PART THREE
I
By the sixth century, the unity of the Mediterranean had been shattered; it was no longer mare nostrum, either politically or commercially. There have been attempts to show that the fundamental unity of the Mediterranean as a trading space, at least, survived until the Islamic conquests of the seventh century (culminating in the invasion of Spain in 711), or even until the Frankish empire of the incestuous mass-murderer Charlemagne acquired control of Italy and Catalonia.1 There have also been attempts to show that recovery began much earlier than past generations of historians had assumed, and was well under way in the tenth or even the ninth century.2 It would be hard to dispute this in the case of the Byzantine East, which had already shown some resilience, or in the case of the Islamic lands that by then stretched from Syria and Egypt to Spain and Portugal, but the West is more of a puzzle. It is hardly an exaggeration to say that some historians observe decline at the same moments as others detect expansion. To this one can sensibly answer that there was enormous regional variation; but the question remains when and whether the Mediterranean lost, and then recovered, its unity. Just as in antiquity the integration of the Mediterranean into a single trading area, and subsequently into a single political area, had taken many centuries, from the Dark Age of the tenth century BC to the emergence of the Roman Empire, so in the era of the ‘Third Mediterranean’ the process of integration was painfully slow. Full political integration was never again achieved, despite the best efforts of invading Arabs and, much later, Turks.
The loss by Byzantium of so many of its mainland possessions to the Slavs and other foes did leave the empire with several remarkable assets. Sicily, parts of southern Italy, Cyprus and the Aegean islands remained under Byzantine rule, and the empire drew wealth from gold and silver mines in several of these lands.3 Even Sardinia and Majorca were under Byzantine suzerainty, but it is unclear whether a functioning network of communication across the Mediterranean still existed. Constantinople maintained control over Egypt, the source of much of its grain supply, though the city had shrunk considerably. ‘Syrian’ merchants, along with Jewish ones, were mentioned in western European chronicles, attesting to the continued role of the descendants of the Phoenicians in trans-Mediterranean trade networks. The Byzantines realized that they were gravely threatened not just by the barbarian peoples of the North but by enemies in the East. But, despite the temporary Persian occupation of Jerusalem in the early seventh century, it was not the Persians who shattered Byzantine power in Syria and Egypt.
Far along the trade routes traversed by Syrian merchants in search of perfumes and spices for sale in the Mediterranean, beyond the lands of the desert-dwelling Nabataeans, a little way inland from the eastern shores of the Red Sea, a religious and political power was emerging that would permanently transform the relationship between the northern and southern shores of the Mediterranean. In the time of Muhammad (d. 632) the aim of the Muslims was to effect the conversion of the pagan peoples of Arabia, and the submission or conversion of the Arabian Jewish tribes. The unification of the tribes under the banner of Islam (meaning ‘submission’ – if not to Allah then at least to those who worshipped Allah) was followed by a tremendous release of military and political energy under the early ‘deputies’, or khalifas (caliphs), who succeeded Muhammad, and whose armies captured Jerusalem and Syria within a few years of his death, before pouring into Egypt under the commander ‘Amr ibn al-‘As in 641. Typically, ibn al-‘As was already at odds with his master the caliph. The absolute unity of God was the central tenet of Islam, but the unity of its followers soon cracked.
Islam was not born in the Mediterranean but it interacted from the earliest days with the rival monotheistic religions of the Mediterranean, Judaism and Christianity (it also interacted with paganism, but in a negative way, since the Muslims refused to tolerate religions other than Judaism, Christianity and, in Persia, Zoroastrianism). Islam was able to win converts among the Christians of Syria because many were disaffected members of Monophysite churches persecuted by the Greek Church. The Monophysite treatment of Jesus not as an equal partner in the Trinity but as the Son of God generated within time may have made Islam more palatable to these Christians, for the Muslims accepted Jesus, or Isa, as the greatest prophet after Muhammad, and accepted the Virgin Birth, while also insisting that Isa was only human.4 Other features of Islam recalled Jewish practices, notably the ban on eating pork, regular daily prayer (five times in Islam, three times in Judaism) and the lack of a priestly caste in charge of religious rites, for this was something that had virtually disappeared from post-Temple Judaism. The Muslim view was that the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament were corrupted texts out of which the foretelling of the arrival of the greatest prophet had been edited; on the other hand, it was recognized that Jews and Christians, the ‘Peoples of the Book’, worshipped the same God as the Muslims. What emerged from this was the concept of the dhimmi, the subject Christians and Jews who, in return for the poll-tax, or jizyah, were guaranteed the right to worship, so long as they did not attempt to convert Muslims to their faith. Indeed, the taxes paid by the dhimmis became one of the pillars of the Islamic state. Exempted from military service, which was the preserve of the Muslims, the dhimmis sustained the military machine through their tax payments. Therefore the rapid conversion of all the Copts in Egypt or all the Berbers in North Africa would be problematic. It would erode the tax base of the caliphate. It made sense to adopt a tolerant attitude to the dhimmis, who were, as the eminent historian of the Middle East Bernard Lewis has said, ‘second-class citizens – but citizens’. In other words, they were seen as an integral part of society and were not regarded as alien minorities – indeed, outside Arabia they were, in the seventh and eighth centuries, majorities, all along the coast of Syria, in Egypt and in distant Spain, not to mention eastern lands such as Persia.
The fall of Egypt to an Arab army of perhaps 12,000 soldiers was rendered easier by the hostility of the Copts towards Orthodox Byzantium. The immediate effect on Constantinople was the sundering of the route carrying state grain from the Nile to feed the citizens of New Rome. Later, in 674 and 717, Constantinople would face Arab sieges, but for the moment the Arabs stayed within Africa, and they looked from Egypt not towards the Mediterranean but southwards to Nubia: the occupation of lands close to the Red Sea would enable them to consolidate their hold on Arabia. The main focus of Arab expansion immediately after the death of Muhammad was Iraq and Iran, since Persia was the greatest power in the region directly to the north of Arabia. Their initial aim was not, then, to create an empire that would stretch along the entire southern flank of the Mediterranean. Their Mediterranean conquests were a side-show. It was only after they were rebuffed in Nubia that they turned west to Cyrenaica, entering the lands of the Berber tribes.5
This proved to be a sensible decision. While Cyrenaica and the province of Africa remained under Byzantine rule, there was always the danger that they would serve as bases for a war of recovery aimed at Egypt. To prevent this, the Arabs needed to gain control of the coastlines and harbours of the North African coast, and this was possible only with the help of large contingents newly arrived from Yemen, and of the Berbers themselves, the native population of North Africa who consisted of a combination of Romanized town-dwellers and rural tribesmen of several religious allegiances. The Arabs also required a fleet, and an ‘Arab’ naval victory against the Byzantines off Rhodes as early as 654 can only mean that they were successful in hiring local Christian crews: the sea battle probably consisted of a tussle between Greeks on one side and Greeks, Syrians and Copts on the other. Relations with the Berbers were not always easy: pagan Berber tribes converted to Islam, and then slid back to their own beliefs once the Arabs had disappeared over the horizon; one tribe is said to have converted to Islam twelve times.6 There were also large numbers of Christian and Jewish Berbers, and Queen Kahina, possibly a Jewish Berber, was remembered as a doughty warrior.7 The Islamization of Berber North Africa in the seventh century was rapid, light and impermanent, but it was sufficient to carry along Berber troops in search of booty, as the Islamic armies began to face their real targets around the Byzantine city of Carthage. From the 660s onwards, they gained control of the lesser towns of the old Roman province of Africa, or, as they called it, Ifriqiya, and they established a garrison city of their own, set back from the Mediterranean, at Qaywaran; they were more interested in its proximity to land where they could graze their camels than in exploiting the sea. In 698, hemmed in by land, and without adequate support from Constantinople, Carthage was besieged by an Arab army of 40,000 troops brought from Syria and elsewhere; they were joined by perhaps 12,000 Berbers. It was the Arab capture of Carthage, rather than the Roman conquest nearly 750 years earlier, that marked the end of its extraordinary history as a centre of trade and empire. The Arabs had no use for it and built a new city close by, at Tunis. Byzantium had lost another of its richest territories; the sliver of Spain conquered by Justinian had already been absorbed by the Visigoths in the 630s, leaving little more than loose authority over Ceuta, Majorca and Sardinia. Byzantine power in the western Mediterranean had to all intents vanished.
II
The Islamic conquests present a paradox to historians of the Mediterranean. In one view, it was these conquests that sundered the unity of the Mediterranean; and yet it was also Islam that provided the foundation for the creation of a new unity across the Mediterranean, though not across the entire sea, for the Islamic networks of trade and communication were mainly confined to its southern and eastern shores. Close trading links developed with Constantinople, Asia Minor and the Byzantine Aegean, and with several Italian ports that lay under loose Byzantine suzerainty, notably Venice and Amalfi, but the inhabitants of southern Gaul and of Italy mainly experienced Muslim sailors in the unappetizing form of slave-raiders. Slaves became the main commodity that passed between western Europe and the Islamic world, generally through the Mediterranean (there also developed overland routes carrying slaves from eastern Europe to Spain, by way of castration clinics in the monasteries of Flanders). The persistence of piracy might be taken as evidence that trade continued, for there is no profit in piracy when there is no one on whom to prey; but most of the victims of the ‘Saracens’ were probably landlubbers picked off the shores of southern Italy and southern France by the slave-raiders. Three other commodities, papyrus, gold and luxury textiles, have been singled out as absentees, after many centuries in which they had supposedly been major articles of trade. On the basis of their disappearance, the great Belgian historian Henri Pirenne argued that the seventh and eighth centuries marked the fundamental break from antiquity in the Mediterranean; trade slowed to ‘the merest trickle’.8 Since most papyrus was produced in Egypt, the disappearance of this ancient product from western Europe and its replacement by locally manufactured parchment might be taken to indicate that it was no longer being traded across the Mediterranean. The papacy was one of the few institutions to continue to use papyrus as late as the tenth and eleventh centuries, and Rome had the advantage of proximity to the still-functioning ports of the Bay of Naples and Gulf of Salerno, which enjoyed links both to Constantinople and to the Islamic lands.
Evidence that trade remained active, if not exactly busy, does exist. In 716 the Frankish king of Gaul, Chilperic II, granted to the monks of Corbie handsome tax exemptions and permitted them to import papyrus and other eastern goods through Fos-sur-Mer in the Rhône delta, though he was merely confirming older privileges, so this does not prove that business through Fos was still lively.9 In its heyday Fos channelled northwards not just Spanish leather and papyrus (fifty quires each year) but 10,000 pounds of oil, 30 drums of stinking fish-sauce, 30 pounds of pepper, five times as much cumin, as well as massive amounts of figs, almonds and olives, assuming these quantities ever actually arrived.10 As has been seen, Marseilles, nearby, was one of the few ports in the north-western Mediterranean that had not withered completely. Archaeological investigations show that the city actually grew during the sixth century and that the ties to Carthage and its region remained strong after 600. There was even a local gold coinage, testifying to Mediterranean links, since there was no reliable source of gold within western Europe.11 But by the end of the seventh century Marseilles was under pressure. The loss of Carthage to the Arabs meant that its ties to Africa were sundered. The supply of gold dried up and the coins could not be minted, while eastern amphorae no longer arrived.
One group of adventurous, multilingual Jewish merchants known as the Radhaniyyah, or ‘Radhanites’, was described by the ninth-century Arab writer ibn Khurdadbih.12 He listed four routes along which these merchants travelled, some overland through Gaul and past Prague to the kingdom of the White Bulgars that stretched over vast open spaces north of the Black Sea, others by sea from Provence to Egypt and then down the Red Sea to India, or from Antioch in the Levant to Iraq, India, Ceylon and by sea once again to the Far East. Some, however, set out from Spain and made their way to the Levant by following the North African coast, a route easier to follow by land than by sea, because of shoals and contrary winds and currents.13 Radhanite merchants returning from the Nile Delta might take ship for Constantinople, or they might find a route back to Gaul. These descriptions of their routes cast the Radhanites in the role of spice merchants, carrying condiments, perfumes and drugs, though their northern contacts enabled them to bring iron weapons, furs and slaves down to the Mediterranean, where Muslim buyers were short of iron and glad to purchase swords from the north.14 Alongside the Radhanites there were many other slave traders, Christian and Muslim; by 961 there were 13,750Saqaliba, Slav slaves, living in Muslim Córdoba. Warfare between Germanic and Slav peoples in the Wendish lands in what is now eastern Germany ensured a plentiful and regular supply of captives, and the terms sclavus and ‘slave’ recall the Slavonic origin of very many of these slaves. Slaves from the Slav borderlands arrived in Syria and Egypt as well, along with Circassians brought down from the Black Sea.15 Though horrible, the fate of these slaves, even those who survived the trauma of castration, was not always comparable to the fate of the slaves carried in such vast numbers across the Atlantic towards the Americas in later centuries. Strong-looking young men were not emasculated but entered the emir’s guard in Córdoba, sometimes rising to a high military command. On the other hand, women might enter the closed world of the harem; and handsome boys fell into the possession of pederast princes. One merchant who fits the Radhanite label well was Abraham of Saragossa, a Spanish Jew who benefited from the personal protection of the Frankish emperor Louis the Pious. He was active around 828 and was exempt from the payment of tolls; he was explicitly permitted to buy foreign slaves and to sell them within the Frankish lands, but in 846 Jewish merchants were accused by the archbishop of Lyons of looking no further than the cities of Provence for their source of supply, and of selling Christian slaves to buyers in Córdoba.16
Whereas Roman naval power had been based on the extinction of piracy, Muslim naval power was based on the exercise of piracy. It was this that made service in Muslim fleets palatable to the Greeks, Copts, Berbers and Spaniards who undoubtedly manned the ships. Western shipping was freely targeted by pirates in the service of Muslim rulers. A ninth-century Arab writer described how Christian ships in the Mediterranean could be treated as a legitimate target for Muslim pirates when the ships were heading for other Christian lands; if a ship was seized and its captain insisted that he was travelling under the protection of a Muslim ruler such as an Andalucían emir, written proof could be demanded.17 Although the invasion of Spain by Arab and Berber armies in 711 had involved few naval operations – apart from the crucial one of crossing the Straits of Gibraltar – the rest of the eighth century saw Muslim fleets gain in confidence in the western Mediterranean. An outburst of piracy after the fall of Carthage in 698 was suppressed easily enough by the Byzantine navy, but the Byzantine loss of effective control of the seas west of Sicily allowed Muslim fleets a free hand off the islands and coastlines that still acknowledged, even if remotely, Byzantine overlordship: the Balearic islands, Sardinia, the Ligurian coast.18
The safety of this region deteriorated seriously around 800. Naval skirmishes erupted all over the surface of the western Mediterranean. These events are generally presented as a struggle to hold back Arab invaders who were trying to gain mastery of the Mediterranean islands. Often, though, the Muslim navies were more intent on grabbing booty (including captives, whom they would put on sale), than in trying to extend the dominion of Islam. The Christians too were keen to take slaves and to win booty, even though they were more obviously on the defensive. Moreover, precisely because there was now a great power in the west willing to fight back against the Muslim navies, tension increased and the pirates became ever more daring. In 798 Arab navies attacked the Balearic islands, which had not been a target of the original invasion of Spain. Knowing that Constantinople was incapable of offering any help, the islanders turned instead to the ruler of Gaul and northern Italy, Charlemagne, whom they acknowledged as their new overlord. Charlemagne sent some forces and the Arabs were repelled the next time they raided the islands.19 He ordered his son Louis to build a fleet for the defence of the Rhône delta, and he commissioned new coastal defences to protect the ports of southern France and north-western Italy. Hadumar, the Frankish count of Genoa, led a fleet against Arabs invading Corsica, and was killed in the fray. Fighting continued off both Corsica and Sardinia, and a Frankish admiral named Burchard destroyed thirteen enemy ships. Meanwhile, the Venetians (of whom more shortly) patrolled the waters off Sicily and North Africa and they or other ships in Byzantine service scored notable victories against ships from al-Andalus, Islamic Spain. Thirteen Arab ships that attacked the small but strategically valuable island of Lampedusa, between Sicily and Africa, were wiped out by the Byzantines in 812. Before long the North Africans decided that events had gone far enough, and they arranged a ten-year truce with Gregorios, the governor of Byzantine Sicily.20 Christian navies were now in command west of Sicily, while the Byzantines had gained a much needed respite in the central Mediterranean – the Arab raids on Sicily and Calabria had caused great damage to the exposed coastal towns and villages.
Unfortunately for the Byzantines, the Muslims decided that they wanted more from Sicily than slaves and booty, launching an invasion in 827 which slowly brought the entire island under the rule of the Aghlabid emirs of North Africa. They renewed their raids on Sardinia and Corsica, to which the Franks responded with an ambitious naval attack on the African coast. The problem was that the Frankish navy had no permanent base, and, even after winning a succession of engagements, a single defeat at Sousse was enough to force the Franks out of Africa. In any case, the Frankish empire had passed its peak with the death of Charlemagne in 814, and his successor Louis the Pious was distracted from the western Mediterranean by internal rivalries. In the 840s, the Arabs were free to raid Marseilles, Arles and Rome. To the extreme embarrassment of both the Byzantines and the Franks, who each claimed dominion over southern Italy, a Muslim navy captured the seaport of Bari in 847, establishing an emirate that lasted until 871, when finally the Franks and the Byzantines learned to work together long enough to expel the Muslims.21 After tentative moves in the ninth century, Arab pirate bases were established in the tenth century along the coast of Provence, and a little way inland at Fraxinetum (La Garde-Freinet). Arab piracy gravely endangered Christian trade out of Provence, while providing the Muslims with a supply of slaves and war booty.22
III
The Byzantines enjoyed mixed success in the face of the Muslim advance. Having held back the Arabs at the walls of Constantinople in 718, they mobilized their fleets in the Mediterranean in the early eighth century, and yet local revolts, particularly in Sicily, endangered their control of the sea routes across the Mediterranean. Since the sixth century the Byzantine navy had been dominated by the dromôn, a variant on the war galley that grew in size over time but became the standard warship used throughout the Mediterranean until the twelfth century; its characteristics included the use of a lateen instead of a square sail, banks of oars placed beneath the main deck and (possibly) skeletal hull construction instead of shell construction. Originally rowed by a small crew of fifty oarsmen, one on either side (making them ‘monoremes’), they evolved into biremes, with each oar manipulated by pairs of rowers numbering up to 150 men.23 Muslim fleets, equipped with similar ships, faced a great difficulty: the shoals, rocks and sandbanks of the North African shore made east–west movement along the coastline difficult. Shipping was forced to choose island-hopping routes further to the north, and this, as well as piracy and slaving, was a good reason why Muslim navies intruded into the waters around the Balearic islands, Sardinia and Sicily.24 To say that these navies ‘held waters’ provides only a shorthand description of the way fleets operated: it was vital that galleys had access to friendly ports where they could take on supplies, if they were to patrol an area of sea effectively. Remote control in the form of fleets sent out from the heartlands of Byzantium was impossible, and the best option was to establish Byzantine bases on the maritime frontier.25 The Byzantines managed to hold the waters north of Cyprus and Crete (which they lost for a time to the Arabs). This enabled them to maintain communications in the Aegean and a little way beyond, but the situation was more parlous on the fringes of the Byzantine Empire, notably in the Adriatic.
Their difficulties in this zone began not with the Arabs, whose seizure of Bari came relatively late, so much as with the Franks, rulers by the end of the eighth century of large tracts of Italy including (in 751) the former Byzantine province, or Exarchate, whose capital lay at Ravenna. Frankish armies were still active close to the Adriatic in the 790s, when Charlemagne crushed the great, wealthy empire of the Avars, annexing to his empire vast tracts of what are now Slovenia, Hungary and the northern Balkans. In 791 the Franks took charge of Istria, the rocky peninsula at the top of the Adriatic that was still under nominal Byzantine rule.26 These campaigns brought Frankish and Byzantine interests into collision. Ill-feeling between the Franks and the Byzantines was compounded by the coronation of Charlemagne as western Roman emperor on Christmas Day 800 in Rome, even if the new emperor laughed off this event as of minor importance. Byzantium remained deeply sensitive about its claim to be the true successor to the Roman Empire until its fall in 1453. Reports that Charlemagne thought he might like to take over Sicily added to the unease. He even seemed to be conspiring with the Abbasid caliph of Baghdad, Harun ar-Rashid, who sent him an elephant as a sign of his esteem, along with the keys to the church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem, over which the Byzantines claimed protective authority.
From Constantinople, the Adriatic was seen as the first line of defence against hostile armies and navies that sought to penetrate the Byzantine heartlands. The defence of the Via Egnatia that ran from Dyrrhachion to Thessalonika had a military rationale, quite apart from its importance as a trade route.27 The Byzantines therefore expended energy defending the Dalmatian and Albanian coastline from Franks, Slavs, Arabs and other invaders and raiders. Despite the survival of magnificent early Byzantine mosaics in towns such as Poreč, in Istria, this was a region where the Latin Church was dominant and where a form of Low Latin was spoken, developing into the now vanished Dalmatian language.28 Byzantine influence also extended to the Italian side of the Upper Adriatic, stretching in a great crescent across the lagoons and marshes of Grado and down the Italian side past a series of sandbanks, or lidi, to the port of Comacchio, not far north of Ravenna. For the loss of the Exarchate of Ravenna had not entirely deprived Byzantium of an Italian dominion, and, even if it was inhabited more by fish than by humans, and produced more salt than wheat, it proved to be an unsuspected asset.
This was an unstable world in which water and silt jostled for control. It was here that the Piave, the Po and the Adige, as well as numerous smaller rivers, dumped their deposits. According to the sixth-century writer Cassiodorus, the early inhabitants of these marshlands lived ‘like water birds, now on sea, now on land’, and their wealth consisted only of fish and salt, though he had to admit that salt was in one sense more precious than gold: everyone needs salt but there must be people who feel no need for gold. Cassiodorus idealized the marshlanders, claiming that ‘the same food and similar houses are shared by all, so they cannot envy each other’s hearths, and they are free from the vices that rule the world’.29 The barbarian invasions transformed this area, not by conquering the lagoons but by making them into a refuge for those escaping from the armies of the Germanic people known as the Lombards. This immigration did not happen all at once, but a number of villages emerged at Comacchio, Eraclea, Jesolo, Torcello, and a cluster of small islands around the ‘high bank’, or Rivo Alto, later abbreviated to Rialto. There were glass workshops in the little community of Torcello, going back to the seventh century. Comacchio received privileges from the Lombard rulers, perhaps as early as 715. One island, Grado, became the seat of a grandly titled patriarch whose ecclesiastical authority extended over all the lagoons, though individual bishops proliferated – every settlement of any size possessed one, and impressive churches began to be erected in the eighth and ninth centuries, strongly suggesting that trade was prospering.30 As in Dalmatia, the bishops followed the Latin rite even though political allegiance was directed towards Constantinople. Before the fall of the Byzantine Exarchate, the inhabitants looked to Ravenna for immediate political guidance and military protection, and as early as 697 the Exarch appointed a military commander, or dux, to guard the lagoons.31 After the fall of the Exarchate in 751, the value of the lagoons lay, paradoxically, in their remoteness. They were an assertion of the continuing presence of the true Roman Empire in northern Italy.
Following the arrival of the Franks in Italy in the late eighth century, the inhabitants of the lagoons were tempted to defect to the new Roman emperor Charlemagne. His armies were close by and he could lure them with promises of trading privileges in Lombardy and beyond. Moreover, the Franks had made themselves respectable with their interest in classical culture; they had begun to smooth the rough edges of their barbarian identity. Pro-Frankish and pro-Byzantine factions emerged in the lagoons and in Dalmatia. At the start of the ninth century, the Byzantines were determined to hold their position and sent a fleet to the Upper Adriatic, clashing with the Franks in these waters. In 807 the Byzantines recovered most of the lagoons, and two years later they besieged Comacchio, still loyal to the Franks. This had the unfortunate effect of drawing a Frankish army and navy towards the region, led by Charlemagne’s son Pippin, king of Italy. Pippin scared the Byzantine fleet away, which left the lagoons dangerously exposed, and he laid siege to the lido at Malamocco, hoping to break through to Rivo Alto and the settlements within the lagoon; accounts vary, but he seems to have failed. The fourteenth-century chronicle of Doge Andrea Dandolo described how the inhabitants bombarded the Franks with loaves of bread to prove that the siege was not hurting them and that they still had plenty to eat, a tale associated with so many sieges that it need not be believed.32 Both the Franks and the Byzantines regarded this war as a distraction from more important issues, and had an appetite for peace. Charlemagne realized that if he made concessions he could secure grudging recognition as emperor from the Byzantines. In 812 a formula emerged that respected Byzantine claims to suzerainty over the lagoons, while expecting the inhabitants to pay the Franks an annual tribute of thirty-six pounds of silver and to provide naval help against the Slavs in Dalmatia. The tribute payment was no great burden, because peace brought privileged access to markets in Italy, and this corner of the Adriatic was able to function as a channel of communication between western Europe and Byzantium, enjoying the protection of the empires of East and West. This was a unique position, of which merchants took full advantage.
Out of the lagoons, and out of the Adriatic war with Charlemagne, emerged the city of Venice, as a physical, political and mercantile entity. The conflict with the Franks encouraged the scattered people of the lagoon to gather in a defensible group of islands, protected by a long lido from sea invaders, but far enough from the coastline to deter land invaders. Gradually the Venetians spread across the islands closest to Rialto, driving deep wooden piles into the sodden earth and constructing wooden houses out of timber brought from Istria. Early Venice was not a city of marble, and did not even possess a bishop of its own – the nearest bishop resided on the island of Castello, on the eastern fringe of the settlements around Rialto.33 The Venetians were as expert in navigating barges and punts through the Po delta as they were in sailing the Adriatic, but several families emerged that kept tight hold of the office of dux, or Doge, mainly families owning farms on the mainland, for Venice was not yet so dominated by trade that its elites had lost interest in cultivating the soil.34
Yet even before Venice began to coalesce into a single town, trading links with far afield had begun to develop. While the trade in salt, fish and timber must not be underestimated, the Venetians found a role as entrepreneurs in the limited luxury trade between East and West. Competitors were few: by the eighth century even Rome was receiving few goods from across the Mediterranean. The volume of luxury imports was small but the profits were high, because of the risks and because of the rarity of the articles the Venetians carried: silks, jewels, gold artefacts, saints’ relics.35 They sold these goods on to Lombard princes, Frankish kings and luxury-loving bishops, mainly in the Po Valley and neighbouring areas. Byzantine and occasionally Arab coins have been found on sites around the Upper Adriatic. A hoard of coins dating from the time of the Frankish–Byzantine naval war was discovered near Bologna, by the river Reno, one of the water-courses that debouches into the lagoons. It is a mixed bag of Byzantine, south Italian and Islamic gold coins; the Byzantine coins are from Constantinople, and the Islamic gold includes pieces from Egypt and North Africa. This suggests that the money was being carried on a river-boat by a merchant with connections across the Mediterranean. Venetian ships were sometimes commissioned to carry ambassadors back and forth to Constantinople.36 Now that Marseilles was in decline, Venice had become the main port through which contact with the eastern Mediterranean was maintained – commercial, diplomatic, ecclesiastical.
Of all the travellers who reached Venice from the East by far the most important was a long-dead Judaean named Mark who was credited with authorship of one of the books of the Gospels and with founding the Church of Alexandria. In 828–9 some Venetian merchants in Alexandria stuffed his stolen remains into a barrel, covered the bones with pork and smuggled their cargo past Muslim customs officials who refused to poke beneath the pork – if a theft of relics succeeded, this was a sure sign that the saint approved.37St Mark was deposited in a chapel built next to the Doge’s residence, though it was only in the eleventh century that the chapel was vastly enlarged to create the great basilica which until the nineteenth century was not a cathedral but the chapel of the Doge. This did not simply make Venice into a centre of pilgrim traffic, at the expense of Alexandria; it also meant that Venice was appropriating part of Alexandria’s ancient identity as one of the patriarchal seats of Christianity.38 By virtue of its close links with Constantinople, Venice also sought to uphold Byzantine culture amid the vanished glories of the western Roman Empire. The Venetians were beginning to create not just a distinctive city built in the water, but a distinctive culture and a distinctive polity, suspended between western Europe, Byzantium and Islam.
IV
The fact that Venice and a little later Amalfi became the principal centres of limited communication between East and West reveals the degree to which continuity had been broken. These were new towns. The scale of collapse in the late Roman Empire had been so great that the ancient trading centres of the western Mediterranean vanished off the commercial map. This was not true of the eastern Mediterranean, where Alexandria survived the sixth-century crisis and remained a vigorous centre of trade after the Islamic conquest of Egypt. By the late eighth century there are signs of general recovery in Byzantium, but the West was slow to recover, and what was lost was the intense trans-Mediterranean contact that had flourished when Rome ruled the entire sea. Under Rome, that contact had been more than commercial: religious ideas had flowed from the East towards the imperial capital; artistic styles had been copied; soldiers and slaves had arrived far from their place of birth. In the ‘Dark Age’ the slaves still moved back and forth, though in lesser quantity, but cultural influences from East to West took on an exotic character, as gifts from the court of Constantinople were passed across unsafe seas to reach the court of a barbarian king, pirates and leaking ships permitting.
When historians have tried to calculate the flow of traffic across the Mediterranean at this time, they have had to admit that there was far less movement in the eighth century than in the ninth, and this does not seem to be simply the result of the disappearance of written sources from the eighth century, since the evidence of shipwrecks is also less rich during that time.39 Of 410 recorded movements in these two centuries, only a quarter date from the eighth century, and these include voyages by missionaries, pilgrims, refugees and ambassadors, often engaged in special journeys. Only twenty-two merchant voyages can be identified; Muslim merchants did not want to enter infidel lands, and the merchants we hear about are either Jews or Syrians, even if these may eventually have become generic terms meaning little more than ‘merchant’.40 Ambassadors were sent back and forth between western Europe and Byzantium in the hope of opening up contacts, political, commercial, ecclesiastical and cultural, not because these contacts were already flourishing. Although Arab coins from the eighth and ninth centuries have been found in western Europe, they arrived in greater quantities at the end of the eighth century, when Charlemagne was carving out his new Frankish dominion that stretched into northern Spain and southern Italy, and Byzantine coins began to appear in quantity only from the middle of the ninth century.41 In fact, many of these Arab coins were themselves European, produced in Muslim Spain.
The restoration of contact between the western and eastern Mediterranean lands, and between the northern and southern shores of the Mediterranean, would depend on the activities of groups of merchants who found it possible to move unhindered across the seas. Any number of factors would determine their ability to do this: their religious identity, the legal mechanisms they employed to control risk and to ensure profit, their ability to communicate with one another across vast spaces. By the tenth century such groups emerged both in the Islamic lands and in parts of Italy.