Ships from the Desert
- 2 days ago
- 9 min read
Flat Island (‘Yassi Ada’ in Turkish) lies 16NM south-east of Leros, in the channel between the Greek Islands and the Turkish Bodrum Peninsula. Missy Bear regularly sails up the same channel heading home from Kos and all places further south.
The tiny, low island is a ships’ graveyard.
For example, in the summer of 626 AD, an Eastern Roman (Byzantine) cargo ship hit the reef there and sank in 30m of water. It was small merchant sailboat. It had a well-equipped galley with a chimney, and a locker containing gold and copper coins for victuals and wages. It was 21m long with a capacity of 60 tons, and was carrying 900 amphorae probably containing wine. It may have been carrying supplies for the Byzantine army, who were planning another campaign against their perennial Persian foe, currently under the rule of the Sassanian dynasty.
The ship was probably square-rigged as was usual then, but its hull construction is interesting, because it marks a point in the evolution from the ancient “skin first”. to the later “skeleton first” method. In ancient times, the thick planks were first fastened together with mortise-and-tenon joints to form the hull, and the internal skeleton was built into it afterwards. This construction was very heavy and robust, and allowed ancient warships, such as triremes, to carry below-water rams.
Latterly, the skeleton of the hull was constructed first, before planks were attached using iron nails. This was a much lighter, and cheaper, design. The lower hull of the wreck at Yassi Ada was constructed “skin first”, but the extended upper skeleton showed planks nailed to it (per the later method).
The ship was most likely sailing downwind, running before the prevailing northerly Meltemi. The white-horsed wave-tops probably disguised or hid the waves breaking upon the rocks. And the rest, as they say, is history.
As the merchant wreck was still settling on the sea-bed, the Byzantine and Sassanian empires continued to slug it out in Asia Minor, Syria and Mesopotamia. But, unbeknownst to them, an even greater storm was brewing…
To the south, in the western Arabian Peninsula, a young Arab prophet-cum-local warlord, called Mohammed, had been kicked out of his home town of Mecca. He arrived in Medina and had persuaded the local Arab families/tribes there to stop squabbling, and to follow his new teachings. He led them to fight and vanquish his home town, and then he continued his “jihad”. Before his death in 632 AD, most Arab tribes across the peninsula were now Muslim, having converted to Mohammed’s faith, Islam, and were now paying him some form of tribute.
The word “Arab” appears in twenty-four of our blog posts. We have encountered ghost references to Arabs past in Roussillon, Catalonia, Sardinia, Sicily, the Aegean islands, and Türkiye. And yet, I confess, I still know very little about them, and who they were or are. So, either as self-punishment or self-improvement, I have just read “The Great Arab Conquests”, by Hugh Kennedy. It only covers the first couple of hundred years the Islamic empire (7th to 9th centuries), but I thought I should make a start somewhere.
To be honest, as a Mediterranean sailor who has, so far, steered-clear of the north African shore, I often got the impression (outside Sicily) that the only Arabs in ‘middle-earth’ were simply pirates, or corsairs. In fact, the early Arab leaders (“Caliphs”) were very suspicious of adventures by sea, and often counselled against it. The early Arabs, as we shall see, were essentially land-lubbers, who excelled at surviving and raiding on the relatively flat, low-lying, desert fringes. Their only ships were camels.
Anyway, what follows is a rather simplistic summary of 200 years of conquest or jihad, often of the military-conquest type.
Arabs are originally from the Arabian Peninsula. Ethnically they were tribal, camel-riding nomads, or Bedouin, although some were settled in towns in the Hijaz (west) and Yemen (south). They traded across the Syrian desert, and often supplemented their income through raiding and robbery, before retreating to the desert.
The major Hijazi town was Mecca, and it was here that Muhammad was born into a wealthy family. After his visitation from Gabriel, he became a prophet (not the only one around there at the time, it has to be said), and he was not universally liked or accepted. Nearby Medina was having some inter-family or inter-tribal squabbles, and when Muhammad went there to preach, he helped resolve these issues. He gained followers to his monotheistic preaching, and so it started.
One of the problems of the new Islam was that if you are a Muslim, you cannot then raid or rob your fellow Muslim. So, you can see how this would have been seen as a problem for the revenue stream of some of his new Bedouin converts. Luckily, there were still plenty of infidels to rob at this stage. But, as the Islamic realm grew, the margins into non-Muslim areas had to be pushed further to create the opportunities for booty. As well as to convert more infidel souls to Islam, of course.
The first push was northwards into the western Syrian desert, along the long-established trading routes of the eastern Mediterranean coast. These first small Arab armies were highly mobile, and without need of a supply chain. They were expected to feed and arm themselves. Their reward was a share of the spoils. Any Jews remaining in this area after the major Roman pogrom, would have not been too pleased to see these Arabs. And contemporary Christians saw these new Muslim converts as “barbarians from the wilderness”.
The jihad model was simple, but effective, and very sustainable: If the enemy surrendered, then they would be allowed to live; else the men would be put to the sword, and the women and children taken and sold into slavery. Those that survived must pay a financial tribute. This was an annual tax in money, or equivalent produce, such as oil or grain (but not wine of course). Subjects must agree not to help the Muslim’s enemies. Further, any person who wanted to keep and practise their religion must pay the dreaded annual poll-tax. This was one major incentive to convert, but there were others. Some converts simply wanted to slip the yoke of their existing overlords, e.g., Byzantine or Sasanian, and only Muslims were given opportunities in military or administration professions.
Another reason for the success of jihad was that it had a meritocratic, not a hereditary, theme. Failure, or getting above one’s station, was frowned upon and dealt with by the Caliph.
At junior school I was amazed that the whole of the Roman Empire had been conquered by the inhabitants of a small Italian city. In my naivety and dullness, it had not dawned on me that not all Romans were from Rome. Similarly, not all Muslims armies were Arab, as there were simply not enough of them for such a conquest. Muslim armies comprised men from conquered races and lands, whether they were slaves, conscripts or just volunteers looking for adventure and spoils. Some freed slaves achieved very senior rank.
As the armies moved to the northern edge of Syria, they arrived at the Taurus mountains, where the Byzantine military line held firm. So, the Muslim armies turned east, into Jazira and Mesopotamia. They kicked the Sassanians out of Iraq and then chased them into their Zoroastrians heartlands of Iran.
In the early 7th century, these landscapes were ripe for the picking for several reasons. Firstly, the Byzantines had been fighting the Sassanians for years. Both sides were battered and tired. As were the resident populations. On top of that, there had been an early outbreak of the bubonic plague in 540 AD. So, the Muslim armies were taking towns and cities that were often underpopulated and broken. Which may explain why slaves were a common booty.
Further north of Iran, at the Caucuses, they met the Khazars. This Turkish people put up a greater resistance and halted the Muslims’ progress. Further east the invading armies encountered more mountains in what is modern Afghanistan, and the Hind (Indus valley of modern Pakistan). The upland resistance here was fierce, and progress halted. [DN – Some history lessons are never learned]
Other Arab armies had been sent west into Egypt. Egypt was still in Byzantine control, but the locals were Coptic Christians. Theologically, the Orthodox Byzantine overlords did not like the renegade Copts and their heretical ideas. There was local resentment. This circumstance played into Muslim hands, because some annoyed Copts occasionally worked with the Muslims. The moral of this story is, “resist being divided, lest you be conquered by someone else” (or something along those lines…)
Despite the Romans being thrown out of Egypt for the first time in nearly 700 years, they still retained their naval supremacy. The “Mare Nostrum” remained theirs. For now.
The Arab-led Muslim army, reinforced by new recruits from southern Arabia, continued west along the African coast, into the Maghreb. This was the domain of the Berbers, a variable collection of nomadic tribes. They put up some resistance, often by razing and torching the urban remnants of the Roman province of Africa. (The Berbers were so upset by the Arab slave-taking, however, that they finally revolted in 740 and caused a major setback in the Arab conquests.)
Nevertheless, the Arab-led Muslims, often with a large Berber contingent, had already crossed the strait of Gibraltar in 711, and conquered the Visigoths of Hispania (the Iberian Peninsula). The fact that this German tribe were in the middle of a civil war probably made it easier. [DN - If you are being invaded, you really need to put internecine difference to one side]. Most of the land south of the northern mountains of Cantabria and the Pyrenees was vanquished.
The raiding then continued into Gaul, now the kingdom of another Germanic tribe – the Franks. The Muslim army raided along the southern Mediterranean coast, as well as pushing northwards, until the Frankish King, Charles Martel, defeated the Muslim army at the Battle of Poitiers in 732 AD. This put a stop to this expansion, and the Muslims retreated to consolidate in Hispania – or “Al Andalus” as they called it.
Meanwhile, the Byzantines had been fighting back, largely by conducting naval raids along the coasts of Syria and Egypt. The Arab-Muslims now saw the need to build a navy to counter this, and started ship construction in locations in the Nile delta and at Tunis.
Most of the timber was brought in from Lebanon. [DN - Did you know that the word “arsenal” originates from the Arabic phrase "dār aṣ-ṣināʿa" meaning house of manufacturing, and entered English via Italian and French in the 16th century.] There were also Muslim naval bases in Acre and Tyre, and at Tarsus on the southern coast of Anatolia.
This new navy allowed the Muslims to expand their campaigns across the seas, to the Mediterranean islands in around the 650s. They raided or invaded Cyprus, Sardinia, Sicily and Crete, as well as pillaging smaller islands such as Rhodes and Kos.
They ruled Sicily until the Normans arrived in the late 11th century. And at Cyprus the Muslims jointly controlling the island with the Byzantines, where the poor locals had to pay tribute to both the Muslims and the Christians. This lasted for about 300 years, until the Third Crusade.
But, the main maritime objective of the Muslims’ waterborne jihad was Constantinople, the head of the Byzantine beast. The armies couldn’t get there by land, so they built a fleet to get there instead. [DN - As a nautical aside, whereas the hull construction of the Muslim ships was similar to that of the Byzantines’, the Arabs ships were probably lateen-rigged, which probably gave then some upwind advantage. Nevertheless, warships were also usually powered by oar, especially during engagement.] The first and most famous naval battle of this campaign was “The Battle of The Masts”, which took place in 655 off the southern Anatolian coast near modern Finike. To cut a long story short, the opposing ships ended up being alongside each other. Hand-to-hand combat with swords followed, and the Muslims prevailed.
The Byzantine Emperor escaped back to Constantinople. Subsequently, several Muslim fleets arrived through the Sea of Marmara, and laid siege to the capital, but each failed, largely down to the defenders’ use of the mysterious and legendary ‘Greek Fire’.
So, in conclusion, the ships had arrived from the desert. But, the Muslim navy never fully established dominance of the seas. As a result, the great Arab conquests stopped short in about 750 AD. The spread of Islam faltered. The Muslim Caliphate never achieved the extent of the Roman Empire in that it never ruled Anatolia (Türkiye), the Balkans, Italy, Gaul (France), or Britain. The geographical barrier of the Mediterranean Sea was one of the few reasons why Islam did not spread so far in northern and western Europe. Equally, as Kennedy states, “the Mediterranean separated the Muslims from many potential enemies from the north and west”
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