THE SWORD AND THE SEA 143endangered wooden ships. Its first known use in 678 gave the Empire a
forty-year breather before her existence was again threatened by Arab
navies.
By 715 the Arab navies sailed back under the command of Caliph
Suleiman bin Abdulmelik, and his brother Mesleme. Again, they pressed
attack to the very ramparts of the city, but a surprise sortie by the renovated
Byzantine fleet caught the attackers off guard, and Greek fire did the rest.
Not until 782 did the Arabs regain the strength to assail the Byzantine
capital, when Harun-ur Rashid again confronted the massive walls. Like
his predecessors, he failed to overcome the defense, and he and his fleet
exacted nothing more than a token subsidy from the empire. This effort,
the last of the Arab sieges of Constantinople, left the weary city and
empire to survive another 700 years until the Turks finally battered the
walls with great guns and at the same time overcame the naval defense.
The repeated repulses by the defenders of Constantinople, made it nat-
ural that Arab naval efforts shifted more to the west, away from the center
of Byzantine power. Arab armies had marched along the coast of North
Africa in the seventh and eighth centuries, sweeping all before them.
These victories brought the famous old ports of Africa into Arab hands
and before long Saracens—or Moors as they came to be called—were
using the sea power of the African ports to considerable advantage.
A major campaign launched from North Africa brought the invasion of
the Iberian Peninsula and the establishment of seven centuries of Moorish
Spain. The naval elements of this invasion concentrated at Ceuta on the
African side of the Strait of Gibraltar. Ceuta itself had been captured from
King Roderick of the Visigoths in 711. As the conquest of Spain contin-
ued, Morocco was the embarkation point for many reinforcements that
rolled into the newly forming caliphate of Cordoba.
The Spanish Caliphate was itself to foster considerable naval activity,
and in 827 and 831 combined fleets of Muslims from Africa and Spain
descended upon the Byzantine outpost of Sicily. Sicily held out 140 years
as both the Empire and the local inhabitants offered fierce resistance to
the various unallied invaders, but the island had fallen exclusively under
Saracen control by 975. They would hold the rich prize only until 1061,
when Normans arrived from Italy as mercenaries under Ibn al-Thumna
against his rivals. It was not a happy choice, and before the beginning of
the twelfth century, the Normans would hold the entire island.
In the eleventh century European crusaders captured the Syrian ports
and Egypt fell into generally anemic hands, leading to a downturn in Arab
naval activity. By the time the crusader tide had ebbed, the Turkish in-
vasions had swept aside the old Arabic states. The Turks themselves would