150 david abulafiaempire as the rice paddies of Valencia or the almond groves of Majorca. The fonduk
retained its importance, and the much-decayed buildings of the Austrian, French
and Italian fonduks of the eighteenth century still stand in Tunis.
Maintaining control from afar has always been a problem, and in the fifteenth cen-
tury the Aragonese kings governed their scattered territories through viceroys, for they
insisted upon the separate identity of the kingdoms and principality that made up their
Mediterranean empire. The Venetians appointed a member of their patriciate to govern
Crete as its “duke,” accountable to the Doge and Council in Venice itself—a matter of
some importance, as the island was an important source of grain and other primary
foodstuffs from the thirteenth century onwards. The Genoese on the other hand tended
to leave their far-flung settlements, islands and trading stations to their own devices.
The Genoese settlers at Pera, across the Golden Horn from Constantinople, refused to
follow the political lead of their compatriots back home, and in the early fourteenth
century, when Genoa was under the overlordship of King Robert of Naples, they sup-
ported his opponents, the so-called Ghibellines. Both Genoa and Venice understood
that the small islands of the Aegean were most easily managed as private fiefs of Italian
pirate captains who recognized one or the other republic as their overlord. In Sardinia,
both the Pisans and the Genoese were keen to extract grain, leather, cheese and other
basic goods, and it made sense to endow the great churches and monasteries of their
cities with estates there, trusting them to organize production of the goods the mer-
chants sought, while the merchants based themselves in newly-founded towns such as
Cagliari and Alghero. Under the Aragonese (who faced strong internal opposition) the
island was legally a separate kingdom, though ruled by the king of Aragon through a
viceroy, with its own parliament and legal system. What was “colonial” was the system
of exploitation of the soil and the low status accorded to the native Sards.
Possessing the tools was very necessary, but we are still left with the question how
sea power was actually exercised. John Pryor has argued that there is, in effect, no
such thing as control of the surface of the sea, and that sea power within the
Mediterranean, at any rate, primarily consisted of control of key ports and bases
(Pryor, 1988). Movement between ports might necessitate convoys such as the
Venetian muda, with ships travelling together under armed guard, at least if they car-
ried precious goods such as spices. Of course, the fact that some naval powers resorted
to convoys indicates that the dangers of the sea consisted of rather more than tem-
pests and shoals. Predatory pirates or enemy fleets were rarely absent, though the
Romans succeeded in reducing these dangers to a very low level in the early imperial
period. But if we turn to the central Mediterranean we can arguably observe one good
example of a maritime empire that commanded the sea; and this was largely the result
of its ability to patrol relatively narrow stretches of waters between Italy and Albania
and between Sicily and North Africa, as well as controlling intermediate islands, nota-
bly Malta. This is the kingdom of Sicily under its founder, Roger II (d. 1154), up to
its fragmentation into two under Charles I of Anjou (d.1285—he lost Sicily to the
Aragonese in 1282 and was left only with the mainland half of his kingdom). Roger
used commercial pressure, the desperate need of the North African cities such as
Mahdia for food supplies, to bring them under his control; Malta (occupied in 1127)
provided him with an island base half-way to Africa; and he occupied Corfu, fearing a
Byzantine invasion from the Balkans. Charles looked in the same direction and aspired
to control Albania, and therefore the entrance into the Adriatic, and he gives the0002063951.INDD 150 2/17/2014 11:36:30 AM