The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean
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Under Alexander, as under his predecessors, Russian interest in the Mediterranean was closely tied to Russian sympathy for the Orthodox Slavs, over whom the tsar sought to extend his protection. It was for this reason that the Russians sent ships to the Bay of Kotor, which gave access to the mountain-girt Orthodox principality of Montenegro, a region the Turks had never bothered to bring fully under their dominion. The importance of Montenegro to the Russians was ideological, not practical, even if Kotor was said to be home to 400 trading vessels, though this must include some that were no larger than skiffs.52 The religious question also came to the fore in Russian dealings with Dubrovnik. For fear of the Serbs, the Ragusans had traditionally discouraged the Orthodox Church within their narrow domains, and in 1803 the Senate even closed down the chapel of the Russian consulate. By March 1806 a French army was advancing down the Dalmatian coast, and the Ragusan government reluctantly agreed to let Russian soldiers man the defences of Dubrovnik if and when the French arrived. But at the end of May, as the French entered Ragusan territory, the Senate decided that French Catholics were preferable to Russian Orthodox, setting off a struggle that took place over their heads between French troops and Russian ones, aided by Montenegrin Slavs. Although the Russians managed for a time to extend their influence along the Dalmatian coast, Dubrovnik remained a French base, and in 1808 its republican government went the way of the Venetian republic, with barely a whimper. A representative of the French commander Marmont declared: ‘my lords, the republic of Ragusa and its government are dissolved and the new administration is installed’. Dubrovnik was placed under the authority first of Napoleonic Italy and then of the new province of Illyria. Marmont was rewarded with the novel title duc de Raguse.53 The collapse was not merely political, for, even though Dubrovnik was home to 277 sailing ships in 1806, only forty-nine were still in use in 1810.54 The republic had become caught up in wars that could not possibly serve its interests. The fading power of the Ottomans left the Ragusans without the traditional Turkish guarantee of their neutrality and safety; an attempt to secure Turkish support was fruitless, because the Ottomans were, at this stage, largely beholden to the French.55 It was an ignominious end to a republic that optimistically took LIBERTAS as its motto.
It was also the beginning of the end for Russian intervention in the Mediterranean. The Russians still found it difficult to maintain control over operations so far from St Petersburg. Operations were compromised by the collapse of the Russian-Turkish entente late in 1806, following deep disagreements with the Turks about the affairs of Wallachia, in modern Romania. The Russians and the Turks were surprised to find themselves at war. With misgivings, Great Britain gave some support to the Russians, but it was the Russian fleet that fought one of the great naval battles of the Napoleonic Wars off Mount Athos at the end of June and start of July 1807, hoping to break open the mouth of the Dardanelles.56 On paper, this was a Russian victory, but in reality the Turkish fleet was still able to block the Dardanelles, and the tsar had in any case had more than enough. The lucrative trade from the Black Sea into the Mediterranean had dried up during the conflict; following reverses in Europe the tsar made his peace with Napoleon at Tilsit in 1807 and abandoned his Mediterranean ambitions. He also abandoned his fleet in the Mediterranean. The Russian ships were simply stuck there. Those that tried to escape into the Atlantic were easily captured by the British. Several ships made for Trieste, Venice and Corfu, but there was nothing for them there, and they were surrendered, abandoned or even scuttled; others reached Toulon and joined the French navy: Napoleon had been hoping that one advantage of peace with Russia would be the acquisition of its fleet. French officers raced to Corfu to raise the French flag there in place of the Russian.57 Mediterranean intervention had cost Russia a great deal of money and in the end brought it no permanent advantage.
9
Deys, Beys and Bashaws,
1800–1830
I
The battle of Trafalgar left the Mediterranean open to British shipping, but Great Britain had not yet gained incontestable mastery over the sea-lanes. The bitter struggle for control of Sicily and southern Italy between Britain, acting in support of King Ferdinand of Naples, and Napoleon’s armies, acting in support of Marshal Murat, who was trying to usurp the Neapolitan throne, reached a high point in July 1806 at the battle of Maida (a British victory, deep in Calabria).1 Maida demonstrated that Napoleon had been foolish in allowing so many troops to be pinned down in miserable conditions far from the areas in northern and central Italy he most wished to control. Earlier dreams of using Taranto as a base for controlling southern Italy and the entrance to the Adriatic and Ionian seas evaporated.2 Yet the British fleet was far more stretched than the story of its victories suggests. The British needed to keep open the channel of communication linking Malta to Trieste, for Trieste had become an important source of supplies from the Austrian empire, now that routes through Germany were blocked by Napoleon’s armies.3 And by 1808 the French seemed to be clawing back their control of the Mediterranean; they had re-established their fleet at Toulon, and there were fears of a naval attack on Naples and Sicily.
The British government wondered whether there was any point pursuing war in the Mediterranean. Other concerns intruded: the French were trying to take control of Spain, and with the outbreak of the Peninsular War attention shifted to formidably tough land campaigns in Iberia. How difficult conditions were can be seen from the size of the British fleet, which had plenty of other duties to perform close to England, in the Caribbean and elsewhere. On 8 March 1808 fifteen ships of the line lay under the control of Admiral Collingwood, Nelson’s capable successor; one at Syracuse, one at Messina and one off Corfu; twelve stood guard at Cádiz. These large warships were supported by thirty-eight frigates, sloops, brigs and bomb-vessels within the Mediterranean, most of which were patrolling and reconnoitring as far afield as Turkey and the Adriatic. In earlier stages of the Napoleonic Wars British naval strength had been even smaller: eleven ships of the line in July 1803, ten in July 1805.4 Compared to the massive war fleets of antiquity, or at Lepanto, the fleets of the competing navies at the start of the nineteenth century seem minute. On the other hand, British ships were demonstrably superior to French and Spanish ones, especially in fire-power.5 The British government constantly had to make choices about where to concentrate naval resources, and yet these decisions were made at a great remove in time and space from the fleets in the Mediterranean: proposals to blockade Tuscany, Naples and Dubrovnik brought its deliberations into the realms of fantasy.6
The British needed allies. Russian ambitions had been useful in providing naval help. By 1809 the British tried to harness the Albanian warlord Ali Pasha, in the hope that he would take the Ionian isles for them. They also tried to win the support of Greek rebels against the Ottomans, who were, though, instinctively hostile to Ali Pasha. And the British government was also afraid that excessive trouble in the western lands of the Ottoman Empire would weaken the Turks so much that their empire would implode. They did not want that to happen just yet, during a war with Napoleon on which the very survival of the United Kingdom depended. In the Mediterranean, the only way out of this conundrum was to occupy the Ionian isles and to place the Septinsular Republic under the protection of Great Britain. Admiral Collingwood landed with 2,000 men, whose mere arrival in the Ionian isles was sufficient to scare the French into abject surrender. Count Stadion, an Austrian minister, believed that Britain had now become ‘master of the Adriatic’.7
Great Britain had gained the prizes by the end of the Napoleonic Wars – Malta, Corfu, Sicily. Sicily became to all intents a British protectorate in the last phases of the Napoleonic Wars, between 1806 and 1815. King Ferdinand resented his dependence on British aid, but the British kept a tight hold on Sicily: they required naval bases there and they needed to obtain essential supplies for their fleet.8 The British presence on the island ensured that Murat did not dare invade in 1810, even though Napoleon had ordered him
to do so, and even though he marched as far as the Straits of Messina.9 The British understood the need for a permanent presence in the Mediterranean in order to hold back the French, and especially to keep them out of Egypt and the routes leading to India. Despite a general fall in Mediterranean trade, a commercial mentality was also at work, and the markets of the Mediterranean would be even more attractive if Britain had unimpeded access to them. The Napoleonic Wars brought other dramatic changes. Napoleon’s extinction of the Venetian republic in 1797 was not greatly mourned in the rest of Europe; nor could the Ragusans persuade anybody to restore their privileges once Bonaparte had been defeated. The old Mediterranean commercial powers disappeared off the map.
II
The waning of Venetian and Ragusan commerce provided opportunities for the ships of other, non-Mediterranean, nations. Trade may have declined, but plenty of commercial opportunities remained. Sicily, it is true, had lost its age-old position as a great granary servicing the needs of the entire Mediterranean. The island’s population grew by about half during the eighteenth century, but much of this growth was concentrated in the cities, notably Palermo. Meanwhile, grain production fell, partly through a failure to maximize output and partly because land was going out of cultivation. The Sicilians had been exporting as much as 40,000 tons of grain each year in the seventeenth century, but climatic conditions worsened; the wetter climate of what has been termed a ‘Little Ice Age’ was only one factor, since Mediterranean producers faced competition from the Baltic and other regions.10 In the nineteenth century, British entrepreneurs such as Woodhouse and Whitaker encouraged vine cultivation in western Sicily, for the production of heavy Marsala wines. There were still goods that could most easily be acquired in the Mediterranean – coral from Sardinia and North Africa, dried fruits from Greece and Turkey, coffee exported via the Ottoman lands. The Danes, Norwegians and Swedes, fat from the proceeds of their northern trade, made their appearance off the coasts of North Africa, in the Barbary ‘regencies’ (so called because their rulers, variously known as deys, beys and bashaws, or pashas, were nominally the deputies of the Ottoman sultan). From 1769 the Danes had delivered ‘presents’ to the dey of Algiers, in return for protection of their shipping, though periodically the dey would decide he wanted larger donations, which he obtained by harrying Scandinavian shipping, and around 1800 these demands brought the Algerians and the Danes to the edge of war. Meanwhile, the bey of Tunis felt so insulted at the inferior quality of their presents that he seized some Danish ships in May 1800, and the next month sent some men to chop down the flagpole of the Danish consulate, setting off a brief war in which the Danes, and before long the Swedes, largely found themselves at his mercy.11
These problems were resolved through diplomacy. The beys and deys wanted presents, which kept their finances afloat. Their policy, the United States Congress was informed, was to tempt each nation into Mediterranean waters with new commercial treaties, and then to ‘break friendship with every nation as often as possible’.12 Too many agreements with European powers deprived the Barbary regencies of the chance to seize merchandise and captives from foreign ships. Captives could be ransomed, but they could also be used as diplomatic pawns, to secure presents; and while they lingered in filthy conditions in Barbary jails, they could be used as free labour (though officers were generally treated much better). Ratings were chained to the floor at night and, in Tripoli, received a daily allowance consisting of a biscuit made of barley and beans, full of impurities, some goat’s meat, some oil and water. Put to work building the walls of Tripoli, enslaved captives might be forced to work bare-headed in the hot sun, berated as ‘Christian dogs’ and lashed with whips.13 The North African rulers were aware, of course, that the Christian states would go to great lengths to gain the freedom of these men, and of the women who continued to be picked off the shores of Sardinia, Sicily and the Balearic islands.
There was a new nation whose ships provided novel opportunities for Barbary extortion: the United States of America. The American conflict with Tripoli was the first war fought by the fledgling union against a foreign power, and it led to the creation of an American navy.14 American writers presented the North Africans as uncivilized ‘barbarians’, which was easy to do when the commonly used name for the Maghrib was ‘Barbary’.15 The reports sent by American consuls in Tunis and elsewhere confirmed the belief that the beys, deys and bashaws were uncontrolled tyrants, whose attitude to the art of government could be judged from the beheadings and amputations that American envoys witnessed. George Washington expressed strong views about the Barbary corsairs in a letter sent to Lafayette in 1786:
In such an enlightened, in such a liberal age, how is it possible the great maritime powers of Europe should submit to pay an annual tribute to the little piratical States of Barbary? Would to heaven we had a navy able to reform those enemies to mankind, or crush them into non-existence.16
He failed to foresee that the United States would soon join the powers of Europe in making such payments to the Barbary states.
The idea, mooted by several historians, that the American war against the Barbary states was fought as a Christian struggle against Islamic ‘barbarism’ does not match the evidence. As Frank Lambert has written, ‘the Barbary Wars were primarily about trade, not theology’; the treaty of 1797 between the United States and Tripoli stated explicitly that the United States was not constitutionally a Christian country, and President Madison was convinced that this statement had eased relations with Muslim North Africa, by removing religious differences from the issues under contention.17 For, ‘rather than being holy wars, they were an extension of the American War of Independence’.18 On paper, the War of Independence had ended in 1783 with the British recognition that the thirteen colonies had broken loose from the Crown. In reality, there were many unresolved issues, especially the right of American shipping to trade freely across the Atlantic and within the Mediterranean. The principle that citizens of the new nation should be greeted in foreign ports on the same terms as the old European nations was one for which the Americans were willing to fight. Great Britain had seen the American colonies as an integral part of a closed colonial system in which its trans-Atlantic possessions would provide Britain with raw materials and at the same time absorb the growing output of British industry. The whole system was protected by a web of commercial taxation typical of the mercantilist outlook of the eighteenth century. American opposition was expressed in the famous Boston Tea Party of 1773; it proved very difficult for either side to disengage from this relationship. In 1766, ten years before the American Revolution, the Pennsylvania Gazette reported that ‘a Bond for a Mediterranean Pass’ approved by the British authorities was contemptuously set alight in a coffee house in Philadelphia.19
For the Americans, trading towards the Mediterranean posed two sets of problems, though they were intertwined. Even after 1783, British ports such as Gibraltar might be reluctant to host American ships, and British captains might seize any opportunity to arrest American shipping – British captains were especially keen to press American crews into British service, especially while Great Britain was at war with France. British politicians such as Lord Sheffield saw the Americans as potential trade rivals who could undermine Britain’s commercial supremacy, though it was noted that their chances of making a success of Mediterranean trade were limited, thanks to the Barbary corsairs. The second problem was that of relations with the rulers of North Africa: the Americans sought free access to their ports, and they also sought assurances that their ships would not be attacked on the high seas by corsairs from Algiers, Tunis and Tripoli. Jefferson to all intents agreed with Lord Sheffield, observing that the Europeans already had a large presence in the Mediterranean, but the Americans would have to creep in through narrow straits where pirates ‘could very effectually inspect whatever enters it’.20
It was clear, then, that American trade with the Mediterranean could never compete in volume with that of the established E
uropean powers, especially France, which played the leading role in Mediterranean commerce at the end of the eighteenth century. Nevertheless, American intervention had very significant consequences for the Barbary states, reshaping their relationship with the non-Muslim naval powers. The Barbary Wars were the first phase in a series of events that culminated in the French conquest of Algeria from 1830 onwards. Among the principal actors was the Bacri family, Jewish financiers who operated out of Algiers; as well as bankrolling the dey, the Bacris traded towards Livorno and maintained close commercial ties with co-religionists in the British bases at Gibraltar and Minorca. Their influence at the court of the dey is all the more surprising because American observers acknowledged that the Jews were ill-treated in Algeria. But the dey realized that he could use the Jewish bankers as intermediaries in his dealings with the Europeans, and that they were totally at his mercy. The dey of Algiers executed David Coen Bacri in 1811, after a rival Jewish leader, David Duran, whose ancestors had arrived from Majorca following the pogroms of 1391, ruthlessly accused him of treason. Duran hoped to lever himself into Bacri’s seat of honour, but soon met a similar fate.