The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (62 page)

While these free trade provisions gave the Venetians a pronounced advantage in the commerce of the eastern Mediterranean, they were unable to carry all the empire’s trade. Genoese and
Pisan merchants based in Constantinople took up the slack, although they
had to pay tariffs of between 4 and 10 percent.

Less than four hundred kilometers to the west of Venice,
Genoa lies on the
Ligurian Sea where the coast turns west toward France and the Iberian Peninsula. The hardscrabble Genoese faced the sea with their backs to the steep hills of the Apennines. They had few opportunities for agriculture, mining, or lumbering and limited access to the interior. To seaward, Genoa fronted on a narrow continental shelf where fish were scarce. Such success as the Genoese had at sea derived from their ability to exploit what is probably the best natural harbor between Barcelona and La Spezia. The fact that it is the northernmost harbor in the western Mediterranean gave them a favorable position for trade with central and northern Europe via the Po valley and the Alpine passes. (
Pavia is 115 kilometers north of Genoa, much of the way through the mountains, and Milan is on the other side of the Po 35 kilometers beyond Pavia.) About seventy-five miles down the coast at the mouth of the Arno River, Pisa had better access to the markets and manufactures of
Florence, but at the same time was more easily embroiled in the politics of Tuscany and the Italian interior.

Genoese and Pisan merchants competed fiercely for the growing trade of the western Mediterranean, but although they spent much of the eleventh century at war with each other, they put aside their differences to evict the Muslim emir of
Sardinia in 1015, and more memorably to attack
Mahdia. When the
Zirids broke with the
Fatimids in midcentury,
Ifriqiya had been plunged into a period of incessant warfare that severely disrupted Mahdia’s trade, which was taken up by Pisan and Genoese merchants, among others. For African gold, the
Italians traded
European slaves, furs, and tin, as well as wood and grain when these were in short supply. They used the gold, in turn,
to buy silks,
spices, medicinals, and other luxuries in Byzantine and Muslim markets to the east. Taking advantage of the Zirids’ weakness, in 1087 Pisa and Genoa joined forces to attack Mahdia. The most substantive account of the undertaking comes from a Pisan victory song that includes few details of the actual fighting, but whose
religious overtones anticipate the more explicitly pious nature of the First Crusade. Just as the Venetians could not take full advantage of the privileges granted by the chrysobull of 1082, the outcome of the Mahdia campaign proved indecisive because neither Pisa nor Genoa had the wherewithal to seize the territory for themselves.

A decade after the Mahdia campaign, Alexius summoned western Christian rulers for military help against the Seljuqs. An earlier appeal had borne no fruit, but in 1095 he sent an embassy to
Pope
Urban II, whose response was to preach the First Crusade. The Crusades were holy wars sanctioned by the pope and undertaken by individuals “
for the salvation of their souls and the liberation of the Church” in
Jerusalem, and whom the pope promised to “relieve … of all penance imposed for their sins, of which they have made a genuine and full confession.” Acknowledging that some might take the cross for other reasons, Urban specified that absolution applied only to those who fought “for devotion alone, not to gain honour or money.” For the mass of crusaders, the prospect of attaining anything more than spiritual benefit was remote: most probably joined for religious reasons, or at least “
In the name of God and profit.” If the Crusades were not undertaken for material gain, commercial shipping would prove the crusader states’ lifeline, to the great profit of Venice, Genoa, and Pisa. The armies of the First Crusade converged on Constantinople in 1097 before marching southwest across
Anatolia. One contingent crossed the upper
Euphrates to take
Edessa (Urfa, Turkey), while the remainder took Jerusalem and, thanks to the timely arrival of twelve
Genoese galleys at Port Saint Symeon (the ancient al-Mina),
Antioch. The Genoese had taken the cross and came as crusaders, but for their services they received commercial privileges in the port, as did the Pisans who followed in 1099. Although last off the mark, by 1100 the Venetians had a fleet of some two hundred ships en route to the Levant, and over the long term they profited more from the crusader states than any of their maritime rivals.

The relative ease with which the Italians were able to supply the Crusaders was due partly to the century-long decline of Muslim naval power in the Mediterranean. By the eleventh century,
the Fatimid fleet theoretically
numbered between seventy-five and ninety galleys, five of them assigned to the Red Sea. More than half were stationed at Cairo and ports in the Nile
delta, while perhaps twenty-five were distributed among Ashkelon, Acre,
Sidon, and Tyre. Fleet administration was overseen by the emir of the sea (
emir al-bahr,
a title that entered European languages as “admiral”) and there was a standing force of about five thousand sailors and marines. In addition to being overstretched, the Fatimid forces were handicapped by the maritime geography of the eastern Mediterranean, where sources of freshwater were in short supply, especially as Levantine ports fell to the crusaders, and neither the place nor time of the Christian fleets’ coming were predictable. The loss of
Cyprus and Crete to the Byzantines in the 960s all but ensured Egyptian naval forces had to fight defensively.

The Fatimids also suffered from having the only standing navy in the eastern Mediterranean. The crusader states had neither ships nor the manpower to crew them, but an endless stream of armed shipping brought merchants, pilgrims, and crusaders to the
Holy Land for two centuries. The fleets seldom coordinated with each other, so the Fatimids faced not a unitary navy that it might destroy root and branch in a single campaign, but a kaleidoscope of fleets from not only Venice, Genoa, and Pisa, but also the Byzantine Empire, Spain,
France, Sicily, and even England and
Scandinavia. Given these geographic, strategic, and logistical disadvantages, that the Fatimid fleet remained remotely effective for as long as it did is remarkable.

As if to accentuate the importance of maritime power to the crusader states, the first to fall to a resurgent Islam was the landlocked county of Edessa, the loss of which prompted the Second Crusade (1147–49). This was not limited to the Holy Land, but included campaigns on the
Iberian Peninsula and against the pagan
Wends, Slavs living in what is now northern Germany. The eastern crusade was a fiasco, and the Baltic campaign fared little better although it did initiate a century-long period of eastward expansion. But the pressure on al-Andalus was considerable. At its greatest extent, the Umayyad Caliphate of
Córdoba reached as far north as the mountains of
Asturias and León, and it was here that the Iberian
Reconquista
took shape under
Alfonso VI, king of León and Castile and self-styled emperor of all Spain. The caliphate had lost its monopoly on power in al-Andalus at the beginning of the eleventh century, and Christian kings took advantage of divisions among the roughly thirty or so Muslim
taifas
that had sprung up in its place. The starting point of the
Reconquista
is generally taken to be Alfonso’s capture of Toledo in 1085, news of which helped fuel the drive to reclaim the Holy Land from Muslim rule prior to the First Crusade. This also led the
taifas
to seek help from the
North African
Almoravids who defeated Alfonso in 1086 and consolidated
their authority over al-Andalus, including the major
ports from
Cádiz to
Almería and the Balearics. They were succeeded by a rival
Berber dynasty, the
Almohads, who had been active in the Atlantic Moroccan port of
Salé and “
who organized their fleet in the most perfect manner ever known and on the largest scale ever observed.” By midcentury, the Almohads had advanced into al-Andalus, where they made their capital at
Seville, and after consolidating their control of Almoravid North Africa they ousted the
Normans from
Mahdia, Sfax, and Tripoli (in Libya), which they had controlled for less than a decade.

The rulers of
Norman Sicily had been conspicuous by their absence from the First Crusade. This was not due to a desire to placate Sicilian Muslims, although they comprised a significant proportion of the population. Muslims continued to raid Sicily into the 1120s, and the Norman kings of Sicily attempted to extend their control over parts of North Africa and fought the Almohads. However, the Normans had an emphatically pragmatic approach in their overseas relations, and as early as the raid on Mahdia they had declined to occupy the port on behalf of the Pisans and
Genoese because they had come to an accommodation with the Zirid emir. At the same time, Genoese and Pisans were welcome as traders and furnished with letters of protection. As a result in part of this policy of forbearance, Norman Sicily was one of the most cosmopolitan and prosperous kingdoms in western Eurasia, with a cultural brilliance that reflected and harmonized the diverse origins and faiths of its Muslim, Orthodox, Latin Christian, and Jewish inhabitants.

Following the
pope’s call for an Iberian crusade,
the Genoese negotiated with the king of
Castile to support a campaign against Almería, in exchange for which they were promised one-third of the city. They received comparable concessions from the count of
Catalonia for the capture of the
Ebro River port of
Tortosa. The campaign was an enormous undertaking for Genoa, which fielded more than 225 galleys and other vessels and twelve thousand men in addition to the ships’ crews.
After taking Almería in October 1147, the bulk of the Genoese forces wintered at Barcelona before going on to take Tortosa. Unable to shoulder the expense of occupying such distant territories as a communal project, the city sold its interest in Tortosa to the count of Barcelona and leased its holdings in Almería to a wealthy Genoese merchant before Almohad forces recaptured the port, which remained an integral part of Muslim Spain for another three centuries.

Inconclusive though its overseas campaigns were, involvement in the Second Crusade helped consolidate Genoa’s political position with respect to the Holy Roman Empire. When
Frederick I, “Barbarossa,” marched into northern Italy in 1158 and demanded that the cities pledge fealty and pay tribute
to him as emperor, the Genoese successfully pleaded for special consideration because they had brought an end to “
the attacks and damages of the barbarians that used to vex the coastline from Barcelona to Rome every day,” and every Christian could “now sleep and rest securely under his fig tree and arbor.” Rhetorical flourishes aside, Genoese aspirations were not defined by religious politics, and in 1152 and 1160 the Genoese negotiated treaties with the North African ports of
Bougie (Béjaïa,
Algeria) and
Ceuta, and began trading with Atlantic Moroccan ports to which
gold caravans from
West Africa had been diverted to avoid
Bedouins blocking the way between sub-Saharan
Africa and the Mediterranean.

The Second Crusade in
Iberia was not confined to Spain or the Mediterranean. Only a week after the fall of Almería, Portugal’s first king, Afonso I, captured Almoravid
Lisbon with the support of about thirteen thousand northern European crusaders—from
Flanders, Normandy,
Scotland, England, and the
Rhineland—who had sailed from England in a fleet of about
165 ships. Afonso urged them to join his assault on Lisbon, one of the most populous cities on the peninsula and “
the richest in trade of all Africa and a good part of Europe.” Following prolonged negotiations over compensation, Afonso agreed that neither he nor his men would have any share in the booty that came from the sack of the city, and he exempted his allies and their heirs from paying duties on their goods and ships “from now henceforth in perpetuity throughout all my lands.” After a four-month siege, Lisbon fell in what contemporaries considered one of the few successes of the Second Crusade and what is now taken as a pivotal moment in the
Reconquista
.

The main reason for the failure of the Second Crusade in the east was a poorly conceived decision to attack
Damascus, the state least hostile to the crusader kingdoms and the defense of which united a host of otherwise fractious Muslim rulers.
Nur al-Din emerged as the preeminent leader in
Syria, and after routing the crusaders at Damascus in 1154 he rallied his coreligionists to oppose the crusaders elsewhere. He was succeeded by his deputy in Cairo, Saladin (Salah al-Din Yusuf), who founded the
Ayyubid Dynasty (1169–1254) and became one of the crusaders’ most capable adversaries. But by this time the Egyptian navy had been weakened beyond repair. Saladin made recovery of the Levantine ports a priority, but this was accomplished from the land rather than the sea, and thanks to the fleet’s considerable shortcomings they were ceded again during the Third Crusade. Despairing over the loss of ten ships blockading Tyre, Saladin’s biographer wrote: “
It became clear from this disaster … that the rulers of Egypt had not attended to the needs of the navy nor recruited suitable men for its service; instead they had collected obscure, ignorant, weak and untried men on a random basis. It was therefore no
surprise that when confronted with danger they were gripped with fear, and when ordered to obey they were unable to do so.” Saladin appealed to the
Almohads of Iberia for naval support, but sources differ about whether they replied favorably. Even if 190 ships were sent, as a later author reports, they were of little help.

During this period, the Byzantine Empire had been plunged into turmoil by a combination of military setbacks at the hands of the Seljuqs, conflict between the eastern and western Churches, and a succession crisis. In 1182, the future emperor
Andronicus ordered the massacre of the Latin population at Constantinople. A contemporary estimate of
sixty thousand dead seems high but testifies to the great number of foreign traders in the city and the violence unleashed by Andronicus. Revenge for the slaughter was swift, as Latin refugees fleeing Constantinople pillaged Byzantine ports throughout the Aegean, but it would reach its devastating climax two decades later.