The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (70 page)

Despite Aden’s strong fortifications and its distance from the Persian Gulf, its wealth and the lack of a naval presence made the port a tempting target for the emir of Kish, who in 1135 demanded a share of Aden’s revenues. When this was denied, he launched an expedition comprising fifteen vessels and about seven hundred men to seize the port. This proved too small to assault Aden itself, but for two months the Kishites intercepted and plundered ships that attempted to enter or pass the port. “
We faced each other,” according to one of the Geniza letters, “but they did not dare to land, while the people of the town had no vessels for attacking their ships.” The stalemate was finally broken when two ships belonging to Ramisht sailed into Aden. “As soon as the ships entered the port, they were manned with a great number of regular troops, whereupon the enemy was chased from the port and began to disperse on the sea.”

In the 1930s, Alan Villiers spent a year sailing with Muslim sailors on the Red Sea and western Indian Ocean. The bulk of his time was spent aboard a
boom
called
Triumph of Righteousness
in transit from Aden to Mogadishu and Basra by way of Shihr, Mombasa, and the Rufiji delta, among other stops. “With the
Triumph
packed to the gunwales with mangrove poles for the voyage home to the Gulf,” he wrote, “her crew had to sleep where they could” in conditions unchanged in a thousand or more years. Courtesy of the National Maritime Museum, Greenwich, England.

Ramisht was no run-of-the-mill trader and he is renowned for his sumptuous endowments at Mecca: a gold waterspout, a silk covering for the
Kaaba, and a hospice for
Sufi pilgrims. According to an anonymous contemporary who knew the family, one of Ramisht’s employees

Given the general state of trade in the Persian Gulf, Ramisht’s wealth seems extraordinary: the value of the Kaaba covering was recorded as either four
thousand or eighteen thousand dinars—at a time when a lower-middle-class family could live in
Cairo on
twenty-four dinars a year. But if Ramisht was more successful than most, he was not unique.
The freedman of a governor of Aden who died in 1152 left an estate valued at 650,000 local dinars, 300,000 Egyptian dinars, seventeen hundred pounds of silver ornaments, and vast quantities of perfumes, spices, weapons, and other merchandise; there is no record of what the governor himself was worth.

Notwithstanding the benefits to the state of a prosperous trade, later Egyptian rulers seem to have viewed successful
merchants in the India trade as a threat rather than an asset. The
Mamluks were especially quick to undercut anyone they suspected of amassing excessive influence. As a result, the more institutionalized nature of the later
karim
may have evolved to protect merchants not from pirates as much as from
the caprice of political rulers. Perhaps the most outrageous of these was al-Malik al-Mansur, the first Rasulid sultan of Yemen, who notoriously cheated merchants by impounding the pepper they imported and then forcing them to repurchase it at a profit of 50 percent for himself. He further decreed that when he made purchases from the merchants, a
buhar
should measure 170 kilograms, but that when he sold, it should be only 100 kilos. Although their actions were no less arbitrary, not all rulers acted against merchants’ interests, and some went so far as to exempt a portion of merchants’ import duties. The benefits of such largesse to the port, and therefore the sultanate, were obvious. A fourteenth-century Rasulid sultan “
dispensed unaccustomed justice” by conferring honors on the maritime merchants of Aden and abolishing many of their taxes, with the result that “the merchants began to tell to every part on land or sea of his good conduct and his great liberality.”

Compared with the uncertainties of conducting trade in the lands of their coreligionists, Muslim merchants seem to have had a more stable and satisfying reception on the coasts of the Indian subcontinent. Contrary to a conventional narrative that stresses religious animosity between Hindus and Muslims, maritime enterprise in
medieval India often transcended confessional divisions. A number of stories accounting for good intercommunal relations have little to do with business per se. According to one inscription from the turn of the eleventh century, a Muslim merchant saved a Hindu king from shipwreck near Goa. In acknowledgment of this act of charity, his grandson was made a regional administrator and allowed to found a mosque at Goa, the upkeep of which was paid for by duties collected in the port. Other inscriptions reveal that Hindu rulers from the
Konkan Coast routinely made the
pilgrimage by sea to the Hindu shrine in the predominately Muslim port of
Somnath in Gujarat. A later tradition holds that the Chalukya king of Gujarat,
Jayasimha Siddharaja, founded Muslim communities
there in the twelfth century, and several sects claim to have converted Siddharaja to Islam.

Somnath was not merely a center of religious devotion for Hindus but an integral part of the commercial network of the
Monsoon Seas. “
The reason why in particular Somnath has become so famous,” according to an Arab historian a century before Siddharaja, “is that it was a harbour of sea-faring people, and a station for those who went to and fro between
Sofala in
Zanj [East Africa] and
China.” As such, it played an important role in the economy of the Chalukya kingdom, and
Jain merchants, who exercised considerable authority, may well have encouraged
Siddharaja and other rulers to treat their Muslim counterparts generously. Whatever the case, the Hindu-Muslim accommodation endured and just as Hindu Chola kings endowed
temples for the benefit of Buddhist merchants from Southeast Asia, Chalukya rulers did so for Muslims. A bilingual Arabic and
Sanskrit inscription of the thirteenth century describes the endowment of a mosque by
Nuruddin Firuz, a shipowner from
Hormuz. Lauded as a “
great and respected chief, prince among seamen, king of kings of merchants,” Firuz built the mosque with the help of prominent Hindus, and he and the Hindu ruler of Gujarat were described as “righteous friends.”

The thirteenth century represents a watershed in the history of
Islam in South and Southeast Asia, thanks in part to the ripple effects from the rise of the Mongol
Empire, which led to the final demise of the
Abbasid Caliphate, confirmed the Mamluks as the
rulers of Egypt, and rejuvenated Muslim interest in South and Southeast Asia. Muslim merchants had established enclaves of varying size in India, East Africa, China, and mainland Southeast Asia in the preceding centuries, but these were essentially merchant communities with limited if any political power. Territorial expansion into northern India had led to the capture of Delhi in 1025, but it took another two centuries for an independent
Delhi sultanate to break away and envelop Bengal by 1225, and Gujarat in 1297. By this time, the first Muslim-ruled kingdoms had started to emerge “below the winds” in island Southeast Asia, starting with a handful of port cities like
Samudra-Pasai on northwest
Sumatra, which became a major
supplier of pepper to both China and western markets. Whether the first Muslim rulers here came from Bengal, Gujarat, southern India, or the Arabian Peninsula is unknown, but Samudra-Pasai and its rivals attracted Muslims from across Asia and East Africa, and this period has been described as a “
moment of incandescence” when Islam assumed a completely new aspect in the political world of the Indian Ocean. From this point on,
the religion flowed easily through the existing networks of trade to the east. For indigenous people, the wealth of Muslim merchants was notable and their practices were worthy of imitation. For traders, profession of a common faith facilitated
transactions and increased trust, and many
Southeast Asian rulers converted to Islam to attract Muslim traders to their ports.

Samudra-Pasai flourished as an independent sultanate thanks to its strong ties to the Muslim trading networks of the Monsoon Seas and because its nearest large neighbors—
Srivijaya, Java, and the
emergent state of
Ayutthaya in Thailand—were preoccupied with keeping each other in check. Rivalry between Ayutthaya and Java was resolved by the establishment of the
new port of
Melaka by
Paramesvara, who had ties to the
Majapahit kingdom on Java, the royal house of Srivijaya, and a noble family of Pasai. Located on the Malay Peninsula near the middle of the Strait of Malacca, the port’s strategic position was enhanced by the Melakans’ adoption of Islam, under Paramesvara or one of his successors, and the exemplary business practices followed by their rulers. To a greater extent than even Srivijaya had, Melaka depended almost exclusively on its mastery of foreign trade, which provided its primary source of revenue through an elaborate system of taxes. Goods coming from the west were assessed customs duties, while those from the east were subject to a complex arrangement under which the sultan was permitted to buy certain goods below the market price. The sultans of Melaka further profited from direct participation in trade through ship ownership and other investments.

The commercial character of Melaka is attested by the existence of
kampongs
or ethnic communities including Gujarati Muslims (the most influential group before the coming of the Portuguese in the following century),
Kelings from the Coromandel Coast, and
traders from Fujian, Luzon, and
Bengal, among other places, each group being represented by their own
syahbandar,
or harbormaster. Melaka also became the source of the prevailing maritime legal tradition for Southeast Asia, which was codified in the
Melaka maritime code,
Undang-undang Laut Melaka,
around the end of the fifteenth century. This is one of the oldest comprehensive sets of Muslim-based maritime law and as such bears closer comparison with the chapters of the
Rhodian Sea Law than with the more discursive
Treatise Concerning the Leasing of Ships
. One unusual aspect of the law is the attention it pays to relations between men and women aboard ship, a reflection of the high status and active participation of
women in trade and other aspects of public life throughout Southeast Asia, even after the coming of Islam.

Melaka’s initial prosperity was also linked to its close ties with China, whose single greatest burst of maritime commercial expansion coincided with
Paramesvara’s rule. Starting in the 1330s, the Yuan Empire sustained a number of violent shocks including famine, plague (which killed tens of millions of
Chinese before it reached the greater Mediterranean basin), and repeated flooding of the
Yellow River. These calamities emboldened ethnic Chinese opponents to Yuan rule, and in 1356 rebels led by
Zhu Yuanzhang captured Nanjing, which became the imperial capital. Having consolidated his power along the middle and lower reaches of the Yangzi, twelve years later Zhu captured
Dadu (which he called Beiping, “the north pacified”) and established the Ming (“brilliant”) Dynasty.
Ming
Taizu, as he is known, installed reform-minded Confucianist bureaucrats who set China on a sinocentric path from which it would rarely deviate over the next six centuries.

As a native Chinese dynasty, the Ming had to turn their back to the sea in order to focus on the defense of their continental borders. The dynasty’s attitude toward maritime affairs is best captured in an edict of 1371 that “
not even a little plank is allowed to drift to the sea.” That the ban on trade was so absolute was probably due to the
Neo-Confucian cast of the bureaucracy, whose priorities for the government were antithetical to the encouragement of those activities that made maritime trade feasible, namely travel, technological advances in shipbuilding and navigation, the encouragement of financial institutions, and the legal protection of private property. Nonetheless, Taizu and his successors recognized the need for coastal defense against pirates and they ordered the construction of thirty-five hundred ships for a variety of missions: four hundred warships based near Nanjing, twenty-seven patrol vessels and combat ships assigned to coast guard stations, and four hundred grain fleet escorts. Nor were their missions limited to coastal waters. Embracing Ming Taizu’s dictum that “
To repel them at sea is easy, to check them after they are ashore is hard,” Chinese ships pursued pirates to the Ryukyu Islands and Korea and fought them in
Dai Viet, which the Ming occupied from 1408 to 1428.

The most spectacular reversal to the ban of 1371 took place between 1405 and 1433 when
Ming Chengzu, also known as the Yongle emperor, dispatched six enormous fleets, and a successor a seventh, to India, the
Red Sea, the Persian Gulf, and East Africa. Led by a Muslim eunuch named
Zheng He, these expeditions involved hundreds of ships and tens of thousands of sailors, soldiers,
and traders who logged ten to fifteen thousand miles per voyage.
Chengzu’s motives were apparently threefold: to increase China’s international prestige while reaffirming his own legitimacy, through force if necessary; to encourage tribute trade and eliminate threats to that trade by expatriate Chinese; and a desire to find his predecessor, whom he had deposed and probably killed but who was rumored to be living abroad. The first three voyages (1405–11) took the Chinese as far as the southwest Indian city of Calicut (Kozhikode),
“the
great country of the Western Ocean.” Outward bound, the treasure fleet sailed from the Yangzi, and after stopping in Fujian Province proceeded to ports in
Champa, Java, and Sumatra or the Malay Peninsula. Passing through the Strait of Malacca, the fleet headed west across the Bay of Bengal to Sri Lanka before reaching Calicut, about forty-five hundred miles from Nanjing. On the last four voyages (1413–33), the Chinese ventured farther still, to
Hormuz, Aden, and other ports on the
Arabian Peninsula, and to the East African
ports of Mogadishu, Brava, and
Malindi. On the final expedition, smaller squadrons were detached to visit Bengal, while some Chinese Muslims, including the author
Ma Huan, visited
Mecca after sailing from Aden to Jeddah in a local vessel.