Byzantine Emporia
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Luxury historical commentary. Read 'Saladin the Strategist': Other books:
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Last Seen Profiles
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'Saladin the Strategist' is finally available in paperback!
379 pages with annotations and index; final updates to the Kindle edition have also been uploaded (for those who have already purchased).
I'll post all my Saladin-related threads below...
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THE ELEPHANT TRADE
The Battle of Raphia, fought in 217 BC between the Ptolemaic and Seleucid Kingdoms, is the only known battle in which Asian and African elephants directly clashed. Both kingdoms poured huge expense into maintaining trade networks to obtain the beasts. Thread.
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Mansa Musa was unfathomably rich, owing to the productive gold mines of Mali. He was so liberal with his wealth that, during his pilgrimage to Mecca in 1324, he was said to have crashed the value of the gold dinar in Cairo.
How true is the legend? Thread.
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Modern banking emerged in the late Middle Ages as Italian firms figured out how to skirt the Church’s usury laws. How did they actually do it? Thread.
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The Blue Banana—an arc through Western Europe containing an exceptionally high % of GDP and population—is one of those fashionable concepts like BRICS that looks nice at first glance, but doesn’t necessarily reveal anything deeper.
But supposing it does, what is it? Thread.
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If Byzantium can be given a starting date, it’s today’s date in 636, when it suffered one of its worst ever defeats at the Battle of the Yarmouk.
This marked the end of a cosmopolitan Mediterranean hegemon and left a mostly Greek, Orthodox holdout of the Roman state. Thread.
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The Frankish knights of Outremer survived more than four decades in a period of acute crisis, during which they were desperately outnumbered by an increasingly united foe.
How did they do it?
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The Genoese acquired Constantinople's suburb of Galata under a 1267 treaty with Byzantium. It was in many ways one of the first modern colonies, a prototype for the treaty ports of future imperial powers. Thread.
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The withdrawal of Andronikos Doukas from the field at Manzikert doomed the Byzantine army to one of its most infamous defeats in history.
He had been tasked with a critical role in the Byzantine system of warfare—a system that stretched back to the Roman Republic. Thread.
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Florence hosted a major church council in 1438-1445 which futilely sought to reconcile Constantinople & Rome and thereby save Byzantium.
But at the same time, Florence was at the center of another conflict which ultimately determined the fate of the east Mediterranean.
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How did Aleppo, which stands on a minor river in the middle of a vast plain, come to be the greatest metropolis in Syria?
Simply by standing dead center on the overland portion of the trade route connecting the Indian Ocean to the Mediterranean. Thread.
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It took a decade for a 17th-century financial crisis to travel from Spain to China.
The Spanish Crown suffered a pair of fiscal disasters in 1627-28 which eventually forced it to cut silver exports to the Far East, hammering a Ming China already teetering on the precipice.
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Was Machiavelli right about anything? (No)
Thread.
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On this date in 1187 Saladin destroyed the Crusader army at Hattin, killing or capturing all but a few hundred of more than 20,000 men.
Perhaps history’s most one-sided victory, won by a middling tactician with a decidedly mixed record against the Franks. How did he do it?
The Frankish knights of Outremer survived more than four decades in a period of acute crisis, during which they were desperately outnumbered by an increasingly united foe.
How did they do it?
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The Spartans drilled.
This is a ridiculous reading of the sources mentioned, and it neglects a few other important ones.
Thread.
Ep. 54 Last summer,
@BretDevereaux
's viral article "Spartans Were Losers: The U.S. Military’s Admiration of a Proto-Fascist City-State is Based on Bad History" kicked up a storm of debate on X.
In this full-length interview, we asked Prof. Devereaux to back up his major
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WAR AND CLIMATE
The Byzantine-Persian War of 602-28 was one of the most earth-shaking events of Late Antiquity, but our sources are extremely scant. Surprisingly, climate data helps us fill in some of the gaps.
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Basra, the famed city from which Sinbad set off on his voyages, was one of the jewels of Iraq and one of the most important centers for the Indian Ocean trade under the Abbasids. Thread.
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Arabs have been associated with long-distance desert trade since they first appeared in history in distant antiquity. Yet at some point, they also developed a reputation as fine mariners.
Paradoxically, this was probably from trying to protect their land monopoly. Thread.
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THE DOME OF HAGIA SOPHIA
Why was the Hagia Sophia such an achievement? Not least because it was the world’s largest domed basilica for 1000 years.
Domes in turn helped deal with a very ancient problem in the Mediterranean: earthquakes.
Thread
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The Stato da Mar, Venice’s maritime empire, was founded on the territory it gained from the Fourth Crusade. But the success of this empire owed to the Venetian constitution, which had just undergone many important changes by 1204. Thread.
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Byzantium’s Eastern Frontier.
The most sophisticated defensive system of the Middle Ages. It broke the momentum of three centuries of Arab invasions and allowed the Byzantines to resume the offensive, reaching its greatest heights.
A thread.
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It's from an incredibly detailed map of Old World trade routes in the 11th-12th centuries. You can find the full version here:
@byzantinemporia
Fantastic map! Do you know the author, or the source? I'd love to see the complete map :D
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One of the most enduring myths about Byzantium is that it was primarily a “defensive” empire, one which preferred to pay off its adversaries or use cat’s paws rather than fight.
While it did make effective use of both, this has to be put in context of its grand strategy. Thread.
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Most of the feudal entities created following the Fourth Crusade were eventually reconquered by Byzantium and others.
A few survived past the fall of Constantinople.
One of them—the Duchy of Naxos—ended up with a Portuguese Jew as duke in Ottoman service. Thread.
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Historians can tell us a lot about the past through their errors. In fact, these tell us a lot about one of the most famous battles in Byzantine history, if we just read them carefully.
But first, a story from Herodotus about the Phoenicians. Thread.
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The medieval Kingdom of Cyprus had a very distinctive aristocratic culture which closely followed trends in France. This lasted long after the fall of its neighboring Crusader states and through the Venetian period, up until the Ottoman conquest of 1571. Thread.
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One of Saladin’s most underrated accomplishments was his conquest of the Red Sea. Although far less spectacular than his conquests in Syria or against the Crusaders, it had much subtler influences on events thousands of miles away.
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How crop failures in the Soviet Union helped clean up the Great Lakes
In the early 1970s, Russia and the Ukraine had a series of bad harvests, putting the entire USSR at risk of famine. In 1972 the US government agreed to subsidize $300 million in sales of grain.
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The Levantine Riots
The Sasanian conquest of Roman Syria & Egypt revealed fractures along sectarian lines that would break open a few decades later during the Arab conquests. But intra-Christian tensions were just part of it: the empire also faced a major Jewish uprising. Thread
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When the Seljuks arrived in the Middle East, they played a very similar role to the Franks in Dark Age Europe: protectors of an enfeebled religious authority and the enforcers of orthodoxy.🧵
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Portuguese spices vs. Spanish silver
The 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas seemed to favor the Portuguese over the Spanish: spices were consumable, every ounce of silver reduced the value of all others in circulation. But it was not so simple—that silver funded Portugal's competitors.
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In the last years of the 15th century, Venice suffered twin calamities. Their full consequences took a long time to bloom, but their combined effect knocked Venice from the height of her power and sent the Republic into a steady decline. Thread.
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I just finished
@JudithHerrin2
’s ‘Ravenna’, a history of the city from the 4th to the 9th century. Two things especially stood out (thread).
1. It focuses on a time period that is usually treated as intermediate: from the end of the western Roman Empire until the Carolingians.
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Constantine XI makes a last stand as Ottoman troops flood into Constantinople.
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The Siege of Kerak
At the end of October 1183, Saladin appeared with a massive army before the mighty Crusader castle of Kerak. It was the beginning of a dramatic month-long siege.
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A rare example of Crusader influence on Islamic architecture: the surviving minaret from the White Mosque in Ramla.
Although it looks like a converted Gothic bell tower, it was constructed by Sultan Baibars not long before the fall of Acre.
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Venice’s famous glass industry owed much to its trade connections with the Orient—most obviously, techniques learned from Syrian and Egyptian craftsmen.
But it also involved some of the more arcane aspects of shipping: cargo imbalance and freight differentials. Thread.
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Images from the newly-opened tunnels beneath the Baths of Caracalla.
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In the 15th century, Venice got sucked into wars on the Italian mainland which diverted its energies from its mainstay of seaborne commerce. But the precedent was set by a series of earlier wars which showed just how wide a gap Venice’s commercial empire had to straddle. Thread.
Breaking the long-standing policy of both friendship with Milan and focus on the sea, Foscari embroiled Venice in a series of wars which lasted until 1454. Although Venice was wildly successful, acquiring territory up to Milan itself, this came at a cost.
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MEDIEVAL RESERVE CURRENCIES
Several different coins served as the backbone of international trade during the Middle Ages. Although not exactly a reserve currency in the modern sense (there were no central banks), these followed the shifting pattern of economic might. Thread.
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Sanctions and economic warfare almost never work as intended—at best, they degrade a state’s capacity to act over time. But in the runup to the Hundred Years’ War, England deployed one of the most effective economic blockades of all time.
Thread on the Flemish wool embargo.
WAR, SANCTIONS, AND INTERNATIONAL TRADE
European warfare from 1500-1815 was dominated by large coalitions which spanned the continent and often cut across major trade routes. How did states and merchants alike manage this?
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As the siege of Acre neared its one-year mark in the summer of 1190, the Crusaders hatched a number of schemes to break the deadlock.
Each of these failed spectacularly, but they kept dusting themselves off and trying again. Thread.
#otd
1189, Saladin's army arrives before the city of Acre, which is under siege by the remnants of the Army of Jerusalem and the first arrivals from the Third Crusade. The two sides will remain locked in a mutual siege for the better part of the next two years.
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An oft-stated corollary to the claim that Byzantium was primarily a defensive empire is that it occupied a terrible geographic position. The opposite was true: its position was SUPERB.
But the reasons are far more interesting than geography alone. Thread.
One of the most enduring myths about Byzantium is that it was primarily a “defensive” empire, one which preferred to pay off its adversaries or use cat’s paws rather than fight.
While it did make effective use of both, this has to be put in context of its grand strategy. Thread.
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A year after the Notre Dame fire, we still don’t know for sure what started it. An investigation has determined a likely cause, but there’s no direct evidence any which way.
Given what we do know, though, we still have to take the possibility of arson very seriously.
A thread.
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Cyprus, Byzantium, and Richard the Lionheart
Richard’s conquest of the island en route to the Holy Land was more than a chivalrous sideshow. It marked a major shift in the region, presaging Byzantium’s rapid loss of influence with the 1204 sack of Constantinople. Thread.
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The Second Crusade was really the decisive battle of the whole movement:
-If Damascus had fallen, the Franks could hold it indefinitely
-Which means no Syrian armies can conquer Egypt
-Also means the Franks get the Hauran, can support many more knights...probably the Bekaa too
Although some terrain separated the Crusaders from inland it didn’t generally impede attacks. Crusader attacks on Muslim cities like Aleppo & Damascus ended in failure. Crusader forces were fragmented, too far from their power centers, & reliant on reinforcements from the West.
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The structure of the Exarchate of Ravenna, established in 584 to protect Justinian’s Italian conquests from the invading Lombards, makes a lot more sense in light of the empire’s linguistic divisions.
Short thread.
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Photos of the passages underneath the Hagia Sophia. A huge network of crypts, waterways, and ventilation tunnels runs beneath the basilica, including what may have been an ancient library (first photo).
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The Chatalar Inscription
The Bulgarian Empire’s heartland lay along the southern bank of the Danube, the old limes abandoned in the 7th century. Intriguingly, there are hints that the Roman frontier culture survived for centuries and influenced the Bulgarians. Thread.
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Years ago I ran into a friend in Helmand Province who was on an advisory team supporting the ANP. He told me about how one of the police chiefs was widely known to rape prisoners during interrogations. Been thinking a lot about the look on his face as he told me that.
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One of the most important Mediterranean islands relative to its size is Tenedos, modern Bozcaada. Only ~40 sq km in area, its position near the Dardanelles gave it a major role in wider events during the last century of Byzantium and the peak of the Ottoman Empire.
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"The Constantinople of the Franks" is how Muslim writers referred to the Crusader port of Acre. Although nowhere near as large as the real one, it was immensely wealthy—its population estimated as large as 40,000—and it was the economic engine of the Kingdom of Jerusalem.
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One of the most overlooked bits of the Byzantine-Persian War of 602-28 is how Theophanes, in the midst of describing Heraclius' exploits in Persia, casually mentions that his brother destroyed a >50k Sasanian army—probably the most significant event of the war.
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If Venice was so susceptible to entangling wars on the mainland, why wasn’t Genoa—a mercantile republic of comparable strength at the opposite corner of the Italian peninsula?
A combination of geography and politics made it not just difficult, but undesirable. Thread.
In the 15th century, Venice got sucked into wars on the Italian mainland which diverted its energies from its mainstay of seaborne commerce. But the precedent was set by a series of earlier wars which showed just how wide a gap Venice’s commercial empire had to straddle. Thread.
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On 19 September 1918, General Allenby launched an offensive to break through Ottoman lines in northern Palestine, the Battle of Megiddo.
He was inspired by Thutmose III's conquest of Canaan, in which the pharaoh attacked from an unexpected direction in a battle of the same name.
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The Crusades are sometimes presented as a flash in the pan, a meteoric burst of conquests that were bound to crumble eventually. But they could have just as easily endured centuries longer than they did.
Thread on the failed Crusade against Damascus.
The Frankish knights of Outremer survived more than four decades in a period of acute crisis, during which they were desperately outnumbered by an increasingly united foe.
How did they do it?
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Tsar Simeon I of Bulgaria. The most successful ruler of Bulgaria, who brought it to its greatest extent.
He did it largely by observing the Byzantines and beating them at their own game. Thread.
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The Venetians were famous for having a lot of complicated procedures to suppress factions or radical breaks in policy, ensuring that individual interests were subordinated to the state. But there was one other crucial factor: it was a virtual gerontocracy.
Venetian Elections
Of the Great Council, 30 were chosen by lot
Then reduced to 9 by another lot
Who named 40
Of whom 12 were chosen by lot
Who named 25
Of whom 9 were chosen by lot
Who named 45
Of whom 11 were chosen by lot
Who named 41....
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Most of the adventures in the Arabian Nights take place around the Indian Ocean, stories with Persian or Indian origins. But at least one of them comes from Byzantine tales of the exotic. Thread.
The voyages of Sinbad the Sailor unfailingly met with disaster, even if he always managed to return home laden with riches.
What would a voyage look like if he ever managed to complete one?
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It's hard to understand just how fractious civic politics could get in the Middle Ages. The skyline of San Gimignano—a village, by our standards—illustrates this.
Each tower (there were originally 72) was a family stronghold, in the event of factional fighting in the streets.
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John Haldon's reconstruction of the Greek Fire pumps used on Byzantine ships:
-A vat of oil is kept continuously heated
-The chamber is pressurized with an air pump
-The nozzle is aimed and valve opened to fire
-A pilot light ignites the burst as it jets towards enemy ships
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Bronze Age Triangular Trade:
Prevailing winds and currents in the eastern Med made it hard to sail from Egypt directly to Crete. Trade expeditions would therefore sail north to Cyprus/Syria, then west along the Anatolian coast, before returning home across open waters.
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Between Acre and Tripoli, the major port cities are spaced with almost perfect regularity every 40 km of coastline: Acre, Tyre, Sidon, Beirut, Byblos, Tripoli. I wonder if this reflects the natural size of ancient political units.
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Christian and Muslim armies used basically the same siege techniques during the Crusades, even though they fought with completely different styles in open field. The reasons why are pretty interesting, short thread.
Unlike massive counterweight trebuchets, the main purpose of traction trebuchets (mangonels) wasn't to batter down castle walls. More important was suppression: they were paired with archers to sweep defenders from the walls so that assault troops could get close.
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The new hegemons of the Mediterranean made these expensive beasts tactically obsolete, rarely using them in battle themselves—they disappear altogether after Caesar’s time.
Instead, the Romans inherited the real legacy of the elephant trade: the great ocean route to India.
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Finally available in paperback, the critical edition of one of the finest overviews of the Italian Wars! (US only for now due to copyright restrictions, I'm working on getting international rights)
I’m proud to announce the publication of a critical edition of F.L. Taylor’s 1920 classic, The Art of War in Italy, 1494-1529. It covers the first decades of the Italian Wars in which warfare rapidly transformed from medieval to early modern.
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When Alexander was a boy, his tutor chastised him for burning too much incense.
After conquering Gaza, the great spice-trading emporium, Alexander sent 500 talents of frankincense back to the old man in Macedonia, with the message:
"Now you can stop short-changing the gods."
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I like the idea that we may one day be able to write formal histories of the age before history. We’re learning so much about the distant past that it’s becoming possible to construct actual narratives of events that predate the dawn of writing. Thread
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The Venetian trade outpost of La Tana was built on the ruins of the ancient Greeks' most far-flung Black Sea colony, Tanaïs on the Sea of Azov.
The most amazing part: the stones used to build it were cut and numbered in Venice, then transported across the sea for assembly.
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In 1182, Saladin launched a daring attack by land and sea on Beirut.
It was a sharp break from his usual raids into enemy territory and skirmishes with the Crusaders. But at a deeper level, it was part of a consistent strategy that ultimately brought him victory.
Thread
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Just when maritime trade was booming between the Abbasid Caliphate and Tang China, the two empires came into direct contact in Central Asia at the Battle of Talas. Despite this clash, the period saw the renewal of the overland Silk Route. Thread.
This trade flourished during the peak of two great empires: the Abbasids in the west, the Tang in the east. Many subsidiary routes also became integrated into this massive Indian Ocean trade system.
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WAR, SANCTIONS, AND INTERNATIONAL TRADE
European warfare from 1500-1815 was dominated by large coalitions which spanned the continent and often cut across major trade routes. How did states and merchants alike manage this?
I posted ahead of Russia’s war against Ukraine that Moscow would rely on international partners following the complete isolation by the West.
China 🇨🇳 (the
#Dragonbear
), Brazil 🇧🇷, African but also Central Asian countries and last but not least India 🇮🇳.
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Elephants were potent weapons in Hellenistic warfare, capable of disrupting the dense ranks of the Macedonian phalanx—Alexander suffered heavy casualties from them at the Battle of the Hydaspes.
So in the Wars of the Diadochi, his successors scrambled to acquire their own.
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Not having elephants could be disastrous. The Egyptians discovered this at the Battle of Panium in 200 BC, when their army was nearly annihilated after the infantry got caught between charging elephants to their front and outflanking cavalry to their rear.
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In 1996, a shipwreck was salvaged from the floor of the Java Sea after 800 years underwater. It was found to contain 100,000 pieces of ceramics, nearly 200 tons of iron, and many luxury goods. Piecing this together with literary evidence, we can trace the ship’s voyage. Thread.
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What explains the utter collapse of Constantinople's defense on the night of 12 April 1204? Queller and Madden argue that the dizzying succession of coups in the previous 21 years had basically trained the populace to be apathetic.
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A knyght ther was and that a worthy man…
Chaucer’s Knight, one of the most famous characters of medieval literature, spent his life campaigning across Europe & the Mediterranean. Likely based on real people, we can trace his adventures through historical events. Thread.
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Markets of Constantinople.
They were so big, drawing in so much wealth from across the world, that access to them was extremely valuable.
So when the Byzantines refused to let Bulgarians trade in the city, it ended up causing a major war.
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Banking ultimately came out of money-changing. Money-changers had always been around, earning a premium on the spread between exchange rates—this was necessary for interregional commerce.
What changed in the later Middle Ages was the expansion of long-distance trade.
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The first of many wars between Venice and Genoa was fought over property in the Crusader capital Acre. The war drew in the Templars, Hospitallers, and major barons, and each side bombarded the other's quarters with catapults, leveling large parts of the cities and killing 1000s.
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The Qal'at ar-Rum, or Roman Castle, on a dammed portion of the upper Euphrates.
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Images of the Madonna and Child and St. Catherine's martyrdom, with figures in Chinese-style robes.
From the tombstone of Caterina Ilioni, who died in the Italian quarter of Yangzhou in 1342.
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For a good overview of the Medici bank, which some of the Florentine examples in the thread came from, see 'Medici Money' by
@TimParksauthor
:
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Niccolò Machiavelli. His name is synonymous with cunning and clever schemes, the ultimate ruthless strategist.
But how clever was he?
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Judging by drainage basins alone, it's odd that Portugal rather than Aragon remained independent of the other Iberian kingdoms.
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Saladin the Strategist is out!
Maps and annotations aren't finished, but I'm not a patient man. You can get the Kindle version now for a discount, and it will automatically update when the full version is released.
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Easy to underestimate how thorough the breakdown of a centralized system can be. To put it in modern perspective, here's what it takes just to get the right 𝘸𝘢𝘷𝘦𝘭𝘦𝘯𝘨𝘵𝘩 for the lasers in lithography machines used to etch the most advanced microchips (from "Chip War")...
Worth noting on this point (which I broadly agree with) -- archeological evidence shows pretty conclusively that living standards in the former Western Roman Empire declined massively, and the population declined with them.
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Gold was also substantially less in demand in Cairo than in Alexandria or other mercantile cities, therefore the effects of even a small change in the money supply were likely to persist.
So did Mansa Musa really crash the value of the dinar? Yes, quite probably.
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The Wars of the Diadochi left the Seleucids and the Ptolemies as the great powers of the Hellenistic Era, the only two who could afford elephants in large numbers.
But only the Seleucids had direct access to India, with their control of Persia and lands east.
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Venice is built on ~10 million log pilings driven into the marshy earth. It's theoretically possible to use C14 dating to trace the evolution of the entire city from the days of the Huns.
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Thus, despite their enormous expense and difficulty of use, kings could not afford to allow their enemies such an advantage. In this way they were a bit like battleships in the early 20th century or air forces later on, drawing militaries into competitive cost spirals.
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Trade fairs started popping up in northern Europe in the 13thcentury: first the famous Champagne fairs, then in the Rhineland, Flanders (especially Bruges), Switzerland, Lyons, and London.
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This was a big advantage. The best war elephants were from India, larger and stronger than the readily available North African breeds. Indian elephants overpowered their counterparts at Raphia (even if that didn’t change the ultimate course of the battle).
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Guicciardini v. Machiavelli
The most common objection I got to this thread was that Machiavelli was primarily a political philosopher who observed the broad patterns in human affairs.
This is where his friend Guicciardini serves as a useful antidote. Thread.
Was Machiavelli right about anything? (No)
Thread.
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There are four big factors:
-Physical geography
-Trade patterns encouraging industrial development
-Resource geography
-Historic political fragmentation
These help explain not only why the Blue Banana is so densely developed, but why other advanced regions aren’t.
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Anazarbos, a very ancient city built into a cliffside overlooking the Cilician plain. The present castle was built by the Armenian princes ruling the region in the 12th century.
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The Maiden's Castle of Corycus! A Byzantine island fortress which, together with its counterpart on the mainland, guarded a harbor entrance on the Cilician coast.
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A while back I read the memoirs of Hermann Balck, a German general who fought in both World Wars. In a strange way, they reminded me a lot of Byzantine and Arab chronicles—in narrative style, structure, and content.
Short thread.
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....and he was almost kicked out of the Army for it. We were tacitly giving our moral endorsement to the worst people in Afghanistan.
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