Episode 312 - The Mediterranean in the Crusading era with Nicholas Morton

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Hello everyone and welcome to the history of Byzantium episode 312

The Mediterranean in the Crusading Era with Nicholas Morton

I am back from Turkey after another wonderful tour with a group of listeners.

It was an absolute joy to see Nicaea for the first time and the same goes goes for Pergamon and Aphrodisias.

If you'd like to go on a tour in the future, then email me and I'll put you on the mailing list.

I'm working on answering your questions about Andronicus II and many other topics, but in the meantime, I thought we could answer one query which has come up from time to time, which is why were Venetian and Genoese ships better than those of other nations, and particularly, of course, Byzantium?

To answer this, I've turned again to our expert in residence, Dr.

Nicholas Morton.

He was kind enough to give us a survey of the history of the Mediterranean during the Crusading era.

We talk about the expansion of the Italian trading cities, the ships they built and how they fought, as well as the role of the Crusades in this process.

I have a couple of other interviews ready to share soon, so you should have a nice few episodes before Christmas.

I'll also be hosting Zoom calls for patrons soon.

For now, here's the interview.

And I should remind you that Dr.

Morton is Associate Professor in Middle Eastern and Global History at Nottingham Trent University in the UK.

And his new book, The Mongol Storm, Making and Breaking Empires in the Medieval Near East, is available now.

Dr.

Nicholas Morton, welcome back to the history of Byzantium.

Hi, let's get you back on the show.

Well, we're becoming your second home at this point

after you've taken us through the impact of the Mongols on Anatolia and the wider Middle East and then a narrative of the Fifth Crusade.

And today, I think we're going even more ambitious with a panoramic sweep through the naval history of the Mediterranean during the Crusading era.

So let's go back to sort of the year 1000

before

this all kicked off.

And can you sort of give the listeners an idea of what the situation is in the Mediterranean around the year 1000?

Yeah, sure.

So it's a fascinating time because for several centuries before the year 1000, the Mediterranean had really been dominated by fleets from Islamic North Africa and from the Middle East.

And this change came about in the 7th century as part of the rise of Islam.

And it saw the other competing fleets being sort of driven from the sea lanes.

And famously, one 14th century

Muslim writer called Ibn Khaldun, a very famous intellectual, wrote that not a single Christian plank floated on it

around the time of the first millennium.

And that's a bit of an exaggeration, but not by much.

And notably, there are things going on that people don't know much about, such as in the end, in sort of the late

10th century, the Fatimid Empire in Egypt launches a seaborne invasion of southern Italy and defeats the German Imperial Army.

This is not common knowledge.

So that's sort of the backdrop to the period I'm most concerned with, which sort of takes it beyond the year 1000.

But what makes this time so fascinating is that there's a sort of change of tides taking place.

Where before the year 1000 it had been

for the most part, Islamic fleets, both mercantile and military, that define the sea lanes of the Mediterranean, that increasingly changes as you move into the 11th, 12th, and 13th century.

And to some extent, the Byzantine Empire has been an exception to that.

It tends to maintain its maritime position in the Aegean for most of that period.

But in terms of the broader Mediterranean,

that's the big picture.

Yeah, and listeners will remember this because obviously the

Byzantine islands of Cyprus and Sicily and Crete are all taken from them over that period of Islamic dominance.

And yeah, they're able to maintain a fleet close to home that keeps Constantinople safe, but increasingly they're struggling to do much about the Arab Emirates.

So this,

I'm guessing the change is coming through the Italian city-states who have featured so prominently in our podcast narrative.

So when exactly did Pisa and Genoa and of course Venice rise to prominence?

Just to sort of stand back for a moment, it is astonishing just how much

three cities, brackets for

Venice, Genoa, Pisa, and for a time Amalfi, just how much these cities could dominate such huge areas of sea and, by extension, the coastal regions around them.

But they do.

And it is in the 11th century that they begin to rise as major mercantile powers.

They've got their origins in the 10th century, or at least they've got their origins even further back, but their origins as a power in the 10th century.

Pisa's wealth, its sort of initial starting point, centers on its iron deposits.

So that's what it's got to to work with to begin with.

The Venetians have salt.

They're major exporters of salt, particularly to begin with.

Genoa has far less to work with, which perhaps may explain why they are often more adventurous than the rest.

They've got to make their money elsewhere rather than having a product to begin with, although in time they do begin to develop their own industries as well.

But yeah, what we begin to see is the rise of these major Italian fleets in the 11th century and then them beginning to do business extensively with North Africa, areas of the Western Mediterranean, particularly Genoa,

and with Venice.

Venice has a very close relationship with the Byzantine Empire, which goes back, goes a long way back, all the way back to the Byzantine attempts to

sort of revive its position in the Italian peninsula in the sixth century with Justinian and his various

successors.

And that relationship frays, but that link's never really lost at the same time.

There's always a set of awareness that Venice is linked to the fortunes of the Byzantine Empire or to the identity of the Byzantine Empire.

And so, yes, Venice grows as a major power and it conducts a great deal of trade with the Byzantine Empire.

And as for Amalfi,

Amalfi trades a fair amount with

Egypt and Fatimid Egypt at this time is not just Egypt itself, it's also much of the Levantine coast region, the sort of the Holy Land region, including Jerusalem as well.

And just an interesting historical nugget, it's merchants from Amalfi who, so the story goes,

originally founded a hospital in Jerusalem and another one in Antioch.

And the Jerusalem hospital was the one that would go on to become the Order of St.

John aka the Knights Hospital.

Yeah, absolutely.

And

do you have a sense of what drove that expansion at that time in Italy, in these states?

That's a very good question.

I mean, all these cities have a very strong civic identity.

They're all ambitious.

They seem to have that in them.

They want to expand.

They want to push outwards for whatever reason.

Yes, there are developments in Italy more broadly.

There is a sort of the beginnings of a evolution in terms of agricultural production, some extent textiles, and yet there's something else there too.

There's some kind of

dynamism that begins to kick in at about this time.

It may be linked as is so often the case, to a sense of growing opportunities.

Because it's not just that these Italian fleets are conquering the sea lanes of the Mediterranean from Islamic fleets, but the Muslim world itself is beginning to turn in on itself.

There's lots of infighting and wars.

Islamic Spain breaks up into what becomes known as the Taifa kingdoms period, and later on will be conquered twice from North Africa by the Almoravids and the Al-Mahads.

North Africa breaks up into a series of smaller emirates.

The Fatimid Empire becomes very embattled with the Seljuk Turks who advance into the Middle East or Central Asia as well.

So, where previously

at least there was a greater sense of consolidated purpose, that begins to get lost in the 11th century.

And so, it's quite possible the Italians saw this fragmentation and realized, actually, there's something in this that could benefit them.

It's possible a similar process is at work with Byzantium.

The Byzantines, obviously, in the 11th century, do suffer a series of external invasions from the Normans along the Adriatic coast, from the Seljuk Turks in Anatolia, that's modern-day Turkey, and from the Pechenegs across the Danube frontier.

But recent work on the economy in Byzantium suggests actually it was doing pretty well in the 11th century, particularly in the Aegean.

So I don't quite feel there was the same level of vacuum there that the Venetians in particular are moving into, although the Byzantines are very keen for the Venetians to help them in their wars against the Normans.

And it's, of course, the Normans aren't just the Kingdom of England and the Battle of Hastings.

There's a substantial Norman presence in southern Italy and Sicily, which grows at this time, coming to pose a threat to Byzantium.

So the Byzantines are looking for Venetian help there, too.

So that might also

go some way to explaining why the Venetian presence grew in that area as well.

Yeah, that's really interesting.

I mean, in a way, what you're describing in the East is the collapse of the Caliphate, which had been, you know, this one unitary power dictating policy.

And now that it split up, presumably all these opportunities to negotiate with smaller states are opening up.

And we're about to talk about the Crusades.

European demography must be a part of this.

If you've suddenly got lots of second and third sons with nothing to do and no land to inherit, pushing them outward to conquer new lands or to man your fleets must suddenly sort of generate opportunities.

There's a big picture change taking place in Western Christendom.

The 10th century is sometimes called the Iron Century because there were so many

threats and invasions on various fronts.

You've got the Vikings attacking the northern seaboard, those are the North Sea and Baltic coastline areas.

You've got various peoples to the east of the Holy Roman Empire

trying to move westwards and that creates obviously

large areas of war zones and that occupies the attention of the German empires, the Ottonian empires.

And there is still in the 10th century, although it's diminishing somewhat, there's ongoing raiding.

from the North African emirates into the southern French and Italian coastline, although that is in decline by that point.

But then again, there's another change of tide that's taking place.

The Vikings convert

and the Vikings become essentially known as Normans, Northmen, and they start to spearhead Christendom's expansion rather than

being threatened invaders.

And similarly, you've got in this era the formation of the kingdoms of Poland and Hungary, again, which take a lot of the pressure off

of Christendom's eastern frontier.

And as I mentioned already, the rise of the Italian fleets that too sees a shift in the Mediterranean.

So, suddenly, Christendom is looking outwards in a way it hadn't done previously.

And

there is evidence to suggest that there's a rising population which will

act as a sort of galvanizer for that process.

I strongly suspect we're looking at a period of economic growth as well.

There's various indicators that are sort of pointing upwards at that time.

And so, with all these things going for for it, Christendom is able to project its force outwards, where previously it had been on the defensive.

So, all of that does, to some extent, underpin what's taking place here.

Brilliant.

So, by the end of

that century,

by the time we get to 1100, the Crusades have begun and end up being this kind of

waves of

people moving east.

And

after initially being this giant land campaign,

fleets become much more involved as the Second, Third, Fourth Crusade, and so on get going.

So, what does the Crusading era do to

commerce in the Mediterranean?

Sure.

So, the First Crusade, raised in 1095, reached northern Syria in about 1097.

And then, over the following years, very brutally conquered conquered a series of cities most notably Antioch and Jerusalem later on Tripoli but

then in the years that followed the Crusaders or Franks as they became known

they also began to conquer many of the coastal cities along the Levantine coast so that's the coast just to sort of to the northeast of Egypt that then goes up to link with the southern coast of Anatolia or Turkey

and that includes several really big ports.

Beirut is a deep water port.

Tripoli is a deep water port.

Other ports, which are not quite so sort of geographically endowed, but nonetheless, which conducted a great deal of commerce and involves Acre

and also Latakia in the north.

And those many of those ports were conquered when Italian fleets,

including those of Pisa, Venice, and Genoa,

when they turned up with their fleets and joined forces with the armies of the Crusader states, and then they'd siege these cities.

And then, when these cities fell, what the Italians wanted was always the same.

They want a trading quarter in that city.

And so, suddenly, you're looking at a substantial increase in the Italian presence along the East Mediterranean coast.

Now, I must stress: the Italian merchants are not the only merchants who are doing business on the Mediterranean.

It's not as if they solely dominate the area.

There are Byzantine merchants, there are Armenian merchants, there are plenty of Muslim merchants as well.

But nonetheless, these conquests along the coast of the Levant, they do seem to have had an effect in galvanizing trade across the area.

And in time, that gets coupled with,

for example, the Middle East directly before the First Crusade was the

scene of an enormous upheaval when the Seljuk Turks invaded the entire area.

And for a time, the area was

very much a war zone as various different groups such as the Arab dynasties and Kurdish groups tried to resist them.

And then eventually the Seljuks conquered.

So there's been a great deal of upheaval, whether that upheavals from the Seljuks or the Crusaders, but the Crusaders want to build.

They want to build ports, they want to build port facilities, they want to increase the shipping lanes.

The Seljuks too, having consolidated their control across the region in about the same period, they also want to build up their trading position.

And so, roads, caravans arise.

And so, to some degree, you've actually got a situation where, for all that they do fight wars against each other, the Seljuk Turks and their empire and the Crusaders actually have quite a lot in common when it comes to commerce.

They want to encourage this.

And then, swinging down further south in Egypt, you have the fatimid empire and there too after an initial very determined effort to defeat the crusaders which ultimately fails the fatimids start to do business with them because again they depend on trade routes that come through syria then across the sinai desert to egypt and these are trade routes that the crusaders have some control over And it's notable, for example, that when the Crusaders or Franks, when they mint their own coins,

they do it in imitation of the Fatimid Dinars, and they're doing it because they want to join that trading zone.

And so, although often you get people talking about the Crusades as if somehow the

Crusades and Crusader States were these ring-fenced areas with no interaction with anyone else because that's the Crusader territory, it's totally untrue.

There's a great deal of interaction, particularly commercial interaction.

The Turkish powers of Syria, the Seljuk Turks, and their rulers in Aleppo and Damascus, they depend for their commerce on the Crusader States ports.

They simply can't draw revenue without doing that, or not revenue on the scale they need.

And the Crusader States ports and their governors, they can't function without trade goods passing through Damascus and Aleppo and Seljuk territory to reach them.

So commercially, they have a strong vested interest in working together.

And so what you have, the result of all of this, I'm sorry, it's been a rather long-winded answer, is you have a meeting of different agendas, all of which are looking to encourage trade.

And so, for these various reasons, yes, trade takes off, and the Italian cities are one part of that jigsaw puzzle.

Excellent.

We're about to get into

more specifics of

their ships and their activities, but let's just bring the the Byzantines into this picture

before we get into

more specific naval things.

So

how influential were the Byzantines in this Mediterranean world, in your view?

There's been some really good research done on this recently, various studies.

The one that's really given me a lot to think about is Wickham's The Donkey and the Boat, which came out very recently.

But it seems as though trade, particularly in the Aegean, it remained very buoyant

and actually grew throughout the 11th and 12th century.

And the Byzantine Empire is a complex bureaucracy.

It can manage these things very well.

And it's got all sorts of existing other communications networks, whether for regional governance or for the management of populations.

And these provide an underlying network which the trade routes can then follow.

And then you've got the Byzantine Navy providing a degree of security on top of that.

So the Aegean tends to remain fairly buoyant.

It does play a major part in this.

A bigger question, though, is the extent to which Byzantine merchants ranged further afield.

Did they tend to stick to their internal economy or did they tend to go out beyond it?

And whilst we do have some examples of Byzantine shipping going further afield, it does the

tendency, I think, is for Byzantine merchants to remain internal.

but that internal trade is strong.

And it's trading in staples such as olive oil, wine, and grain, and things like that, but also luxuries as well.

So, a question that comes up often, I'm interested to hear your answer, is how important is that maritime commerce to the economy of the Byzantine Empire?

It's a good question.

It depends on the region for, I don't know, Cappadocia or something like that in Anatolia.

It's not going to be so important because

Anatolia is part of a very different commercial zone to, say, Greece or the Aegean Islands.

It's networks differently.

If you're in the Aegean Islands, it goes without saying that you'll be very dependent on maritime trade.

But my sense is, and again, this comes back to something that Wickham's work does very well.

I mean, he makes a point that bulk cargo is possible and is actually the bedrock of trade.

And so there has been a tendency in the past to see trade as being mostly in luxuries, in luxury fabrics or precious stones or textiles or highly worked artisanal products.

Actually, he makes a very good case for most trade being in bulk.

And you can't trade in bulk easily overland, or at least not for long distances.

It can be much more easily served by maritime transport.

That's my feeling, anyway.

Because of course, if you've got a wagon with, say, two people to service it and then several draft animals, a good chunk of that wagon is going to be taken up with simply enough stuff to keep the animals and the people going before you can then load anything else onto it.

Whereas a ship, you can carry several hundred tons, perhaps, and then you can take it much further.

But

yeah,

baggage animals, ships, they form a an integrated network, but I do think maritime trade is really important.

I think it's a problem for the byzantine empire when it loses its ability to maintain a safe zone for that internal trade yeah well that's that's where we are well that's where i'm researching the narrative right now when uh latin piracy is rife in the aegean um

i think this is an interesting one for listeners because the behavior of the italian cities feels much more modern much more capitalistic searching out the rich markets whereas byzantium it being a much more centralized

state with this capital that can buy up lots of things from its own provinces and then sell them on, it's sort of alien to people.

People's assumption is that trade is always

expansive and capitalistic and not a sort of internal market.

Okay, so

let's get into some more naval specifics because

this is going to be new to me because I've never really gone into the research of this, which is why I was excited for the interview.

So,

what kind of ships are we talking about for commerce and warfare in this era?

There's a constellation of different types of vessels, but crudely speaking,

you can already divide them into three main types.

The first is

the narves or ships,

simply translated.

And these form the bulk, particularly the Italian cities

merchant vessels or the big bulk carriers and these are quite long they're quite high-sided the way they were described to me when I was an undergraduate is they're a bit like Noah's Ark with sails but it's that quite sort of they're not they're not round but there is a rounded quality to them and they're very very large and they're quite hard to tackle if you're a pirate or naval commander because they're so high out of the water and so simply getting from an attacking vessel onto them is very difficult.

And they can carry enormous numbers of people.

This is one of the things that I can't quite explain it yet.

It's one of the things no one's really, at least not to my satisfaction, provided an answer for.

And that is just how big these ships could get.

There seems to be some correlation to the advent of the Crusades because, suddenly, by the time you get to the mid-12th century, suddenly authors are talking about ships often from Italy, which can carry over a thousand people.

And some sources say as high as 15 to 16,000.

There's a Muslim pilgrim who travelled on a Genoese vessel, he said it could carry 2,000 people.

Now,

I'm guessing that most listeners will react to that rather as I do by saying, well, that's got to be an exaggeration.

That's it.

It can't be true.

Because that would imply a very large vessel.

and

it's not just people sort of herded together in small areas.

Some people are traveling on these ships in a fair degree of comfort plus cargo, which makes them even bigger.

And so you think, well, how on earth can that possibly be right?

But

there are problems with dismissing it too easily.

For example, there are actually legal contracts,

particularly those connected to the military orders in fact, which actually specify the total number of people that can be carried on a particular vessel and they do indeed go over a thousand in terms of total persons on a ship

the problem is i'm not aware at least of any maritime archaeologists have ever found one of these vessels

so it's one of those imponderables there are several documents which it's hard to disbelieve a legal contract saying you may carry on a ship up to this number of people it's hard to see a reason why you'd falsify that we even have a passenger manifest for one vessel in 1250 now it's not a really big one it could this one carries only about 500 but it has a manifest for 500 which is still huge so clearly vessels could get this big and yet

when maritime historians talk about vessels of that kind of size they're normally talking about the early modern period they're not talking about the 12th century And so there is a bit of a sort of missing link in terms of the maritime history of the area that needs more exploration.

It's something I've been keeping an eye on for some time.

But I think the one thing we can be sure about is that the ships carrying goods and people

at this time, they're not sort of quaint little medieval vessels carrying half a dozen people.

They can be big, and the technology exists to facilitate that.

So, that's the first type, really big sailing ships.

The second type is galleys, and galleys can be subdivided into war galleys, which are the most famous.

And most of the war galleys in this period are byrenes.

And our word on byrenes, now the classical bireme, a bireme meant two banks of oars.

So you've got one level of oars, monorime, two banks of oars, bireme on each side.

In this period, that meaning seems to have changed somewhat.

What it actually means in this period is probably just one bank of oars on each side, but

two rowers per oar.

That's where the bireme part comes from.

And later on, you get tri-reams at the end of the 13th century.

It seems like Genoa played a big role in that.

And

if you're interested in reams, there's even in the 15th century an attempt at a quinquareme.

So five rowers per oar, which the Venetians tried, but it doesn't really take off.

the galleys form a met form the major war vessel.

Their advantage is they're quick, or they're quick for short distances.

If you get the rowers going,

you can probably produce about seven to ten knots, which will make you the fastest ship on the sea,

but for only a short space of time, because, of course, your rowers are not going to be able to maintain that in the long term.

So, that's the galleys' speed.

Sorry, that's the galley's advantage, speed.

and they'll carry a force of marines who will then do the fighting.

But you do also have trading galleys as well, particularly for high-quality, low-bulk products that need to be transported quickly, or for high-profile ambassadors, ambassadors or envoys, again, people who need to get from one place to another as fast as possible.

So, galleys can perform a number of different functions.

The disadvantage of galleys is that they're a lot less seaworthy.

The narves, the big ships, they've got big, thick, solid wooden sides.

They're pretty sturdy.

But galleys, because they're built for speed, they've got thinner sides and they rise only a short way out of the water.

All of which is designed to keep down their weight and to increase their speed.

But the problem with that is if you've only got

the ship's sides of two or three feet out of the water, even a mild swell is going to cause problems for you if you're a galley captain because there is a danger that you'll find your ship being swamped.

And the other problem, of course, is that all those rowers in the hot Mediterranean sun, they're going to need a lot of water if they're going to function.

And I mean, you can go for sort of, I don't know, the image that comes to mind is sort of asterisks and

obelisks of the galley slaves being whipped and faster, faster.

That kind of thinking doesn't really work if someone's utterly dehydrated.

You can't beat them to work harder.

They have to be properly

hydrated.

And so galleys have to carry large amounts of water, which they can't.

So galleys tend to operate over short distances or to island hop so that they can replenish their water very quickly.

So those are the two big types.

But actually, for my money, by far the most important type of vessel and the most common type of vessel is much less exciting, and that's small coastal ships.

ships that don't carry more than 20 or 30 people or small cargoes but there are thousands of them and i think when you visualize these big mediterranean ports whether that's alexandria in egypt or whether that's tripoli in the crusader states or whether that's

thessalonica or constantinople anywhere else

you should visualize the occasional galley and the occasional large ship arriving at port, but that should take place against a cloud of smaller sails.

People bringing small passengers or families or small cargoes from one area to another, from one island to another.

And that really, the more I look at the evidence, the more I see that these small ships are the bedrock of trade and communication, far more so than bulk carriers, despite the fact that, of course, bulk carriers and galleys are, to some extent at least, more exciting.

Absolutely.

I mean, it's always dangerous with numbers, but anecdotally,

you know, the Byzantines seemed to need

four or five hundred ships, according to them, to transport an army across the Mediterranean back in the fifth, sixth century, where by the Crusading era, 120 ships seemed to be able to do the same job.

So there does seem to have been

an improvement in the size of ships and their ability to carry more

people.

True.

And

you get incredible discrepancies in fleet sizes.

So some sources will say that a Crusader or Byzantine fleet included, say, 30 or 40 ships.

Then others will say that that same fleet included 300 ships.

And historians will then generally say something like, well, obviously that reflects

historians inflating numbers.

I just wonder, in fact, whether the first number the main, the central large vessels, and the second number was all sort of the other craft that gathered around those major sort of capital ships, as it were.

Yeah, absolutely.

So,

what about navigation?

How are all these ships getting around during this period?

So, this is this is a this is this for me at least, this was one of my keyholes into this subject because I really wanted to know an answer to that, too.

And it's fascinating to see just how much changes in these years.

And

before this, you can navigate by the stars, and that can be reasonably easily achieved.

A lot of ships also get about the Mediterranean by sticking to coastal waters.

So you follow a coast as far as you can, and then when you're in sight, when you say peril on the west coast of Italy and you're within sight of Sicily, then you hop across.

Or similarly, you cross the Adriatic at a narrow point where you can see the Greek coast on the other side.

If you're traveling from Italy, and you follow the Greek coast round, and then you go from island to island till you get to the Anatolian coast or wherever it may be.

And of course, experienced seafarers would also know the prevailing wind directions because there are consistent

streams in the wind directions of the Mediterranean.

And so you'll get a sense of where you are simply by which way the winds blow, because you'll know that that particular area

has winds that go in that direction.

And also, there's another incentive for sticking to the coast as well, which is convectional winds.

And just to word on those,

so the Mediterranean, obviously, it gets fairly hot.

And in the heat of the day, the land gets hotter first.

It takes a lot longer for water to heat up.

And so the heat rises above the land and that then sucks in air from above the sea.

And so in comes

this air from across the sea and that creates an inshore breeze.

And that inshore breeze tends to hold steady in lots of areas in the Mediterranean, particularly along the eastern Mediterranean coast.

Now ships can

cope with sailing at 90 degrees to the wind.

And so they tend to ghost up and down the coast following those convectional winds, which is another incentive for sticking to coastal waters.

So these things can be achieved, but things are also changing.

Now, it's in this era, at the end of the 12th century, but really taking off in the 13th, that you have the advent of the magnetic compass.

Now, this was not an invention of the Mediterranean sea room.

It was an invention from China, but it found its way across to the Mediterranean.

And once it arrives, arrives that too is going to be a major aid to navigation.

And in a similar vein in the 13th century you have the advent of the maritime chart and the earliest maritime charts that we've got that could potentially be used for navigation are what's called the peasant porterlands which provide a reasonable outline of the Mediterranean coastline.

It's where the maps of the Mediterranean ought to get recognizable rather than really having to work out which bits being represented where from the earlier medieval maps.

And there's a lot of debate among scholars about who invented these

navigation charts first.

Was it Byzantium?

Was it the Muslim world?

Was it Western Christendom or some part thereof?

People get very

overexcited about that kind of debate.

But for me, at least, I think that kind of misses the point, which is that with a lot of the technologies that you see in this era, technologies, techniques, rigging layouts, steering technologies, shipbuilding technologies,

what's so notable is that they change hands so quickly.

And so it's very hard to know really whether maritime charts were developed first in any of these civilizations because they emerge in others very quickly.

And so for my money at least, what's notable about this area, and in my view at least, a lot more exciting, is rather than trying to go through a rather sort of

annoying conversation about which civilization gets the credit for inventing it, it's to see this as a joined up sea area.

Sailors are moving from port to port.

Crews are changing the whole time.

It's not surprising that ideas and techniques are changing hands really quickly.

The Italians sell entire ships to Egypt.

And of course, they can be unpicked and reverse engineered very easily, just as can trade goods or technologies passing the other way.

Shipwrights are being hired by one culture or another, and the Mongols, notably in 1290, actually hired Genoese and Venetian shipwrights to go and build them a galley fleet in Baghdad.

So

these technologies are technologies on the move.

And I think what's more interesting is rather than trying to work out who invented them first, which is actually lost to us, it's to realize just how joined up it all is and how quickly ideas and technologies are changing hands, which, in my money, at least, is a lot more interesting and exciting than the alternative.

Yeah, really interesting.

Um, well, let's just talk a little bit about psychology of seafaring.

Um,

on my last visit to um, Istanbul, I was able to show um

people a carving up in the galleries of the Hagia Sophia where someone had had carved Saint Nicholas

and carved three ships alongside him.

And so, our conclusion is that, you know, someone had sailed to Constantinople and was asking Saint Nicholas for protection for these three ships, you know, on our journey wherever they were headed next.

And so I'm guessing a lot of the crews of these Italian states as they expanded had their own sense of

the supernatural in the sea and in seafaring.

What can you tell us about that?

Sure.

Perhaps the best starting point here is just to point out just how incredibly hazardous

crossing the Mediterranean was.

And between about October and March, ships don't sail because it's the storm season.

Not even the big, high-sided narves can cope with that.

There are occasions when envoys on matters of extreme urgency do attempt a winter crossing, but people don't do it normally because there's a very good chance you won't survive it.

So, sailing is hazardous, and that's even before we go to the problems attached to piracy or human-based problems, or being attacked by a rival fleet.

And for much of the medieval period, the Genoese, the Pisans, and the Venetians are very likely to act as pirates against one another.

They're not working together, or at least not for long periods of time.

That's before you build in the dangers of piracy from other civilizations with a naval presence as well.

So piracy is another issue.

Shipwreck

is another issue.

And you do get

some attempts to try and make shipwreck as,

to try and take away that danger as much as possible.

You do get lighthouses or beacons that are established to try and prevent that from happening but we're not talking obviously about navigation and voyage being as advanced as it is in other periods.

So yeah there's lots of hazards, there's lots of reasons reasons why you could die.

And that's before, of course, we move on to the fact that by pressing hundreds of people into a small ship, they're all going to be showing their parasites before long.

And there, too, you've got another hazard.

So, people don't like sailing.

And most many of the accounts we've got, we've got a very colourful letter written by someone called James of Vitri, who went out to become Bishop of Acre.

He did not like sailing at all.

It's hazardous.

He was sick.

It's just, he just found the whole

experience terrifying and was very, very glad to get to journey's end.

And I suspect that holds true for a lot of people.

It is hazardous.

It is dangerous.

And of course, if you suffer from seasickness, that's just going to make it even more miserable.

So for all those reasons, yeah, absolutely.

There's it's in the same way that a farmer stares at

a farmer will probably spend, or a farming family will spend most of their lives praying to God for

good weather and therefore for good crops.

So a sailor or anyone being carried by ship will be spending a lot of time praying for good weather and

fine seas, etc.,

because there are just so many hazards.

And of course, these are then amplified by,

I was going to say, imagined terrors, but they're not seen as imagined terrors in the medieval period.

And that's monsters.

And it seems entirely plausible that your ship could be attacked by

monsters from the deep and there are actually books that offer advice on how to deal with

monsters should they attack you and so one particularly memorable primary source in this era it offers guidance on how to deal with sirens should they attack your ship and they're not sirens in sort of the way they're often invoked in sort of Hollywood films.

They're not beautiful women singing people to their deaths.

They do try and sing people to their deaths, but they're supposed to be apparently, according to this tale anyway, be bird-like creatures that nonetheless can hold axes and other weapons.

And you are in danger from their song.

And so this book of advice rather sort of tersely says, if the sirens start to sing and to attack your ships, you stick wax in your ears, pick up your crossbow and shoot them down.

So that's how you deal with sirens.

Well,

that's good.

They've learned from Odysseus'

success or mistakes, depending on your perspective.

What about when two fleets come together and attack each other?

How did fighting, or what did it look like during this era?

Okay, so it's changed quite a lot because in the preceding period,

and again, we can call upon Hollywood for some very vivid images of these sorts of things.

It's all about, well, that ships are constructed with rams.

And the idea being that you ram at an enemy ship, make a nice big hole in it, the enemy ship sinks and you've won your naval battle.

Rams have gone out of fashion by the time we get to the 10th century.

Part of the reason for this seems to be that ships are being very much more solidly constructed with a much more powerful internal frame.

So whilst you might be able to put a hole in a ship, actually, you won't buckle the frame because the frame is pretty solid.

So, that hole can then be filled, and a ram won't have quite the same kind of effect.

So, something else is needed.

And so, rams begin to die out from sort of the sixth, seventh century, that sort of era.

And

for the Byzantine Navy, at least, they get replaced to some extent with a spur,

which is sort of a big spike at deck level, which can then be used to sweep an

opponent's deck.

You don't tend to get that so much from sort of the era of the Crusades, but we're looking at a process of evolution.

The Byzantine weapon that does seem to retain its value is Greek fire and Greek fire launchers, which can then hurl flammable material onto an

opponent's ship.

That does remain a potent weapon, but for most fleets, it's actually the crossbow that becomes the main weapon of choice.

And so equipping ships with scores of warriors wielding crossbows and bows, that predominantly is the way in which ship-to-ship warfare takes place.

And so it really is a bit of a shift.

But given the nature of the ships I've just outlined, there are problems with that, particularly if you are fighting on galleys.

If you're trying to sort of get your crossbows to align onto an enemy deck, but that deck is way above you, that poses significant problems.

And so, for example, during the Third Crusade, when Richard I of England tried to tackle a large high-sided ship belonging to Saladin's forces, and he tried to tackle it with galleys, he encountered a lot of difficulties simply because he couldn't board it.

And so, there are all sorts of issues there in dealing with that kind of warfare.

Another weapon which occurs in some battles, the most famous one is not actually from the Mediterranean, it's from

the English Channel North Sea area, is where you get a fleet equipped with powdered lime.

So you get your limestone, you ground it down into powdered lime, you put it all in bags, and then you make sure that your fleet is up wind of its opponent, and then you unleash the lime.

The lime floats down in a fog and then crosses into the enemy ships.

And of course, if you get powdered lime in your eyes, you go blind.

So it's an extraordinarily unpleasant weapon.

Not there are many weapons that are pleasant, but even so, it's pretty foul.

And

that too can be a very powerful weapon

used at this time.

So that would be

another weapon.

Otherwise, there is the possibility of boarding an opposed opponent's ship, but crossbows are what get talked about most.

Yeah,

that's pretty nasty.

So I often talk in the podcast about the Venetians and others trying to get to Alexandria, trying to get access to the Egyptian market.

Can we talk a bit about the goods that were traded?

And

is there a strong connection between Mediterranean trade and the Indian Ocean, which is sort of what people imagine is where goods are coming from up to Alexandria to seem exotic to Western Europeans.

Yeah, it's this, I guess, again, it's one of those wonderful subjects where you can show just how much

different cultures and civilizations from across the world have exchanged ideas and trade plays a major role in that.

So yeah,

lots of goods from the Indian Ocean region

reached the Middle East and then went from the Middle East to the Mediterranean.

And this has historic roots.

I mean, the Romans traded enormously with India, and Roman products have

turned up far to the east of India.

And so, this is not unprecedented.

But, yes, during this period of 1000 through to 1400, there is a rising trade with the Indian Ocean region.

One of the questions I've often wondered about is:

did this take place through the Crusader States?

Because they have a presence on the Red Sea coast at Eilat.

And you might think, well, maybe they traded from there via the Red Sea into the Indian Ocean.

The signs seem to be that they didn't.

Most trade with the Indian Ocean either goes via Egypt, the bulk of it goes via Egypt,

or through the Persian Gulf and then from there to into Iraq and from Iraq then further afield.

But Egypt's the big one and the fleets will come from India to the Egyptian eastern coast, from where they'll then be transported, sometimes by baggage animal, often by canal.

There's an extensive network of canals in Egypt in this era, then across north to places like Damietta or Alexandria for shipment into the Mediterranean trade.

And that is a major umbilical cord for commerce.

It's also what makes Fatimid Egypt rich.

It's also what explains how much Chinese porcelain there turns up in archaeological digs in Cairo.

It also explains how so many spices and other food products and precious stones from India turn up in Western Europe.

And studies have shown actually that the aristocracy in Western Europe for large stretches of time

had a diet that actually had very little in common with the peasantry of Western Europe because it included just such large quantities of

pepper and cumin and other food products, cumulatively labeled spices from that area so the trade is substantial and of course that all that trade can be taxed which goes some way to explaining why egypt in particular is the fulcrum of commerce in for much of this period it also explains why the crusader states wants to imitate the egyptian coinage because clearly that's the center of the commercial dynamo across the region

Yeah, absolutely.

So you've already started to answer this one, but can you talk about other goods that ships were carrying across the Mediterranean in this era and

sort of where those

goods were taken

and consumed?

Sure.

Historically, of course, the famous one are the high-value products.

Silk from China would be an obvious one, although it has to be said there are plenty of silk-producing areas in the Mediterranean by that point too, but Chinese silk is very famous.

And there's some wonderful examples of that.

So, for example, there's an Armenian gospel book which shows an image of an Armenian archbishop, but he's wearing silk robes with a Chinese dragon on them.

And so, even in that, you can see that link.

And I understand from archaeologists, the Knights Hospital,

should you ever go back in time and be offered a meal by the Knights Hospital on Acre, you will probably be served that meal on

Chinese ceramics.

Likewise, spices and other goods from the Indian Ocean, absolutely.

These are the things that are often best known.

But there's a lot of other products that are being traded as well.

Sugar is a really big one and an increasing one.

Egypt's Fayoum region, the Crusade Estates, they all mass produce sugar because it can be sold into

the Mediterranean market and various areas that aren't suitable climatically for sugar.

will buy them in bulk at a very high price because, well, everyone wants to ruin their teeth apparently, and they still do.

But other things, textiles are probably one of the highest value forms of

trade goods.

I mentioned before Wickham's book, The Donkey and the Boat, does a very good job of showing the importance of textiles, particularly things like linen from Egypt, which forms a major part of

the commerce across the area, but you also have other trade in cotton goods as well.

And then there are other things.

One of the interesting things about Egypt is that, for all its wealth, and despite the fact it has a lot to offer in terms of its own trade goods, particularly grain, all those

square miles of cereal crops in the Nile Delta are all being irrigated when the Nile floods, that makes Egypt incredibly powerful economically.

But Egypt doesn't have forests.

and it doesn't have iron.

So it needs to import both those things.

And just to dovetail with the Fifth Crusade podcast we did a few weeks ago,

it's notable that one of the treaty clauses at the end of the Fifth Crusade is that the Franks must leave behind all their spare mosques.

And that's very the reason for that is very simple.

It's because they don't have timber suitable for those sorts of mosques.

And the places that the Egyptians can get their timber from is firstly from

the area around Venice and also from southern Anatolia.

But to get good quality timber from either of those regions, they've got to work with the Franks.

Obviously, the Venetians

are part of Western Christendom, but to get timber from, say, Silesia in southern Anatolia down to Egypt, you've got to bring it by coastal vessel along the coast of the Crusader States.

And

there's actually a treaty where that clause is actually part of it

specifying timber must be able to be brought to Egypt because Egypt needs it.

In the same vein you've also got the papacy banning the export of timber from Western Christendom precisely because the Pope does not want to facilitate that trade

and you get these various sort of trade blocks going both ways or in multiple ways.

The papacy tries to block the export of metal and timber and weapons to Muslim territory.

But you also have various laws in Muslim territory banning the export of weapons or military materials to the Crusader states for the same reasons.

Yeah, absolutely.

So, in addition to just making money or improving your diet or getting weapons of statecraft, do you see other sort of cultural impact from the exchange of all these goods in the Mediterranean?

Yes, it's as

when you import an item, let's say an item of textiles, for example, it's not just about textiles for clothes.

Obviously, the designs on those textiles, the ideas associated with those designs, or the artistry on a service of plates, or the ideas connected to a piece of metalwork, these get transmitted too.

And so we have examples

of

Crusader States crockery being sold to various other areas.

And of course,

those designs therefore get spread to other areas.

Lots and lots of

Byzantine influences artwork in the Crusader States extensively.

And part of that may well have come either through trade or the movement of artisans between one territory or another.

The fleur-de-lis appears in a surviving dagger, which belonged to a Turkish ruler.

Architecture changes hands in much the same way as navigation, and the artisans are all mobile.

So they're exchanging ideas and they're bringing with that their own influences and artistic styles.

So lots of these things are moving from one area to another.

Another example would be fashion.

And so, for example, there is a real phase where diplomats in Western Europe liked to dress like Mongol envoys because the Mongol envoys would turn up wearing these amazing brockade items of clothing, these coats and tunics, and that then became the center of a fashion craze.

And so people began to dress like the Mongol ambassadors because that's what people found impressive at the time.

And so that things like that change hands, but then it's about diet as well.

New and interesting foodstuffs moving from one area to another.

One of my favorite sources

for this period is a cookbook, and it's a cookbook produced for an Ayyubid prince.

And so, just Ayyubid means from the family of Saladin.

So, this is from the early 13th century.

And this cookbook for a Muslim prince includes,

I may get this entirely white list, it includes recipes such as flatbreads from Georgia,

items from Armenia, all sorts of different foodstuffs from the Turkish world or Arab world, and there's even a Frankish roast.

So, there too, it just gives a hint of just how much food is changing hands, and people like new frying new foods, and so it all gets exchanged.

So,

yeah, there's a lot of that going on, and it does make it very interesting.

Brilliant.

Well, I think we must draw to a close, but with our final question,

let's look a little bit into the future.

Listeners will now be familiar with the rise of Beyliks, these

Turkish statelets in Anatolia that rise in response to the Mongol dominance of the plateau.

How does

the rise of these Turkish states, including, of course, the Ottomans, influence the future of the Mediterranean and Aegean Aegean

maritime situation?

Okay, so a lot's changing by the time we get to the late 13th, 14th century, that sort of period.

The Beyliks themselves, they're all interested in trade.

We have evidence of the big ones at least being very interested in trade.

And they actually form individual trading agreements with other maritime powers including the Venetians.

They're interested in trade too.

And they inherited from the Anatolian Seljuks, who ruled before the rise of the Beyliks, quite a complex system of network of trade networks, which, of course, was itself built on top of many Byzantine networks previously.

So trade's already

expanded quite a lot.

And that's only been galvanized by the Mongols' war with the Mamluks.

So just a word on that.

The Mamluk Empire in Egypt and Syria, and it fights a very long war with the Mongols further east in sort of Iraq, Iran, that sort of area.

And because they're waging war to the south of Turkey so much, that pushes many trade routes further north through Anatolia and then from Anatolia to the big southern Anatolian ports, places like Antalya, for example, or Redalia, and from there into the Mediterranean trade.

So all of this makes Anatolia...

very wealthy, very commercially central, and Italian merchants as well as others increasingly see the Anatolian ports, many of which are under the control of the Beyliks, as being their entry points into trade, not just with the Middle East, but with Asia as a whole.

So there's a lot of commerce going on there.

The Beyliks are very keen on that for the most part.

But there is a bigger picture as well, in that the Beyliks are also interested, increasingly so, in maritime expansion.

And so there are various naval raids and attacks on Aegean islands, which adds an additional level of conflict to a region that's already being conflicted between various Italian powers and the Byzantine Empire to some extent as well.

So that adds a degree of complexity there.

And then, of course, on top of all of that, you have the arrival of the Black Death,

which

studies are increasingly

looking like we're talking about total mortality in the Middle East, as well as other areas, including Western Christendom, possibly as high as 50 to 60% of total population.

That's going to change everything, including trade.

Absolutely.

Well, thank you so much.

That was

a brilliant overview.

And hopefully

we'll

get people to discover more for themselves.

I should remind everyone that the Mongol storm, making and breaking empires in the medieval Near East, is out now in

physical book and audible for those of you who consume your books that way.

Dr.

Nicholas Morton, thank you so much for coming back.

Thank you.

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