The principal route followed by the First Crusade bypassed
the Mediterranean and took the army overland through the Balkans and Anatolia;
many crusaders never saw more of the sea than the Bosphorus at Constantinople
until, much reduced in numbers through war, disease and exhaustion, they
reached Syria. And even in the East their target was not a maritime city but
Jerusalem, so that its conquest in 1099 created an enclave cut off from the
sea, a problem which, as will be seen, only Italian navies could resolve.
Another force left from Apulia, where Robert Guiscard’s son Bohemond brought
together an army. The Byzantines wondered whether he was really planning to
revive his father’s schemes for the conquest of Byzantine territory, and so,
when he reached Constantinople, he was pressed to acknowledge the emperor’s
authority, becoming his lizios, or liegeman, a western feudal term that was
used because Bohemond was more likely to feel bound by oaths made according to
his native customs than by promises made under Byzantine law. When in 1098 he
established himself as prince of Antioch, a city only recently lost by the
Byzantines to the Turks, the imperial court made every effort to insist that
his principality lay under Byzantine suzerainty. It was amazing that a vast
rabble of men, often poorly armed, proved capable of seizing Antioch in 1098
and Jerusalem in 1099, though the Byzantines were more inclined to regard this
as a typical barbarian stroke of fortune than as a victory masterminded by
Christ. Seen from Constantinople, the outcome of the crusade was not entirely
negative. Western knights had installed themselves in sensitive borderlands
between Byzantine territory and lands over which the Seljuk Turks and the
Fatimid caliphs were squabbling Bohemond’s religious motives in joining the
crusade should not be underestimated, but he was a pragmatist: he saw clearly
that the crusader armies would be able to retain nothing without access to the
Mediterranean, and without naval support from Christian fleets capable of
keeping open the supply-lines to the West. He would therefore need to build
ties with the Italian navies. He could count on the enthusiasm that had been
generated in Genoa and Pisa by the news of Pope Urban’s speech, conveyed to the
Genoese by the bishops of Grenoble and of Orange. The citizens of Genoa decided
that the time had come to bury their differences and to unite in a compagna
under the direction of six consuls; the aim of the compagna was primarily to
build and arm ships for the crusade. Historians have long argued that the
Genoese saw the crusade as a business opportunity, and that they were hoping to
secure trade privileges in whatever lands the crusaders conquered comparable to
those the Venetians had recently acquired in the Byzantine Empire. Yet they
could not foresee the outcome of the crusade; they were willing to suspend
their trading activities and pump all their energy into the building of fleets
that were very likely to be lost far away in battles and storms. What moved
them was holy fervour. According to a Genoese participant in the First Crusade,
the chronicler Caffaro, even before it, in 1083, a Genoese ship named the
Pomella had carried Robert, count of Flanders, and Godfrey of Bouillon, the
first Latin ruler of Jerusalem, to Alexandria; from there they had made their
way with difficulty to the Holy Sepulchre, and had begun to dream of recovering
it for Christendom. The story was pure fancy, but it expresses the sense among
the Genoese elite that their city was destined to play a major role in the war
for the conquest of Jerusalem.
Twelve galleys and one smaller vessel set out from Genoa in
July 1097. The crew consisted of about 1,200 men, a sizeable proportion of its
male population, for the overall population of the city of Genoa may have been
only 10,000. Somehow the fleet knew where the crusaders were, and made contact
off the northern coast of Syria. Antioch was still under siege, and the Genoese
fleet stood off Port St Symeon, the outport of the city that had functioned as
a gateway to the Mediterranean since the Bronze Age. After the fall of Antioch
in June 1098, Bohemond rewarded the Genoese crusaders with a church in Antioch,
thirty houses nearby, a warehouse and a well, creating the nucleus of a
merchant colony. This grant was the first of many that the Genoese were to receive
in the states created by the crusaders. In the early summer of 1099 members of
a prominent Genoese family, the Embriachi, anchored off Jaffa, bringing aid to
the crusader army besieging Jerusalem – they dismantled their own ships,
carrying the wood from which they were built to Jerusalem for use in the
construction of siege engines. And then in August 1100 twenty-six galleys and
four supply ships set out from Genoa, carrying about 3,000 men. They made
contact with the northern French ruler of the newly established kingdom of
Jerusalem, Baldwin I, and began the slow process of conquering a coastal strip,
since it was essential to maintain supply-lines from western Europe to the
embattled kingdom. They sacked the ancient coastal city of Caesarea in May 1101.
When the Genoese leaders divided up their loot, they gave each sailor two
pounds of pepper, which demonstrates how rich in spices even a minor Levantine
port was likely to be. They also carried away a large green bowl that had been
hanging in the Great Mosque of Caesarea, convinced that it was the bowl used at
the Last Supper and that it was made of emerald (a mistake rectified several
centuries later when someone dropped it, and it was found to be made of glass).
Since the bowl is almost certainly a fine piece of Roman workmanship from the
first century AD, their intuitions about its origins were not entirely wrong.
It was carried in triumph to the cathedral in Genoa, where it is still
displayed, attracting attention as one of several candidates for the title Holy
Grail.
The green bowl was, for the Genoese, probably as great a
prize as any of their commercial privileges, all of which were celebrated in
the city annals as signs of divine bounty. The Genoese made friends with the
rulers of each of the crusader states (Jerusalem, Tripoli, Antioch) that needed
help in gaining control of the seaports of Syria and Palestine. In 1104 their
fortunes were further boosted by the capture of the port city of Acre, with an
adequate harbour and good access into the interior. For most of the next two
centuries, Acre functioned as the main base of the Italian merchants trading to
the Holy Land. The Genoese produced documents to show that the rulers of
Jerusalem promised them one-third of the cities they helped conquer all the way
down the coast of Palestine, though not everyone is convinced all these
documents were genuine; if not, they are still evidence for their vast
ambitions. They were even promised a third of ‘Babylonia’, the current European
name for Cairo, for there were constant plans to invade Fatimid Egypt as well.
To all this were added legal exemptions, extending from criminal law to
property rights, that separated the Genoese from the day-to-day exercise of
justice by the king’s courts. The Genoese insisted that they were permitted to
erect an inscription in gilded letters recording their special privileges
inside the Church of the Holy Sepulchre in Jerusalem. Whether or not this
inscription was ever put in place, the demand for such a public record indicates
how determined the Genoese were to maintain their special extra-territorial
status in the kingdom of Jerusalem, which never developed a significant navy of
its own.
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