A Companion to Mediterranean History

174 clifford r. backman

Lessons learned

Several lessons can be drawn from these vignettes.

First, the ancient sources often romanticize pirates

and their doings as much as modern readers do

Plutarch’s tale of Pompey invites skepticism with every sentence. Pirates were indeed
a menace to Roman commerce in the first century bce, but an organized force of
20 000 operating out of two known sites (Cilicia and Crete) with easily-recognizable
vessels beggars belief. So too does a police force of 120 000 legionaries aboard 500
warships. The most common warships used by the Romans at that time were “fives”
and “sixes”—the quinquereme and hexareme which, discounting the rowers and other
crew, carried roughly 100 and 200 soldiers each, respectively, not enough for so large
a force. Moreover, the extraordinary terms of the lex Gabinia commission suggest a
motive other than sweeping the sea lanes clean. By extending his jurisdiction to any
site within 400 stades of the coast, the law effectively gave Pompey command, for
three full years, of virtually every city in the (soon-to-be) empire, including the city of
Rome itself, which easily lay within that limit. Small wonder, then, that most members
of the Senate had opposed the law’s passing. And the trope of a lone hero, pulled
reluctantly out of retirement to perform one last mission to save the world from an
outsized threat—a garish and omnivorous troupe of pirates so successful that they
seduce the scions of some of Rome’s own best families into joining them—and then
doing so in less than one-tenth of the time expected, is fit for a sub-par but probably
highly profitable Hollywood movie. The coup de grâce is the ending, in which our
hero persuades the entire pirate crew to put away their wicked ways, surrender their
ill-gotten gains, and take up the simple but noble life of honest, hard-working tillers
of the soil. It might even have given W.S. Gilbert pause, as a plot’s plausible denoue-
ment. All this is not to say that Pompey never cleared the sea of pirates. He plainly did,
but almost certainly not in the astonishing fashion described by Plutarch.

Second, commercial piracy was commonplace and

depended on reliable information about trade networks

The most remarkable aspect of Bernat de Sarrià’s adventure in 1308 is not that he
returned from Siracusa and took up his ambassadorial task again, but that he was
allowed to do so. Frederick’s letter to James was private and confidential, sent under
his privy seal, and asked only for compensation for what Bernat had stolen. The letter
expresses no shock or outrage, even though it points out to James that “various others
under your command” had also attacked Sicilian ships in similar fashion in recent
years. It is not a cry of indignation; the letter’s tone is quite matter-of-fact. The two
ships carrying Bernat and his entourage were galleys—the warships of the era—and
they would have been prepared to defend themselves if necessary; but they were not
an offensive force. They did not need to be, for a treaty between all the parties con-
tending for control of Sicily had been in place since 1302. But they were sufficient to
seize the merchant ship in harbor at Siracusa. By the fourteenth century piracy had
become so common that claims for reparations were a regular part of bureaucratic