ACT IV Part II: The Submission of Muslim Sicily
Planet of Hats
Donor
Excerpt: Evolving Economics in Western Islam - Marwan Munis, University of Mahdia Press, AD 1977
The breather in the Lateran Wars - what was hoped in its time to be the end of the conflicts between the Pope and the Emperor - gave Pope Urban II some space to relax and deal with other pressing foreign policy challenges within his realm and without it.
In truth, the predation upon the island of Sicily had begun by the 1070s and 1080s; Norman mercenaries out of southern Italy had shoved the divided Sicilians out of their toehold in Reggio, with the city eventually given to the Papacy as an enclave. By 1083, meanwhile, Genoa effectively controlled the city of Trapani, having planted men-at-arms there to protect its local rulers - at the cost to the local Arabo-Sicilians of gaining control of the city's trade. The rising Italian merchant republics valued the island for their own designs - the politically-divided island stood astride a vital trade route between west and east, controlled much good and fertile land, incorporated a number of large cities, and most importantly, presented a tempting target for a Europe beginning to burst at the seams with excess population.
The arrival of Zawi ibn Ziri early in the 11th century had given Sicily a few decades of internal stability as New Berbers simply imposed their will upon the feuding parties there, leading eventually to Zawid Sicily becoming a dependency of Zirid Ifriqiya. However, Sicily lacked a number of the factors which allowed al-Andalus to hang on:
Soon enough, this meddling landed in front of Urban II, who threw chum into the water in early 1093 by calling for a military expedition to Sicily. Urban even granted a vermillion banner to the expedition. Undoubtedly favouring his own supporters, he issued the contract to the merchant government of Pisa, choosing it over Genoa, which was nominally loyal to the Holy Roman Emperor and had declined to take sides in the Lateran War. While Italy lay within the Empire, the Pisans had taken Urban's side during the initial conflict with Emperor Hermann II and had the backing of the Margrave of Tuscany.
Urban encouraged the Pisans to make their expedition one on behalf of all of Christendom, and the Pisans spent plenty of good silver hiring in men at arms from throughout the Mediterranean. Among those joining the expedition were several Italian and Provencal[1] knights and minor lords, seasoned in battle with the Moors; the most prominent among them were Roger of Toulouse, brother of Duke William of Narbonne, and Berenguer of Barcelona, third son of the Count of Barcelona and Urgell, and not in line to inherit.
Loaded up with mercenaries, the Pisan fleet set out to attack the northeast of the island. The fleet split up and made landfall in Messina and Milazzo, seizing both cities with little loss of life. With eyes on Catania, the force set to work moving along the coast to connect their holdings. With Sicily divided, the adventurers found themselves with no shortage of locals hoping to use the invaders as a card against their neighbours, and a surprising number of Arabo-Greek people ended up siding with the Catholic force.
Over the next decade or so - and indeed, well beyond Urban II's papacy - Pisa and Genoa would gradually gain ascendancy in Sicily. By 1100, they had evicted the Arabo-Sicilian leadership from Palermo, the city becoming a centre of Pisan trade. The north part of the island was marked by Pisa as the Duchy of Sicily and organized as a client state of sorts; an Italian from Pisa, Ildebrando Alliata, was proclamed Duke, though in reality he took his marching orders from Pisa, with Pisan merchants and traders controlling trade in this part of the island. Not to be outdone, Genoa - in control of the western tip of Sicily as far east as Alcamo and Sciacca, set up a rival Count of Trapani, who also claimed jurisdiction over all of Sicily.
The south of Sicily, meanwhile, remained Muslim for some time into the 1100s. The Zawids being unable to stem the tide of the Italian communes, they were soon toppled by an Arabo-Sicilian baronial revolt, installing a regime in Syracuse led by Abu 'Amr ibn Ahyad. He and the later Ahyadids - an Arab dynasty rather than a Berber one, and likely an offshoot of the Banu Kalb, much like the formerly ruling Kalbids - held on for a long period as tributaries of Pisa and Genoa, with the two merchant republics controlling most commerce in the south.
The island rapidly became a trade battleground, as Pisa and Genoa competed for control over the Sicilian marketplace. Piracy in the central Mediterranean increased, while merchants in the major port cities competed to lure ships into their particular ports rather than others. Together with Genoa's continued efforts to gain control over the giudicati of Sardinia, the central Mediterranean soon found itself a maritime merchant battlefield, as the two Italian communes struggled for trade supremacy.
The population felt little of this; more interested in trade than in wars of religious conversion, the Pisans in particular imposed few cultural hardships upon the Arabo-Greek society living on the island at the time. While the island's rulers and key trade leaders were always members of well-connected Italian families, with the Alliata family of course being the most prominent in the early years, Arabo-Greeks - including Muslims - held high offices within both the Pisan and Genoese parts of Sicily, and Muslims were permitted to worship.
The havoc in Sicily had a few consequences. By 1100, members of the Sicilian elite were trickling away from the island in a progressively larger stream of emigration. The defeated Zawids landed back in Ifriqiya, while many landed in Melita,[2] contributing to a boom in the island's Muslim population and the development of the island as a Mediterranean port of call. Others, however - a mix of Arabo-Sicilians and native Sicilian converts to Islam - went west and settled in Saqlabid al-Andalus, mainly in the southeast. While not a large influx, their arrival added a new element to the intriguing trader society beginning to collate around the cities of Denia, Balansiyya and to an extent Qirtajina.[3]
Within Sicily itself, the gradual takeover by the Italian communes, coupled with the absence of persecutory policies towards the locals and the continued tributary status of the Ahyadids of Syracuse, led to an intense Italo-Arab-Greek culture forming within Sicily itself, with a little seasoning from those Normans and Provencals who stayed after the seizure of the northern 60% of the island. This culture would set the stage for development of fantastic works of art and architecture. It would later allow for the proliferation of Arab agricultural and industrial techniques throughout Italy and the rediscovery of certain ancient Greek manuscripts, which would eventually be transliterated into Latin. This high culture, heavily seasoned with Arabity, would make Sicily a centre of medieval learning and advancement and spread forgotten Roman learning throughout the central and western Mediterranean for decades and centuries to follow.
More importantly, the steady fall of Muslim Sicily marked the beginning of the dominance of the Italian communes in the central Mediterranean, and the beginning of its consequences for al-Andalus. Sicilian ports once open to Andalusian merchants increasingly came to be dominated by Pisan and Genoese merchants, levying taxes on Andalusian traders and transactions as they sought to milk the market for as much profit as they could. While ports in Ahyadid Sicily remained viable for some time, Andalusian merchants still found themselves facing stiffer competition from Pisan and Genoese merchantmen, who enjoyed special status stemming from their suzerainty over the Ahyadid ports. This made Mahdia, Tunis and Meuia[4] the best port options for Andalusian merchants - and with the ports in Ifriqiya facing the threat of attack from parties ranging from the al-Mutahirin to marauding Bedouins migrating out of Egypt, Andalusian sailors found themselves with increasingly fewer options for trading between Egypt and Andalusia. This hardship created immediate challenges for Andalusian traders seeking to bring goods to and from market.
It is this stiffening of competition in the Mediterranean, together with the arrival of Arabo-Sicilians tied into the Mediterranean trade, which ultimately not only speeded the transition of al-Andalus's economy away from a pure cash crop base and towards sustainability, but also provided fertilizer for the cultural seed already planted in the area around Denia. Under pressure from Pisa and Genoa, Andalusian merchants in this area - already a cultural crossroads as a stronghold of the Saqaliba, with a large and empowered muwallad population beginning to burgeon - would form the nucleus of what would develop into a regional maritime-mercantile tradition. This tradition would go on, in turn, to dramatically change the course of history - though not for many years to come.
[1] Occitan.
[2] Malta.
[3] Cartagena.
[4] Valletta, Malta.
6. Al-Andalus and the Fall of Zawid Sicily
The breather in the Lateran Wars - what was hoped in its time to be the end of the conflicts between the Pope and the Emperor - gave Pope Urban II some space to relax and deal with other pressing foreign policy challenges within his realm and without it.
In truth, the predation upon the island of Sicily had begun by the 1070s and 1080s; Norman mercenaries out of southern Italy had shoved the divided Sicilians out of their toehold in Reggio, with the city eventually given to the Papacy as an enclave. By 1083, meanwhile, Genoa effectively controlled the city of Trapani, having planted men-at-arms there to protect its local rulers - at the cost to the local Arabo-Sicilians of gaining control of the city's trade. The rising Italian merchant republics valued the island for their own designs - the politically-divided island stood astride a vital trade route between west and east, controlled much good and fertile land, incorporated a number of large cities, and most importantly, presented a tempting target for a Europe beginning to burst at the seams with excess population.
The arrival of Zawi ibn Ziri early in the 11th century had given Sicily a few decades of internal stability as New Berbers simply imposed their will upon the feuding parties there, leading eventually to Zawid Sicily becoming a dependency of Zirid Ifriqiya. However, Sicily lacked a number of the factors which allowed al-Andalus to hang on:
- No central authority. The institution of the Caliphate was preserved by the Saqlabids; while Arabo-Andalusian supremacy was sidelined in practice and ethnic strife was a serious factor even in the Saqlabid period, from Abd ar-Rahman III there was always the expectation of a unifying central figure of high lineage. Sicily had no such caliphal tradition, and the governors there were always mere emirs with a distant nod to the Fatimid Caliphs, for whom Sicily stopped mattering much after the famine of the 1060s. Cut off from a central authority, Sicily was doomed to fracture into competing taifas.
- No control over the manpower pools in Ifriqiya and the Maghreb. Even in the Saqlabid period, a great chunk of al-Andalus's manpower derived from Maghrebi Berbers. Zawid Sicily, on the other hand, didn't have the manpower to follow the Andalusian route of clientizing chunks of the Maghreb, instead finding itself as dependency of the Zirids. Simply, the Zawids had no way to pull the old Andalusian trick of importing thousands of Christian and Berber mercenaries to throw at a given military problem, and not enough native manpower to clientize Ifriqiyan tribes.
- No obvious avenue of rescue. The defeat of the Zirids at the hands of the al-Mutahirin broke a key line of support between Ifriqiya and Sicily, though in fact the Zirids were relatively boat-challenged to begin with. Certainly the Sicilians had enough boats to raid throughout the Mediterranean, but never much of an organized navy. Once the Zirids capitulated and broke ranks with the Fatimids, badly weakened by the purity fanatics to their west, the Zawids of Sicily were effectively on their own, their history of piracy simply putting a vast crosshair over the island in the eyes of the rising powers of the Mediterranean.
Soon enough, this meddling landed in front of Urban II, who threw chum into the water in early 1093 by calling for a military expedition to Sicily. Urban even granted a vermillion banner to the expedition. Undoubtedly favouring his own supporters, he issued the contract to the merchant government of Pisa, choosing it over Genoa, which was nominally loyal to the Holy Roman Emperor and had declined to take sides in the Lateran War. While Italy lay within the Empire, the Pisans had taken Urban's side during the initial conflict with Emperor Hermann II and had the backing of the Margrave of Tuscany.
Urban encouraged the Pisans to make their expedition one on behalf of all of Christendom, and the Pisans spent plenty of good silver hiring in men at arms from throughout the Mediterranean. Among those joining the expedition were several Italian and Provencal[1] knights and minor lords, seasoned in battle with the Moors; the most prominent among them were Roger of Toulouse, brother of Duke William of Narbonne, and Berenguer of Barcelona, third son of the Count of Barcelona and Urgell, and not in line to inherit.
Loaded up with mercenaries, the Pisan fleet set out to attack the northeast of the island. The fleet split up and made landfall in Messina and Milazzo, seizing both cities with little loss of life. With eyes on Catania, the force set to work moving along the coast to connect their holdings. With Sicily divided, the adventurers found themselves with no shortage of locals hoping to use the invaders as a card against their neighbours, and a surprising number of Arabo-Greek people ended up siding with the Catholic force.
Over the next decade or so - and indeed, well beyond Urban II's papacy - Pisa and Genoa would gradually gain ascendancy in Sicily. By 1100, they had evicted the Arabo-Sicilian leadership from Palermo, the city becoming a centre of Pisan trade. The north part of the island was marked by Pisa as the Duchy of Sicily and organized as a client state of sorts; an Italian from Pisa, Ildebrando Alliata, was proclamed Duke, though in reality he took his marching orders from Pisa, with Pisan merchants and traders controlling trade in this part of the island. Not to be outdone, Genoa - in control of the western tip of Sicily as far east as Alcamo and Sciacca, set up a rival Count of Trapani, who also claimed jurisdiction over all of Sicily.
The south of Sicily, meanwhile, remained Muslim for some time into the 1100s. The Zawids being unable to stem the tide of the Italian communes, they were soon toppled by an Arabo-Sicilian baronial revolt, installing a regime in Syracuse led by Abu 'Amr ibn Ahyad. He and the later Ahyadids - an Arab dynasty rather than a Berber one, and likely an offshoot of the Banu Kalb, much like the formerly ruling Kalbids - held on for a long period as tributaries of Pisa and Genoa, with the two merchant republics controlling most commerce in the south.
The island rapidly became a trade battleground, as Pisa and Genoa competed for control over the Sicilian marketplace. Piracy in the central Mediterranean increased, while merchants in the major port cities competed to lure ships into their particular ports rather than others. Together with Genoa's continued efforts to gain control over the giudicati of Sardinia, the central Mediterranean soon found itself a maritime merchant battlefield, as the two Italian communes struggled for trade supremacy.
The population felt little of this; more interested in trade than in wars of religious conversion, the Pisans in particular imposed few cultural hardships upon the Arabo-Greek society living on the island at the time. While the island's rulers and key trade leaders were always members of well-connected Italian families, with the Alliata family of course being the most prominent in the early years, Arabo-Greeks - including Muslims - held high offices within both the Pisan and Genoese parts of Sicily, and Muslims were permitted to worship.
The havoc in Sicily had a few consequences. By 1100, members of the Sicilian elite were trickling away from the island in a progressively larger stream of emigration. The defeated Zawids landed back in Ifriqiya, while many landed in Melita,[2] contributing to a boom in the island's Muslim population and the development of the island as a Mediterranean port of call. Others, however - a mix of Arabo-Sicilians and native Sicilian converts to Islam - went west and settled in Saqlabid al-Andalus, mainly in the southeast. While not a large influx, their arrival added a new element to the intriguing trader society beginning to collate around the cities of Denia, Balansiyya and to an extent Qirtajina.[3]
Within Sicily itself, the gradual takeover by the Italian communes, coupled with the absence of persecutory policies towards the locals and the continued tributary status of the Ahyadids of Syracuse, led to an intense Italo-Arab-Greek culture forming within Sicily itself, with a little seasoning from those Normans and Provencals who stayed after the seizure of the northern 60% of the island. This culture would set the stage for development of fantastic works of art and architecture. It would later allow for the proliferation of Arab agricultural and industrial techniques throughout Italy and the rediscovery of certain ancient Greek manuscripts, which would eventually be transliterated into Latin. This high culture, heavily seasoned with Arabity, would make Sicily a centre of medieval learning and advancement and spread forgotten Roman learning throughout the central and western Mediterranean for decades and centuries to follow.
More importantly, the steady fall of Muslim Sicily marked the beginning of the dominance of the Italian communes in the central Mediterranean, and the beginning of its consequences for al-Andalus. Sicilian ports once open to Andalusian merchants increasingly came to be dominated by Pisan and Genoese merchants, levying taxes on Andalusian traders and transactions as they sought to milk the market for as much profit as they could. While ports in Ahyadid Sicily remained viable for some time, Andalusian merchants still found themselves facing stiffer competition from Pisan and Genoese merchantmen, who enjoyed special status stemming from their suzerainty over the Ahyadid ports. This made Mahdia, Tunis and Meuia[4] the best port options for Andalusian merchants - and with the ports in Ifriqiya facing the threat of attack from parties ranging from the al-Mutahirin to marauding Bedouins migrating out of Egypt, Andalusian sailors found themselves with increasingly fewer options for trading between Egypt and Andalusia. This hardship created immediate challenges for Andalusian traders seeking to bring goods to and from market.
It is this stiffening of competition in the Mediterranean, together with the arrival of Arabo-Sicilians tied into the Mediterranean trade, which ultimately not only speeded the transition of al-Andalus's economy away from a pure cash crop base and towards sustainability, but also provided fertilizer for the cultural seed already planted in the area around Denia. Under pressure from Pisa and Genoa, Andalusian merchants in this area - already a cultural crossroads as a stronghold of the Saqaliba, with a large and empowered muwallad population beginning to burgeon - would form the nucleus of what would develop into a regional maritime-mercantile tradition. This tradition would go on, in turn, to dramatically change the course of history - though not for many years to come.
[1] Occitan.
[2] Malta.
[3] Cartagena.
[4] Valletta, Malta.
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