We were in Milazzo to bide our time and wait for a moment when Scylla and Charybdis would be asleep, so that we could pass between them and sail safely through their whirlpool into the Ionian Sea. Which side of the Strait would we choose? It was ‘on the horns of a dilemma’ and we would be ‘between a rock and a hard place’ whatever.
But that decision was for later...
For now, we parked Missy Bear in the marina on a warm sunny day and stomped up the hill to the ancient citadel. It is now an extensive museum complex incorporating the Norman keep and walls - that were improved and extended by the Swabians, Aragonese and Spanish – to the old derelict and deconsecrated cathedral of 1608.
Wandering around the ruins and exhibits allowed me to reflect on our Mediterranean voyage to date, and hopefully to fill in a few details and add some colour.
CARTOGRAPHY IN THE MIDDLE AGES
In my blog of August 11th (‘Middle Earth’) - looking at where Missy Bear would be sailing - I marvelled at the 14th century map of the known world (the Mappa Mundi) housed in Hereford Cathedral. It’s the largest medieval map of the world and, if memory serves, was painted on goatskin by monks at Lincoln Cathedral in around 1300. The monks used the best of their knowledge, presumably from earlier maps, augmented by tales of returning travellers that they interviewed at the time. However, I am now even more impressed by another map – the Tabua Rogeriana - a facsimile of which was on display in the Norman castle.
According to the museum, “Roger II loved the civilisation and culture of Islam. For this reason, he invited one of the most important exponents of the Arab world, the geographer and traveller al Idrisi, to his court. From 1138 al Idrisi was at the service of the Norman king, who financed his book on world maps (the famous Charta or Tabula Rogeriana of 1154), accompanied by a lengthy manuscript (known as The Book of Roger), in which al Idrisi also describes Milazzo (Milas), its castle and promontory, the exportation of high-quality linen and its tuna fisheries: a town with the most beautiful and most elegant people, similar to those in the greatest cities for their culture, industry, trade and leisure”.
The map is amazing and seems to be far more accurate on the Mediterranean than the Mappa Mundi even though it predates it by about 150 years. It has fewer little graphics of the cities though, which are simply depicted by black dots, so is less interesting to gaze at for long periods. It goes to show that the Muslims were very skilled, not just at numeracy.
THE ARAGONESE IN SICILY
In the July 24th blog (‘…and the Crown of Aragon’) we saw that, having failed to expand southwards into Castille, the Crown of Aragon expanded eastwards. This thalassocracy included much of what is now eastern Spain and southern France, the Balearic Islands, Sardinia, Sicily, Malta, Southern Italy and parts of Greece. We also learned later ('The island where east met west') how they were invited to help the locals kick out the French during the War of the Sicilian Vespers.
We haven’t come across a lot of extant Aragonese history, but the second ring of citadel walls are Aragonese having been built in the 15th century by ‘Ferdinand the Catholic’ (Ferdinand II). He built bulwarks – five of them circular – and the walls linking them were double-skinned with a passage between them and various utility areas, e.g., for storing arms.
The blog also told how Ferdinand would later marry Queen Isabella I (Crown of Castille), creating a union that would become ‘Spain’. And at one of the gates into the central Norman fortifications, you can see the coat of arms of Ferdinand and Isabella, which would have been added at that time. It replaced the previous limestone coat of arms dating back to the Swabians, who won/inherited the Kingdom of Sicily from the Normans. The eight bastions of the Norman castle are square. I presume that the Aragonese thought circular ones were superior, but I don’t know why.
A PING PONG BALL, NOT A FOOTBALL
In my blog of August 30 ('Why did Sardinians fight in the Crimean War'), we mentioned the Treaty of Utrecht that ended the War of the Spanish Succession. The Spanish (heirs of Ferdinand and Isabella) were made to cede the island of Sicily to the House of Savoy, which gave the Savoyards a nice kingship! But the Savoyards were then made to swap Sicily for the lesser prize of Sardinia by their ally, the Austrian Holy Roman Emperor.
The Spanish never really accepted the loss of Sicily and so King Philip V (a Bourbon) invaded the island in 1718. The Spanish besieged Milazzo. On August 11, at the Battle of Cape Passaro (south-east corner of Sicily), a British fleet attacked and destroyed the Spanish fleet and then brought an Austrian army from Naples to Milazzo, to lift the Spanish siege.
On the wall in the castle is a wonderful plan drawn by a Frenchman (I suppose) and showing the various camps of the Spanish and Imperial forces at the Battle of Milazzo. I am guessing that the ships are the British fleet? The key describes the various temporary fortifications and the various attacks by the Austrians early on October 15. If you were at Sandhurst, you could spend a while studying this, but in summary, the Spanish stopped the attack and counterattacked, and then pursued the fleeing Imperial army. There were many casualties and prisoners on both sides, but the Austrians were not driven out from the peninsular which was used as a bridgehead to send over more troops the next year.
Spain was eventually defeated in 1720, but the Spanish Bourbons eventually took the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in 1734.
INDEPENDENCE AND UNIFICATION
In the blog of August 30, we described how Victor Emmanuel supported the ‘Expedition of the Thousand’ (1860–1861) led by Giuseppe Garibaldi, which resulted in him winning the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies from the Bourbons. We joked that a Garibaldi had beaten a Bourbon in the battle of the biscuits. I can't remember a Sicilian town that we have visited that doesn't have a street called 'Via Vittore Emmanuelle'.
But whilst walking around Milazzo, we came across a building on the road 'Marina Garibaldi'. (Marina simply means near the sea). It is called the 'House of the Patriot' and it was in that house that the Spanish Bourbons signed their surrender of the castle, before Garibaldi saw that their troops sailed off back to Spain.
FULL CIRCLE BACK TO TONNI
Back in July 19 (‘Gone fishing…’) we looked at the history of fishing, or the unsustainable exploitation of fish. And on July 24 (‘Port Vendres…’) I posted a picture of an 80kg+ tuna that had just been landed there, and how sad it made me feel to see such a fine wild creature killed and butchered. Well, I admit I have eaten tuna since, most of it raw. But the museum of tuna fishing in the old monastery got me thinking again.
Milazzo occupies a long promontory that juts out northwards into the Tyrrhenian Sea. Perhaps it is the underwater geography that made the location a prime spot for tuna to gather.
On the wall was a jolly poster titled ‘14a Sagra del Tonno’ (the 14th Tuna Festival) and it was dated Sunday 28th July 2007. I googled the festival and it doesn’t seem to happen anymore. The reason, perhaps, is that there are not enough big tuna left to celebrate? This is evidenced by an old wall chart showing the number the tonni landed in Milazzo from 1896 to 1963, with each 1000 or 500 tuna being recorded as a large or small cartoon fish. 1896 recorded 1500 fish, but 1899 scored a whopping 5000. Catches ebbed and flowed, as these things do, but the trend was downwards. In 1962, they only caught the equivalent of a small cartoon fish’s head – maybe 100? And by 1964 they had stopped recording.
It seems that tuna fishing was an industry or even sport for the whole community. The technology they developed to herd, funnel, trap and finally spear these animals was very complex. There was a scale model on display showing how vast nets were anchored to the sea bed to guide the fish into individual square keep nets, that could be compartmentalised by opening and closing net doors. The fish were then allowed to swim, one compartment at a time, into the final narrow net where they were speared and hauled out of the sea.
There was even colour video footage of this, which must have been from the late 50’s or early ‘60s I assume. If you are squeamish, you wouldn’t want to watch it. It had the feeling of a huge water-based carnival, with young and old all involved. But now the carnival is over and it seems such a shame for both the fish and the community. Do you put it down to greed or blissful ignorance? I don’t know.
But just to round this blog up, al Idrisi’s allusion to the tuna fishery that was clearly note-worthy nearly a thousand years ago, makes me sad to reflect that we have almost wiped it out within 60 years of recklessness.
A THOUGHT ON SUSTAINABILITY
A better understanding of history is enabling me to realise just how fragile a state we have engineered in relatively recent times. But I also mustn’t forget what I learned, in the museum in Lipari, about the end of the Bronze Age: that man has overexploited natural resources for thousands of years.
The example, I am thinking of is the almost total destruction of the forests on Cyprus to make iron. Cypriot pine trees were felled in huge quantities to make charcoal for the smelting of iron ore. Charcoal had always been uses to smelt metals such as copper and so forth. That was sustainable. But because iron has a much, much higher melting point than other metals, it needs far more fuel to retrieve it. Someone calculated that the entire forests of Cyprus would have been cut down within 50 years to account for the amount of iron it was used to create.