The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (42 page)

The island was poorly defended and there was little love lost between
Cretans and the Byzantines, whose rule was marked by onerous taxation and corruption. The Andalusians established their capital at al-Khandak (or Chandax, now Iraklion), which became the vibrant urban center of an autonomous Cretan emirate.
Taxation was moderate and the island was transformed from a backwater province on the Byzantine frontier to a prosperous economic power in its own right, exporting wine, honey, cheese, and wood, especially for Egyptian shipyards. As important, Crete became a launching pad for raids on islands in the Ionian and Aegean Seas, the Greek mainland, and Asia Minor. The island’s loss can be attributed to the Byzantines’ failure to recognize the geopolitical shift in the eastern Mediterranean following the loss of Egypt, the Levant, and North Africa to Muslim armies. No one with a strategic interest in the region could ignore Crete unless they held undisputed control of the sea; once such mastery was lost it was only a matter of time before the island was contested between rival powers.

The emirate of Crete flourished independent of any mainland state. If
Muslims had a common enemy in Christian Constantinople (and vice versa), the political divisions among the Abbasids and the new dynasties to the west militated against any meaningful coordination. A glaring example of this occurred in the aftermath of the Muslim
Leo of Tripoli’s bold raid on
Thessaloniki, the second city of the empire, in 905. Given that the
Cretans’ occupied strategic islands around the Aegean and had considerable experience fighting the Byzantines, soliciting their advice or support would seem to have been a sensible step for any invader. Yet Leo so failed to communicate his intentions that when he approached Crete on his return to Tripoli (in
Lebanon), the Cretans mistook his fleet for a Byzantine invasion. The confusion was understandable, for Constantinople had challenged Muslim control of Crete from the outset and made at least four unsuccessful attempts to retake the island.

It would be more than half a century after Leo’s humiliating sack of Thessaloniki that the Byzantines conquered Crete. In the end the island’s fate was sealed by the lack of coordination among rival Muslim states, including the Fatimids, whose preoccupation with seizing Egypt prevented them from perceiving Crete’s strategic significance—not to the
Dar al-Islam
necessarily, but to their own ambitions. Just as the Byzantines had neglected to consider Crete’s importance in the Mediterranean of the ninth century, Muslim leaders’ collective failure to keep the island from reverting to Byzantine control changed utterly the balance of power in the eastern Mediterranean.
Nikephoros Phokas seized the island in 961, and as emperor four years later he ordered an invasion of Cyprus that ended the three-century-old condominium arrangement with the caliphate. This was part of a concerted effort by Nikephoros and his successors, who brought much of Syria and the Levant under Byzantine rule for the first time since the 640s. Efforts to retake Sicily failed, however, and the island prospered under the Kalbid governors, who ruled for a century. The Fatimids maintained an active interest in Italy and they enlisted the
Kalbids in their struggle with Umayyad Córdoba.
The Kalbids raided al-Andalus in the 950s, but they were no match for the Umayyad fleet and
Abd al-Rahman III retaliated with raids on Ifriqiya.

These examples of the lack of coordination and shared purpose on the part of Muslim states underscores the fact that while it is customary to think in terms of a Mediterranean divided between Christian and Muslim spheres of influence, power among the littoral states split along innumerable secular and religious fault lines. This is evident not only from the military record, but from the expansion of eastern Mediterranean trade between Byzantine and Muslim ports in the eleventh century, and the unexpected mix of materials and crew associated with the Serçe Limani ship. International relations of the eleventh century and later would become even more complicated as Christian
Europe was convulsed by the schism of 1054, which saw a hardening of lines between the Greek Orthodox east and the Latin Catholic west, and within the latter the emergence of new maritime powers that would reshape trade in completely new ways.

In the meantime, the proliferation of Muslim states was a mixed blessing for the Byzantines. After the seventh century they never encountered a major fleet such as they had faced at the battle of the Masts or during the sieges of
Constantinople, and the Byzantine navy was never in danger of being overwhelmed by an enemy force. Yet because there was no single “Muslim” navy, they could not concentrate their own naval power to achieve a decisive victory at sea. Instead, the Byzantine fleet was often stretched to the limit, as it was during the ultimately fruitless effort to retake Sicily after the loss of Crete. While the Byzantine and Abbasid navies were capable of mounting large-scale offensive operations over long distances, most fleets operated within a fairly small radius from their home port.

So long as there were no rivals with the means or inclination to build a standing fleet, the Byzantine navy was a more or less provisional force of small squadrons to which merchant ships, sailors, and fishermen could be seconded as needed. When the enlarged fleet had accomplished its mission, it was disbanded, the costs of maintenance being too high to sustain in peacetime. Between the founding of Constantinople and the emergence of Islam, the size of naval ships shrank, partly because large ships were not needed and partly because the growing threat posed by barbarian invasions across the northern frontier put greater emphasis on
river and lake operations carried out in conjunction with land forces. When necessary, substantial imperial fleets could put to sea, as they did against the
Vandals in the fifth and sixth centuries, but even so the
ships were considerably smaller than they had been in antiquity.

By the fifth century, the Byzantine warship par excellence was the single-banked
dromon
(“racer”). Initially these were small ships, manned by 20 to 50 crew, but with the rise of the caliphate navies and the resumption of fleet engagements in the seventh century they began to grow rapidly, although they seem never to have had more than two banks of oars. The
dromon
had a single deck that provided protection for the rowers and two or even three lateen-rigged masts. Rowed by between 100 and 120 oarsmen, larger
dromons
carried a total complement of about 160 men, and in exceptional cases upward of 200. Unlike the galleys of antiquity, the
dromon
did not carry an underwater ram.
Instead, it was
fitted with a
spur, a heavy beam attached to the stempost above the waterline and designed to shatter enemy ships’ steering gear and oars. The spur was not an integral part of the hull and its development likely resulted from the transition from shell-first to frame-first construction, because hulls built on the latter principle could not withstand the shock of ramming. (Rams may have been abandoned as naval operations moved from the high seas to shallow inland waters, where they would have been impractical.) Muslim ships apparently differed little from their Byzantine counterparts—their shipwrights came out of the same tradition, after all—except that they are thought to have been larger, heavier, and slower, reflecting a trade-off between speed and size that is a constant in naval architecture.

In addition to carrying rowers, crew, and soldiers, ships were fitted out
to carry horses. Several independent accounts describe knights on horseback disembarking from ships via gangplanks, although how they mounted their stiff charges in their low, narrow stalls is unknown. Despite the prolonged period of maritime conflict between the Byzantine and Muslim states and the evolution of new shipbuilding methods and weapons in this period, apart from a few buildups in preparation for specific campaigns, the generally cautious approach to naval power on all sides seems to have prevented the escalation of gratuitous naval arms races and the ensuing fiscal and military crises characteristic of the
Hellenistic age or the twentieth century.

Hostilities with Sasanian Persia prompted the Byzantines to establish
permanent regiments of locally recruited soldiers and sailors tasked with defending the provinces in which they lived. To counter the threat from the caliphate later in the seventh century, the navy was put on a more permanent footing with the formation of the fleet of the
karabisianoi
, literally “those of the war galleys,” under a commander who was in essence the chief of naval operations. The
karabisianoi
became a power unto themselves and were implicated in several coups before Leo the Isaurian disbanded them. In their place there emerged a tripartite naval organization with an imperial fleet based at Constantinople, provincial fleets that operated for the most part locally, and three fleets attached to
naval themes (military districts) whose admirals reported directly to the emperor. Dependent on the central government at Constantinople for much of their support, the provincial fleets constituted the naval branch of themal armies and their smaller ships patrolled against pirates and enemy raids. Ships of the naval themes were manned and provisioned from the themes where they were stationed. The Aegean theme protected the
Dardanelles, the Samian theme the southern Aegean, and the
Kibyrrhaiot theme, based at
Attaleia (Antalya) in Asia Minor opposite Cyprus, the eastern Mediterranean. This arrangement of imperial, themal, and provincial fleets survived with little modification until the mid-eleventh century.

These forces were built and stationed at
ports of different sizes and orientations found around the empire. A
neorion
was an artificial harbor of any kind, but in naval usage it designated an arsenal where ships could be fitted out and repaired and weapons stored. The main arsenal on Constantinople’s
Golden Horn was known simply as the Neorion, although there were commercial
neoria
, too, notably Constantinople’s Prosphorion on the Golden Horn, and the Harbors of Julian (or Sophia) and of Theodosius on the
Sea of Marmara. A shipyard specializing in the construction of warships and stockpiling naval stores and weapons was more commonly called an
exartysis
(from the
Greek verb “to rig”), a term that came to be used for the bureaucracy responsible for maintaining the imperial fleet. Each theme had one mainland and one island arsenal: at Abydos and on
Lemnos; on
Samos and at Smyrna; and at Attaleia and on
Rhodes. Important provincial shipyards were found in Sicily and
Calabria, at
Ravenna and
Dyrrachium (Durrës,
Albania), on
Euboea, and on the Black Sea at Amisos (Samsun,
Turkey), Amasra,
Trabzon, and Kherson.

Thanks to the empire’s long and active seaboard, experienced mariners were readily available to man its ships. Service in the fleet was frequently incumbent on men registered with the state and whose maintenance was paid for out of the revenues from his lands or, if these were insufficient, through other people’s taxes. Most crews served in the regions where they lived, but the naval themes occasionally supplied men to other areas. The permanent crews of the naval themes and provincial fleets represented only the nucleus of a force that could be enlarged as circumstances required, through
conscription or by hiring domestic or foreign mercenaries, especially Varangians from Kievan
Rus,
Franks, Venetians, Genoese, and others drawn from the merchant communities settled in Constantinople.

While maritime trade and naval defense were central to the health of the
Byzantine Empire,
medieval attitudes toward mariners and their business were in constant tension. The Byzantine heirs of Rome’s naval tradition made their capital one of the foremost seaports of the age, and occupied an archipelago-studded sea no different in its geography or resources than it was in the time of their Attic and Ionian ancestors. And as in ancient Greece, contempt for those intimately connected with the sea was common. Upon being informed that a ship docked within sight of the palace belonged to the empress, the ninth-century
Theophilus ordered the ship destroyed on the grounds that it was beneath the imperial dignity to be involved in trade; or, as he scolded his wife: “
God made me an emperor, you would make me a ship captain.” In ninth- and tenth-century lists of
imperial precedence, admirals of the imperial fleet and the
Kibyrrhaiot theme never ranked in the top twenty, and those of the Samian and Aegean themes fell near the bottom.

At the same time, cities like Constantinople depended on overseas trade for
food, ordinary commodities, and luxuries, and the Byzantine state’s investment in the navy shows its commitment to securing the sea-lanes. So, too, did the government’s efforts to channel traffic to specific ports, not only to ensure the collection of duties and taxes but also to monitor the comings and goings of foreign traders who were issued passports and limited in where they might trade and how long they might stay. The provisions of a 907 treaty with
Kievan Rus are typical: “
Such Russes as arrive here shall dwell in the St. Mamas quarter. Our government will send officers to record their names, and they shall then receive their monthly allowance, first the natives of Kiev, then those from … the other cities. They shall not enter the city save through one gate, unarmed and fifty at a time, escorted by an agent of the Emperor. They may conduct business according to their requirements without payment of taxes.” Despite the suspicion with which alien merchants were viewed, the barriers to social advancement faced by seafarers led to the Byzantines’ increasing dependence on foreigners to carry their trade.

Relying on foreign recruits to round out ships’ crews is a common practice among navies, although one usually overlooked except when the navy in question is that of a people who, like the Muslim caliphs, are thought to have an innate fear or abhorrence of the sea. Much has been assumed about the religious con
text within which Muslims view the sea, and some critics have been content to conflate the desert origins of Islam with the religion itself and to conclude that, as one historian recently maintained, “
At worst, Islam was hostile to the sea, at best it ignored it.” One story that is often cited as evidence of Muslims’ antipathy to maritime pursuits relates how, having been informed that the “ ‘
The Sea is a great creature upon which weak creatures ride—like worms upon a piece of wood,’ ” Umar, the second caliph, “recommended … that the Muslims be kept away from seafaring. No Arab traveled by sea save those who did so without Umar’s knowledge and were punished by him for it.” While the Arabs of
Mecca and
Medina may have been newcomers to maritime trade, Arabia is a peninsula and
Oman,
Yemen, and Nabataea in particular have ancient traditions of seafaring. Pre-Islamic Arabic poetry preserves examples of Arabs’ awareness of the sea, and the
Quran is filled with passages about seafaring and ships guided by Allah’s beneficence: “
It is God who has subdued the ocean for you, so that ships may sail upon it at His bidding; so that you may seek His bounty and render thanks.” As traders within or between the Byzantine and
Sasanian Empires, Arabs had a more than passing familiarity with imperial military and fiscal policy, and they quickly adopted the administrative procedures they found in the lands they conquered. This is especially evident in the context of the caliphate’s naval organization, which reflected Byzantine practice and was replicated across North Africa and in al-Andalus.