I
The rise of Pisa and Genoa is almost as mysterious as that of Amalfi, and the mystery is compounded by the startling success of these cities in clearing the western Mediterranean of pirates and in creating trade routes, sustained by colonies of merchants and settlers, as far east as the Holy Land, Egypt and Byzantium. Pisa and Genoa had strikingly different profiles. Genoa had been the seat of a Byzantine governor in the seventh century, but after that two or three hundred years of quiet descended, savagely interrupted by the sack of the city by Saracen raiders from North Africa in 934–5.1 It has no obvious resources; it perches by the side of the Ligurian Alps and is cut off from grain-producing plains. The favoured products of its coastline are wine, chestnuts, herbs and olive oil, and it was out of its herbs and oil that Genoa perfected the basil sauce known as pesto, a product that speaks for poverty rather than wealth. Its harbour became adequate by the end of the Middle Ages, after many centuries of improvements, but its ships were best protected from the weather by being beached along the sandy shores to east and west of Genoa itself, and it was there that most of them were put together.2 Genoa was not a centre of industry, with the exception of shipbuilding. The Genoese had to struggle to survive, and came to see their trading voyages as the key to the city’s survival. As their city grew, so did their dependence on outside supplies of wheat, salted meats and cheese. From these modest beginnings emerged one of the most ambitious trading networks in the pre-industrial world.
Pisa looked quite different. The city stands astride the river Arno, several miles from the sea; the final muddy, marshy exit of the river into the sea deprived Pisa of a good port. Its obvious assets lay in the flat fields stretching down to the coast, sown with grain and, closer to the shoreline, inhabited by the sheep that supplied Pisa with wool, leather, meat and dairy products. The citizens of Pisa had less reason to worry about how they might feed themselves than those of Genoa. On the other hand, the low-lying Tuscan coast was more exposed than rocky Liguria to sea-raiders from Muslim hideouts in Provence and Sardinia, and, by the time Pisa’s navy first appeared, its prime enemy had become the Muslims. In 982 Pisan ships accompanied the army of the German emperor Otto II as he marched far south into Calabria, hoping to suppress Muslim raids from Sicily. During the next century Pisa and Genoa concentrated on clearing the Tyrrhenian Sea of Saracen pirates. The obvious way to achieve this was to establish command positions in Sardinia, and Pisa and Genoa responded with precocious vigour to the arrival in Sardinia of the army and navy of the Spanish Muslim warlord Mujahid, ruler of Denia and Majorca, in 1013.3 Mujahid’s power almost certainly reached no further than some coastal stations in Sardinia, whether or not he aspired to conquer the whole island. Chasing Mujahid out of Sardinia by 1016 greatly enhanced the credentials of the Pisans and Genoese as exponents of Christian holy war against the Muslim enemy. The power balance between Christians and Muslims was slowly changing; as central power in the Muslim lands became more fragmented, the fleets of Pisa and Genoa seized their opportunity.
II
The better the two cities came to know Sardinia, the more they saw that it was valuable in its own right. The island had a vast sheep population, and by the twelfth century the Pisans and Genoese began to see Sardinia as an extension of their own countryside orcontado. There was plenty of grain, of middling quality; there were big lagoons in the south that could be turned into saltpans; the Pisans and Genoese also had no compunction about enslaving Sards, whom they regarded as primitive folk. These Sards spoke a form of late Latin, preserved in curious estate documents listing the sheep, cattle and horses of a society that had changed remarkably little since the days of the nuraghi. Sardinia remained a pastoral society that looked away from the sea: it was insular but not really Mediterranean. The political and religious institutions were archaic. Petty kings or ‘judges’ had emerged in the tenth century as the last representatives of now vanished Byzantine authority. But Byzantium lingered in another form. The churches of the island followed a version of the Greek rite, and before 1100 some at least of them were built in the cruciform Greek style. The papacy inveighed against these customs, and supported the arrival of monks from the mainland, including Benedictines from Montecassino.4 All these changes helped transform life in Sardinia; members of the leading families, the so-called maiorales, took Genoese and Pisan wives or husbands, and they could now easily buy the products of the mainland, for even pots and pans were imported. But the standard of living of Sardinian peasants, suffering from disease, poor diet and high mortality, remained extremely depressed. This meant fewer mouths to feed, and more grain to export. There is only one word for the way Pisa and Genoa treated Sardinia: exploitation.
During the twelfth century the Genoese regularly sent ships to the island, whose cheap but vital products ensured a safe return on investments. Anyone with a little spare cash – widows with a modest inheritance, for instance – could quite safely invest five or ten pounds of Genoese silver money in a trading expedition to Sardinia and hope to receive six or twelve pounds back a few months later.5 Sardinia gave Pisa and Genoa their first colonial experience. The two cities attempted to maintain control by securing the loyalty of the judges. In the years around 1100, this was often achieved through the agency of the great churches of the two cities. Mariano Torchitorio, judge of Cagliari in the south, gave the cathedral of San Lorenzo in Genoa lands in southern Sardinia. But he was a far-sighted man, because he also ensured that Pisa received some gifts.6 Even so, playing off one side against another achieved only short-term results. Pisa and Genoa were too powerful to be resisted. The Pisans built cathedrals and convents in the striking Pisan style of architecture, their exterior covered in bands of black and white marble; no clearer statement could be made of Pisan ascendancy. The abbey of Santa Trinità di Saccargia, built at the beginning of the twelfth century, is a typical northern Sardinian example of this architecture, with its zebra façade and flanks. It was the Pisans and Genoese who built the first well fortified towns since the days of thenuraghi: in the judgeship of Cagliari the Pisans occupied the steep hill simply known as Castello that still hangs over the city of Cagliari, surrounding it with high walls and making out of it a Pisan enclosure, where their soldiers and merchants could abide in safety. The Doria family of Genoa is credited with founding Alghero, in north-western Sardinia, around 1102. In the twelfth and thirteenth centuries Genoa and Pisa were able to consolidate their hold on Sardinia, despite attempts by popes and Holy Roman Emperors to insist that it was (at least in theory) their own property. Yet what mattered was who was there on the ground. The problem was that Genoa and Pisa both aspired to dominion over as much of the island as they could grab for themselves. Bitter conflict between the two cities was the result. It was Sardinia, rather than disagreements in the Italian mainland, that brought them most often to war. By 1200, the waters around Sardinia were largely clear of Muslim pirates; but Italian pirates abounded – Pisans preying on Genoese, and vice versa.
III
One reason the Pisans and Genoese were able to launch their own fleets was the collapse of central authority in northern Italy. The ‘kingdom of Italy’ had little more than a notional existence, and its ruler was, since the tenth century, the German king, who was also entitled to claim the crown of the western Roman Empire, revived in 962 with the papal coronation of Otto I. The power of the local imperial viscounts withered; the day-to-day government of these and other towns fell into the hands of the local patricians. By the beginning of the twelfth century they began to organize themselves into self-governing communities – historians use the terms ‘commune’ and ‘city-republic’, but they adopted a variety of terms including, in Genoa, ‘company’ (compagna), which literally meant ‘those who break bread (pane) together’. Indeed, the government of Genoa after 1100 was very like the management of a business partnership. The compagna was formed for a limited period of a few years, to resolve a specific problem such as the building of a crusade fleet, or political tensions that, in Genoa, sometimes resulted in assassinations and street-fighting. The commune was in some respects a public institution, embracing the whole community, but in other very important respects it was a private league, though the distinction between ‘public’ and ‘private’ was not clear in the minds of twelfth-century Genoese. The city was littered with private enclaves, the property of monasteries and nobles, little pieces of exempt territory that were only very gradually brought under the control of the presiding officers of the compagna. These officers took the resounding title of ‘consul’, proving an awareness of the Roman republican model, though there were as many as six consuls when the first compagna came into being.7 As in ancient Rome, the system of election was carefully manipulated by those with real power, and in this period they were always drawn from the patrician class.8
These patricians created the trading empire of Genoa, and similar developments occurred in Pisa. The difficult question is who they were – not their names, such as Doria and Spinola at Genoa, or Visconti and Alliata at Pisa, which are recorded again and again – but whether their wealth and power originated in trade or from the land. The Italian city communes brought together the petty nobility of the region around the town, who had long been accustomed to taking up residence there, and a body of relatively newly made men whose status depended on the wealth derived from commerce, textile workshops or banking. By the early twelfth century, in Pisa and Genoa, these groups were well mixed together, by marriage alliances that brought new money into old families in need of extra cash. The prestige of entry into families whose members had earned a record on the battlefield or in naval combat appealed to the richest members of the merchant community. A new solidarity emerged. This patriciate was certainly not willing to share itspower with the artisans and sailors who made up a large part of the citizen body. The rise of the commune did not indicate that the cities had become democratic republics; rather, it indicated that oligarchy had triumphed – hence, indeed, the bitter struggles between factions on the streets of Genoa. Between these outbreaks of violence, however, there were opportunities to make money on an unprecedented scale. The elite invested in overseas trade directed to ever more distant destinations; they bought urban property and they continued to manage their country estates, even extending them by acquiring lands across the water in Sardinia. The city government interfered little in these activities, except when international alliances affected trade, and those alliances were determined by the same people who dominated trade.9
These were trends that could be observed right across northern Italy in the years around 1100, though Pisa and Genoa were among the first cities to form an aristocratic commune. The growth of towns in the interior, particularly in the great Lombard plain, had an important effect on what was happening in the Mediterranean, because they became centres of demand for luxury goods from overseas, while their own elites organized the production of increasingly fine cloths and metal goods that could be carried across the Mediterranean in payment for the silks and spices they now demanded. Genoa and Pisa and, on the eastern side of Italy, Venice found themselves able to supply consumers with whom the older generation of merchants from Amalfi had not been able to make close and regular contact. Besides, these cities began to look beyond the Alps. Courts and cities in southern Germany welcomed goods that arrived by way of Venice, and in the twelfth century German merchants arrived there, laying the foundations for the German warehouse, or Fondaco dei Tedeschi, that would for many centuries act as the commercial agency of the German merchants based there.10 Genoese merchants began to wend their way up the Rhône towards the emerging fairs of Champagne, where they could buy the finest Flemish woollen cloths, for transport down the Rhône to the Mediterranean. A vast network was emerging, focused on the maritime trade of Genoa, Pisa and Venice, but with ramifications that stretched across western Europe.
This commercial revolution was backed up by impressive developments in business methods and in record-keeping. Indeed, the reason so much is known about the economy and society of Genoa in this period is that, from 1154 onwards, large volumes survive containing contracts, wills, land sales and other transactions, recorded by the city notaries.11 The first of these notarial registers to survive is a bulky book written on thick, smooth paper imported from Alexandria by a certain Giovanni Scriba (‘John the Scribe’), whose clients included the most powerful families in mid-twelfth-century Genoa.12 Business methods became increasingly sophisticated, which was partly made necessary by the public disapproval of the Catholic Church towards anything that smelled of ‘usury’, a term whose meaning varied enormously, from extortionate rates of interest to simple commercial profits. Mechanisms had to be developed to escape ecclesiastical censure, which in its sternest form could lead to excommunication. Loans could be made in one currency, to be repaid in another, so that interest was hidden in the exchange rate. Often, though, merchants engaged in what they simply called a societas, or ‘partnership’, where a sleeping partner would invest three-quarters of the total and his (or her) colleague would invest one quarter, while also agreeing to travel to whichever destination had been agreed, and to trade there. On his return, the profits would be divided in half. This was a good way for a young merchant to begin to build up capital, but another arrangement became even more common: the commenda, where the travelling partner invested nothing apart from his skills and services, and received a quarter of the profits. These arrangements helped to spread wealth beyond the patrician elite; a busy, ambitious merchant class was developing, unafraid of the dangers of the sea and of ports in foreign lands.13 The Genoese and Pisans looked across the Mediterranean and saw opportunities in every corner.
IV
Mastering the waters near home was the essential prelude to more ambitious ventures in Byzantium and the Islamic lands. Venice needed to clear Muslim fleets from the Adriatic while Bari was held by Muslim emirs (between 847 and 871); in 880 it was rewarded for its efforts with a privilege from the grateful Byzantine emperor. In 992 Venice once again came to the help of Byzantium, and on this occasion received a grant of trading rights.14 The Pisans and Genoese did not possess as powerful a patron as the Greek emperor, and relied on their own efforts. In 1063 a Pisan fleet raided the port of Muslim Palermo, destroying some enemy ships and seizing the great chain that stretched across the harbour to keep away intruders such as themselves. They did not penetrate beyond the quayside, but they still carried off vast amounts of booty.15 They used their profits to glorify God, for they donated part of them to the great cathedral of Santa Maria that the Pisans were beginning to construct, and if anything was a sign of the city’s growing prosperity it was this magnificent marble church.
These forays generated a sense that they were engaged in a holy struggle against the Muslims. God would reward their efforts with victory, with booty and with what were as yet ill-defined spiritual benefits. There was no sharp line dividing material and spiritual rewards. This is abundantly clear from the events of 1087, when the Pisans and Genoese launched an attack on the city of Mahdia on the coast of Tunisia.16 Standing on a promontory, Mahdia had been founded by the Fatimid rulers who eventually took charge of Egypt, and was one of the major towns through which passed the gold dust gathered in the bend of the river Niger, beyond Timbuktu; carried by caravan across the Sahara, it reached the Mediterranean and was pumped into the economy of the Islamic lands. Control of Mahdia might also be seen as the key to control of the Sicilian Straits, and therefore to free passage between the eastern and the western Mediterranean. Thus it would long remain the target of Christian conquerors – Norman kings in the twelfth century, French crusaders in the fourteenth. But in the late eleventh century it was at the height of its prosperity. It was frequented by the Genizah merchants, who sold products such as eastern pepper and Egyptian flax there.17 From 1062 to 1108 Mahdia was ruled by a single vigorous emir, Tamin, who enriched himself not just from trade but from pirate attacks on Nicotera in Calabria and Mazara in Sicily.18 He was a thorough nuisance to his close neighbours. The Fatimids foolishly unleashed Bedouin armies (the Banu Hillal and the Banu Sulaym) who, they thought, would bring Tunisia back to Egyptian allegiance. In the end the Bedouins merely increased the disorder, and damaged the countryside beyond repair, so that the inhabitants of North Africa became dependent on Sicilian grain, after so many centuries during which Tunisia had been a bread basket of the Mediterranean.19 According to an early thirteenth-century Arab writer, ibn al-Athir, the Christians tried to involve Roger, the Norman count of Sicily, in their campaign against Mahdia (he hadspent the last quarter-century extending Christian control over the island); but ‘Roger lifted his thigh, made a great fart’ and complained about all the trouble that would result: ‘commerce in foodstuffs will pass into their hands from those of the Sicilians, and I shall lose to them what I make each year on grain sales’.20
Even without Count Roger, the Italian allies were happy to press ahead in 1087. Pope Victor III welcomed members of the expedition in Rome, where they acquired pilgrims’ purses, showing they had visited the shrine of St Peter. This has excited modern historians of the crusades who have insisted, rightly, that from the preaching of the First Crusade in 1095 onwards, crusaders were treated as pilgrims: ‘pilgrimage and holy war were evidently drawing together’.21 As in Palermo, the Italians did great damage, raiding Mahdia, but did not take the city, and probably never expected to do so. With their spoils they were able to pay for the construction of the church of San Sisto in Cortevecchia in the heart of Pisa, whose façade they decorated with ceramics seized from Mahdia.22 In addition, the Pisans commissioned a victory poem in Latin. The ‘Song about the victory of the Pisans’ (Carmen in victoriam Pisanorum) is full of biblical imagery recalling the struggle of the Children of Israel against their heathen neighbours. The Mahdians,Madianiti, were transformed in the poet’s version into ancient Midianites, while the Pisans saw themselves as the heirs of the Maccabees and, even more, of Moses: ‘Lo! Once again the Hebrews despoil Egypt and rejoice in having defeated Pharaoh; they cross the Great Sea as if it is the driest land; Moses draws water out of the hardest stone.’23 The poem conjures up a febrile atmosphere in which the holy cause of fighting the Infidel supersedes merely commercial considerations.
That the relations between Pisa and the Muslims were not always antagonistic is demonstrated by the Islamic ceramics used by the Pisans to decorate their churches.24 These ceramics, highly glazed and colourfully decorated, were quite different in style to the plainer wares produced in western Europe, and, when inserted in church exteriors, they glistened in the sun like jewels.25 The large bowls, or bacini, inserted in the towers and façades of churches in Pisa tell an intriguing tale not just of war but of trade and of fascination with objects from the East. Churches constructed in the eleventh century displayed fine Egyptian ceramics on their exterior. There were pots from Sicily and Tunisia before and well after the Mahdia campaign; Morocco sent to Pisa large amounts of rather plainer pottery in green and brown, covered with a bluish glaze. The Pisans became so accustomed to this type of decoration that they continued to insert bacini in church towers long after they had developed their own glazed ceramics industry, in the thirteenth century. For it was not just the pottery that the Italians acquired from the Muslim world; they also borrowed the technology, laying the foundations of the maiolica industry of Renaissance Italy.
A bowl inserted in the façade of the church of San Piero a Grado near Pisa displays a three-masted vessel with triangular sails, a sharply curved prow and a steep poop; this is a ship from Muslim Majorca, and the design is very stylized.26 Even so, the image conveys a blurred impression of the sort of bulky sailing ship that carried goods between Spain, Africa and Sicily in the days of Islamic hegemony in the southern waters of the Mediterranean. It matches the description in the Genizah letters of very capacious ships, known as qunbar, that carried both heavy cargoes and passengers.27 Another bowl shows a smaller boat furnished with oars as well as a sail, side by side with a two-masted ship, and this could be a representation of a fast, long, low, sleek galley.28 Once again, the Genizah letters come to our aid. There, light galleys called ghurabs appear; the word signified the sharp edge of a sword, in view of their ability to cut through the waves. Alternatively, the long low boat could be a qarib, a sea-going barge, capable of travelling all the way from Tunisia to Syria.29
V
The challenges to Muslim domination of the Mediterranean became critical at the end of the eleventh century. Christian expansion into the Muslim Mediterranean was well under way in the 1060s, following the invasion of Sicily by the armies of Robert Guiscard and his brother Roger de Hauteville, Norman knights who had already carved out for themselves dominions in the Lombard and Byzantine territories in southern Italy. In 1061, ten years before they took control of Bari, the capital of the Byzantine province known as ‘Longobardia’, they were tempted to cross the Straits of Messina and to intervene in the bitter quarrels among the three emirs who dominated Sicily, and were largely oblivious of the Norman threat. One of these emirs, ibn al-Hawas, held his own sister in protective custody in the hilltop city of Enna; she was the much abused wife of the powerful and unlovable emir of Catania, ibn ath-Thimnah, whose attempts to win her back by force failed. In desperation, ibn ath-Thimnah begged the Normans to come to his aid, and Robert and Roger de Hauteville agreed to do so. They arrived, outwardly at least, not as invaders but as military support for the emir of Catania, and used this alliance as the basis for their gradual takeover of the entire island, beginning with the capture of Messina and continuing with the capture of Palermo in 1072 (though the conquest was not complete till Noto fell in 1091). Their ability to move men and horses across the Straits of Messina is impressive. Roger became count of Sicily and married a noblewoman from Savona, in north-western Italy; she was followed to Sicily by large numbers of settlers from Liguria and other parts of Italy, who became known as the Lombardi. With this immigration the slow process of the Latinization of Sicily began, and speakers of dialects related to Ligurian Italian could still be found in several eastern Sicilian towns in the twentieth century.30
Still, the island’s character did not change quickly. For much of the twelfth century Sicily remained home to a mixed population of Muslims, in the majority around 1100, Greeks, only a little less numerous, and Jews, perhaps 5 per cent of the whole population, with the Latin settlers, whether Norman or ‘Lombard’, accounting for less than 1 per cent. The Greeks were concentrated more in the north-east of Sicily, in the area round Etna known as the Val Demone, and in particular in Messina, which became the main shipyard of Norman Sicily. Each group was allowed considerable autonomy: freedom to practise its religion, which had been enshrined in the ‘surrender treaties’ conferred on conquered towns such as Enna; its own law-courts for cases between co-religionists; a guarantee of the count’s protection, subject to payment by Muslims and Jews of the gesia, or poll-tax, which was simply a continuation of the Muslim jizyah tax payable by the Peoples of the Book, except that now Christians were exempt and Muslims were liable.
Robert Guiscard’s conquest of the Byzantine province in southern Italy and the neighbouring Lombard principalities had, meanwhile, aroused the intense ire of the Byzantine emperor. The relationship between the papacy and the Greek Orthodox Church had been steadily deteriorating in the eleventh century, as the popes began to emphasize their authority over all Christendom, and the Norman victories threatened to draw southern Italy away from Greek ecclesiastical allegiance as well. Although the ‘Eastern Schism’ of 1054 is often seen as the decisive moment in the break between a Catholic West and an Orthodox East, the events of that year were another moment in a long catalogue of quarrels: the papal legate Humbert of Silva Candida slammed a bull of excommunication directed at the patriarch of Constantinople and his master, the emperor, on the high altar of Hagia Sophia in Constantinople. The Byzantines had adroitly balanced Latin and Greek in the coastal towns of Apulia, where Latin bishops were often keener to accept the authority of Constantinople, at least in political matters, than that of western rulers, including the pope. The arrival of the Normans turned Latin against Latin and Greek against Greek; the Norman conquest of the toe of Italy, Calabria, and then of Sicily, brought many thousands of Greeks under the rule of Robert’s brother Roger. After the fall of Bari in 1071 Norman enmity only became more intense, as Robert planned the invasion of the Byzantine territories facing Italy across the Adriatic. He saw Dyrrhachion and the Ionian isles as a gateway through which he could penetrate deeply into Byzantine territory, with the help of his son, the blond giant Bohemond. Robert’s excuse for campaigning against Byzantium was that he was acting on behalf of the deposed and exiled emperor Michael Doukas; he welcomed into his entourage a fugitive monk whom he declared to be Michael. He paraded this monk in imperial finery in front of the walls of Dyrrhachion, whereupon (the historian Anna Komnene insists) ‘Michael’ was immediately and raucously denounced as an impostor by the citizens ranged along the battlements. One might expect Anna to say this, as she was the daughter of the reigning emperor, Alexios Komnenos, founder of a vigorous dynasty whose military and political successes generated a great revival in the fortunes of Byzantium. Anna suspected, and it is hard not to agree, that Robert aspired to the throne of Constantinople. The attack on Albania was only the first stage in a war he intended to carry along the Via Egnatia to the very heart of Byzantium.
In 1081–2 Robert built a fleet of ships capable of carrying massive siege towers covered in animal hides, intending to launch a naval assault on Dyrrhachion while Bohemond would advance overland after disembarking at Valona further down the coast. It was summer and the seas should have remained calm, but Anna Komnene reported that God showed favour to the Byzantines by sending a great tempest that scattered and destroyed Robert’s fleet. As the clouds emptied themselves, the towers built on the ships were weighed down by the sodden hides and collapsed on to the deck. The ships were swamped and Robert and a few of his men were lucky to survive, cast up on the shore. Even in the face of such adversity the obstinate Robert Guiscard did not see this as divine judgment, but was determined to renew the attack.31 Robert gathered his remaining forces together and besieged Dyrrhachion, even bringing forward some more massive siege towers that topped the walls. These walls were so solidly built that two chariots could, according to Byzantine writers, pass one another on top – an image that owes more to Homer than to the realities of eleventh-century warfare, from which chariots had long since disappeared. For Dyrrhachion could only be won by treachery and deceit. Eventually, an Amalfitan merchant opened the gates of the city to the invaders.32
Alexios had a clever solution to the problem of how to manage a war with a potent foe at the western extremity of his empire. His fleet lacked the capacity to fight and win so far from home. Byzantine sea power was confined to the Aegean, and Byzantium had sufficient problems on land: Seljuk Turks attacking its eastern borders in Asia Minor, Slavs in the Balkans, not to mention faction fighting within Constantinople itself. The Byzantines preferred diplomacy to conflict, but clearly diplomacy alone would not tame Robert Guiscard. Instead, the diplomacy was directed elsewhere, to Venice, whose merchants lived in dread of conflicts that would make the Adriatic exit impassable. A Norman victory in Albania would enable south Italian fleets to control access to the Adriatic. Venice was always happiest if the power that controlled the western coast of the southern Adriatic did not control the eastern coast as well. So the Venetians agreed to provide naval help against Guiscard’s fleet off Dyrrhachion. They set sail carrying piles of heavy beams studded with nails, and they pounced on enemy ships, punching holes in them. In the end, the Byzantines recovered Dyrrhachion and Robert (facing trouble back home in Italy) was forced to withdraw, though Bohemond continued for a while to wreak havoc in Albania. When Robert returned to the attack he was old and sick, and he died on campaign in 1085, in Kephalonia, in the little port of Fiskardo that still carries his nickname of Guiscard, ‘the wily one’. Although Alexios and his court heard the news with relief, this was by no means the last attempt by the rulers of southern Italy to invade Byzantium through Albania.
Meanwhile, the Venetians sent messengers to Emperor Alexios, and in 1082 he issued a Golden Bull that showered them with gifts, while emphasizing that they were his duli, or subjects. The most precious and controversial of his presents was a grant of the right to trade free of taxation anywhere in the Byzantine Empire, excluding the Black Sea and Cyprus. The emperor wanted to preserve the special role of Constantinople as the link between the Mediterranean, from which it received spices and luxury goods, and the Black Sea, down which merchants brought furs, amber and other northern products. The Venetians were even granted bits and pieces of land by the Golden Horn, including a wharf and their own church (with its own bakery).33 The privilege of 1082 set a gold standard in the Mediterranean; and, whenever the Italian cities negotiated an alliance with a trading partner in need of naval assistance, they had a model to emulate.
There are different views about the extent to which the Byzantine economy came to be dominated by Venetian and other Italian merchants. In the longer term, the presence of the Italians probably stimulated the production of agricultural goods and of cloths for export.34 Clearly, in the years around 1100 the Venetian presence in Byzantium was still very limited. The main destinations of Venetian traders within the Byzantine world were surprisingly close to home: Dyrrhachion, once it was recovered from the Normans; Corinth, to which access could be gained without entering the Aegean, using the ancient port at Lechaion on the Gulf of Corinth. Thence the Venetians carried wine, oil, salt and grain back home to their booming city, where demand for these relatively humble foodstuffs was constantly increasing.35 For most Venetian traders, Constantinople, with its silks and gems and metalwork, lay over the horizon. But they began to think of realizing the full potential of the privileges they had been granted. This was a matter of entitlement, for they still saw themselves as inhabitants of a far-flung fragment of the Eastern Roman Empire, and took pride in their status as imperial subjects: no clearer indication of this can be found than the architecture and decoration of the Basilica of St Mark, which had been rebuilt in the second half of the eleventh century in an overtly Byzantine style, derived from the Basilica of the Apostles in Constantinople. St Mark’s was intended to recall a whole catalogue of eastern connections, for it also proclaimed with pride the link to Alexandria, the patriarchal seat of the saint whose bones it conserved.36
By the end of the eleventh century, then, Pisa and Genoa had taken up arms with increasing vigour to clear the western Mediterranean of Muslim pirates, and had carved out a dominion of their own in Sardinia; meanwhile, the Venetians had won what would become a unique position within the Byzantine Empire. Muslim domination of the Mediterranean could no longer be taken for granted, especially once the armies and navies of the First Crusade began to move.