The collapse of empires in the central and eastern Mediterranean was matched in the far west by the disintegration of Almohad power. The caliphs lost their enthusiasm for the extremist doctrines of Almohadism, and were accused of betraying the principles of their movement. Following military defeat at the hands of Christian kings of Spain at Las Navas de Tolosa in 1212 the caliph is said to have been strangled by one of his slaves. The Almohad territories in Spain and Tunisia fell into the hands of a new generation of local kings who only paid lip-service to Almohadism. The Hafsid rulers who gained control of Tunis proclaimed themselves successors to the Almohad caliphate, though more as a way of asserting their legitimacy than out of deep commitment to Almohad beliefs. The Berber Marinids broke Almohad power in Morocco in the mid-thirteenth century, after a long struggle. At the same time the Nasrid dynasty established itself in Granada, where it would last until 1492; it adhered strictly to Sunni Islam, not Almohadism. The thirteenth century also saw a major transformation in the Christian western Mediterranean: Pisa’s rivalry with Genoa for mastery over the waters around Corsica and Sardinia culminated in Pisan defeat at the battle of Meloria and the loss of iron-rich Elba in 1284.1 Although the Pisans did not yet lose control of the large areas of Sardinia they ruled, and even recovered Elba, a new rival to both Pisa and Genoa emerged, not a maritime republic but a group of cities led by Barcelona and backed by the growing power of the king of Aragon and count of Catalonia, James I ‘the Conqueror’.
The Mediterranean vocation of the kings of Aragon was not obvious before the thirteenth century. Lords of a small, mountainous kingdom that only toppled the Muslim emirate of Saragossa in 1118, they dissipated much of their energy in attempts to interfere in Christian Castile and Navarre. But in 1134 King Alfonso ‘the Battler’ of Aragon died, having failed to produce an heir; his brother, a monk, was forced out of his convent in order to breed. A daughter was born who eventually married the count of Barcelona. As a result, the county of Barcelona and the kingdom of Aragon remained joined together from the middle of the twelfth century onwards, but the union was a personal one, embodied in the ruler, who remained a count (notionally under the overlordship of the king of France) in Catalonia, and a king only in highland Aragon. Moreover, the count of Barcelona was distracted by regional conflicts within Catalonia, where he was at best the first among equals. The count’s horizon did extend further than Catalonia, though, since he had a number of allies and vassals across the Pyrenees in Languedoc and Roussillon. In 1209 the involvement in southern French affairs of the count-king of Aragon-Catalonia (as he is often called) dragged him into the great crusade preached by the papacy against the Cathar heretics, the Albigensian Crusade. Although several of his southern French vassals were accused of protecting the heretics, or even being heretics themselves, the count-king, Peter II, placed his obligations as overlord first and came to their aid against the northern French army of invasion led by Simon de Montfort. Peter was killed in battle at Muret near Toulouse in 1213, leaving a young heir, James, in Montpellier; these events further destabilized Catalonia.2
Barcelona was still, in the days of Benjamin of Tudela, ‘a small city and beautiful’, though he insists that around 1160 it was visited by merchants from Italy and all over the Mediterranean.3 This was a low point in the city’s fortunes, however, for if there was one Spanish city on the shores of the Mediterranean that had seemed, in the eleventh century, to be on the verge of a boom it was Christian Barcelona.4 Under its energetic and warlike counts, who enjoyed making threats against and raiding the Muslim kingdoms dispersed through southern Spain, vast amounts of tribute were received, pumping gold into the economy and encouraging prosperous businessmen like Ricart Guillem to invest in vineyards, orchards and other properties on the western edge of Barcelona (close to the modern Ramblas). Ricart, the son of a castellan, was a rising star in Barcelona: he fought against the troublesome mercenary El Cid in 1090 and travelled to Muslim Saragossa to trade silver for gold. But this first flowering of Barcelona was brief and was followed by a long winter; tribute payments dried up at the end of the eleventh century after the Almoravids established themselves in southern Spain.5 Then, with the rise of Genoa and Pisa, Barcelona was sidelined, because it lay a little way from the routes Italian ships took when bound for such desirable havens as Ceuta and Bougie: they preferred to descend past Majorca and Ibiza and make contact with the Iberian coast at Denia, on its spur a little to the south of Valencia. Barcelona did not have a fine port, for what seems today such an excellent harbour is modern. The Catalans still had to rely on the Genoese navy when their army attacked Tortosa in 1148. Yet the Catalans began to build their own small fleets, setting up a shipyard by the Regomir Gate in Barcelona, the southern portal of the city, where the road running down from the cathedral debouched on the beach (this is now well within the city, in the southern reaches of the ‘Gothic Quarter’).6 Barcelona was also a capital city, in which the count-king’s palace dominated its north-eastern quarter. For, although Barcelona developed a well-regulated system of government, it was never a free republic, and the city fathers lacked the freedom of manoeuvre the Pisans and Genoese possessed.7 But that was one of the reasons for Barcelona’s success. In the thirteenth century, the interests of its patricians and of the count-king increasingly converged. They all began to see the benefits of overseas trade and of naval campaigns right across the Mediterranean.
During the long minority of James I, absent in his mother’s city of Montpellier, the great Catalan lords squabbled among themselves; even so, royal rights were not fatally undermined, for James’s supporters included grandees such as the count of Roussillon, who saw that the defence of royal authority would bolster his own position. By the 1220s the young king was keen to establish his credentials as a crusading hero. He revived long-standing schemes for the conquest of Muslim Majorca, briefly held by his ancestor Ramon Berenguer III in 1114, thanks to Pisan naval support. On this occasion, though, he proposed to attack Majorca using a fleet composed of his own subjects’ ships. Indeed, the Genoese and Pisans were firmly ensconced in Majorca, where they had trading stations, so they were unsympathetic to James’s ambitions.8 The king began by consulting his subjects at a great banquet in Tarragona, offered to him by a prominent shipowner, Pere Martell, who acclaimed the enterprise as a just and profitable one:
So please you, we hold it right that you conquer that island for two reasons: the first, that you and we will thereby increase in power; the other, that those who hear of the conquest will think it a marvel that you can take land and a kingdom in the sea where God pleased to put it.9
From that moment, it was clear that the interests of the king and the merchants coincided.
As well as Catalan ships, James could call on the resources of Marseilles, for the counts of Provence were members of a cadet branch of the house of Barcelona. In May 1229 he gathered together 150 large ships, besides a great many smaller ones. James asserted that ‘all the sea seemed white with sails, so large a fleet was it’.10 After a troublesome crossing the Catalans and their allies landed, and by the end of the year they had captured the capital city, Madina Mayurqa (known to the Catalans as Ciutat de Mallorca, the modern Palma). The Catalan cities, as well as Marseilles and Montpellier, were rewarded for their help by the award of urban properties and lands outside the city walls. Aware of Genoese and Pisan sensitivities, the king bestowed trading privileges on the Italian merchants in Majorca, even though they had opposed his great enterprise. These acts laid the foundation for the commercial expansion of Ciutat de Mallorca. However, it took many more months to quell the rest of the island. In 1231 James scared Minorca into surrender by a bluff: he gathered his troops in eastern Majorca, within sight of Minorca, and at nightfall each soldier was given two torches, so that when the Muslims of Minorca saw the flares in the distance they were convinced a massive army was ready to descend on them, and sent a message of submission. They paid an annual tribute in return for a guarantee of the right to govern themselves and to practise Islam.11 Ibiza was captured in 1235 by a private expedition sanctioned by the king but organized by the archbishop of Tarragona.
As the conquest of Ibiza suggests, James took little direct interest in the affairs of these islands. He happily placed the government of Majorca in the hands of an Iberian prince, Pedro of Portugal, in exchange for strategically valuable territories in the Pyrenees to which Pedro had a claim. James was still looking landward more than seaward. Yet the result of his Majorcan campaign was that the Balearic islands had suddenly become a forward position for Christian navies, and James celebrated his victory by recording his deeds in an autobiography, the first such work to survive from the hand of a medieval king. It was written in Catalan, a language merchants and conquerors now carried across the sea and down the coast of Spain to Majorca, and then, when James conquered Valencia in 1238, into yet another new Christian dominion. At the end of his life, with two surviving sons, he thought it right to reward the elder one, Peter, with Aragon, Catalonia and Valencia, but created an enlarged kingdom of Majorca for his younger son, James. This new kingdom, which lasted from 1276 to 1343, included valuable lands James held on the French side of the Pyrenees: Roussillon, Cerdagne and Montpellier, an important centre of trade linking the Mediterranean to northern France. Intentionally or otherwise, he had created a kingdom that would live from the sea.
One problem with his conquests was what to do with the Muslim population. James saw the Muslims as an economic asset. In Majorca many remained on the land, subject to Christian overlords. The Muslim community slowly seeped away, some emigrating, others converting. This did not leave the land empty: Christians migrated across the sea, whether from Catalonia or Provence, and the character of the island population changed quickly, so that by 1300 the Muslims were a beleaguered minority.12 In Valencia, on the other hand, the king tried to present himself as a Christian king over a Muslim kingdom: although the core of Valencia City was depopulated of Muslims, a flourishing Muslim suburb developed, and across the old Muslim kingdom of Valencia Muslim communities were guaranteed the right to practise their laws and religion, and even (as also happened in Minorca) to ban Christians and Jews from settling in their small towns and villages. These were important centres of production, often specializing in those crops and crafts that the Arabs had brought westwards in the early days of the Islamic conquests: ceramics, grain (including rice), dried fruits and fine cloths were all available, and brought the king and noble landlords valuable income through taxes on trade, overland or across the Mediterranean.13 The surrender agreements that were offered to the Muslims sometimes barely indicated that they had been defeated; they read almost like treaties between equals.14 But that seemed a good way to secure stability, at least until the Valencian Muslims rebelled, and tougher conditions were imposed in the 1260s. Royal tolerance was real, but conditional and fragile.
James saw special potential in the Jews, even though the large Jewish community in Barcelona was not greatly interested in maritime trade (or, contrary to facile stereotypes, in moneylending).15 He invited Jews from Catalonia, Provence and North Africa to settle in Majorca. He had his eye on one particular Jew from Sijilmasa, the town on the northern edge of the Sahara where many of the caravans bringing gold from the bend of the Niger arrived. This was Solomon ben Ammar, who was active in trade and finance around 1240, and acquired property in Ciutat de Mallorca. Such a figure could penetrate with ease into the markets of North Africa, making Majorca into a bridge between Catalonia and the Islamic Mediterranean. Like many of the Jews in Spain itself, he had the advantage of fluency in Arabic. It is no coincidence, then, that in the next century Jews and converts from Judaism based in Majorca set up cartographic studios that exploited exact geographical knowledge from both Muslim and Christian sources, and produced the famous portolan charts that still astonish with their fine detail as they trace the coastlines of the Mediterranean and the seas beyond.16
Within Spain, the encounter between the three Abrahamic faiths took on various guises. In Toledo, deep within Castile, King Alfonso X sponsored translations of Arabic texts (including Greek works put into Arabic), using Jewish intermediaries. By the shores of the Mediterranean such activities were more limited. The uppermost questions in the mind of James I of Aragon were a practical one: how to maintain control over a potentially restive Muslim population in Valencia and other lands he ruled; and a religious one: whether and how to offer his Jewish and Muslim subjects the opportunity to convert to Christianity. Since he benefited enormously from special taxes imposed on these communities he faced the same dilemma as the early Muslim conquerors of the southern Mediterranean littoral: too many conversions would erode his tax base. So, when he insisted that his Jewish subjects must attend synagogue to listen to sermons delivered by missionary friars, he was secretly glad that they preferred to pay him a special tax so that they would be exempted from this demand. Still, he made a public show of supporting the friars. Ramon de Penyafort, General of the Dominican Order, gave high priority to missions among the Catalan Jews and to the Muslims of North Africa. One of his achievements was the creation of language schools where missionaries could learn Arabic and Hebrew to the very highest standard and study the Talmud and the hadith, so they could argue with rabbis and imams on their adversaries’ terms.17 In 1263, King James acted as host to a public disputation in Barcelona, where the eminent rabbi Nahmanides, from Girona, and Paul the Christian, a convert from Judaism, argued furiously over whether the Messiah had come; each side claimed victory, but Nahmanides knew that he was now a marked man and would have to leave Catalonia. Fleeing to Acre, he lost his seal-ring on the beach. It has now been found and is displayed in the Israel Museum in Jerusalem.18
Something of the quality of day-to-day encounters between people of different faiths can be gathered from a report of a second, more modest, disputation between a Jew and a prominent Genoese merchant, Ingheto Contardo, that took place in the Genoese warehouse in Majorca in 1286. A local rabbi used to come to the Genoese loggia to spar with his Genoese acquaintance. Contardo treated the rabbi not as an enemy but as a friend in need of enlightenment and salvation. He said that if he found a Jew freezing in the cold, he would happily take down a wooden cross, smash it into fragments and burn it to provide warmth.19 The Jew taunted Contardo with the question: why, if the Messiah has come, is the world at war, and why are you Genoese fighting the Pisans so bitterly? These years of bitter conflict also provide a setting in which to try to understand the career of a charismatic kabbalist who travelled back and forth across the Mediterranean and who knew something about Christian and Muslim mysticism: Abraham ben Samuel Abulafia, born in Saragossa in the Hebrew year 5000 (1239–40).20 Abulafia was preoccupied by the coming of the End of Days – the theme of a Messiah who would declare himself in the presence of the pope had been mentioned in the Barcelona disputation of 1263.21 He travelled the Mediterranean from end to end. Setting out from southern Italy, he attempted to penetrate beyond Acre in 1260, but his way through the Holy Land to the legendary river Sambatyon where dwelled the Twelve Lost Tribes of Israel was barred by fighting between Franks, Muslims and Mongols. Abulafia returned to Barcelona, but restlessly set out again in the 1270s, teaching his doctrines at Patras and Thebes in Greece, arousing the ire of the Jews of Trani in southern Italy, and heading for the papal court where he planned to reveal his Messianic mission, writing visionary books all the while. In his writings he developed a distinctive, ecstatic kabbalistic system, characterized by his belief that the letters of the Hebrew alphabet could be used, in elaborate combinations, to provide a spiritual pathway to God. He was convinced he could show how the soul, immersed in contemplation of God, would leave its material presence and witness God’s ineffable glory. Fortunately for him, the pope died a few days before his proposed audience, and (after a month in prison, where he succeeded only in puzzling his Franciscan captors) he headed back to southern Italy and Sicily, surrounded by his devoted followers; his last appearance was on the island of Comino, between Malta and Gozo, in 1291, a violent time to be living in those waters.
Abulafia’s career illustrates how radical religious ideas were spread by travel across the Mediterranean, sometimes by the innovator himself, sometimes by his followers. His career also shows how, among mystics, ideas of how to approach God were shared and exchanged between adherents of all the revealed religions. One prolific Catalan author and missionary, Ramon Llull (1232–1316), attempted to harness together the common beliefs of Jews, Christians and Muslims, his own mystical theories, and Trinitarian theology, and produced a system or ‘Art’ that he carried across the Mediterranean on travels as ambitious as those of Abraham Abulafia. Llull hailed from the Majorcan branch of a respectable Barcelona family; in the new society of Majorca he prospered as a royal courtier but, he insisted, he led a life of sin and debauchery; a mystical experience on Mount Randa in Majorca in 1274 convinced him that he must turn his talents to the conversion of unbelievers.22 He attempted to learn Arabic and Hebrew, and established a language school for missionaries at Miramar in the Majorcan mountains. He composed hundreds of books and visited North Africa several times (only to be expelled for denouncing the Prophet), but there is no evidence he ever converted anyone. Perhaps his ‘Art’ was too complicated for anyone but a small coterie of followers. One way of explaining the ‘Art’ is to see it as an attempt to categorize everything that exists and to understand the relationship between each of the categories. Thus he defined nine ‘absolutes’ (though the number varied in his works), including Goodness, Greatness, Power and Wisdom, and nine ‘relatives’, such as Beginning, Middle and End. The profusion of codes, diagrams and symbols makes some of his books impenetrable at first sight, though he also wrote novellas on the theme of conversion aimed at a more popular audience.23
Llull was unusual among Christian missionaries in insisting that Jews, Christians and Muslims worshipped the same God, and he set his face against the growing trend to see in the rivals of Christianity adherents of Satan. In his Book of the Gentile and the Three Wise Men he offered a generally fair and well-informed account of the beliefs of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, and allowed a Jewish interlocutor to set out the proofs for the existence of God. His book argued that ‘just as we have One God, One creator, One Lord, we should also have one faith, one religion, one sect, one manner of loving and honouring God, and we should love and help one another’.24 He attempted to put into practice what he preached. He wrote a short handbook for merchants visiting Alexandria and other Muslim lands, setting out how they should engage in discussion with the inhabitants about the relative merits of Christianity and Islam. But they were much more interested in engaging in discussion about pepper prices; they knew, too, that any criticism of Islam could lead to arrest and deportation or even execution. Llull’s first attempt to cross from Genoa to Africa in 1293 failed because even he lost courage. He had already loaded his books and other effects on the ship when he was paralysed by fear and refused to sail, scandalizing those he had been impressing with his fine words. Soon after, though, he did set out for Tunis, and there he announced to the Muslims that he was ready to convert to their faith if they could convince him of its truth – a ploy to draw them into debate. His verbal battles brought him to the sultan’s attention, and he was placed on board a Genoese ship and sternly ordered never to return, under penalty of death. Such threats to missionaries often made them dream of martyrdom.25 After carrying his teachings to Naples and Cyprus he returned to North Africa in 1307, this time to Bougie, standing up in the marketplace to denounce Islam. When he was arrested he told the authorities: ‘the true servant of Christ who has experienced the truth of the Catholic faith should not fear the danger of physical death when he can gain the grace of spiritual life for the souls of unbelievers’. Ramon Llull had, however, charmed the Genoese and Catalan merchants, who possessed some influence at court and ensured that he was not executed. He returned to Tunis in 1314, at a time when the sultan was playing a time-honoured game: to strengthen his hand against his rivals he sought the support of the Catalans, and let whispers circulate that he was interested in converting to Christianity. Llull was therefore welcome, at last, but he was an old man, and he probably died on board a ship returning to Majorca in spring 1316.26
The sultan was more interested in mercenaries than in missionaries. Catalan militias helped sustain the rulers of the Maghrib, but the kings of Aragon valued their presence too: they provided a guarantee that the North African sultans would not become sucked into the bitter rivalries that, as will be seen, convulsed the Christian monarchies of the western Mediterranean in the late thirteenth and early fourteenth centuries. Some mercenaries, such as Henry, prince of Castile, were adventurers who had failed to secure lands in Europe.27 They were not a new phenomenon. In the late eleventh century Pope Gregory VII had written appeasing letters to North African emirs, in the hope of providing for the religious needs of Christian soldiers in Muslim armies. In Spain, Christians joined Muslim armies and Muslims joined Christian ones. By 1300, however, the mercenaries formed part of a wider strategy that made areas of North Africa into virtual protectorates of Aragon-Catalonia.
Another area of Catalan expertise was sailing the sea. By the end of the thirteenth century Catalan ships had a good reputation for safety and reliability; if a merchant was in search of a ship in, say, Palermo on which to load his goods, he knew he would do well to choose a Catalan vessel, such as the substantial Sanctus Franciscus, owned by Mateu Oliverdar, which was there during 1298.28 Whereas the Genoese liked to divide up the ownership of their boats, the Catalans often owned a large ship outright. They rented out space to Tuscan wheat merchants or slave dealers, and sought out rich merchants who might be willing to lease all or part of the ship.29 The shipowners and merchants of Barcelona and Majorca inveigled themselves into the places where the Italians had long been dominant. In the 1270s, the middle-class widow Maria de Malla, from Barcelona, was trading with Constantinople and the Aegean, sending out her sons to bring back mastic (much valued as chewing-gum); she exported fine cloths to the East, including linens from Châlons in northern France. The great speciality of the de Malla family was the trade in furs, including those of wolves and foxes.30 The Catalans were granted the right to establish fonduks governed by their own consuls in Tunis, Bougie and other North African towns. There were big profits to be made from the overseas consulates. James I was outraged when he discovered in 1259 how low was the rent paid to him by the Catalan consul in Tunis. He promptly tripled it.31 Another focus of Catalan penetration was Alexandria; in the 1290s the de Mallas were seeking linseed and pepper there. In the fourteenth century, King James II of Aragon tried to persuade the sultan of Egypt to grant him protective authority over some of the Christian holy places in Palestine, and the sultan promised him relics of Christ’s Passion if he would send ‘large ships containing plenty of goods’.32 The papacy, with the outward support of the king of Aragon, attempted to ban the lively trade of the Catalans and Italians in Egypt; those who traded with the Muslim enemy were to be excommunicated. But the king ensured that two Catalan abbots were to hand who could absolve merchants trading with Egypt, subject to payment of a swingeing fine. These fines developed into a tax on trade, and produced handsome revenues: in 1302 fines on trade with Alexandria accounted for nearly half the king’s recorded revenues from Catalonia. Far from suppressing the trade, the Aragonese kings became complicit in it.33
Naturally the Catalans wanted to challenge the Italian monopoly over the spice trade to the East. Yet their real strength lay in the network they created in the western Mediterranean. Catalans, Pisans and Genoese jostled in the streets of the spacious foreign quarter of Tunis, a concessionary area full of fonduks, taverns and churches. Access to the ports of North Africa meant access to the gold-bearing routes across the Sahara; into these lands, the Catalans brought linen and woollen cloths from Flanders and northern France and, as their own textile industry expanded after 1300, fine cloths from Barcelona and Lleida. They brought salt too, which was plentiful in Catalan Ibiza, and in southern Sardinia and western Sicily, but was in short supply in the deserts to the south, and was sometimes used there as a currency in its own right. As thirteenth-century Barcelona began to boom, they ensured that there were sufficient food supplies for a growing city. Sicily early became the focus of their trade in wheat, carried in big, round, bulky ships, and they were so successful that as early as the 1260s they began to supply other parts of the Mediterranean with Sicilian wheat: Tunis, which had never recovered from the devastation of the North African countryside by Arab tribes in the eleventh century; Genoa and Pisa, which might have been expected to look after their own supplies; the towns of Provence.34 A business contract of the late 1280s simply demanded that the ship Bonaventura, recently in the port of Palermo, should sail to Agrigento where it was to be filled up with ‘as great a quantity of wheat as the said ship can take and carry’.
The Catalans specialized in another important cargo: slaves. These were variously described as ‘black’, ‘olive’ or ‘white’, and were generally Muslim captives from North Africa. They were put on sale in Majorca, Palermo and Valencia, and sent to perform domestic work in the households of their Catalan and Italian owners. In 1287 the king of Aragon decided that the Minorcans were guilty of treachery, declared the surrender treaty of 1231 void and invaded the island, enslaving the entire population, which was dispersed across the Mediterranean – for a time there was a glut in the slave market.35 The luckier and better-connected slaves would be ransomed by co-religionists – Muslims, Jews and Christians all set aside funds for the ransoming of their brethren, and the two religious orders of the Trinitarians and Mercedarians, well represented in Catalonia and Provence, specialized in ransoming Christians who had fallen into Muslim hands.36 The image of the young woman plucked off the shores of southern France by Saracen raiders was a stock theme in medieval romance, but the Catalans were perfectly ready to respond in kind; they muscled into the Mediterranean trade networks through piracy as well as honest business.
Meanwhile, Majorcan ships kept up a constant flow of traffic towards North Africa and Spain. A remarkable series of licences issued to sailors intending to leave Majorca in 1284 reveals that ships set off from the island almost every day of the year, even in the depths of January, and there was no close season, even if business was livelier in warmer months. Some of these ships were small vessels called barques, crewed by fewer than a dozen men, able to slip quickly across to mainland Spain time and again. More typical was the larger leny, literally ‘wood’; lenys were well suited to the slightly longer run across open water towards North Africa.37 The Majorcans were pioneers, too. In 1281 two Genoese ships and one Majorcan vessel reached the port of London, where the Majorcan ship loaded 267 sacks of fine English wool, and the Majorcans continued to trade regularly with England well into the fourteenth century. The Phoenicians had never had much difficulty in escaping through the Straits of Gibraltar, bound for Tartessos, but medieval ships battled with the incoming flow from the Atlantic and the fogs and contrary winds between Gibraltar and Ceuta. They also battled, literally, with the rulers of the facing shores – Marinid Berbers in Morocco, the Nasrid rulers of Granada in southern Spain. These were not hospitable waters, and the opening of the sea route out of the Mediterranean was as much a diplomatic as a technical triumph. Raw wool and Flemish textiles could now be brought directly and relatively cheaply from the north straight into the Mediterranean, bound for the workshops of Florence, Barcelona and other cities where the wool was processed and the textiles were finished. Alum, the fixative most easily obtained from Phokaia on the coast of Asia Minor, could be ferried to cloth workshops in Bruges, Ghent and Ypres, avoiding the costly and tedious trek by road and river through eastern France or Germany. The navigation of the Mediterranean and the Atlantic began slowly to be tied together, even if there were constant crises, and Catalan war fleets often patrolled the Straits. By the early fourteenth century, Mediterranean shipbuilders were imitating the broad, round shape of the northern cogs, big cargo vessels that tramped the Baltic and the North Sea – they even adopted the name, cocka. Down the coast of Morocco, too, Catalan and Genoese ships found markets full of the grain they craved, where the inhabitants were keen to acquire Italian and Catalan textiles; by the 1340s these boats had penetrated as far as the Canary Islands, which the Majorcans tried (and failed) to conquer.38
Predictably, the Majorcan merchants, subject to their own king after 1276, decided they wanted their own consuls and fonduks. This was one of many sources of tension between the two brothers, Peter of Aragon and James of Majorca, who divided up James I’s realms. Sailors and merchants were not slow to exploit these tensions. In 1299 a scoundrel named Pere de Grau, who owned a ship, was accused of stealing a tool box from a Genoese carpenter in the western Sicilian port of Trapani. Tit-for-tat, Pere insisted that in fact the carpenter had stolen his longboat. The matter was brought before the Catalan consul, but Pere scathingly stated: ‘this consul does not have any jurisdiction over citizens of Majorca, only over those who are under the dominion of the king of Aragon’.39 As fast as the Catalans extended their trading network across the Mediterranean, it threatened to fragment into pieces.
This fragmentation extended across the Mediterranean. In the mid-thirteenth century dramatic political changes once again altered the regional power balance. Crusading expeditions vainly tried to protect the fragile, narrow coastal strip ruled from Acre that called itself the kingdom of Jerusalem. The smaller it became the more it was contested between baronial factions, for the monarchy was very weak and other contentious forces, including the Italian communes and the Military Orders of the Hospital and Temple, were very strong. Western rulers were well aware of the danger Egypt posed to the kingdom, and a series of ship-borne crusades targeted Egypt: the Fifth Crusade briefly gained control of Damietta in the Nile Delta, in 1219–21; Louis IX of France also invested Damietta in a disastrous crusade in 1248; on both occasions, the crusaders hoped to trade their Egyptian conquests for Jerusalem, or even to hold both Egypt and the Holy Land, a vain dream. Increasingly, though, Christian kings were distracted from crusading by quarrels nearer home, such as the battle for Sicily that will be discussed later in this chapter. There was plenty of crusading rhetoric, and there were small naval expeditions, but after 1248 the age of large-scale expeditions to the Holy Land came to an end.40 Military commanders of slave origin seized power in the Ayyubid dominions, controlling Egypt and Syria from 1250 to 1517; these Mamluks perpetuated the commercial arrangements between the Italian merchants and the Egyptian government, but they were also determined to wipe the Latin kingdom of Jerusalem off the map. Acre fell to the Mamluks in 1291 amid horrific massacres, though many refugees crowded on to the last departing ships and found safety in Cyprus. Acre disappeared as a centre of international trade, and Latin rule in the East became confined to the kingdom of Cyprus.
We have already seen that one legacy of the Fourth Crusade was a weak Frankish regime in Constantinople, which the Greeks of Nikaia recovered with Genoese help in 1261 – the reward for Genoa was handsome trading privileges that included access to the grain, slaves, wax and furs of the Black Sea. There was also violent change in Sicily, where Frederick II revived and reinvigorated the Norman system of government; one of his achievements was the rebuilding of the Sicilian fleet, which he launched on a campaign against Jerba in North Africa, in 1235.41 When the papacy opposed his combined rule over Germany, Sicily and parts of northern Italy, Frederick put his fleet to good use in 1241, capturing an entire delegation of cardinals and bishops as they travelled aboard Genoese ships to Rome to attend a papal council.42 Ironically, Frederick’s admiral was another Genoese, Ansaldo de’ Mari, for the Genoese were as divided as ever about whether to support or oppose Frederick. While the bitter wars between Frederick and the papacy are not strictly part of the history of the Mediterranean, the years following his death in 1250 had major repercussions for the Mediterranean as a whole. In 1266–8, Frederick’s heirs in Sicily and southern Italy were defeated and all but exterminated by the papal champion Charles, count of Anjou and Provence, and brother of the crusading king of France, Louis IX.
Charles attempted to create a Mediterranean empire, not just for himself but for his Angevin heirs. At the centre of it, he envisaged the kingdom of Sicily and southern Italy, surrounded by a maritime cordon sanitaire ensuring control of the waters between Sicily and Africa and between southern Italy and both Albania and Sardinia. As a young man he had already snatched Provence away from the Aragonese, by marrying one of the heiresses to the county; under his rule the rebellious patricians of Marseilles were forced to accept his authority, and its port became his great arsenal.43 He plotted to ensure that his son Philip was elected king of Sardinia in 1269, in the face of the opposition of King James I of Aragon.44 He bought the title to the shrinking kingdom of Jerusalem from Princess Maria of Antioch in 1277, even though the king of Cyprus possessed a widely recognized counter-claim. Charles saw himself as a crusader against the Muslims, whether in Tunis or the East, but his primary concern in the East was the former Byzantine Empire. He claimed lands acquired in Albania by the Hohenstaufen, and seized Dyrrhachion; then, with the approval of a number of Albanian warlords, he assumed the title ‘king of Albania’.45 Following the restoration of the Greeks to Constantinople, he dreamed of setting the Frankish dynasty back on the imperial throne it had seized after the Fourth Crusade, and of winning the hand of the Frankish emperor for his daughter. He was convinced that the Greek emperor, Michael VIII Palaiologos, was not seriously interested in the reunification of the Greek and Latin Churches under papal control. For him, the only way to bring the schismatic Greeks under the authority of Rome was by force.
Charles planned to send a great fleet against Constantinople, in conjunction with the Venetians; Dyrrhachion would provide a base from which he could penetrate deep into Byzantium along the Via Egnatia. The old battle plans of Robert Guiscard and William the Good were taken out of a drawer and dusted off. Charles committed half of his very plentiful revenues to the building of his fleet of fifty or sixty galleys and maybe thirty auxiliary vessels. These galleys were magnificent ships, large, sturdy and supposedly capable of staying afloat in high seas.46 Operating such a fleet would cost at least 32,000 ounces of gold, possibly 50,000 ounces.47 It was an extraordinary misjudgement of what his heavily taxed subjects would tolerate. The pressure cooker exploded. In Palermo, descendants of the Latin settlers who had been migrating to the island since the late eleventh century turned on Charles’s Angevin soldiers in the great uprising of the Sicilian Vespers, of March 1282.48 Their cry was ‘Death to the French!’, but just as important a focus of their hostility was the group of bureaucrats from Amalfi and the Bay of Naples who, having been pushed out of Mediterranean trade by the Genoese and Pisans, now placed their skills in accounting at the service first of Frederick II and then of Charles I.49 Their enthusiasm for the minutiae of the tax system helped antagonize the island elites. The rebels rapidly conquered the island in the hope of creating a federation of free republics there. Rebuffed by Charles’s great ally the pope, to whom they naively appealed for support, they turned instead to the husband of Frederick II’s granddaughter, the last survivor of the Hohenstaufen dynasty: King Peter III of Aragon, the son of James the Conqueror.
In August 1282, Peter and his fleet happened to be close by, campaigning on what Peter insisted was a holy war against the North African town of Alcol. Whether this was a façade, and he was really plotting to seize Sicily, has been much debated. The events in Palermo, beginning with riots after a French soldier made sexual advances to a young Sicilian housewife, seem quite uncoordinated, even chaotic. When Peter arrived in September, he, or rather, his wife Constance, won the support of most of the Sicilian elite. He came, after all, to vindicate her claim to Sicily, and would have seized southern Italy as well if its inhabitants had joined in the rebellion and if he had possessed the resources to defeat Charles of Anjou’s well-funded armies (Charles benefited from the loans of the Florentine bankers, whose support guaranteed supplies of Apulian grain to the growing city of Florence).50 The Angevins persuaded the French king to invade Aragon in 1283 (a disaster for France); the Aragonese supported the anti-papal factions in Italy, providing a focus of loyalty in the internecine strife of pro-Angevin Guelfs and pro-Aragonese Ghibellines within the Tuscan and Lombard cities.51 The result was stalemate: by 1285, when both Peter III and Charles I died, the Aragonese king held Sicily and the Angevin king held southern Italy, but both called themselves ‘king of Sicily’. (The mainland kingdom is often conveniently referred to as the ‘kingdom of Naples’.) Despite papal attempts at mediation in 1302 and after, the rivalry between Angevins and Aragonese continued throughout the fourteenth century, consuming precious financial resources and occasionally exploding outwards.
The conflict was fought out on the sea as well as on land. Charles of Anjou probably regarded the smaller Catalan fleet as a puny rival. This was a mistake, particularly after King Peter appointed Roger de Lauria, a nobleman from Calabria, Admiral of the Fleet. He was one of the greatest naval commanders in the history of the Mediterranean, a new Lysander.52 In contrast to the compact, well-run Catalan fleet, Charles’s navy was impressively equipped but lacked cohesion; it was a motley assortment of south Italians, Pisans and Provençaux. In October 1282 Roger de Lauria overwhelmed Charles’s fleet off the coast of Calabria, at Nicotera, capturing twenty Angevin and two Pisan galleys, and forcing Charles on to the defensive in mainland southern Italy.53 However, if Charles were ever to recapture Sicily, he would also need to gain mastery over the Sicilian Straits dividing the island from Africa. Here again he was stymied by Roger de Lauria, and the battleground was the waters around Malta, which was contested between an Angevin garrison and an Aragonese invading force. In June 1283 a Provençal fleet of eighteen galleys arrived in what was to become the Grand Harbour of Malta, but it was pursued there by Lauria’s fleet of twenty-one galleys. The two navies fought all day, and by nightfall the Angevins had been forced to surrender many of their ships and to scuttle several others. No less serious were the Angevin casualties: perhaps 3,500 Angevin troops were slaughtered, and the Aragonese took several hundred captives, including noblemen. Most of the victims were probably from Marseilles, which may have lost nearly one-fifth of its population in the battle.54 When the French launched their invasion of Catalonia in 1283, Catalan fleets were also on hand, capturing half the French fleet off Roses. Roger asserted: ‘no galley or ship, nor even, I believe, any fish goes about on the sea unless it carries the arms of the king of Aragon’.55
The Angevins were now unable to defend the shores of southern Italy from constant Catalan raids, and their loss of mastery over the Tyrrhenian Sea was confirmed in June 1284, when Charles I’s son, Charles, prince of Salerno, was foolhardy enough to lead an Angevin fleet against Roger de Lauria’s ships off Naples. Many Neapolitan sailors knew better than to engage with the Catalans, and had to be forced at sword-point to embark. This time disaster took a different form. The Neapolitan fleet was not destroyed, but several Provençal galleys were captured, and on board one of them was Charles of Salerno.56 He was to remain an Aragonese captive until 1289, even though his father died in 1285 and (at least in Angevin eyes) he then became king of Sicily and count of Provence. In the years that followed, the Catalan fleet impudently extended its operations across the Mediterranean, raiding Kephalonia (a Neapolitan possession), the Cyclades and Chios; Jerba and Kerkennah, off the coast of Tunisia, were brought back under Sicilian control. No one could withstand Roger de Lauria. His unbroken series of naval victories ensured that Sicily remained in Aragonese hands.
Majorca was a different problem. Peter III had from the start resented his father’s division of his lands between the king of Aragon and the king of Majorca. When his younger brother, James II of Majorca, treacherously embraced the Angevin cause, Peter invaded Roussillon, marched into the royal palace in Perpignan, and, finding himself locked out of his brother’s bedroom, hammered on the door in frustration while James escaped down a filthy manhole and fled across country. He won back his crown only in 1298, following papal mediation.57 Yet Peter made a similar decision to his father when he divided the newly conquered island of Sicily from his other lands, bequeathing it to his second son as a separate entity. This recognized an awkward fact: the Sicilians had not been fighting for the house of Barcelona but for the house of Hohenstaufen. Moreover, Sicily was far from home and difficult or impossible to control from Barcelona. Yet the island was enormously desirable. Well before the Vespers, Catalan merchants were coming en masse to Palermo, Trapani and other ports, seeking grain and cotton. Peter’s aim was, however, to redeem his wife’s dynastic claim, not to defend the interests of his merchants. After Peter’s death, opportunities for the merchants were compromised by strife among the three Aragonese kings – the rulers of Aragon-Catalonia, Majorca and Sicily.
Despite the political divisions, and despite occasional embargoes within the Catalan-Aragonese world, the Catalans had carved out a place for themselves alongside the Italians. They entered the competition for mastery over the Mediterranean at the right moment: the Genoese, Pisan and Venetians had not yet gained complete control over the sea routes when Barcelona began to compete for access to Africa, Sicily and the East. The Catalans possessed impressive expertise in the arts of navigation, including cartography. But they also had one advantage their rivals entirely lacked: under the protection of the kings of Aragon, they gained easy access to the courts of rulers in Tunis, Tlemcen and Alexandria. Later generations would look back on the age of James the Conqueror and Peter the Great as the heroic age of Catalonia.