The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (63 page)

In 1198,
Innocent III called the Fourth Crusade. Rather than attempt a direct assault on the
Holy Land, the crusaders planned to invade
by way of Alexandria—an objective that could be justified in the name of liberating its large Christian population—or Cairo, “
because they could better destroy the [
Ayyubid]
Turks by way of Babylon [Cairo].” There was, however, a powerful commercial incentive for attacking Egypt, which was the chief terminus for the Indian Ocean trade and the richest state in the Muslim Mediterranean. Organizers planned to recruit thirty-five thousand soldiers, including forty-five hundred knights and their horses, to be carried in some three hundred ships supplied by Venice at a cost of
eighty-five thousand marks—about twenty thousand kilograms of
silver, or twice the yearly revenues of the kings of either
France or England—payable in the spring of 1202. By the fall of that year, only a third of the crusaders’ army and funds had reached Venice. Determined to receive payment in full, the Venetians coerced the crusaders into raising the balance through plunder, the first victim being Zara (Zadar,
Croatia). An attack on a Latin Christian city was anathema to many, but two hundred ships joined Doge
Enrico Dandolo to take the port, and the stage was set for the next diversion of the Fourth Crusade from its original goal.

The following year, the crusaders sailed to Constantinople to help restore the beleaguered
Isaac II, who resumed the throne with his son
Alexius as co-emperor. The two prevailed upon the
Franks to remain at Constantinople, but when they reneged on their debt to the crusaders, including “
200,000 silver marks, and provisions for every man in your army,” the Franks declared war.
^a
Isaac and Alexius were murdered by their own subjects, and the Franks looted the city of “
so much, indeed, that no one could estimate its amount or its value. It included gold and silver, table-services and precious stones, satin and silk, mantles of squirrel, fur, ermine and miniver. And every choicest thing to be found on this earth,” including the four gilded bronze horses of the
Basilica of St. Mark in Venice. The value of the crusaders’ spoils was put at a staggering four hundred thousand marks.

Baldwin of Flanders was elected emperor of what is known as the
Latin Empire of Constantinople (1204–61), which comprised about a quarter of the late Byzantine Empire. The
doge of Venice became “
lord of a quarter and of a half [of a quarter; that is, three-eighths] of the Roman Empire,” including the ports of
Dyrrachium,
Ragusa, and Corfu on the Adriatic; Corone and Modone in the
Peloponnese;
Rhodes and Negroponte (
Euboea); Gallipoli; and
Rhaedestus and
Heraclea on the
Sea of Marmara—all important links in the Venetians’ lengthening chain of trade. Venice also claimed three-eighths of Constantinople itself, and unlike any of the other participants in the campaign, she did not have to pledge fealty to Baldwin. The remainder of the old empire was divided between the
empire of Nicaea under
Theodore Lascaris, which ran from the Black Sea to the Aegean; the
Seljuqs; and, on a narrow strip of eastern
Asia Minor bordering the Black Sea, the
Orthodox
empire of Trebizond (
Trabzon).

To all intents and purposes, the Most Serene Republic monopolized Byzantine trade and dominated the sea route to the Levant, but the Venetians were not without competitors. Although the Latin Empire effectively excluded Genoese merchants from their traditional trading quarter in Constantinople and banned them from the most profitable Aegean trade,
Genoa was experiencing an economic boom: Genoese bankers were lending money to the crusader states, the
pope, and individual crusaders; their trade in the western Mediterranean was expanding; and in 1252 Genoese and Florentine bankers began
minting gold coins. Outside of the Byzantine Empire, Sicily, or Iberia, the latter two having inherited the practice from their Muslim predecessors, these were the first gold coins issued in Europe since the early eighth century. More than a symbol of Latin Europe’s economic rejuvenation, gold coins were also essential for its future prosperity.

Their mutual expansion put the rival cities on a collision course and open warfare between Genoa and Venice erupted in 1257. Hostilities were limited initially to the waters around Acre and Tyre, but the calculus changed with the
Treaty of Nymphaeum (1261) between Genoa and the empire of Nicaea. For the right of passage into the
Black Sea and other considerations, the Genoese agreed to provide Michael VIII Palaiologos with fifty armed ships for his
campaign against the Latin empire of Constantinople. This naval force tipped the balance in Michael’s favor and he entered Constantinople the same year. The treaty notwithstanding, the Venetians remained the most important carriers in the Aegean, but as such they were a favorite
target for pirates.
Theodore Lascaris had sponsored pirates to harass Venetian and Latin shipping, and conditions worsened after Michael’s capture of Constantinople. A Venetian-Byzantine treaty addressed the problem of Venetian pirates operating against imperial interests, and vice versa, as well as abuses by Byzantine customs officials. But the fatal flaw of Byzantine policy was that with no fleet of its own, the empire had to leave the suppression of piracy to foreign powers—essentially asking the foxes to guard the henhouse. This weakness was exacerbated by the threat of attack from the ousted Franks, whose machinations led to the
War of the Sicilian Vespers, the longest and best documented naval conflict of the period, although in the end it hardly involved the Byzantines at all.

The
Norman kingdom of Sicily had come to an end at the close of the twelfth century, when control of the island passed ultimately to
Charles I, duke of Anjou (in France), who hoped to use Sicily as a springboard for a campaign against Constantinople. The Byzantine emperor Michael enlisted the help of Peter III of Aragon, who drove Charles out of Sicily. (In so doing Peter laid the groundwork for a Spanish Mediterranean empire encompassing the Balearics,
Corsica,
Sardinia, and, for more than four centuries, Sicily. The crowns of Sicily and Aragon remained joined until the end of the
War of the Spanish Succession in 1712.) Chief architect of the Aragonese naval success was the
Calabrian admiral,
Roger of Lauria, “
a man of inestimable worth” in
Boccaccio’s words, who between 1283 and 1305 won six major naval engagements in which he displayed a strategic and tactical ability apparently unique in the age of
medieval galley warfare. Lauria’s approach to manning his ships was distinct from that of contemporary naval powers, for he commanded a polyglot collection of warriors and crews without regard to nationality or religion. People from different regions specialized in different types of warfare. Lauria’s
oarsmen were generally Sicilian; the crossbowmen Catalan (their reputation second only to that of the Genoese); and the corps of
almugavars
(“
footsoldiers skilled in the use of lances, missiles, and shields, and who range far and wide by day and night,” not unlike modern special forces), as well as heavy and light cavalry, were Aragonese. Initially Roger relied on the
compulsory service required of the subjects of the crown of Aragon, but as the size of the fleet and duration of the war increased, so did resistance to the crown’s prerogatives. Conscription was tried, but the better solution was to offer incentives in the form of pay competitive with wages in the merchant fleet, a share of booty from raids and warfare, and forgiveness of debts. The conflict
spread to the western
Mediterranean and in 1285 naval power proved decisive against a
Franco-Angevin invasion of Aragon, when Philip III led eight thousand knights across the Pyrenees. These could only be supported by sea, and when Lauria defeated a French fleet in a night battle off the Spanish coast and then took the port of Rosas, the French withdrew. But it was the deaths of Charles, Peter, and Philip in 1285–86 that brought the war to a close.

Only a decade before, the Genoese had opened a new epoch in the history of the Mediterranean and Europe, if not the world, with the establishment of regular sea trade between the Mediterranean and the North Sea. The earliest record of a direct voyage from Genoa to Flanders is that of
Nicolozzo Spinola in 1277. It is hardly surprising that the Genoese initiated this route: they had been active on the Atlantic coast of North Africa as far south as
Salé and Safi for a century; they were
employed as shipwrights and sailors in Galician
ports on the
Bay of Biscay; and they were past masters in the overland trade to northern Europe. Much has been made of the obstacles presented by the winds and currents that flow through the
Strait of Gibraltar from west to east, but these are overblown. Ships have routinely sailed through the Strait of Gibraltar since before Cádiz was Gadir. Although it is on balance easier to enter the Mediterranean than to leave it, easterly winds prevail five months of the year—in March, July to September, and December—and coastal currents flow toward the Atlantic.

Shortly after its conquest by Ferdinand III of Castile in 1248, Seville was awash in shipping from around the Mediterranean and northern Europe. According to the
Estoria de España,

That is to say,
medieval mariners perceived the Strait of Gibraltar as neither barrier nor boundary. The chief obstacle to regular navigation between the Mediterranean and northern European ports was a lack of commercial incentive, not inadequate ships. However, the growth of the Iberian and northern
European economies helped make the sea route competitive with the transalpine routes between Venice and Genoa and northern France, while the decline of trading opportunities in the
Levant compelled merchants to seek out alternative outlets for their energy and capital.

The search for new business ventures received additional impetus in 1291 when the
Mamluk sultanate that ruled Egypt and
Syria completed the Muslim
Reconquista
of the Levant with the capture of Tyre and Acre. In response, some Genoese wanted to invade Egypt in alliance with the Mongols, who since 1259 had controlled the continental
silk road all the way to the Black Sea. That the Genoese sought commercial advantage from a campaign in Egypt is seen from two other efforts made in 1291. The first was their negotiation with the
Ilkhans of Persia to build a fleet to divert
Indian Ocean trade from the Red Sea to the Persian Gulf, a plan that fell victim to civil unrest in Genoa. Better known was the attempt by Ugolino and Vadino Vivaldi to reach the Indian Ocean by sailing around Africa, an undertaking that if successful would have enabled the Genoese to bypass Egypt altogether, much as Eudoxus had sought to circumvent the Ptolemies 1,500 years before. The Vivaldis fared no better than Eudoxus, and after passing through the Strait of Gibraltar they were last reported somewhere on the coast of West Africa roughly opposite the
Canary Islands before they sailed into history, two centuries before Portugal’s
Vasco da
Gama rounded the Cape of Good Hope from the Atlantic to the Indian Ocean.

Any prospect for a revival of the Italians’ Levantine trade disappeared when the
Mamluks decided that the only way to safeguard the coast against attack from the sea was to
raze virtually every port from the Sinai to the Gulf of Alexandretta (or Iskanderun). The Levant’s maritime vitality was eliminated as thoroughly as it had been by the
Sea People at the end of the Bronze Age. The destruction was not accompanied by the same violence, but the consequences were far more enduring. Beirut and Tyre eventually recovered, but most Levantine
ports remained dormant until the twentieth century, and the heirs to millennia of maritime commercial expertise simply sat out the most dynamic centuries of oceanic trade.

As the Levantine ports atrophied, Indian Ocean merchants began avoiding the Red Sea, sailing instead to
Hormuz at the mouth of the Persian Gulf. From there,
caravan routes ran west and north, with one branch leading to the Mediterranean port of Ayas, in
Cilician Armenia, and the other to
Trabzon, on the Black Sea. The Venetians had had access to the Black Sea since the Fourth Crusade, but the Genoese were the first to really profit from the trade, and their merchant colonies ringed the coast from Constantinople to the
Crimea and around to
Sinop. The Crimea was among the most polyglot places in the
world, where Turks,
Mongols, Catalans, Venetians,
Genoese,
Syrians, Jews,
Armenians, Arabs, and
traders from central Europe came together to trade everything from grain, hides, and slaves to silks and
spices.
Caffa (
Feodosiya,
Ukraine) was as impressive an entrepôt as Theodosia had been in antiquity, and the fourteenth-century traveler
Ibn Battuta commended the “
wonderful harbor with about two hundred ships in it, both ships of war and trading vessels, small and large, for it is one of the world’s celebrated ports.” But the best situated port was
Tana (
Azov, Russia), only a short portage from the Volga River and the trade of the
Caspian Sea,
Persia, and the silk road.

Black Sea merchants profited not only from the decline of the Levantine ports but from the prosperity and stability of the
Pax Mongolica that descended on
Central Asia in the mid-1200s. Trade was generally beneficial for all concerned, but there were hidden hazards. At some point in about the 1330s, a plague had erupted in China, from where it spread westward across the Eurasian steppes. In 1347 a Genoese ship carried the disease from Caffa to Europe. So long as it had remained land-bound, the disease made its way slowly, but once injected into the arteries of western maritime trade, the Black Death moved with horrific speed. In the words of a Byzantine chronicler: “
A plague attacked almost all the sea coasts of the world and killed most of the people. For it swept not only through
Pontus,
Thrace and
Macedonia, but even Greece,
Italy and all the islands,
Egypt, Libya, Judea and Syria.” After incubating over the winter, the disease continued on to other centers of maritime trade:
Genoa itself,
Pisa, Venice,
Marseille,
Bordeaux, and Bayonne; from the south of France to England,
Calais, Cologne,
Copenhagen, Bergen,
Lübeck,
Novgorod; and from these ports via river into the heart of Europe. Had it not been for the Genoese initiative in beginning regular galley trade between the
Mediterranean and Flanders in the 1200s, the plague’s effects on Europe would have been dramatically different. Maritime trade was not the only vector of the disease, but it was the most efficient.