I
The fall of Acre in 1291 shocked western Europe, which had in fact done little to protect the city in its last decades. Plans to launch new expeditions abounded, and among the greatest enthusiasts was Charles II of Naples, after his release from his Catalan gaol. But this was all talk; he was far too preoccupied with trying to defeat the Aragonese to be able to launch a crusade, nor did he have the resources to do so.1 The Italian merchants diversified their interests to cope with the loss of access to eastern silks and spices through Acre. Venice gradually took the lead in Egypt, while the Genoese concentrated more on bulky goods from the Aegean and the Black Sea, following the establishment of a Genoese colony in Constantinople in 1261. But the Byzantine emperors were wary of the Genoese. They favoured the Venetians as well, though to a lesser degree, so that the Genoese would not assume they could do whatever they wished. Michael VIII and his son Andronikos II confined the Genoese to the high ground north of the Golden Horn, the area known as Pera, or Galata, where a massive Genoese tower still dominates the skyline of northern Istanbul, but they also granted them the right to self-government, and the Genoese colony grew so rapidly that it soon had to be extended. By the mid-fourteenth century the trade revenues of Genoese Pera dwarfed those of Greek Constantinople, by a ratio of about seven to one. These emperors effectively handed control of the Aegean and the Black Sea to the Genoese, and Michael’s navy, consisting of about eighty ships, was dismantled by his son. It was assumed that God would protect Constantinople as a reward for the rejection of all attempts at a union of the holy Orthodox Church with the unholy Catholic one.2
The Genoese generally tolerated a Venetian presence, for war damaged trade and ate up valuable resources. Occasionally, as in 1298, pirate attacks by one side caused a crisis, and the cities did go to war. The battle of Curzola (Korčula) that year pitted about eighty Genoese galleys against more than ninety Venetian ones. The Venetians were on home territory, deep within the Adriatic. But Genoese persistence won the day, and hundreds of Venetians were captured, including (it is said) Marco Polo, who dictated his extraordinary tales of China and the East to a Pisan troubadour with whom he shared a cell in Genoa.3 The real story of the Polos was not simply one of intrepid, or foolhardy, Venetian jewel merchants who set out via Acre for the Far East, accompanied by the young Marco. The rise of the Mongol empire in the thirteenth century led to a reconfiguration of the trans-Asiatic trade routes, and opened a route bringing eastern silks to the shores of the Black Sea, although the sea-lanes through the Indian Ocean and Red Sea continued to bring spices to Alexandria and the Mediterranean from the East Indies. Once they had gained access to the Black Sea in the 1260s, the Genoese and Venetians attempted to tap into this exotic trans-Asia trade. True to form, the Venetians were more interested in the expensive luxury items, while the Genoese concentrated on slaves, grain and dried fruits, local products of the shores of the Black Sea. Good-quality wax was also in high demand, to illuminate churches and palaces across western Europe. The Genoese set up a successful trading base at Caffa in Crimea, while the Venetians operated from Tana, in the Sea of Azov. In Caffa the Genoese collected thousands of slaves, mostly Circassians and Tartars; they sold them for domestic service in Italian cities or to the Mamluks in Egypt, who recruited them into the sultan’s guard. The spectacle of the Genoese supplying the Muslim enemy with its crack troops not surprisingly caused alarm and displeasure at the papal court.
The Genoese despatched Pontic grain far beyond Constantinople, reviving the Black Sea grain traffic that had helped feed ancient Athens. As the Italian cities grew in size, they drew their grain from further and further afield: Morocco, the shores of Bulgaria and Romania, the Crimea, Ukraine. Production costs there were far lower than in northern Italy, so that, even after taking into account the cost of transport, grain from these lands could be put on sale back home at prices no higher than Sicilian or Sardinian imports. Of those too there was still a great need. The Genoese distributed grain from all these sources around the Mediterranean: they and the Catalans supplied Tunis; they ferried grain from Sicily to northern Italy.4 One city where demand was constant was Florence, only now emerging as an economic powerhouse, a centre of cloth-finishing and cloth-production. Although it lies well inland, Florence depended heavily on the Mediterranean for its wool supplies and for its food; it controlled a small territory that could produce enough grain to feed the city for only five months out of twelve. The soil of Tuscany was generally poor, and local grain could not match the quality of the hard wheats that were imported from abroad. One solution was regular loans to their ally the Angevin king of Naples, which gave access to the seemingly limitless grain of Apulia.5
These developments reflected massive changes in the society and economy of the lands surrounding the Mediterranean. By 1280 or 1300, population was rising and grain prices were rising in parallel. Local famines became more frequent and towns had to search ever further afield for the food they needed. The commercial revolution in Europe led to a spurt in urban growth, as employment prospects within towns drew workers in from the countryside. Cities began to dominate the economy of Mediterranean western Europe as never before in history: Valencia, Majorca, Barcelona, Perpignan, Narbonne, Montpellier, Aigues-Mortes, Marseilles, Savona, Genoa, Pisa and Florence, with its widely used and imitated gold florins, to name the major centres in the great arc stretching from the Catalan lands to Tuscany. Aigues-Mortes, rich in salt, whose appearance has changed little since the early fourteenth century, was founded in the 1240s as a commercial gateway to the Mediterranean for the kingdom of France, which had only recently acquired direct control over Languedoc. King Louis IX eyed with concern the flourishing city of Montpellier, a centre of trade, banking and manufacture that lay, as part of a complex feudal arrangement, under the lordship of the king of Aragon. He hoped to divert business to his new port in the salt lagoons, which he also used as a departure point for his disastrous crusade in 1248. In the event, Aigues-Mortes soon became an outport for Montpellier, which avoided French royal control for another century.6 The Venetians had their own distinctive answer to the problem of how to feed the 100,000 inhabitants of their city. They attempted to channel all grain that came into the Upper Adriatic towards the city; the Venetians would have first choice, and then what remained would be redistributed to hungry neighbours such as Ravenna, Ferrara and Rimini. They sought to transform the Adriatic Sea into what came to be called the ‘Venetian Gulf’. The Venetians negotiated hard with Charles of Anjou and his successors to secure access to Apulian wheat, and were even prepared to offer support to Charles I’s campaign against Constantinople, which was supposed to depart in 1282, the year of the Sicilian Vespers.
As well as food, the big round ships of the Genoese and Venetians ferried alum from Asia Minor to the West; the Genoese established enclaves on the edge of the alum-producing lands, first, and briefly, on the coast of Asia Minor, where the Genoese adventurer Benedetto Zaccaria tried to create a ‘kingdom of Asia’ in 1297, and then close by on Chios, which was recaptured by a consortium of Genoese merchant families in 1346 (and was held till 1566). Chios not merely gave access to the alum of Phokaia; it also produced dried fruits and mastic. More important than Chios was Famagusta in Cyprus, which filled the gap left by the fall of Acre. Cyprus lay under the rule of the Lusignan family, of French origin, though the majority of its inhabitants were Byzantine Greeks. Its rulers were often embroiled in faction-fighting, but the dynasty managed to survive for two more centuries, supported by the prosperity Cyprus derived from its intensive trade with neighbouring lands.7 Massive communities of foreign merchants visited and settled: Famagusta was the base for merchants from Venice, Genoa, Barcelona, Ancona, Narbonne, Messina, Montpellier, Marseilles and elsewhere; its ruined Gothic churches still testify to the wealth its merchants accumulated.8
From Cyprus, trade routes extended to another Christian kingdom, Cilician Armenia, on the south-east coast of modern Turkey. Western merchants supplied wheat to Armenia by way of Cyprus, and they used Armenia as a gateway to exotic and arduous trade routes that took them away from the Mediterranean, to the silk markets of Persian Tabriz and beyond. Cyprus enjoyed close links to Beirut, where Syrian Christian merchants acted as agents of businessmen from Ancona and Venice, furnishing them with massive quantities of raw cotton for processing into cloth in Italy and even in Germany, a clear sign that a single economic system was emerging in the Mediterranean, crossing the boundaries between Christendom and Islam. Some of the cotton cloth would eventually be conveyed back to the East to be sold in Egypt and Syria. Trade and politics were fatefully intertwined in the minds of the Lusignan kings. When King Peter I of Cyprus launched an ambitious crusade against Alexandria in 1365, his grand plan included the establishment of Christian hegemony over the ports of southern Anatolia (of which he had already captured a couple) and Syria, but a sustained campaign in Egypt was far beyond his resources; the expedition turned into the unwholesome sack of Alexandria, confirming that what had been proclaimed as a holy war was motivated by material considerations. Soon after his return to Cyprus, King Peter, who knew how to make enemies, was assassinated.9
II
The commercial supremacy of the Italian and Catalan merchants was based on their naval supremacy. The big round sailing ships could cross freely from Christian to Muslim shores only because long, oared galleys patrolled the seas. The galleys were about eight times as long as they were broad, and combined oar and sail power. Under oar, four or six men sat abreast of one another, two or three per oar. As trading vessels, they were best suited to carrying small quantities of high-value goods such as spices, for hold space was very limited. They were fast and manoeuvrable, but they were still liable to be swamped by high seas. As the Flanders route developed, ships bound for the Atlantic were built longer, broader and (most importantly) higher, so the new ‘great galleys’ could face the winds and currents of the Bay of Biscay.10 The round ships included a very few Venetian and Genoese vessels the size of the Roccaforte, built in the 1260s: this was a massive ship of about 500 tons, more than twice the displacement of most round ships.11
Some fleets, notably those sailing from Venice to the Levant or to Flanders, moved in convoy and had armed protection (what the Venetians called the muda system). Even so, rampant piracy by Muslim or Christian corsairs could interrupt traffic for long periods. In 1297 a rebel faction from Genoa, led by a member of the Grimaldi family whose habit of wearing a hood supposedly earned him the nickname ‘the Monk’, seized the rock of Monaco at the extreme west of the Genoese land dominion (in fact, the nameMonoikos originated with Phokaian settlers in antiquity and has nothing to do with a monk, or monaco). The sailors of Monaco made thorough nuisances of themselves for many decades, posing as supporters of the Angevin king of Naples, Robert the Wise, who had become overlord of Genoa in 1318. In 1336 Monegasque pirates seized two galleys returning from Flanders laden with merchandise. The Senate felt obliged to suspend all its Flanders sailings, which did not resume for twenty years. The Grimaldi stayed put, remained a nuisance, and are still rulers of Monaco, though they found slightly more respectable ways to make money than piracy.12
While trade created a successful merchant class, it also enhanced the power of the patrician families. In Venice, the nobility dominated the most profitable trade routes, leaving the commerce in grain, salt and wine to middle-class merchants in their round ships. Defining who qualified as noble was not straightforward, though there were some ancient families, such as the Dandolos, who had stayed at the top of the social ladder for centuries. The question was who was to be allowed to ascend that ladder at a time of growing prosperity, when many new men had acquired great wealth and claimed the right to determine where the galley convoys should sail and with which foreign kings treaties should be made, decisions that (in the early fourteenth century) were made by the aristocratic Senate. The solution that was offered in 1297 was to limit membership of the Great Council, from which the Senate and higher committees were drawn, to those who were already members and their descendants – about 200 families, many of them leading trading families such as the Tiepolos. This ‘closing’, or Serrata, was intended to be more or less final, although, over the years, some families were admitted to noble ranks through the back door.13 The Serrata was thus an opportunity to reaffirm the supremacy of the aristocracy in politics, trade and society.
III
The Catalans too were enjoying their successes at the start of the fourteenth century. The formal end to the War of the Vespers in 1302 reopened the routes linking Sicily, Majorca and Barcelona. Most importantly, the king of Aragon decided to vindicate a claim to Sardinia, which the pope had granted to James II of Aragon in 1297, in exchange, the pope hoped, for Sicily.14 James’s brother Frederick responded aggressively by holding on to Sicily as its independent monarch, and it was only in 1323 that King Alfonso IV launched an invasion of Sardinia. While his motives were primarily dynastic, the Catalan merchant community thought it would gain substantially from the conquest of an island so rich in grain, salt, cheese, leather and – most importantly – silver.15 The would-be conquerors failed to take into account the eternal reluctance of the native Sards to accept outside rule. The Catalans bunkered down in the towns, mainly along the coast (their Catalan-speaking descendants still live in Alghero), and kept the Sards outside the town walls. Meanwhile, the Genoese and Pisans regarded the Catalan invasion as an infringement of their own rights of lordship. The Pisans were in the end allowed to retain estates in southern Sardinia, but Pisa was a spent force – not long before, the city had even considered voluntary submission to James II of Aragon. The Genoese posed a more serious problem. They responded with vicious attacks on Catalan shipping, while the Catalans were just as brutal. The seas around Sardinia became perilous. This was a contested isle – contested between its would-be masters and its ancient inhabitants, contested between one would-be master and another. In the late fourteenth century native resistance culminated in the creation of a dynamic kingdom based at Arborea, in the centre-west of the island; its queen, Eleonora, is much celebrated as a lawgiver.16
Following the accession of the ambitious, pint-sized king known as Peter the Ceremonious (Peter IV) to the throne of Aragon in 1337, the Aragonese court began to develop what might be called an imperial strategy. At the start of his reign he resolved to deal with the problem of his cousin’s behaviour in Majorca. King James III of Majorca gives the impression of being mentally unstable. He deeply resented the insistence of Peter IV that the king of Majorca was a vassal of the king of Aragon, but he came to Barcelona to discuss their fraught relationship. His ship docked by the walls of a seaside palace, and at his insistence a covered bridge was built linking the ship to it; he then tried to lure Peter on board, and the story circulated that he had an insane plan to kidnap the king of Aragon. The Majorcan business community found all this very trying. They wanted and needed to maintain close links to their opposite numbers in Barcelona. It was a relief when the king of Aragon declared James contumacious and seized Majorca in 1343; the Catalan fleet contained 116 ships, including twenty-two galleys.17 James died soon after, attempting to recover his lands. At the end of his long life (he reigned for fifty years) Peter was trying to negotiate a marriage alliance that would return Aragonese Sicily to the fold. His imperial dream began to turn into reality: at last, a Catalan-Aragonese ‘empire’ was coming into existence, from which the Catalan merchants hoped to make big profits. In 1380 Peter explained the importance of these trans-Mediterranean connections while pondering the need to retain control of the war-torn island of Sardinia:
If Sardinia is lost, it will follow that Majorca will also be lost, because the food that Majorca is accustomed to receiving from Sicily and Sardinia will stop arriving, and as a result the land will become depopulated and will be lost.18
A network was emerging that would tie together Sicily, Sardinia, Majorca and Catalonia, in which the Italian islands regularly provisioned Majorca and Barcelona with vital food supplies.
Maintaining the fleet was a headache. During the thirteenth century, a large arsenal was built in Barcelona, the shell of which is now the Maritime Museum. Here the shipwrights worked under cover, and large iron rings were suspended from the arches, enabling them to use block and tackle to raise the hull. But the cost of building an arsenal to house twenty-five galleys was estimated by a royal counsellor as 2,000 gold ounces, which was more than the kings of Aragon could afford. This was before taking into account the cost of maintaining ships in good order and of supplying the sailors with food, armaments and other equipment. The diet of sailors aboard Catalan galleys was a monotonous one of hard biscuit, salted meat, cheese, beans, oil and wine, as well as chickpeas and broad beans; the main difference from the diet of Genoese, Venetian and Neapolitan sailors was the balance of elements, with the Venetians receiving rather less biscuit and cheese and much more salted meat, while the Neapolitan fleet was awash with free wine (does this explain its poor performance in battle?).19 With the help of garlic, onions and spices it was possible to mix together a reasonably tasty topping for the biscuit, and it was understood that garlic and onions protected against diseases such as scurvy. Biscuit was exactly that – biscoctus, ‘twice-cooked’, so that it was hard but light, easily preserved and nutritious.20 The lack of salted fish seems odd. Salted fish was an important part of the diet in Barcelona; there were plenty of local anchovies and fish was also brought from the Atlantic, especially in Lent, when consumption of meat was forbidden to Christians. On the other hand, there was no reason for the crown to pay for fish when an abundance was available underneath the ship’s keel. Salted foods would increase demand for water, which was a constant problem. Each man would need at least eight litres a day, especially when rowing in hot weather. Ships could carry over 5,000 litres of water, which spoiled easily and had to be purified and flavoured with vinegar. But supplies needed to be replenished, and, as in antiquity, frequent landfalls were the solution.21 Mastering these supply problems was one of the chores the admiral had to perform. He was much more than a naval commander.
Some areas of the western Mediterranean were off-limits. Around 1340, command of the Straits of Gibraltar was disputed between the Genoese, the Catalans and the Marinids of Morocco.22 The problem was compounded by fears of a Moroccan invasion of southern Spain, a reprise of the invasions from Morocco that had posed such a threat to the Christian kingdoms of Iberia in the eleventh and twelfth centuries. Fortunately for the Christian powers, the Muslim kings of Granada were generally as anxious to avoid Marinid domination as were the Christians, but in the late 1330s they allied themselves with the Moroccans, greatly endangering passage through the Straits. Not for the first time, the king of Castile attempted to win control of the Straits by besieging Gibraltar, but was himself besieged by Muslim forces and reluctantly pulled back.23 In 1340 the Castilian fleet was defeated by a renascent Moroccan fleet off Gibraltar, losing thirty-two warships. The shock of the defeat of fellow-Christians prompted the Aragonese to make peace with the Castilians, with whom they had long been squabbling. The king of Aragon hoped to equip at least sixty galleys, but he had to beg his parliaments or Corts for funds; the Valencian Corts offered twenty galleys and even the quarrelsone king of Majorca offered fifteen. Meanwhile, the Moroccans were free to enter Spain, but the Castilians, this time with Portuguese help, crushed a Moroccan army at the battle of Salado in southern Spain, in October 1340. The captured Marinid battle-standards can still be seen in the treasury of Toledo Cathedral. The victory did not end the war, however, and squadrons of ten or twenty galleys were repeatedly sent to the Straits. This was rather little by comparison with the Moroccans, who had somehow managed to float 250 ships, including sixty galleys, in 1340.24 The war came to an end in 1344 when King Alfonso XI of Castile marched into Algeciras, with the result that a Christian king held the northern side of the Straits, even though Gibraltar next door remained unconquered.25
Muslim naval activity revived in the eastern Mediterranean, too. To some degree this was in response to Christian successes in the waters off Turkey. In 1310 the Knights Hospitallers, displaced from Acre nearly two decades earlier, set out from their current base in Cyprus and seized Rhodes, which for several years had been the target of Turkish raids and lay under nominal Byzantine suzerainty.26 The Hospitallers now made Rhodes their base, building a large fleet and engaging actively in piracy. They also negotiated endlessly with western rulers – the kings of France, Naples and other lands – in the hope of securing the help of a massive crusading fleet. But the target of this fleet was no longer just the Holy Land and the Mamluk state in Egypt and Syria. Increasingly, attention turned to the Turks, whose arrival on the shores of Asia Minor changed the rules of the game: the Turks had broken through the long-established Byzantine cordon that confined them to the Anatolian plateau, and, just as the Hospitallers adapted to the sea, so did the Turks, with the help of Greek manpower drawn from the imperial navy. Michael VIII had disbanded the Byzantine fleet in 1284 to save money, thinking that the Italian navies would protect him and that he was now safe from Charles of Anjou, who was tied up fighting the rebels in Sicily. A number of small Turkish principalities emerged along the coast of Asia Minor, most importantly the emirate of Aydın, which bordered the Aegean. Fortunately for the Christians, these Turkish emirates spent as much time quarrelling among themselves as they spent raiding Christian lands. Even so, Aydın was becoming a severe nuisance to its Christian neighbours by 1318, when its emir, Umur Pasha, entered into an alliance with Catalan mercenaries who had gained control of Athens a few years earlier and placed themselves under the nominal authority of the Aragonese king of Sicily.27 A curious alliance came into being between these Catalans and the Turks of Aydın, to the intense irritation of the Venetians – the island of Santorini, which was the feudal possession of a Venetian nobleman, was attacked twice, and the Venetians feared that the allies would next threaten Crete.28
The solution to the Turkish threat seemed to lie in a properly equipped, well-funded naval crusade in which the Hospitallers, the Italian navies, the Angevins of Naples and the French would work together to establish complete mastery over the Aegean. This was compromised by the ambitions of the Venetians and the Genoese, whose primary concern was the protection of their trade routes and of the lordships they possessed in the region. A ‘Holy League’ of western navies, to which Venice eventually adhered, temporarily cleared the Aegean of pirates in 1334.29 But the problem did not go away and the pope eagerly promoted another crusade which managed to seize Smyrna from Umur Pasha in 1344. The Smyrna crusade was only superficially a success. The Christians had succeeded in collecting a fleet of only about thirty galleys: western enthusiasm had been more theoretical than real.30 Having occupied the citadel, which, remarkably, they held until the great Timur captured it in 1402, the crusaders failed to conquer the hinterland, and a valuable trading centre was transformed into a beleaguered garrison town. The truth was that the crusaders were under-resourced. Rulers such as Robert the Wise, the Angevin king of Naples, had long been raising crusade taxes and even equipping crusade fleets, which then magically turned in the other direction, being put to use in the king’s wars against the Genoese Ghibellines or the Aragonese of Sicily.
The instability of this region was enhanced by the strengthening of the Genoese presence, following the conquest of Chios by a Genoese joint-stock company in 1346; the island was shared out among the Genoese investors and administered by the company orMahona. Their main sources of profit were alum, mastic and dried fruits, and they were not keen on further adventurism by western fleets; even the Hospitallers gradually lost their crusading fervour and capitalized on the superb position of Rhodes on the trade routes. Just to the east, the defeat of Aydın left a power vacuum in Anatolia that was rapidly filled by a parvenu group of Turks tucked away in the north-west. The Osmanlı, or Ottoman, Turks were enthusiasts for the holy jihad against Byzantium (they conquered Nikaia in 1331), but, like all the Turks of this period, they were also willing to offer their services to Christian rulers in need of mercenaries. So it was that the Greek emperor John VI Kantakouzenos allowed them to settle on the European side of the Dardanelles, at Gallipoli, their first Balkan bridgehead.
The ascendancy of the Christian fleets thus did not remain unchallenged, even as late as the middle of the fourteenth century. The Catalans struggled to mobilize fleets of the size they would need if Muslim contenders for domination of the Straits of Gibraltar were to be held in check. Even so, the alliance of the king of Aragon with the Catalan merchants had created a well-integrated network capable of supplying the western Mediterranean lands with both necessities and luxuries. Despite minor interruptions and many moments of foreboding, peace was maintained between Venice and Genoa from 1299 to 1350. Genoese admirals in search of a good war found other clients. They had already served Frederick II in the thirteenth century; by 1300 they were teaching the Castilians how to mobilize fleets in the Mediterranean and the Atlantic, and they laid the foundations of the Portuguese fleet. But they were incapable of resisting another murderous invader which returned to the Mediterranean after seven or eight hundred years.
IV
The Black Death has sometimes been seen as a natural check on the excessively rapid expansion of the economy of Europe and the Mediterranean lands in the high Middle Ages: population grew so fast that intolerable pressure was placed on the land, forcing up grain prices, and forcing out the production of up-market foodstuffs such as eggs and chickens. Marginal lands that produced poor yields were brought into cultivation; every stalk of grain counted. Famines occurred more and more often, especially in highly urbanized areas such as Tuscany, though the shortages were far worse in northern Europe, especially the Great Famine of 1315 onwards, which had little effect south of the Alps.31 Yet a more optimistic picture can also be painted. By 1340, population had peaked, at least in western Europe and Byzantium. Between 1329 and 1343 the urban population of Majorca shrank by 23 per cent, and similar figures can be produced for towns in Provence and elsewhere.32 Greater specialization stimulated trade networks, bringing vital necessities to the cities in return for commercial products. As early as 1280, the Pisans abandoned indifferent grain lands in the mouth of the Arno to sheep; they traded leather, meat, cheese and wool for grain from overseas, for there is hardly a part of a sheep that cannot be put to good use. The little Tuscan town of San Gimignano, specializing in commercial crops such as saffron and wine, was able to support a population denser than at any time before the twentieth century. Its commercial network extended into the Mediterranean, where, as has been seen, its merchants traded local saffron as far east as Aleppo. This trend to ‘commercialization’, visible also in northern Europe, anticipated many of the developments that followed the Black Death.
Whether or not the economy was emerging from a crisis around 1340, the Black Death knocked Europe and the Islamic world off balance. The death of up to half of the population of the lands around the Mediterranean was bound to have dramatic effects on the social, economic, religious and political life of the peoples of the Mediterranean. It was a psychological shock as much as an economic one.33 Yet the plague did not induce a long Dark Age comparable to the bleak periods that marked the end of the Bronze Age and the collapse of Roman unity in the Mediterranean. The coming of the plague had accentuated the troubles of the late Roman Empire and had delayed recovery, but it was not the sole cause of the massive recession that occurred. But the plague of the fourteenth century was the main agent in transformations within the Mediterranean and the lands beyond that led to the creation of a new order.
The Genoese were unwittingly responsible for the arrival of the Black Death in the Mediterranean. Bubonic plague was brought to their trading base at Caffa in the Crimea not by merchants but by Mongol armies, who besieged Caffa in 1347.34 Several Italian ships managed to flee from the war in the Crimea; their route took them to Constantinople, but, even if they were not infected, there were stowaways on board who were – black rats, who relished the grain that filled the holds of the Black Sea fleets, and who carried plague fleas, which also found a home in bales of cloth in the cargo hold. By September 1347 bubonic plague was raging in the Byzantine capital, and as its citizens began to flee they carried the infection with them. A slave ship set out for Alexandria from the Black Sea, carrying over 300 people; according to the Arab historian al-Maqrizi only forty-five were still alive when the ship reached Egypt, and all soon died.35 It is no surprise that Alexandria became a hub from which bubonic plague spread across the eastern Mediterranean, infecting Gaza in spring 1348. The first port in the western Mediterranean to be infected was Messina. A Sicilian chronicler placed the blame for the arrival of the disease on twelve Genoese galleys fleeing from the East, which arrived in October 1347. The inhabitants of Messina fled all over their island, carrying the germs with them, and the infection crossed the Straits to Reggio as well, reaching Naples by May 1348.36 By spring 1348 the Black Death had gained a firm grip on Majorca, and from there it spread along the classic trade routes across the Catalan world, towards Perpignan, Barcelona and Valencia, and down into the Muslim kingdom of Granada, reaching Almería by May 1348.37 In the same month, the citizens of Barcelona processed with their relics and statues beseeching divine intercession to end the plague; such processions naturally did more to spread the disease than to end it.38 Tunis was infected in April 1348, most likely from Sicily, while a further source of infection lay in the Catalan ships travelling down to the ports of Morocco and Algeria from Majorca.39 The urban boom of the twelfth to fourteenth century meant that the western shores of the Mediterranean were just as susceptible to plague as the teeming cities of the Middle East. Everywhere, it carried away astonishing numbers of people: a third to a half of the population, possibly as much as 60 or 70 per cent in some parts of the western Mediterranean, such as Catalonia.40 As it spread it intensified, taking on a pneumonic form that could kill within hours of breath-borne infection.
The loss of up to half of the population of Europe and the Mediterranean had dramatic effects on economic relationships. Demand for foodstuffs contracted greatly, even though in the immediate aftermath of the plague many went hungry as fields in Sicily and elsewhere were left uncultivated, since the labour force was dead or dispersed. The population of the great trading cities collapsed, for the disease spread easily down the alleyways and canals of Genoa, Venice and other trading towns.41 The Black Death was not a single occurrence: recurrent bouts of plague in the late fourteenth century pushed the overall population down again just as it was poised to recover; new plagues hit the young particularly hard, for the older generations had lived through plague years and had built up some resistance. In the century after the revolt of the Vespers Sicily may have lost 60 per cent of its population, falling from 850,000 to 350,000 inhabitants; two events of capital importance were the plague of 1347 and a further plague that erupted on the island in 1366.42 Nothing could be the same again after the devastations and horror of the Black Death. Yet the plague, though it had transformed the Mediterranean, had not produced a lasting recession. Old institutions such as the merchant fonduk remained in place; the Genoese, Venetians and Catalans continued to snipe at one another; Christians drew up elaborate plans for crusades against the Mamluks, whose power remained for the moment firm. Underneath all this, there were subtle but important changes in the way that the old networks operated, and the first signs emerged that a rival trading zone was emerging beyond the Straits of Gibraltar. Out of this recovery the Fourth Mediterranean was born at the end of the fourteenth century.