The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (41 page)

Muslim maritime expansion began in 648 when, sailing at the head of a fleet of seventeen hundred ships, the governor of Egypt, Muawiya ibn
Abi Sufyan, secured an annual indemnity from the people of Cyprus. When they lent ships to the Byzantines seven years later, he captured the island and in so doing touched off the first naval conflict between the empire and caliphate. Following the loss of Cyprus, Emperor
Constans II marshaled a fleet of seven hundred to a thousand ships to seize the port of Phoenix, on the Lycian coast north of Cyprus. Surviving accounts of the engagement are often contradictory, yet on one point all agree: the Muslims scored a stunning victory at the
battle of the Masts (Dhat al-Sawari), which Christian authors refer to as the
battle of Phoenix. The outcome proved that Muslims could fight at sea; but domestic struggles within the caliphate prevented them from following up until after Muawiya became the first Umayyad caliph.

In 678, the Umayyads initiated a decade-long
siege of Constantinople during which they occupied a naval base on the
Sea of Marmara but were unable to capture the Byzantine capital. The agreement ending the siege resulted in the demilitarization of Cyprus and obliged the Cypriots to remain neutral in any conflict between empire and caliphate. The island became a way station for merchants, passengers, naval fleets, and spies. Although the Cypriots remained Christian and in theory neutral, the island’s ambiguous status gave Muslim commanders a strategic advantage against the Byzantines, as both Muslim and Christian authors alike recognized. In his
Taktika
of around 900 the emperor
Leo VI notes that “
When the barbarians from Egypt and Syria and
Cilicia are gathering for an expedition against the Romans [that is, the Byzantines], the commanders of the naval provinces must proceed with their squadron to Cyprus.” A tenth-century Arabic writer concurred, noting that the first stage of any naval expedition against the Byzantines was a rendezvous in
Cypriot waters. Cyprus remained subject to condominium rule until the resumption of full Byzantine authority in 965.

Even before the campaigns against
Constantinople, Muslim armies had swept across North Africa—
Bilad al-Maghrib,
or Lands of the Sunset—as far as Ifriqiya.
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In 695,
Carthage fell to an Arab army but the new governor decided that the
port was too exposed to attack from the sea and founded a new one in nearby
Tunis, an almost impregnable site located on a lake separated from the sea by a narrow isthmus across which the
Arabs dug a channel. The Byzantines made no attempt to retake Carthage due to domestic unrest at Constantinople, where seven emperors ruled between 695 and 717, when the Umayyads launched a major invasion. Their progress was unbroken until the ascension of
Leo III, “the Isaurian,” who raised the walls at Constantinople, laid up supplies, and
strung a chain across the mouth of the
Golden Horn, the first time such a measure is known to have been taken there. Even with a fleet of eighteen hundred ships and a large army, the Umayyads were unable to block Constantinople’s access to the Black Sea granaries and they were forced to abandon the siege.

The failure against Constantinople did not deter the Umayyad advance across North Africa. Following the establishment of Tunis,
Musa ibn Nusayr led an Arab-
Berber army to
Tangier, and in 711 an army of twelve thousand under
Tariq ibn Ziyad crossed the Strait of Gibraltar to land near the rock named in his honor,
Jabal Tarik, or Gibraltar. Musa and Tarik pushed their armies north to the
Tagus River, Toledo,
Tarragona, and Barcelona, and established the capital of al-Andalus at
Seville, about eighty-five kilometers up the Guadalquivir from the Atlantic. Although
Córdoba became the capital forty years later, Seville remained a major commercial port and naval base under Muslim and, from the thirteenth century, Christian rule for nine hundred years. Remote as it was, al-Andalus was one of the first parts of the Muslim world to break decisively with the political authority of the caliphate. When Abu al-’Abbas as-Saffah established the Abbasid Caliphate in 750, he murdered most members of the Umayyad house except for
Abd al-Rahman I, who fled west and founded the independent Umayyad Emirate of al-Andalus. Even without this overt split, al-Andalus was destined to follow a distinct historical arc thanks to its being the Muslim state with the most immediate and prolonged contact with Latin Europe, its position astride the Strait of Gibraltar, its encounter with Viking raiders, and its largely hostile relations with Ifriqiya and Muslim Sicily.

Muslim forces first raided Sicily in 652, but the island was not hotly
contested until the first half of the eighth century, when Ifriqiyan ships began raiding Sicily,
Sardinia, and the Balearic Islands. At the end of the eighth century,
Charlemagne responded to an appeal from the Balearics for help against Moorish attacks and for thirty years the archipelago was a base for Frankish ships patrolling between Italy, Sardinia, Barcelona, and the Frankish coast.
The
Franks’ interest in northern Italy accelerated following their overthrow of the
Lombard kingdom, and Charlemagne’s attempt to incorporate Venice into his territories brought them into conflict with the Byzantines in 806. Nominally subject to Constantinople, Venetian merchants were eager to trade with
the Franks, and a treaty of 812 confirmed Venice’s status as Byzantine territory while allowing its citizens to trade with the Franks and obliging them to support the Franks against pirates in the northern Adriatic. Under the de facto protection of the two great powers, Venetian naval and commercial power grew steadily.

Although drawn ten centuries after Muslim armies under Tariq ibn Ziyad crossed from Ceuta, North Africa, to the rock named for him—Jabal Tarik—Carel Allard’s “
The Bay and Strait of Gibraltar”
clearly shows Gibraltar’s commanding position at the Mediterranean’s only outlet to the Atlantic Ocean. Allard’s map and its inserts illustrate the capture of the port by an Anglo-Dutch fleet in August 1704, during the War of the Spanish Succession. The insets depict a view of the rock of Gibraltar (top left); a map of southern Spain and North Africa (lower right); and a naval battle (below). Courtesy of the Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam.

Frankish-Byzantine rivalry and the scaling back of the Byzantine naval presence in the west to deal with a Bulgar threat on the Black Sea opened the way for
Ifriqiyan expansion in Sicily. In 800, the Abbasid caliph
Harun al-Rashid had appointed
Ibrahim I ibn al-Aghlab emir of Ifriqiya, the first of the autonomous Aghlabid emirs who would rule for a century. One of Ibrahim’s priorities was creating a fleet to protect Ifriqiya’s trade. The year after the resolution of the Venetian crisis, the Byzantine
strategos
of Sicily reached an
agreement with Muslim ambassadors to ensure the rights of merchants in each other’s ports, and somewhat later the rulers of Christian
Naples asked for Aghlabid support against the neighboring
duchy of Benevento. The first Muslim forces on the Italian Peninsula raided Naples’s enemies on both coasts, gained control of the
Strait of Otranto, and sent a fleet as far north as the mouth of the
Po River and Istria (modern Slovenia), opposite Venice.

The
Aghlabids began raiding Sicily in the 820s but they did not establish a foothold on the island until invited to support a revolt by the Byzantine naval commander. An expeditionary force of seventy to a hundred ships and ten thousand troops sailed from
Tunis in the summer of 829 and two years later
the Aghlabids captured
Palermo, which, renamed al-Madinah, became the capital, primary naval base, and commercial center of the new emirate. The conquest of the island took the rest of the century—
Syracuse fell in 878, Taormina in 902—during which the Aghlabids continued their offensive in the Adriatic. Their 866 siege of
Ragusa (
Dubrovnik,
Croatia) was thwarted by the unanticipated arrival of a hundred Byzantine ships that reached the Adriatic via the ancient
diolkos
over the
Isthmus of Corinth, presumably to avoid Cretan and Aghlabid fleets in the Aegean and Strait of Otranto. Over the next three decades, Byzantine, Carolingian, and Aghlabid forces vied for control of southern Italy and the Adriatic, but by the early tenth century the
Strait of Messina was the effective line of demarcation between Muslim Sicily and Christian Italy. Lying as they did on the front lines between the Aghlabids and Byzantines, Naples, Amalfi, and other southern Italian ports went out of their way to avoid hostilities with Muslim Sicily. With their long-standing
trading privileges at Constantinople, between the ninth and eleventh centuries the merchants of Amalfi leveraged their city’s
neutrality and its central location to become middlemen between the kingdoms of western Europe, Muslim North Africa—especially Egypt—and the Byzantine Empire. Amalfitans were “
renowned across nearly the whole world,” while the port itself was celebrated as a meeting place of “Arabs,
Libyans, Sicilians and Africans” and regarded as “
the most prosperous town in
Lombardy, the most noble, the most illustrious on account of its conditions, the most affluent and opulent.”

In one view, Muslim power in the Mediterranean reached the high-water mark at the start of the tenth century, when one or another emirate or caliphate occupied in whole or part Cyprus, Crete, Sicily,
Malta, the Balearics, and, in the Aegean, Paros and Naxos in the
Cyclades north of Crete,
Aegina near
Athens, and Nea off the
Dardanelles. Of the major Mediterranean islands, only
Corsica remained subject to Christian princes. Yet while the
Dar al-Islam
had grown, Muslims were no more unified than Christians, a point of special relevance with respect to the naval balance of power in the Mediterranean. In the west, the Umayyads ruled in Spain, and augmented their gains by capturing the Balearics, which would remain under Muslim rule for three centuries. Several smaller emirates ruled over Morocco, while the Aghlabid governors of Ifriqiya exercised considerable freedom of action in North Africa and on Malta and Sicily. Farther east, the
emirate of Crete was beholden to no one, and Cyprus was held in common with the Byzantines, while on the mainland the
Tulunids ruled Egypt from 868 to 905.

Within barely half a century, the picture had changed irrevocably as the Abbasid Caliphate fractured along sectarian lines. Syria was lost to the Shiite
Hamdanids of
Iraq in 906, Ifriqiya to the Shiite
Fatimids three years later, and Egypt, for the second time, to the short-lived
Ikhshidids (935–969), who were, like the Abbasids, Sunni. To the west, meanwhile,
Abd al-Rahman III made a definitive break with the rest of the Muslim world by styling himself caliph, or successor to Muhammad, rather than emir, a mere commander or prince. The Umayyad Caliphate of
Córdoba did not long survive him, and by the end of the century political power in al-Andalus and the Balearics had devolved on some thirty independent statelets called
taifas
. Of all these developments the most consequential was the
emergence of the Fatimids, who toppled the
Aghlabids in Ifriqiya and Sicily. In 921, they founded a new capital about ninety miles south of Tunis at the port of
Mahdia, which became a staging ground for raids on Italy,
France, Spain, and islands from Malta to the Balearics. They went on to conquer Egypt and much of the
Levant, and their new capital at Cairo (al-Qahira, “the triumphant,” established in 969) quickly eclipsed
Baghdad as the commercial and political center of the Muslim world, with profound effects
for trade in the Mediterranean and on the Monsoon Seas. Despite this relocation of the center of power in the Muslim world from the head of the Persian Gulf and Baghdad to the
eastern Mediterranean, and the Fatimids’ maritime orientation while in Ifriqiya, on the sea-lanes of the Mediterranean the rise of Fatimid Egypt resulted not in triumph but catastrophe.

The best lens through which to view the failure—or lack—of maritime strategy in the Mediterranean in this period is the island of Crete, the history of which reveals many of the socioreligious, political, and military complexities of the age. The conquest of the
Maghreb and al-Andalus had eliminated Romano-
Byzantine influence from North Africa and the western Mediterranean. But in al-Andalus, ethnic and confessional strains between Arabs,
Berbers, Syrians, and Romano-Gothic
converts to Islam called
muwalladun
impeded unity for much of the Islamic period. Following a series of bloody purges, fifteen thousand
muwalladun
and others fled al-Andalus in about 813. About half the exiles—most of whom were artisans from the inland cities of Toledo and Córdoba—migrated to Morocco. Despite having little or no maritime background, the remainder seem to have sailed via Sicily or Ifriqiya and the Aegean to Egypt where “
people, called Andalusians, entered [Alexandria] having with them much booty taken from the islands of Greece.” Expelled by the Abbasid governor of Egypt and discouraged from settling in other Muslim territories, in about 824 the exiles sailed to Crete.