My hope is that those who pick up this book will enjoy reading it as much as I have enjoyed writing it. For the invitation to do so and for their enthusiastic encouragement thereafter, I am deeply indebted to Stuart Proffitt at Penguin Books and my agent, Bill Hamilton, at A. M. Heath, and for further encouragement to Peter Ginna and Tim Bent at my American publisher, Oxford University Press in New York. One special pleasure has been the opportunity to visit or revisit some of the places I mention. I have benefited greatly from the hospitality of a number of hosts in the Mediterranean and beyond: Clive and Geraldine Finlayson, of the Gibraltar Museum, were as welcoming as ever, and enabled me not just to revisit Gibraltar but to make a foray across the Straits to Ceuta; Charles Dalli, Dominic Fenech, their colleagues in the History Department at the University of Malta, HE the British High Commissioner and Mrs Archer and Ronnie Micallef of the British Council were exemplary hosts in Malta; HE the Maltese Ambassador to Tunisia, Vicki-Ann Cremona, was also a superb host in Tunis and Mahdia; Mohamed Awad, rightly famous for his hospitality, opened my eyes to his city of Alexandria; Edhem Eldem revealed unsuspected corners of Istanbul (and Alexandria); Relja Seferović of the Croatian Historical Institute in Dubrovnik was enormously helpful there, in Montenegro (at Herceg Novi and Kotor) and in Bosnia-Hercegovina (at Trebinje); Eduard Mira shared his knowledge of medieval Valencia in situ; Olivetta Schena invited me to Cagliari to commemorate my late friend and distinguished Mediterranean historian Marco Tangheroni, enabling me also to visit ancient Nora; further afield, the History Department of Helsinki University and the Finnish Foreign Ministry invited me to expound my views about Mediterranean history in a city whose great fortress is often called the ‘Gibraltar of the North’; Francesca Trivellato allowed me to read her excellent study of Livorno in advance of publication. Roger Moorhouse identified a host of suitable illustrations, often difficult to run to earth; Bela Cunha was an exemplary copy-editor. My wife Anna explored Jaffa, Neve Tzedek, Tel Aviv, Tunis, Mahdia and large swathes of Cyprus with me. Anna tolerated growing mountains of books on the ancient and modern Mediterranean in a house already full of books on the medieval Mediterranean. My daughters Bianca and Rosa have been delightful companions on travels to various corners of the Mediterranean, and fed me material on diverse topics such as the Moriscos and the Barcelona Process.
I am also very grateful to audiences in Cambridge, St Andrews, Durham, Sheffield, Valletta and Frankfurt-am-Main who responded so helpfully to a lecture I hawked around on ‘How to write the history of the Mediterranean’. In Cambridge, I received bibliographical and other advice from Colin and Jane Renfrew, Paul Cartledge, John Patterson, Alex Mullen, Richard Duncan-Jones, William O’Reilly, Hubertus Jahn and David Reynolds, among others, while Roger Dawe very kindly gave me a copy of his magnificent translation of and commentary on the Odyssey. Charles Stanton read the first draft and set me right on a number of points – needless to say, the errors that remain are mine. Alyssa Bandow engaged enthusiastically in lengthy discussions of the ancient economy which helped me clarify my ideas. No institution can compare with the colleges in Cambridge and Oxford in offering an opportunity to discuss one’s ideas with people in a great variety of disciplines, and I owe more than I can say to the stimulus of having among my colleagues at Caius not just a host of History Fellows but Paul Binski, John Casey, Ruth Scurr, Noël Sugimura and (until recently) Colin Burrow, as well as Victoria Bateman, whose comments on the text I much appreciate, and Michalis Agathacleous, whose guidance around southern Cyprus was enormously helpful. The Classics Faculty Library was especially generous in providing for my needs, as were Mark Statham and the staff of Gonville and Caius College Library. When in the final stages of preparing the manuscript, I found myself unable to leave Naples owing to a volcanic eruption – not Vesuvius! – Francesco Senatore and his delightful colleagues (Alessandra Perricioli, Teresa d’Urso, Alessandra Coen and many more) offered magnificent hospitality including the use of an office at ‘Frederick II University’, and lively conversation. Soon after the skies cleared, I benefited enormously from a chance to discuss the themes of this book at a gathering at Villa La Pietra, the seat in Florence of New York University, thanks to the kindness of Katherine Fleming, and refined my ‘Concluding Thoughts’ further in Norway, following an invitation from the ever-courteous organizers of a symposium held in Bergen in June 2010 to celebrate the award of the Holberg Prize to Natalie Zemon Davis.
This book is dedicated to the memory of my ancestors who travelled back and forth across the Mediterranean over the centuries: from Castile to Safed and Tiberias in the Holy Land, with intervals in Smyrna; and then, with my grandfather, from Tiberias westwards again and after him, with my grandmother, back across the sea to Tiberias, also including my forebear Jacob Berab, who reached Safed from Maqueda in Castile, and sundry Abulafias, Abolaffios and Bolaffis in Livorno and across Italy. The title is of the book is taken from the Hebrew name for the Mediterranean, which appears in a blessing to be recited on setting eyes on it: ‘Blessed are you, Lord our God, king of the Universe, who made the Great Sea’.
David Abulafia
Cambridge, 15 November 2010
Introduction: A Sea with Many Names
Known in English and the romance languages as the sea ‘between the lands’, the Mediterranean goes and has gone by many names: ‘Our Sea’ for the Romans, the ‘White Sea’ (Akdeniz) for the Turks, the ‘Great Sea’ (Yam gadol) for the Jews, the ‘Middle Sea’ (Mittelmeer) for the Germans, and more doubtfully the ‘Great Green’ of the ancient Egyptians. Modern writers have added to the vocabulary, coining epithets such as the ‘Inner Sea’, the ‘Encircled Sea’, the ‘Friendly Sea’, the ‘Faithful Sea’ of several religions, the ‘Bitter Sea’ of the Second World War, the ‘Corrupting Sea’ of dozens of micro-ecologies transformed by their relationship with neighbours who supply what they lack, and to which they can offer their own surpluses; the ‘Liquid Continent’ that, like a real continent, embraces many peoples, cultures and economies within a space with precise edges. It is important, then, to begin by defining its limits. The Black Sea washes shores from which grain, slaves, furs and fruit were exported into the Mediterranean since antiquity, but it was a sea penetrated by Mediterranean merchants rather than a sea whose inhabitants participated in the political, economic and religious changes taking place in the Mediterranean itself – its links across land, towards the Balkans, the Steppes and the Caucasus, gave the civilizations along its shores a different outlook and character to those of the Mediterranean. This is not true of the Adriatic, which has participated strongly in the commercial, political and religious life of the Mediterranean, thanks to the Etruscans and Greeks of Spina, the Venetians and Ragusans in the medieval and early modern period, and the businessmen of Trieste in more modern times. In this book, the boundaries of the Mediterranean have been set where first nature and then man set them: at the Straits of Gibraltar; at the Dardanelles, with occasional forays towards Constantinople since it functioned as a bridge between the Black Sea and the White Sea; and at the littoral running from Alexandria to Gaza and Jaffa. And then, within and along the Mediterranean, this book includes the port cities, particularly those where cultures met and mixed – Livorno, Smyrna, Trieste and so on – and the islands, mainly when their inhabitants looked outwards, which is why the Corsicans have a lower profile in this book than the Maltese.
This is perhaps a narrower vision of the Mediterranean than has been supplied by other writers, but it is surely a more consistent one. The subject-matter of books on Mediterranean history has been the history of the lands around the Mediterranean, allowing, naturally, for some attention to the interaction between these lands. Two works stand out prominently: Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell’s massive Corrupting Sea of 2000 is especially rich in ideas about the agrarian history of the lands bordering the Mediterranean, assuming that a history of the Mediterranean should include land bordering the sea to a depth of at least ten miles. They demonstrate some fundame
ntal features of Mediterranean exchange: the ‘connectivities’ linking different points, the ‘abatements’ when contraction occurred. But, in the last analysis, they are essentially concerned with what happens on land rather than on the surface of the sea itself. And then, looming over all historians of the Mediterranean, lies the shadow of Fernand Braudel (1902–85), whose book The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, first published in 1949, was one of the most original and influential works of history composed in the twentieth century. From the 1950s onwards, Braudel guided the researches of many dozens of scholars not just on the history of the Mediterranean in his chosen period, but earlier and later periods too, and not just of the Mediterranean but of the Atlantic and other seas; and in his latter days he reigned with dignity and distinction over the highly respected Annales school of historians from his base at the mysteriously named ‘sixth section’ of the École Pratique des Hautes Études in Paris. But his ideas had germinated slowly. French intellectuals such as the esteemed poet and essayist Paul Valéry, who died in 1945, had become fascinated with the idea of a ‘Mediterranean civilization’ shared among the French, the Spaniards and the Italians, present both on their native shores and in their colonial possessions in North Africa and the Middle East. Braudel’s book was the product of lengthy rumination in France, Algeria, Brazil and German prisoner-of-war camps, during which Braudel made an intellectual journey from the close study of past politics that still engaged many French historians, through the Mediterranean identities postulated by Valéry, to the writing of history informed by geography. Showing encyclopaedic mastery of the history of the entire Mediterranean, not just in the sixteenth century, Braudel offered a novel and exciting answer to the question of how the societies around its edges have interacted. At the heart of Braudel’s approach was his assumption that ‘all change is slow’ and that ‘man is imprisoned in a destiny in which he himself has little hand’.1 This book suggests the opposite in both cases. Whereas Braudel offered what might be called a horizontal history of the Mediterranean, seeking to capture its characteristics through the examination of a particular era, this book attempts to provide a vertical history of the Mediterranean, emphasizing change over time.
Braudel showed what almost amounted to contempt for political history, understood as ‘events’ (histoire évènementielle).2 The geography of the Mediterranean was seen to determine what happened within its boundaries. He consigned politics and warfare to the very end of his book, and its real strength lay elsewhere, in its understanding of the landscape of the lands around the Mediterranean, and of important characteristics of the Mediterranean Sea itself – its winds and currents, which helped determine the routes people took to cross it. In fact, Braudel’s Mediterranean extended far beyond the sea to encompass all the lands whose economic life was somehow determined by what was happening there: he managed at various points to bring Cracow and Madeira into his calculations. In his wake, John Pryor has laid a strong emphasis on the limitations imposed by winds and currents, arguing that medieval and early modern navigators found it difficult to navigate along the North African shore, and emphasizing the importance of the open season between spring and autumn when it was possible to sail the sea backed by suitable winds. Against this, Horden and Purcell have suggested that sailors were prepared to carve out additional shipping lanes where the winds and currents were less favourable, but where other interests – commercial or political – drew them along their new routes.3 The forces of nature could, then, be challenged with skill and ingenuity.
The physical features of this sea certainly cannot be taken for granted. The Mediterranean possesses several features that result from its character as an enclosed sea. In remote geological time it was entirely closed, and between about 12 and 5 million years ago evaporation reached the point where the Mediterranean basin became a deep and empty desert; once breached by the Atlantic, it is thought to have been flooded with water in a couple of years. It loses water through evaporation more rapidly than river systems feeding into the Mediterranean are able to replace it, which is not surprising when it is remembered how puny some of the rivers are: the little rivers of Sicily and Sardinia, the historic but not substantial Tiber and Arno (the Arno becomes a trickle upriver from Florence in high summer). It is true that the Mediterranean draws down water from the massive river system of the Nile, and the Po and the Rhône also make some contribution. Among European rivers, the Danube and the Russian river systems make an indirect contribution, because the Black Sea draws in water from several great arteries stretching deep into the landmass. The result is that the Black Sea has an excess of unevaporated water, creating a fast current that rushes past Istanbul into the north-eastern Aegean. But this only compensates for 4 per cent of the water loss in the Mediterranean, and the principal source that replaces losses by evaporation is the Atlantic Ocean, which provides a steady inflow of cold Atlantic water, to some extent counterbalanced by an outflow of Mediterranean water which (because of the evaporation) is saltier and therefore heavier; the incoming water rides on top of the outgoing water.4 The fact that the Mediterranean is open at its ends is thus crucial to its survival as a sea. The opening of a third channel, at Suez, has had more limited effects, since the sea route passes through narrow canals, but it has brought into the Mediterranean types of fish native to the Red Sea and Indian Ocean.
The inflow from the Atlantic deterred medieval navigators from making a regular passage out of the Straits of Gibraltar, though it did not deter Vikings, crusaders and others from entering the Mediterranean. The major currents follow the coasts of Africa eastwards from Gibraltar, swing past Israel and Lebanon and around Cyprus, and then round the Aegean, Adriatic and Tyrrhenian Seas and along the French and Spanish coasts back to the Pillars of Hercules.5 These currents have had a significant impact on the ease with which ships have been able to move around the Mediterranean, at least in the days of oar and sail. It has even proved possible, tacking back and forth, to use the currents to sail in the face of the Mediterranean winds. The weather systems in the region tend to move from west to east, so that the winds could be profitably exploited to carry shipping in spring from the ports between Barcelona and Pisa towards Sardinia, Sicily and the Levant, though the major influence in the western Mediterranean during winter is the north Atlantic weather system, while in the summer it is the Atlantic subtropical high, stationed over the Azores. Wet and windy weather in the winter is characterized by the mistral bringing cold air into the valleys of Provence, but it has many close cousins such as the bora or tramontana of Italy and Croatia. John Pryor has pointed out that the ‘Gulf of the Lion’ off Provence is so named because the roar of the mistral resembles that of a lion.6 No one should underestimate the unpleasantness or danger of a winter storm in the Mediterranean, despite the modern image of a sun-drenched sea. Occasionally low-pressure weather systems develop over the Sahara and are dragged north as the unsettling wind known as the scirocco (Italy), xaloc (Catalonia) or hamsin (Israel, Egypt); vast amounts of red Saharan dust may be dumped on the lands surrounding the Mediterranean. So long as ships relied on sail power, the prevailing northerly winds endangered navigation along the coast of North Africa, for they threatened to throw ships on to the sandbanks and reefs of the southern Mediterranean shores, while (as Pryor has also observed) the steeper inclination of most of the north Mediterranean shores made them much more attractive to navigators, as did their coves and beaches; however, these coves were also a long-standing temptation to pirates in search of a nook or cranny.7 Passage from west to east, the famous Levant trade of the Middle Ages, was easier for ships setting out from Genoa or Marseilles in the spring and following the northern shores of the Mediterranean, past Sicily and Crete and around Cyprus to reach Egypt; it was not standard practice to cut across from Crete to the mouth of the Nile until the coming of the steamship. Of course, one cannot be completely sure that the winds and currents have remained the same. Yet there are enough references in cla
ssical and medieval sources to such winds as the Boreas from the north-west to make it clear that the bora has a very long history.
Changes in the climate could have important consequences for the productivity of lands close to the Mediterranean, with a knock-on effect on the trade in Mediterranean grain, which was so important in antiquity and the Middle Ages and then lost its primacy. A cooling of the climate in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries helps explain why grain lands went out of cultivation and why imports of grain from northern Europe became surprisingly common, strengthening the hand of Dutch and German merchants in the Mediterranean. Desiccation of coastal regions may suggest climate change, though here, importantly, the human hand is often visible: in North Africa new waves of Arab invasion in the eleventh and twelfth centuries may have resulted in neglect of dams and irrigation works, so that agriculture suffered. Economic decline in Asia Minor during the period of the late Roman Empire was accentuated by the abandonment of vines and olive terraces that had held in place soil which now washed down into rivers and silted them up.8 In modern times, dams, notably the Great Aswan Dam in Upper Egypt, have changed the pattern of flow of water into the Mediterranean, with effects on currents and humidity. It is man who has altered the seasonal cycle of the Nile, decisively changing the economic life of Egypt and putting to an end the annual floods which the ancient Egyptians attributed to their gods. On the other hand, the geographer Alfred Grove and the ecologist Oliver Rackham have suggested that human beings have had a less drastic effect on the Mediterranean environment than is often assumed, for nature in the Mediterranean lands shows a capacity to recover from climatic and other variations, and from the abuses imposed on it. Humans, they stress, do not determine the evolution of climate, or at least did not do so before the twentieth century; and erosion, even allowing for a human role, also takes place naturally – it happened in the age of the dinosaurs too. One area where human impact has often been reported is deforestation, which has had severe effects in Sicily, Cyprus and along the Spanish coast; demand for timber for ships has been succeeded by the clearance of land for new or expanding towns and villages, but here too an argument can be pressed that natural regeneration has often taken place. Grove and Rackham are less optimistic about the future the Mediterranean faces, as water resources and fish stocks are over-exploited and, in some areas, desertification threatens, likely to be rendered worse if credible prophecies about global warming are even partly valid.9 To look back at the history of the Mediterranean is to observe a symbiosis of man and nature that may be about to end.
The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean Page 2
