Arabs in History by Lewis Bernard;

Author:Lewis, Bernard;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press USA - OSO
Published: 1993-02-14T16:00:00+00:00

7 The Arabs in Europe

Que Castillos son aquellos? Altos son y reluzian!

—El Alhambra era, señor, y la otra la mezquita.

(Romance de Abenamar)

THE Arabs in pre-Islamic times were not entirely unacquainted with the sea. For centuries before the rise of Islam the peoples of southern Arabia built ships and carried on important maritime traffic in the Red Sea and Indian Ocean. But the northern Arabs, and particularly those of the Ḥijāz and of the Syrian and Iraqi borderlands, were primarily a continental people, with little knowledge of the sea or of navigation. It is one of the most striking features of the great Islamic conquests that they should have adapted themselves so readily to this new form of activity. Within a few years of their occupation of the Syrian and Egyptian coastlines the people of the landlocked deserts of Arabia, with the help of local shipwrights and sailors, had built and manned great war fleets which were able to meet and defeat the powerful and experienced Byzantine navies and to give to the Caliphate that vital prerequisite of its safety and expansion—the naval control of the Mediterranean.

The conquest of Syria and Egypt brought a long stretch of Mediterranean coastline under Arab control, with many ports and a seafaring population. The Arabs, who had hitherto met only Byzantine armies, now met Byzantine navies too, and the brief Byzantine reoccupation of Alexandria from the sea in 645 offered them an early warning of the significance of sea-power. They were quick to react. The credit for the creation of the Muslim navies belongs primarily to two men, the Caliph Mu̔āwiya and the Governor of Egypt, ̔Abdallah ibn Sa̔d ibn Abī Sarḥ. Both in Alexandria and in the ports of the Syrian littoral the Muslims equipped and manned war fleets which soon won victories as striking as those of the Muslim armies. The first great naval battle occurred in 655, when a Muslim fleet said to have consisted of two hundred ships inflicted a crushing defeat on a larger Byzantine fleet off the Anatolian coast.

When the ̔Abbāsids transferred the seat of the Caliphate from Syria to Baghdad the interest of the central government in the Mediterranean decreased, but the independent Muslim rulers of Egypt and North Africa long maintained fleets that dominated the Middle Sea from end to end. The Fātimid Caliphs of Egypt, we are told, had at one time no fewer than five thousand sea captains sailing under their orders. During the ninth century an increasing volume of Muslim merchant shipping linked the ports of the Muslim coasts of the Mediterranean with one another and with the Christian ports of the north.

The first warlike activities of the newly formed Muslim fleets were directed against the Byzantine islands of Cyprus, Crete, and Rhodes, which were among the main bases of the Byzantine navies in the eastern Mediterranean. The Arab historians tell us that the first Caliphs were unwilling to authorize expeditions across the sea, and ̔Umar is quoted as forbidding his generals to advance to any place ‘which I cannot reach on my camel’.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.