City of Fortune: How Venice Won and Lost a Naval Empire (23 page)

Pepper

Nothing encapsulated the development of consumerism more acutely than the appetite for spices. They performed no necessary function in food preservation, only salt did, but the galaxy of comestibles that medieval people classed as spices – pepper, ginger, cardamoms, cloves, cinnamon, sugar and dozens more – made food more appealing and expressed a certain desire for culinary interest and displays of wealth. Across the barriers of holy war, the crusades had given Europeans a taste for oriental refinement. Spices were the first manifestation of a world trade and its ideal commodity. They were lightweight, high in value, low in bulk, and almost imperishable; they could be readily transported over long distances by boat or camel, rebagged into smaller lots, stored almost indefinitely. At the far western end of a long supply chain the peoples of the Mediterranean were largely ignorant of how and where they grew – Marco Polo was
the first European to leave an eyewitness account of the cultivation of pepper in India – but they were fully aware that the spices were landed in Egypt and the Arabian peninsula and that the total trade passed through the hands of Muslim middlemen. The spice routes would alter their course according to the rise and fall of kingdoms further east, but during the thirteenth century, the ports of the shrinking crusader kingdom in Palestine were a crucial outlet to the Mediterranean. It was this that made the competition at Acre so fierce. After Genoa was ousted, its merchants concentrated their trading colony forty miles up the coast at Tyre. And while the Mamluk dynasty in Egypt was slowly reducing the crusader castles of Palestine one after another, both the Genoese and the Venetians were also simultaneously trading with it within the Nile Delta. When it came, the Mamluk counterstrike against the crusades seriously altered the fortunes of both republics and turned their contest in a new direction.

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In April 1291, the Mamluk sultan al-Ashraf Khalil drew up a huge army outside the walls of Acre, determined finally to snuff out the infidel presence within the lands of Islam. The Muslims, embittered by the long centuries of holy war, had come with a grim determination to leave not a Christian alive. Al-Ashraf had prepared his campaign carefully, dragging with him from Cairo an array of giant catapults and other war machines, among them two huge specimens, ominously named the Victorious and the Furious, and a posse of efficient smaller engines called the Black Oxen. Acre was a substantial city of some forty thousand people drawn from all the crusading states in Europe: French and English, Germans, Italians, the crusading orders (the Templars, Hospitallers and Teutonic knights) and the commercially minded Venetians and Pisans. Many had been residents for a long time. On 6 April the catapults began to hurl giant rocks against the tall medieval walls and the sultan’s engineers started methodically mining beneath them with horrible efficiency. After centuries of squabbling between the various Christian factions, the final
defence was conducted with a bravery and sense of unity born of desperation.

Both the Venetians and Pisans fought valiantly; their skills in constructing and operating their own catapults were employed to great effect, but day after day the continuous bombardment relentlessly degraded the defensive ring. Attempts at a negotiated truce were rebuffed. The sultan was implacable. He remembered a massacre of Muslim merchants in the city the previous year and pressed on. On Friday 18 May, he ordered a final assault on the stricken town. To the sound of arrows whipping through the air, the crash of rocks, the beating of drums and the blaring of trumpets, the Mamluk army forced its way into the city and put it to the sword. The final hours of Acre were pitiful and squalid. The Templars and Hospitallers went down almost to the last man. Women and children, young and old, rich and poor crowded the quays as the Muslims advanced over the bodies of the indiscriminately slain. At the waterfront civilisation collapsed. Venetian merchants clutching their gold begged for passage but there were not enough vessels to take them off. Overcrowded rowing boats capsized and sank, drowning their occupants; the strong seized control of ships and held the imploring citizens to ransom. The ruthless Catalan adventurer Roger de Flor, commandeering a Templar galley, became fabulously rich on the proceeds of one day’s work, extorting jewels, pearls and sacks of gold from the noblewomen of the city. Those unable to pay were left pitifully at the water’s edge, waiting to be killed or enslaved. When Acre fell, the sultan systematically reduced it to ruins. The remaining Christian strongholds, Tyre, Sidon, Beirut and Haifa, were all stormed or surrendered in quick succession. The Muslims scorched the whole coast against the possibility of a Christian return. They razed the cities to the ground. After two centuries, the crusading footholds in the Holy Land had been swept away.

To Christian Europe this was a profound shock; there were immediate plans for fresh crusades – and recrimination. The papacy was well aware who had been providing the Mamluks
with military supplies. Venice and Genoa had always maintained a complex position on Islamic trade. As the Victorious and the Furious hurled giant rocks at the walls of Acre, Italian merchants were buying silk and spices, flax and cotton in Alexandria, selling back worked woollen goods from the new looms of Italy, furs from the Russian steppes – and other more contentious materials which had directly affected the course of the wars. Iron and timber – al-Ashraf’s giant catapults may well have been constructed from wood carried on Christian ships – were war materials; even more serious to the papacy, many of the troops who burst through the gates of Acre were military slaves shipped from the Black Sea in Christian vessels. In 1302 Pope Boniface VIII demanded a trading ban with the Mamluks in Egypt and Palestine which gradually squeezed the maritime republics. Specific commodities were expressly forbidden under pain of excommunication. Some of the military trade continued illicitly; the purely mercantile exchange in spices and cloth certainly did, but the papal stance hardened progressively. It became increasingly desirable to bypass the Islamic world in securing the luxury products – the spices, pearls and worked silk – that originated from beyond Christendom. In a daring response to circumstance, some enterprising Genoese armed two galleys and sailed out into the Atlantic just as Acre fell. Their objective was to discover a direct route to outflank Arab middlemen (and the Venetians) and source spices direct from India. The enterprise was two hundred years premature; they were never seen again. But within the Mediterranean basin the fall of Acre realigned the competitive pressure between Genoa and Venice. It pitched them into new theatres of war. Henceforward the battleground would swing north again into a contest for the Bosphorus and the Black Sea.

‘In the Jaws of our Enemies’

1291–1348

The Bosphorus, the seventeen-mile strait which links the Mediterranean to the Black Sea, is one of the strategic waterways of the world. A narrow maritime corridor twisting through high hills, it was formed in the last ice age, when the landlocked Black Sea burst out of its confines. The straits are governed by unique hydraulic forces. The powerful current pushing the fresher water of the Black Sea down towards the Mediterranean at a speed of five knots is reversed forty metres down by a submarine counter-surge forcing heavier salty water up the Bosphorus, so that a ship lowering a fishing net may be dragged back northwards against the apparent run of the sea. In the late summer, during the breeding season, millions of fish used to migrate up the straits, so many that you could catch the bonito, the greater mackerel, in the Golden Horn with your bare hands, according to the Greek geographer Strabo, or idly scoop them in nets from the windows of waterside houses. In winter the Bosphorus was a zone of fog and snow; icy winds funnelled off the Russian steppes; the occasional iceberg bumped against the walls of Constantinople. The Bosphorus, as the later French traveller Pierre Gilles pointed out, was the reason for the city’s existence – ‘with one key [it] opens and closes two worlds, two seas’. And at the end of the thirteenth century, with the loss of Acre and the shutting down of the souks of the Nile Delta, the Bosphorus became the centre of the great competitive game between Genoa and Venice. The lock which it now opened was access to the second world, that of the Black Sea.

The ancient Greeks described it as pleasant, in the hope of
appeasing its fierce squalls and ominous depths, but the Black Sea has a dark heart. Below two hundred metres, the sea drops away into silence. These lower reaches lock up the world’s largest reservoir of toxic hydrogen sulphide. There is no oxygen. The water is dead; wood remains perfectly preserved. The ghostly hulls of thousands of years of maritime disasters lie undecayed on the sea bed; only their iron fittings – anchors, nails, weapons and chains – have been eaten away by the poisonous depths. The Venetians called it the Greater Sea and it frightened them. Its centre is a blank; there are no island stepping stones, as in the Aegean, to provide anchorage in a storm; most shipping preferred to creep round its edge or darted across at its narrowest point.

Yet along its northern shore the sterility of the open water is offset by an astonishing coastal shelf, where four great river deltas debouch millions of tons of nutrient-rich sediment into the sea. The level bird-haunted swamps of reed and mud at the mouth of the Danube sustained, until modern times, a wealth of marine life. Salmon came to spawn here in vast numbers and sturgeon the size of small whales. The offshore shallows seethed with fish – anchovy, mullet, whiting and turbot. The fish stocks of the Danube, the Dnieper, the Dniester, and the Don – tucked into the tributary Sea of Azov in its north-east corner – fed Constantinople for a thousand years; caviar was a food of its poor, and the migratory bonito so crucial that it featured on Byzantine coins. Along the estuarine gulfs fish were salted, smoked, barrelled up and shipped west to supply the largest population in the late medieval and early modern world. When the Spanish traveller Pero Tafur arrived in the Black Sea in the fifteenth century he watched the packing of caviar: ‘they put the eggs into casks and carry them all over the world’. Beyond, the black earth of the level Ukrainian steppes provided Constantinople’s grain basket – and the gateway to yet another world.

To the Europeans the shores of the Black Sea were the frontiers of civilisation; the steppes beyond were the province of barbarian nomads, where distance was only marked by the tumuli of
the ancient Scythians, long buried with their slaves, their women, horses and gold. Early travellers felt not only the blast of the restless steppe wind and the physical cold but a deeper discomfort of the soul. ‘I was now come into a new world,’ wrote the early steppe traveller William of Roubruck. Two centuries later Pero Tafur was more easily dismayed. He found it ‘so cold that ships freeze in the harbour. Such is the bestiality and deformity of the people that I was glad to give up the desire to see more, and return to Greece.’

But it was here, in coastal settlements fringing the ominous sea and backed by the steppe wilderness, that the Greeks had settled since Mycenaean times and traded with the nomads. Until the fall of Constantinople in 1204 the Byzantines kept the Bosphorus straits firmly closed. The Black Sea provided the grain without which the city could not survive; the Italians were barred. It was the sacking of the city in 1204 which sprung the lock. Unhindered, the Venetians began to make forays into the Greater Sea. In 1206, they established a modest trading post at Soldaia on the Crimean peninsula and started trading with the local chiefs. They were at first discouraged by the violence and instability of the steppe dwellers beyond their walls, but the same year, two thousand miles to the east, an event was taking place that would reshape the trade routes of the world. The war lord Temuchin, Genghis Khan, managed to unite ‘the people with felt tents’ – the warring tribal peoples of the Mongolian steppe – into a coherent force to thunder west across the great Eurasian grasslands. Within thirty years the Mongols had blitzed their way from China to the plains of Hungary and the frontiers of Palestine. After the devastation – the deaths of millions of Persian peasants, the sacking of Baghdad and the great Muslim cities of the Euphrates, the burning of Herat, Moscow, Cracow – an extraordinary peace settled on the Eurasian world. The Mongols created a unified kingdom that stretched five thousand miles west from China; the old silk routes reopened; trading posts sprang up. Under the Pax Mongolica travellers could traverse the blue horizons without fear of banditry
or arbitrary taxation. And the Mongol khans were keen to make contact with the West. From about 1260 a highway opened into the heart of Asia that created new opportunities for transcontinental trade. For the merchants of Europe it dangled the tantalising possibility of cutting out Arab middlemen and sourcing the luxury goods of the furthest Orient direct.

The western terminus of these routes was the Black Sea. By land, camel trains jogged from caravanserai to caravanserai out of central Asia; by sea the spices of Java and the Moluccas were routed round India to the Persian Gulf, trans-shipped across land to the roadheads at Trebizond on the southern shore of the Sea – or further west to Lajazzo on the Mediterranean. From Saray on the Volga, in the western kingdom of the Mongols, the Golden Horde exerted a peaceful pressure on the petty princelings of the Black Sea. Suddenly a doorway opened that would last a century. Through it slipped adventurous European merchants. The elder Polos, Matteo and Nicolo, set out from Soldaia in 1260 with jewels for the khan of the Golden Horde at Saray; twenty years later Marco would follow in their footsteps. With the fall of Acre and the papal ban on Islamic trade, the Black Sea became the displaced centre of world trade – the axis of a series of long-range routes for exchange from the Baltic to China – and the epicentre of the commercial rivalry between Venice and Genoa. It was an opportunity that would enrich and wreck medieval Europe.