The Byzantine naval forces from the fifth through the tenth centuries were, like the Byzantine army, the heirs of Roman military organization, tactics, and traditions (see Chapter 8 for the Byzantine army). In the case of Byzantium’s navy, it inherited the main mission of the Roman fleet: to serve as an auxiliary arm to the army. The Byzantine navy would, however, be faced with new problems during the seventh and subsequent centuries that would force it to deal with a major maritime threat from Muslim naval forces, something the Romans had not really faced since the first century BCE.
The Roman Tradition
From the end of the first century bce, the naval forces that Rome had developed over the previous two and a half centuries found themselves in what might seem to be an enviable position. The naval victory over Ptolemaic Egypt (as Augustus liked to frame his victory in Actium in 31 bce) meant that, for the first time in her history, Rome had truly removed all of her major rivals from the Mediterranean Sea. For the next three centuries, the Roman fleet would be relegated to serving as an ancillary force to the army, used primarily for ferrying troops and providing logistical support or for protecting the grain supply that kept the city of Rome fed (see Chapter 5 for the role of the Roman fleet until the middle of the third century). Indeed, without a major threat, Rome was virtually able to abandon construction of large warships, instead concentrating on smaller craft and transports.
By the middle of the third century, however, the various political and military crises that beset Rome opened the way for Germanic and Celtic raiders to hit the coastal regions of the empire, sometimes even attacking major urban centers such as Athens. This led to an effort to re-create a fighting navy, although the Roman navy from the late third century onward would be not a fleet of major warships, but rather more of a coastal defense force. These forces often combined squadrons of small, fast warships with land forces quartered in coastal fortifications. One of the best-known examples of this scheme, the Saxon Shore, was detailed to defend the coasts of Britain and Gaul from various groups of raiders. The count of the Saxon Shore was a Roman military official who commanded both naval and land forces in an effort to combine preclusive security through the use of coastal fortifications with the more elastic defense provided by squadrons of warships.
The Age of Byzantine SupremacyBy the end of the fifth century, the naval situation had changed dramatically. The Western Roman Empire had fallen to the depredations of the barbarians (who incidentally made their major inroads overland rather than by sea). The Byzantine Empire, the eastern remnant of the Roman Empire, survived and, with the possible exception of the Vandals, faced little in the way of a challenge to its control of the eastern Mediterranean. As a result, the Roman navy once again became of force of relatively few warships and a greater number of transports.
Consequently, many of the military operations that took place during the sixth and early seventh centuries saw the navy play only a supporting role. Most often, the fleet transported troops and provided logistical support to the army. Indeed, the Byzantines pioneered the role of amphibious warfare during this period. Specialized transports were developed to make the conveyance of horses easier than had been the case, as one of the major problems facing armies in the period before this was finding a manner in which animals could be transported easily and safely by sea. Byzantine naval skill was put to good use by Heraclius in his campaigns against the Persians: The fleet prevented the Persians and Avars from combining across the Bosporus to besiege Constantinople in 626 and then transported Heraclius’s army to the coast of Cilicia behind the Persian invasion, compelling their withdrawal from Asia Minor.
Byzantium and the Arab Challenge
Byzantine naval superiority ended with the rise of the Caliphate (see below), even as the challenge posed by Arab raiding fleets reinforced the character of the Byzantine navy as an imperial defense force. The front line of defense rested with squadrons based along the coasts of western Asia Minor and southern Greece. By the 670s, these forces were organized as a theme (the divisions of the empire used to support the army; see Chapter 8) called the Karabisianoi, led by a strategos, just as army themes were. The theme provided rowers and marines instead of soldiers, but it otherwise mirrored the somewhat localized, defensive organization and structure of the provincial armies. Additions and administrative subdivision eventually created two more naval themes.
Just as a central professional army based in the capital backed up the provincial armies, a central imperial fleet in the capital remained a crucial element of Byzantine naval organization. The central fleet— which included the admiral in charge of the entire imperial navy, the droungarios of the ploimon— protected the capital, served ceremonial purposes (see the Sources box on page 183), provided the administrative heart of the navy, and controlled Byzantine shipbuilding, which was concentrated in Constantinople. It was especially with regard to such technical matters as construction and administration that the Roman heritage of the Byzantine navy proved valuable, since Mediterranean galley warfare was a difficult, technically sophisticated business that could not easily be started up from scratch.
Tactically, the Byzantine navy relied on relatively small, light galleys known as dromons, powered by two banks of oars. Their offensive weaponry included the ram at the prow of the ship, Greek Fire (see the Issues box “Greek Fire”), and marines who supplied both firepower with bows and the capability of boarding enemy ships. Strategically, the fleet benefited from the prevailing weather patterns of the eastern Mediterranean, which made raids from south to north more difficult to sustain, especially when the raiders lacked a secure base in the Aegean (Figure 10.1). But the strategic situation grew markedly worse around 827, when both Sicily and Crete fell to Arab seaborne invasions. Crete, especially, gave Muslim raiders a base within easy reach of the Greek mainland, the coasts of Asia Minor, and the main Aegean shipping lanes—and a century and a half of insecurity for those areas ensued.
Although acting mostly on the defensive between 650 and 900, the Byzantine fleet also launched occasional raids against the Syrian and even Egyptian coasts. Such raids may have been militarily insignificant, but they probably gave morale boosts to an empire whose land forces struggled simply to stay intact while on the defensive during this period.
Tenth-Century Naval Offensives
The shift in Byzantine military fortunes that followed the fragmentation of the Caliphate after 900 (see Chapter 8) was felt at sea as much as on the empire’s land frontiers. The naval offensive focused on retaking Arab- held Crete. Invasions in 911 and 949 under Emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus failed. However, in 960, a third expedition under Nicephoras Phocas succeeded in retaking the island for the Byzantines and, as a result, in making Aegean shipping and the Anatolian coastline much more secure from Arab raids, which lost their only effective base of operations.
The details of the first two operations are preserved in an official collection of documents known as the De Ceremoniis, compiled by Constantine VII, and provide a window on the size of such expeditions and the organizational problems that beset them. (See the Sources box “Constantine VII Porphyrogenitus” for extracts from De Administrando Imperio.) The sources testify to the organizational difficulty of launching such expeditions, as the documents resulted from imperial inquests into who actually went on them (as opposed to who was called out to go on them) so that numerous claims for back pay and rewards could be settled.
The 911 expedition consisted of several hundred ships of all types, dromons as well as supply ships. Sailors and oarsmen for the ships numbered about 34,000; another 13,000 soldiers served as part of the naval units, presumably as marines accustomed to naval combat. In addition, the fleet transported units of the central professional army and the provincial army, which combined numbered around 4000 men; at least 1000 of these, the professionals, were cavalrymen, whose horses also had to be transported. Thus, over 50,000 men, at least 2000-3000 horses, and all their attendant equipment and supplies sailed from Constantinople in an expedition that ultimately failed. The numbers in 949 were similar—regular army units came to about 5400, but fewer marines are listed. We have no figures for the expedition of 960, but it must have been at least as large. In any case, the key to its success, where the earlier expeditions failed, seems to have been not the size of the forces involved, but the effectiveness of the leadership exercised over the combined naval and land forces. Political infighting and incompetence plagued the earlier expeditions, but Nicephoras Phocas was an experienced general, a charismatic leader, and, perhaps most important, an excellent administrator. Even so, it took a hard siege of Chandax, the capital of Crete, over the winter of 960-961, ending with its storming in March, before the conquest could be completed. During the siege, the fleet played a vital role in keeping the besiegers supplied and preventing intervention by any relief forces. In many ways, the challenges facing Nicephoras were the tenth-century equivalent of those Eisenhower faced on D-Day in 1944 and demonstrated the sophisticated combined-arms operations a well-led imperial navy was capable of.
The Chronicle of Theophanes reports that “at that time [673/4] Kal- linikos, an artificer from Heliopolis [in Lebanon], fled to the Romans. He had devised a sea fire which ignited the Arab ships and burned them with all hands. Thus it was that the Romans returned with victory and discovered the sea fire.” Later Byzantine historians and chroniclers elaborated on this account of the origins of what became known as Greek Fire to build a long-accepted picture of a great secret weapon. According to this tradition, the formula for Greek Fire, a combustible substance made from some combination of petroleum, naphtha, and other ingredients that at the least could not be put out with water and perhaps was either spread or even ignited by contact with water, remained a closely guarded state secret. The substance itself, either pumped at high pressure out of bronze siphons mounted on the bows of galleys or lobbed, from on-board catapults, in earthenware pots that would shatter on impact, constituted a deadly weapon against wooden ships that the Byzantine navy used again and again to devastating effect, most decisively at the siege of Constantinople in 717. Only when the Turks discovered how to combat it in the late eleventh century (vinegar, rather than water, did the trick in dousing the flames) did Greek Fire lose importance as a Byzantine naval weapon; the formula was lost with the fall of the empire, never to be recovered.
Greek Fire
This illustration from a Byzantine manuscript shows the flaming substance being shot through bronze tubes.
Subsequent European historiography, until recently, has largely followed this account and it remains in popular circulation. This is perhaps not surprising, as the tale certainly has all the elements of a high-tech spy thriller. Furthermore, it suited a Byzantine self-image of a Chosen People specially favored by God, and it may have continued to suit a Western self-image that has contrasted inventive, technologically adept Westerners (with Byzantines in this instance counting as “Western”) with tradition-bound, technologically backward non-Westerners.
The problem with this account is that investigation into Arab sources makes clear not only that Arab naval forces were familiar with Greek Fire—that is, it was not a very secret weapon— but that they used it themselves. Both Arab and Byzantine naval handbooks, as distinct from courtgenerated propaganda, portray Greek Fire as a standard part of the weaponry of eastern Mediterranean fleets in the period 700-1100. It was, to be sure, an important and useful weapon, especially against more lightly built ships and against enemies trapped in confined waters or unprepared for its use, such as a Viking-Rus fleet destroyed on the Black Sea by the Byzantines in 941. But it was by no means surefire, so to speak, as siphons had limited range and catapulted pots had limited accuracy. This, as much as effective Turkish countermeasures and the Turkish conquest of Byzantium, accounts for the later disappearance of Greek Fire from Mediterranean naval arsenals. And its historical effect has been exaggerated. The fires that disrupted the Arab fleet at Constantinople in 717 seem, on closer reading of the sources, to have been set by fireships—entire ships loaded with combustible materials and launched into the midst of a closely confined fleet at anchor, a common trick used to good effect by the English against the Spanish Armada in 1588, for example (see Chapter 20).
The long emphasis on Greek Fire has also tended to obscure the real reasons for Byzantine naval survival in the face of the Caliphate’s navies, which were probably larger and certainly better funded than Byzantine fleets. Inherited Roman traditions of organization, seamanship, and shipbuilding continued to sustain the Byzantine naval effort against the Arabs and would carry the Greeks back into the offensive at sea by the tenth century. As in other cases, Greek Fire is an example of flashy weaponry that has overshadowed the technological and tactical essentials of military success in the historical imagination.
The Caliphate and Muslim Naval Forces
There was a long pre-Islamic tradition of Arab seafaring. But sailing was the occupation of those Arabs living on the southern and eastern coasts of Arabia, who conducted strictly merchant shipping—there was no Arab tradition of naval warfare—in the Indian Ocean, not the Mediterranean. Their ships, small craft constructed from planks sewn together with coconut husks, reflected both the small-scale, private nature of Arab trading and the lack of cheap iron for nails and would have been unsuitable for warfare in any case. Thus, the Caliphate, created by Arabs from the northwestern interior of Arabia, really had no native resources of either men or material to draw on to create a combat navy in the Mediterranean.
Given their background, it is not surprising that the earliest caliphs in fact had no interest in naval forces. Umar, the second caliph, tried to prohibit naval raids on Byzantine islands (some took place anyway, drawing his wrath). When the Muslim governor of Syria asked permission to raid Cyprus, Umar reflected on the advice that “man at sea is an insect on a splinter, now engulfed, now scared to death” and wrote back that “the safety of my people is dearer to me than all the treasures of Greece” and refused. Yet the necessity for naval forces became clear, first to local Muslim commanders, then to the caliphs, when the Byzantine navy threatened Muslim holdings with impunity. The great Egyptian port of Alexandria proved crucial in this process in several ways. Captured by the Muslims in 641, its vulnerability was exposed when a Byzantine fleet recaptured it in 645. Lack of support from Constantinople and the local Coptic population allowed the Arabs to recapture the city, but with any naval reinforcement, it could have been held against almost any land force. Yet the recapture of the city also provided the solution, for Alexandria was not only a port but a major naval base with facilities and skilled Coptic workmen. Supplied with Syrian timber, it could build a fleet for the Caliphate and supply Coptic oarsmen and navigators to serve under Arab admirals, who had no experience of command at sea. The wholesale Muslim adoption of the Byzantine naval infrastructure in the African provinces they captured is reflected even in the administrative divisions of the Caliphate’s navy, which retained their Roman names, and Copts continued to provide many of the sailors in Muslim naval forces for several centuries.
Figure 10.1 The Mediterranean Maritime World, 800-1000 The pattern of winds and currents in the Mediterranean made from west-to-east and north-to-south travel easier than east-to-west and south-to-north travel, benefiting naval powers on the north coast and making the major midsea islands strategically vital.
Arab armies thus took to the sea as marines aboard ships built and manned by recently conquered Egyptians. Success came remarkably quickly. In 655, a Muslim navy moved to invade Lycia, perhaps to secure supplies of timber for further shipbuilding. A major Byzantine fleet, said to have numbered 500 ships, moved to oppose the invasion, and a battle ensued off the coast of Lycia in Southwest Asia Minor. In what seems to have been a standard tactic for the times, the two fleets came together for what was essentially a land battle at sea, featuring hand-to-hand combat between each side’s marines. The Byzantines probably counted on maintaining greater cohesion to give them the advantage, but the Copts apparently did well enough for their Muslim masters to allow Arab swordsmen to win the day.
The battle of Dhat al-Sawari opened the way for further Arab offensives at sea, and by the 680s, Arab fleets were raiding Sicily and threatening Constantinople. Combined land and naval offensives against the Byzantine capital culminated in the unsuccessful siege of the city in 717-718. After that, major naval offensives tailed off, though 827 saw both Sicily and Crete fall to Arab invasions, as noted above. Coastal raiding, only nominally under the control of the Caliphate, came to dominate Muslim naval activity in the eastern Mediterranean.
Thus, although organizationally the naval forces of the Caliphate bore some resemblance to an imperial navy, their offensive doctrine and strategic aims more closely resembled those of predatory sea peoples. The tension, perhaps exacerbated by a continuing reluctance of many northern Arabs to take up seafaring, which was viewed as less than noble, resulted in a lack of full commitment on the part of the Caliphate to maintain a true navy of imperial defense. This is reflected in the decline of Alexandria as a naval base in the 700s (a decline that also reflected shifts in trade routes brought about by Muslim conquests, emphasizing again the close connection of trade to military naval activity). It is also reflected in the fact that much Muslim naval activity even at the height of the Caliphate involved small-scale raiding by privateers who had the spiritual but not the material backing of the imperial government.
Sea Ghazis
With the decline of the Caliphate and the fragmentation of the Muslim world politically, Muslim naval activity especially in the western Mediterranean moved even more toward the predatory model. But political fragmentation was not the only factor that encouraged this development. The Muslim world had early on established a pattern of somewhat marginalized frontier warriors, ghazis, who carried the holy war to the infidels on a daily basis (see Chapter 8). This pattern proved easily adaptable to maritime frontiers as well, and Muslim corsairs in individual ships and small squadrons began to fight the jihad as a guerre de course (war by commerce raiding) against Christian shipping and as raids for plunder against Christian coastal settlements from early in the Caliphate, as we have seen.
These raids intensified in the ninth century as Carolingian defenses crumbled in western Europe (see Chapter 7) and reached their height in the tenth century. Based ultimately on the North African coast west of Tunis, the raiders created and profited from Muslim control of the central islands of the western sea: Sicily, Sardinia, Corsica, and the Balearics, all of which put them athwart the major Christian shipping routes and within easy range of Christian ports. In fact, significant pirate forces established themselves for a time in bases in southern France, whence they raided well inland. Though nominally part of the larger struggle of Islam with Christianity, much of this activity was typical of predatory sea peoples: private, piratical sometimes even of Muslim shipping, and not centrally directed. It did, however, contribute to the economic disruption and political fragmentation of post-Carolingian Europe.
The raids were carried out in small, fast galleys that could slip into and out of sheltered coves to take on water and provisions. The crews doubled as rowers and marines and were all free men sharing in the spoils of the raids. Such corsairs were hard to contain once at sea because of their mobility. Byzantine defenses were more effective against the ghazis in the eastern Mediterranean, but the empire had neither the inclination nor the resources to deal with Muslim piracy in the west, far from the empire’s main bases. Defense against this threat was left to be developed by the maritime cities of Italy in the later tenth and eleventh centuries.
The Emergence of the Italians
Venice, in fact, as an outpost of Byzantium, might have contributed to imperial defenses against Muslim corsairs, but Venice looked first to the Adriatic and then to the east. It was western Italian cities led by Genoa and Bari that spearheaded the Christian resurgence in western waters. Slowly reviving trade spurred in such cities a greater interest in maritime defenses while providing greater resources for naval activity.
The Italian response was of necessity a primarily active defense. Ports erected walls and fortifications, but the tide turned when Christian ships took the offensive against Muslim shipping and above all when the pirate bases became the object of attack not just from Italian naval forces but from armies raised in southern France. That coast having been cleared, Genoese as well as Spanish galley forces began to raid and then contest control of the islands crucial to Muslim access to shipping routes. Again, non-Italians played a significant role: The Norman conquest of Sicily in the mid-eleventh century seriously restricted Muslim shipping. The advantages that Mediterranean wind and current patterns gave to those on the northern shores in any contest for the central islands and sea-lanes magnified the success of the Christian revival. By 1050, Christian ships, led by the Italians, controlled the western Mediterranean well enough that they increasingly turned their attention to fighting each other for dominance (Genoa and Venice emerged as the crucial rivals) and to contesting the eastern Mediterranean with Muslims and Byzantines.
The Italian revival demonstrated the vital connection between trade and naval warfare, and the governments of the cities reflected this. Increasingly dominated by merchant oligarchies, they took an active part in fostering trade and maritime defense. True hybrids between the imperial and predatory models, they would in the next age help develop a new, more mercantile, model of naval force.
A Chinese imperial navy emerged as a result of the founding of the Song dynasty in 960; the Song had a very different character from the earlier Tang dynasty (618-907). The Tang had been land-based in a number of ways. Its political center of gravity was in the north, facing Central Asia. Its expansionist energies were directed westward toward the steppes, following the route of its most important trade contacts, which were overland via the Silk Road. A strong seaborne trade in porcelain also developed out of the southern ports but was carried out almost exclusively by Persian and Arab merchants. Foreign domination of overseas trade was partly a result of official policy. Tang government and society were dominated by a militaristic aristocracy, hostile by inclination and philosophy to merchant activity, especially maritime trade. Great landowners looked to land for wealth and power, and the government regulated trade tightly and at times arbitrarily. In such an environment, a navy was quite low on the government’s priority list.
The Song found themselves in a very different situation from the Tang. Hemmed in to the north and west by resurgent Asian nomads, the Song adopted a defensive strategy and looked much more actively to the sea for foreign contact and trade. Ports were refurbished, lighthouses were built along the coast, and government assistance flowed to merchants willing to challenge the Arab and Persian monopoly at sea. Social change opened the door to the policy shift. Many of the great aristocratic families had killed each other off in the fighting that brought down the Tang. The gentry, still traditional but less hostile (if only because less militaristic) to economic development, emerged to take their place, and merchants assumed a new social importance as well.
The government therefore became more supportive of trade, including providing for an imperial navy to protect Chinese merchants and patrol the coasts. A more active Chinese merchant marine not only encouraged this move but provided the resources in money, ships, and skilled sailors to create the navy. Consistent with an imperial defensive force, the tactics of Chinese warships evolved toward ship killing. The creation of ships with heavy prows for ramming opponents complemented the development of gunpowder bombs launched from shipboard catapults.
All of these trends would be intensified, and the imperial navy would take on a new importance in guarding the rivers that shielded southern China, when the northern Song capital fell to barbarians in 1127 and the dynasty retreated south of the Yangzi. With the loss of the cavalry lands of the north, the navy became, in effect, the second arm of Chinese defense alongside the infantry, and special river-going paddle-wheel ships with rams joined the Song naval arsenal. These developments are considered further in Chapters 14 and 15.
As imposing and sophisticated pieces of technology, imperial warships were good not only for conducting naval campaigns but for conspicuously displaying imperial might and power. The following extracts from one of Emperor Constantine VII’s treatises on imperial administration exemplify both the symbolic and the administrative sides of the imperial navy.
Until the reign of Leo [886-912, Constantine’s father], the glorious and most wise emperor, there was no imperial galley (dromon) for the emperor to embark in, but he used to embark in a scarlet barge; except that, in the time of the Christ-loving sovereign Basil [867-886], when this same emperor visited the hot baths of Prousa, . . . he embarked in a galley and another galley followed behind. And the rowers who embarked in it were taken from the imperial barge and from the sailors of the Stenon. For of old the Stenon too had up to ten ships of war in the imperial navy. . . . But the glorious and most wise Leo, the emperor, who was rather more hospitably inclined towards magisters and patricians and familiars of senatorial rank, and who always wished them to share his pleasure in this, reckoned that the barge was inadequate for the reception of a larger number of nobles, and constructed a galley, and would invariably embark in it wherever he desired to go. And there would go with him whomsoever he might desire of the nobles, both of magisters and patricians. . . . For this reason, then, Leo, the glorious and most wise emperor, constructed the galley, and, some while after, he constructed another galley as well, which was known as the ‘second’ and christened ‘Attache’. . . .
In the reign of Leo, the glorious and most wise emperor, when the new galleys were constructed by the imperial mandate, [the] protospatharius of the basin [a chief naval officer] had beneath his authority the oarsmen of these galleys also. Now, the aforesaid protospatharius of the basin would go down every day in the afternoon and take his seat in the basin (for which reason he was called protospatharius of the basin), and would judge cases arising between the oarsmen, both of the barges and of the galleys, over whom he had authority, and would give sentence and administer according to the law. And whenever he found anyone acting beyond his competence or wrongdoing another or remiss in his own work, he would punish him with a sound cudgelling. . . . The proto- spatharius Podaron and the protospatharius Leo Armenius had been chief oarsmen of the patrician Nasar, the lord admiral (droungarios of the ploimon), and in the time of Basil, the Christ-loving sovereign, were promoted from the navy and became the chief oarsmen of the barge of the emperor; and in the reign of Leo, the glorious and most wise emperor, when he constructed the galleys, he made them steersmen for their bravery and seamanship. And when a crisis arose, the emperor seconded the oarsmen of the two galleys, together with the two steersmen of the first galley, to ships of war in the navy, giving them much needful equipment, such as shields, leather targes, very fine coats of mail and everything else that naval personnel require to take with them; and the patrician Eustathius, the lord admiral, took them with the imperial fleet and went off against the enemy.
source: Constantine Porphyrogenitus, De Administrando Imperio, ed. G. Moravcsik, trans. R. J. H. Jenkins (Washington, DC; Dumbarton Oaks, 1993), pp. 247-251.