Monks and Sailors Under the Ottoman Sultans

T J hen their empire was in its prime, the Byzantines were among V V other things very proud of their fleet, which defended them suc cessfully against the Arabs for more than three centuries. In the 10th cen tury Emperor Constantine VII Porphyrogenetus emphasised that the em peror of Constantinople was the lord of all seas up to the Pillars of Hercu les; in the 11th century the provincial nobleman and author Kekaumenos wrote that the glory of Byzantium was its fleet. However, at the end of the same century Byzantine thalassocracy became questionable as pirates in great numbers emerged from all sides, from West and East. Further more, first under the pressure of the Normans of Sicily and later under that of the Italian maritime states, that is Pisa, Venice and Genoa, the Byzantine merchant fleet became more and more marginal. In 1204 the fleet was unable to defend Constantinople against the crusaders. After this fatal event, which rendered the decline of the empire visible, Byzantine control over the seas lost ground to the profit of the western European states which increased their maritime power. Actually Byzan tium became dependent on the fleet of the two Italian maritime republics, Venice and Genoa, which received extensive commercial privileges from the emperor. At the end of the 13th century, Andronicus II Palaeologos realised that his impoverished empire could not sustain the necessary ex pense for the maintenance of a fleet and, early in his reign, he proceeded to its official dissolution; his contemporaries criticised his decision either with surprise or scepticism or with open disapproval.1 In the first years of the 14th century conditions at sea were dramati cally changed under the impact of a new power, that of the Turkish mari time emirates, which began to attack the islands and the littoral of the Aegean using their newly-constructed light vessels.2 Their presence con

Ancient history · Byzantine architecture · Byzantine studies · Emperor · Empire · Glory · Ottoman empire · Political science · Politics · Reign · Roman Empire · Archaeology and Historical Studies · Byzantine Studies and History · Classics · History · Law · Maritime and Coastal Archaeology