The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (40 page)

Whereas the shell-first sequence requires considerable skill at all stages of construction, frame-first lends itself to a more hierarchical workforce; the
most skilled shipwrights were responsible for erecting the keel, stem- and sternposts, and frames; fixing the planks to a skeleton frame required less experience; and caulking the seams between planks entailed no knowledge of carpentry at all. Though frame-first hulls require more maintenance, this is offset by the fact that they can be built and repaired faster and at less expense, and hull forms can be duplicated more easily. In addition, plank-on-frame construction requires less wood, which lowered the material cost of shipbuilding. Thus, the shift to frame-first construction was a technological revolution that resulted in a manufacturing one.

How the fore-and-aft
lateen sail evolved is likewise unknown. All sails work by exploiting the difference in air pressure from one side to the other. With a square sail, wind blowing from astern creates high pressure behind the sail and low pressure in front; as the sail seeks to go toward the area of lower pressure it moves the hull forward. Whether the physics involved are understood, the basic idea is obvious to anyone who has stood in a strong breeze. The same principle applies to fore-and-aft sails (the lateen is but one of many types), which are cut to belly slightly in the direction away from the wind, thus allowing for an area of low pressure on the leeward side of the sail that exerts pull in that direction. The square sail is most effective when sailing directly downwind, but by swinging the yard forward and down, one can create a triangular shape not unlike a lateen. In its perfected form, a lateen enables a vessel to sail closer to the wind—at an angle of between sixty-six and forty-five degrees to the wind direction—compared to only about ninety degrees with a square sail. The lateen sail is especially well suited to ships of small to medium size—a capacity of
thirty to sixty tons burden was typical of the period—because they require smaller crews than does a square sail for a vessel of comparable size. The lateen rig was
suited to the times because it offered the mobility and speed necessary to avoid encounters with pirates or hostile states in an era of instability.

The adoption of the lateen occurred between the second century, the date of the oldest
pictorial evidence, and the sixth century, after which there is no iconographic evidence of the square sail in the Mediterranean for several hundred years. It is commonly thought that the latter was abandoned completely until northern Europeans reintroduced it in the fourteenth century, but this is probably not the case. When artists began showing ships with square sails in the thirteenth century, they depicted rigging details similar to those employed by sailors of the ancient Mediterranean but unlike those found in northern Europe. This suggests that sailors continued to use the square sail, but only in vessels too small or otherwise insignificant to have attracted the attention of artists.

The Serçe Limani ship is revealing not only for what it shows us about developments in naval architecture and shipboard life; analysis of the
associated finds also invites reconsideration of the nature of relations between Christians and Muslims. The glass cullet carried as ballast suggests that the ship was en route from a
Syrian port with a local glassblowing industry to
Constantinople, probably the foremost glassmaking center in the world. Apart from the cullet, the site yielded eighty pieces of intact cups and other glassware not intended for recycling. By themselves, these intact pieces would have constituted a significant contribution to the study of medieval glass. The painstaking recovery, recording, and categorization of nearly a million glass fragments allowed for the reconstruction of hundreds of beakers, dishes, bowls, ewers, jars, lamps, and other items, and in so doing revolutionized the study of medieval Islamic art.

Much of the rest of the cargo seems to have been perishable goods, although about ninety wine and
oil amphorae were carried as ballast. More modest finds include copper pots, padlocks, adzes, drill bits and chisels, combs, chess pieces, and sixty-four spears and javelins. The provenance of the amphorae and weapons show that most of the ship’s complement, perhaps eleven people all told, were likely
Hellenized
Bulgarians from near Constantinople. Other personal effects include forty Byzantine copper
coins and three gold Fatimid dinars. One of the nine
anchors is stamped with
Arabic letters, as is a
glass weight (one of sixteen) that dates the wreck to no later than 1025. Another clue to the nature of cross-cultural relations beyond the seas comes from the nearly nine hundred decorated lead sinkers used for weighing down fishing lines or fishing nets. These were manufactured in a Byzantine workshop, probably in Constantinople, from lead mined in Iran.

The surprising variety of material goods in this thousand-year-old time capsule offers us a glimpse of the Mediterranean as an arena of collaborative exchange between Byzantine and Muslim merchants in the century before the
Crusades, when the balance of power shifted sharply to the west. The material evidence for peaceful relations among merchants is corroborated by the contemporaneous formulation of maritime and commercial laws that at once respected and transcended the legal norms peculiar to Christianity, Islam, and
Judaism, which allowed trade to flourish even where religious politics presented apparently insurmountable obstacles. The glass wreck is thus a multifaceted prism through which we can see the essential political, technological, and commercial developments that marked the progress from late antiquity to the early modern period.

Faced with the growing problems of governing a sprawling empire, in 293
Diocletian divided the rule of the Roman Empire between two co-emperors, a move that ultimately led to the division of the state into eastern (Greek) and western (Latin) halves. The outer limits of the empire were seldom peaceful, and the so-called
Pax Romana was a fiction. The Roman peace was enforced by pacification, all but endless warfare against barbarian tribes to the north, west, and south, and against more highly developed states of ancient lineage in the east. Rome’s security depended on the strength of the empire’s long, heavily fortified borders, especially along the Rhine and Danube Rivers. Ultimately, the armies and bureaucracy upon which the state relied proved unaffordable and unreliable, and probes by Germanic tribes climaxed with the Barbarian Migrations of the fourth and fifth centuries.

For conservative contemporaries, a ready explanation for Rome’s problems was the rise of Christianity, which grew despite official persecution and internal
schisms. The fates of religion and the empire were joined by Constantine, whose troops proclaimed him emperor of the west in 306. Six years later, he converted to Christianity, and in 324 he defeated his co-emperor, Licinius, at the
battle of the Hellespont. This was the first major fleet engagement in the Mediterranean in 350 years.
Constantine had 200
triaconters and pentecon-ters against 350 triremes under Licinius. Whether Constantine’s victory was due to better commanders, who may have deployed only part of their fleet to ensure freedom of maneuver in the narrows, or to a storm that drove Licinius’s ships ashore on the second day of the battle, the defeat broke Licinius, who shortly thereafter was captured and executed.

Constantine established his capital at Byzantium, which was officially renamed Constantinople in 330 and eventually became the sole capital of the empire known as Rum (Rome) to contemporaries, and as the
Byzantine Empire by later writers. Situated on a peninsula at the southern end of the Bosporus where it meets the
Sea of Marmara, Constantinople (now
Istanbul) was at a major crossroads of trade and communication between Asia and Europe and the Black Sea and Mediterranean, and it was the first major
European capital founded in a port. A major consideration in the choice of Constantinople was its geographical setting, which offered “
the quiet shelter of harbours to navigators,” especially along the
Golden Horn, a four-mile inlet north of the peninsula that provided “anchorage throughout its whole extent.” As important, there was more than enough waterfront to accommodate the merchant and naval shipping of the commercial, political, and economic
center of empire. Just as all roads once led to Rome, all sea-lanes now led to the Byzantine capital. Growth was rapid, and by the sixth-century reign of
Justinian I greater Constantinople was home to an estimated eight hundred thousand people. Even after the coming of Islam in the seventh century and the rise of the Italian maritime republics in the eleventh, Constantinople’s size and strategic location guaranteed its place in the first rank of European and Mediterranean cities.

Within half a century of the founding of the new capital, barbarian tribes were overrunning the empire’s Rhine-Danube frontier and setting in train a series of events that would lead to the loss of the western empire and the rise of new states from Britain to North Africa.
Visigoths crossed the Danube and sacked Rome in 410. Emperor
Honorius was forced to withdraw the last Roman legions from Britain and enlisted Visigothic help in pushing the
Vandals into
Spain. In 429,
Gaeseric led the Vandals across the
Strait of Gibraltar into North Africa from where they became the first power to contest Rome’s control of the Mediterranean in five hundred years. Settling in rich but weakly defended
Carthage, the Vandals took to the sea and established themselves in the Balearics,
Corsica, and
Sardinia, where they were well positioned to attack the Italian mainland,
Illyria, and Greece. In 455, Gaeseric plundered Rome without retribution, and in 476 the last western emperor was banished to the Neapolitan villa built by the Roman general Lucullus after the
Mithridatic Wars.

By the start of the sixth century, the north coast of the Mediterranean was divided among the Byzantines, the
Ostrogoths of northern Italy, the
Visigothic kingdom of Toulouse in southwest France, and Vandal Spain. Byzantine relations with the Ostrogoths were generally good, but just as he sought to undermine Persian supremacy in the
trade of the Indian Ocean, Justinian was eager to reassert imperial authority in the west to protect maritime commerce against the Vandals and Visigoths. In 533 Justinian’s general
Belisarius sailed with ninety-two warships and five hundred transports to seize North Africa and Sardinia and in a single battle brought the Vandal kingdom to an end. Turning next to Ostrogothic Italy, Belisarius captured Sicily,
Naples, and Rome before bogging down in the face of stiff resistance and Justinian’s refusal to send reinforcements, in part because he feared Belisarius’s popularity. By midcentury, however, the Byzantines had regained Italy, Sicily, and the coast of Visigothic Spain, including the
Guadalquivir River ports of Seville and
Córdoba, and
Ceuta, across the Strait of Gibraltar. Apart from western North Africa and the Frankish and Visigothic coast from
Saguntum to the Italian border, the Mediterranean littoral was again under a single rule. But the Byzantines’ comparatively strong commercial and naval presence in the Mediterranean was
scant compensation for its weakness on land and their imperial revival was brief. By the early 600s, the
Lombards from central Europe had overrun much of Italy, the
Avars were camped at the gates of Constantinople, and in 624 the Visigoths expelled the Byzantines from Spain for the last time. Yet none of the new western powers was inclined to harness the maritime potential of the territories they controlled, which enabled the Byzantines to maintain sea-links to their central Mediterranean territories.

Maritime commerce carried
Judaism, Christianity, and Islam around the Mediterranean, just as sea trade facilitated the
spread of Buddhism from India and Sri Lanka to Southeast Asia and China. While religion could unite people across broad regions, sectarianism frequently undermined religious bonds. Christianity was the official religion of the Byzantine state, but highly politicized doctrinal differences led to persecution of Coptic and
Nestorian Christians. As a result, when Sasanian Persia invaded the Levant in the 610s,
Copts and Nestorians found the more tolerant Persian rule preferable to that of their fellow Christians in Constantinople. The Sasanians captured
Damascus,
Antioch,
Jerusalem, and Alexandria, and in 626 they were encamped at Chalcedon (Kadiköy, Turkey), across the Bosporus from Constantinople. This proved the high-water mark of their advance. Three years later, the Byzantines seized the Persian capital at
Ctesiphon on the Tigris, while their fleet reoccupied the ports of Syria and Egypt. With the defeat of the Sasanians, the Byzantines remained the largest and most coherent state in the Mediterranean basin.

All but unnoticed in the struggle between the rival empires was the emergence of the prophet Muhammad, whose followers seized the great inland trading city of Damascus in 635 before overwhelming a Byzantine army at the
battle of the Yarmuk River (between Jordan and Syria), thereby releasing the Semitic peoples of the Levant from nearly a thousand years of alien Hellenistic-Roman-Byzantine rule. Turning east, the
Arabs captured Ctesiphon and by 642 Arab armies had reached the borders of greater India, a conquest worthy of Alexander and with far more enduring results. To the west,
Amr ibn al-As established
Fustat (later Cairo) at the head of the Nile delta and took the port of Alexandria.

The capture of Mediterranean ports gave the Arabs access to ships and experienced mariners, which enabled them to attack the Byzantines by sea. Initially, the caliphs focused on conquering Byzantine territories around the
eastern Mediterranean basin. Occupying Egypt and Syria, with their ports and naval professionals, made it possible to
attack
Cyprus and Constantinople itself. At the end of the century, Umayyad armies took the Byzantine province of Africa, which they called
Ifriqiya and which became the point of departure for expansion into western North Africa and the
Iberian Peninsula. Sicily was conquered in the ninth century, around the same time that exiles from al-Andalus established an independent emirate on Crete. Common to all these developments was the replacement of Christian rulers by Muslim ones; but the Christian and Muslim worlds were both rent by political rivalries and confessional schisms that created ample opportunity for cooperation between Christians, Muslims, and Jews.