The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean

by David Abulafia

  The Genoese shared with the Venetians a nostalgia for past times, for an era in which Genoa had achieved greatness through sending its galleys across the Mediterranean and even into the seas beyond. A Genoese nobleman, Antonio Giulio Brignole Sale, wrote a treatise in 1642 in which he examined the arguments for and against the building of a new galley fleet, which the city fathers hoped would restore Genoese fortunes. He was convinced that the Mediterranean was the ideal theatre of operations, for ‘the provinces are more numerous, and more distinct, where many put in to port, so that everyone can find employment more easily’. By building galleys, it would be possible to renew ‘the ancient Levant routes’, which were the ‘special theatre of the acquisitions and glories of the Genoese’, a point upon which he insisted while admitting that opponents of his scheme argued that the Mediterranean no longer looked the same as it did in medieval days, and building galleys in the medieval fashion would not bring back that lost world.57

  In the late sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, the Mediterranean suffered from a sort of disorientation. Despite attempts by the Genoese to reconstitute the Levant trade, the Mediterranean lost its primacy in the traffic of western Europe to the Atlantic merchants, for whom the Mediterranean was one, and not necessarily the most interesting or important, of their concerns, which stretched from Holland to Brazil and the East Indies, or from England to Newfoundland and Muscovy.58 The initial promise of the fifteenth and early sixteenth centuries had not been fulfilled.

  6

  Diasporas in Despair, 1560–1700

  I

  Ottoman sultans and Spanish kings, along with their tax officials, took a strong interest in the religious identity of those who crossed the areas of the Mediterranean under their control. Sometimes, in an era marked by the clash of Christian and Muslim empires, the Mediterranean seems to be sharply divided between the two faiths. Yet the Ottomans had long accepted the existence of Christian majorities in many of the lands they ruled, while other groups navigated (metaphorically) between religious identities. The Sephardic Jews have already been encountered, with their astonishing ability to mutate into notionally Christian ‘Portuguese’ when they entered the ports of Mediterranean Spain. This existence suspended between worlds set off its own tensions in the seventeenth century, when many Sephardim acclaimed a deluded Jew of Smyrna as the Messiah. Similar tensions could also be found among the remnants of the Muslim population of Spain. The tragic history of the Moriscos was played out largely away from the Mediterranean Sea between the conversion of the last openly practising Muslims, in 1525, and the final act of their expulsion in 1609; it was their very isolation from the Islamic world that gave these people their distinctive identity, once again suspended between religions.

  The world inhabited by these Moriscos differed in important respects from that inhabited by the other group of conversos, those of Jewish descent. Although some Moriscos were hauled before the Inquisition, the Spanish authorities at first turned a blind eye to the continued practice of Islam; it was sometimes possible to pay the Crown a ‘service’ that bought exemption from interference by the Inquisition, which was mortified to discover that it could not boost its income by seizing the property of exempt suspects.1 Many Morisco communities lacked a Christian priest, so the continued practice of the old religion is no great surprise; even in areas where christianization took place, what sometimes emerged was an islamized Christianity, evinced in the remarkable lead tablets of Sacromonte, outside Granada, with their prophecies that ‘the Arabs will be those who aid religion in the last days’ and their mysterious references to a Christian caliph, or successor (to Jesus, not Muhammad).2 In many respects, the Crown’s major concern was political, rather than religious: a Spanish Christian writer reported that the leaders of the Granadan Moriscos had secretly negotiated with the rulers of the Barbary states and with the Turks, in the hope of establishing a statelet under their protection, but this was a hopeless cause since they lacked ships or supplies; besides, the Spanish coastal stations in North Africa acted as a partial barrier to contact between the Barbary states and the Moriscos, while ‘the Algiers corsairs are much better at piracy and trading along the coasts than they are at mounting difficult expeditions on land’.3 Even so, there was no room for complacency. The Moriscos might support the Ottoman sultans by creating a diversion within Spain while the armies and navies of the Catholic king were engaged in faraway lands – not just at Lepanto or Malta, but in the Netherlands. Philip II, like his father, Charles V, was tempted to see the problem of Unbelief in black-and-white, so that, for Philip, the presence within Spain of unruly Moriscos was, ultimately, part of the same problem as the presence within his northernmost possessions of unruly Calvinists: ‘I have such a specific obligation to God and the world to act,’ Philip wrote, for ‘if the heretics were to prevail (which I hope God will not allow) it might open the door to worse damages and dangers, and to war at home’.4

  These fears seemed to be realized in the final days of 1568, when violence erupted among the Moriscos of Granada, who were exasperated at recurrent attempts by the government and the Inquisition to turn them into proper Christians. The Moriscos had been ordered to speak Castilian instead of Arabic; they were forbidden to wear ‘the Moorish robes in which they took such pride’; women were ordered to abandon the veil and to show their faces; they were ordered not to gather at the public baths, and Moorish dancing was banned at weddings and other celebrations.5 For two years a hideously bloodthirsty war was waged between contestants who were unwilling to give any quarter; as feared, Turks and Berbers arrived from North Africa to offer support to the rebels, and diplomatic links were forged with the Sublime Porte and the North African rulers.6 And yet this support was never enough to crack the resolve of the Spanish troops, led by Don John of Austria, whose ruthlessness soon won him the command of the Christian navy at Lepanto. The problem for the Moriscos was that ‘instead of relying on their own efforts, they persisted in deluding themselves (against all the evidence) that large armies would arrive from Barbary to help them or, failing that, huge fleets would arrive, miraculously to waft them, their families and their possessions out of our grasp’.7 In fact the Turkish court decided that Spain was beyond its reach, and turned its attention to the much more accessible and feasible prize of Cyprus.8 The difficulties of the Moriscos were made all the greater because the rebellion was centred in the Alpujarras mountains and Granada, away from the coastline. Following defeat, 50,000 Moriscos found themselves dispersed across Castile, leaving the only large concentration of Muslims in the kingdom of Valencia.9 This, however, was seen as a temporary solution; when Philip II acquired the throne of Portugal in 1580, the chance seemed to have arrived for the imposition of complete religious uniformity throughout all Iberia. One possibility that was mooted was to send the Moriscos out to sea in ships that would then be scuttled, for it made no sense to add to the population of hostile North Africa. The bishop of Segorbe chillingly suggested that the Moriscos should be sent to Newfoundland, for ‘they will die out there completely’, especially after all males were castrated and all females sterilized.10 The possibility of a mass expulsion was therefore on the agenda in the 1580s, nearly thirty years before it was finally resolved. The question was not whether they should be expelled, but by what means. Notably, this assumed that all Moriscos were potential traitors, political and religious enemies of Christendom, and ignored the significant number of converts who had assimilated into Christian society (some, indeed, becoming priests); nor was any account taken of the effects on Spain at a time of growing economic difficulties, especially within the Morisco heartlands of the kingdom of Valencia. For by now the decline of the city of Valencia was obvious; there were legitimate worries about the state of the silk and sugar industries, and concern that irrigation works would fail, so that the already inadequate supplies the city drew from the countryside would vanish.11 The Valencian Corts, or parliament, had no doubt that expulsion would ruin Valencian landlords, including chur
ches and monasteries, and Valencian envoys sent to the king pointed out that the Crown would lose the revenue it normally collected for guarding the coasts of Spain. All this was of no avail – by the time the envoys reached King Philip III, the decree of expulsion had been issued, in August 1609.12

  In the end the argument that it was easier to send these people to North Africa had won, and the decree of expulsion began by insisting on the treasonable correspondence of the Moriscos with the rulers of Barbary and Turkey.13 Although the decree demanded an immediate evacuation, on ships provided by the Crown, the process inevitably proved much slower, and the expulsions continued until 1614. The economic arguments against expulsion were partly heeded: six in every 100 Moriscos were allowed to stay, so long as they were farmers and were thought to show Christian sympathies; they would be expected ‘to show those who took over the properties how to work, among other things, the sugar mills and irrigation systems’. The decree set out in painstaking detail (to a modern reader, reminiscent of the infamous Wannsee conference in Nazi Berlin) the exact categories of people who were to go, for there were mixed families and questions arose concerning children who had one Old Christian parent.14 The ports from which they were to depart were carefully assigned, and included Alicante, Valencia and Tortosa. A preaching campaign was set in train, to argue that the Moriscos were about to bring the Ottoman fleet to Spain, and that they had offered 150,000 troops to aid the Turks. The Moriscos were tempted to resist, but abandoned any hope of doing so when they saw how large were the Spanish forces sent to usher them out of their homeland. Indeed, the Moriscos decided that no one should volunteer to join the special category of those who were permitted to remain and teach the Christians how to exploit the land. The solidarity of the Moriscos is impressive. In the kingdom of Valencia, the duke of Gandía was desperate when he learned that nobody would stay behind to cultivate his sugar estates. For him, as for the Moriscos, what was happening was a disaster. On 2 October 1609 nearly 4,000 Moriscos embarked at Denia, many on Neapolitan galleys sent specially to take them to the Barbary coast; the number of those who embarked swelled, and 28,000 were carried in a short space of time to North Africa. It was not difficult for Spanish ships to leave them there: the first shipment was taken to Oran, still a Spanish possession, and on their arrival the Moriscos negotiated with the ruler of Tlemcen for the right to settle in Muslim territory. Other refugees spurned the initial Spanish offers of free transport and arranged their own passage: 14,500 embarked at Valencia, in sight of the Christian citizens, who came to buy their silks and laces at bargain prices in what became, perforce, ‘a giant flea market’.15 Some Moriscos made it plain that this was, for them, an act of liberation rather than persecution: the princes of Barbary ‘will let us live as Moors and not as slaves, as we have been treated by our masters’.

  There is evidence for over 150,000 departures, though some contemporary estimates were lower: the Valencian Inquisition produced a figure of 100,656, including 17,766 who embarked at the port of Valencia itself, and of these 3,269 were less than twelve years old, and 1,339 were unweaned babies.16 Soon it was time to turn attention to the ancient kingdom of Aragon, from which 74,000 Moriscos departed, and a lesser number from Catalonia; many left by sea via Tortosa, though others took a land route through the Pyrenees into France, enduring terrible conditions. King Henry IV of France insisted they must nearly all be shipped to North Africa.17 The Franco-Ottoman alliance did not extend to the protection of the Spanish Muslims, and Henry, who had triumphed after bitter wars between Protestants and Catholics, was reluctant to introduce further religious diversity into the kingdom he had won by abandoning Protestantism.18 Still, the French were taken aback by what they saw. Cardinal Richelieu later described these events as ‘the most fantastic, the most barbarous act in the annals of mankind’, though he was probably more interested in condemning the Spanish Christians than in defending the Spanish Muslims.19 Meanwhile, the Spanish Crown turned its attention to Castile, and in early 1614 the Council of State informed Philip III that the work was done.20 Adding together all the Spanish kingdoms, perhaps 300,000 Moriscos were expelled.21

  From the Spanish Christian perspective, the expulsion was an act against unbelievers, though some well-assimilated Christians of Muslim descent were swept up despite assurances that those who willingly took the sacrament would be permitted to stay. The curious effect of the Crown’s brutality was that a mixed population, resentful of Spanish policy, had now been installed on the Barbary coast, and Moriscos lent their energies to the corsair raids on the Spanish coastline. Alongside the spirit of revenge, there persisted nostalgia for a romantically remembered past. The music of al-Andalus was preserved partly among the Moriscos and partly among earlier groups of exiles – refugees from troubles in Granada and elsewhere who had already settled in the North African towns. The indigenous inhabitants of North Africa were less welcoming than the exiles hoped. Many Moriscos seemed to be impossibly Hispanicized in language, dress and customs, after decades of Christian campaigns against ‘Moorish practices’; they held themselves aloof from the Maghribi population. Most of the Moriscos who settled in Tunisia spoke Spanish and many carried Spanish names; they even introduced American fruits such as the prickly pear into North Africa, products they had come to know in Spain between 1492 and 1609.22 If they wanted to find comrades who would understand their ways, they sometimes decided that they were better understood by the Sephardic Jews, who shared their nostalgia for the old Spain of the three religions, maintained a distance of their own from the native Jewish communities, and continued to speak a form of Castilian. Thus an emotional kinship in exile was formed between Sephardic Jews and Andalusi Muslims in North Africa.

  II

  The Sephardic Jews also underwent a sharp crisis later in the same century. Its starting-point was the city of Smyrna, or Izmir. Smyrna and Livorno formed part of a binary system that linked Italy to the Ottoman world.23 Neither had been a place of great significance in the early sixteenth century. But the Baron de Courmenin visited Smyrna in 1621 and wrote:

  At present, Izmir has a great traffic in wool, beeswax, cotton and silk, which the Armenians bring there instead of going to Aleppo. It is more advantageous for them to go there because they do not pay as many dues. There are several merchants, more French than Venetian, English or Dutch, who live in great freedom.24

  As with the dried fruit of the Ionian isles, it was local produce that brought Smyrna to the attention of foreign merchants; other contemporary merchants also noted the arrival of increasing quantities of Persian silk, brought across Anatolia by the Armenians. The Turks had less difficulty with European silk traders than with European merchants who sought out grain and fruits, since Constantinople was also hungry for those items.

  After 1566, European trade with the Aegean was thrown off balance by the loss of the last Genoese possession in the region, Chios. Without a strong Genoese base offshore, Smyrna began to develop, offering locally produced cotton and newer commodities such as tobacco, about which the Sublime Porte had doubts – not because of a generic dislike of its fumes, but because the more tobacco the region produced, the less foodstuffs could be grown, and the Ottoman capital was always in need of a regular food supply.25 Almost immediately after the fall of Chios, Charles IX of France secured trading rights in Smyrna for French merchants (in 1569), and Elizabeth I secured a charter of privileges for trade there in 1580, which became the preserve of the English Levant Company; then the Dutch received privileges in 1612.26 The foreign merchants appreciated Smyrna’s position, tucked inside a gulf, which prevented lightning raids by corsairs, and their presence also drew to the city countless Jews, Greeks, Arabs and Armenians.27 A traveller’s report from 1675 speaks, somewhat implausibly, of a Jewish population of 15,000, which should probably be scaled down to a couple of thousand. These Jews came from all over the Mediterranean and beyond: there were Sephardim, both Levantine and Portuguese, Romaniotes (Greek Jews) and Ashkenazim from eastern Europe. The
legal status of the Portuguese Jews varied, for they sought protectors from whose tax exemptions they could benefit: at one moment at the end of the seventeenth century they (along with the Danes and the Venetians) accepted English protection, then they turned to the Ragusans, and finally the sultan took them under his own protection, which denied them a good many tax breaks, and therefore pleased their rivals – as the Levant Company asserted in 1695, ‘it is the Jews who are our greatest rivals in Smyrna’.28

  The special nature of seventeenth-century Smyrna was particularly obvious along the harbour front, on the Street of the Franks. It was there that the elegantly furnished houses of the Europeans could be found. Gardens at the back of them gave access to the quayside, and were used as passage-ways for goods; terraces led upwards to the roofs of European warehouses.29 A French visitor observed in 1700: