Abstract
Sea raiding – that is, razzias undertaken by a ship against land-based targets – was a piracy-adjacent form of organised violence that was exceedingly common in human history, not least in the central Middle Ages, when it appears to have been a dominant form of naval activity. In the central medieval Mediterranean, sea raids are very frequent in the sources, but details about their organisation and practical management are rarely mentioned. This paper undertakes to construct a step-by-step operations model of a sea raid as practised in the Mediterranean ca. 1000. That is, it gives a practical picture of how sea raids were organised, directed, carried out and successfully (or not) brought to a conclusion. In the absence of prescriptive manuals, this picture is necessarily constructed from a wide range of descriptions of actual sea raids in chronicles, hagiography, poetry and other sources. While the navies of large states and empires frequently carried out sea raids, this paper emphasises the importance of non-state actors and private piratical initiatives.
Raids have been the dominant form of military endeavour among many societies. As such, there is considerable historical production on the subject, including such masterpieces of world literature as The Cattle Raid of Cooley, and – closer to our subject – the epics of Diogenes Akritis or The Daredevils of Sassoun. One such society, the Bedouin, gave us the word razzia. 1 However, while many militarised frontier societies have celebrated their raids on horseback, seaborne raiding has seen fewer songs.The reasons for this may have something to do with the capital costs of shipbuilding providing fewer opportunities for individual heroics, as well as the fact that – for similar reasons – there was simply less of it. Moreover, the long ranges and technical complexity of sea raiding put it well outside the comfort zone of medieval chroniclers, few of whom had experience of the sea – often we hear no more of a sea raid than it occurred: ‘insule Baleares a Mauris et Sarracenis depredatae sunt’, as a Carolingian chronicler wrote. 2 Moreover, in most cases – as here – the information comes to us from nearer the victims than the perpetrators. We only know, for example, that ships from Spain (al-Andalus) attacked the coast of Italy in 1012 because of a scant eight words in a Pisan chronicle. 3 We know much less about the medieval practices of raiding by sea than by land, then, and the sources are particularly weak with respect to the raiders themselves and their organisation.
This paper, then, undertakes to construct a step-by-step operations model (Figure 1) of a Mediterranean sea raid in the years around the first millennium. Just as the horse and its rider allured the poets, likewise most military manuals of the period addressed war on land. 4 As such, our evidence is based on actual descriptions of sea raids pulled from a heterogenous blend of chronicles, histories, poetry and hagiography. Historians have made much of the unity of the Mediterranean, and in this arena, I believe, it is amply justified. Practices of violence were (and are) key sinews across cultures, and so the sources are drawn from all across the Great Sea (Map 1). There is, as far as I can tell, no warrant to look for differing styles of sea raiding among differing peoples. While some cultures made more of seaborne violence than others, in contrast to the differences between mounted pastoralists and town-dwellers, the technical constraints of sea raiding fell more or less equally on all comers. 5 As such, we hope to portray the stages of sea raiding on the Mediterranean's various coasts – or at least, as much as possible within a short space and limited sources.
Conceptual flow chart of the stages of a raid as outlined in this paper.
Places mentioned.
War at sea in this era has attracted considerable interest from historians, especially Byzantinists. Some themes have seen more work than others, with naval engagements ranking high, as well as naval tactics, logistics and the types and design of ships. 6 Although raiding is invariably mentioned in these studies, it has less often been the focus of investigation itself. 7
The subject of this paper is the praxis of sea raiding; as such, the political and social contexts that permitted the practice are largely left on one side, beyond the observation that they changed over the period. The latent, although dwindling, energies of Islamic expansion were still active, propelling, for example, Tunisian raids against Italy. 8 The period we might call the First Islamic Mediterranean was over by the late eleventh century, but the disruptions that attended its eclipse sent many Muslims to sea to seek their fortunes. 9 Byzantine recovery from the early tenth century prompted significant state-sponsored raiding, while the empire's troubles in the late eleventh century created opportunities for raiding and piracy on the part of smaller agents, such as the Italians and Turks. By the twelfth century – in the wake of the first crusade – the Italians were well on their way to establishing marine hegemony over the Great Sea. Underlying these geopolitical conditions was fairly continuous demographic and economic growth in the Mediterranean, which however was happening faster in some areas than others. 10 This growth probably started from a fairly low level, especially in the Latin west – around 800 there were fewer ships on the sea and fewer people as well, which translates to fewer targets for raiders.
Before proceeding, we should indicate what we mean by a raid or razzia. 11 Although generally conceptualised under the heading of military action, at least in modern times, raids were not expeditions of conquest – or even combat. To risk battle was very much the opposite of what was intended. Rather, a raid was an armed expedition that set out with the intention of violently seizing goods for profit.
Nonetheless, raiding sometimes served conventional military strategy, for example to weaken potential conquests. Thus we read in the eleventh century Egyptian Book of Curiosities that the Aglabids of Tunisia raided Sicily in preparation for more serious invasions. 12 Or they served as diversions or reprisals – in the 820s a Caliphal fleet raided Attaleia in revenge for Byzantine incursions against Muslims elsewhere. Finally, raiders made supply runs for the main body of a campaign. 13 We might compare the cavalry screens of hussars of eighteenth-century armies, which at once scouted for the foe, plundered the countryside and hid the precise location of their main column.
In the period ca. 800–1110, there is little sense that razzias reached the level of strategic military terrorism that they attained in the modern period, when they were used as tools of ‘pacification’ against civilian populations. For the French in Algeria, for example, conquest was effected by a raiding policy ‘meant to destroy settlements, crops, camps, and herds’. 14 Not that such outcomes did not occur – they frequently did. Yet although the effect of the guerre de course, to ‘raise the costs of war to the enemy while lowering them for oneself’, might be achieved, many sea raids occurred outside the context of open warfare between polities. 15 The assumption existed that predatory violence was a legitimate profit-making activity, and people acted accordingly.
A certain amount of what might be called official information survives concerning sea raids launched by such empires as the Byzantines and Fatimids, supplemented by a number of historical accounts – to which we shall have recourse. 16 But probably the greater number of sea raids were the work of smaller entities; regional or city-based polities, independent statelets, city-states and non-affiliated contractors or pirates. It may be said that the era was a golden age of private violence, in which sea raids were often the initiative of individuals, while acknowledging that the distinction between public and private authority is a tenuous one in this period. Amidst small polities and functionally autonomous cities, we find authority in the hands of ad hoc oligarchies of private citizens – as at Pisa; elevated municipal officials – as the Qadis of Tyre; ambitious military men – as the Normans; and situations about which we have very little information indeed – as at Malta. The legitimacy of any of these contexts is ambiguous – even within an individual's lifespan, as for example that of Guiscard, who plundered in his youth as a bandit, in his old age as a sovereign duke.
Given that merchant ships could join naval contingents, and that the navies of all but the largest states were likely ad hoc affairs using whatever ships and sailors were available, it is hard to draw precise lines. Pisa was part of the empire and Tuscany, but no one has ever imagined that the emperor or marquis had anything to do with the Pisan attacks on Annaba or Palermo. Conversely, ships that were part of a formal navy might do some raiding on the sly; Pope Stephen VI was concerned ca. 885–6 that the Greek naval commander sent to assist in the defence of Rome might raid the Roman coasts he was assigned to protect. 17
Citizens owned ships, and their crews were armed out of necessity. 18 There was nothing to stop them from raiding a suitable shore. The sources provide less evidence of such practices, although with the significant caveat that many raids are reported without much provenance. For instance, the Montecassino Chronicle tells us that in 1114 raiders from Guelma attacked Sardinia. 19 This could have been an action of the Hammadid navy, ordered by ’Abd al-Aziz ibn Mansur, or of private individuals with official sanction, or a private initiative with no state backing at all. Certainly many raiders were beyond public authority. Attaleiates described plunderers ‘like wild wolves’, whose identity was unknown even to the ruler of their country. 20
A few such initiatives do survive in the sources: the Barese sailors who raided Myra in 1087 were grain-traders on their way back from Antioch, where they had decided – on their own – to plunder Byzantine Myra; the Muslim attackers of Demetrias in 1046 were able to masquerade as merchants until the time was right – almost certainly because they were merchants. Other cases are known. In 903, a certain Hishām al-Hawlānī raided and subsequently conquered Mallorca. Although he later placed the island in the hands of the Cordoban emirate, the initiative appears to have been private. 21 In 1087, a noble of Amalfi, Pantaleo of the Comitemauroni clan, brought a contingent to the Pisan–Genoese raid on Mahdiyya, seemingly also a private venture. In the early ninth century, Alexandria was the temporary base for a fleet of exiles from Spain; homeless, they preyed upon shipping and raided Christian shores. Although they sold their captives in Egypt, they so vexed the Alexandrians with their violence that they were expelled in the early 820s. 22 They went on to conquer Crete, and their leader become emir. The successful miscreant of this era soon found himself a public figure, with titles to match, as most famously the Hauteville brothers, who emerged from an untitled military family to become kings and dukes.
Choosing a target
Choosing a target was not a matter of setting sail into the unknown. 23 The risks and investment of sea raiding were usually too great for anything other than careful planning. Ships were one of the most complex and expensive commitments a community could undertake. Nor were the lives of able-bodied sailors to be cheaply thrown away, vital as they were in a Mediterranean of relatively small populations. 24 As such, raiders took care over their target, investigated local conditions and selected suitable moments for their attacks. 25
In later periods, the choice of target was hedged by various legalities – but this was not the case around the millennium, when such niceties as declarations of war did not exist and all maritime actions might shade into piracy. 26 Raids of Muslims upon Christians and Christians upon Muslims dominate our sources, but it is apparent that intrafaith raiding was also very common, if less celebrated. The famous sea raiders of eleventh century Italy, the Pisans, put up inscribed plaques on their cathedral commemorating their raids against Muslims – but other texts tell us of their attacks on fellow Christians. 27
The greatest constraint on target choices was, of course, geography. Tunisian raids were usually launched against nearby southern Italy; those of Denia followed the northern coast of the western basin; the Pisans started with the Tyrrhenian. Raiders assembling at Annaba would make the two-day crossing to Sardinia, where they would have to decide whether to bear east to Italy or continue north. 28 Ambition and experience could drive raiders further, as when the Zirids sent ships all the way from Ifriqiya to the Dodecanese or the Pisans ravaged the Ionian islands. 29
Needless to say, it was wealth that attracted raiders. This does not mean, however, that most raids were directed against the largest and richest cities. In fact, large cities suffered the least from raiders, notwithstanding the occasional exception; Leo of Tripoli's sack of Thessaloniki was a full scale naval action; those of the Pisans against Palermo, Mahdiyya and Mallorca were more predatory, as was the 844 Viking raid on Seville – which lacked walls or defences, having long been at peace. 30 Indeed, cities may sometimes have benefited from sea raids, as their populations swelled with refugees – which could only have enhanced their regional prominence, as more vulnerable communities were eclipsed. 31
Public call and assembling the forces
The larger polities might simply direct their navies to raid enemy territory, as the Byzantines did against Egypt in 853. 32 In such cases, questions of planning and recruitment usually fall within established military practice. Yet the raids conducted by major state-funded navies appear to be the minority. The impression is that while many raids might be sponsored by a polity, they were not necessarily undertaken by what we would call a formal navy.
In these cases, as we are not dealing with a squadron in a naval base, the raiding force needed to be assembled. In the mid-eleventh century the city of Annaba was described as a meeting place where raiders arrived ‘from all sides’. 33 The observation that the Pisans pulled together ships ‘from all around’ before the raid on Palermo suggests something similar. 34 How this worked is unclear. While no sources document the process, we may imagine the upcoming raid advertised around town, from the pulpit or merely passed by word of mouth up and down the coast.
Two other Pisan sources offer insight. In the Carmen de victoriam Pisanorum we find Pisan and Genoese ships cruising down the Tyrrhenian littoral, picking up contingents at Rome (probably Civitavecchia) and Amalfi. One might suppose that the flotilla was preceded by diplomatic contacts, inviting potential allies to ready themselves. 35 On the other hand, in the Liber Maiorichinus (henceforth LM) the Pisan fleet arrived unscheduled in Catalonia and acquired allies there and at Narbonne, Montpelier and Arles. 36 As the Pisans had originally intended to attack Mallorca directly without reaching the continental coast at all, these contingents must represent impromptu responses to the Pisan call for aid.
In all these cases, there was publicity involved, perhaps attended by public assemblies. As such, it might be difficult to keep secret, and an attack on Salerno failed in the 870s precisely because an Italian merchant in Tunisia heard the news. 37 Flurus the Amalfitan was informed by a friendly Tunisian; in other cases the news came from spies dispatched to watch for military preparations. 38 The citizens of Thessaloniki in 904 knew that Leo was on his way to sack their city, and Mubashir Nasr al-Dawla of Majorca in 1114 was well aware that the Pisans were preparing to raid his kingdom, and dispatched messengers to talk them out of it. 39 In another case, sailors from Bari discovered that the Venetians were planning a raid on a Byzantine city in Lycia, and acted fast to plunder it first. 40
Shipbuilding for raids seems like it ought to be a clandestine affair, but Ibn al-Athīr's account seems to imply foreknowledge of Pisan preparations for the raid on Mahdiyya. 41 Similarly, when Rafi‘ ibn Makan, governor of Gabes, sought to build an enormous warship to expand his local powerbase, news quickly filtered to the Zirids in Mahdiyya, who undertook countermeasures. 42 It was to avoid such outcomes that the Byzantines banned all travel to Syria prior to their attack on the emirate of Crete, but such a broad interdiction of mobility was probably beyond the capabilities of most polities in this period. 43
The Mediterranean was a world of seaborne commerce, in which merchants and information passed openly over every border. Geniza letters are full of references to the actions of pirates and enemies, although often vague and outdated, but if a merchant like Flurus the Amalfitan could warn a target city, he could just as easily scout it out for attack. Two of the major Pisan raids, against Palermo in 1063 and Mahdiyya in 1087, were preceded by regular merchant contacts; they knew how to get there and may have known that both cities were in danger of falling to other foes – Palermo to the Normans, Mahdiyya to the Banu Hillal – and hoped to pre-emptively plunder their erstwhile trade partners. 44 Although not all sources are so yielding, it may probably be taken as a general principle that where raiders went in the Mediterranean, merchants or other travellers had preceded them.
Ship selection
Despite advances in underwater archaeology, we still know little about ships in this period, and it is hardly possible to offer more than a brief comment in this short space. Written sources suggest far greater variety than attested by the few finds; al-Muqaddasī, for example, mentions 36 different types of ships. 45 The Pisan Liber Maiorichinus of ca. 1116 deploys a distinctly international vocabulary – some Arabic, some Greek – in describing the Pisan armada. 46
A new raid might call for new ships, as before the large-scale Pisan raids against Mahdiyya in 1087 and Mallorca in 1114. Whether that meant the ships were built out of the public purse or in government shipyards is unclear; it is, indeed, uncertain that such things always existed in the period. In the House of Islam, polities constructed arsenals, a practice taken up by the Italians, although we are not sure exactly when. In any case, other resources were available. Ships could be purchased. In the 1050s, the Zirid ruler sent agents to Fustat (Old Cairo) to buy ships for his attacks on Sicily. 47 More mysteriously, around 1080 the Turkish warlord Tzachas (Çaka) encountered ‘a certain man from Smyrna who had considerable experience in such matters and to him he entrusted the business of constructing pirate vessels’. 48
Although there was overlap between pirates and sea raiders, their requirements were not the same. Pirates needed fast ships to overhaul target vessels and to make swift escapes. Sea raiders relied on delivering a preponderance of force at a precise point – vessels able to deliver fighters (and sometimes horses) to shore, with sufficient capacity to overwhelm the defence, and also to carry away the booty. 49 These requirements were not necessarily compatible in a single ship design; it's not surprising, then, that Anna Comnena specified that the fleet of Tzachas contained both pirate vessels and decked vessels with sailors. 50 We may suppose she meant galleys by the former, which are sometimes specified in the sources. 51
Two other considerations that emerge from the sources are size and draw; we often hear of ships pulled up on the beach – an important point for raiders without a safe harbour. 52 Some ships were small: at Nauplion, ca. 900, a captured pirate ship was towed by a Byzantine trireme into harbour ‘as if it were a small boat’. 53 On the other hand, in 846, the Muslim ships were big enough to carry cavalry but small enough to sail up the Tiber. 54 The best documented ship of the period, the Serçe Limanı shipwreck, was found with a cargo of glass cullet, and was evidently a merchant cargo-hauler. With her broad beam, she was no nimble pirate vessel. However, her flat bottom and large capacity would have made her a viable choice for delivering well-armed men to shore (Figure 2) – and it is clear that raiders and merchant ships were sometimes interchangeable. In 1046, for example, upon failing to surprise a harbour in Thessaly, raiders sailed right in and identified themselves as traders. 55
Early eleventh-century Mediterranean Cargo hauler in a stiff breeze. This kind of flat-bottomed, broad-beamed vessel was used for commercial shipping in the eastern Mediterranean, but could have been pressed into service for sea raiding where its large capacity would be useful for carrying men or booty. Illustration by the author based on the Serçe Limanı shipwreck of ca. 1025: Bass et al., Serçe Limanı. An Eleventh Century Shipwreck, Vol. 1. Readers are invited to contact the author with corrections.
Recruitment
The adherence of individuals to raiding parties is another mysterious subject. Certainly volunteers were welcome. For some, at least, religion offered an incentive, or at least a justification, for raiding: the ‘severing of the head of every infidel is music to my ears’, as Ibn Hamdis put it. 56 The Pisans, meanwhile, identified Ibn Hamdis's patron Tamin as a heretic ‘worse than Arrius’ and an antichrist who must be put down. This species of rhetoric eclipses all others in the sources, and doubtless sheltered even those whose motivations were more mercenary.
Some texts give the impression that armed and ruthless men might apply their skills anywhere; one French tale has a skilled warrior repeatedly falling into the hands of raiders, and each time simply joining his captors. 57 More concretely, Muslim jurists specified that Christian sailors might work aboard Muslim ships, and mercenaries are well attested spanning the Mediterranean. 58
Most of our information about recruitment pertains to the large polities, which are well studied. 59 In the early modern period, recruitment had written outcomes, as soldiers or sailors subscribed to articles detailing their employment and share of the spoils. The bureaucratisation of war was less developed in the eleventh century, however. One hint occurs in the Alexiad, where we hear that Tzachas, when he raided Chios in the 1080s, ‘disembarked all his men, counted them and entered their names on a list’, a procedure that may relate to the allocation of the booty. 60
In 1063, when Pisan ships were gathered from ‘all around’ for the descent on Palermo, we read that all classes of society participated – ‘maiores, medii … minores’ – but not necessarily without some grumbling about the interruption to their trading activities. 61 We may wonder whether captains felt obliged to obey a call from their city's government. Or did their crews – presumably among the minores – oblige them to participate, in anticipation of greater rewards from booty than daily wages? Either way, the implication is that the raiders need not be professional fighters, but rather sailors or citizens – although no precise lines can be drawn. In times of war, the Fatimids resorted to press-gangs, and we have reports that merchant ships were brought to a standstill by the loss of their crews. 62 In times of peace, then, there were plenty of sailors around with military experience.
In later times, pirates would sometimes pile on the crew capacity, filling ships to the brim with fighters far beyond the requirements of ship handling. 63 We do not know whether this happened in the Middle Ages, as its obvious combat advantage ran counter to the need to store bulky loot – as we shall see. A rare – perhaps unique – detailed crew complement for the Barese raid on Myra in 1087 indicates that three ships landed with 73 men. 64 Although we do not know the crew capacity of the Serçe Limanı ship, there were certainly weapons sufficient to equip 24 men – which might be taken as a low estimate, as the remains are incomplete and the crew evidently escaped, presumably taking some weapons with them (Figure 3). 65
11 spears; 51 javelins, 3 swords, 2 axes, 1 spike of uncertain use: weapons found aboard an eastern Mediterranean cargo-hauler wrecked c.1025. Other weapons may have been evacuated with the crew. Source: Bass, et al. Serçe Limanı. An Eleventh-Century Shipwreck, Vol.1, 315–17; 363–98.
For long distance raids, additional men might be needed: pilots. These could be hired or coerced. For the Byzantine attack on Crete in the 960s, local islanders were found to guide the armada; Muslim ships in Italy in the ninth century found friends in Naples to conduct them along the coast. 66 We are not told how the Tunisian raiders navigated the waters of Asia Minor in the 1030s, but Arabic geographical treatises exist to confirm for us that there were Muslims who had the requisite knowledge. 67
With targets chosen, and ships and men ready, the raiding party set sail for its destination. What happened next depended upon the expected duration of the raid. If an extended campaign was in the works, the next step was to establish a raiding base. Conversely, a shorter raid might consist only of a rapid attack on a target settlement followed by a swift withdrawal.
Extended raids: establishing a base
One thing that is not always apparent is the potentially lengthy duration of raids. While sometimes ships might arrive, plunder and murder, and then depart the following day, it was quite common for raiders to extend their sojourns to a considerable duration. Sometimes a predetermined interval was set, as under Abū Ḥafs's Andalusian raiders, who would ravage for 12 days before reassembling at the ships. 68 If a raiding group was particularly well organised – as when the Byzantines ravaged the coast of Egypt – they might remain on the move from target to target, acquiring food and water as they went for a month or more. 69
However, for raiders intending to linger, a base was usually necessary. For such purposes raiders would look for a site that was both well defended and from which it was easy to escape, as they were often outnumbered by locals. It should also be sufficiently distant from major settlements that local forces could not easily concentrate against it. They might make use of natural features, as the Muslims of Fraxinetum allegedly did the thorny maquis of Provence. 70 Islands made good bases and the Camargue, then even more waterlogged than now, was thus used by some far-faring Vikings in 859. 71 The Muslim base at the mouth of the river Garigliano, which held ‘women, children, prisoners, and all stolen goods’, offered both a quick getaway into the Tyrrhenian, but also river access to the interior, was placed fairly distant from enemy cities, and – probably – fortified in the ruins of a Roman city. 72
A base camp enforced geographic limits to the raiders’ activities, encouraging them to intensify their exploitation of the region, searching ‘through all villages, rural districts, mountain peaks, forests, borderlands, and caves’ for booty. 73 If the base became well established, such that its defence ceased to be a daily priority, the raiders might make extremely wide-ranging expeditions. The catchment area of the Fraxinetum raiders was hundreds of kilometres; by the mid-tenth century it had effectively developed from raiding base to regional power. Inevitably, some bases became permanent, but settlement is not our subject. And whether or not a base was a formal fortification or an ephemeral campsite, its purpose was the same: to provide support and storage for raids upon nearby targets.
Sudden attack!
‘When the moon had risen, and the sky was darkening, galleys burst into the harbour. There was fire and shouting, and men running about on ships and on land. All hell was unleashed’, in the words of a witness. Shock and surprise were the standard tactics of raiders, and in this case of ca. 1060 were successful: in a missive shorter than most academic abstracts, our writer exclaimed his powerlessness to describe what happened three times, and remarked on the inability of witnesses to enumerate the attacking galleys. Some galleys were able to disembark armed men, and raiders hurled firebrands into at least four ships while attempting to tow off a fifth – and the letter-writer was too preoccupied with firefighting to even note the attackers’ withdrawal. 74
Speed and confusion served to paralyse the defence, and are frequently attested. A twelfth-century description of a raid has a single galley ‘dart forward’ to secure the beachhead for the rest of the pirate fleet, which seems like a plausible tactic – another text has an admiral grounding his ships in the enemy harbour. 75
One of our most evocative descriptions comes from an avowed piece of fiction, Rhodanthe and Dosikles, but it offers a ring of truth in describing what was, after all, a frequent occurrence: the barbarians rushed out immediately … They burnt the cargo-carrying hulks, Tearing the cargo out of their holds, One man's head was hewn off by the sword, Another was split apart by a whetted blade, Another's heart was pierced.
76
The application of shock tactics meant that raiders caused damage out of proportion to their predatory needs, although such occurrences are perhaps overrepresented in our records, as they would naturally draw the attention of chroniclers. Still, they did happen. Tzachas so obliterated Adramyttium that a passer-by might have ‘thought no man had ever lived there’. 78 Another case occurred in Mallorca, when in 1115 the Pisans and their allies devastated the Muslim capital of Medīna Mayūrqa, leaving, in the words of Ibn al-Kardabūs, ‘the city in ruins, the streets deserted; everything bore the appearance of desolation and ruin’. 79 Wholesale slaughter is indeed a feature of many raid accounts. Far from home and potentially outnumbered as they were, raiders were always vulnerable to counterattacks, and therefore it was often considered safer to kill most of the men capable of bearing weapons. As the Pisans in Mallorca, ‘some competed to slit men's throats; others dragged away the women’. 80
Religious desecrations are common in the sources, although the emphasis may have as much to do with our chroniclers as the raiders themselves. Patriarch Nicholas of Constantinople stated outright that the scattering of relics pained him more than the rape of virgins and slaughter of men – a sentiment not necessarily shared by those present at the occasion. 81 Still, there can be little doubt that it was a tactic used to induce fear and to shock and distract the defenders, presumably the intention during a ninth-century Viking razzzia against Seville, in which the raiders sought to burn down the mosque with fire arrows; that failing, they entered and heaped up flammable materials in the aisles. 82 On the isle of Paros, the Muslim commander attempted to carry off stone ornaments from a church; unable to do so, he left their smashed remnants for later visitors to remark on. 83 More prosaically, religious sites often contained valuable treasures. In 1087, the Pisans knew to head straight for the ‘mesquitam’ of Mahdiyya, while Sicilian raiders in 991 made a point of sacking the churches of the Amalfi coast. 84
The mobility of raiders was another key to their success. As a chronicler relates of a ninth-century Byzantine attack: they ‘landed at Damietta on the 9th of Dhū ʾl-Ḥijjah, 238 (May 22, 853) and took complete possession of the town. They killed a large number of Muslims there and carried away women, children and (dhimmi) non-Muslims as captives. ʿAnbasah ibn Isḥāq, at the head of his troops, rushed out to meet them on the 10th, as did a large number of the common people, but they were unable to catch up with the Byzantines, who moved on to Tinnīs’, where they sheltered in a fortification. 85
While it is evident that the element of surprise was important to raiders – to ‘disembark by night and secretly enter the town’ – our sources are full of occasions when it was not achieved. 86 In the Fatimid Levant, watchmen were maintained; if Byzantine ships appeared alarms were sounded, beacons lit by night or smoke signals by day. ‘The signals go from ribat to ribat, so hardly an hour passes before everyone is armed and ready’. 87 Other watchposts may have existed that, if unable to mount a defence themselves, might send news to those who could; in 1087, for example, Mahdiyya was warned by carrier pigeons dispatched from Pantelleria. 88
Of course, such mechanisms had their limits. In the early ninth century, when Vikings made their famous attack on Narbonne, watchers on the shore took them for harmless trading ships. 89 The Vikings were probably just lucky, but in 1100 the Pisans resorted to outright trickery, flying Byzantine colours to sneak under the defences of Rhodes, which they then sacked. 90
Leaving fortresses aside, the fact remains that only the wealthiest and most organised polities could make significant investment in coastal defences and that even for those empires, opposing a landing on any given stretch of coast was beyond their capabilities. 91 Many shores seem to have been entirely undefended, such as Mallorca's. 92
Targeted communities: Defending and escaping
Taken by surprise, a desperate defence was sometimes the only possible strategy; it worked for the villagers of tiny Laurito (near Positano) in 991, who were able to rain stones upon the attackers’ heads. 93 However, their success may have had more to do with the availability of easier targets; the Sicilian raiders proceeded to plunder the rest of the Amalfi coast. On the nearby island of Gallus another ad hoc defence was organised by a monk named Arsenius, but in this case experienced climbers – a common skill among sailors –ascended with ropes and overcame Arsenius and his band.
That inhabitants might seek to escape raiders is obvious; to do so, however, was tricky. Individuals might withdraw to caves or secret valleys, as on Lipari in the 830s. 94 However, the odds of escape were inversely proportional to the size of the group escaping: a gaggle of citizens is easy to track, whereas in the late ninth century an 18-year-old nun made a desperate sprint for the centre of a deserted island and evaded recapture. 95 She was young and fit; in contrast, we read of an old woman of Capri, confined to her cottage, who could do nothing but listen for the tramp of approaching feet. 96
If, conversely, there was notice of the raiders’ approach, it was quite common for entire settlements to temporarily decamp into the hinterlands, as the inhabitants of Ostia and Porto did in 846. 97 Ideally, they might retreat to a better fortified location. In the longer run, frequent raiding could have an effect on population settlements. Communities, or at least families, might be uprooted; that of Luke of Steiris abandoned their home on the isle of Aegina for the Gulf of Corinth, then several towns in the region of Phocis – only to face raiders again – before moving inland. 98 According to some sources, entire islands were depopulated by raiders from Crete, and, somewhat later, Roger II carried the population of the isle of Djerba into slavery. 99 The Byzantines considered it a commandment ‘to avoid dangerous places and not tempt the Lord God … lest, by being captured again, they be judged by the pious to have brought it on themselves’. 100
Avoiding counterattacks
It was vital for raiders to effect their business before the defence was able to concentrate their greater numbers. Getting bogged down in overcoming strongpoints, then, was a dangerous strategy – as raiders from Tunisia discovered in 1075. Having landed and battered their way into Mazara, they then spent eight days trying to reduce the citadel, which left enough time for the Count's army to confront them in the piazza of the city. 101 The same thing happened to Pisan sea raiders in 1126, who successfully sacked Amalfi, but then having settled down to take its adjacent fortresses, they left themselves open to a sudden counterattack by Roger II's forces. 102 Even for raiders who avoided such entanglements, making an exit could be tricky. Norman sea raiders in 1061 found themselves trapped on a Sicilian beach for three days by bad weather. 103 More than one tactical manual advises this as the opportune moment to defeat raiders, who will be burdened by their captives and stolen goods. 104
Here, perspective matters. For the victims and their savaged communities, the damage was done with the initial attack. However, from the raiders’ point of view, success was achieved only when they got home. Abandoning booty or killing prisoners to avoid pursuit, throwing goods overboard to lighten the load, losing a ship or even just failing to find a good target all meant that they came home defeated. In 844, Viking raiders at Seville, driven off by Abd al-Rahmān II's forces, stopped under a hail of arrows – according to Ibn al-Qūṭīyah – to parley for the hostages, for even at that extremity they needed to salvage something of value for their efforts. 105
There was significant risk involved. If a raid failed, a raider might become a prisoner, as al-Higari did in 1138, although as a literate man he was able to write home to beg a ransom. 106 Raiders themselves might end up as slaves, as seemingly happened to the luckier among the Vikings who attacked Seville. Or they might simply be butchered, the fate awaiting Russian raiders on Constantinople. 107 One has the impression that sea raiders, perpetrators of unexpected attacks on undefended victims, were subject to especially condign reprisal – not an unjustified outcome. Some Vikings defeated at Seville in 844 were hanged from posts and from palm trees, while Zirid raiders captured by the Byzantines in the 1030s were impaled along the coast of Asia Minor. 108 In the mid-twelfth century, we hear of raiders whose ship was destroyed by a rogue wave; struggling to the shore of the nearby island of Ikaros, they fell one and all to the blades of the islanders. 109
Captives and other booty: Sorting and ransoming
The point of a raid was booty, and the nature of the booty available must have varied from place to place. Gold and treasure were the most desirable, but also the most elusive. Certain extant objects are usually assumed to be booty, such as the bronze griffin in Pisa, but this is far from certain. Although easy to carry, treasure was always guarded and held in safe locations, so it was less often the target of raids than might be supposed. In other piratical eras, it was common to raid for more quotidian commodities, such as foodstuffs and cloth – and this certainly occurred in our era, even if only occasionally documented. 110 There was, however, one other commodity that was always available, and that was humans. 111
The ships were not the deep hulls of the early modern period; only so much space could be allocated to a cargo as bulky as humans, a factor that may have kept crew sizes down, and occasionally led to other expedients, as when on the beaches of Ischia raiders slaughtered their own horses to make space for captives – an unsurprising outcome, as a horse averaged 9–13 dinars in value, while a single healthy captive could easily bring 20. 112
For that reason, captives were immediately sorted and divided into those likely to fetch a good sum on the markets and those not worth carrying home. The latter category included the elderly, as well as those who might make a good slave, but whose passage was a risk – that is, males likely to attempt violence. The pirate Trapelicinus threw the men overboard for this reason, retaining only women and children for the market. 113 Often, however, it was the custom to sell the second category back to their kith and kin. In 1074, for example, Tunisian raiders, having sacked Nicoterra and taken captives, loitered offshore until the following day, when they returned to the beach to ransom the elderly and others deemed unfit for the passage. 114 Such a practice forced painful choices on the defenders – if they called for reinforcements, the raiders were likely to depart quickly and family members, instead of being redeemed, would be lost forever, if not summarily slaughtered. A similar situation is outlined by Adémar of Chabannes with respect to Viking raiders on the coast of Aquitaine. 115 Such forced ransoms were a useful technique for raiders, as they obliged the victims to have recourse to whatever funds they had hidden away. By this means, whatever money was missed or inaccessible to the raiders could still be extracted.
One key point is the location of the sorting. In the early tenth century, Muslim raiders who had sacked communities on Lesbos sailed to an uninhabited island to sort their captives, one of whom escaped by headlong flight into the interior. 116 On some occasions the ransoming and the sorting took place in the same place, as in Nauplion around 900, where the raiders brought all their captives to the slave market but did not offer all of them for sale – leading to an altercation with the Greeks, who wished to ransom the entire crew. 117
Sometimes there were mutually agreed locations for exchange. Donnolo, for instance, was seized as a child from Oria in the early tenth century; his family knew to proceed to Taranto to redeem him. Nauplion thus served raiders from the Emirate of Crete. 118 And in 1114 when North African raiders seized Montecassino monks in Sardinia, their abbot made a ransom arrangement with a speed that suggests prior knowledge. Likewise, in 1049, the abbot Isarn of St Victoire travelled all the way from Marseille to Valencia to redeem captured monks. 119 We hear of a Venetian ship sailing to redeem captives overseas. 120 The Jewish community of Alexandria sought to ransom – although they could ill afford it – whatever captive Jews were brought to their city, even if they were Byzantine citizens. 121
In the Life of St Euthymios the Younger we see captives sorted into one ship and their belongings into another, which might imply different storage facilities on the two vessels, or different destinations for the two types of loot. 122 Perhaps the ship with the captives was to loiter in Byzantine waters and negotiate ransoms, while the goods were transported back to raiders’ home port.
Treasure, too, required sorting. Plunder, for the raiders, was a crucial test of discipline. When the opportunity for looting occurred, leaders needed to choose ‘the most distinguished’ of their followers and set guards against their own men. 123 If a raiding flotilla was made up of allies from different cities, sorting had to be well organised and would probably take place when the fleet broke up. Medieval chroniclers, as is well known, were not given to moral queasiness over atrocities; it did bother them, however, when agreements over the distribution of booty were slighted. The Priest Raol condemned the allies who ‘observed not the bond of their oath’ and ‘secretly snatched away all those things [i.e. stolen booty] which ought to have been made the common property’. 124 And we have an account – of debatable veracity – that Fraxinetum was undermined by disagreements over the allocation of captives. 125 Perhaps the dispute, in which a raider betrayed the settlement after his captive was confiscated by a stronger comrade, implies the existence of a code for the distribution of booty. However, the limited sources we have suggest rigid hierarchies of command. Theodore Prodromos imagines a pirate captain making a claim to his overlord: ‘the girl is booty from my band of men/plunder from my sword’, which implies a priority of rights – but the claim was denied. 126
Conclusion: Profit (and loss)
To join a raid was to sail into acute danger. Only a certain kind of man would do it and only a certain kind of profit would justify it. Profit, however, was relative; raiders from a poorer region attacking a richer target might be well pleased with a modest haul. 127 For the Pisans in 1063, the ransom of a single ship seems to have been sufficient to declare the venture profitable, and worthy of commemoration. 128
There is very little evidence in this period for how sea raids were financed. Later on, there is evidence for fractional contributions, in which even lower ranking citizens of Genoa might financially contribute to an expeditions and hope for a profit on its return 129 . Yet this is not documented in earlier centuries. The bias of the sources is towards elite warlords: Mujahid of Denia outfitted ships to raid the Tuscan coast, but the source does not tell us how much money he spent. 130 As such, we can hardly say whether he made his investment back again.
Nonetheless, it is evident that despite its dangers, a practice that persisted over centuries cannot have been systematically unprofitable. And indeed, the fact is that the raiders faced an enviable economic situation: an extremely valuable commodity – human captives – was also highly abundant and relatively unguarded, at least more so than gold and treasures. It is true that populations were probably fairly low, but it remains the case that the Mediterranean was rich in settlement and therefore targets – and both of these grew over our period. There were limits, of course, and occasionally we hear of slave markets becoming depressed after successful raids, but generally there was demand for slaves throughout our period. 131
As such, raids are frequently noted, if rarely described. 132 The Pisans recorded on the façade of their cathedral five major conflagrations against Muslims in the eleventh century and one, in 1015–16, was a defensive war. 133 Four raids over a century does not seem like much, but it is not farfetched that there must have been others that, owing to more doubtful outcomes, were not commemorated on the duomo. Arabic sources record a Pisan and Genoese attack in 1092 in the Spanish levant, which was a failure, and an unsuccessful raid near Sicily, which might have been a Pisan attack. 134 The sources are, indeed, replete with anonymous attacks; al-Bakrī records the coastal defences of North Africa against the Christians – but which Christians were attacking? 135 Likewise, the very numerous accounts of ‘Saracen’ depredations often leave us in the dark.
Al-Bakrī described Annaba as ‘the meeting place for corsairs; They arrive from all sides, since the crossing from there to Sardinia is short enough to be completed in two days’, terms which imply a regular occurrence. 136 Did the corsairs meet every year, or even more often? The sources do not usually support such a volume of raids, but the sources are limited, and, as Carraz notes, tend to favour important expeditions. 137 A considerable number of coastal communities are not mentioned more than once or twice, if at all, over the course of the tenth or eleventh centuries. If a small flotilla set out in, say, 990 and raided Cagliari or Cosenza, there's no guarantee we should hear of it.
We can be certain that sea raiding was more common than the chronicles indicate. This is implicit in the naval technology of the era, which did not encourage long blue-water cruises, at least by the galleys frequently used for raiding. 138 If, then, Tunisian raiders assailed the east coast of Asia Minor, as Skylitzes records for 1035, they were 1500 km from home as the crow flies – and ships are not crows. 139 They must have made stops along the way, and some of those stops must have involved raiding. There are many comparable examples: if a Spanish fleet destroyed Pisa in 1011, where else did it stop? 140 Occasionally such details are specified; when the Pisans sailed to raid Mallorca, Ibiza was not spared. 141
We may ask whether sea raiding, like the equestrian societies that produced raiding poetry on land, became a way of life for certain maritime communities in the ninth to eleventh century Mediterranean (and beyond, of course). If so, these communities and their traditions of nautical violence were outside the literary mainstream of their own societies, or their production of written sources was directed towards other avenues – although of course, as primary elite institutions, churches and religious authorities might be prime beneficiaries of successful raids. Raids paid for churches – again, at Pisa – and treasures were enshrined within or upon their walls. However, this did not, for the most part, inspire monastic chroniclers to celebrate seaborne raids.
There are exceptions. The Pisans produced two epic poems of sea raiding, the Carmen and the LM, but as these were written within a few decades of each other (ca. 1090 and ca. 1120 respectively), they obviously represent a unique moment. Other accounts, not least of crusading, discuss seaborne invasions of various sorts, but cannot be said to be about sea raiding. The fact remains that most accounts come from not raiders but the shores they afflicted – typically from nearby abbeys or cities. Yet notwithstanding the configuration of the sources, it is evident that the practice of raiding was a complex business; it was, moreover, a business in the modern sense of the word, in that violent seizure was conceptualised as a legitimate profit-making activity. Like other businesses, it had processes and practices, perhaps even guidelines and regulations. What these were is lost to time, however, so we have had to reconstruct them based on limited descriptive evidence. It remains a mystery how, in an era of organised violence, the traditions of violence were in fact organised, but organised they were.
Footnotes
Declaration of conflicting interests
The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
Funding
The author received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article.
