thalassoCraCies 145maritime, Peloponnesian cities is taken into account; and in any case necessity made
quick learners out of the Spartans, led by their exceptionally competent admiral
Lysander. Beneath the swirl of events commemorated by Thucydides with his sharp
political eye are harder questions. How did the Athenian thalassocracy benefit trade—
not just the trade in foodstuffs towards the capital, but trade out of Athens in textiles,
ceramics and other fine goods that might end up in Italy or even Gaul? Did the
outbreak of war in the Adriatic (because the original quarrel was over Epidamnos,
later known as Dyrrachium, Durazzo and Durrës) have anything to do with the shift
in the trade routes that was sending goods bound for Etruria up the Adriatic to the
ports at Spina and Adria, south of Venice, rather than through the contested
Tyrrhenian Sea? In other words, we can trace the rise and fall of Athenian naval power,
in a manner of which A.T. Mahan would have approved, but making the connection
between commerce and political power is more difficult (Constantakopoulou, 2007;
Moreno, 2007).
Similar puzzles embarrass historians of the medieval Mediterranean. We can begin
with the vexed problem of Muslim sea power. Islam was never able to match the
control over the entire Mediterranean achieved by Rome, partly because the New
Rome, based at Constantinople, continued to thrive and partly because some areas of
the western Mediterranean remained in the hands of Christian rulers. There was a
naval struggle for the Balearic Islands in the ninth century that delayed the Muslim
takeover of the islands for nearly two centuries after their conquest of much of main-
land Spain (Haywood, 1991). As late as the fourteenth century, Moroccan shipping
remained a threat to the expanding Christian kingdoms within Iberia. But it is hard
to gain a sense of how effective Muslim mastery over parts of the Mediterranean was;
and it is clear that commercial traffic fell increasingly into the hands of the Italians and
the Catalans, even between nodal points in the Islamic Mediterranean such as Ceuta
and Alexandria. The Catalans created a formidable trading network in the face of stiff
opposition from the Genoese, who had a longer and very successful history of trade
right across the Mediterranean. Catalan merchants had the support of the kings of
Aragon, who were also counts of Barcelona, but they had a different agenda: James I
of Aragon-Catalonia conquered Majorca in 1229 primarily to boost his power at
home by leading a victorious crusade against the Muslims who had controlled the
island for over 300 years. He handed the day-to-day government of the island to oth-
ers, and it was precisely this lack of interference from the center that fostered the lively
business community of the island, consisting of Christian and Jewish settlers from
Spain, southern France and (in the case of the Jews) North Africa.
The island became the hub of a vibrant trading network—a “Mediterranean empo-
rium.” Yet the king had made use of Catalan and Provençal shipping to move his great
army across the water; this was the first time a Catalan ruler had not depended on the
Genoese and/or the Pisans in a naval campaign against the Muslims. He did have the
vocal support of a prominent Catalan merchant named Pere Martell, and what Martell
offered was some of these ships. Later conquests by the kings of Aragon consolidated
the commercial network of the Catalan merchants; but, even though the Catalan
merchants generally seem to have supported the Aragonese expeditions, often with
big loans of funds (as in Sardinia in 1323–1324), the Aragonese kings pursued distinct
dynastic aims, and commercial considerations were at best secondary. So the acquisition
of the city of Valencia in 1238 enabled the Catalans to create a new commercial center0002063951.INDD 145 2/17/2014 11:36:30 AM