Dear members of MEMHS,

The following is the draft of an article that is intended for a festschrift in memory of Simon Barton (hence the reference to him in the first paragraph), though it increasingly doesn’t really fit the parameters of that volume. It is based on a keynote talk I gave last July in Barcelona at the conference “Movement & Mobility in the Medieval Mediterranean (6th–15th centuries),” back in the happy days when we were all much more mobile ourselves. I think it is sometimes in the nature of keynote lectures to be compendious, even sprawling, and I suspect those qualities remain in the article and make it at times rather rambling. I look forward to your comments and suggestions at our discussion on November 24.

Amy Remensnyder

DRAFT! NOT TO BE CITED OR CIRCULATED WITHOUT AUTHOR’S PERMISSION 2

THE RESTLESS SEA: STORM, SHIPWRECK AND THE MEDITERRANEAN, CA. 1000-CA. 1700

Amy G. Remensnyder

“Know, oh reader, that sailing the sea has many principles … you should know all the coasts and…their various guides such as mud, or grass, animals or fish, sea-snakes and winds. You should consider the tides, and the sea currents and the islands on every route,” wrote the fifteenth-century navigator Ahmad ibn Mājid al-Najdī in his manual of instruction for mariners.1 He piloted ships in the Red and the Arabian Seas, but Muslim,

Christian and Jewish seafarers in the medieval Mediterranean—including those Castilian and Portuguese mercenaries who, as Simon Barton so cogently demonstrated, crossed its waters to fight for North African rulers—would have agreed with his advice.2 They knew that they ignored the marine environment at their peril. After all, declared one of Ibn

Mājid’s Christian contemporaries, “of all things the sea is the most unfaithful.”3 It was a particularly rough Mediterranean passage that compelled him to borrow these words from an ancient Greek philosopher.

1 G.R. Tibbets, Arab Navigation in the Indian Ocean Before the Coming of the Portuguese, being a Translation of Kitāb al-Fawā’id uṣūl al-baḥr wa’l-qawā’id of Ahmad b. Mājid al-Najdī (London, 1981), p. 77. 2 Simon Barton, “Traitors to the Faith? Christian Mercenaries in al-Andalus and the Mahgreb, c. 1100- 1300,” in Medieval Spain: Culture, Conflict, and Coexistence, ed. Roger Collins and Anthony Goodman (New York, 2002), pp. 23-45. 3 Itinéraire d’Anselme Adorno en Terre Sainte, ed. Jacques Heers and Georgette de Groer (Paris 1978), p. 370.

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Medievalists studying maritime Mediterranean mobility, however, mostly have yet to recognize importance of the sea as a living marine environment—its currents, its winds, its storms, its rocks, its flora, and its fauna—for those people who ventured on its back.4 The major exception is the scholarship on nautical technology, because it explores how vessels were built to work with and survive the sea’s physical demands.5

Medievalists are not alone in this neglect of the sea qua sea. Until very recently, much of the research resulting from what is variously called the oceanic turn, the new maritime history, or thalassography confines salt water to a supporting role, reducing it to a surface across which ships move to connect terrestrial points.6 But what if rather than treating the sea as a featureless substance serving human movement, medievalists instead paid

4 For example, David Abulafia, The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean (New York, 2011); Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell, The Corrupting Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History (Oxford, 2000). 5 For example, Ruthy Gertwagen, “A Chapter on Maritime History: Shipping and Nautical Technology of Trade and Warfare in the Medieval Mediterranean, 11th-16th Century,” in Maritimes Mittelalter: Meere als Kommunikationsraüme, ed. Michael Borgholte and Nikolas Jaspert (Ostfildern, 2016), pp. 109-148; John H. Pryor, Geography, Technology, and War: Studies in the Maritime History of the Mediterranean, 649- 1571 (Cambridge UK, 1988), esp. pp. 12-101. 6 Such is the case with many of the foundational studies in this burgeoning field of history, including Marcus Rediker, Between the Devil and the Deep Blue Sea: Merchant Seamen, Pirates and the Anglo- American Maritime World, 1700-1750 (Cambridge, 1987); Michel Mollat, Europe and the Sea, trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan (Cambridge MA 1993); Iron Men, Wooden Women: Gender and Seafaring in the Atlantic World, 1700-1920, ed. Margaret S. Creighton and Lisa Norling (Baltimore, 1996); Jerry H. Bentley, “Sea and Ocean Basins as Frameworks of Historical Analysis,” Geographical Review 89 (1999): 215-224; Horden and Purcell, Corrupting Sea; Philip E. Steinberg, The Social Construction of the Ocean (Cambridge, 2001); Sea Changes: Historicizing the Ocean, ed. Bernhard Klein and Gesa MacKenthun (New York, 2004); “Oceans of History: AHR Forum,” American Historical Review 111 (2006): 717-780; Seascapes: Maritime Histories, Littoral Cultures, and Transoceanic Exchanges, ed. Jerry H. Bentley, Renate Bridenthal and Kären Wigen (Honolulu, 2007); Stephanie E. Smallwood, Saltwater Slavery: A Middle Passage from Africa to American Disapora (Cambridge MA, 2008); Abulafia, Great Sea; Julia Clancy-Smith, Mediterraneans: North Africa and Europe in an Era of Migrations, c. 1800-1900 (Berkeley, 2011); Cyprian Broodbank, The Making of the Middle Sea: A History of the Mediterranean from the Beginning to the Emergence of the Classical World (Oxford, 2013); John Mack, The Sea: A Cultural History (London, 2013); The Sea: Thalassography and Historiography, ed. Peter N. Miller (Ann Arbor MI, 2013); Christophe Picard, La mer des caliphs: une histoire de la Méditerranée musulmane (VIIe-XIIe siècle) (Paris, 2015). For some recent salutary exceptions, see W. Jeffrey Bolster, The Mortal Sea: Fishing the Atlantic in the Age of Sail (Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press, 2012); Sunil Amrith, Crossing the Bay of Bengal: The Furies of Nature and the Fortunes of Migrants (Cambridge MA, 2013); Stuart Schwartz, Sea of Storms: A History of Hurricanes in the Greater Caribbean from Columbus to Katrina (Princeton, 2015); Johan Mathew, Margins of the Market: Trafficking and Capitalism Across the Arabian Sea (Berkeley, 2016); Bathsheba Demuth, Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait (New York, 2019).

DRAFT! NOT TO BE CITED OR CIRCULATED WITHOUT AUTHOR’S PERMISSION 4 attention to its “natural conditions,” as Michael Borgolte and Nikolas Jaspert urge, or incorporated insights from oceanography, as Ruthy Gertwagen proposes—or even heeded environmental historians’ call to dethrone humans as the sovereign historical subject?7

Environmental historians conceptualize humans and the non-human natural world as being inextricably linked in a complex web of reciprocal influences that renders both participants in history.8 This perspective offers the potential to chart new waters in the history of human maritime mobility in the Mediterranean. What might it look like to understand the Mediterranean as “both geo-cultural frame and nautical actor” and to explore how its “winds, seasons, climates, and currents … shaped political and economic pulses” as well as “dictate[d] who went where, when and how?” asks Julia Clancy-Smith, for example, of this sea’s more modern centuries.9 The questions I pose about the nexus between the Mediterranean and people on the move are often differently inflected, yet they too rest on the premise that the marine environment is a historical force to be reckoned with.

7 Michael Borgolte and Nikolas Jaspert, “Maritimes Mittelalter—Zur Einführung,” in Maritimes Mittelalter: Meere als Kommunikationsraüme, ed. Michael Borgholte and Nikolas Jaspert (Ostfildern, 2016), p. 28; Gertwagen, “A Chapter,” pp. 109-110. In her recent work on fishing in the premodern Mediterranean, Gertwagen explicitly adopts the methods of environmental history: see her “Bridging over ‘Stormy Gaps’ between Humanities and Science in Marine Environmental History’s and Marine Ecological History’s Methodology,” in When Humanities Meet Ecology: Historic Changes in Mediterranean and Black Sea Marine Biodiversity and Ecosystems since the Roman Period until Nowadays. Languages, Methodologies and Perspectives. Proceedings of the HMAP International Summer School, ed. Ruthy Gertwagen et al. (Rome, 2010), pp. 13-24; and her “Towards a Maritime Eco-history of the Byzantine and Medieval Eastern Mediterranean,” in The Inland Seas: Towards an Ecohistory of the Mediterranean and the Black Sea, ed. Tønnes Bekker-Nielsen and Ruthy Gertwagen (Stuttgart, 2016), pp. 341-368. 8 For some programmatic statements of environmental history’s principles, see William Cronon, “The Uses of Environmental History,” Environmental History Review 17 (1993): 1-22; Ted Steinberg, “Down to Earth: Nature, Agency, and Power in History,” American Historical Review 107 (2002): 798-820; Ellen Stroud, “Does Nature Always Matter? Following Dirt through History,” History and Theory 42 (2003): 75- 81; Linda Nash, “The Agency of Nature or the Nature of Agency?” Environmental History 10 (2005): 67- 69; eadem, “Furthering the Environmental Turn,” The Journal of American History 94 (2013): 131-135. 9 Julia Clancy-Smith, “The Mediterranean of the Barbary Coast: Gone Missing,” in The Making of the Modern Mediterranean: Views from the South, ed. Judith E. Tucker (Oakland CA, 2019), pp. 37, 59.

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My time period is capacious and has ill-defined boundaries, which I cross freely.

“Compared with the stable conventions for marking eras on land, maritime periodization is remarkably fluid,” observes Kären Wigen.10 It starts in the eleventh century, when

Latin Christian ships began to compete seriously with those of Islamic polities as well as with Byzantine vessels for space on this sea’s waves; it ends circa 1700 as Islamic marine power in the Mediterranean declined, European ships established hegemony, and this sea became a different sort of multi-confessional realm. I thus join the increasing numbers of

Mediterraneanists who bridge the traditional gulf between medieval and early modern.11 I will often use the term “pre-modern” here, though by rights this word embraces many more centuries than I consider. This long period encompasses a diversity of shipboard experience conditioned by seafarers’ religious affiliation, cultural perspective, and social status, as well as by shifting politics and changing nautical technologies. Yet here I emphasize the continuities and commonalities in pre-modern voyagers’ relationship with the Mediterranean in order to highlight the sea itself.

Human developments define my chronological parameters, but the sea sets the subject. I focus on those moments during this half millennium when the Mediterranean’s own multiple mobilities disrupted human maritime movement. Exploding into storm or shattering into shipwreck, they starkly expose the sea’s immense power over people.

Storm and shipwreck demand that we take Ibn Mājid’s exhoration seriously and pay attention to the marine environment in all its complexity; these events inescapably

10 Kären Wigen, “Introduction,” in Seascapes, p. 14. 11 Examples of Mediterraneanists working across this chronological divide include Pryor, Geography, Technology, and War; Horden and Purcell, Corrupting Sea; Abulafia, Great Sea (who uses the periodization of 600-1350 and 1350-1830); A Faithful Sea: The Religious Cultures of the Mediterranean, 1200-1700, ed. Adnan A. Husain and K.E. Fleming (Oxford, 2007); Andrew Devereux, The Other Side of Empire: Just War in the Mediterranean and the Rise of Early Modern Spain (Ithaca NY, 2020), a study that despite its title reaches well back into what is usually considered the medieval period.

DRAFT! NOT TO BE CITED OR CIRCULATED WITHOUT AUTHOR’S PERMISSION 6 confronted pre-modern seafarers with a convergence of other-than-human-natural forces, among them waves, winds, seasons, currents, rocks, islands, and marine fauna.

Many Mediterranean voyages passed without incident, even when the sea became more unpredictable; this was an era of climate change as the relatively pacific Medieval

Climate Anomaly gave way circa 1300 to the more turbulent Little Ice Age.12 But as maritime insurance contracts recognized, storm and shipwreck were risks that seafarers consciously assumed every time they embarked on any vessel, whether large or small.13

The “invisible ways fixed in memory”14 that shipmasters, pilots, and crews followed across the Mediterranean’s waves were in fact blazed with the seamarks of storm and shipwreck.

Experienced sometimes as opportunity but more often as emergency, crisis, or even disaster, storm and shipwreck distill much about how seafarers related to and understood the Mediterranean. In the offing here are not the technical details of mariners’ nautical efforts to meet these challenges, but rather how the Mediterranean’s violence elicited from seafarers emotional and religious responses that bore the impress of the marine environment, the space of the ship, and the social divisions often apparent on board. Those moments when the Mediterranean most acutely asserted its dominion over the ship illuminate how mariners’ perceptions of the sea could diverge from those of

12 The dating of the onset of the Little Ice Age is much debated and would seem to vary according to region; for the Mediterranean context, see Jean-Michel Carozza, Benoît Devillers, Nick Marriner and Christophe Morhange, “Introduction,” in “Le petit âge de glace en Méditerranée,” ed. Jean-Michel Carozza, Benoît Devillers, Nick Marriner and Christophe Morhange, special issue, Méditerranée: Revue géographique des pays méditerranéens 122 (2014): 3-9. 13 Seafarers were thus among those communities who most actively took on and managed natural hazard risk; Christopher M. Gerrard and David N. Petley, “A Risk Society? Environmental Hazards, Risk and Resilience in the Later Middle Ages in Europe,” Natural Hazards 69 (2013): 1051-1079 (esp. 1072). On the emergence of Mediterranean maritime insurance, see Luisa Piccinno, “Genoa, 1340-1620: Early Development of Marine Insurance,” in Marine Insurance: Origins and Institutions, 1300-1850, ed. A.B. Leonard (New York, 2016), pp. 25-45. 14 Pinuccia I. Simbula, “La percezione del tempo nell’esperienza dei marina e dei naviganti,” Studium Medievale 2 (2009), p. 160.

DRAFT! NOT TO BE CITED OR CIRCULATED WITHOUT AUTHOR’S PERMISSION 7 passengers. They also reveal the ship as a site of potential religious tension. The seascape of risk laid bare by the history of storm and shipwreck indeed could collide with the

Mediterranean’s complicated religious geography; these junctures suggest the sea was an actor in rather than just a stage for this region’s multi-confessional politics.

Yet if the socially constructed experience of storm and shipwreck could splinter along lines of labor, faith and other factors, the commonality of physical experience could transcend them. The sea was, as Stuart Schwartz has written of Caribbean hurricanes, “always indifferent to” human categories of difference, and its violence spared no one.15 Storm and shipwreck could transform shipmates into a collectivity held together by shared fear and trauma. As fragile and evanescent as sea foam, these disaster communities dissolved as rapidly as they formed, sometimes leaving traces on the shore.

This exploration of storm and shipwreck in the pre-modern Mediterranean is experimental and partial, ignoring vast reaches of these subjects. Yet all the currents that flow through it meet at one point: the restless sea’s ability to shape history.

An Environment in Motion

Pre-modern people experienced Mediterranean maritime mobility not as frictionless displacement between terrestrial points but instead as prolonged interaction with an environment that starkly manifested the overwhelming, ineluctable power of non- human natural forces: millions of tons of water in motion. Wind and wave, tempest and tide, the sway of fishes and the play of light, the pull of currents and the drift of seaweed—the sea is never still. Other aquatic environments such as rivers and lakes too are in motion, but the scale and potency of marine movement dwarfs theirs. Marine

15 Schwartz, Sea of Storms, p. 50. My formulation of disaster communities owes much to his analysis.

DRAFT! NOT TO BE CITED OR CIRCULATED WITHOUT AUTHOR’S PERMISSION 8 currents “are many thousand times more powerful than any river on land,” writes one oceanographer.16

Premodern seafarers recognized the sea’s exceptional restlessness. “The waters of the sea are more rude, sonorous, and wondrous in their elevations than other waters,” declared the fifteenth-century Dominican Felix Fabri, who spent long months aboard

Mediterranean ships.17 A man who wanted never to set foot in a boat would have agreed with the friar: Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn’s biographer and contemporary, Ibn Shaddād. In an anecdote intended to glorify the sultan, he invoked the sea’s distinctively intense movement. Ibn

Shaddād related how the sight of the Mediterranean’s “motion and billowing” on the coast near Akko terrified him, but it inspired in courageous Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn dreams of launching a fleet to pursue the Franks.18 Salt water was such a realm of motion that it could even dissolve the distinction between mobile and immobile. An eleventh-century

Fatimid geographer described how on certain days, a mosque would appear on the shore at Sousse. After people prayed there, it would sink back into the waves.19

Even those seafarers who didn’t believe the sea had the wondrous power to make the immobile mobile knew it as a living environment in ceaseless motion. Whether they were in a small boat used for coastal trips or a large ship plying deeper waters, and whether they were crew or passenger, they were enveloped in what has been called the

“synaesthetic experience of the sea” common to all pre-steam maritime voyages.20 So intense was this sensory perception of the sea’s encompassing presence that premodern

16 Dorrick Stow, Oceans: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford, 2017), p. 58. 17 Felix Fabri, Evagatorium in Terrae Sanctae, Arabiae et Egypti peregrinationem, ed. Conrad Hassler, 3 vols. (Stuttgart 1843-1849), 1:52. 18 Bahā’ al Dīn ibn Shaddād, The Rare and Excellent History of Saladin, trans. D.S. Richards (Aldershot UK, 2001), p. 29. 19 An Eleventh-Century Egyptian Guide to the Universe: The Book of Curiosities, ed. and trans. Emilie Savage-Smith and Yossef Rapoport (Leiden, 2013), p. 516. 20 John Mack, The Sea: A Cultural History (London, 2013), p. 103.

DRAFT! NOT TO BE CITED OR CIRCULATED WITHOUT AUTHOR’S PERMISSION 9 seafarers perhaps shared the feeling of some contemporary Tunisian fishermen, who describe themselves as being not “at sea” but “in the sea.”21

Before steam, a ship moved toward its port as a partner in an intricate dance with the marine environment’s own motion. Vessels that primarily used sail were dependent on winds, but even galleys propelled by human muscle had to reckon with currents and winds. With their low freeboards, these craft were easily swamped in seas greater than three feet.22 All ships had to fear maelstroms, whirlpools born where currents clash; their potent eddies could stop a vessel or drag it underwater.23 Hence the acute attention to natural signs that Ibn Mājid recommended to mariners. They needed to predict and respond to sea’s movements that determined those of the ship. And hence the obsessive detail about wave height and wind strength in accounts of Mediterranean voyages. Such seemingly tedious minutia reveal how sensory awareness of the sea’s immense might permeated the premodern experience of maritime mobility.

In favorable conditions, mariners had the exhilarating sensation of commanding the sea’s power. One mid fourteenth-century Christian voyager remembered with pleasure how it felt to fly before the wind off Tripoli, so fast “that a bird could not have caught up with us.”24 The eleventh-century Andalusi Jewish wazier and poet, Shmuel

HaNagid, lyrically conjured such a moment: “We worked the oars and a wind came up/

21 Naor Ben-Yehoyada, The Mediterranean Incarnate: Region Formation between Sicily and Tunisia since World War II (Chicago, 2017), p. 111. 22 Gertwagen, “A Chapter,” p. 115. 23 Felix Fabri, Evagatorium 1:36. 24 Niccolò da Poggibonsi, Libro d’Oltramare, ed. Alberto Bacchi della Lega, 2 vols. (Bologna 1881), 2:217.

DRAFT! NOT TO BE CITED OR CIRCULATED WITHOUT AUTHOR’S PERMISSION 10 as over a field of corn,/ and the sea like a slave, did as I asked/ like a maid, and the sky was sapphire.”25

The Mediterranean, however, was never actually a slave to even the most skilled mariner, for no one could control its waves and winds. This is true of all seas and oceans, but every body of salt water has its own personality created by its seabed, currents and coastline—and the Mediterranean is famously mercurial. “It is a difficult and stormy sea,” declared a tenth-century Muslim traveller.26 The sixteenth-century Ottoman admiral

Piri Re’is was even more pointed, contrasting the reliable seasonal Indian Ocean winds with the capricious Mediterranean ones: “No matter where the wind may be in the

Mediterranean, it will be inconstant. Sometimes it will deviate and sometimes it will blow and take you on your way.”27 His modern successors still warn of this sea’s unruliness. “Wind behaviour appears unpredictable, and weather … often changes from benign to life-threatening in a matter of minutes,” cautions a recent sailing handbook to the Mediterranean.28

Premodern seafarers’ accounts confirm Piri Re’is’s observation about the fickle

Mediterranean’s power to disrupt human maritime mobility. Contrary winds could leave ships languishing in port for weeks or months at a time.29 At sea, favorable winds might

25 Shmuel HaNagid, “Miracle at Sea,” in Selected Poems of Shmuel HaNagid, trans. Peter Cole (Princeton, 1996), p. 8. 26 Al-Muqaddisī, The Best Divisions for Knowledge of the Regions (Aḥsan al-Taqāsīm fī Ma ‘rifat al- Aqālīm), trans. Basil Collins (Reading UK, 2001), p. 15. 27 Piri Re’is, Kitāb-i bahriye, ed. Ertuğrul Zekai Ötke, trans. Vahit Çabuk, Robert Bragner, Tülay Duran, 4 vols. (Ankara, 1988), 1:75. 28 Roberto Ritossa, Mediterranean Weather Handbook for Sailors, 2nd ed. (St. Ives UK, 2014), p. 1. For other comments about the Mediterranean’s changeable winds, see Broodbank, Making of the Middle Sea, p. 74. 29 Thus the length of sea voyages in the Mediterranean was highly variable; Simbula, “La percezione del tempo,” esp. pp. 165-174. For some examples among many, see Bernhard von Breydenbach, Peregrinatio in terram sanctam: Frühneuhochdeutscher Text und Übersetzung, ed. Isolde Mozer (Berlin, 2010), pp. 634-644; Felix Fabri, Evagatorium, 3:323-327; Nicola de Martoni, “Liber peregrinationis ad loca sancta, in Louis Le Grand, “Relation du pèlerinage à Jérusalem de Nicolas de Martoni, notaire italien (1394-1395),”

DRAFT! NOT TO BE CITED OR CIRCULATED WITHOUT AUTHOR’S PERMISSION 11 suddenly shift, something sixteenth-century mariners setting out from Sardinia tried to avoid by embarking only after having consulted a small ivory ship that hung in the main port’s Marian shrine; its prow infallibly indicated wind direction on the open sea.30 But even this maritime charm could not predict those eerie moments when the wind died away, immobilizing a ship on glassy water for days on end or setting it adrift on currents that could carry it into hostile territory.31 No wonder it was on a becalmed vessel that the thirteenth-century Moroccan sufi al-Shādhilī supposedly composed the “Litany of the

Sea.” Recited by Muslim voyagers by the fourteenth century, this prayer implores God to, among other things, “subject to us this sea … send us a gentle breeze … let it bear us along as if by miraculous intervention.”32 During an agonizingly long windless spell on a voyage between Tunis and Alexandria, thirty Muslim passengers spent the night reciting the Qur’ān in the hopes that God would stir the air.33 Becalmed Christians too beseeched

God, along with an array of maritime saints, to dispel the sea’s lassitude, for they knew as well as Muslims did the dangers of the doldrums.34 On ships languishing in windless waters, food rotted, water putrified, vermin proliferated and people died of disease,

Revue de l’Orient Latin 3 (1895), pp. 646, 663; the account by a fifteenth-century Nasrid ambassador to the Mamluks in Luis Seco de Lucena Paredes, “Viaje a Oriente: embajadores granadinos en el Cairo,” Miscelánea de studios árabes y hebraicos 4 (1955), p. 12; and evidence cited in Amar S. Baadj, “Travel by Sea and Land between the Maghrib and the Mamluk Empire,” in The Mamluk Sultanate from the Perspective of World History: Economic, Social and Cultural Development in an Era of Increasing International Interaction and Competition, ed. Reuven Amitai and Stephan Conermann (Bonn, 2019), pp. 286-287, 292. 30 Felipe de Guimeran, Breve historia de la Orden de Nuestra Señora de la Merced de Redempción de cautivos Christianos … (Valencia 1591), pp. 64-65. 31 For example, Felix Fabri, Evagatorium, 1:44; Nompar de Caumont, Voyatge d’outremer en Jherusalem, ed. Peter S. Noble, Oxford 1975, pp. 72-73. 32 Marco di Branco, “Some Observations on the Ḥizb al-Baḥr (the “Litany of the Sea”)”, in Ein Meer und seine Heiligen: Hagiographie im mittelalterlichen Mediterraneum, ed. Nikolas and Marco di Branco (Paderborn, 2018) p. 268. Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, Travels in Asia and Africa 1325-1354, trans. H.A.R. Gibb and C.F. Beckingham, 5 vols. (London, 1958-2000), 1: 25-27. 33 Jorge Lirola Delgado, “Travesías náuticas en la Riḥla del almeriense Jālid al Balawī (siglo XIV),” in Actas del II Congreso de Historia de Andalucía (Córdoba, 1994), pp. 85-92 (here p. 88). 34 See for example, William of Malmesbury, The Miracles of the Blessed Virgin Mary, ed. and trans. R.M. Thomson and M. Winterbottom (Woodbridge UK, 2015), p. 52; Nompar de Caumont, Voyatge, pp. 72-73.

DRAFT! NOT TO BE CITED OR CIRCULATED WITHOUT AUTHOR’S PERMISSION 12 dehydration or starvation, as fifteenth-century Mediterranean voyagers remembered with a shudder.35

According to a ḥadīth that Muslim writers quoted by the late tenth century, the

Mediterranean was not just a particularly fickle sea, but also a particularly murderous one. God says to the Mediterranean and the Indian Ocean, “I have created thee and deigned thee as a carrier for some of my servants… how wilt thou act towards them?”

The Indian Ocean replies, “I shall carry them,” but the Mediterranean answers, “I shall drown them.”36 To pre-modern people, it often seemed that this insubordinate sea did try to drown them, especially when it wielded the formidable weapon of tempest.

Storm

The Mediterranean only infrequently generates cyclonic storms of hurricane force, so-called Medicanes.37 But it was and is a sea of storms, to borrow a phrase Stuart

Schwartz coined for the Caribbean.38 According to climate scientists, the Mediterranean has the “highest concentration of cyclogenesis in the world” (that is, of extra-tropical storm formation), as well as “the heaviest extra-tropical rainfall events and very strong local winds.”39 Contained by the mountainous terrain ringing most of its coastline, the

Mediterranean possesses its own “specific … air mass and ... distinctive …

35 Felix Fabri, Evagatorium, 1:116; Santo Brasca, Viaggio in terra santa, con l’itinerario di Gabriele Capodilista, ed. Anna Momigliano Lepschy (Milan, 1966), p. 120. 36 Al-Muqaddisī, Best Divisions, p. 15. For a later version, see Muḥammad b. Sa’īd al-Zammūrī al-Ṣanhājī, Kanz al-asrār wa lawāqiḥ al-afkār in Le trésor des secrets et des idées fécondes….., 2.15, trans. Belkacem Daouali (Saarbrücken, 2011), pp. 180-181. 37 María del Carmen Llasat, “Storms and Floods,” in The Physical Geography of the Mediterranean, ed. Jamie Woodward (Oxford, 2009), p. 534. 38 Schwartz, Sea of Storms. 39 Llasat, “Storms and Floods,” p. 515. Cf. Andrew Harding, Jean Palutikof, and Tom Holt, “The Climate System,” in The Physical Geography of the Mediterranean, ed. Jamie Woodward (Oxford, 2009), p. 74.

DRAFT! NOT TO BE CITED OR CIRCULATED WITHOUT AUTHOR’S PERMISSION 13 meteorology.”40 This sea is situated at the conjunction of “subtropical high pressure systems to the south, and westerly wind belts to the north,” which shift with the seasons.41 In the winter, the subtropical air moves southward and the westerly winds churn the water, though tempests can occur even when warmer, drier air of summer is over the sea.42

As pre-modern mariners knew only too well, the marine and terrestrial geography of certain areas of the Mediterranean especially spawns storms. The Gulf of Antalya, for example, which ships travelling between Cyprus and Rhodes had to traverse, was notorious for its lethal combination of fierce tempests and underwater crags; a fifteenth- century shipmaster’s claim that a particularly harrowing passage through its waters had turned his hair white was probably more than an old salt’s yarn intended to impress passengers.43 “All ships” travelling through this gulf “are in danger of being destroyed and lost,” wrote one fifteenth-century seafarer.44 Christians facing its perils comforted themselves with the thought that, as one wrote, “in past times, it was much more dangerous than it is now, because out of three ships, usually two remained sunk there.”45

They credited Constantine’s mother Saint Helena with the improvement, relating how she had weakened the gulf’s waves by making the sign of the cross or by casting overboard a

40 Llasat, “Storms and Floods,” p. 513. 41 Harding, Palutikof, and Holt, “Climate System,” p. 69. 42 Harding, Palutikof, and Holt, “Climate System,” Table 3.1, p. 75. 43 “Le voyage de Pierre Barbatre à Jérusalem en 1480,” ed. Noël Pinzutti and Pierre Tucco-Chala, Annuaire-Bulletin de la Société de l’histoire de France (1972-73), p. 126. For other descriptions of the storms in this gulf, see Pantaleão de Aveiro, Itinerario da Terra Sancta, ed. António Baião (Coimbra, 1927), p. 47; Breydenbach, Peregrinatio, p. 108; Martoni, “Liber peregrinationis,” p. 638. For some other discussion, see Michele Bacci, “A Holy Site for Sailors: Our Lady of the Cave in Famagusta,” in Famagusta Maritima: Mariners, Merchants, Pilgrims and Mercenaries, ed. Michael K. Walsh (Leiden, 2019), pp. 47-51. 44 “Le voyage de Pierre Barbatre,” p. 126. 45 Itinéraire d’Anselme Adorno, p. 356.

DRAFT! NOT TO BE CITED OR CIRCULATED WITHOUT AUTHOR’S PERMISSION 14 relic of the Passion she was ferrying home to her son.46 But as these tales admit, it was beyond even the powers of a legendary saint wielding some of the most potent talismans in Christendom to completely tame the natural forces that make the Gulf of Antalya so treacherous. The cold fronts that move south over the Anatolian Plateau and stir the water near Cyprus mean that this stretch of the Mediterranean still ranks among its stormiest.47

Just as ill-reputed was a vast bay at the other end of the Mediterranean: the Gulf of Lion, onto which Marseilles’ harbor opened. As one fourteenth-century voyager commented, this bay owed its name to its roaring tempests.48 These gales were precipitated by the topography of what modern oceanographers deem the “most windy region of the entire Mediterranean Sea.”49 The Gulf of Lion, they explain, is particularly

“open to onshore winds and extratropical storms moving along a southern track between the Middle Atlantic and the Mediterranean.”50 Mountain ranges punctuated by valleys hedge its coast, creating gaps that funnel cold fronts from the northwest onto the sea and thus regularly generate marine storms even in the Mediterranean’s most pacific season of summer.51

No wonder that a fourteenth-century Christian voyager declared that “a ship could cross the [rest of the] sea peacefully, [but] it could not cross [the Gulf of Lion] without

46 Aveiro, Itinerario, pp. 46-47; Itinéraire d’Anselme Adorno, pp. 356, 358; Santo Brasca, Viaggio, pp. 121, 177; “Le voyage de Pierre Barbatre,” p. 153. Breydenbach (Peregrinatio, p. 650) locates Saint Helena’s nail toss in the Adriatic instead. 47 Llasat, “Storms and Floods,” pp. 515, 517 (Fig. 18.2); Harding, Palutikof, and Holt, “Climate System,” pp. 75, 76 (Fig. 3.4a). 48 Ludolph von Suchem, De itinere terrae sanctae liber, ed. Ferdinand Deycks (Stuttgart, 1851), p. 18. 49 C. Millot, “Wind Induced Upwellings in the Gulf of Lions,” Oceanologica Acta 2 (1979): 261-274 (here 262). 50 Uwe Ulbrich et al., “Climate of the Mediterranean: Synoptic Patterns, Temperature, Precipitation, Winds, and Their Extremes,” in The Climate of the Mediterranean Region: From the Past to the Future, ed. Piero Lionello (London, 2012), pp. 301-346 (here 332). 51 Millot, “Wind Induced Upwellings,” p. 262.

DRAFT! NOT TO BE CITED OR CIRCULATED WITHOUT AUTHOR’S PERMISSION 15 great storms, danger and fear.”52 Barcelonan dignitaries on a ship bound from their city to

Italy in June 1435 had the misfortune to experience the truth of this statement. As they entered the Gulf of Lion, a tempest suddenly attacked their galera, destroying one rudder, swallowing eighteen oars and almost wrecking the vessel amidst the islets and shallows off Sardinia.53 They were among the many seafarers in the fourteenth and fifteenth centuries to feel the lion’s bite; paleotempestologists argue that as the Medieval Climate

Anomaly gave way to the Little Ice Age, storms increased in frequency and fury in this gulf.54

The effects of climate change then were as uneven as they are now. The arrival of the Little Ice Age rendered other waters in the western and central Mediterranean more turbulent, but it perhaps did not exacerbate the extant difficulties of navigation in the eastern Mediterranean.55 Due to an “east-west climate see-saw,” the Little Ice Age seems to have brought more rain to the western stretches of the sea and greater aridity to its eastern half.56 It is worth asking whether this differing impact of climate change on the sea was among the many complex reasons that in the late middle ages, eastern

Mediterranean polities such as the Byzantines and the Mamluks invested far less than did

52 Ludolph von Suchem, De itinere, p. 18. 53 See the description in L. Camós Cabruja, “Historia dramática de una embajada barcelonesa en Italia en 1435,” Boletin de la real Academia de Buenas Letras de Barcelona 25 (1953): 11-53 (here 15-16). I thank Victòria A. Burguera i Puigserver for this reference. 54 L. Delizeau et al., “Intense Storm Activity during the Little Ice Age on the French Mediterranean Coast,” Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaecology 299 (2011): 289-297; Philippe Sabatier et al., “7000 years of Paleostorm Activity in the NW Mediterranean Sea in Response to Holocene Climate Events,” Quaternary Research 77 (2012): 1-11; Philippe Degeai et al., “Major Storm Periods and Climate Forcing in the Western Mediterranean during the Late Holocene,” Quaternary Science Reviews 129 (2015): 37-56. 55 On increased storms during the LIA in the western Mediterranean, see Dario Camuffo et al., “Sea Storms in the Adriatic and the Western Mediterranean during the Last Millennium,” Climactic Change 46 (2000): 209-223. 56 Neil Roberts et al., “Palaelimnological Evidence for an East-West Climate See-Saw in the Mediterranean since AD 900,” Global and Planetary Change 84-85 (2012): 23-34; M.-L. S. Goudeau et al., “Seasonality Variability in the Central Mediterranean during Climate Change in the Late Holocene,” Palaeogeography, Palaeoclimatology, Palaecology 418 (2015): 304-318.

DRAFT! NOT TO BE CITED OR CIRCULATED WITHOUT AUTHOR’S PERMISSION 16 their western counterparts in building the larger and more sea-worthy ships produced by new nautical technologies.57 Was the emergence of these cochas, carracks, and great galleys a response not just to economic, political and military factors but also to increasingly stormier waters in the west?

But even before the Medieval Climate Anomaly yielded to the Little Ice Age, tempests regularly roiled the Mediterranean, especially when winter winds attained their full strength. Storms had more impact on ships’ movement than did this sea’s inconstant winds. In the fourteenth century, successive storms drove one ship headed from Cyprus to Venice first back to the coast of Turkey, then south to Tripoli, then west to the island of Sapienza.58 A three-hour summer gale sent another ship scudding back forty miles to the Aegean island it had just left behind.59 Far less lucky was the ship on which the twelfth-century Jewish merchant Abū Sa’īd was travelling from Tunis to Sicily. A severe storm lengthened this voyage from its usual day or day a half to a remarkable thirty-five; the gale forced Abū Sa’īd’s ship to anchor at a deserted island, where the crew and passengers cowered for weeks until the sea’s rage was spent.60 For two years running, storms foiled a Muslim pilgrim’s efforts to complete the Alexandria-to-Tunis leg of his journey home to al-Andalus. This man set out twice only to have bad weather force the ship on which he was travelling backwards.61 Premodern Mediterranean seafarers thus experienced maritime mobility not as the smooth linear progression from point A to point

57 On these new ship types (and their adoption in the west, including by the sultanate of Granada, but not in the east), see Gertwagen, “A Chapter”; eadem, “Characteristics of Mediterranean Sea Going Ships of 13th- 15h Centuries,” in Splendour of the Medieval Mediterranean (13th-15th Centuries), ed. David Abulafia and Xavier BArral I Altet (Barcelon, 2004), pp. 543-561; John H. Pryor, Geography, Technology, and War: Studies in the Maritime History of the Mediterranean, 649-1571 (Cambridge UK, 1988), pp. 39-57. 58 Poggibonsi, Libro, 2:217-220. 59 Martoni, “Liber peregrinationis,” pp. 580-581. 60 S.D. Goitein, Letters of Medieval Jewish Traders (Princeton, 1973), pp. 323-327. 61 Lirola Delgado, “Travesías náuticas,” pp. 88-89.

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B that most modern scholarly maps of navigation routes tend to suggest with their neat arrows and evenly spaced dashes, but instead as a series of unplanned and involuntary zigzags caused by tempests blowing the ship off course.62

Storms meant more to seafarers than thwarted and delayed movement—they meant danger as well. The contracts for maritime insurance that emerged in the late medieval Mediterranean often lumped storms together with pirates in the list of the worst perils that might occasion payout.63 It is not clear whether ships succumbed more readily to the human hazard or to the natural one, but seafarers’ descriptions of storms leave little doubt that they were experienced as enemies as dangerous as even the most ruthless of sea robbers.64 Towering waves, deafening thunder, blinding lightning, screaming wind, and churning water rampage through the abundant accounts of tempests in narratives of

Mediterranean sea voyages, whether Jewish, Muslim or Christian.

Exaggeration surely eddied through seafarers’ memories of storms. Travellers liked to boast that the tempests they endured were deemed by the ship’s crew to be the worst that these men of the sea had ever confronted. Tales of suffering inflicted by tempests also belonged to the narrative repertoire of pilgrims’ pious travails. Writers could use storms to thrill readers, crafting them as climaxes in descriptions of otherwise dull weeks on the water. Imagery borrowed from scripture could help to heighten the drama; Muslims, for example, found the Qur’ānic phrase “waves like mountains” (11.42)

62 Even two maps that, exceptionally, do plot the effect storms could have on Mediterranean ships still employ continuous lines rather than zigzags; Fernand Braudel, La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II, 2 vols., 2nd ed. (Paris, 1966), 1: 229, 231. 63 Dominique Valérian, “La course et la piraterie en Méditerranée occidentale à la fin du Moyen Âge: entre activité économique et instrument politique,” in Les territoires de la Méditerranée, XIe-XVIe siècles, ed. Annaliese Nef, Damien Coulon, Christophe Picard, Dominique Valérian (Rennes, 2013), pp. 35-49 (here 38-39). 64 Valérian (“La course,” pp. 38-39) argues storms were the worse hazard, whereas Piccinno argues pirates were more dangerous to a ship; see her “Genoa, 1340-1620,” p. 36.

DRAFT! NOT TO BE CITED OR CIRCULATED WITHOUT AUTHOR’S PERMISSION 18 apt for Mediterranean gales.65 Yet for all their literary shaping and creative license, these portrayals of an enraged marine environment unleashing vast incomprehensible force were not mere hyperbole. “The largest, most violent storms on earth are generated at sea

… the energy released by a single tropical cyclone in one day would be enough to power the entire industrial production of the United States for one year,” writes one oceanographer.66 Mediterranean marine storms were smaller than these southerly monsters, but they still subjected pre-modern people to some of the most extreme and most terrifying weather events they would ever experience.

These destructive demonstrations of the sea’s awesome power over humans made seafarers feel the Mediterranean as a willful presence—even an animate force—as some personifications of marine storm elements suggest. Christian mariners, for example, transformed the eerie electromagnetic phenomenon of blue flames that could ignite on ship masts or prows during storms into the saints’ comforting presence. They reassured alarmed passengers that these fires manifested the protection of Saint Elmo, the Virgin

Mary, or Saint Nicholas and meant the storm would soon pass.67 Modern science confirms pre-modern sailors’ insight that such corona discharge often occurs near storm’s end.68

The fury of marine storms more often evoked supernatural malevolence than benevolence. Authors of Christian hagiography do not seem to have conceived of the sea itself as demonic even at its fiercest, but high medieval Christian artists could paint devils

65 Ibn Shaddād, Rare and Excellent History, p. 29; The Travels of Ibn Jubayr, trans. Roland Broadhurst, (London 1952), pp. 331, 332. 66 Stow, Oceans, p. 81. 67 For examples, see Felix Fabri, Evagatorium, 1:54; Nompar de Caumont, Voyatge, p. 61; “Voyage de Pierre Barbatre,” p. 167; Santo Brasca, Viaggio, pp. 124-125. 68 William Beatty, “What Causes the Strange Glow Known as St. Elmo’s Fire?” Scientific American (September 22, 1997) https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/quotwhat-causes-the-stran/ (accessed 1/30/2020).

DRAFT! NOT TO BE CITED OR CIRCULATED WITHOUT AUTHOR’S PERMISSION 19 and sirens into marine storms and the Jewish-Christian Testament of Solomon featured a sea horse demon that boasts of becoming tempest waves.69 The “Devil’s mother,” asserts a twelfth- or thirteenth-century Jewish fable, is usually “present in the sea” during storms; when she cannot be there, she sends her deputies to whip the waters.70 A third-century rabbi claimed that mariners told tales of one monstrous ocean wave asking another whether anything was left for it to destroy.71 A fourteenth-century Christian seafarer described his ship’s traumatic meeting with “a cursed spirit that we call Macone,” probably a waterspout.72

The men who knew the sea most intimately, that is mariners, could believe that storms manifested the displeasure of the Mediterranean itself when asked by humans to do the intolerable: to bear a dead body. According to a fourteenth-century German chronicle, the crew of a twelfth-century ship departing Cyprus protested when a crusader’s bones were loaded on board, fearing them as a danger to the living. As the chronicler explained, “the sea’s insolence is so great … that with billowing dangers, it violently menaces ships carrying dead bodies.” Though mollified at first by the promise of money, the mariners renewed their outcry when a gale began to rock the ship. The

69 Sea itself as not demonic in Christian hagiography: Jana Habig, “Die pericula maris in den Acta Sanctorum—das Meer als Unhelisbringer?” in Ein Meer und seine Heiligen: Hagiographie im mittelalterlichen Mediterraneum, ed. Nikolas and Marco di Branco (Paderborn, 2018), pp. 247-249, 260. Sea-horse demon in the Testament of Solomon: Alexandra Cuffel, “The Sea as Magical Stage: Miracles and (Un)Holy Names in the Chronicle of Aḥima‘aẓ,” in Ein Meer und seine Heiligen: Hagiographie im mittelalterlichen Mediterraneum, ed. Nikolas and Marco di Branco (Paderborn, 2018), p. 232. For an example of demons in Christian paintings of marine storm, see the Dalmatian altarpiece (ca. 1400) in the National Gallery, London (https://www.nationalgallery.org.uk/paintings/dalmatianvenetian-helsinus-saved- from-a-shipwreck-a-french-canon-drowned#painting-group-info; accessed November 17, 2019); for sirens in storm paintings: Gentile da Fabriano’s 1425 predella with scenes from the life of St. Nicholas in the Pinacoteca Vaticana (http://www.museivaticani.va/content/museivaticani/en/collezioni/musei/la- pinacoteca/sala-ii---secolo-xiii-xv/gentile-da-fabriano--storie-di-s--nicola-di-bari.html; accessed November 17, 2019). Many thanks to Tearney-Pearce for the reference to the latter painting. 70 Cited in Raphael Patai, The Children of Noah: Jewish Seafaring in Ancient Times (Princeton, 1998), p. 72. 71 Patai, Children of Noah, p. 125. In another early rabbinic tale, sea waves converse, though here about saving a pious man’s life; ibid. p. 113. 72 Poggibonsi, Libro, pp. 226-227

DRAFT! NOT TO BE CITED OR CIRCULATED WITHOUT AUTHOR’S PERMISSION 20 guardians of the bones tricked the sailors into silence by tossing a coffin filled with stones overboard, but paid the price for deception by arriving at their destination half drowned by rough seas.73

The chronicler concludes that the crew was right in wishing to deny the corpse passage, but he also suggests that passengers didn’t always share mariners’ belief that dead bodies aboard riled the sea. Some erudite pilgrims, including Felix Fabri and

Bernhard Breydenbach, in fact told tales intended to sink this notion as a sailors’ superstition. Both related how during their joint 1483 return from the Levant, the body of a distinguished passenger who died en route was embalmed on an Aegean island, and then smuggled back on board without the mariners’ knowledge and hidden in the hold among spice sacks and ballast; the ship’s subsequent safe homecoming proved, declared

Fabri and Breydenbach, that sailors’ belief in the sea’s violent refusal to carry a corpse was nothing more than a “lie.”74 But their scorn mattered little to the master of the

Venetian ship on which they and their fellow pilgrims sailed to the Levant. When they stipulated in their contract negotiations with him that if any pilgrim died at sea, the body was to be kept on board until the vessel reached land, he replied that “he would gladly have a corpse on his galea, but that the sea would not suffer it and thus our voyage

(navigatio) would be hindered.”75

Mariners animated the stormy sea to ventriloquize their own dread of corpses.

There were practical reasons for their fear; in the tight quarters of a ship, the stench of decomposing bodies would spread rapidly, as would any diseases lurking in rotting

73 “Chronica Reinhardsbrunnensis” MGH SS 30.1: 546-547. 74 Breydenbach, Peregrinatio, pp. 630, 632; Felix Fabri, Evagatorium, 3:296-297. 75 Felix Fabri, Evagatorium, 1:91, 92. On Christian burial practices at sea, see Romedio Schmitz-Esser, Der Leichnam im Mittelalter: Einbalsamierung, Verbrennung und die kulturelle Konstruktion des toten Körpers (Ostfildern, 2014), pp. 38-41; for Muslim burial at sea, see Hassan S. Khalilieh, Islamic Maritime Law: An Introduction (Leiden, 1998), pp. 168-171.

DRAFT! NOT TO BE CITED OR CIRCULATED WITHOUT AUTHOR’S PERMISSION 21 human flesh. Yet an undercurrent of anxiety that dead things on board would spell the death of the voyage itself also welled up in mariners’ aversion to corpses. The sea recoiled so strongly from death, they believed, that it would stifle the winds or send contrary ones to punish ships that carried vials of a liquid they considered especially prone to putrefaction: water from the Jordan River. The presence of these little flasks on board could cause conflict between crew and passengers. Christian pilgrims prized Jordan water as a holy souvenir, but sailors feared it as a cause of refractory seas; when bad weather or lack of wind plagued a ship, its master might order a search of passengers’ luggage for the offending vials or even threaten to throw overboard anyone who was found to have one.76 Felix Fabri explains why: “some say that Jordan water, although live water when it flows, dies and rots when put in a container. And because the sea can’t bear death and putrefaction, thus the ship’s progress is impeded”— a belief he hastens to dismiss even as he personifies the angry Mediterranean.77

It was perhaps logical for mariners to read tempests as the sea’s rebellion against humans and their desires. At their fiercest, storms smashed rudders and masts, tore sails, and left ships helpless. But even without such damage, storms often took control of ships, despite crews’ efforts. “We let the ship do and go where it would,” wrote a fourteenth-century Franciscan of a storm off Tripoli, recalling how people and cargo rolled across deck as the ship “lurched like a sick man, who wants to walk but can’t stay on his feet … the ship … first fell on one side and then on the other, and could not be controlled in any way.”78

76 Breydenbach, Peregrinatio, p. 644; Pietro Casola, Viaggio a Gerusalemme, ed. Anna Paoletti (Turin, 2001), p. 239. 77 Felix Fabri, Evagatorium, 2:36, 41-44. 78 Poggibonsi, Libro, pp. 218-219.

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Storms exposed the emotional costs, the dangerous hubris and the contingency of maritime mobility, generating fear that was the emotional counterweight to the thrilling audacity of humans venturing onto the immense moving force that was the sea. Storms reminded seafarers of the reality that even when onboard ships as big as “castles,” as one fifteenth-century voyager lauded Genoese vessels, humans at sea were no more than little

“worms clinging to a piece of wood,” to borrow a well-worn metaphor for maritime voyages that originated with Muslim writers and was echoed by some Jewish ones.79 This stark imagery of human impotence gave one Muslim voyager the language in which to express his alarm at the Mediterranean’s agitation: “the sea under us [was] like the land, shaking its people, rocking its mountains and plains. We [were] sitting [like] a worm on

…wood.”80 The pilgrim Ibn Jubayr combined this trope with scriptural language to capture his own dread during November storms with “waves like mountains (Sura 11.42) that struck the ship such blows that with all its size it tossed like a tender twig.”81

Tempests and their terrors transformed ships into temporary emotional communities of fear. In the wake of a storm, wrote a fourteenth-century Franciscan, “we all felt as if we had escaped the tomb, we were pale and jaundiced and all this was because of fear.”82 A century later, an Italian canon vividly remembered how fright forged bonds between all on board; during a violent storm off the island of Zakynthos, as waves washed over the ship he was travelling on and threatened to swamp it, “everyone

79 Ships compared to castra: Itinéraire d’Anselme Adorno, pp. 48, 50. The “worm on wood” metaphor for sea travel originates in ninth-century Islamic texts and continued to be used by Islamic writers; Yohanan Friedmann, “Minor Problems in al-Balādurī’s Account of the Conquest of Sind,” Rivista degli Studi Orientali 45 (1970): 253-260 (here 254-255); Khalilieh, Islamic Maritime Law, p. 4, note 9. For another much later example, see Ibn Khaldun, The Muqaddimah: An Introduction to History, trans. Franz Rosenthal, 2nd ed., 3 vols. (Princeton, 1980), 2:39. Some Jewish writers in the Islamicate world also used the image, including Shmuel HaNagid in his poem “Miracle at Sea” (in his Selected Poems, p. 10). 80 Quoted in Friedmann, “Minor Problems,” p. 254-55. 81 Travels of Ibn Jubayr, pp. 331, 332. 82 Poggibonsi, Libro, 1:17-18. Another good description: Martoni, “Liber peregrinationis,” pp. 663-664.

DRAFT! NOT TO BE CITED OR CIRCULATED WITHOUT AUTHOR’S PERMISSION 23 fled under cover and no one needed to say ‘this is my place,’ but in that moment, ‘all was in common’ [because] death was hunting us.”83

As this cleric’s language suggests, the sea’s violence created a commonality of physical and emotional experience that could sweep away distinctions among those on board and unite them in the common enterprise of survival. A ship in a storm thus became what might be called a disaster community.84 Crews deployed their skills to keep the vessel afloat, sometimes receiving monetary rewards later from grateful passengers.85

But passengers could also pitch in, bailing out the water that poured over gunwales or leaked in through storm-strained seams.86 Individual interests were sacrificed for the collective good, as the age-old practice of jettison also suggests. “Fear of death moves merchants and others to throw their goods into the sea when there is a tempest, with the goal of lightening ships so that they can escape danger,” commented a thirteenth-century

Castilian law code.87 To take one example of this practice from myriads, an eleventh- century Jewish merchant from the Maghrib described how a storm off Tyre “drove us out into the middle of the sea, where we remained for 4 days … we threw part of the cargo overboard and I gave up all hope for my life and my goods.”88

Carefully regulated by maritime law, jettison expressed hierarchies of worth in which property was weighed against human lives and perhaps even human lives against

83 Casola, Viaggio, p. 259. 84 Disasters often dissolve “normal distinctions” and hierarchies, and engender cooperation in the interest of survival; Schwartz, Sea of Storms, p. 106. 85 Poggibonsi, Libro, 2:220. This may be an example of the special payments mandated in some high medieval Italian law codes for mariners who saved cargo during storms; on these legal provisions, see Rose Melikan, “Shippers, Salvors, and Sovereigns: Competing Interests in the Medieval Law of Shipwreck,” The Journal of Legal History 11 (1990): 163-182 (here 167). 86 For one example among many, see Goitein, Letters, p. 41. 87 Alfonso X, Las Siete Partidas … glosadas por el licenciado Gregorio Lopez, 5.9.7 (1555; 3 vol. reprint, Madrid, 1985), 2:864 (cf. 5.9.3, 2:862). 88 Goitein, Letters, p. 46.

DRAFT! NOT TO BE CITED OR CIRCULATED WITHOUT AUTHOR’S PERMISSION 24 each other.89 Islamic jurists, for example, agreed that heaviest goods should be jettisoned first, followed by lighter goods, then by animals, but they debated whether humans themselves could be jettisoned. Most said no, but some argued that to save Muslim lives, non-Muslim captives and slaves could be tossed into the sea. Other jurists instead proposed voluntary sacrifice, recommending that lots be drawn to see who would go overboard.90

Jonah’s fate (Book of Jonah, 1.15) notwithstanding, there is little evidence of humans actually casting other humans into the sea during a tempest. Yet a ship in a storm was a fragile collective in which fear of death suspended normal rules. The corpses of people swept overboard by storm might even float by you, macabre proof of the sea’s ability to dispense death, as a sixteenth-century Franciscan experienced off Crete.91 No wonder a grinning skeleton rides the bow of a tempest-tossed ship in a late fifteenth- century Venetian print.92 To exorcise the dark shadow of mortality conjured by storms, seafarers often turned to the only force with the power to still the enraged Mediterranean: its creator, God.

Storms distilled the piety generated by maritime mobility. They reminded you that to embark on the sea was to commit yourself to God’s hands. 93 This belief shared by

89 On Christian and Islamic laws of jettison, see Olivia Remie Constable, “The Problem of Jettison in Medieval Mediterranean Law,” Journal of Medieval History 29 (1994): 207-220; Khalilieh, Islamic Maritime Law, pp. 87-105; Emilia Matiax Ferrándiz, “Will the Circle Be Unbroken? Continuity and Change of the Lex Rhodia’s Jettison Principles in Roman and Medieval Mediterranean Rulings,” Al- Masāq: Journal of the Medieval Mediterranean 29 (2017): 41-59. 90 Khalilieh, Islamic Maritime Law, pp. 96-97, 116-117; idem, “Human Jettison, Contribution for Lives, and Life Salvage in Byzantine and Early Islamic Maritime Laws in the Mediterranean,” Byzantion 75 (2005): 225-235 (here 225-229). 91 Aveiro, Itinerario, p. 26. 92 Paris BNF, Estampes et Photographie, ES 19 rés. Reproduced in Aventuriers des mers VIIe-XVII siècles: de Sinbad à Marco Polo Méditerranée – Océan Indien (Paris, 2016), p. 46. 93 For examples of the common trope of venturing on the sea as entrusting yourself to God, see Mohamed Cherif, “La piraterie en Méditerranée d’après les sources hagiographiques maghrébines,” in Seeraub im Mittelmeerraum, ed. Nikolas Jaspert and Sebastian Kolditz (Leiden, 2019), p. 83; Yehuda Halevi, “On the

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Muslims, Christians and Jews was in tension with both seafarers’ considerable practical efforts to meet maritime risks and their evident recognition of the Mediterranean’s power over ships. Yet the shipboard community of disaster was awash with prayer; providential and natural explanations of maritime storms and other environmental hazards co-existed then as they often do today.94 In their accounts of Mediterranean storms, members of all three faiths typically relate how cries to God rang out amidst the clamor of terror. As a proverb circulating in various Mediterranean vernaculars by the fifteenth century declared: “if you want to learn to pray, go to sea.”95

In seeking deliverance from the divine anger they believed could cause storms,

Muslims and Christians also vowed offerings to saints and pilgrimage to their shrines, sometimes throwing pieces of parchment or paper inscribed with their names into water.96 As this suggests, shipboard emergency devotional practices could be specific to the sea. Members of all three faiths wielded religious talismans to quell the water’s movement. Christians tied relics to ropes and hung them from the stern or dragged them through the angry waves, while Jews tossed pottery or parchment inscribed with God’s

Sea: A Sequence of Poems,” trans. Gabriel Levin, European Judaism: A Journal for the New Europe 28 (1995), no. 6, p. 88. 94 A point made throughout Schwartz’s Sea of Storms (e.g. and, for the late medieval period, by Gerrard and Petley, “A Risk Society?,” pp. 1061-1062. 95 Fifteenth-century evidence: Iñigo López de Mendoza, Marqués de Santillana, Refranes que dizen las viejas tras el fuego, ed. Hugo Oscar Bizzarri (Kassel, 1995), p. 106. Instances of this proverb from the sixteenth century and later include Gonzalo Fernández de Oviedo, Historia general y natural de las Indias, Prologue to Book 50, ed. Juan Pérez de Tudela, 5 vols. (Biblioteca de Autores Españoles [Madrid, 1846-], vols. 117-121), 5:308; and the cases collected in José Gella Iturriaga, “Quattrocento proverbi marina comuni agli italiani e agli spagnuoli,” in Congresso internazionale di etnografia e folklore del mare, Napoli 3-10 ottobre 1954: Cronaca dei lavori (Naples, 1957), pp. 379, 380, 384. 96 For examples among many, see Gabriele Capodilista, “Itinerario,” in Santo Brasca, Viaggio, p. 171; Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, Travels 2:320; Amy G. Remensnyder, “Mary, Star of the Multi-confessional Mediterranean: Ships, Shrines and Sailors,” in Ein Meer und seine Heiligen: Hagiographie im mittelalterlichen Mediterraneum, ed. Nikolas Jaspert and Marco di Branco (Paderborn, 2018), p. 316. For a vivid example of storms interpreted as manifesting God’s anger, see Aveiro, Itinerario, pp. 57-58.

DRAFT! NOT TO BE CITED OR CIRCULATED WITHOUT AUTHOR’S PERMISSION 26 holy names into stormy waters.97 Muslims confronted tempests with amulets and cast into churning seas offerings of oil, candles, bread, or even dirt from the tomb of Sidi Muḥriz in Tunis, which sailors believed was particularly efficacious.98 Muslims also attached bits of cloth inscribed with saints’ names high on the mast, reaching heavenward to gird this critical part of the ship with holy protection against wind and waves.99

A ship’s crew might participate with passengers in these rituals, but, as was natural, the men most familiar with the Mediterranean’s moods also had specialist ways of tackling tempests. The Babylonian Talmud depicts Jewish sailors shaking clubs inscribed with prayers at the enraged sea.100 In the seventeenth century, North African corsairs snared by storms would sacrifice a sheep that had been blessed for them in port by a marabout.101 In the same era, their Christian counterparts confronted tempests with practices aimed at quelling an animate marine cosmos. They tried to cut through bad weather and kill storm winds by brandishing a knife while reciting secret prayers, a practice that continued among some Maltese and Italian fishermen well into the twentieth

97 Christians and relics dragged through waves: Remensnyder, “Mary, Star of the Multi-confessional Mediterranean,” pp. 318-319. Jews and pottery and parchment with the names of God: Cuffel, “Sea as Magical Stage,” p. 233; S.D. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Portrayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza, 6 vols. (Berkeley, 1967-1993), 1:324. 98 Amulets: Badīc al-Zamān al-Hamadhānī, Maqāmāt, trans. W.J. Prendergast (London, 1973), no. 23, pp. 98-99. Bread: Piri Re’is, Kitāb, 1:309-311; F.W. Hasluck, Christianity and Islam under the Sultans, ed. Margaret M. Hasluck, 2 vols (Oxford, 1929), 1: 345-346. Candles and oil: Emanuel d’Aranda, Relation de la captivité et liberté du Sieur Emanuel d’Aranda, jadis Escalve à Algiers (Brussels, 1662), pp. 9-10; Pierre Dan, Histoire de Barberie et de ses corsairs… 2nd ed. (Paris, 1649), 3.6.3, pp. 322-324; Joseph Pitts, A True and Faithful Account of the Religion and Manners of the Mohammetans… (Exeter, 1704), pp. 12-13 (Chap 2). Dirt from the tomb of Sidi Muḥriz: Abū Ḥāmīd, al-Garnāṭī, Tuḥfat al-Albāb (El regalo de los espíritus), trans. Ana Ramos (Madrid, 1990), p. 95; ‘Ali ibn Abī Bakr Harawī, A Lonely Wayfarer’s Guide to Pilgrimage, trans. Joseph W. Meri (Princeton, 2004), p. 138. 99 Mohamed Cherif, “Quand les saints protègent les pèlerins en Méditerranée médiévale,” Arqueologia Medieval 9 (2005): 5-11 (here 8); Itinéraire d’Anselme Adorno, p. 80. 100 Cuffel, “Sea as Magical Stage,” p. 231. 101 Dan, Histoire, 3.6.2 , p. 322; D’Aranada, Relation, pp. 82-83.

DRAFT! NOT TO BE CITED OR CIRCULATED WITHOUT AUTHOR’S PERMISSION 27 century.102 Fourteenth-century Muslim mariners in the Indian Ocean wielded a sword instead against malevolent winds.103

During maritime emergencies, Muslim, Christian, and Jewish rituals and prayers might mingle on the same ship, making this community of fear a multi-confessional one.

A seventeenth-century Christian put it well in his account of his time as a captive in

Algiers. He remembered how when a February storm threatened to sink the North

African vessel on which he was voyaging toward the ransom waiting for him in Tetouan, its deck transformed into a “veritable last judgment,” as the Muslims, Jews, Catholics, and Protestants on board broke out in a cacophony of prayers, each confession in its own way.104 As this and other descriptions of marine disasters highlight, Mediterranean ships were potential agents of religious encounter not just because they ferried people across sea to places where other religions held sway, but also because they brought people of different faiths together on the sea.

So many complex constellations of religious identities were possible onboard that they are hard to chart.105 Muslims, Jews, and Greek Christians could take passage on

102 Dan, Histoire, 1.8, pp. 52-53. For modern examples of this practice see: Francesco Casaburri, “Il folkloreamarinaro di Cetara,” in Congresso internazionale di etnografia e folklore del mare, Napoli 3-10 ottobre 1954: Cronaca dei lavori (Naples, 1957), pp. 87-95 (here 92); Joseph Cassar-Pullicino, “Some Maltese Traditions About the Sea,” in L’homme méditerranéan et la mer: Actes du troisième congress international d’études des cultures de la Méditerranée occientale (Jerba, avril 1981), ed. Micheline Galley and Leïla Ladjimi Sebai (Tunis, 1985), pp. 443, 454-455; Luigi Lombardi Satriani and Mariano Meligrana, “Precariètà ed esorcizzazione del rischio nella cultura marinara tradizionale del sud d’Italia,” in L’homme méditerranéan, pp. 474-485 (here 478-482); Saverio La Sorsa, “Pregiudizi e superstizioni dei marina,” in Congresso internazionale di etnografia e folklore del mare, Napoli 3-10 ottobre 1954: Cronaca dei lavori (Naples, 1957), pp. 435-448 (here 444-445). 103 Dionisius A. Agius, Classic Ships of Islam: From Mesopotamia to the Indian Ocean (Leiden, 2008), p. 240. 104 D’Aranda, Relation, p. 84. Cf. Itinéraire d’Anselme Adorno, pp. 78, 80. 105 Among the abundant evidence for the multi-faith configurations mentioned in this paragraph are descriptions in Felix Fabri, Evagatorium, 1:125-126; Travels of Ibn Jubayr, pp. 26, 325, 361-362; and discussions in Baadj, “Travel,” p. 286; Giancarlo Casale, “The Ethnic Composition of Ottoman Ship Crews and the ‘Rumi Challenge’ to Portuguese Identity,” Medieval Encounters 13 (2007): 122-147; Bernard Doumerc, “Cosmopolitanism on Board Venetian Ships (Fourteenth-Fifteenth Centuries),” Medieval Encounters 13 (2007), pp. 78-95; Kathryn L. Reyerson, “Cross-Cultural Encounters on the High Seas

DRAFT! NOT TO BE CITED OR CIRCULATED WITHOUT AUTHOR’S PERMISSION 28 ships owned by Latin Christians (though Muslim jurists debated whether it was legitimate for Muslims to do so106); Greek Christians could travel on Ottoman ships, where their fellow passengers might include not just Muslims but also Jews, who could voyage too on ships whose home ports lay in the Maghrib. Crews were if anything even more religiously and ethnically mixed than passengers. Whether Jews worked some ships as sailors is unclear, but one did command a sixteenth-century Algerian corsair ship.107

Latin-Christian owned ships were often crewed by Latin and Greek Christians, Muslims, and baptized Muslims. Crews of North African and Ottoman ships included Muslims,

Christians, and Christian converts to Islam. By the late fifteenth century, many of the men whose muscle powered corsair galleys were slaves of a different faith from the vessel’s master.108 Laboring aboard ships could also be men of fluctuating or murky religious allegiance.109

(Tenth-Sixteenth Centuries),” Medieval Encounters 3 (2007): 1-3; Theresa M. Vann, “Christian, Muslim, and Jewish Mariners in the Port of Rhodes, 1453-1480,” Medieval Encounters 13 (2007), pp. 158-173. 106 A. Gateau, “Quelques observations sur l’intérêt du voyage d’Ibn Jubayr pour l’histoire de la navigation en Méditerrané au XIIe siècle,” Hespéris 36 (1949): 289-312 (here 293-294); Vincent Lagardère, Histoire et société en Occident musulman au moyen âge: Analyse du ‘Miyār d’al-Wansarīsī (Madrid, 1995), 1.86. 107 Goitein argues that after the eleventh century, Jewish sailors were rare; Goitein, Letters, p. 125, note 24. David Jacoby agrees, pointing to an “absence of evidence regarding Jewish sailors” in the eastern Mediterranean; see his “The Jews in the Byzantine Economy (Seventh to Mid-Fifteenth Century),” in The Jews In The Byzantine Economy (Seventh To Mid-Fifteenth Century), ed. Robert Bonfil, Oded Irshai, Guy G. Strousma and Rina Talgam (Leiden, 2012), p. 241. For the sixteenth-century Jewish corsair ra’is, see Orit Rotgaizer and Sa’ar Nudel, “Piracy and the Jews (2nd century BCE-19th century CE,” in Pirates: The Skull and Crossbones, ed. Ruthi Gertwagen & Avshalom Zemer (Haifa, 2002), pp. 219-220. 108 For a good introduction to the sprawling bibliography on this subject, see Salvatore Bono, Schiavi: Una storia mediterranea (XVI-XIX secolo) (Bologna, 2016), pp. 191-219. On the shift from free to enslaved rowers by the late fifteenth century, see Michel Fontenay, “L’esclave galérien dans la Mediterranée des temps modernes,” in Figures de l’esclave au Moyen Âge et dans le monde moderne, ed. Henri Bresc (Paris, 1996), pp. 115-143 (here 126-130). 109 Prime examples were the “renegades,” amply discussed in Bartolomé Bennassar and Lucile Bennassar, Les Chrétiens d’Allah: L’histoire extraordinaire des renégats XVIe et XVIIe siècles (Paris, 1989); also Giovanna Fiume, Schiavitù mediterrannee: Corsari, rinegati, e santi di età moderna (Milan, 2009), pp. 70- 86. Other mariners too had fluid religious identities. See, for example, Karoline P. Cook, “Navigating Identities: The Case of a Morisco Slave in Seventeenth-Century New Spain,” The Americas 65 (2008): 63- 79 (here 67-68, 73-75); and for more general discussion, Michael Kempe, “Piraterie, Sklaverei, Konversion: zur Frage nach der Relevanz von Religion im mediterranen Kaperkrieg (17.-18. Jahrhundert),” in Seeraub Im Mittelmeerraum: Piraterie, Korsarentum und maritime Gewalt von der Antike bis zur Neuzeit, ed. Nikolas Jaspert and Sebastian Kolditz (Paderborn, 2013), pp. 113-114.

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The religious heterogeneity on high medieval and early modern Mediterranean ships is now well recognized. Almost unexplored, however, is how it combined with the material conditions of life on board to make ships sites of inescapable and intense religious encounter. Given the notoriously cramped quarters characteristic of

Mediterranean ships, passengers and crews could hardly avoid witnessing the daily and emergency devotional practices of people of different faiths.110 On late medieval Catalan ships, each crew member had .787 square meters of space.111 Passengers didn’t enjoy much more. According to Felix Fabri, each passenger on Venetian ships was allotted a body length spot in which to “sleep, sit and eat.”112 The situation was similar on medieval

Muslim ships, where the average passenger had just enough room in which to pray.113

The acute religiosity and fear generated by tempests might create the potential for shipboard religious entanglement; danger at sea could cause the observation of others’ devotional practices to shade into participation in them. This possibility was perhaps particularly pronounced among mariners. Not only were they used to working alongside men of different faiths and to encountering other ways in foreign ports, but their labor also gave them an acutely visceral understanding of how, when it came to survival at sea, everyone on board was literally in the same boat. Hence in the hazardous waters off Cape

Baba in Asia Minor, where “sudden squalls from the mountains” buffeted ships, some

110 For examples, see Felix Fabri, Evagatorium, 1:130; Travels of Ibn Jubayr, pp. 336-337; Martoni, “Liber peregrinationis,” p. 664. 111 Arcadi García Sanz and Núria Coll i Julia, Galeres mercants catalanes dels segles XIV i XV (Barcelona 1994), p. 201. In general on cramped conditions on medieval and early modern ships, see Michel Mollat, Europe and the Sea, trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan (Cambridge MA 1993), p. 157. 112 Felix Fabri, Evagatorium, 1:92 (he also remembers violent nighttime quarrels over space as pilgrims tried to sleep, 1:137-138). 113 Hassan S. Khalilieh, “Women at Sea: Modesty, Privacy, and Sexual Misconduct of Passengers and Sailors Aboard Islamic Ships,” Al-Qantara 27 (2006): 137-153 (here 145, note 30).

DRAFT! NOT TO BE CITED OR CIRCULATED WITHOUT AUTHOR’S PERMISSION 30 sixteenth-century Christian crew members joined their Muslim colleagues in tossing propitiatory offerings into the sea and invoking the marabout who had lived there.114

Maritime emergencies even had the power to dissolve barriers of faith, leaving a sense of common fate and shared humanity that lasted until the risk abated. It was for this reason that the seventeenth-century Christian captive Emanuel d’Aranda made it alive on deck to see the “Last Judgment” scene of multi-confessional tempest prayer he described so vividly. He recounted how when the storm set in, he and the other enslaved Christians incarcerated in the ship’s hold begged the “Turk” in charge of them to promise that if the vessel began to sink, he would open the hatch so that “each could escape and prolong his life as best he could, whether by swimming or in some other way.” The “Turk” kept his pledge. D’Aranda even remembers him shouting “Christians, come up! We should all die together!”—perhaps not this man’s exact words, but perhaps his sentiment as he threw open the hatch to free the Christians from certain drowning.115

Bad weather at sea and the fear it elicited could also exacerbate or even produce friction between members of different faiths crammed cheek by jowl in the same ship. In the late fifteenth century, a Latin Christian shipmaster departing from Jaffa with a load of

Christian pilgrims added several well-paying Jews as passengers. When a windless spell plagued the vessel, some Christian pilgrims muttered that the Jews were at fault and should be thrown overboard. The crew, however, rejected these passengers’ reflexive anti-Semitism and privileged their own less confessionally incendiary understanding of why wind might vanish; they insisted that the blame lay with pilgrims who had disobeyed

114 Piri Re’is, Kitāb, 1:309-311 (on the Muslim practice); Hasluck, Christianity and Islam, 1:344-346 (on Christian crew participating and on the winds from the mountains). 115 D’Aranda, Relation, pp. 83-84.

DRAFT! NOT TO BE CITED OR CIRCULATED WITHOUT AUTHOR’S PERMISSION 31 the prohibition on keepsakes of Jordan River water, dangerous objects which they and the shipmaster insisted be jettisoned.116

In this episode, it was the difficult sea that drew inter- and intra-faith tensions to the surface. A moralizing fable from the Babylonian Talmud shows even more clearly how the existential angst of marine dangers could combine with the multi-confessional nature of Mediterranean maritime mobility to allow the sea to be drafted as a powerful player in religious polemics. This tale features a ship in a tempest. The pagan passengers desperately pray to their own idols, but the waves abate only when a Jewish child intercedes with God. Naturally, his shipmates admit his divinity’s superiority.117 Ballads sung many centuries later by Sephardic Jews in diaspora echoed this parable, depicting how people on a storm-tossed ship who pray to the Virgin Mary drown while those who invoke God are saved.118 Proclaiming Judaism the true faith, these ballads mocked

Christians while perhaps also warning any Jew tempted to join them in invoking Mary during storms at sea.

The violent sea could actually plunge people into anguish over their religious allegiances, according to a sixteenth-century Portuguese Franciscan. He was lucky enough to be safely in port in Cyprus when a huge gale blew through, but a Portuguese conversa whom he met later on shore instead had endured the storm’s terrors out at sea on a ship called the Quirina. She told the friar how, as “she was looking death in the eye,” she repented of an earlier decision she had made to renounce Christianity and live as a

116 Three pilgrims who were eyewitnesses each tell versions of this story: “Voyage de Pierre Barbatre,” p. 153; Le voyage de la Saincte Cyté de Hierusalem avec la description des lieux, portz, villes, citez et aultres passaiges fait l’an 1480, ed. Charles Schefer, Paris 1882, pp. 101-102; Santo Brasca, Viaggio, p. 121 (who omits the Jews but mentions that the shipmaster also forbade his crew from playing cards or dice until the wind improved). 117 Cuffel, “Sea,” p. 230. 118 Remensnyder, “Mary, Star of the Multi-confessional Mediterranean,” pp. 320-321.

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Jew. She vowed to return to the Catholic fold and God miraculously saved her from the sea’s wrath. To the friar’s disgust, however, when he encountered this woman some months later in a Syrian port town, she had reinterpreted her rescue, now insisting that

God had helped her survive because “she had always been a good Jew.”119

Vows made at sea indeed often went unfulfilled, as Christian and Muslim writers recognized, for shipboard fears could fade into a distant memory on shore.120 Yet

Christian and Muslim literary works often summoned storms as devices to impel the protagonist’s romantic or heroic transformation121—and in Cyprus, the same Portuguese

Franciscan met another survivor who proved to him that the restless sea did indeed have the power to spur permanent religious change: a Castilian Jewish youth, who had been travelling on the same ship as the conversa. According to the friar, when the Quirina began to sink, this boy begged a Jesuit on board for help. Told that the only lifeboat floated on baptismal waters, he pledged on a makeshift cross to accept Christianity. The youth later fulfilled his vow in the cathedral of Nicosia, with the Franciscan author as eyewitness.

The friar styled this shipboard conversion as a triumph of the true faith that counterbalanced the conversa’s perfidy.122 But visible beneath this rhetorical gilding is a very real convergence of maritime and personal emergencies. Like his shipmate, the

Jewish boy was caught in the rip currents generated by the tortured religious politics of

119 Aveiro, Itinerario, pp. 54-55. 120 Piri Re’is, Kitāb, 1:71-73; Alonso de Espinosa, Del origen y Milagros de la santisima Imagen de Nuestra Señora de Candelaria que parecio en la isla de Tenerife, con la descripción desta Isla (Seville, 1594), folio 120r. 121 Albrecht Classen, “Storms, Shipwrecks, and Life-Changing Experiences in Late Medieval German Literature: From Oswald von Wolkenstein to Emperor Maximilian,” Oxford German Studies 43 (2014): 212-228; idem, “Storms, Sea Crossings, and the Transformation of the Protagonist in Medieval and Renaissance Literature,” Neohelicon 30 (2003): 163-182; M.C. Lyons, The Arabian Epic: Heroic and Oral Story-Telling, 3 vols. (Cambridge, 1995), 1: 62. 122 Aveiro, Itinerario, pp. 59-60.

DRAFT! NOT TO BE CITED OR CIRCULATED WITHOUT AUTHOR’S PERMISSION 33 the post 1492 era, as Iberian Jews and conversos struggled to navigate the social and literal seas of exile (the Jesuit shipboard advisor was himself a convert from Judaism). As the Quirina began to founder, he was under pressure from all sides: his own drive to survive, the Jesuit converso’s sermonizing, and perhaps even threats from other

Christians on board, who might have seen this Jew’s presence as the reason for the ship’s distress. In any case, side by side with the conversa who wrestled with her own religious choices aboard the tempest-driven Quirina, this youth would experience the ultimate power of the sea to disrupt maritime mobility and change lives: shipwreck. The storm rammed their ship onto rocks between Paphos and Limassol. There, large and powerfully built though this Venetian vessel was, it broke apart.123

Shipwreck

In the absence of comprehensive studies of pre-modern Mediterranean shipwreck, it is difficult to offer statistics on the frequency with which this sea devoured ships.124

Most ships seem to have arrived at their destinations, but a goodly number never did.

Shipwreck was common enough that it shadowed the lives of at least three late medieval intellectual luminaries: the Christian mystic and missionary, Ramon Llull, who survived when his ship sunk off Pisa, taking his books and his wardrobe with it;125 the Jewish

123 Aveiro, Itinerario, pp. 52-53. 124 Due to the Covid-19 pandemic, I have been unable to consult the most comprehensive work on the subject: A. J. Parker, Ancient Shipwrecks of the Mediterranean and the Roman Provinces (Oxford, 1992). Extant data bases of pre-modern Mediterranean shipwreck do not seems to offer statistics on the percentage of ships wrecked versus those not wrecked: Julia Strauss (2013). Shipwrecks Database. Version 1.0. (accessed 2/5/2020) oxrep.classics.ox.ac.uk/databases/shipwrecks_database/ (on Mediterranean shipwreck up to 1500); and for early modern shipwrecks: https://nadl.tamu.edu/index.php/early-modern-european- shipwrecks/ (accessed 2/5/2020) and http://shipwrecks.haifa.ac.il/ (accessed 2/5/2020). 125 Ramon Lull, “Vita Coetanea,” CCCM 34, pp. 297-301***.

DRAFT! NOT TO BE CITED OR CIRCULATED WITHOUT AUTHOR’S PERMISSION 34 philosopher Moses Maimonides, whose brother perished in the Indian Ocean;126 and the

Muslim polymath Ibn Khaldūn, who lost his wife, several children, and his library to the waves.127

Shoddy construction or a vessel’s aging frame might be at fault, but often the combination of the rigors of the Mediterranean’s marine environment and human error or incompetence strained ships beyond their limits. Storms could submerge or rupture ships in open water. But frequently it was violent collision with the Mediterranean’s limestone that wrecked vessels. Hence during tempests, shipmasters reversed their usual practice of coasting and tried to steer far away from jagged shores. Even in good weather, mariners had to keep a sharp lookout for the many underwater hazards detailed by a fourteenth- century oceanographer avant la lettre: “in the sea there are mountains and rocks, grasses and vegetation…In some places, the rocks and mountains are covered by hardly a hand or arm’s worth of water. Thus no one dares to sail in some places toward the south near

Barbary, because many rocks and shoals are there.”128 Marine charts today still caution sailors to avoid stretches of the Maghrib’s shore, warning of “shoal patches … not always marked by breakers” and of currents “unpredictable in both rate and direction.”129 The red coral the fourteenth-century voyager describes being harvested along this coast as it was elsewhere in Mediterranean too could rend an unwary ship’s hull. As the Little Ice

Age sent more rain into the western Mediterranean, rising sea levels covered the rocks

126 Goitein, Letters, pp. 207-28. 127 Allen James Fromherz, Ibn Khaldun: Life and Times (Edinburgh, 2010), p. 101. 128 Ludolph von Suchem, De itinere, p. 11. 129 Imray Chart M35 “Mediterranean Sea: Sicilian Channel” (2014).

DRAFT! NOT TO BE CITED OR CIRCULATED WITHOUT AUTHOR’S PERMISSION 35 and shoals in a particularly treacherous area off Tunis with just enough water that they vanished from mariners’ collective knowledge, but remained dangerous to ships.130

Mariners scanning the sea’s surface to read its depths knew that creatures lived there who also might bring down a ship. Muslim, Christian, and Jewish seafarers described huge “fish” that wrecked ships by leaping on them or by biting chunks from hulls, sometimes leaving teeth embedded in the wood; others capsized vessels in their powerful wake.131 One Christian traveller claimed that mariners threw bread in the water to try to satiate these creatures’ hunger while Muslim authors reported men of the sea making loud noises to frighten them away.132 It is not always easy to fit the marine giants of these stories into modern taxonomies. What species exactly is the troya, a fish that supposedly could be deterred from damaging a ship by humans making angry faces at it?

But these stories are more than tall fish tales about mythic monsters embodying the sea’s power to sink ships. Modern evidence from the Mediterranean indicates that whales, swordfish, and sharks can respond to the intrusion of large wooden objects into their own realm in just the ways described by these pre-modern seafarers.133 Just this year, some of

130 Clancy-Smith, “Mediterranean,” pp. 61-62, note 11. This area, the Skerki Banks, has been a shipwreck site since antiquity; Anne Marguerite McCann and John Peter Oleson, Deep-AWater Shipwrecks oof Skerli Bank: The 1997 Survey (Portsmouth RI, 2004). 131 Abū Ḥāmīd, Tuḥfat, pp. 63, 64-65; Felix Fabri, Evagatorium, 1:117; Ludoph von Suchem, De itinere, pp. 12-14; Shmuel HaNagid,“Miracle at Sea,” in his Selected Poems, pp. 8-9. Sometimes the teeth of marine creatures that bit ships were believed to have miraculously plugged holes in hulls and thus kept ships afloat. Hence a sawfish rostrum became a relic venerated in Naples; Angelo R. Mojetta et al., “Where Sharks meet Humans: The Mediterranean Sea, History and Myth of an Ancient Interaction between Two Dominant Species,” Regional Studies in Marine Science 21 (2018): 30-38 (here 36). 132 Bread in water to feed fish: Ludoph v. Suchem, De itinere, p. 12. Loud noises to frighten fish away: Abū Ḥāmīd, Tuḥfat, pp. 64-65. The latter practice was also used by Muslim mariners in the Indian Ocean: Agius, Classic Ships of Islam, pp. 234-235. 133 Teresa Romeo et al., “Recent Records of Swordfish Attacks on Harpoon Vessels in the Sicilian Waters (Mediterranean Sea,” Acta Adriatica 58 (2017): 147-156; Hakan Kabasakal and Sait Özgür Gedikoğlu, “Shark Attacks Against Humans and Boats in Turkey’s Waters in the Twentieth Century,” Annales Ser. Hist. nat. 25 (2015): 115-122.

DRAFT! NOT TO BE CITED OR CIRCULATED WITHOUT AUTHOR’S PERMISSION 36 the orcas seasonally present in the Straits of Gibraltar have been bumping hard against sailboats, whether in play (orcas often surf vessels’ wake) or in self-defense.134

Like storms, shipwreck had good narrative value. Yet it was more than a convenient device to underscore the bravery of travellers and to magnify their maritime sufferings. Shipwreck haunted premodern Mediterranean seafarers as a terrifying possibility and a physical reality. The remains of unlucky ships littered this sea, sometimes shockingly visible. In clear shallow water, mariners might spy the bones of ships on the sea bottom; when passing capes or points, they might confront the rotting carcasses of vessels caught on the rocks. In one of his jottings about Cyprus, Leonardo da

Vinci evoked the eerie seascape left by shipwreck: “How many vessels have broken upon these rocks! Here might be seen an innumerable host of ships: some broken in pieces and half buried in sand: here is visible the poop of one, and there a prow; here a keel and there a rib; and it seems like a day of judgment when there shall be a resurrection of dead ships, so great is the mass that covers the whole northern shore.”135

Leonardo probably never visited this coast himself, but his remarkable imagination did not invent nautical graveyards; they would have been disturbingly familiar to Mediterranean mariners. Perhaps they even plotted onto this sea’s shoals and deeps memory maps of recent or long past maritime disasters, like some modern fishermen do.136 In the aftermath of shipwreck, what is left of a vessel settles on the seabed, where it is colonized by marine life, changed by the sea’s chemistry, and thus

134 Elian Peltier, “Rough Play or Bad Intentions? Orca Encounters off Iberia Baffle Experts,” The New York Times, September 20, 2020 (online: https://www.nytimes.com/2020/09/20/world/europe/orca-boat- spain.html?referringSource=articleShare; accessed September 21, 2020). 135 Passage from the Windsor Folios translated in Edward McCurdy, The Mind of Leonardo da Vinci (Mineola NY, 2005; 1st publ. 1928), p. 247. 136 For an evocative modern example, see Heidrun Friese, “Thalassographies of Departure, Disaster and Rescue: Fishermen and Undocumented Mobility,” Etnofoor 27 (2015): 13-36 (here 28-29, 31).

DRAFT! NOT TO BE CITED OR CIRCULATED WITHOUT AUTHOR’S PERMISSION 37 slowly fuses with the physical environment with which mariners have to reckon.137 (The anthropogenic change to the sea wrought by shipwreck could include pollution. Medieval and early modern ships didn’t carry the petrochemicals and plastics modern ones do, nor did they sport the lead-sheathed hulls of Roman ships, but the oars of galleys had large lead counterweights, which along, with the lead components of any fishing gear on board, would be deposited on the sea bottom during a wreck, where the toxic metal would slowly leach into the water).138

To modern archaeologists, shipwreck remains offer troves of data about trade routes, cargoes, nautical construction, and maritime material culture.139 But to pre- modern seafarers, such salt soaked debris exposed the fragility of the technology on which maritime mobility was based. The shattered corpses of vessels were maritime memento moris, warnings that, as Felix Fabri wrote, seafarers are never more than a four- finger width away from death, since that is the thickness of a ship’s hull.140 Encounters with wrecked ships thus left mariners uneasy and anxious. A seventeenth-century Knight of Malta remembered how seeing shipwreck remains near a rocky cape in the Adriatic

“made everyone [on board] afraid and we believed that at any instant we might suffer a

137 Colin Martin, “Wreck-Site Formation Processes,” in The Oxford Handbook of Maritime Archaeology, ed. Alexis Catsambis, Ben Ford, and Donny L. Hamilton (Oxford, 2011), pp. 47-67. 138 Lead counterweights on medieval and early modern galleys: Federico Foerster Lares, “The Warships of the kings of Aragón and Their Fighting Tactics during the 13th and 14th Centuries AD,” The International Journal of Nautical Archaeology and Underwater Exploration 16 (1987): 19-29 (here 19-20); René Burlet, Jean Carrière and André Zysberg, “Mais comment pouvait-on ramer sur les galères du Roi-Soleil?” Histoire et Mesure 1 (1986): 147–208 (here 158) (many thanks to Gillian Weiss for this latter reference). So much lead was used on Roman ships that they have been called “mobile sources of lead pollution contaminating people and the marine environment”; Baruch Rosen and Ehud Galili, “Lead Use on Roman Ships and Its Environmental Effects,” The International Journal of Nautical Archaeology 36 (2007): 300- 307. 139 For general considerations of interpretive strategies in shipwreck archaeology, see Jonathan Adams, “Ships and Boats as Archaeological Source Material,” World Archaeology 32 (2001): 292-310; David Gibbins and Jonathan Adams, “Shipwrecks and Maritime Archaeology,” World Archaeology 32 (2001): 272-291; Johann Rönnby, “The Archaeological Interpretation of Shipwrecks,” in Interpreting Shipwreck Remains: Maritime Archaeological Approaches, ed. Jonathan Adams and Johann Rönnby (Southampton UK, 2013), pp. 9-24. 140 Felix Fabri, Evagatorium, 1:53-54 (quoting an ancient philosopher I haven’t been able to identify).

DRAFT! NOT TO BE CITED OR CIRCULATED WITHOUT AUTHOR’S PERMISSION 38 similar terrible fate. We continuously beseeched heaven with a thousand prayers and a thousand vows.”141

Shipwreck detritus signaled dangerous waters; if one vessel had met its demise there, another might easily too. Perhaps mariners also considered it bad luck to encounter the relics of a sea-swallowed vessel, fearing that the submerged ship might drag them down to join it beneath the waves. According to a sixteenth-century Spanish captive in

Algiers, corsairs from that city told tales of how during the winter, a magical bronze ship prowled beneath the Mediterranean’s stormy surface. Those mariners travelling in a more orthodox manner needed to sight the underwater ship before it saw them, for otherwise, their vessel would sink and all aboard drown.142

Whether or not this story accurately depicts Algerian corsairs’ beliefs about the perils of winter voyages, it suggests another reason why seeing a shipwreck was ill- omened: a vessel under water reversed the proper spatial relation between ships and the sea—and thus turned the world topsy-turvy. Whatever caused a ship to “crack asunder, as an egg would crack when a man presses it with his two hands,” as an eleventh-century

Jewish merchant put it, shipwreck could represent the rupture not just of a vessel’s fabric, but also of order on many levels.143 Because shipwreck destroyed the technological artifact that allowed humans to survive in the inhospitable environment of the sea, it could symbolize the collapse of other technologies people create to insulate themselves from nature, such as the body politic, culture, or society.144

141Malta, National Library, AOM 1771, folios 104v-105r. 142 Antonio de Sousa, Topographia, e historia general de Argel… (Valladolid, 1612), chapter 16, folio 17r. The attribution of this text to Diego de Haedo (listed as author by this edition) has been debunked. 143 Goitein, Letters, p. 41. 144 Josiah Blackmore, Manifest Perdition: Shipwreck Narrative and the Disruption of Empire (Minneapolis, 2002), pp. 52-54; Carl Thompson, “Introduction,” in Shipwreck in Art and Literature: Images and Interpretations from Antiquity to the Present Day, ed. Carl Thompson (New York, 2014), p. 7.

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The heavy cargo of meanings that ships carried in literature, religion, and art amplified the rich potential of shipwreck as metaphor for Muslims, Christians and Jews.

Shipwreck as trope could encompass empire, love, chivalric adventure, and other secular domains.145 It also could convey religious messages: the fragility of human life, the inevitability of divine punishment of sinners, and the necessity to rely on God, spiritual guides, and holy people for salvation.146 By the sixteenth century, shipwreck had even expanded from a discrete motif into a subject commanding its own narrative genre, its rhetorical weight increasing and shifting alongside Europeans’ global maritime empires.147

The prevailing symbolic meanings of shipwreck seeped into seafarers’ memories of the actual event. Yet when the sea’s power and human error conspired to send vessels into the deeps or run them aground, the ruptures effected were very real. The element of the marine environment that often came to the fore during shipwreck and its aftermath— the shore—offers the space in which to explore these breaks as more than metaphor.

Shipwreck rendered the threshold between sea and land a site of horror and of opportunity as wave, wind, and current brought to shore the material and human flotsam from vessel’s broken body. Redistributing people and property, the sea could inflect

145 For discussion, see among others: Classen, “Storms, Shipwrecks”; Simone Pinet, “Where One Stands: Shipwreck, Perspective, and Chivalric Fiction,” eHumanistica 16 (2010): 381-394; Nicholas M. Parmley, “Alfonso X’s Imagined Mediterranean Empire: Shipwrecks, Storms, and Pirates in the Cantigas de Santa María,” Hispanic Review 85 (2017): 199-221. 146 For examples of Islamic religious valences of shipwreck, see Daniel G. König, Arabic-Islamic Views of the Latin West: Tracing the Emergence of Medieval Europe (Oxford, 2015), p. 234; Jürgen Paul, “Faire naufrage,” in Miracle et karāma: hagiographies médiévales comparées, ed. Denise Aigle (Turnhout, 2000), pp. 375-395. For Jewish religious interpretations: Patai, Children of Noah, pp. 112-113; Sarah Arenson, “Medieval Jewish Seafaring between East and West,” Mediterranean Historical Review 15 (2000): 33-46 (here 42). For Christian religious interpretations see: Michel Bideaux, “Chroniques de l’infortune et naufrage organisés,” Cahiers d’études romanes 3 (1999): 91-103; Blackmore, Manifest Perdition, pp. 3-20; Classen, “Storms, Shipwrecks”; Steve Mentz, “God’s Storms: Shipwreck and the Meanings of the Ocean in Early Modern England and America,” in Shipwreck in Art and Literature, pp. (esp. 80-81). 147 See among many others Blackmore, Manifest Perdition; Steve Mentz, Shipwreck Modernity: Ecologies of Globalization, 150-1719 (Minnesota, 2015).

DRAFT! NOT TO BE CITED OR CIRCULATED WITHOUT AUTHOR’S PERMISSION 40 religious politics and change survivors’ lives for the better or the worse. The violent ruptures of wreck thus extended the Mediterranean’s dominion over mobile people and their goods onto land, whether continental coast or island edge.

Shipwrecks spilled cargos of textiles, spices, wood, comestibles, weapons, pottery, luxury objects and more into the Mediterranean, which the sea then carried to places they were not originally intended for. This might be God’s will, suggests Christian hagiography through the topos of images of the Virgin Mary such as Santa María del Mar of Almería or La Candelaria of Tenerife that felicitously arrive from the water; they float ashore to their new homes, their charisma intact despite their wave-damaged wood and paint.148 Jews too harbored the belief that divine providence might steer shipwreck bounty to the deserving faithful. A second-century midrashic text asserts that all the

“bundles of silver and of gold, and precious stones and pearls, and all the desirable vessels” from Mediterranean shipwrecks “are spewed out by the sea of Jaffa and hidden for the pious for the future.”149

But if in cultural imagination, shipwrecks could bring just rewards to holy men or sacred objects to a community in need of them, in reality they often brought to shore cargo that aroused less pious emotions and encouraged breeches of social and ethical norms.150 Accounts of Mediterranean shipwreck often describe a storm of greed as

148 La Candelaria of Tenerife: Alonso de Espinosa, Del origen y Milagros, 2.4, folios 36r-v (whose protests that the image was not shipwreck flotsam indicates that it might very well have been). Santa María del Mar of Almería: the image’s miraculous arrival from the sea is recounted in testimony supposedly given in 1502 and quoted in Gabriel Pasqual y Orbaneja, Vida de San Indalecío y Almería ilustrada en su antiguedad, origen, y grandeza, (Almería 1699), p. 150; for discussion, see Amy G. Remensnyder, La Conquistadora: The Virgin Mary at War and Peace in the Old and New Worlds (Oxford, 2014), pp. 130-131. For other examples of sea-borne holy images, see Remensnyder, “Mary, Star of the Multi-confessional Mediterranean,” pp. 313-315. 149 Patai, Children of Noah, p. 116. 150 “A place of serendipitous bounty for shore-dwellers, the beach is also a place of theft and lies,” writes Andrew M. Richmond, “ ‘The Broken Schippus He Ther Fond:’ Shipwrecks and the Human Costs of Investment Capital in Middle English Romance,” Neophililogus 99 (2015): 315-333 (here 321).

DRAFT! NOT TO BE CITED OR CIRCULATED WITHOUT AUTHOR’S PERMISSION 41 coastal dwellers rushed to seize what seemed to them like gifts from the sea but actually were someone else’s belongings.151 In 1340, news of a ship driven aground on the island of Lampedusa even lured a motley flotilla of boats to risk the winter seas and set out from

Sicily, full of people eager to grab what they could from the wreckage.152 The complicated laws regulating seaside salvage articulated by Muslim and Christian polities were often ignored by scavengers intent on turning someone else’s tragedy into their own economic opportunity.153 They resisted, sometimes violently, any dazed survivor who tried to assert property rights.154 Such “cruel theft, ” as one sixteenth-century eyewitness called it, edged the post-shipwreck shore with moral darkness.155

Snarled among the goods over which brutal wrangles might erupt was flotsam that no one contested: human corpses, often grotesquely swollen and sometimes disfigured from collisions with rocks or the appetites of sea creatures. The premodern

Mediterranean would have merited the title of giant graveyard that this sea has earned in today’s era of mass migration across its treacherous waters.156 Shipwreck left same tragic trail of bodies washed ashore then as it does now, dragging the meeting place of land and sea into the history of death.

151For a particularly vivid description, see Aveiro, Itinerario, pp. 53-54. 152 Acta curie felicis urbis Panormi, 7, Registri di lettere (1340-1348), ed. Laura Sciascia (Palermo, 2007), no. 104, pp. 144-148. 153 On the laws of salvage, see Hassan Salih Khalilieh, Admiralty and Maritime Laws in the Mediterranean Sea (ca. 800-1050) : The Kitāb Akriyat Al-Sufun Vis-à-Vis the Nomos Rhodion Nautikos (Leiden, 2006). pp. 205-223; idem, Islamic Maritime Law, pp. 109-115; Melikan, “Shippers.” 154 Acta curie felicis urbis Panormi,, no. 104, p. 145; Aveiro, Itinerario, pp. 53-54. 155 Aveiro, Itinerario, p. 54. 156 It is common in contemporary media discussions of mass migration to label the Mediterranean a cemetery. For some discussion, see Hakim Abderrezak, “The Mediterranean Sieve, Spring, and Seametry,” in Refugee Imaginaries: Research Across the Humanities, ed. Emma Cox, Sam Durrant, David Farrier, Lyndsey Stonebridge, Agnes Woolley (Edinburgh, 2019), pp. 372-391. For a particularly powerful exploration of possible responses to the bodies of migrants drowned at sea, see Cristina Cattaneo, Naufraghi senza volto: Dare un nome alle vittime del Mediterraneo (Milan, 2018).

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Responses to these water-logged human remains reveal the shore yet again as a site of potential ethical failure following shipwreck. Although Islamic law and Christian duty mandated that locals bury beached bodies, scavengers often robbed corpses first—or simply ignored them.157 A sixteenth-century Franciscan helped to bury the dead from a wreck on Cyprus, neatly segregating Jews, Muslims, and Christians, but a century earlier, a Dominican had no luck persuading galley rowers from his ship to inter a body they found on shore.158 Perhaps stranded corpses were often left to rot, as this one apparently was. Burying them required labor, expense, potential exposure to contagious disease— and close encounter with the sea-dead, whose bloated anonymity aroused particularly deep dread.159 The stinking corpses strewn by shipwreck along the shore materialized the

Mediterranean’s lethal force in a profoundly disturbing way.

In the wake of shipwreck, the sea might also bring ashore living people: survivors, individuals, that is, cast up on a coast they did not choose. Hence in Jewish,

Christian, and Islamic literature, shipwreck was a useful device with which to displace protagonists and launch them on new adventures.160 As a literary motif, it also allowed for personal as well as physical re-orientation; the sufferings of shipwreck could test a

157 Islamic law: Khalilieh, Islamic Maritime Law, p. 170. Scavengers robbing corpses before burying them: Clancy-Smith, “Mediterranean,” p. 52. Scavengers ignore bodies: Aveiro, Itinerario, p. 54. 158 Franciscan burying corpses: Aveiro, Itinerario, p. 56. Dominican and stranded body: Felix Fabri, Evagatorium, 1:33 159 For a provocative exploration (based on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Mediterranean evidence) of people’s reluctance to take on the responsibility of burying beached bodies and the special horror inspired by the corpses of the drowned, see Jürgen Hasse, “Und das meer gab die Toten heraus, die in ihm waren: Sepulkralkulturelle Sonderwege im Umgang mit Standleichen,” in Das Mittelmeer und der Tod: Mediterrane Mobilität und Sepulkralkultur, ed. Alexander Berner et al. (Paderborn, 2016), pp. 339-353 (who also gives statistics showing the density of corpses on coasts after shipwreck and naval battles). 160 In Islamic literature, Sinbad is the prime example but he is not alone. For other examples, see Andresas Tietze, “Die Geschichte vom Kerkermeister-Kapitän: Ein türkischer Seeraüberroman aus dem 17. Jahrhundert,”Acta Orientalia 19 (1942): 152-210 (here 160-163); M.C. Lyons, The Arabian Epic: Heroic and Oral Story-Telling, 3 vols. (Cambridge, 1995), 1: 63. Examples of shipwreck serving this purpose (as well as others) in Christian literature range from medieval romance and epic to Shakespeare’s Tempest; for some discussion, see Pinet,“Where One Stands,” p. 389. ̰For a Jewish example, see “The Tale of the Jerusalemite,” in Rabbinic Fantasies: Imaginative Narratives from Classical Hebrew Literature, ed. David Stern and Mark J. Mirsky (New Haven, 1990), p. 125

DRAFT! NOT TO BE CITED OR CIRCULATED WITHOUT AUTHOR’S PERMISSION 43 hero’s virtues or even impel a confrontation with the self that led to positive transformation, spiritual rebirth or, in later texts, to self-fashioning and self-discovery.161

Thus in Ludovico Ariosto’s early sixteenth-century Orlando Furioso, the violent sea propels the Muslim paladin Ruggiero toward baptism by sinking his ship and plunging him into the Straits of Sicily. While struggling against the waves to reach a rocky islet, he vows to convert.162

Here, literary imagination transmuted into interior change the possibilities of more concrete, positive ruptures with one’s previous life that actual shipwreck could proffer survivors—especially slaves and captives— who were cast up on the right shore.

Slaves from ships wrecked on deserted islands could take advantage of the pandemonium of screaming winds, driving rain, and their masters’ disarray to smash their chains and seek freedom by hiding in limestone caves or in dense macchia, as sixteenth-century

Muslim galley slaves did on Lampedusa and Christian ones on Formentera.163 Events of

1606 on Djamour el-Kebir/Zembra suggest that when such marine disasters tossed slaves and captives onto shores patrolled by co-religionists, they could open the way for not only escape but also revenge. In April of that year, a fleet of the Knights of Malta prowling the waters around this craggy island just west of Cap Bon was surprised by a storm; heavy weather turned the tricky passage through this area into a lethal one. As the ships strove to claw off the coast toward which the west winds were driving them, three

161 Some scholars argue the motif of survivors’ self-transformation appears in medieval literature: Jean- Marie Barbera, “La fonction narrative du naufrage dans Tirant lo Blanc,” Cahiers d’études romanes 3 (1999): 129-147; “Classen, “Storms, Shipwrecks.” Others argue that it appears first in early modern literature: Pinet,“Where One Stands.” 162 Ludovico Ariosto, Orlando Furioso, secondo l’editio princeps del 1516, ed. Tina Matarrese and Marco Praloran, 2 vols. (Turin, 2016), 37.19-22, 37.46-60, 2:1228-1229, 1236-1240. 163 Lampedusa: AGS Simancas, Estado Legajo 1119, no. 79. Formentera: Richard Hasleton, Strange and wonderfull things. Happened to Richard Hasleton, borne at Braintree in Essex, in his ten yeares trauailes in many forraine countries... (London, 1595), n.p. (3rd page of main text).

DRAFT! NOT TO BE CITED OR CIRCULATED WITHOUT AUTHOR’S PERMISSION 44 collided. The survivors who made it to Djamour el-Kebir’s narrow beach included

Muslim galley slaves, who turned the tables on their masters by freeing themselves of their irons and then building fires on the island’s summit to signal to mainland Muslims the presence of vulnerable Christian enemies. The next day, Tunisian war ships arrived and battle ensued.164 Shipwreck thus gave the sea yet another role in the complex, religiously inflected politics of the Mediterranean.

As the episode on Djamour el-Kebir indicates, the Mediterranean’s religious geography did not always work in the favor of shipwreck survivors. If you washed up on the wrong shore, that is one controlled by your enemies, as happened to these Knights of

Malta, then you were very vulnerable. Vulnerability was in fact the hallmark of shipwreck experience, as high medieval Christian literature often suggested by depicting the shipwreck victim as female.165 Actual shipwreck survivors used the language of exposure instead. They claimed that the sea stripped them bare and reduced them to what one Muslim survivor called a “foul state of nakedness.”166 The garments they might improvise from flotsam, as this man did from “ruptured oil skins,” did not remedy their abjection. Perhaps the force of hitting the water had torn their clothes off, perhaps they had shed sodden garments to avoid drowning—or perhaps they invoked the imagery of

164 The whole episode (including the storm and its winds) is described in detail by Bartolomeo dal Pozzo, Historia della Sacra Religione Militare di S. Giovanni Gerosolimitano detta di Malta, 2 vols. (Verona and Venice, 1701-1715), 1:507-514. This island had long been a pirates’ lurking place; Itinéraire d’Anselme Adorno, pp. 98-100. For a much earlier example of shipwreck freeing Muslim captives and creating Christian ones, see the miracle story in Abd al-Ḥaqq al-Bādisī, El-Maqṣad (Vies des saints du Rif), trans. G.S. Colin (Paris, 1926), pp. 83-85. 165 Richmond, “ ‘Broken Schippus,’ ” p. 329. An excellent example from Mediterranean literature is Boccaccio’s Alatiel, the Sultan of Egypt’s daughter whom shipwreck renders prey to Christian male sexual desire (Decameron, II.7). Shipwrecked mariners were vulnerable in northern waters as well; Maryanne Kowaleski, “ ‘Alien’ Encounters in the Maritime World of Medieval England,” Medieval Encounters 13 (2017): 96-121 (here 116-117). 166 Kenneth Garden, “The Riḥla and the Self-Reinvention of Abū Bakr al ‘Arabi,” Journal of the American Oriental Society 135 (2015): 1-17 (here 1); Carole Hillenbrand, The Crusades: Islamic Perspectives (New York, 2000), p. 559. (Christian example: Ramon Llull, Vita Coetanea***).

DRAFT! NOT TO BE CITED OR CIRCULATED WITHOUT AUTHOR’S PERMISSION 45 nakedness to express how the sea ripped away their belongings and markers of status. “I came out of it without a dinar or even a dirhem and no garment to wear; I arrived naked in Tripoli,” wrote an eleventh-century Jewish merchant after current and wind ground his ship against shoals on the Libyan coast.167

Whether or not the sea literally stripped shipwreck survivors to their skin, it left them vulnerable to further hazard, whether human or other-than human. In response, an elemental, if evanescent, community of fellow sufferers might form as it did during a storm, though now the fate shipmates confronted together was far worse than the tossing of a tempest. Survivors could help each other in the sea, as a twelfth-century Italian

Jewish merchant experienced on a sinking ship. When he clung to its upper deck, rigid with terror and praying for divine aid, people already in the water beckoned and called out, “come down quickly … catch a piece of wood and ride upon it, perhaps God will grant you a rescue.”168

Solidarity among shipwreck survivors that transcended the hierarchies of status, power, and religious difference structuring shipboard experience might even reach the shore. The seventeenth-century captive Emanuel d’Aranda and the other enslaved

Christians on an Algerian ship had planned to “kill all the Turks” on board and seize control of the vessel. But when the winter storm that Aranda described in such detail wrecked them near Tetouan, his immediate thought on making it to land was to search among the crowd of survivors in the hopes that the “Turk “ who had taken care of the slaves (presumably the man who had opened the hatch to free them from the foundering

167 Goitein, Letters, no. 71, p. 317. On the weather conditions of this wreck, see Ruthy Gertwagen, “Geniza Letters: Maritime Difficulties along the Alexandria-Palermo Route,” in Communication in the Jewish Diaspora: The Pre-Modern World, ed. Sophia Menache (Leiden, 1996), p. 87. 168 Goitein, Letters, no. 3, p. 41

DRAFT! NOT TO BE CITED OR CIRCULATED WITHOUT AUTHOR’S PERMISSION 46 ship) was still alive. Aranda found him in a “troop of Christian slaves, Turks, [and] Jews, who pressed up against each other, like sheep, to get warm.” At this point in his narrative,

Aranda’s language shifts to the collective, asserting a community of shipwreck experience. Rather than reserving “we” for himself and his Christian companions as earlier, he extends it to embrace all seventy odd survivors, detailing how they organized themselves and spent the night huddled together around a bonfire of flotsam. In the wake of their rescue by the governor of Tetouan and their arrival in that city, the collectivity evaporated, normative social distinctions reasserted themselves, and Aranda returned to the terminology of Christian, “Turk” and Jew.169

Yet shipwreck survivors also had to fear each other. According to medieval

Islamic law, it was legitimate for people floating on wreckage to fight off challengers to save their own life.170 The danger from former shipmates was no less on land, at least when slaves’ potential freedom was at stake. Shipwrecked slaves could summon violence to regain their liberty, as the 1606 episode on Djamour el-Kebir revealed, but beached masters too could reject disaster solidarity in favor of efforts to retain human property; the “Turks” who survived the wreck of an Algerian galley on Formentera “were unwilling to depart with us, thinking to finde some other galley of the company to take us aboard and carie us back to Argire,” wrote one of the Christian slaves with whom these

Muslims had earlier crept under some “bushes and thickets” to recover from the ordeal at sea.171

169 D’Aranda, Relation, pp. 77-78, 85-90. On the transition from shipboard collectivities to the fragile one of shipwreck survivors, see Blackmore, “Sunken Voices,” pp. 67-68. 170 Khalilieh, Islamic Maritime Law, pp. 155-156. 171 Hasleton, Strange and wonderfull things.

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Survivors especially had to fear people who lived along the shore. True, religious charity, desire for a reward, or maritime solidarity with victims of the sea could motivate coastal dwellers to offer food, shelter and clothing.172 Yet the manifest vulnerability of the shipwrecked could incite theft—not just of their possessions but also of their liberty, if the sea beached them in hostile territory held by people not of their faith. Hence

Barbary corsairs shipwrecked off the Sicilian promontory of San Vito lo Capo in the sixteenth century were taken captive by local Christians just as Christian corsairs shipwrecked a century later on the Maghribi coast were by Muslims living there.173 An

English Lutheran laboring as a rower on the Algerian galley that collided with

Formentera’s coast managed to elude his Muslim masters, only to be incarcerated by

Catholics on nearby Majorca when they learned of his Protestantism.174

The potential for shipwreck to fracture one’s freedom along the Mediterranean’s religiously charged political fault lines explains Ibn Jubayr’s relief when William II of

Sicily not only sent boats to rescue him and his fellow Muslim passengers from a shattered ship off Messina but also demonstrated Sicilian exceptionalism by refraining from making them captives. If this had happened “on the mainland,” Ibn Jubayr wrote,

“or even on one of the islands inhabited by the Rum… even if we had been saved, we should have been forever slaves.”175 Some three centuries later, a Nasrid diplomat remembered how close he had come to this dreaded consequence of shipwreck on his

172 For an example, see Martoni, “Liber peregrinationis,” p. 665. On such charity as a religious duty, see Khalilieh, Islamic Maritime Law, p. 161; Patai, Children of Noah, pp. 114-116. 173 Pozzo, Historia, 2:405; Antonio Cordici, “Istoria della chiesa di San Vito del Capo…,” edited in Angela Morabito, “Una seicentesca Istoria della Chiesa di San Vito del Capo con la vita e miracoli del Santo,” in Congreso internazionale di studi su San Vito ed il suo culto. Mazara del Vallo 18019 Lulgio 2002, ed. Ferdinando Maurici, Renato Alongi, and Angela Morabito (Trapani, 2004), pp. 199-200. For other examples, see Salvatore Bono, I corsari barbareschi (Turin, 1964), p. 345; Enrica Lucchini, La merce umana: schiavitù e riscatto dei Liguri nel Seicento (Rome, 1990), pp. 161-162. 174 Hasleton, Strange and wonderfull things. 175 Travels of Ibn Jubayr, p. 338.

DRAFT! NOT TO BE CITED OR CIRCULATED WITHOUT AUTHOR’S PERMISSION 48 voyage to the Mamluk court. During his vessel’s dawn approach to Hospitaller-held

Rhodes, it shuddered horribly as it grazed an enormous “shoal,” probably the sandy spit of shifting configurations that juts out immediately to the north of the island’s harbor; despite the pull of the strong current of which navigational manuals still warn, the ship escaped ruin. Had God willed it otherwise, wrote the Muslim ambassador, “we would have perished or been taken prisoner.”176

On coasts marked by military tensions between Muslims and Christians, shipwreck might also allot survivors an even more brutal change of fate; the death they had eluded at sea might await them there. Christians from Crete killed “Turks” shipwrecked on a deserted island in the Aegean, wrote Cristoforo Buondelmonti, the

Florentine priest who turned his experiences of sailing that contested sea in early fifteenth century into one of the first isolarios, or book of islands.177 He also recounted how

“Turks” shipwrecked on a deserted islet near Psara cobbled together a raft from the skins of the wild donkeys that lived there and set off for home, only to be killed at sea as they neared the coast.178 These stories served Buondelmonti’s agenda of depicting the

Ottomans as pirates who unjustly possessed islands that were rightly Christian, but they also capture the very real risks faced by shipwreck survivors in a sea at war.179

176 Text in Lucena Paredes, “Viaje a Oriente,” p. 9. On the unstable nature of this sandy spit, see United States Hydrographic Office, Sailing Directions for the Mediterranean, 5 vols. (Washington DC, 1945), 4: 186. On the current, see United States Hydrographic Office, Supplement to Hydrographic Office Publication no. 154, Mediterranean Pilot Vol. IV (Washington DC, 1941), p. 26. 177 Buondelmonti’s text exists in many versions; for the episode here as told in two representative manuscripts, see Cristoforo Buondelmonti, Description of the Aegean and Other Islands…, ed. and trans. Evelyn Edson (New York, 2018), p. 29; idem, Liber insularum archipelagi: Transkription des Exemplars Universitäts- und Landesbibliothek Düsseldorf Ms. G. 13, ed. Karl Bayer (Wiesbaden, 2007), p. 15. 178 Buondelmonti, Description, p. 68; idem, Liber insularum, pp. 43-44. 179 On Buondelmonti’s view of the Ottomans, see Michel Balard, “Buondelmonti and the Holy War,” in Shipping, Trade and Crusade in the Medieval Mediterranean: Studies in Honour of John Pryor, ed. Ruthy Gertwagen and Elizabeth Jeffreys (London, 2012), pp. 387-395. Christian sailors marooned on Christian shores could also be deemed “enemies” and killed; Kowaleski, “ ‘Alien’ Encounters,” p. 116.

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Shipwreck survivors were equally vulnerable to the dangers posed by the natural environment where they came ashore, as Buondelmonti knew from his own maritime misfortunes. During his Aegean journey, he was shipwrecked in the desolate and deserted

Fourni islands. There he and his shipmates survived for a week with only wild plants to eat and water that collected in rocky hollows to drink. He engraved his despair on the island, scratching these words with his sword point in a cave: “Here Cristoforo died from dire hunger.”180 The site of his sufferings was the same as that of many other shipwreck survivors, including the “Turks” of his stories: an island.

Islands belonged to the marine environment that composed the geography of

Mediterranean shipwreck. It has been said rightly that before the age of steam, shipwreck and islands were synonymous.181 The Mediterranean was thus a hazardous sea to navigate safely; due to millennia of changing sea levels and convergence between the

African and the Eurasian continental plates, some 5000 islands and islets stud its waters.182 Each presented its own set of perils for a ship running blind before a storm or suddenly swung in the wrong direction by this sea’s unpredictable winds: sandbars, jagged cliffs, fringing rocks, and hidden shoals. Hence, in bad weather, ships steered well clear of islands, unless they were already anchored in a protected harbor there.

As Buondelmonti’s anguished graffito suggests, the specter of shipwreck on deserted islands was particularly terrifying. There, people who had survived the rigors of the waves became nature’s prey again. After all, if the event of shipwreck “begins an

180 Buondelmonti, Description, p. 67; idem, Liber insularum, p. 43. 181 John Gillis, Islands of the Mind: How the Human Imagination Created the Atlantic World (New York, 2009), p. 108. 182 Broodbank, Making of the Middle Sea, pp. 78-79; Ian Stewart and Christophe Morhange, “Coastal Geomorphology and Sea-Level Change,” in The Physical Geography of the Mediterranean, ed. Jamie Woodward (Oxford, 2009), p. 401; Ioannis N. Vogiatzakis and G.H. Griffiths, “Island Biogeography and Landscape Ecology,” in Mediterranean Island Landscapes: Natural and Cultural Approaches, ed. Ioannis N. Vogiatzakis, Gloria Pungetti and Antoinette M. Mannion (Dordrecht, 2008), pp. 61-81 (esp. 63-64).

DRAFT! NOT TO BE CITED OR CIRCULATED WITHOUT AUTHOR’S PERMISSION 50 irreversible process in which [the vessel] leaves the world of human artifice and reverts to nature,” as one maritime archaeologist has written,183 the same could be said of survivors’ beaching on an uninhabited island. Of the twenty days he and his shipmates spent on a deserted island between Tunis and Sicily “with no food other than nettles,” a twelfth-century Jewish Maghribi merchant recalled that “when we set out from there, we did not have the look of human beings anymore… after arrival in Sicily we were so exhausted from our sufferings at sea that we were unable to eat bread or understand what was said to us for a full month.”184 Personal experience of the sea’s power to reduce humans to a state of nature could induce lingering trauma.

It is no wonder that in literature, deserted islands could serve as settings for a marooned hero to reinvent civilization, an imaginative possibility that the twelfth-century

Andalusi writer Ibn Ṭufayl realized hundreds of years before Daniel Defoe.185 But men of the sea could have a more practical response to the potential nightmare of shipwreck on such islands. They recognized it as a risk that they might manage by seeking to mitigate its consequences. Treaties between France and the Regency of Tunis in 1665 and 1672 stipulated that if a vessel belonging to one signatory were to be wrecked on an uninhabited island, passing ships that sailed under the other signatory’s flag were required to rescue both people and cargo (and were expressly prohibited from selling either).186

183 Martin, “Wreck-Site Formation Processes,” p. 48. 184 Goitein, Letters, pp. 325-326. 185 Abu Bakr Muhammad bin Tufail, The Journey of the Soul: The Story of Hai bin Yaqzan, trans. Riad Kocache (London, 1982); Samar Attar, “Serving God or Mammon? Echoes from Hayy Ibn Yazquan and Sinbad the Sailor in Robinson Crusoe,” in Robinson Crusoe: Myths and Metamorphoses, ed. Lieve Spaas and Brian Stimson (New York, 1996), pp. 78-97. 186 Traités de la France avec les pays de l’Afrique du Nord: Algérie, Tunisie, Tripolitaine, Maroc, ed. E. Rouard de Card (Paris, 1906), pp. 122-123, 136.

DRAFT! NOT TO BE CITED OR CIRCULATED WITHOUT AUTHOR’S PERMISSION 51

Such foresight took a much more concrete form on what was perhaps the

Mediterranean’s most remote uninhabited island: Lampedusa.187 There, by the sixteenth century, Muslim and Christian mariners maintained together a stockpile of food, clothes, and tools.188 These provisions kept in one of the island’s many limestone caves were intended for the use of any seafarer, whether Muslim or Christian, free person or escaped slave, who was marooned there. Holy figures presided over this potentially life-saving cache; tucked into the cave were the tomb of a Muslim marabout and an image of the

Virgin Mary. These were good choices as saintly stewards for this non-confessional mariners’ shrine-cum-supply depot. Mary was a woman venerated by both Muslims and

Christians, as well as one of the premier Christian maritime saints of the high medieval and early modern periods.189 If the marabout resembled his peers, he was an equally appropriate patron for this sea shrine. Muslim mariners—and even some Christian ones— believed that Muslim holy men controlled the sea’s winds and waves, powers they wielded in life and after death.190

But the true guardian ensuring the supplies would be there in the cave for shipwrecked seafarers and others in need was the Mediterranean itself. According to sailors’ lore, the marine environment enforced the shrine’s protective taboos. Mariners believed that if you came to Lampedusa and made no offerings at the shrine or took

187 On Lampedusa as one of the most remote islands in the Mediterranean, see Broodbank, Making of the Middle Sea, pp. 78, 212. 188 On Lampedusa as one of the most remote islands in the Mediterranean, see Broodbank, Making of the Middle Sea, pp. 78, 212. 189 Remensnyder, “Mary, Star of the Multi-confessional Mediterranean.” 190 Al-Bādisī, El-Maqṣad, pp. 23-24, 87; Piri Re’is, Kitāb, 1:181-183; The Diary of Henry Teonge, Chaplain on Board His Majesty’s Ships Assistance, Bristol and Royal Oak, Anno 1675 to 1679 (London, 1825), p. 141, For discussion, see Amara Allaoua, “La mer et les milieux mystiques d’après la production hagiographique du maghreb occidental (XIIe-XVe siècle),” in La mer et le sacré en Islam médiéval, ed. Christophe Picard (Revue des mondes musulmans et de la Méditerranée, Série Histoire, 130 [2011-2012]): 33-52 (here 39-41); Cherif, “La piraterie,” pp. 86, 88-90.

DRAFT! NOT TO BE CITED OR CIRCULATED WITHOUT AUTHOR’S PERMISSION 52 something without leaving equivalent value, you would be unable to sail away, your ship immobilized by contrary winds or lashed by tempest. Tales circulated of Muslim and

Christian mariners and Jewish passengers who tested the prohibition and were duly punished by wind and wave. These stories’ warning value was doubtless enhanced by mariners’ knowledge that Lampedusa, with its hidden shoals, strong currents, variable winds and sudden storms, had wrecked many ships.

Lampedusa’s celebrated shrine is a fitting port in which to end this exploration of the restless sea. Guarded by the tempests that could break vessels on this deserted island’s shores but also a refuge for people marooned by the same sea’s violence, the cave shrine adds to the abundant evidence of storm and shipwreck as complex manifestations of the Mediterranean as an other-than-human natural force in history.

With its fickle winds, fierce storms, and frequent shipwreck, this sea could delay, re- orient, or thwart human maritime movement and thus change destinies. Just as significant are the more unexpected analytic consequences that have emerged from this consideration, including how storm and shipwreck plunge the sea into the history of emotions and of disaster communities. Evanescent emotional communities of fear formed aboard ships confronting extreme weather and other marine emergencies; saltwater terror could even act as a social solvent, temporarily dissipating differences between people and uniting them in the collective enterprise of survival.

But storm and shipwreck also highlight the marine environment as a hitherto unrecognized participant in the politics of religious difference so significant to the history of the Mediterranean in this half millennium. The sea could manifest as catalyst in these politics to people while they were on its waters. The fraught moments when vessels were

DRAFT! NOT TO BE CITED OR CIRCULATED WITHOUT AUTHOR’S PERMISSION 53 unable to harness wind, wave, and current in their service, but were instead captive to these marine elements throw into stark relief the significance of the religious diversity that so often prevailed on Mediterranean ships. Maritime emergencies could precipitate interfaith tensions among people on board or cause crises leading to conversion.

Shipwreck even sent waves to land that broke against the shore’s religious and political antagonisms and eddied through the geography of Mediterranean slavery. In shipwreck’s wake, some enslaved people surfaced to freedom, but more often survivors were exposed to captivity or even murder at the hands of religious or political enemies.

At times, this essay about the sea has indeed drifted ashore. But it has done so in the service of exploring what storm and shipwreck reveal to be a seascape every bit as variegated and three-dimensional as the Mediterranean’s landscape of myriad micro- ecologies. The multiple contours of this seascape as experienced by pre-modern people on the move were more fluid than those of the surrounding landscape; after all, the

Mediterranean is a liquid environment in constant motion. “[M]ost sea features are volatile—the temporary function of wind, tide and current,” writes Robert MacFarlane.191

Product and evidence of the Mediterranean seascape’s mutability, storm and shipwreck could even transform coastlines and islands from familiar guides on the horizon into potentially lethal obstacles for ships and places of suffering for people cast ashore. But storm and shipwreck also became waymarks along the “sea roads,” those “dissolving paths, whose passage leaves no trace beyond a wake, a brief turbulence astern,” to borrow more of MacFarlane’s elegant prose.192 Pre-modern mariners knew the

Mediterranean as a seascape of risk, where certain stretches of water anchored memories

191 Robert MacFarlane, The Old Ways: A Journey on Foot (New York, 2012), p. 124. 192 MacFarlane, Old Ways, p. 88.

DRAFT! NOT TO BE CITED OR CIRCULATED WITHOUT AUTHOR’S PERMISSION 54 of past disasters and harbored configurations of current, coast, wind, wave, and sea- bottom warning of potential dangers in the present.

Mariners’ lives depended on their deep understanding of and profound respect for the dangerous, unpredictable force that was the sea. These men’s rituals of cutting tempest winds, their stories about bad weather tormenting ships that carried corpses, and their belief that storms protected the supplies in Lampedusa’s cave-shrine suggest how their labor gave them a distinctive, felt sense of the Mediterranean as a living presence.

After all, mariners’ bodies sustained the tug of the wind against the sails and the pull of the water against the oars. “Human beings have historically known nature through work,” declares Richard White.193 Yet the Mediterranean’s power was palpable even to pre- modern passengers venturing on its back for the first time, for they too experienced those moments when the relationship between seafarers and the marine environment spun into human crisis.

Much has been omitted from this experiment in using storm and shipwreck to write a bluer history of the Mediterranean. I have not, for example, considered how storms sculpted coastlines and altered harbors, nor have I asked whether ships wrecked more often as the Little Ice Age made subtle yet significant changes in the

Mediterranean’s seascape. These and many other questions await answers. But it is my hope that this essay contributes to restoring to its rightful place in history a force that is literally reshaping the world today, as rising ocean waters and ever more ferocious marine storms shipwreck coastal communities and create migrants, millions of whom then entrust their lives to the same sea that commanded the fate of so many pre-modern mobile people.

193 Richard White, The Organic Machine: The Remaking of the Columbia River (New York, 1995), p. x.