ABSTRACT
The Mediterranean Sea, Mare Nostrum,1 to use the name presumptuously chosen by the Romans, had been no stranger to sea fights both in ancient times and in the period from the foundation of Byzantium to the rise of Islamic powers on its eastern and southern shores. It is generally agreed among naval historians of the period up to10002 that the earlier thalassocracy of the Roman Empire in the east3 had been severely shaken by the advancing forces of the Caliphs leading to the loss of Crete in 826 and the Arab conquest of Sicily after 875. Ibn Khaldun, a later Arab historian, wrote of this period with perhaps pardonable exaggeration, ‘the Christian nations could do nothing against the Muslim fleets anywhere in the Mediterranean. All the time the Muslims rode its waves for conquest’.4 There is also a widely-held view that in the later tenth and eleventh centuries the Christian nations of the northern shores of the Mediterranean regained the initiative in naval warfare and maintained their supremacy over the navies of the southern states at least until the mid-fifteenth century.
