The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (43 page)

The importance that naval power would have for the security of Egypt was not lost on Muawiya, who in seizing Alexandria was quick to occupy the city’s dockyard, which the Arabs called
dar al-sina’a,
literally “place of work,” a word that entered Romance languages as “arsenal,” probably through Venetian merchants who were trading to Egypt by the early eighth century. In light of the Muslims’ reputation for lubberliness, the growth in the number of Egyptian shipyards following the conquest is noteworthy. Whereas the Byzantines had gotten by with one arsenal at
Alexandria and another on the
Gulf of Suez, the
Muslims built others at Rosetta,
Damietta, and Tinnis in the Nile
delta, and another at
Fustat. To help ensure a native supply of wood, the government established and regulated
acacia plantations “for the fleet” from at least the eighth century.

The caliphate also maintained
an arsenal at Akka (Acre) and a major naval base at
Tarsus in
Asia Minor. The founders of Tunis relocated a thousand Coptic shipwrights and their families from Alexandria, and it is they who are credited with enabling the Umayyads to establish a fleet that would redefine the balance of naval power in the central Mediterranean. South of Tunis,
Susa (Sousse) was the site of an Aghlabid arsenal until it was superseded by the
Fatimid capital at
Mahdia. Situated on a narrow, kilometer-and-a-half-long peninsula separated from the mainland by a large wall, Mahdia offered excellent protection for the fleet inherited from the
Aghlabids. Ports in the western
Maghreb and al-Andalus antedated the coming of Muslim rule, but while
Ceuta and Algeciras stood watch over the
Strait of Gibraltar, it is unlikely that either was home to an arsenal until
Abd al-Rahman II’s creation of a navy in the ninth century.

By the 700s, governors of the coastal provinces of the caliphate had autonomous fleets of which the Egyptian, the best known, is likely representative. The three primary
sources of support were payments in cash for the maintenance of ships and crews, the requisition of goods needed by the fleet, and drafting sailors from a nationwide levy. In the early stages of the Muslim expansion, most ships’ crews were Greeks and Egyptian
Copts native to coastal areas formerly under Byzantine control. Uthman, the third caliph, is said to have decreed that Muslims could not be drafted to fight at sea against their will, yet the two groups who seem to have supplied most of the marines were descendants of Arab immigrants to Egypt (
Muhajirun
), and non-Arab converts to Islam (
Mawali
).
Berber and Visigothic sailors and fishermen, transplanted Arabs, and perhaps Copts made up the crews of North African fleets. Villages, cities, and provinces were expected to provide seamen (and their upkeep) on the basis of the census. To ensure against desertion, elders or officials guaranteed that their sailors would “
fulfill their expedition as sailors, without turning
aside,” or going absent without leave. Alternatively, villagers could pay someone from another area to represent them, a practice that may have resulted in a fleet manned chiefly by professional sailors.

Generally speaking, seafaring tended to attract only the poor. (Under the Umayyads, the Egyptian fleet had a
three-part scale for paying sailors, the crew being the least well paid, followed by marines of non-Arab descent and then marines of Arab descent. The sailors’ bread was also said to be of inferior quality.) Even so, high-caliber crews could only be ensured by offering adequate compensation, which was generally forthcoming only in response to a crisis. As a Muslim historian observed after a Byzantine attack on Damietta in 853, “
from this time [the government] began to show serious concern for the fleet, and this became an affair of the first importance in Egypt. Warships were built, and the pay for marines was equalized with that of soldiers who served on land. Only intelligent and experienced men were admitted to the service.” At the other end of the
Mediterranean, when the Umayyads established a fleet in the ninth century, Abd al-Rahman II ordered that “
men of the sea be recruited from the coasts of al-Andalus, who got good salaries.” In extreme cases, governments turned to
impressment, and in Fatimid
Ifriqiya prospective crew were sometimes jailed to ensure their availability at the start of the sailing season, a practice even some Fatimid officials criticized. Like the Byzantines, Muslim rulers also relied on mercenaries to man their ships, and Aghlabid and Kalbid rulers in Sicily apparently raised crews from among slaves, freemen, Jews, and Christians, and drew their officers from the ranks of free and enslaved Slavs.

A striking difference between Muslim and Byzantine fleets was in the division of labor. Muslim crews tended toward greater specialization, whereas Byzantine sailors “
were at the same time rowers as well as fighting men.” If they happened to be skilled in ship repair, for instance, they did this work in addition to
rowing and fighting. Similarly, officers were supposed to be skilled in reading the weather and celestial navigation and qualified to lead their men in battle. A Muslim commander had broad responsibility for his ships starting with their building: “
He should check the construction of ships, their components, assemblage of parts, and their proper removal and joining. He must try to find the best oars and select them carefully; he should also make the best selection of masts and
sails.” But the crews under his command included caulkers who apparently
had no other function, as well as specialist navigators, meteorologists, and surgeons, while separate officers commanded the oarsmen, who did not fight, and the marines, who did not row.

Although Andalusian rulers depended on mariners to ensure communication and transportation with the Maghreb, the seafaring communities of the
western Mediterranean do not loom large in the accounts of contemporary writers. This disjunction resulted from the fact that while Muslim and Christian states controlled the lands of the western Mediterranean, they made little effort to exercise dominion at sea. But seafarers were certainly there and by the end of the eighth century, Muslim and Christian authors alike distinguished between “
Moors”;
Berbers from western
Algeria and Morocco; and “Saracens,” Arabs from the Umayyad Emirate of
Córdoba. Such broad categories mask the fact that there was considerable mixing among these groups, and ignore altogether the survival of Christian Mozarab seafaring communities of whom rulers in both Spain and Morocco were suspicious and who raided and traded to
Provence, Corsica, the Balearics, and Sicily on their own account. The emirate’s indifference to its maritime communities changed following raids by Danish Vikings in 844, in response to which Abd al-Rahman II devised a comprehensive approach to coastal defense from
Lisbon to the Mediterranean and established arsenals at
Seville,
Almería, and
Tortosa.

Neither the Byzantines nor the Arabs sought pitched engagements at sea
unless the outcome was certain, which it rarely was. While some of the fundamentals for the strategic use of offensive sea power were in place, resources, cost, politics, geography, and difficulties of communication made naval operations problematic. Naval tactics were of considerable interest to both Byzantine and Muslim audiences, but
surviving manuals were written by authors with little or no practical experience of naval warfare and who plagiarized ancient sources, which with their use of rams, for example, were irrelevant to medieval warfare. In addition to disabling ships with their ships’
spurs, fleet commanders had a variety of
long-range weapons, including
catapults for hurling stones, javelins, ceramic pots filled with poisonous insects and snakes or quicklime, and firepots. The most sophisticated weapon of the age was a kind of flamethrower known today as “
Greek fire.” The inventor was a Syrian refugee named
Kallinikos who “
manufactured a naval fire with which he kindled the ships of the Arabs and burnt them with their crews” during the Muslim siege of Constantinople in the 670s. As a weapon system, Greek fire comprised a flammable liquid made from raw or distilled crude oil heated in a pressurized bronze container and sprayed through a nozzle attached to a pumping apparatus. Greek fire gave those deploying it an enormous psychological advantage. In addition to the fire itself, the bellows used to heat the liquid created a terrifying noise, and the nozzles through which the flames shot were fashioned in the shape of wild animals so that “
The fire to be hurled at the enemy through
tubes was made to issue from the mouths of these figure-heads in such a way that they appeared to be belching out the fire.”

Greek fire was one of the Byzantines’ most closely guarded secrets, handed down over centuries through the descendants of Kallinikos. In a tenth-century handbook of imperial administration,
Constantine VII wrote that anyone who revealed details about the weapon should be stripped of his rank or office and “
anathematized and made an example for ever and ever, whether he were emperor, or patriarch, or any other man.” Despite these threats and precautions, knowledge of Greek fire was already
available to Muslim fleets by 835, when Aghlabid sailors used it in Sicily, and in the following decade
Abd al-Rahman II armed his Andalusian ships with it. The
Aghlabids bequeathed their expertise to the
Fatimids, who brought it with them in their conquest of Egypt and quickly introduced it to the south. The tenth-century geographer al-Muqaddasi claimed it was indispensible for transiting the
Bab al-Mandeb where “
Every ship … needs to carry armed men, and personnel to throw Greek fire.” Even before they acquired Greek fire, however, the Muslims developed protection against it. According to an eighth-century account, the head of the Egyptian arsenals invented “
something which was never before heard of. He took cotton and some mineral substances; he mixed them all together and smeared the ships of the fleet with the mixture, so that when the fire was thrown by the Greeks upon the ships, they did not burn. And this I saw with my own eyes: the ships were struck by Greek fire and did not burn but the fire was at once extinguished.” In addition, there was
fireproof clothing. One recipe called for dipping a cloak in a mixture of talc,
alum, ammonium, hematite, gypsum, stale urine, and egg whites. Such garments were used to protect both soldiers and horses (Greek fire was also employed on land), though whether these were used at sea is unknown. For protection against traditional weapons, however, sailors did wear
protective chain mail, cuirasses, and padded jackets.

Throughout their centuries of conflict with Muslim powers, the Byzantines’ great advantage was that they never lacked for essential
naval stores like wood,
tar, hemp, and sailcloth. Shipbuilding timber was found on the coasts of Asia Minor, the Greek mainland, the Adriatic coast of
Illyria, southern Italy and Sicily, and on Cyprus and
Crete. The disadvantage of this embarrassment of riches was that regardless of which part of the empire they attacked, invaders were usually able to secure both the materials and expertise necessary to build or repair their own ships, and it was the quest for just these advantages that stimulated some of the earliest Muslim campaigns. Caliphs and emirs were under constant pressure to guarantee
supplies of wood for shipbuilding, construction, and fuel for domestic and industrial uses like smelters and kilns,
the need for which could not be satisfied by the comparatively meager forests of northern
Syria, the
Maghreb, or al-Andalus. The battle of the Masts was so named in Arabic chronicles because it was fought to procure mast timber from the wooded slopes above Phoenix, and Cyprus, Crete, and Sicily were as attractive for their forests and other natural resources as for their commanding position along the major east–west axis of
Mediterranean trade.

Archaeological and written records testify to the diversity of routes and goods in circulation around the Mediterranean, yet in the late Roman period a preponderance of shipping was dedicated to the
annona,
shipments of grain to be made into bread for free distribution to the masses—the bread of “bread and circuses.” This practice underwent drastic change in the fourth century when the Alexandrian fleets were redirected to Constantinople and those of Africa declined in significance as the population of Rome dwindled. In the sixth century, an estimated twelve hundred to eighteen hundred ships were involved in the
annona
trade, most of them making two round-trips in a season. In addition to these state-subsidized vessels, another six hundred to nine hundred independent traders were homeported at Constantinople. The
annona
stopped following the Persian capture of Alexandria in 617, and the Byzantines ended the free distribution of grain for good the following year. Any hope for the trade’s revival ended with the Arab capture of
Egypt and
Abd Allah’s reopening of the ancient canal between the Nile and the Red Sea to facilitate grain shipments to the ports of
Jeddah, established in 646, and Yanbu, which served the holy cities of
Mecca and
Medina, respectively. This benefited not only the citizens of the Arabian ports, but also the growing numbers of pilgrims who performed the
hajj. Improvements to the abandoned canal between the Nile and the Red Sea—the
Canal of the Commander of the Faithful—made it navigable only when the Nile was in flood. Nonetheless, Alexandria’s loss of her largest Mediterranean trading partner
caused the population to fall from an estimated eight hundred thousand people at its imperial peak to perhaps one hundred thousand in 860. Although it hardly compensated for Alexandria’s lost opportunities, trade did intensify along the coasts of North Africa, as well as between
Ifriqiya, Sicily, and southern Italy, and between and along the coasts of the western Maghreb and al-Andalus. This was due both to the vitality of the Islamic state and also to Carolingian expansion into northern Italy and central Europe, which stimulated
transalpine trade to satisfy the demand for Mediterranean goods in the north. The growth in the
slave and lumber
trades was a boon to Adriatic shippers, especially
Venetians and Muslims, who were sometimes rivals but often worked in a symbiotic relationship.