82 dominique valérian
at defending the shores against Muslim raids launched from the Maghreb or Sicilian
coasts; from the beginning of the eleventh century, Pisan and Genoese vessels began
raiding North African ports and contributed to territorial conquests in the Iberian
Peninsula and Sicily. On the eve of the First Crusade, domination of the western
Mediterranean was already changing, in particular with the conquest of Sicily and
Sardinia. In the eastern Mediterranean, while the Fatimids still maintained a naval
policy, the Byzantine emperors were neglecting their fleet and in 1082 were forced to
beg for the help of Venetian vessels in resisting the Norman threat, in exchange for
important commercial privileges. During the twelfth century, Latin supremacy was
confirmed: a huge shipbuilding effort was undertaken to supply the Latin states of
Syria–Palestine and to support the development of maritime trade. Fleets were becom-
ing important to the survival of the Latin possessions in the east and the prosperity of
the merchant republics. At the same time, the Byzantines abandoned their naval
ambitions and the Muslim powers—Fatimid, Ayyubid and Mamluk—were unable to
compete effectively with Frankish fleets (though the Mamluks did succeed in regain-
ing Syria). In the west, the only exceptions were the Almohads and then the Marinids,
who managed to develop war fleets capable of seriously threatening the Christians.
The last significant naval confrontation, over control of the Straits of Gibraltar in
the 1330s, ended in the Muslim defeat at the battle of Tarifa in 1340. After that, the
sultans were often forced to rent Catalan galleys to fight their Muslim rivals in the
Maghreb. The maritime jihad was then left to pirates or privateers, more or less
controlled by Muslim rulers but not powerful enough to affect dominion over the
Mediterranean in any significant way.
From then on, the Mediterranean, no longer shared between Byzantine–Christian
and Muslim control, was almost exclusively Latin, and with the conquest of the islands
the border between Islam and Christendom moved south. Though Muslim ships did
not disappear completely, they were outnumbered by Christian ships, which served
even maritime trade internal to the Muslim world; at the end of the fourteenth cen-
tury, Ibn Khaldûn lamented that Muslims “became, on sea, as strangers” (1969,
Muqaddimah 525; 1969: 212). Christian powers now competed for supremacy in the
Mediterranean: first the Italian city-states (Venice, Pisa, and Genoa) that developed
colonial empires in the east, then the monarchies (Norman, Angevin, and, above all,
Aragonese) (Abulafia, 1997). The complex reasons for this change, not only military
or political in nature, are discussed below.
Beyond territorial conquests, never very significant, what was at stake in these
changes of political domination over the Mediterranean was the control of navigation
and trade networks, which gradually passed into the hands of Latin merchants.
From a compartmentalized sea to a Mediterranean
inserted into complex networksOur sources cannot give us a picture of trade networks as precise as that of the political
history of the Mediterranean. Chronicles show little interest in commerce or in the
economy in general. They may be supplemented by other types of texts like geographical
descriptions (especially in Arabic) or travel accounts, but the most precise of these texts
are often quite late. Archival records give us a better picture of the movement of men