thalassoCraCies 151impression of having dusted off and studied old Norman Sicilian plans to invade the
area. Just as Roger had established mastery over much of Tunisia, Charles joined a
crusade against Tunis and then extracted substantial tribute from the city’s ruler.
Moreover, Charles hoped to place one of his sons on the throne of Sardinia, though
this led nowhere in the end. Both rulers seem to have conceived of a cordon sanitaire
around their kingdom, an ambition rendered easier by the fact that the southern
Adriatic and the Sicilian Straits were spaces of water that one could almost see across
(Stanton, 2011; Mott, 2003). On the other hand, it is important to stress that this
cordon sanitaire consisted not simply of water: both Roger and Charles had designs
on the coasts facing their core territories, in North Africa and in the western Balkans.
Thus the waters around Sicily were particularly well-suited to the creation of a mari-
time dominion; other examples from this area include the dominions of Carthage in
North Africa, Sicily and Sardinia; and the Vandal kings in the late Roman period, with
a base in Carthage but patches of territory in Sicily, Sardinia and further afield. The
narrowness of this maritime space offered special advantages.
Is thalassocracy a genuine way of exercising political and commercial power, then?
If we use the term loosely to describe empires with a significant maritime component—
empires that drew wealth from trade, empires that were so physically dispersed that
they depended on maritime communication—then the term has some meaning. The
Mediterranean may not, generally speaking, provide the clearest examples. Outside the
Mediterranean several impressive coastal dominions could be described as thalassocra-
cies: the lively trading and political world of Śri Vijaya based at Palembang near the
South China Sea, which eventually gave way to the commercial network dominated by
Melaka (Malacca) in the fifteenth century; the Omani empire in the eighteenth cen-
tury, that stretched along the shores of the Indian Ocean from south of Zanzibar to the
coast of north-west India, and that combined political dominion with intensive com-
merce aboard the famous dhows (Wolters, 1970; Risso, 1986). Then there are island
networks, more modest in scale but accessible to long-distance shipping, which they
were able to supply with vital necessities: the early Portuguese network of trade and
settlement, beginning with the tight little world of Macaronesia, the name given to the
islands of the eastern Atlantic (Madeira, the Azores, the Cape Verde islands), and even-
tually extending to São Tomé and finally to the coast of Brazil; or the windswept world
of the islands stretching down from western Scotland to Man in the era of the Norse
kings (Duncan, 1972: 1–24; McDonald, 2007). But some territories and nations with
great maritime potential looked away from the sea: Mahan’s complaint was that the
United States, with its enormously long coastlines, did not exercise sea power. Perhaps
the Mediterranean is in some senses too complex a region to display such clear cases of
thalassocracy as Oman and the Portuguese Atlantic. Mainlands jut into the sea; islands
are often crammed together, notably in the Adriatic and the Aegean—setting aside
some minor dynasties of Venetian and Genoese warlords in the medieval Aegean, such
as the Gattilusi of Lesbos, the islands of the Mediterranean have generally been ruled
from the mainland, and competed for by mainland powers. Roger II of Sicily spent
much of his career in mainland southern Italy. The Catalan kings of Majorca usually
resided in their palace at Perpignan. Only in remote antiquity were the inhabitants of
Sardinia not under the domination of mainland powers, and even then they spent most
of the time at war with one another, if the thousands of nuraghic castles known to have
existed are evidence of anything. And it is still so today: only two islands in the0002063951.INDD 151 2/17/2014 11:36:30 AM