Читать книгу Sea-Power and Other Studies - Sir Cyprian Bridge - Страница 8

A decisive event, the Mohammedan conquest of Northern Africa from Egypt westwards, is unintelligible until it is seen how great a part sea-power played in effecting it. Purely land expeditions, or expeditions but slightly supported from the sea, had ended in failure. The emperor at Constantinople still had at his disposal a fleet capable of keeping open the communications with his African province. It took the Saracens half a century (647–698 A.D.) to win 'their way along the coast of Africa as far as the Pillars of Hercules';[25] and, as Gibbon tells us, it was not till the Commander of the Faithful had prepared a great expedition, this time by sea as well as by land, that the Saracenic dominion was definitely established. It has been generally assumed that the Arabian conquerors who, within a few years of his death, spread the faith of Mohammed over vast regions, belonged to an essentially non-maritime race; and little or no stress has been laid on the extent to which they relied on naval support in prosecuting their conquests. In parts of Arabia, however, maritime enterprise was far from non-existent; and when the Mohammedan empire had extended outwards from Mecca and Medina till it embraced the coasts of various seas, the consequences to the neighbouring states were as serious as the rule above mentioned would lead us to expect that they would be. 'With the conquest of Syria and Egypt a long stretch of sea-board had come into the Saracenic power; and the creation and maintenance of a navy for the protection of the maritime ports as well as for meeting the enemy became a matter of vital importance. Great attention was paid to the manning and equipment of the fleet.'[26] At first the fleet was manned by sailors drawn from the Phoenician towns where nautical energy was not yet quite extinct; and later the crews were recruited from Syria, Egypt, and the coasts of Asia Minor. Ships were built at most of the Syrian and Egyptian ports, and also at Obolla and Bushire on the Persian Gulf,' whilst the mercantile marine and maritime trade were fostered and encouraged. The sea-power thus created was largely artificial. It drooped—as in similar cases—when the special encouragement was withdrawn. 'In the days of Arabian energy,' says Hallam, 'Constantinople was twice, in 668 and 716, attacked by great naval armaments.' The same authority believes that the abandonment of such maritime enterprises by the Saracens may be attributed to the removal of the capital from Damascus to Bagdad. The removal indicated a lessened interest in the affairs of the Mediterranean Sea, which was now left by the administration far behind. 'The Greeks in their turn determined to dispute the command of the sea,' with the result that in the middle of the tenth century their empire was far more secure from its enemies than under the first successors of Heraclius. Not only was the fall of the empire, by a rational reliance on sea-power, postponed for centuries, but also much that had been lost was regained. 'At the close of the tenth century the emperors of Constantinople possessed the best and greatest part' of Southern Italy, part of Sicily, the whole of what is now called the Balkan Peninsula, Asia Minor, with some parts of Syria and Armenia.[27]

[Footnote 25: Hallam, _Mid.Ages, chap. vi.]

[Footnote 26: Ameer Ali, Syed, _Short_Hist.Saracens, p. 442]

[Footnote 27: Hallam, chap. vi.; Gibbon, chap. li.]

Neglect of sea-power by those who can be reached by sea brings its own punishment. Whether neglected or not, if it is an artificial creation it is nearly sure to disappoint those who wield it when it encounters a rival power of natural growth. How was it possible for the Crusaders, in their various expeditions, to achieve even the transient success that occasionally crowned their efforts? How did the Christian kingdom of Jerusalem contrive to exist for more than three-quarters of a century? Why did the Crusades more and more become maritime expeditions? The answer to these questions is to be found in the decline of the Mohammedan naval defences and the rising enterprise of the seafaring people of the West. Venetians, Pisans, and Genoese transported crusading forces, kept open the communications of the places held by the Christians, and hampered the operations of the infidels. Even the great Saladin failed to discern the important alteration of conditions. This is evident when we look at the efforts of the Christians to regain the lost kingdom. Saladin 'forgot that the safety of Phoenicia lay in immunity from naval incursions, and that no victory on land could ensure him against an influx from beyond the sea.'[28] Not only were the Crusaders helped by the fleets of the maritime republics of Italy, they also received reinforcements by sea from western Europe and England, on the 'arrival of _Malik_Ankiltar_ (Richard Coeur de Lion) with twenty shiploads of fighting men and munitions of war.'

[Footnote 28: Ameer Ali, Syed, pp. 359, 360.]

Participation in the Crusades was not a solitary proof of the importance of the naval states of Italy. That they had been able to act effectively in the Levant may have been in some measure due to the weakening of the Mohammedans by the disintegration of the Seljukian power, the movements of the Moguls, and the confusion consequent on the rise of the Ottomans. However that may have been, the naval strength of those Italian states was great absolutely as well as relatively. Sismondi, speaking of Venice, Pisa, and Genoa, towards the end of the eleventh century, says 'these three cities had more vessels on the Mediterranean than the whole of Christendom besides.'[29] Dealing with a period two centuries later, he declares it 'difficult to comprehend how two simple cities could put to sea such prodigious fleets as those of Pisa and Genoa.' The difficulty disappears when we have Mahan's explanation. The maritime republics of Italy—like Athens and Rhodes in ancient, Catalonia in mediæval, and England and the Netherlands in more modern times—were 'peculiarly well fitted, by situation and resources, for the control of the sea by both war and commerce.' As far as the western Mediterranean was concerned, Genoa and Pisa had given early proofs of their maritime energy, and fixed themselves, in succession to the Saracens, in the Balearic Isles, Sardinia, and Corsica. Sea-power was the Themistoclean instrument with which they made a small state into a great one.

[Footnote 29: _Ital.Republics, English ed., p. 29.]

A fertile source of dispute between states is the acquisition of territory beyond sea. As others have done before and since, the maritime republics of Italy quarrelled over this. Sea-power seemed, like Saturn, to devour its own children. In 1284, in a great sea-fight off Meloria, the Pisans were defeated by the Genoese with heavy loss, which, as Sismondi states, 'ruined the maritime power' of the former. From that time Genoa, transferring her activity to the Levant, became the rival of Venice, The fleets of the two cities in 1298 met near Cyprus in an encounter, said to be accidental, that began 'a terrible war which for seven years stained the Mediterranean with blood and consumed immense wealth.' In the next century the two republics, 'irritated by commercial quarrels'—like the English and Dutch afterwards—were again at war in the Levant. Sometimes one side, sometimes the other was victorious; but the contest was exhausting to both, and especially to Venice. Within a quarter of a century they were at war again. Hostilities lasted till the Genoese met with the crushing defeat of Chioggia. 'From this time,' says Hallam, 'Genoa never commanded the ocean with such navies as before; her commerce gradually went into decay; and the fifteenth century, the most splendid in the annals of Venice, is till recent times the most ignominious in those of Genoa.' Venice seemed now to have no naval rival, and had no fear that anyone could forbid the ceremony in which the Doge, standing in the bows of the Bucentaur, cast a ring into the Adriatic with the words, _Desponsamus_te,_Mare,_in_signum_veri_perpetuique_dominii_. The result of the combats at Chioggia, though fatal to it in the long-run, did not at once destroy the naval importance of Genoa. A remarkable characteristic of sea-power is the delusive manner in which it appears to revive after a great defeat. The Persian navy occasionally made a brave show afterwards; but in reality it had received at Salamis a mortal wound. Athens seemed strong enough on the sea after the catastrophe of Syracuse; but, as already stated, her naval power had been given there a check from which it never completely recovered. The navy of Carthage had had similar experience; and, in later ages, the power of the Turks was broken at Lepanto and that of Spain at Gravelines notwithstanding deceptive appearances afterwards. Venice was soon confronted on the sea by a new rival. The Turkish naval historian, Haji Khalifeh,[30] tells us that, 'After the taking of Constantinople, when they [the Ottomans] spread their conquests over land and sea, it became necessary to build ships and make armaments in order to subdue the fortresses and castles on the Rumelian and Anatolian shores, and in the islands of the Mediterranean.' Mohammed II established a great naval arsenal at Constantinople. In 1470 the Turks, 'for the first time, equipped a fleet with which they drove that of the Venetians out of the Grecian seas.'[31] The Turkish wars of Venice lasted a long time. In that which ended in 1503 the decline of the Venetians' naval power was obvious. 'The Mussulmans had made progress in naval discipline; the Venetian fleet could no longer cope with theirs.' Henceforward it was as an allied contingent of other navies that that of Venice was regarded as important. Dyer[32] quotes a striking passage from a letter of Æneas Sylvius, afterwards Pope Pius II, in which the writer affirms that, if the Venetians are defeated, Christendom will not control the sea any longer; for neither the Catalans nor the Genoese, without the Venetians, are equal to the Turks.

[Footnote 30: _Maritime_Wars_of_the_Turks_, Mitchell's trans., p. 12.]

[Footnote 31: Sismondi, p. 256.]

[Footnote 32: _Hist.Europe, i. p. 85.]