The Sea and Civilization: A Maritime History of the World (51 page)

Fewer ship remains survive from the east, where there is no indication that the Varangian
Rus influenced the construction of native Slav craft, which were built for rivers rather than seas. According to
Constantine VII, as part of the tribute due their Kievan overlords, the
Slavs built logboats called
monoxylon
(“single wood”), which could be easily portaged around the ten sets of rapids that interrupted a seventy-kilometer stretch of the Dnieper below
Dnipropetrovs’k.
Monoxyla
could also be rigged; traders would put in to the river in June and when they reached the
Black Sea, fitted “
such tackle as is needed,
sails and masts and
rudders, which they bring with them,” before following the coast to the ports of the
Bulgar Empire and the Bosporus.
Monoxyla
were adequate for trade, but they were no match for the Byzantine fleet with its larger ships, better organization, and superior weapons. Nor did the Rus ever develop a blue-water naval capability either on the Black Sea, where they exercised little power, or on the Baltic, where their trade was carried by others.

As the eleventh century drew to a close, the unfettered spirit of the Viking age was clearly spent. Except in
Iceland, local chieftains were incapable of maintaining their autonomy against increasingly centralized monarchies and urban centers. While the
Norman Conquest of 1066 is often taken as the end of the Viking age, that date applies only to England and France. An event of comparable significance in the east would be the death of
Yaroslav the Wise in 1054, after which Kievan Rus adopted an increasingly Byzantine orientation. Coincidentally, this is also the date of the east-west
schism in the Christian Church. Iceland was independent from 1000 to 1264, when it was brought under the Norse crown, and in the fifteenth century the Orkney and Shetland
Islands passed from Norse to Scottish control and the Greenland settlements died out.

Extensive though the Vikings’ trade was, virtually all of it was in prestige, luxury, or highly specialized items and in this respect it was not unlike that of the Frisians and others who preceded them. With few exceptions there was virtually no bulk commerce in northern Europe before the eleventh century. Farmers lacked the surplus capacity for an export trade and the only agricultural products shipped in bulk with any frequency were
wine, that of Burgundy and the Seine being shipped via river and coastal waters to the Rhine delta, and wool. The bulk trades characteristic of the maritime commerce of the later Middle Ages—in grain, fish, and wood, as well as wine—were all but unknown. When population and agricultural and artisanal output began to expand, trade was organized around guilds and free associations of merchants whose use of bigger ships of distinctly novel design forced radical changes in the organization of maritime transportation and the conduct of war at sea. Such adaptations were by no means unique to western Eurasia, and similar approaches to long-distance trade could be found in southern India from where they spread across the Monsoon Seas.

The history of Eurasia in the seventh and subsequent centuries is dominated by the advent of the Muslim caliphates and the resurgence of a unified China, and understandably so. Within little more than a hundred years, Islam was the dominant religion across an arc of Asia and
Africa from Portugal to
Kazakhstan and the Indus. In Central Asia it butted up against the western border of Tang China, whose armies had simultaneously pushed the Middle Kingdom’s borders west across two thousand miles of desert and steppe. Yet at the very moment of immediate contact, upheaval within the
Dar al-Islam
and in China directed merchants’ attention away from the silk road across Central Asia to the silk road of the sea. Bustling maritime markets at either end of this maritime trade route from Southwest to Northeast Asia drew merchants and mendicants from around the Monsoon Seas and helped give their respective empires a cosmopolitan flourish. Segments of this commercial network had been in place for hundreds of years, but by the seventh century, mariners on the Monsoon Seas were gaining ever more confidence and expanding the scope of their voyaging, and local rulers in whose territories they stopped, such places as
Srivijaya and the
Chola kingdom, were able to amass the wealth and prestige necessary to build durable and influential states of their own. So was born a virtuous circle in which the transmission of goods and culture benefited local and regional rulers whose more powerful and stable states in turn drew the attention of merchants from ever greater distances.

At the start of the seventh century, Southwest Asia was divided between the Byzantine and
Sasanian Empires. The Byzantines controlled most of Asia Minor, the Levant, and Egypt, while the Sasanians ruled Iran,
Iraq, and parts of eastern Asia Minor. On the
Arabian Peninsula they controlled the adjacent mainland territory of al-Bahrayn as well as the island of
Bahrain and the coast from
Kuwait to
Qatar;
Oman, at the southeast corner of the peninsula; and Yemen, with its port of
Aden on the
Arabian Sea. Other parts of Arabia lay beyond the reach of imperial rule—the Hejaz, which borders the Red Sea and includes the holy cities of
Mecca and
Medina;
Hadramawt, on the south coast between Yemen and Oman; and Yamana, an inland territory in northern Arabia. Islam’s advance in the east mirrored its westward expansion in speed and extent. In 634, Muslim armies took the great Syrian trading city of
Damascus, which became the capital of the caliphate for more than a century, and Persia was conquered in 643, a year after the capture of Alexandria. By the start of the
Umayyad Caliphate in 661, Islam held sway across the Arabian Peninsula,
Mesopotamia, and eastern Asia Minor, and Muslim armies had advanced into the
Caucasus Mountains. East of the Caspian Sea, between 694 and 714 al-Hajjaj ibn Yusuf ath-Thaqafi, viceroy of al-Iraq, campaigned into
Afghanistan and across the
Amu Darya (Oxus River) to the
Syr Darya, about 325 kilometers to the north, and many of the Persian and Turkic people of
Transoxiana (the heart of modern
Uzbekistan) began converting from Zoroastrianism,
Buddhism, and
Christianity to Islam. Transoxiana was a commercially and strategically important region through which the western approaches to the silk road passed en route to Kashgar and the Taklimakan Desert, where they merged with routes from Afghanistan and India. At midcentury, Muslim expansion into Central Asia slowed. Although
Abbasid forces defeated the Chinese at the
battle of the Talas River in modern Kazakhstan in 751,
Tibetan tribes moving north checked their eastward advance. At the height of their expansionist phase, the Tibetans fought the Chinese and
Arabs. Although the Tibetans were eventually contained by Muslim and Chinese armies acting simultaneously, though not in concert, their disruptions forced merchants to exploit more fully the sea routes between the Persian Gulf, India, Southeast Asia, and China.

Muslim armies reached the head of the Persian Gulf in 635, where they established a military encampment at
Basra. Within a decade, the Sasanian Empire had fallen, and by the start of the eighth century Islam had spread as far east as the Indus River and its adherents included many Persian and
Omani mariners who carried their new religion with them on trade routes that flourished as the Muslim state consolidated. The increase in trade without an accompanying extension of political authority led to an increase in
piracy in the
Arabian Sea between the Indus delta and
Gujarat. In an effort to restore order, the viceroy al-Hajjaj ordered Muslim armies into the Indian subcontinent in 711, a year before
Tariq ibn Ziyad landed at Gibraltar to begin the Muslim conquest of the Iberian Peninsula. Although this could be considered a natural extension of al-Hajjaj’s campaign in Transoxiana and Afghanistan, the casus belli was quite specific. According to the ninth-century historian al-Baladhuri,

Al-Hajjaj authorized a series of punitive expeditions the last of which, led by
Muhammad ibn-al-Kasim, was reinforced by “
ships laden with men, weapons and supplies.” Ibn-al-Kasim conquered the port of Daybul, slew its king, and forced the submission of
Sind, an area roughly coterminous with modern Pakistan. Many of the Buddhist inhabitants converted to Islam, and the conquest helped restore order to the shipping routes that skirted northwest India and the coasts of Konkan and
Malabar south to Sri Lanka. But Sind would prove the eastern limit of Islam’s territorial expansion in South Asia for three hundred years.

Despite their great progress in spreading Islam, the Umayyad caliphs in Damascus suffered the strains of ancient tribal factions overlaid with theological schisms and tensions between Arab Muslims and foreign converts. Tensions were especially acute between Arabs and
Persians, whose cultural and imperial identity had far deeper and broader roots than those of anyone else inundated in this first wave of Arab conquest. When a collateral descendant of Muhammad named
Abu al-’Abbas as-Saffah rebelled against the Umayyads, troops from northern Persia supported him and he was proclaimed caliph in 749. Abu al-’Abbas established himself at al-Kufah, on the lower Euphrates, but his brother and successor
Abu Jafar al-Mansur erected a new Abbasid capital at Baghdad, on the west bank of the Tigris, in 761–62. The transfer of the administrative machinery of state 750 kilometers east of Damascus spelled the end of Syrian predominance in the Muslim world and turned the caliphate’s focus from the Mediterranean and North Africa to Central Asia and the Indian Ocean, with enormous repercussions for the trade of the Monsoon Seas.

According to the ninth-century geographer al-Yaqubi, the site of Baghdad had been revealed to al-Mansur, who predicted that it would become “
a water-front for the world. Everything that comes on the Tigris [up] from Wasit, al-Basrah, al-Ahwaz, Faris, Uman, al-Yamanah, al-Bahrayn, and the neighboring places, can go up to it and anchor at it. In the same way whatever is carried on boats on the Tigris [down] from
Mosul, Diyar Rabiah,
Azerbaijan and
Armenia, and whatever is carried on boats on the
Euphrates from Diyar Mudar, al-Raqqah, Syria, the Frontier, Egypt and
North Africa, can come to this terminus and unload here.” A further advantage was that it was easily defended. Two centuries after al-Yaqubi, the geographer al-Muqaddasi recalled the advice given to al-Mansur, which in his rendering noted that Baghdad was “
in a place between rivers so that the enemy cannot reach you except by ship, or by bridge, by way of the Tigris or the Euphrates.”

Within fifty years of Baghdad’s founding the population had swollen to perhaps half a million people, making it the largest city in the world outside China; in the west, its nearest rivals were
Constantinople,
Alexandria, Damascus, and Basra. The city’s swift rise owed much to its location on the Tigris at a point where the river comes to within fifty kilometers of the Euphrates. Here, in central
Iraq, it lay astride the continental trade routes between Persia,
Central Asia, and India in the east, and Syria, the Mediterranean, and North Africa in the west. The riverbanks were lined with shipping, from round reed
quffas
sent downriver from the hill country around Mosul, to seagoing ships fresh from voyages on the Persian Gulf and the Indian Ocean. Canals provided access to the Euphrates and the western trade, while Baghdad was a terminus of the pilgrim road from Mecca in the southwest. Although the capital was nearly five hundred kilometers upriver from the Persian Gulf, the Tigris did open Baghdad to the trade of the Indian Ocean world. So al-Yaqubi could declare: “
This is the Tigris; there is no obstacle between us and China; everything on the sea can come to us on it”—a claim that echoes Sargon’s boast about the dock of
Akkad, although mariners now sailed farther than
Dilmun,
Magan, and
Meluhha. By the tenth century, Baghdad was possibly the busiest port in the world, while its outports—among which contemporaries counted those of southern
Iran and the island of
Socotra—were described as “
the frontier of India.”

Although their prosperity declined in the final decades of the
Sasanian Empire, the Persian Gulf
ports of
Ubulla, Basra, and
Siraf remained active in long-distance trade during the transition from Sasanian to Muslim rule. Al-Baladhuri asserts that before the start of the Islamic era Ubulla was preeminent. As one of two capitals of the Umayyad province of Iraq (the other was al-Kufah), Basra quickly eclipsed Ubulla, although its success owed more to politics than geography. The original military camp was on the site of the
ancient
Charax Spasinou, but it was fifteen kilometers from the
Shatt al-Arab and functioned as a port only thanks to a canal that connected it to Ubulla.
^a
Nonetheless,
Basra attracted shipping from around the Muslim world and beyond. Well before it became a port of entry for Baghdad, which was founded more than a century later, Basra flourished in its own right and at its peak during the eighth and ninth centuries it was home to more than two hundred thousand people of many faiths and ethnicities, and it was noted for its manufactures, agriculture (dates in particular), and its vibrant literary, artistic, and religious communities.