraine. Production costs there were far lower than in northern Italy, so that, even after taking into account the cost of transport, grain from these lands could be put on sale back home at prices no higher than Sicilian or Sardinian imports. Of those too there was still a great need. The Genoese distributed grain from all these sources around the Mediterranean: they and the Catalans supplied Tunis; they ferried grain from Sicily to northern Italy.4 One city where demand was constant was Florence, only now emerging as an economic powerhouse, a centre of cloth-finishing and cloth-production. Although it lies well inland, Florence depended heavily on the Mediterranean for its wool supplies and for its food; it controlled a small territory that could produce enough grain to feed the city for only five months out of twelve. The soil of Tuscany was generally poor, and local grain could not match the quality of the hard wheats that were imported from abroad. One solution was regular loans to their ally the Angevin king of Naples, which gave access to the seemingly limitless grain of Apulia.5

  These developments reflected massive changes in the society and economy of the lands surrounding the Mediterranean. By 1280 or 1300, population was rising and grain prices were rising in parallel. Local famines became more frequent and towns had to search ever further afield for the food they needed. The commercial revolution in Europe led to a spurt in urban growth, as employment prospects within towns drew workers in from the countryside. Cities began to dominate the economy of Mediterranean western Europe as never before in history: Valencia, Majorca, Barcelona, Perpignan, Narbonne, Montpellier, Aigues-Mortes, Marseilles, Savona, Genoa, Pisa and Florence, with its widely used and imitated gold florins, to name the major centres in the great arc stretching from the Catalan lands to Tuscany. Aigues-Mortes, rich in salt, whose appearance has changed little since the early fourteenth century, was founded in the 1240s as a commercial gateway to the Mediterranean for the kingdom of France, which had only recently acquired direct control over Languedoc. King Louis IX eyed with concern the flourishing city of Montpellier, a centre of trade, banking and manufacture that lay, as part of a complex feudal arrangement, under the lordship of the king of Aragon. He hoped to divert business to his new port in the salt lagoons, which he also used as a departure point for his disastrous crusade in 1248. In the event, Aigues-Mortes soon became an outport for Montpellier, which avoided French royal control for another century.6 The Venetians had their own distinctive answer to the problem of how to feed the 100,000 inhabitants of their city. They attempted to channel all grain that came into the Upper Adriatic towards the city; the Venetians would have first choice, and then what remained would be redistributed to hungry neighbours such as Ravenna, Ferrara and Rimini. They sought to transform the Adriatic Sea into what came to be called the ‘Venetian Gulf’. The Venetians negotiated hard with Charles of Anjou and his successors to secure access to Apulian wheat, and were even prepared to offer support to Charles I’s campaign against Constantinople, which was supposed to depart in 1282, the year of the Sicilian Vespers.

  As well as food, the big round ships of the Genoese and Venetians ferried alum from Asia Minor to the West; the Genoese established enclaves on the edge of the alum-producing lands, first, and briefly, on the coast of Asia Minor, where the Genoese adventurer Benedetto Zaccaria tried to create a ‘kingdom of Asia’ in 1297, and then close by on Chios, which was recaptured by a consortium of Genoese merchant families in 1346 (and was held till 1566). Chios not merely gave access to the alum of Phokaia; it also produc
ed dried fruits and mastic. More important than Chios was Famagusta in Cyprus, which filled the gap left by the fall of Acre. Cyprus lay under the rule of the Lusignan family, of French origin, though the majority of its inhabitants were Byzantine Greeks. Its rulers were often embroiled in faction-fighting, but the dynasty managed to survive for two more centuries, supported by the prosperity Cyprus derived from its intensive trade with neighbouring lands.7 Massive communities of foreign merchants visited and settled: Famagusta was the base for merchants from Venice, Genoa, Barcelona, Ancona, Narbonne, Messina, Montpellier, Marseilles and elsewhere; its ruined Gothic churches still testify to the wealth its merchants accumulated.8

  From Cyprus, trade routes extended to another Christian kingdom, Cilician Armenia, on the south-east coast of modern Turkey. Western merchants supplied wheat to Armenia by way of Cyprus, and they used Armenia as a gateway to exotic and arduous trade routes that took them away from the Mediterranean, to the silk markets of Persian Tabriz and beyond. Cyprus enjoyed close links to Beirut, where Syrian Christian merchants acted as agents of businessmen from Ancona and Venice, furnishing them with massive quantities of raw cotton for processing into cloth in Italy and even in Germany, a clear sign that a single economic system was emerging in the Mediterranean, crossing the boundaries between Christendom and Islam. Some of the cotton cloth would eventually be conveyed back to the East to be sold in Egypt and Syria. Trade and politics were fatefully intertwined in the minds of the Lusignan kings. When King Peter I of Cyprus launched an ambitious crusade against Alexandria in 1365, his grand plan included the establishment of Christian hegemony over the ports of southern Anatolia (of which he had already captured a couple) and Syria, but a sustained campaign in Egypt was far beyond his resources; the expedition turned into the unwholesome sack of Alexandria, confirming that what had been proclaimed as a holy war was motivated by material considerations. Soon after his return to Cyprus, King Peter, who knew how to make enemies, was assassinated.9

  II

  The commercial supremacy of the Italian and Catalan merchants was based on their naval supremacy. The big round sailing ships could cross freely from Christian to Muslim shores only because long, oared galleys patrolled the seas. The galleys were about eight times as long as they were broad, and combined oar and sail power. Under oar, four or six men sat abreast of one another, two or three per oar. As trading vessels, they were best suited to carrying small quantities of high-value goods such as spices, for hold space was very limited. They were fast and manoeuvrable, but they were still liable to be swamped by high seas. As the Flanders route developed, ships bound for the Atlantic were built longer, broader and (most importantly) higher, so the new ‘great galleys’ could face the winds and currents of the Bay of Biscay.10 The round ships included a very few Venetian and Genoese vessels the size of the Roccaforte, built in the 1260s: this was a massive ship of about 500 tons, more than twice the displacement of most round ships.11

  Some fleets, notably those sailing from Venice to the Levant or to Flanders, moved in convoy and had armed protection (what the Venetians called the muda system). Even so, rampant piracy by Muslim or Christian corsairs could interrupt traffic for long periods. In 1297 a rebel faction from Genoa, led by a member of the Grimaldi family whose habit of wearing a hood supposedly earned him the nickname ‘the Monk’, seized the rock of Monaco at the extreme west of the Genoese land dominion (in fact, the name Monoikos originated with Phokaian settlers in antiquity and has nothing to do with a monk, or monaco). The sailors of Monaco made thorough nuisances of themselves for many decades, posing as supporters of the Angevin king of Naples, Robert the Wise, who had become overlord of Genoa in 1318. In 1336 Monegasque pirates seized two galleys returning from Flanders laden with merchandise. The Senate felt obliged to suspend all its Flanders sailings, which did not resume for twenty years. The Grimaldi stayed put, remained a nuisance, and are still rulers of Monaco, though they found slightly more respectable ways to make money than piracy.12

  While trade created a successful merchant class, it also enhanced the power of the patrician families. In Venice, the nobility dominated the most profitable trade routes, leaving the commerce in grain, salt and wine to middle-class merchants in their round ships. Defining who qualified as noble was not straightforward, though there were some ancient families, such as the Dandolos, who had stayed at the top of the social ladder for centuries. The question was who was to be allowed to ascend that ladder at a time of growing prosperity, when many new men had acquired great wealth and claimed the right to determine where the galley convoys should sail and with which foreign kings treaties should be made, decisions that (in the early fourteenth century) were made by the aristocratic Senate. The solution that was offered in 1297 was to limit membership of the Great Council, from which the Senate and higher committees were drawn, to those who were already members and their descendants – about 200 families, many of them leading trading families such as the Tiepolos. This ‘closing’, or Serrata, was intended to be more or less final, although, over the years, some families were admitted to noble ranks through the back door.13 The Serrata was thus an opportunity to reaffirm the supremacy of the aristocracy in politics, trade and society.

  III

  The Catalans too were enjoying their successes at the start of the fourteenth century. The formal end to the War of the Vespers in 1302 reopened the routes linking Sicily, Majorca and Barcelona. Most importantly, the king of Aragon decided to vindicate a claim to Sardinia, which the pope had granted to James II of Aragon in 1297, in exchange, the pope hoped, for Sicily.14 James’s brother Frederick responded aggressively by holding on to Sicily as its independent monarch, and it was only in 1323 that King Alfonso IV launched an invasion of Sardinia. While his motives were primarily dynastic, the Catalan merchant community thought it would gain substantially from the conquest of an island so rich in grain, salt, cheese, leather and – most importantly – silver.15 The would-be conquerors failed to take into account the eternal reluctance of the native Sards to accept outside rule. The Catalans bunkered down in the towns, mainly along the coast (their Catalan-speaking descendants still live in Alghero), and kept the Sards outside the town walls. Meanwhile, the Genoese and Pisans regarded the Catalan invasion as an infringement of their own rights of lordship. The Pisans were in the end allowed to retain estates in southern Sardinia, but Pisa was a spent force – not long before, the city had even considered voluntary submission to James II of Aragon. The Genoese posed a more serious problem. They responded with vicious attacks on Catalan shipping, while the Catalans were just as brutal. The seas around Sardinia became perilous. This was a contested isle – contested between its would-be masters and its ancient inhabitants, contested between one would-be master and another. In the late fourteenth century native resistance culminated in the creation of a dynamic kingdom based at Arborea, in the centre-west of the island; its queen, Eleonora, is much celebrated as a lawgiver.16

  Following the accession of the ambitious, pint-sized king known as Peter the Ceremonious (Peter IV) to the throne of Aragon in 1337, the Aragonese court began to develop what might be called an imperial strategy. At the start of his reign he resolved to deal with the problem of his cousin’s behaviour in Majorca. King James III of Majorca gives the impression of being mentally unstable. He deeply resented the insistence of Peter IV that the king of Majorca was a vassal of the king of Aragon, but he came to Barcelona to discuss their fraught relationship. His ship docked by the walls of a seaside palace, and at his insistence a covered bridge was built linking the ship to it; he then tried to lure Peter on board, and the story circulated that he had an insane plan to kidnap the king of Aragon. The Majorcan business community found all this very trying. They wanted and needed to maintain close links to their opposite numbers in Barcelona. It was a relief when the king of Aragon declared James contumacious and seized Majorca in 1343; the Catalan fleet contained 116 ships, including twenty-two galleys.17 James died soon after, attempting to recover h
is lands. At the end of his long life (he reigned for fifty years) Peter was trying to negotiate a marriage alliance that would return Aragonese Sicily to the fold. His imperial dream began to turn into reality: at last, a Catalan-Aragonese ‘empire’ was coming into existence, from which the Catalan merchants hoped to make big profits. In 1380 Peter explained the importance of these trans-Mediterranean connections while pondering the need to retain control of the war-torn island of Sardinia:

  If Sardinia is lost, it will follow that Majorca will also be lost, because the food that Majorca is accustomed to receiving from Sicily and Sardinia will stop arriving, and as a result the land will become depopulated and will be lost.18

  A network was emerging that would tie together Sicily, Sardinia, Majorca and Catalonia, in which the Italian islands regularly provisioned Majorca and Barcelona with vital food supplies.

  Maintaining the fleet was a headache. During the thirteenth century, a large arsenal was built in Barcelona, the shell of which is now the Maritime Museum. Here the shipwrights worked under cover, and large iron rings were suspended from the arches, enabling them to use block and tackle to raise the hull. But the cost of building an arsenal to house twenty-five galleys was estimated by a royal counsellor as 2,000 gold ounces, which was more than the kings of Aragon could afford. This was before taking into account the cost of maintaining ships in good order and of supplying the sailors with food, armaments and other equipment. The diet of sailors aboard Catalan galleys was a monotonous one of hard biscuit, salted meat, cheese, beans, oil and wine, as well as chickpeas and broad beans; the main difference from the diet of Genoese, Venetian and Neapolitan sailors was the balance of elements, with the Venetians receiving rather less biscuit and cheese and much more salted meat, while the Neapolitan fleet was awash with free wine (does this explain its poor performance in battle?).19 With the help of garlic, onions and spices it was possible to mix together a reasonably tasty topping for the biscuit, and it was understood that garlic and onions protected against diseases such as scurvy. Biscuit was exactly that – biscoctus, ‘twice-cooked’, so that it was hard but light, easily preserved and nutritious.20 The lack of salted fish seems odd. Salted fish was an important part of the diet in Barcelona; there were plenty of local anchovies and fish was also brought from the Atlantic, especially in Lent, when consumption of meat was forbidden to Christians. On the other hand, there was no reason for the crown to pay for fish when an abundance was available underneath the ship’s keel. Salted foods would increase demand for water, which was a constant problem. Each man would need at least eight litres a day, especially when rowing in hot weather. Ships could carry over 5,000 litres of water, which spoiled easily and had to be purified and flavoured with vinegar. But supplies needed to be replenished, and, as in antiquity, frequent landfalls were the solution.21 Mastering these supply problems was one of the chores the admiral had to perform. He was much more than a naval commander.