THE DEMAND FOR MERCHANT SHIPPING
In our own age so many amazing developments have taken place during the
nineteenth and twentieth centuries that we must not be misled. These
are the exceptions and not the rule in history. Between the merchant
ships of the late Roman Empire and of the next few centuries there is
no evidence to cause us to think the ships materially altered. On the
contrary, what little evidence we have goes to show that the cargo
ship, with her mast, yard and square-sail, continued to be much the
same in the thirteenth century as she was in the third, if we add a
mizzen-mast and a lateen sail.
But all this time the Mediterranean trade had been developing, and
collaterally there was developed a Mercantile Marine. As the years
sped by, there came greater demands for the merchant ship. Thus in the
epistles of Cassiodorus, who was prætorian prefect under Theodoric
(A.D. 495-526), there is a dispatch to the tribunes of the “maritimi,”
or men of the seaboard, bidding them provide for the transport of
wine from Istria to Ravenna; and there is a reference to the frequent
voyages over the “immense spaces of the sea.”[1] By the eighth century
Venice was becoming a great trading port, and its merchants were
realising what the sea meant to them in regard to wealth. Indeed, they
even went so far as to sell Christian men as slaves to the Saracens in
Africa, thus incurring the Pope’s censure.
To Constantinople Venetian merchant ships sailed with goods or
passengers, as, for instance, in the year 968, carrying Bishop
Luitprand thither. In fact, by the year 1000 the city of Venice was
pre-eminent in commerce, and its princes were merchants. Overseas
trading was at last recognised as a means to wealth, and so,
inevitably, by about 1171 the Venetian Navy becomes organised. That
was bound to come as soon as the Mercantile Marine became important;
but it was arranged rather on the lines of our Naval Reserve. For all
ordinary occasions it consisted of volunteers, for whose service there
was payment, and these citizens were also entitled to prize money.
Indeed, throughout nautical history the navies of the world have always
been based on the Merchant Service. In these early days of Venice,
while Dalmatia, Istria and other communities supplied the men, Venice
provided the ships and rigging, the rest of the inventory and the
crew being forthcoming from the dependencies. Finally, in the time of
emergency hired seamen were obtained from foreign countries with whom
the Venetian commercial ships had traded.
He who visits Venice, or is familiar with Ruskin’s _Stones of Venice_,
or at least has admired in some gallery the paintings of the great
Venetian masters, must inevitably think of the sea. Those richly
designed palaces, those luxuriant examples of architecture and art,
were expressive of a city grown wealthy by reason of her sea trade.
Her merchants amassed wealth because their ships enabled them to
trade—the sea is, in fact, the greatest road to riches. And the history
of Phœnicia, Egypt, Greece, Rome, Venice, Portugal, Spain, Holland,
England in the past, and quite recently Germany, Japan and the United
States, is the story of overseas trade by means of merchant shipping.
Most important of all have always been the sea routes to the Orient,
for Eastern produce has ever fetched high prices in European countries.
As we look through the centuries of sea trade it was the fascination
of the East which spurred men to build, fit out and sail ships. It was
this which gave the incentive to make navigation a science; it was this
which created the spirit to explore unknown seas; it was this which
sent Columbus, later on, to the West in the hope of finding the East
Indies. The whole story of the East India Company—indeed of our Indian
Empire—is built up on the invaluable products which could be fetched
thence by peaceable shipping.
It was in the seventh century that the twelve townships decided to
elect one supreme magistrate, called the “doge.” Venice thus insisted
on her own independence, and her geographical position enabled her to
rise into a consummate commercial state. Not merely did she eventually
dominate the Adriatic, but step by step she absorbed all the carrying
trade of the world. Keen, enterprising men of vision and foresight,
these Venetian merchants went far afield, in spite of the difficulties
and dangers of travel. For centuries the Chinese had been sending
merchant ships as far west as Ceylon, whence Indian ships carried the
silk and other goods a stage further west to the Persian Gulf; and
afterwards, as there was no Suez Canal, a land journey intervened until
the Mediterranean was reached. Thus, by the early years of the Middle
Ages, the Venetian ships of commerce brought across the Mediterranean
and up the Adriatic the costly skins, the peacocks’ tails, the purple
garments and other enviable articles which had come from India, the
Caspian shores and elsewhere. In the end, Venice captured the great
trade to India and China, and Constantinople was left behind in the
competition.
But that was not all. Already by the seventh century the rise of
Moslem power had become such that in southern Europe Arab dominion had
obtained control of the Levant and Egypt. Presently the whole of the
north African coast, from the Nile to the Atlantic, fell under this
sway, and during the eighth century the Arabs overran Spain, southern
and central France, until in the same century they were forced back
across the Pyrenees. How does this affect the rise of the Mercantile
Marine? The answer is this. The Arabs were excellent sailors who were
also expert navigators, and incidentally the very word “admiral,”
which still survives in the sea service of all civilised powers, is an
Arabic word. The Arabs took to trading, and that meant the employment
of ships in the Mediterranean; so they introduced the triangular lateen
sail from east of Suez, and to this day the lateen has survived as the
characteristic local sail of Mediterranean craft. Thus between Venice
and Africa overseas trade was created, business made still further
business, and that in turn created a demand for shipping and for men
who would use the sea as a career. Later on it was the Arabs who were
to teach the Spaniards and Portuguese so much about navigation that
India and America were discovered.
In the early years of the Middle Ages, then, we have the Arabian and
the Venetian ships trading about the Mediterranean, though frequently
the former became corsairs and made havoc of the latter, even going to
the length of raiding the Adriatic. But so far the peaceable Venetian
craft were literally merchant ships: they existed for the purpose
of carrying merchandise. There enters now another element—religion.
The Catholic faith, trade, pilgrims, crusades and Arabs—all these
influences had the greatest possible effect on the development of
merchant shipping. It will be remembered that in the seventh century
the Arabs had wrested the Holy Land from the Eastern Empire, but it was
not until the latter part of the eleventh century that western Europe
was really moved to action. Finally, in 1095, a holy war against the
infidel was resolved, and there followed the first crusade; and in this
expedition Venetian ships took part. The most famous crusade of all was
that in which the English king Richard Cœur de Lion engaged, and this
ended in a truce with Saladin by September 1192, on the understanding
that pilgrims should be permitted to visit Jerusalem without being
interfered with by the Moslems.
Thus, we have in the fact of the Holy Land a magnetic attraction for
the ship. In order to carry armies and horses and pilgrims, whether
from England or Venice, to the coast of Syria, you must needs have
large numbers of ships, and of fair size and seaworthiness. This series
of voyages created also a much larger body of seamen and amassed a
tremendous amount of sea-knowledge from experience. In a word, then,
it was a new and enormous impetus to the development of the world’s
Mercantile Marine, as opposed to the purely warlike fast-moving naval
galley. The demand now was for tonnage—to carry human beings as well
as goods. Thus, notwithstanding that the crusades originated from a
strictly religious motive, actually they exercised a most remarkable
stimulus on trade, shipping and travel. Men who had never been
previously outside their own city or village became acquainted with the
sea, strange ships, new lands and novel ideas. They returned home with
fresh aspirations, the desire to carry on extended commerce, and the
realisation that shipping was the key to future riches.
To trace the fitting out of all the crusades would be to go outside
the scope of our immediate subject, but it is enough if we look for
a moment at the direct effect crusading had on the Venetian shipping
industry. The gates, so to speak, whence middle Europe could gain
access to the Holy Land were Venice, Genoa and Marseilles. Seven
years after Richard Cœur de Lion had made the truce with Saladin and
left Palestine, a new crusade was being prepared for; and inasmuch as
Venice was so distinguished a seaport, envoys came to arrange for large
quantities of shipping. Landsmen knew practically nothing about the
sea and ships. They were no better informed than the farmer of to-day
resident all his life in the middle of the United States; so they
arrived asking for advice, information and generally to be put in the
way of obtaining tonnage sufficient to carry 4500 knights, 9000 squires
and 20,000 men-at-arms. This was no small order, even for Venice, quite
apart from the further request for fifty armed galleys to accompany
and protect the expedition. It meant, in fact, the creation of an
immense Mercantile Marine at really quite short notice. Indeed it was
comparatively a much bigger task than the sudden demand for tonnage in
1917 and 1918, when the thousands and thousands of soldiers had to be
packed into steamships and brought from North America to Europe.
Venice rose to the occasion, for it was not merely a matter of business
to provide the shipping, but a matter of religion. The Holy Sepulchre
was in the hands of the infidels: that in itself was a sufficient
inspiration. And so about Pentecost in the year 1202 we can see the
hordes of pilgrims pouring down through the various passes of the Alps
to Venice. It was a huge business, and action in those days was slow
and, to our modern minds, dilatory. But the Venetians had got the ships
ready for the knights and squires and men and horses, though it was
autumn before they put to sea. Some of the cloth and provisions had
arrived in Venice in French ships via the Straits of Gibraltar, and
eventually, on October 9, the galleys and horseboats set forth from the
Adriatic port, and a month later appeared before Zara.
During the Middle Ages the three great maritime powers were Venice,
Genoa and Pisa, and between them there was the greatest rivalry, so
that scarcely ever did two of the parties meet than there was conflict.
But Venice, being the pre-eminent, incurred the greatest amount of
jealousy. The part which Venice and Genoa played in maritime history
is not confined to what they did in any particular century, but lies
rather in the fact that they kept alive and developed the seaman’s art;
until, at the beginning of the fourteenth century, the Venetians made
a crude map which put into form the ideas that inspired the first
Italian voyages in the Atlantic, and Genoa in the next century produced
Columbus, who, after being wrecked in a sea-fight with some Venetian
galleys off the Portuguese coast, settled down in Lisbon and eventually
set forth on his historic voyage to the West.
Ever since the second Punic War Genoa had been a big and important
seaport. Becoming a free city in 958, she had suffered much from
the Saracen raids, but when these infidel corsairs seemed likely to
establish themselves in Sardinia at the beginning of the eleventh
century, the Genoese and Pisan seamen united together against a common
foe, fitted out an expedition and hurled the Arab chief back to Africa.
In 1087 the Genoese and Pisans were sent by the Pope to dislodge
one Temim, a pirate chief who lived south of Tunis. The result was
important to the shipping industry; for, having beaten him and captured
his stronghold, the two cities stipulated for the free admission
of their merchant ships to trade with the Tunisian coast. Thus, in
clearing the seas of corsairs for a time, they also directly stimulated
their own commerce.
Pisan merchant ships as far back as 1052 had been trading to Egypt
and the Levant, and in 1063 Ingulf, Abbot of Croyland in England, had
returned from a pilgrimage in a Genoese merchant ship he had found at
Jaffa. But it was not until the year 1090 that the conquest of Sicily
was effected from the Mussulman hands, and thus the Straits of Messina
became safe for shipping, and the vessels from Genoa and Pisa could go
ahead in safety with their Levantine trade. By the twelfth century,
Genoese, Venetian and Pisan seamen and merchants used to meet at Acre,
to their great financial benefit, though not without manifestations of
commercial jealousy. But we must dismiss from our minds all thoughts
of single ships sailing across from Italy to the Syrian coast when
they liked. There was hardly a time when there were not some pirates
or corsairs hovering about; so the seas might be rid of one chief,
but rendered dangerous by the rovings of another. Thus it was that
shipowners had to do exactly what British mercantile owners were
compelled to resort to in the latter part of the Great War, when the
enemy was attacking so many of our trading craft—the convoy system had
to be employed.
Thus, from Venice, for instance, at regular intervals a convoy of
merchant ships would sail for Acre, escorted by as many as thirty or
forty galleys sometimes, as protection against piratical attack. If
the Venice-Acre trade route were cut, it would mean that the French,
the Germans, the Lombards, the Tuscans and other merchants would not
receive the silks, sugar, pepper and other very valuable Oriental
produce which the Venetians were bringing across in their ships. Thus
the navy of Venice was charged with the duty of protecting its merchant
fleet from the attacks of Genoese, Greek or Arab pirates. Just as
during our recent war convoys used to collect at Falmouth and other
ports prior to beginning their ocean voyage, so in the Middle Ages the
convoy—called a _mudia_—would collect at Venice, bound for Syria or
Egypt. There were only two convoys in the year, so the number of ships
was large, and well needed the strong galley protection. One convoy
left Venice in the spring and got back home in September; the other
left in August, spent the winter abroad, and returned in the following
May. In addition to these commercial convoys, there were also the
pilgrim convoys to Palestine. Genoa sent one convoy a year to Syria and
Egypt, but during the fourteenth century her ships were cruising in the
Black Sea and harassing Venetian craft which had penetrated the Sea of
Azov.
Sea-travel in those mediæval times was thus no pleasure cruise: it
was comparable only to the anxious experiences of passengers at the
height of the recent submarine campaign. Except for religion or
trade, no one ever thought of going to sea. It was too dangerous
an undertaking, so punctuated with storms, and in all respects so
thoroughly uncomfortable, that it was to be avoided as far as possible.
Consequently those who used it as a living expected to be paid very
handsomely. It is difficult in these modern times, with all the safety
and luxury which a steamship connotes, to realise the horror with which
all seafaring was regarded. The result was that artists hesitated
to depict marine subjects; and even when they did, it was usually
to show a ship having a dreadful time in heavy weather. It is for
that reason that illustrations of mediæval ships are so few, either
in stained-glass windows, carvings, devotional books, or paintings.
People had no wish to be reminded of what was to them a very unpleasant
subject, except to those hardened few who preferred ship-life to
agriculture or trade ashore. Unlike present-day conditions, the
merchant himself was compelled to go to sea. There was no other means
of his reaching his markets; but he was heartily thankful to get
himself and his goods safe into port.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] _The Early History of Venice_, by F. C. Hodgson. London, 1901. I
wish also to acknowledge indebtedness to the same author’s _Venice in
the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries_.