Download PDF | Byzantine Warship vs Arab Warship _ 7th-11th Centuries.
Pages : 122
INTRODUCTION
The maritime contest between the Byzantine dromon (pl. dromdnes) and the Arab shalandi (pl. shalandiyyat) began in the mid-7th century and lasted for the best part of four centuries. In their heyday the dromon and shalandi fought each other from one end of the Mediterranean to the other. By the mid-11th century, though, a new form of galley favoured by the Italian city-states — the galea — rose to prominence in the Byzantine and Arab navies, and eventually replaced the remaining dromones and shalandiyyat.
The Arab and Byzantine warships owed much to their Roman predecessors in terms of design and fighting potential. Following the collapse of the Western Roman Empire in the 5th century AD, what was once Rome’s mare nostrum (‘our sea’) became a naval battleground as barbarian fleets and pirates preyed on Roman shipping.
By the 6th century, however, the Byzantines had developed their own powerful navy, which saw off the maritime threat posed by the Vandals and Ostrogoths in the Western Mediterranean, and this fleet spearheaded the revival of Byzantine fortunes during the reign of the Emperor Justinian I (r. 527-65).
By the close of the 6th century the Byzantines not only controlled the former Eastern Roman Empire, but had reconquered territory in Italy, North Africa and the Iberian Peninsula as well. While many of these recaptured Roman provinces were little more than narrow strips of territory fringing the coast, Byzantium’s powerful fleet served as the glue that bound this largely maritime Empire together. For more than a century, Byzantium was the unchallenged master of the sea, from the Pillars of Hercules (the Strait of Gibraltar) to the Nile Delta.
That all changed in the early 7th century. For centuries the Eastern Roman Empire and its Byzantine successor had waged an intermittent war against the Sassanid Persian Empire. In 611 the Sassanids overran Byzantine Syria, and within nine years they had conquered Egypt and much of Asia Minor. In 626 they even laid siege to Constantinople, but the city defences held, and eventually the Byzantine navy attacked and defeated the Persian fleet and lifted the siege. A Byzantine counterattack reconquered much of the lost territories in Asia Minor and the Middle East, but the war left the Empire financially and militarily weakened.
It was at this crucial moment that a new foe appeared — one that would not just threaten the Byzantine Empire — it would dismember it. While the Byzantines and Persians had been at loggerheads the Islamic prophet Muhammad (c.570-c.632) emerged as the leader of a militaristic spiritual movement which had captured Mecca, and went on to conquer most of Arabia. So began what became known as the Arab Conquest — a religiously inspired explosion of military and political power that transformed the known world.
While at first the Arabs lacked a navy and found themselves vulnerable to attack from the sea, they soon developed a formidable fleet that confounded Byzantine expectations in the early years of the Arab Conquest — most spectacularly at the ‘Battle of the Masts’ (Dhat al-sawari) in 655. The Arabs would prove themselves a doughty adversary over the centuries that followed, making the Romans’ unchallenged supremacy in the Mediterranean a distant memory.
Their nature of both dromon and shalandi changed substantially over the period. At first they were single-masted monoremes, with limited space for marines and weaponry. These were the galleys that duelled with each other during the 7th and 8th centuries. These monoremes were then superseded by larger versions — bireme galleys with two masts, and more substantial fighting areas on board. These later warships remained in Arab and Byzantine service until the end of our period. Both the dromon and the shalandi carried marines as well as oarsmen, whose task was to capture enemy warships by boarding them.
However, they also carried a range of missile weapons, from stones and arrows to javelins, darts and large iron bolts. Most dramatically of all, the Byzantines also possessed their great secret weapon — Greek Fire — a highly flammable terror weapon that played a decisive part in the very survival of the Byzantine Empire. The secret was eventually learned by the Arabs, thereby ensuring that naval warfare during this period was a brutal, violent and murderous business. The real stars of this maritime history, though, are the ships themselves — the dromones and shalandiyyat that once dominated the blood-soaked waters of the Mediterranean.
THE MEDITERRANEAN BATTLEGROUND
The dromon and the shalandi were developed in order to operate in a specific setting — the Mediterranean. Naval warfare in the Mediterranean during the Early Medieval period was dominated by three things: sea lanes, islands and bases. All of the major battles fought between the Arab and Byzantine fleets during this era took place somewhere along the major maritime arteries that spanned the Mediterranean Sea.
These ran from Egypt north along the Levantine coast to Syria, then east past Cyprus, following the coast of Asia Minor as far as the Aegean. The island of Crete served as a stopper to the Aegean bottle, and so Levantine trade passed to the east of the island, and occidental trade passed it to the west. From there the sea lanes crossed the base of the Adriatic to reach the southern coast of Italy, and then continued on to Sicily and the Byzantine province of Africa (now Tunisia). Beyond Sicily trade routes spread westwards towards the Balearic Islands and the Iberian Peninsula. Both Arab and Byzantine Strategists understood the economic and political importance of maintaining control of these sea lanes.
That was why control of the islands of Cyprus, Crete and Sicily remained of paramount importance to both sides. Not only could fleets based there interdict these sea lanes, but their geographical presence created maritime bottlenecks, which dictated the shape of almost all of these naval campaigns. In the late 10th century the Arab writer Muhammad ibn Ahmad Shams al-Din al-Mugaddasi (c.945—91) made this point with admirable clarity: In this sea there are three flourishing and well-populated islands. One is Sicily ... then there is Crete ... and then Cyprus. The sea has two channels, which are well known, and on its coast are many The design and development of the dromon and the shalandi would be shaped by this setting, but their strengths and limitations would help to define the nature of the war at sea between the Byzantines and the Arabs in this period. The most significant aspect of galley warfare was that these warships weren’t capable of conducting long-distance operations.
They had limited storage facilities, and so they were unable to operate for more than a week or so without needing to return to a friendly base to replenish their supplies of food and water. Galleys tended to operate within sight of land, and in most instances they would put into shore at nightfall, and resume their voyage in the morning. This made the presence of bases and friendly coastlines of paramount importance in these naval campaigns. The naval battles of this period tended to take place in limited geographical areas — for instance the waters around Cyprus, the southern coast of Asia Minor, the sea approaches to Constantinople, the southern coast of Italy, and off the northern and eastern coasts of Sicily. In almost every case they were fought to determine control of ports, areas of coastline and strategically important islands. These were the locations where victory or defeat in this great struggle would be determined.
THE SITUATION IN THE 7TH CENTURY
At the opening of our period the Mediterranean was convulsed by rapid and violent change. In 634 the first Arab incursions had begun on the Byzantine Empire’s southern frontier in Egypt and Syria. By the end of the year the Arabs were in Damascus, helped by the ill health of the warlike Emperor Heraklios (r. 610-41). The decisive Arab victory at Yarmouk (636) led to the conquest of Syria, and soon Egypt and Mesopotamia were also wrested from Byzantine control. By 642 Alexandria had fallen to the Arabs, which meant they controlled the entire coast of Egypt and Syria, and so gained access to several major ports.
This rapid collapse of Byzantine power in the Middle East didn’t alter the naval situation in the Mediterranean — at least not immediately. Certainly, the Byzantines lost control of important naval bases and shipbuilding ports such as Alexandria, Acre, Tyre and St Symeon (the port serving Antioch), but Byzantine domination of the Mediterranean was unchallenged. What had begun as a military conquest would now take on a naval aspect, however, as the Byzantine navy did what it could to stem the Arab advance. The Arabs were utter ‘landlubbers’, but the ‘Rightly Guided Caliphs’ who succeeded Muhammad as leaders of the Arab jihad (‘struggle’) quickly realized the strategic importance of sea power. Much of the economy of the Arabs’ newly acquired provinces depended on maritime trade, which was strangled thanks to the Byzantine naval presence. In 645 a Byzantine naval attack on Alexandria, Egypt, demonstrated the Arab vulnerability to attack from the sea.
There were only two ways the Arabs could break this maritime stranglehold. One was by denying the Byzantines naval bases from which to operate, much as Alexander the Great had done during his campaign against the Persian Empire in the 4th century Bc. The other — and ultimately the more successful — was the building of a galley fleet capable of wresting control of the Eastern Mediterranean from the Byzantines, and thereby seizing the strategic initiative.
While the Arabs had little experience of Mediterranean shipbuilding, their newly conquered territories included ports with shipbuilding facilities — ones which the Byzantines had used to build their own galleys. This meant they had immediate access to shipbuilding facilities and expertise, and so were able to draw upon this when they began building their own fleet. So, as Arab armies continued their advance along the North African coast, shipwrights in the newly conquered territories were directed to begin building a fleet that could challenge the supremacy of Byzantine sea power.
By 649 they were ready to challenge the Byzantines. That year the governor of Syria, Mu‘awiyah ibn Abi Sufyan, launched a raid against Cyprus, destroying the ancient city of Salamis. An Arab attack on Rhodes followed, and in 655 a fleet led by the Arab governor of Egypt, Abdullah ibn Sa‘ad ibn Abi as-Sarh (d. 656), clashed off Cape Chelidonya in Lycia (south-eastern Asia Minor) with a larger Byzantine fleet commanded by the Byzantine Emperor himself, Constans II, at the ‘Battle of the Masts’ — an encounter that would transform the naval balance of power in the Mediterranean.
DESIGN AND DEVELOPMENT
So what did the vessels that fought at the Battle of the Masts look like, and how did their design and fighting methods address the challenges of fighting in the Mediterranean setting? In fact, the opposing fleets at the battle are likely to have looked very similar. Modern scholars (Gardiner 1995, Pryor & Jeffreys 2006) suggest that the Arab vessels were largely indistinguishable from their Byzantine counterparts. Any modifications to incorporate distinctly Arabic features would be incorporated into this Byzantine-style design over time. Both sides’ vessels were designed, constructed and — in the Arab case, only partly — manned by members of traditional seafaring communities who drew upon a longstanding tradition of shipbuilding and seamanship within the Roman world.
Link
Press Here
0 التعليقات :
إرسال تعليق