Following the arrival of the plague, and the dramatic fall in population, pressure on food supplies within the Mediterranean diminished. This did not mean that the old Mediterranean grain trade withered. In fact, it flourished: as inferior lands were abandoned and turned over to pasture, and as other areas became dedicated to products such as sugar and dyestuffs, the economic life of the lands bordering the Great Sea became more varied. As specialization increased, trade in all manner of goods was stimulated. The Mediterranean economy began to take on a new shape. Local contacts came to the fore: products such as timber were ferried down the coasts of Catalonia; wool was sent across the Adriatic from Apulia to the burgeoning towns of Dalmatia, and from Minorca (famous for its sheep) to Tuscany, where around 1400 the ‘Merchant of Prato’, Francesco di Marco Datini, obsessively ensured that every bale was recorded and every piece of correspondence was preserved – about 150,000 letters – to the great advantage of historians.1 One of his agents in Ibiza complained: ‘this land is unhealthy, the bread is bad, the wine is bad – God forgive me, nothing is good! I fear I shall leave my skin here.’2 But the demands of business came before personal comfort.
The Merchant of Prato also had Tuscan agents based in San Mateu on the Spanish coast, where they could collect the best Aragonese wools, while deep within the Spanish interior sheep were conquering the Meseta, as millions of animals grazed the high ground in summer and the plateau in winter. Datini’s reach extended to the Maghrib and eastwards to the Balkans and the Black Sea. In the 1390s, he was involved in the slave trade, at a time when Circassians from the Black Sea and Berbers from North Africa were being sold in the slave markets of Majorca and Sicily.3 From oriental lands beyond the Mediterranean he obtained indigo, brazilwood, pepper, aloes, zedoary and galingale, as well as cotton, mastic and refined sugar from within the Great Sea. From Spain and Morocco, he imported, besides vast amounts of raw wool, ostrich feathers, elephant ivory, rice, almonds and dates. He ordered a dinner service from Valencia, decorated, as was common practice, with his coat-of-arms, and was irritated when he made a repeat order a few years later and no record of the design had been kept.4
Datini was an oligarch, and not typical of late fourteenth-century businessmen, but his career provides an excellent illustration of the continuing vitality of trade and exchange. He managed to conduct business in the most adverse circumstances, even while the duke of Milan prowled around Tuscany in 1402, sweeping under his belt every major city apart from Florence. Mediterranean merchants had always known how to profit from war as well as peace. Yet there was one very significant change. In the early fourteenth century, the three great Florentine banks of the Bardi, Peruzzi and Acciaiuoli had built close ties to the kings of Naples, the Knights of Rhodes and rulers deep within Europe, who relied all too heavily on the credit they provided; but the banks crashed on the eve of the Black Death when it became obvious that they had accumulated too many toxic debts (notably loans to the English king). The international banks that eventually replaced them were careful not to over-extend themselves and were more modest operations; this was true of the Medici Bank despite the political power and fame of the controlling family.5 Greater caution ensured stable profits. Ambitions were more modest, too: the Catalans sent fewer galleys all the way to Flanders and England, and Marseilles, once an important trading centre, faded in significance. Thus new structures emerged, bound together with new mental attitudes.6 Urban life was stimulated not just by the increasing specialization, reflected in the development of craft guilds, but by the migration into the towns of country-dwellers whose villages had ceased to function through lack of manpower. In Egypt, abandonment of the soil led to neglect of the irrigation works that had maintained the ecological stability of the Nile Delta. The Delta became impoverished, and wages fell, whereas on the European shores they tended to rise in reponse to the limited availability of labour.7 However, city populations grew, in many cases recovering to pre-plague levels by 1400, and this encouraged the Genoese, Venetians and Catalans to continue to explore the granaries of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea.
Even if the coming of the plague stimulated a sense that Christians needed to repent of their sins, these sins clearly did not include fighting one another: Venice and Genoa were at each other’s throats in 1350–55, and again in 1378–81 (the War of Chioggia). On both occasions the cause of conflict was disagreement over access to the Black Sea from the Aegean. During the first conflict, the Venetians entered into an alliance with the king of Aragon, who was competing with the Genoese for control of Sardinia. The Venetians sent their fleet into the western Mediterranean, scoring a victory against the Genoese off Alghero in northern Sardinia in 1353, while the Catalans sent a fleet as far as the Bosphorus, losing one of their admirals in battle. Yet the war brought benefit to neither side: Venice was forced to accept the loss of the duchy of Dalmatia to Hungary after 350 years, and Genoa descended into civil strife – the city fell under the dominion of the Visconti lords of Milan, who decided that Genoese resources were exhausted, and made peace with an equally exhausted Venice in 1355.8
When war broke out again in 1378, attention focused initially on the small island of Tenedos, dominion over which was thought to guarantee mastery over the route through the Dardanelles. A couple of years earlier a Byzantine usurper had donated the island to the Genoese, in return for their aid, but Venice secured promises from one of his rivals that it could take control of the island.9 The willingness of Genoa and Venice to fight is all the more surprising since the Black Death had greatly reduced available manpower, and the Venetians had to recruit large numbers of oarsmen from Dalmatia. There were other serious troubles, too. In between these wars, the Venetians faced a rebellion in Crete in 1363, in which not just the native Greeks were implicated but also some Venetian nobles, such as members of the great and ancient Gradenigo family.10 The rebellion placed in doubt the Venetian supply network, for Crete was exploited – or, as these events suggested, over-exploited – for its grain, wine, oil and vegetables, compensating for the lack of a sufficiently extensive hinterland in north-eastern Italy. During the two wars Venice was placed at severe risk in a different and even more perilous way, when Genoa and Venice clashed within the Adriatic, which Genoese navies had rarely dared enter. In 1378–80 Venice was dangerously exposed, now that the king of Hungary controlled the eastern flank of the Adriatic. Venice faced the constant problem that its imperial ambitions in the eastern Mediterranean could be guaranteed only if the seas closest to Venice were dominated by the republic.
When the Genoese were able to call on aid from the king of Hungary and Venice’s close neighbour, the Carrara lord of Padua, Venice found itself surrounded. In 1379, the Genoese burned the villages that lay along the Venetian Lido and the allied forces stormed the town of Chioggia, at the southern end of the Venetian lagoon. The allies boasted that they would not rest until they had bridled the four bronze horses that stood over the portico of St Mark’s Basilica. The city faced its greatest danger since the Carolingians had besieged the lagoons at the start of the ninth century. Venice managed to hold out under siege; eventually it was the Genoese who felt under siege, as their provisions became exhausted. By June 1380 the Genoese realized that their position was unsustainable, and made peace. One important feature of this confiict is that the Venetians made extensive use of gunpowder, using cannon mounted on the forecastles of their ships. The Genoese commander, Pietro Doria, died when a cannon-ball hit a tower that collapsed on top of him.11
Historians of Venice would like to classify the War of Chioggia as a Venetian victory, but the arrival of the Genoese on the sandbanks of the Lido was an enormous humiliation. Venice lost Tenedos, failed to recover Dalmatia, had to recognize Genoese rights in Cyprus (and therefore the Genoese role in the sugar trade), and even had to hand its mainland dependency of Treviso to the Austrian duke, thereby losing such grain lands as it possessed in north-eastern Italy – a Habsburg shadow would fall over parts of north-eastern Italy until the end of the First World War.12 From both the war of 1350 and the war of 1378 Venice lost more than it gained, in territory and reputation. But, serious as these conflicts were, they were dramatic interruptions in otherwise reasonably peaceful relations, as the ships of the two cities traded side by side in the Aegean, through Constantinople, and onwards to the grain lands of the Crimea. After 1381, the two cities took care to avoid entanglements by defining their trading spheres and commercial interests with care: Venice remained the prime centre of the Levant trade, sending its galleys to Alexandria and Beirut in search of spices; the Genoese laid more emphasis on bulk goods carried in round ships – alum, grain and dried fruits – searching out these products in Asia Minor, Greece and the Black Sea; ‘currants’ took their name from Corinth, while the independent Greek state of Trebizond, on the southern shores of the Black Sea, was the unrivalled source of hazelnuts. Ambitious trading ventures which, around 1300, had sent Genoese and Venetian travellers deep into Persia and even as far as China were no longer pursued; merchants decided to concentrate on restoring vital links across the sea.13
One element of stability was the efficient Venetian shipbuilding industry, the largest industry in the city and perhaps the best organized one in the entire Mediterranean. The Arsenal, which stood alongside the great rope workshop known as the Tana, was already well established in the early fourteenth century, when Dante heard in its dark depths the echoes of Hell itself.
As in the Arsenal of the Venetians
Boils in the winter the tenacious pitch
To smear their unsound vessels o’er again,
For sail they cannot; and instead thereof
One makes his vessel new, and one recaulks
The ribs of that which many a voyage has made;
One hammers at the prow, one at the stern,
This one makes oars and that one cordage twists,
Another mends the mainsail and the mizzen …14
There was an Old Arsenal with docking space for twelve galleys and a New Arsenal three times larger. By the late fourteenth century an efficient system of production under an admiral had evolved: the Arsenal could produce about three large merchant galleys a year, which may not seem many, except that the size of galleys had grown significantly as sailings to the Levant and Flanders became more regular from the 1340s onwards. These great galleys were lateen-rigged triremes that could load up to 150 tons of cargo, though they also carried very large crews of maybe 200 sailors. Only Venetian citizens could load goods on these ships, which travelled in convoy, often accompanied by smaller armed galleys, along routes carefully approved by the Senate; it took twenty-five years to qualify for citizenship, and, as has been seen, the most profitable voyages, handling silks and spices, were dominated by the investments of Venetian noblemen. For more modest goods, the Venetians used round merchant cogs with square sails, constructed in private shipyards and subject to less restriction on design. The largest cog known from the fifteenth century was nearly thirty metres long and displaced 720 tons.15 Skills in shipbuilding were matched by skills in navigation, and Venice vied with Genoa and Majorca as a major centre of cartography. Venetian sailors thus had plenty of exact information about the coasts of the Mediterranean. Moreover, with the increased use of compasses it was possible to navigate with greater confidence and to extend the sailing season across most of the year.16
One business enterprise that kept sailors busy was ferrying pilgrims to the Holy Land. The loss of the last Christian outposts in Palestine did not put an end to pilgrimage; the kings of Aragon vied with others to secure vague rights of protection over Christian sanctuaries in the Holy Land, and the Mamluk sultans knew that they could play the Holy Land card when negotiating political and commercial agreements with western rulers. Pilgrimage was, and was supposed to be, physically demanding. Felix Fabri was a Dominican friar who travelled from Germany to the Holy Land in 1480, and left a vivid account of the smells, discomfort and squalor on board ship: meat swarming with maggots, undrinkable water, vermin everywhere. His return voyage from Alexandria, out of season, exposed him to the winds and waves that had battered earlier pilgrims such as ibn Jubayr. He learned, though, that the best place to sleep was under cover, on top of the hard bales of spices.17 But, at least for a scholarly minority, pilgrimage was taking on a new shape. In 1358 Petrarch was invited by a friend, Giovanni Mandelli, to travel with him to the Holy Sepulchre. Deciding that it was immeasurably safer to stay behind, he favoured Mandelli with a little book in which he described the route across the Mediterranean. He noted all the places that had been visited by Ulysses; he pointed out the temple of Juno Lacinia in Crotone, in the far south of Italy; he observed that Cilicia was where Pompey had defeated bands of pirates; he paused briefly to contemplate the place of the crucifixion of Christ (‘you would not have undertaken such an arduous labour for any other reason than to see with your own eyes … the things that you have already seen with your mind’); but he finally left Mandelli standing not in Jerusalem but in Alexandria, and not among sacks of spices but by the tomb of Alexander and the urn of Pompey.18 Cultural tourism around the sites of classical antiquity was about to begin. Over forty manuscripts of Petrarch’s Itinerary survive, showing how popular it was, above all in fifteenth-century Naples, for Mandelli was showered with information about classical sites along the coasts of southern Italy, and it was this (rather than interest in the holy places) that appealed to readers.
Petrarch’s classical tourism was turned into reality in the 1420s by a merchant of Ancona who found himself transfixed by the sight of classical monuments, first in his home city and then around the Mediterranean. Cyriac of Ancona had political motives too: he made himself known to the Ottoman sultan, who did not realize that one of Cyriac’s aims was to collect information that could be used in a crusade against the Turks. But he took a genuine delight in physical remains from the classical past, travelling to Delphi where, to the amazement of the inhabitants of a greatly overgrown site, he spent six days in 1436 enthusing over what he wrongly believed to be its main temple and over the theatre and stadium, copying inscriptions and drawing plans.19 Although most of those who interested themselves in the classical past would remain comfortably in their armchair, like Petrarch, Cyriac’s career indicates that the allure of Mediterranean travel was no longer exclusively religious or commercial.
A very few of those who travelled ‘went native’, immersing themselves in the religion and customs of the peoples who lived on the opposite shore. There is the extraordinary Anselmo Turmeda, a Majorcan friar who discovered the teachings of Islam in Bologna, travelled to North Africa, where he converted and became a noted early fifteenth-century Muslim scholar under the name of ‘Abdallah at-Tarjuman; his tomb still stands in Tunis. A century later the scholar and diplomat al-Hasan ibn Muhammad al-Wazzan, or Leo Africanus, who was of Granadan birth, was captured by Christian pirates, taken to Rome and became a protégé of the Pope Leo X, and wrote a geography of Africa: here we have someone who could also convey to western audiences the physical realities of the Islamic world way beyond the Mediterranean, and who switched back and forth from Islam to Christianity and back to Islam.20
The fortunes of the kings of Aragon, and of the many kingdoms under their rule, provide an excellent guide to the wider fortunes of the Mediterranean in the late fourteenth and fifteenth centuries. Catalan influence extended right across the Mediterranean, as far as the marketplaces of Alexandria and Rhodes; and, at the end of the century, the king of Aragon was a dominant figure both in the Iberian peninsula and in wider European politics. Martin the Younger, the son and heir of King Martin of Aragon, married the heiress to Sicily after she was to all intents kidnapped and despatched to Spain, giving him ample excuse to invade the island in 1392; in the fifteenth century the island was ruled by viceroys held to account by island parliaments, and the separate line of increasingly ineffective Aragonese kings of Sicily disappeared. Peace was obviously good for the Sicilians, and it was also good for those who wanted to buy their grain. Catalan nobles began to acquire extensive estates in Sicily and to settle there.21 The final achievement of Martin the Younger, before he was felled by malaria in Sardinia, was the recovery of Catalan-Aragonese control over large swathes of that island as well, after which Catalan cultural influence dominated, for instance in the arts.22
The new assertiveness of the rulers of Aragon was demonstrated most forcefully by Alfonso V, who succeeded to the throne in 1416 and was to become one of the great monarchs of the fifteenth century.23 The male line of the house of Barcelona had died out, and Alfonso came from Castile; nonetheless, he looked outwards to the Mediterranean, and his schemes encompassed the entire sea. Like all the Aragonese kings he earned a sobriquet, and Alfonso’s, ‘the Magnanimous’, perfectly expresses his desire to be seen as a generous patron, endowed with the princely qualities he read about in the works of his fellow-Spaniard Seneca, the philosopher of the ancient Roman emperors, for he was a passionate student of classical texts, with a strong interest in heroic accounts of ancient warfare. He knew that two of the most successful Roman emperors, Trajan and Hadrian, were Spaniards.24 Alfonso aspired to restore the Roman Empire in the Mediterranean, in the face of the growing Turkish threat. Early in his reign he attacked Corsica, which the papacy had offered to the kings of Aragon at the same time as Sardinia, far back in 1297. He failed to secure much beyond the stronghold of Calvi, but his campaign reveals that his ambitions were by no means limited to the lands he had inherited in Spain. Pursuing his Roman imperial dreams, he looked towards Italy, and offered his services to the confused queen of Naples, Joanna II, even securing a promise that she would nominate him as her heir (despite a colourful private life she had no sons). Unfortunately she also promised to leave her increasingly turbulent kingdom to the duke of Anjou and count of Provence, René of Anjou. Le bon roi René shared with Alfonso a passion for chivalric culture and the patronage of the arts; he also shared a wish to accumulate kingdoms, though by the end of his life in 1480 he was left with none, compared to the six or seven kingdoms and one principality over which Alfonso ruled when he died in 1458.25 The intermittent battle with René for control of southern Italy took over twenty years, and consumed royal resources, for maintaining a powerful fleet was extraordinarily costly. The financial reserves of the monarchy were perilously low, and Alfonso was therefore forced to go cap-in-hand to his parliaments, giving them a chance to bargain for the privileges they valued most.26 Fortunately, René of Anjou was even poorer, but he did manage to mobilize the Genoese fleet: Genoese hostility to the Catalans had not waned since the Catalan invasion of Sardinia over a century earlier.
Alfonso faced moments of intense danger. In 1435 he led his fleet against the Genoese off the island of Ponza; he was defeated, captured and carried off to Genoa. The Genoese then found themselves obliged to hand their prisoner over to their overlord, the duke of Milan, Filippo Maria Visconti, who was charmed by Alfonso and turned events upside down when he decided to enter into an alliance with him. The duke of Milan even contemplated bequeathing his duchy to Alfonso, whose plans for the domination of Italy distracted him from Iberian affairs. The long and costly war with René culminated in Alfonso’s capture of Naples by tunnelling under its walls, in 1442. Even after his expulsion from what he always regarded as his own kingdom of Naples, René maintained pressure on the conquering Aragonese, and Genoa remained the base for hostile expeditions into southern Italy well into the 1460s.27 Nor did Italian campaigns cease with the fall of Naples. In 1448 Alfonso was knocking at the gates of the small but strategically valuable statelet of Piombino, which incorporated the iron-rich island of Elba, and which had its own fleet, trading and raiding as far as Tunis.28 From Piombino he could exercise control over the movement of ships between Genoa and Naples, while the town also provided a springboard for the invasion of Tuscany. Piombino proved too hard a nut to crack, though the lord of Piombino wisely began to render an annual tribute, in the form of a golden goblet, to assure himself of Alfonso’s goodwill, and over the years bases along the coast either side of Elba fell under Aragonese and, in the sixteenth century, Spanish control.29 By the middle of the fifteenth century most of Italy was divided between five great powers: Milan, Florence, Venice, the papacy and the king of Aragon. Although the king of Aragon controlled much the largest territory (even vaster if the two Italian islands are included), he was forced to abandon his dream of domination over the peninsula when the four other powers adhered to the Peace of Lodi in 1454, to which Alfonso added his signature early the next year. This treaty guaranteed peace (with some notable interruptions) for the next half-century, and one of its aims was to divert the energies of the signatories to the urgent task of fighting the Turks.
Constantinople had fallen to Mehmet the Conqueror one year before the peace agreement. All the talk about resisting the Turks had achieved nothing; indeed, they were advancing with ever greater confidence through the Balkans. Already, in 1447, Alfonso had promised help to the embattled king of Hungary, John Hunyadi. Alfonso raised the promised troops and then sent them to fight his Tuscan war instead. He was not, however, simply a cynic about the crusade against the Turks.30 Alfonso rejoiced in his self-image as a king-redeemer and warrior for Christ – as the new Galahad, a theme that was taken up in the magnificent sculptures of his triumphal arch in Naples. He offered warm support to Scanderbeg, the great Albanian rebel against the Turks, for the loss of Albania to the Ottomans would bring their fleets and armies within sight of southern Italy.31 Alfonso’s ambitions extended as far as Kastellórizo, a tiny island to the east of Rhodes, which became a base for Aragonese naval operations deep inside the eastern Mediterranean (it is now the farthest flung possession of Greece).32 Shortly before the fall of Constantinople he and the Greek prince Demetrios Palaiologos were fabricating plans to seize power in Constantinople from the last Byzantine emperor, Constantine XI, and Alfonso had his own viceroy in the Peloponnese. These grandiose aims of defeating the Turks and recovering the eastern Mediterranean lands were commemorated after Alfonso’s death in the lively novel by Joannot Martorell, Tirant lo Blanc.33 In many ways the swashbuckling hero Tirant is an Alfonso-figure, or rather the figure the king had aspired to become, and (amid the often explicit love scenes) the book was filled with advice about the best way to defeat a Turkish army, along with the Genoese, whom Alfonso regarded as secret allies of the Ottomans.34 In Tirant lo Blanc the Genoese try to frustrate the Hospitaller army defending Rhodes from the Turks:
Your Lordship should know that two Genoese friars of our order have betrayed us, for on their advice the villainous Genoese sent all those ships with many soldiers but little cargo. The traitors in our castle have done a foul deed, removing the notches from our crossbows and replacing them with soap and cheese.35
Genoese behaviour during the final siege of Constantinople in 1453 aroused similar suspicions.36
By 1453, aided by a strong administration and a devotion to the holy cause of the jihad, the Ottomans had already extinguished rival Turkish statelets along the coast of Asia Minor, notably the pirate stronghold of Aydın. Despite a massive defeat at the hands of the central Asian warlord Timur (Tamerlane) in 1402, the Ottomans revived quickly. By the 1420s they had once again become active in the Balkans. The Byzantine emperor sold Thessalonika to Venice in 1423; but, having hankered so long after its dominion, the Venetians were able to hold the city for only seven years before it fell to the armies of Sultan Murad II. The succession of the young Mehmet II resolved the dispute between those relatively cautious advisers who opposed rapid expansion for fear of over-extension, and the more adventurous faction that saw Mehmet as the leader of a revitalized Roman Empire controlled by Muslim Turks who would combine Roman-Byzantine, Turkic and Islamic concepts of rule. His aim was to restore and fulfil, rather than destroy, the Roman Empire. His Greek scribes issued documents describing him as Mehmet, Basileus and Autocrat of the Romans, the title by which the Byzantine emperors had been known.37 But his imperial dream was not satisfied with the New Rome; he sought to make himself master of the Old Rome too. Practical politics also drew western affairs to his attention. The rebellion of Scanderbeg in Albania made the sultan realize that there were defects in the traditional policy of allowing independent Christian vassals to rule the Balkan lands. Even those who had been educated as Muslims at the Ottoman court, like Scanderbeg, could become renegades. Ottoman authority thus needed to be imposed directly, and Ottoman power edged forwards to the shores of the Adriatic. Scanderbeg died in 1468, after which the Albanian rebellion petered out; by 1478 Mehmet had gained control of Valona (Vlorë) on the Albanian coast, and over the next few months he wrested the city of Scutari (Shkodër), dominated by the great fortified hill of Rozafa, from the Venetians.38 Durazzo, the ancient Dyrrhachion, remained in Venetian hands till the start of the next century, and the port of Kotor (Cattaro), deep within its fjord in Montenegro, enjoyed Venetian protection; but the rest of the Venetian dominion in this part of the Adriatic was whittled away.39
The Venetians had been lukewarm about Scanderbeg, anxious that support for rebels would compromise their trading position at Constantinople. Yet to lose the coast of Albania was to pay a heavy price, not just because of its usefulness as a source of salt, but because the Venetians needed to navigate past the Albanian shore on their way out of the Adriatic. Routes inland from the coast were valued too, as they gave access to the silver, slaves and other products of the mountainous Balkan interior. The difficulties were compounded by Turkish assaults on the Venetian naval bases in the Aegean: Lemnos and Negroponte fell into Ottoman hands. Wise to the implications, the Sublime Porte (as the Ottoman court was often known) still issued the Venetians with trading privileges. The message was clear: the Ottomans could tolerate Christian merchants from overseas, just as Muslim rulers all around the Mediterranean had done for centuries; but they regarded Venetian or Genoese territorial dominion within the Akdeniz, or White Sea, as unacceptable.40
By the end of his reign Mehmet was determined to confront the Christian powers in the Mediterranean. An obvious focus of Turkish attention was the headquarters of the Knights Hospitallers on Rhodes, which they had occupied since 1310, and from which they had launched pirate raids against Muslim shipping, as well as gaining control of a few coastal stations in Asia Minor, most notably Bodrum, whose Hospitaller castle was built out of the stones of the great Mausoleum of Halikarnassos. Rhodes also attracted Mehmet as one of the famous cities of the ancient world.41 A Saxon cannon founder named Meister Georg who had been domiciled in Istanbul offered the Turks precious information about the layout of the fortress, but in 1480 the defences of Rhodes proved too strong even for massive Turkish cannon cast by the finest experts. Neither side showed any mercy: the Hospitallers sent out sorties at night-time, and brought back the heads of the Turks they had killed, which were carried in procession through the city to encourage its defenders. Frustrated by the resolute resistance, the Turks made peace with the Knights, who promised to cease interfering with Turkish shipping.42 The sultans did not forget their defeat, but Rhodes remained the property of the Knights of St John for another forty-two years. Nor did western Europeans forget what happened at Rhodes, since it brought some cheer at a time when the Turkish threat was so severe. Immediately afterwards, a woodcut history of the siege was an early bestseller in Venice, Ulm, Salamanca, Paris, Bruges and London.
At the same time, Turkish fleets were threatening the West. Southern Italy was an obvious target, because of its proximity to Albania and because Ottoman control of both sides of the Adriatic entrance would force Venice to obey the sultan’s will. Venice did not want to be seen to oppose the Turks. When they attacked Otranto in 1480, Venetian ships helped ferry Turkish troops across to Italy from Albania, though this met with official disapproval in Venice itself. One hundred and forty Ottoman ships carrying 18,000 men crossed the Straits, including forty galleys. After the inhabitants of Otranto refused to surrender, the Turkish commander, Gedik Ahmet Pasha, made clear what would happen to the survivors and pressed on with his assault; the town possessed poor defences and no cannon, and the outcome was predictable. On capturing the city Ahmet Pasha slaughtered the entire male population, leaving 10,000 people alive out of about 22,000; 8,000 slaves were sent across the Straits to Albania. The elderly archbishop was struck down at the high altar of Otranto Cathedral. The Turks then fanned out across southern Apulia, raiding neighbouring cities. The king of Naples, Alfonso V’s son Ferrante, had sent his armies into Tuscany, but once his troops and ships were ready he was able to launch a successful counter-assault. Even when the Turks withdrew, they made plain their intention of returning and conquering the Apulian ports, while rumour enlarged this into a grand army ready to attack both Italy and Sicily from Albania.43
The siege of Otranto was an enormous shock to western Europe. All the Christian powers in the Mediterranean offered help against the Turks, notably Ferdinand II, king of Aragon and cousin of Ferrante of Naples. The conspicuous exception was Venice, claiming to be too tired after decades of conflict with the sultan’s armies and navies. Turkish raiding parties had started to penetrate into Friuli, an area of north-eastern Italy partly under Venetian dominion – on land as on sea the Turks were threateningly close, and the Venetians preferred appeasement.44 The Venetian consul in Apulia was advised that he should express his satisfaction at the Christian victory to the Neapolitan king orally and not in writing; written messages were often stolen by spies, and the Serenissima Repubblica was fearful that the sultan might see a purloined letter of congratulations and blame Venice for its two-faced outlook.
The immediate danger of a further attack on southern Italy disappeared with the death of Mehmet in May 1481. He was only forty-nine years old. During the coming years western rulers such as Charles VIII of France and Ferdinand of Aragon would make the war against the Turks a central area of policy. Both these rulers took the view that, if they controlled southern Italy, they would be able to lay their hands on the resources needed for a grand crusade and use Apulia as a convenient launching-pad for attacks on Ottoman lands, which now lay so close; both also had controversial claims to the throne of Naples, notwithstanding the presence of a local dynasty of Aragonese origin. Charles VIII’s invasion of southern Italy, in 1494–5, brought him mastery over Naples, but his position proved unsustainable, and he soon had to withdraw. Venice now felt threatened on all sides. Crusades against the Turks would only endanger traffic through the waters facing Ottoman Albania. At the end of the fifteenth century Venice therefore took control of a number of Apulian ports, to guarantee free passage through the Straits.45 In 1495, amid scenes of gory massacre and brutal rape, the Venetians seized Monopoli from the French; they then persuaded the king of Naples, Ferrante II, to grant them Trani, Brindisi and Otranto without bloodshed, holding them until 1509. The king needed allies, and they needed the produce of Apulia, exporting grain, wine, salt, oil, vegetables and saltpetre for their cannons.46 However, the loss of Durazzo to the Turks in 1502 deprived Venice of its most important listening station on the Albanian side of the Straits. They had only just built new fortifications, which still stand. The Mediterranean was becoming divided in two: an Ottoman East and a Christian West. One obvious question was which side was likely to win the contest; but another question was which Christian power would dominate the waters of the western Mediterranean.
A few bridges were created between these two worlds. The Ottoman court was fascinated by Western culture, understandably in view of the claim to mastery over the old Roman Empire; meanwhile western Europeans sought to understand the Turks, and continued to acquire exotic oriental goods.47 The artist Gentile Bellini travelled from Venice to Constantinople, where he painted a famous portrait of Mehmet II that now hangs in the National Gallery in London.48 Pressure on the West was rarely relaxed (mainly when the sultans turned their attention to Persia instead), but the Ottomans realized the importance of creating a neutral territory between their lands and western Europe, whose merchants could gain entry into the contrasting worlds of western Christendom and the Turks. This territory was the small but vibrant trading republic of Dubrovnik, known to western Europeans as Ragusa. Its origins, like those of Venice and Amalfi, lay in a group of refugees from barbarian invasions who occupied a rocky promontory in southern Dalmatia, protected by a wall of mountains from Slav incursions. The Latin Ragusans were soon joined by a Slav population, and by the late twelfth century the town was bilingual, some speaking south Slav dialects and some speaking Dalmatian, a romance language closely related to Italian; in Slavonic, the inhabitants were known as the dubrovčani, ‘those of the woods’. Although they entered into treaties with assertive Serbian and Bosnian princes in the interior, the Ragusans needed protectors, and found them in the Norman kings of Sicily and then in Venice, which consolidated its hold on southern Dalmatia after the Fourth Crusade of 1202–4.49
Once the Hungarian king had wrested Dalmatia from Venice following his intervention in the war of 1350 between Venice and Genoa, the city fell under Hungarian suzerainty (from 1358).50 This allowed the Ragusans to develop their own institutions and their own commercial network without a great amount of external interference. A trading patriciate emerged, able to benefit from access to the Bosnian interior, rich in silver and slaves; Dubrovnik became the main centre in the region for the purchase of salt.51 Demand for silver in the eastern Mediterranean had always been strong, for lack of local supplies, and Ragusan merchants made some headway in the Byzantine and Turkish lands of the East.52 Dubrovnik was able to benefit greatly from new opportunities following the Black Death. Local trade flourished – indeed, without the wheat, oil, salted meat, wine, fruit and vegetables that were regularly carried across to Dalmatia from Apulia, neither Dubrovnik nor its neighbours could have survived; even fish was imported from southern Italy, unlikely as this may seem in a maritime city.53 There was very little land fit for growing anything. A fifteenth-century writer, Philippus de Diversis, explained the essential features of his home city:
The territory of Ragusa, because of its sterility as much as because of the large number of people, lives off a small income, so that nobody could live with his family from his possessions unless he had other riches, and this is why it is necessary to engage in commerce.54
He felt embarrassed at the involvement of the city patricians in trade, which he knew was a taboo shunned by the patriciate of ancient Rome. On the other hand, the lack of local resources stimulated the emergence of important industries: raw wool from southern Italy and Spain was manufactured into woollen cloth, and by the mid-sixteenth century Dubrovnik had become a notable textile centre. The link across the Adriatic to the towns of southern Italy was of crucial importance. Dubrovnik provided the kings of Naples with valuable information about what was happening in the Ottoman lands. In return, these kings helped suppress piracy in the Adriatic and exempted the Ragusans from port taxes.55 Ragusan ships were allowed to dominate the waters off Apulia. This was the beginning of a phase of expansion which would see the Ragusan fleet emerge as one of the largest merchant navies in the Mediterranean; Dubrovnik, not the Argonauts of Jason, provided the English language with the word argosy, a corruption of ‘Ragusa’. A Ragusan patrician, Benedetto Cotrugli, or Kotruljević, became mint-master in Naples, but he is best known for his tract on the art of commerce that set out the business skills that guaranteed success. Among his sage advice to merchants was that they should avoid gambling and card games, nor should they drink and eat too much.56
A maritime republic that lay within walking distance of the territories ruled by the great Slav princes could not escape their attempts at interference, and it was for this reason that the Ragusans preferred protectors who lived some distance away – even the Turks. The city’s difficulties multiplied in the middle of the fifteenth century, when enemies, Slav and Turkish, closed in from several directions. The city was firmly enclosed within its impressive set of walls, which still stand. One enemy was Stjepan Vukčić, herceg (or duke) of lands to the rear of Dubrovnik that became known as Hercegovina. His title was confirmed by the Ottoman court, though he was independent-minded and saw submission to the Sublime Porte as a way of guaranteeing rather than compromising his authority. He decided to raise funds by establishing a trading settlement that would, he hoped, outrival Dubrovnik, at Herceg Novi, by the entrance to the Bay of Kotor. The source of profit would not be exotic goods from the Orient; it would be salt, traditionally traded through Dubrovnik.57 The Ragusans were not innocent of territorial ambitions. They of course wanted to acquire Herceg Novi and even the Serbian town of Trebinje, a little way into Hercegovina. In 1451 Ragusan heralds proclaimed that the reward for assassinating the Herceg (who was also suspected of heresy) would be 15,000 ducats and elevation to the Ragusan patriciate.
This threat frightened Vukčić enough to make him withdraw his armies from Ragusan territory, but Dubrovnik almost at once had to confront a new threat, as Mehmet the Conqueror triumphantly extended his power over the Balkan principalities. So in 1458 Ragusan ambassadors toiled their way to the sultan’s court at Skopje with an offer of submission in return, they hoped, for confirmation of their commercial privileges. Some haggling was necessary, but by 1472 they were sending 10,000 ducats as annual tribute – and it continued to rise thereafter.58 Regular tribute payments were a better guarantee of safety than the city’s massive walls. A curious situation developed. The Ragusans traded with the Ottoman-ruled lands, and yet they gave support to enemies of the Turks such as Scanderbeg, as he passed from Albania to southern Italy to enter the service of the beleaguered King Ferrante of Naples; they looked after Vukčić when he was dispossessed by the Turks, having evidently forgotten their wish to do away with him. Yet the Turks rarely oppressed Dubrovnik, seeing advantage in its role as a commercial middleman that supplied the Sublime Porte with goods and tribute. Around 1500 the Ragusans were able to benefit from the discomfiture of the Venetians who struggled to hold back Ottoman advances along the coast of Albania. Venice could no longer trade with Constantinople, but Ragusan ships could fly their flag with impunity in Turkish waters, and carry goods between East and West. Putting out of their mind the tribute they paid to the Ottoman sultan, the Ragusans flaunted the myth of the city’s freedom, encapsulated in the simple motto LIBERTAS.