The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean

by David Abulafia

  Constantinople had fallen to Mehmet the Conqueror one year before the peace agreement. All the talk about resisting the Turks had achieved nothing; indeed, they were advancing with ever greater confidence through the Balkans. Already, in 1447, Alfonso had promised help to the embattled king of Hungary, John Hunyadi. Alfonso raised the promised troops and then sent them to fight his Tuscan war instead. He was not, however, simply a cynic about the crusade against the Turks.30 Alfonso rejoiced in his self-image as a king-redeemer and warrior for Christ – as the new Galahad, a theme that was taken up in the magnificent sculptures of his triumphal arch in Naples. He offered warm support to Scanderbeg, the great Albanian rebel against the Turks, for the loss of Albania to the Ottomans would bring their fleets and armies within sight of southern Italy.31 Alfonso’s ambitions extended as far as Kastellórizo, a tiny island to the east of Rhodes, which became a base for Aragonese naval operations deep inside the eastern Mediterranean (it is now the farthest flung possession of Greece).32 Shortly before the fall of Constantinople he and the Greek prince Demetrios Palaiologos were fabricating plans to seize power in Constantinople from the last Byzantine emperor, Constantine XI, and Alfonso had his own viceroy in the Peloponnese. These grandiose aims of defeating the Turks and recovering the eastern Mediterranean lands were commemorated after Alfonso’s death in the lively novel by Joannot Martorell, Tirant lo Blanc.33 In many ways the swashbuckling hero Tirant is an Alfonso-figure, or rather the figure the king had aspired to become, and (amid the often explicit love scenes) the book was filled with advice about the best way to defeat a Turkish army, along with the Genoese, whom Alfonso regarded as secret allies of the Ottomans.34 In Tirant lo Blanc the Genoese try to frustrate the Hospitaller army defending Rhodes from the Turks:

  Your Lordship should know that two Genoese friars of our order have betrayed us, for on their advice the villainous Genoese sent all those ships with many soldiers but little cargo. The traitors in our castle have done a foul deed, removing the notches from our crossbows and replacing them with soap and cheese.35

  Genoese behaviour during the final siege of Constantinople in 1453 aroused similar suspicions.36

  IV

  By 1453, aided by a strong administration and a devotion to the holy cause of the jihad, the Ottomans had already extinguished rival Turkish statelets along the coast of Asia Minor, notably the pirate stronghold of Aydın. Despite a massive defeat at the hands of the central Asian warlord Timur (Tamerlane) in 1402, the Ottomans revived quickly. By the 1420s they had once again become active in the Balkans. The Byzantine emperor sold Thessalonika to Venice in 1423; but, having hankered so long after its dominion, the Venetians were able to hold the city for only seven years before it fell to the armies of Sultan Murad II. The succession of the young Mehmet II resolved the dispute between those relatively cautious advisers who opposed rapid expansion for fear of over-extension, and the more adventurous faction that saw Mehmet as the leader of a revitalized Roman Empire controlled by Muslim Turks who would combine Roman-Byzantine, Turkic and Islamic concepts of rule. His aim was to restore and fulfil, rather than destroy, the Roman Empire. His Greek scribes issued documents describing him as Mehmet, Basileus and Autocrat of the Romans, the title by which the Byzantine emperors had been known.37 But his imperial dream was not satisfied with the New Rome; he sought to make himself master of the Old Rome too. Practical politics also drew western affairs to his attention. The rebellion of Scanderbeg in Albania made the sultan realize that there were defects in the traditional policy of allowing independent Christian vassals to rule the Balkan lands. Even those who had been educated as Muslims at the Ottoman court, like Scanderbeg, could become renegades. Ottoman authority thus needed to be imposed directly, and Ottoman power edged forwards to the shores of the Adriatic. Scanderbeg died in 1468, after which the Albanian rebellion petered out; by 1478 Mehmet had gained control of Valona (Vlorë) on the Albanian coast, and over the next few months he wrested the city of Scutari (Shkodër), dominated by the great fortified hill of Rozafa, from the Venetians.38 Durazzo, the ancient Dyrrhachion, remained in Venetian hands till the start of the next century, and the port of Kotor (Cattaro), deep within its fjord in Montenegro, enjoyed Venetian protection; but the rest of the Venetian dominion in this part of the Adriatic was whittled away.39

  The Venetians had been lukewarm about Scanderbeg, anxious that support for rebels would compromise their trading position at Constantinople. Yet to lose the coast of Albania was to pay a heavy price, not just because of its usefulness as a source of salt, but because the Venetians needed to navigate past the Albanian shore on their way out of the Adriatic. Routes inland from the coast were valued too, as they gave access to the silver, slaves and other products of the mountainous Balkan interior. The difficulties were compounded by Turkish assaults on the Venetian naval bases in the Aegean: Lemnos and Negroponte fell into Ottoman hands. Wise to the implications, the Sublime Porte (as the Ottoman court was often known) still issued the Venetians with trading privileges. The message was clear: the Ottomans could tolerate Christian merchants from overseas, just as Muslim rulers all around the Mediterranean had done for centuries; but they regarded Venetian or Genoese territorial dominion within the Akdeniz, or White Sea, as unacceptable.40

  By the end of his reign Mehmet was determined to confront the Christian powers in the Mediterranean. An obvious focus of Turkish attention was the headquarters of the Knights Hospitallers on Rhodes, which they had occupied since 1310, and from which they had launched pirate raids against Muslim shipping, as well as gaining control of a few coastal stations in Asia Minor, most notably Bodrum, whose Hospitaller castle was built out of the stones of the great Mausoleum of Halikarnassos. Rhodes also attracted Mehmet as one of the famous cities of the ancient world.41 A Saxon cannon founder named Meister Georg who had been domiciled in Istanbul offered the Turks precious information about the layout of the fortress, but in 1480 the defences of Rhodes proved too strong even for massive Turkish cannon cast by the finest experts. Neither side showed any mercy: the Hospitallers sent out sorties at night-time, and brought back the heads of the Turks they had killed, which were carried in procession through the city to encourage its defenders. Frustrated by the resolute resistance, the Turks made peace with the Knights, who promised to cease interfering with Turkish shipping.42 The sultans did not forget their defeat, but Rhodes remained the property of the Knights of St John for another forty-two years. Nor did western Europeans forget what happened at Rhodes, since it brought some cheer at a time when the Turkish threat was so severe. Immediately afterwards, a woodcut history of the siege was an early bestseller in Venice, Ulm, Salamanca, Paris, Bruges and London.

  At the same time, Turkish fleets were threatening the West. Southern Italy was an obvious target, because of its proximity to Albania and because Ottoman control of both sides of the Adriatic entrance would force Venice to obey the sultan’s will. Venice did not want to be seen to oppose the Turks. When they attacked Otranto in 1480, Venetian ships helped ferry Turkish troops across to Italy from Albania, though this met with official disapproval in Venice itself. One hundred and forty Ottoman ships carrying 18,000 men crossed the Straits, including forty galleys. After the inhabitants of Otranto refused to surrender, the Turkish commander, Gedik Ahmet Pasha, made clear what would happen to the survivors and pressed on with his assault; the town possessed poor defences and no cannon, and the outcome was predictable. On capturing the city Ahmet Pasha slaughtered the entire male population, leaving 10,000 people alive out of about 22,000; 8,000 slaves were sent across the Straits to Albania. The elderly archbishop was struck down at the high altar of Otranto Cathedral. The Turks then fanned out across southern Apulia, raiding neighbouring cities. The king of Naples, Alfonso V’s son Ferrante, had sent his armies into Tuscany, but once his troops and ships were ready he was able to launch a successful counter-assault. Even when the Turks withdrew, they made plain their intention of returning and conquering the Apulian ports, while rumour enlarg
ed this into a grand army ready to attack both Italy and Sicily from Albania.43

  The siege of Otranto was an enormous shock to western Europe. All the Christian powers in the Mediterranean offered help against the Turks, notably Ferdinand II, king of Aragon and cousin of Ferrante of Naples. The conspicuous exception was Venice, claiming to be too tired after decades of conflict with the sultan’s armies and navies. Turkish raiding parties had started to penetrate into Friuli, an area of north-eastern Italy partly under Venetian dominion – on land as on sea the Turks were threateningly close, and the Venetians preferred appeasement.44 The Venetian consul in Apulia was advised that he should express his satisfaction at the Christian victory to the Neapolitan king orally and not in writing; written messages were often stolen by spies, and the Serenissima Repubblica was fearful that the sultan might see a purloined letter of congratulations and blame Venice for its two-faced outlook.

  The immediate danger of a further attack on southern Italy disappeared with the death of Mehmet in May 1481. He was only forty-nine years old. During the coming years western rulers such as Charles VIII of France and Ferdinand of Aragon would make the war against the Turks a central area of policy. Both these rulers took the view that, if they controlled southern Italy, they would be able to lay their hands on the resources needed for a grand crusade and use Apulia as a convenient launching-pad for attacks on Ottoman lands, which now lay so close; both also had controversial claims to the throne of Naples, notwithstanding the presence of a local dynasty of Aragonese origin. Charles VIII’s invasion of southern Italy, in 1494–5, brought him mastery over Naples, but his position proved unsustainable, and he soon had to withdraw. Venice now felt threatened on all sides. Crusades against the Turks would only endanger traffic through the waters facing Ottoman Albania. At the end of the fifteenth century Venice therefore took control of a number of Apulian ports, to guarantee free passage through the Straits.45 In 1495, amid scenes of gory massacre and brutal rape, the Venetians seized Monopoli from the French; they then persuaded the king of Naples, Ferrante II, to grant them Trani, Brindisi and Otranto without bloodshed, holding them until 1509. The king needed allies, and they needed the produce of Apulia, exporting grain, wine, salt, oil, vegetables and saltpetre for their cannons.46 However, the loss of Durazzo to the Turks in 1502 deprived Venice of its most important listening station on the Albanian side of the Straits. They had only just built new fortifications, which still stand. The Mediterranean was becoming divided in two: an Ottoman East and a Christian West. One obvious question was which side was likely to win the contest; but another question was which Christian power would dominate the waters of the western Mediterranean.

  V

  A few bridges were created between these two worlds. The Ottoman court was fascinated by Western culture, understandably in view of the claim to mastery over the old Roman Empire; meanwhile western Europeans sought to understand the Turks, and continued to acquire exotic oriental goods.47 The artist Gentile Bellini travelled from Venice to Constantinople, where he painted a famous portrait of Mehmet II that now hangs in the National Gallery in London.48 Pressure on the West was rarely relaxed (mainly when the sultans turned their attention to Persia instead), but the Ottomans realized the importance of creating a neutral territory between their lands and western Europe, whose merchants could gain entry into the contrasting worlds of western Christendom and the Turks. This territory was the small but vibrant trading republic of Dubrovnik, known to western Europeans as Ragusa. Its origins, like those of Venice and Amalfi, lay in a group of refugees from barbarian invasions who occupied a rocky promontory in southern Dalmatia, protected by a wall of mountains from Slav incursions. The Latin Ragusans were soon joined by a Slav population, and by the late twelfth century the town was bilingual, some speaking south Slav dialects and some speaking Dalmatian, a romance language closely related to Italian; in Slavonic, the inhabitants were known as the dubrovčani, ‘those of the woods’. Although they entered into treaties with assertive Serbian and Bosnian princes in the interior, the Ragusans needed protectors, and found them in the Norman kings of Sicily and then in Venice, which consolidated its hold on southern Dalmatia after the Fourth Crusade of 1202–4.49

  Once the Hungarian king had wrested Dalmatia from Venice following his intervention in the war of 1350 between Venice and Genoa, the city fell under Hungarian suzerainty (from 1358).50 This allowed the Ragusans to develop their own institutions and their own commercial network without a great amount of external interference. A trading patriciate emerged, able to benefit from access to the Bosnian interior, rich in silver and slaves; Dubrovnik became the main centre in the region for the purchase of salt.51 Demand for silver in the eastern Mediterranean had always been strong, for lack of local supplies, and Ragusan merchants made some headway in the Byzantine and Turkish lands of the East.52 Dubrovnik was able to benefit greatly from new opportunities following the Black Death. Local trade flourished – indeed, without the wheat, oil, salted meat, wine, fruit and vegetables that were regularly carried across to Dalmatia from Apulia, neither Dubrovnik nor its neighbours could have survived; even fish was imported from southern Italy, unlikely as this may seem in a maritime city.53 There was very little land fit for growing anything. A fifteenth-century writer, Philippus de Diversis, explained the essential features of his home city:

  The territory of Ragusa, because of its sterility as much as because of the large number of people, lives off a small income, so that nobody could live with his family from his possessions unless he had other riches, and this is why it is necessary to engage in commerce.54

  He felt embarrassed at the involvement of the city patricians in trade, which he knew was a taboo shunned by the patriciate of ancient Rome. On the other hand, the lack of local resources stimulated the emergence of important industries: raw wool from southern Italy and Spain was manufactured into woollen cloth, and by the mid-sixteenth century Dubrovnik had become a notable textile centre. The link across the Adriatic to the towns of southern Italy was of crucial importance. Dubrovnik provided the kings of Naples with valuable information about what was happening in the Ottoman lands. In return, these kings helped suppress piracy in the Adriatic and exempted the Ragusans from port taxes.55 Ragusan ships were allowed to dominate the waters off Apulia. This was the beginning of a phase of expansion which would see the Ragusan fleet emerge as one of the largest merchant navies in the Mediterranean; Dubrovnik, not the Argonauts of Jason, provided the English language with the word argosy, a corruption of ‘Ragusa’. A Ragusan patrician, Benedetto Cotrugli, or Kotruljević, became mint-master in Naples, but he is best known for his tract on the art of commerce that set out the business skills that guaranteed success. Among his sage advice to merchants was that they should avoid gambling and card games, nor should they drink and eat too much.56

  A maritime republic that lay within walking distance of the territories ruled by the great Slav princes could not escape their attempts at interference, and it was for this reason that the Ragusans preferred protectors who lived some distance away – even the Turks. The city’s difficulties multiplied in the middle of the fifteenth century, when enemies, Slav and Turkish, closed in from several directions. The city was firmly enclosed within its impressive set of walls, which still stand. One enemy was Stjepan Vukčić, herceg (or duke) of lands to the rear of Dubrovnik that became known as Hercegovina. His title was confirmed by the Ottoman court, though he was independent-minded and saw submission to the Sublime Porte as a way of guaranteeing rather than compromising his authority. He decided to raise funds by establishing a trading settlement that would, he hoped, outrival Dubrovnik, at Herceg Novi, by the entrance to the Bay of Kotor. The source of profit would not be exotic goods from the Orient; it would be salt, traditionally traded through Dubrovnik.57 The Ragusans were not innocent of territorial ambitions. They of course wanted to acquire Herceg Novi and even the Serbian town of Trebinje, a little way into Hercegovina. In 1451 Ragusan heralds proclaimed that the rewa
rd for assassinating the Herceg (who was also suspected of heresy) would be 15,000 ducats and elevation to the Ragusan patriciate.

  This threat frightened Vukčić enough to make him withdraw his armies from Ragusan territory, but Dubrovnik almost at once had to confront a new threat, as Mehmet the Conqueror triumphantly extended his power over the Balkan principalities. So in 1458 Ragusan ambassadors toiled their way to the sultan’s court at Skopje with an offer of submission in return, they hoped, for confirmation of their commercial privileges. Some haggling was necessary, but by 1472 they were sending 10,000 ducats as annual tribute – and it continued to rise thereafter.58 Regular tribute payments were a better guarantee of safety than the city’s massive walls. A curious situation developed. The Ragusans traded with the Ottoman-ruled lands, and yet they gave support to enemies of the Turks such as Scanderbeg, as he passed from Albania to southern Italy to enter the service of the beleaguered King Ferrante of Naples; they looked after Vukčić when he was dispossessed by the Turks, having evidently forgotten their wish to do away with him. Yet the Turks rarely oppressed Dubrovnik, seeing advantage in its role as a commercial middleman that supplied the Sublime Porte with goods and tribute. Around 1500 the Ragusans were able to benefit from the discomfiture of the Venetians who struggled to hold back Ottoman advances along the coast of Albania. Venice could no longer trade with Constantinople, but Ragusan ships could fly their flag with impunity in Turkish waters, and carry goods between East and West. Putting out of their mind the tribute they paid to the Ottoman sultan, the Ragusans flaunted the myth of the city’s freedom, encapsulated in the simple motto LIBERTAS.