The Pirates of St. Tropaz

Occupiers

by Robert W. Lebling, Jr. Dhahran, Saudi Arabia

The raiders decided to stay. They began building stone fortifications on the surrounding heights. As further defense against Frankish attack, Liudprand says, the Arabs encouraged the growth of particularly fierce bramble bushes that proliferated in the area, "even taller and thicker than before, so that now if anyone stumbled against a branch it ran him through like a sharp sword."

Only "one very narrow path" offered access to the corsairs' fortifications. "If anyone gets into this entanglement, he is so impeded by the winding brambles, and so stabbed by the sharp points of the thorns, that he finds it a task of the greatest difficulty either to advance or to retreat," the cleric wrote in his history, titled Antapodosis, or Tit for Tat.

Their defenses secured, the adventurers began launching raids into the countryside. They sent messengers back to al-Andalus with word of their conquests, praising the lands of Provence and making light of the military ability of the local inhabitants. As a result, a new band of about 100 Andalusi fighters, certainly including cavalrymen and their mounts, soon arrived to bolster the original 20.

Many more followed as the Muslims' military victories mounted. Administrators and supplies arrived from Cordoba. In time, the Muslim presence along the Riviera grew to such an extent that military expeditions sometimes involved thousands of troops. The Gulf of St. Tropez became a regular port of call for Muslim naval and cargo ships in the western Mediterranean.

The Muslims called their base Fraxinet (in Arabic, Farakhshanit), after the local village of Fraxinetum, named in Roman times for the ash trees (fraxini) then common in surrounding forests. Today, this village survives as La-Garde-Freinet, a picturesque, unspoiled settlement tucked amid forests of cork oak and chestnut some 1300 feet (400 meters) up in the Massif des Maures, between the Argens Plain and the Gulf of St. Tropez. About a half-hour's hike up from the village are the ruins of a stone fortress said to be the one built by the Arab pirates. Other high points in the area were also fortified by the Muslims, but local authorities state that nothing remains of those structures.

New Allies or Not?

Gradually local Frankish lords, seeking to take advantage of the new political and military realities, sought the aid of the Andalusis in settling their private quarrels. The strategy backfired, according to Liudprand: "The people of Provence close by, swayed by envy and mutual jealousy, began to cut one another's throats, plunder each other's substance, and do every sort of conceivable mischief.... They called in the help of the aforesaid Saracens ... and in company with them proceeded to crush their neighbors.... The Saracens, who in themselves were of insignificant strength, after crushing one faction with the help of the other, increased their own numbers by continual reinforcements from Spain, and soon were attacking everywhere those whom at first they seemed to defend. In the fury of their onslaughts ... all the neighborhood began to tremble."

European chroniclers claim that the Arabs laid waste the coastal territory around Fraxinet, today called the Côte des Maures, and then moved into neighboring areas in search of plunder. First, pressing eastward, they "visited the county of Fréjus with fire and sword, and sacked the chief town," according to historian E. Levi-Provençal, a 19th century expert on al-Andalus.

The town of Fréjus, a major seaport founded by Julius Caesar in 49 BC and given the name Forum Julii, was reportedly razed and its entire population driven off. The raiders drove on, hitting one town after another along the Côte d'Azur. Eventually the Muslim forces looped back to the west, raided Marseilles and Aix-en-Provence, then headed up the Rhône Valley and into the Alps and Piedmont. North African Berber soldiers experienced in mountain warfare were probably used extensively in the Alpine operations, historians believe.

By 906, Andalusi forces had seized the mountain passes of the Dauphiné, crossed Mont Cénis and occupied the valley of the Suse on the Piedmontese frontier. The Arabs erected stone fortresses in areas they conquered -- in the Dauphiné, Savoy and Piedmont -- often naming them Fraxinet, after their base. The name survives to this day in these areas, in various forms like Fraissinet or Frainet.

It did not take much longer before direct communications between France and Italy were virtually severed by the Arab expansion. Pilgrims bound for Rome through such Alpine valleys as the Doire, Stura and Chisone were forced to turn back or risk falling victim to Arab raiding parties. In 911, the bishop of Narbonne, who had been in Rome on urgent church business, was unable to return to France because the Muslims controlled all the passes in the Alps.

By about 933, says Levi-Provençal, "light columns, very mobile, held -- at least during the summer -- all the country under a reign of terror, while the bulk of the Muslim forces was entrenched in the mountainous canton of Fraxinetum, in the immediate vicinity of the sea."

As for the "reign of terror," another 19th century historian, J. T. Reinaud, observes: "One saw ample evidence forthcoming for the oft-repeated saying that one Muslim was enough to put a thousand [Franks] to flight." But an element of cultural bias colors the existing chronicles: Not all Provençals feared the Andalusis of Fraxinet. Some formed alliances with them. "There are ... reasons to believe that a number of Christians made common cause with the Muslims and took part in their attacks," Reinaud notes in his Invasions des Sarrazins en France, et de France en Savoie, en Piémont et en Suisse.

If the villagers and townsfolk of Provence and neighboring regions feared the Muslims as much as contemporary chroniclers claim, they somehow managed nonetheless to cooperate with them in a wide range of social, economic and artistic fields.

The Arabs of Fraxinet were not simply warriors; careful reading of the chronicles reveals that many Muslim colonists settled peacefully in the villages of Provence. They taught the Franks how to make corks for bottles by stripping the bark every seven years from the cork oaks that proliferate in the forests of the Massif des Maures. Today, the cork industry is the area's chief local enterprise. The Muslims also showed the Provençals how to produce pine tar from the resin of the maritime pine, and to use the product for caulking boats. Reinaud believes the Muslims kept a naval fleet permanently based in the Gulf of St. Tropez, in part to facilitate communications throughout the western Mediterranean. The tar of Fraxinet would have been used by those sailors.

Today in France, pine tar is called goudron, from the Arabic qitran, with the same meaning. The Muslims also taught the villagers medical skills and introduced both ceramic tiles and the tambourine to the area, and Reinaud believes the second Arab invasion of France had a "considerable influence" on the development of local agriculture. Some French scholars believe the Muslims of Fraxinet introduced the cultivation of buckwheat, a grain that has two names in modern French, blé noir (black wheat) and blé sarrasin (Saracen wheat). Furthermore, strong similarities have been noted between the poetry of the Provençal troubadours and that of Andalusi poets, but this particular case of cross-fertilization may have occurred even earlier than the Arab capture of Fraxinet.

We know little of the individuals who directed or took part in this Muslim enterprise in France. Rarely are Muslims of Fraxinet mentioned by name in the European chronicles of this period. Liudprand tells of one Arab military commander with the Latinized name Sagittus (perhaps Sa'id) who led an Andalusi fighting force from Fraxinet to Acqui, some 50 kilometers (30 miles) northwest of Genoa. But about all we learn of Sagittus is that he died in battle at Acqui in about 935.

A leader of Fraxinet itself, Nasr ibn Ahmad, is mentioned in the Muqtabis of Ibn Hayyan of Cordoba, the greatest historian of medieval Spain. According to that 11th-century chronicle, Abdul Rahman III made peace in 939-40 with a number of Frankish rulers and sent copies of the peace treaty to Nasr ibn Ahmad, described as "commander" of Farakhshanit, as well as to the Arab governors of the Balearic Islands and the seaports of al-Andalus -- all of them subject to the Umayyad caliphate.

Nothing else is known about the Fraxinet commander. The first serious effort to expel the Muslims from Fraxinet was made by Hugh of Arles, king of Italy, in about 931. Hugh enlisted the aid of Byzantine warships on loan from his brother-in-law Leo Porphyrogenitus, emperor of Constantinople. The warships, hurling "Greek fire," attacked and destroyed a Muslim fleet in the Gulf of St. Tropez.

Meanwhile, in a coordinated land assault, Hugh's army besieged the fortress at Fraxinet and succeeded in breaching its defenses. The Muslim defenders were forced to withdraw to neighboring heights. But just when the end of Muslim power in France seemed inevitable, local politics intervened.

Hugh received word that his rival Béranger, then in Germany, was planning a return to France in a bid to capture the throne. The king, desperate for allies, sent the Greek fleet back to Constantinople and formed a hasty alliance with the Muslims he had just sought to expel. He signed a treaty conceding control of Fraxinet and other areas to the Muslims and stipulating that Arab forces should occupy the Alpine heights -- from Mont Genèvre Pass in the west to the Septimer Pass in the east -- and block any attempt by Béranger to cross into France. Liudprand was outraged by Hugh's actions; in the midst of his chronicles, the historian chides the king: "How strange, indeed, is the manner in which thou defendest thy dominions!... Thou allowest them to escape who are without doubt criminals, and fit to be put to death."

After seizing the Great St. Bernard and other key Alpine passes, the Andalusi forces spread out into the surrounding valleys. Grenoble and the lush valley of the Graisivaudun were captured in about 945. About 10 years later, Otto I, king of Germany and later Holy Roman Emperor, perhaps fearing the Muslims would invade his realm, sent an envoy to the caliph at Cordoba, Abdul Rahman III, urging an end to raids by the Arabs of Fraxinet. The caliph's response to the appeal is not known.

In the early to mid-960's, the Muslims began a slow but steady withdrawal from the Alpine regions. To some extent this was due to growing Frankish military pressure, and perhaps to the diplomatic initiatives of Otto I. But one modern scholar, Middle East specialist Manfred W. Wenner, suggests the withdrawal may have been prompted by a foreign-policy change in Cordoba. Abdul Rahman III died in 961 and was succeeded by his son Hakam II, a peaceful man who did not share his father's enthusiasm for military operations in southern France and the Alpine regions. Wenner believes Hakam may have "withheld permission for reinforcements to leave for Fraxinetum from Spanish ports," making it increasingly difficult for the colony to maintain a military presence in the Alps, particularly in the face of ongoing local resistance.

By 965, the Andalusis had evacuated Grenoble and the valley of the Graisivaudun under continuing Frankish pressure. The fertile farmlands and prosperous villages they relinquished were divided up among the Frankish troops who replaced them, in proportion to each soldier's valor and service. According to Reinaud, writing in about 1836, "even today such families of Dauphiné as the Aynards and Montaynards trace the turn of their fortune to this struggle with the Muslims."

As late as 972, the Muslims still controlled the Great St. Bernard Pass. In that year, they captured and held for ransom the famed French cleric St. Maiolus, abbot of Cluny, who was traveling through the pass on his return from Rome. The ransom for Maiolus and his large entourage was set at 1000 pounds of silver -- one pound for each Andalusi soldier involved in the operation. The ransom was eventually paid through the sale of abbey holdings, and Maiolus and his party were released. The incident provoked outrage throughout Christian Europe and sparked further efforts to dislodge the Fraxinet colony and its satellites.

Shortly after 972, the Muslims were driven from the heights around the Great St. Bernard. One of the leaders of the opposing forces in this hard-fought battle was Bernard of Menthone, for whom the mountain pass was later named. (Its name at the time was Mons Jovis, Latin for "Mount Jupiter" -- a term the Arabs of that era incorporated into their name for the entire Alpine region, Jabal Munjaws.)

St. Bernard, of course, later founded the well-known hospice for travelers in the heights of the Great St. Bernard that exists to this day. Some scholars believe the St. Maiolus incident furnished the impetus for building that refuge. Bernard's name, incidentally, was also given to the celebrated dogs trained there to rescue travelers trapped in the winter snows.

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© Copyright 2001 by David W. Tschanz.
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