The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean
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This book does not deny the importance of winds and currents, but aims to bring to the fore the human experience of crossing the Mediterranean or of living in the port towns and islands that depended for their existence on the sea. The human hand has been more important in moulding the history of the Mediterranean than Braudel was ever prepared to admit. The book is full of political decisions: navies setting out to conquer Syracuse or Carthage, Acre or Famagusta, Minorca or Malta. Why some of these places were strategically important did depend to a significant extent on geography – not just wind and waves but other limitations: fresh food and water might last a couple of weeks on a merchant vessel, but were too bulky to load in great quantities on a war galley that had little space to spare. This simple fact meant that control of the open sea was a very tough challenge, at least in the age of sail; without access to friendly ports where supplies could be taken on board and ships could be careened, no power, however many warships it possessed, could lord itself over sea routes. Conflicts for control of the Mediterranean thus have to be seen as struggles for mastery over its coasts, ports and islands rather than as battles over open spaces.10 To manage the almost constant threat of piracy it was often necessary to enter into murky deals with the pirates and their masters, permitting free passage to merchant shipping in return for gifts and bribes. Advance positions were invaluable. The situation of Corfu ensured that it was coveted over many centuries by those who sought to control entry into the Adriatic. The Catalans and then the British constructed a line of possessions across the Mediterranean that served their economic and political interests well. Oddly, though, the places chosen as ports often provided poor harbours: physical advantages were by no means the only consideration. Alexandria was difficult of access through often choppy seas, medieval Barcelona offered little more than a beach, Pisa nothing but a few small roadsteads close to the Arno estuary, and even in the 1920s ships reaching Jaffa had to unload out at sea. The harbour at Messina lay close to the rushing waters of what classical commentators identified as the twin terrors of Scylla and Charybdis.11
Human history involves the study of the irrational as well as the rational, decisions made by individuals or groups that are hard to understand at a remove of centuries or millennia, and that may have been hard to understand at the time those decisions were made. Yet small decisions, like the flutter of a butterfly’s wings, could have massive consequences: a pope’s speech at Clermont in France in 1095, loaded with vague but impassioned rhetoric, could unleash 500 years of crusades; disputes between rival Turkish commanders, in contrast to charismatic leadership on the Christian side, could bring surprise defeat upon Ottoman armies and navies, as at Malta in 1565 – and even then Spain was slower to send aid than the emergency demanded, risking loss of command of the waters around one of its prize possessions, Sicily. Battles were won against the odds; the victories of brilliant naval commanders such as Lysander, Roger de Lauria and Horatio Nelson transformed the political map of the Mediterranean and frustrated the imperial plans of those in Athens, Naples or Napoleonic France. Merchant princes placed their own profit above the cause of the Christian faith. The roulette wheel spins and the outcome is unpredictable, but human hands spin the wheel.
PART ONE
The First Mediterranean,
22000 BC–1000 BC
1
Isolation and Insulation,
22000 BC–3000 BC
I
Carved out millions of years before mankind reached its coasts, the Mediterranean Sea became a ‘sea between the lands’ linking opposite shores once human beings traversed its surface in search of habitation, food or other vital resources. Early types of humans inhabited the lands bordering the Mediterranean 435,000 years before the present, to judge from evidence for a hunters’ camp set up near modern Rome; others built a simple hut out of branches at Terra Amata near Nice, and created a hearth in the middle of their dwelling – their diet included rhinoceros and elephant meat as well as deer, rabbits and wild pigs.1 When early man first ventured out across the sea’s waters is uncertain. In 2010, the American School of Classical Studies at Athens announced the discovery in Crete of quartz hand-axes dated to before 130,000 BC, indicating that early types of humans found some means to cross the sea, though these people may have been swept there unintentionally on storm debris.2 Discoveries in caves on Gibraltar prove that 24,000 years ago another species of human looked across the sea towards the mountain of Jebel Musa, clearly visible on the facing shore of Africa: the first Neanderthal bones ever discovered, in 1848, were those of a woman who lived in a cave on the side of the Rock of Gibraltar. Since the original finds were not immediately identified as the remains of a different human species, it was only when, eight years later, similar bones were unearthed in the Neander Valley in Germany that this species gained a name: Neanderthal Man should carry the name Gibraltar Woman. The Gibraltar Neanderthals made use of the sea that lapped the shores of their territory, for their diet included shellfish and crustaceans, even turtles and seals, though at this time a flat plain separated their rock caves from the sea.3 But there is no evidence for a Neanderthal population in Morocco, which was colonized by homo sapiens sapiens, our own branch of humanity. The Straits apparently kept the two populations apart.
In the long period of the Lower and Middle Palaeolithic (‘Old and Middle Stone Age’), navigation across the Mediterranean was probably rare, though some present-day islands were accessible across land bridges later covered by the rising sea. The Cosquer grotto near Marseilles contains carvings by homo sapiens from as early as 27000 BC and paintings earlier than 19000 BC; it now lies well below sea level, but when it was inhabited the Mediterranean shore lay a few miles further out. The first good evidence for short sea-crossings comes during the Upper Palaeolithic (the late ‘Old Stone Age’), that is, before about 11000 BC. At this point, visitors set foot on Melos in the Greek Cyclades, in search of the volcanic glass obsidian, used in stone tools, and offering sharper edges than flint. Sicily has yielded dozens of Palaeolithic sites from the same period, very often along the coast, where settlers consumed large quantities of molluscs, though they also hunted foxes, hare and deer. They took care of the dead, covering the body with a layer of ochre and sometimes burying the corpses with decorated necklaces. On the western extremity of Sicily, they occupied what are now the easternmost Egadian islands (which were then probably small promontories connected to Sicily itself); on one of them, Levanzo, somewhere around 11000 BC, they decorated a cave with incised and painted figures. The incised figures include deer and horses, drawn with liveliness and a degree of realism. The painted figures are more schematic, rough representations of human beings, and are thought to date to a later occupation of the cave. The drawings and paintings from the Sicilian caves demonstrate the existence of a hunter-gatherer society adept, as we know from other evidence, at the creation of effective tools out of flint and quartzite, whose rituals included sympathetic magic aimed at the winning of prey. They hunted with bows and arrows and with spears; they lived in caves and grottoes, but also inhabited camp sites in the open. They were thinly spread and, while their ancestors had reached Sicily on whatever simple boats were available to them, later generations did not explore the seas further.4
The style of life of the first inhabitants of Sicily was not markedly different from that of hundreds of generations of other Upper Palaeolithic people spread around the shores of the Mediterranean, from whom they were, nonetheless, isolated. This is not to say that their lives lacked complexity; a comparison with nomadic hunter-gatherers in Australia or the Amazon suggests that elaborate myths and rituals have for millennia bonded together families and groups, irrespective of their level of technology. Change, when it occurred, took place very slowly and did not necessarily consist of what might be called ‘improvement’, for skills such as those of the cave artists could be lost as well as gained. Around 8000 BC there was a very gradual warming, and this resulted in changes in flora and fauna that some
times set these small groups of people on the move in search of their traditional prey, and sometimes encouraged a search for alternative types of food, especially that provided by the sea. The sea gradually rose, by as much as 120 metres, as the ice caps melted. The contours of the modern Mediterranean become more recognizable as isthmuses turned into islands and sea coasts retreated to roughly their current position; but all this was too slow a process to be readily visible.5
There was little social differentiation within these wandering bands of people, travelling in search of food, arriving at convenient hilltops and bays, moving from settlement to settlement, zigzagging back and forth. But as groups became familiar with particular areas, they adapted their diet and customs to that area. Possibly, as they buried their dead and decorated the caves, they acquired a real sense of attachment to the land. Occasionally stone tools passed from hand to hand and moved between communities, or were acquired in skirmishes between tribes. In essence, though, they were self-sufficient, relying on what the sea and land offered in wild animals, fish and berries. Although the human population remained tiny, maybe a few thousand in the whole of Sicily at any one time, the effect on the animal stock of climatic change and of human intervention was increasingly severe; larger animals began to disappear, notably the wild horses which had arrived before the humans arrived, when Sicily was still linked physically to Italy; these horses were recorded in the Levanzo cave drawings and provided massive feasts.
During the transitional period to about 5000 BC known as the Mesolithic (‘Middle Stone Age’), when tools became steadily more refined but animal husbandry, ceramics or the cultivation of grain had yet to emerge, the diet of prehistoric Sicilians shifted towards products of the sea, from which they fished sea-bream and grouper; large numbers of mollusc shells have been found on archaeological sites, some incised and decorated with red ochre. By 6400 BC, in what would become Tunisia, the ‘Capsian culture’ emerged, which was heavily dependent on shellfish and has left large mounds or middens along the coast.6 Further east, in the Aegean, Upper Palaeolithic and Mesolithic seafarers made their way occasionally along the island chain of the Cyclades to Melos, collecting its obsidian and transporting it back to cave sites on the Greek mainland such as the cave at Franchthi, 120 kilometres from Melos; their boats were probably manufactured from reeds, which could be shaped and cut using the small sharp-edged stones, or microliths, that they had developed. Since sea levels were still rising, the distance between islands was shorter than now.7 Mesolithic Sicily also knew obsidian, which was obtained from the volcanic Lipari islands off Sicily’s north-east shore. Movement across the open sea had begun. It was local; it was spasmodic; but it was deliberate: the aim was to collect precious materials in order to make superior tools. This was not ‘trade’; there was probably no one living permanently on either Melos or Lipari, and even had there been, the settlers would not have expressed a proprietary right to the volcanic glass that lay about the islands. Those on Sicily or in Greece who acquired pieces of obsidian did not manufacture blades in order to send them inland to neighbouring communities. Autarchy was the rule. It is necessary to take a leap forward into the Neolithic period in order to find regular evidence for purposeful travel in search of desired products, in an age when societies were becoming more hierarchical and complex and the relationship between mankind and the land was changing in revolutionary ways.
II
The ‘Neolithic Revolution’, which eventually encompassed all human communities across the globe, was really a series of independent discoveries of how to control food resources, from about 10,000 BC onwards. The taming of cattle, sheep, goats and pigs provided a consistent source of meat, milk, bone for tools, and in due course fibres for cloth; the realization that crops could be selected and sown in seasonal cycles resulted in the cultivation of various types of wheat, starting with semi-wild emmers, and culminating in the production (in the Mediterranean) of early wheat and barley. The earliest ceramics, at first moulded rather than wheel-thrown, began to be used as food containers; tools were still made of flint, obsidian and quartzes, but they became smaller and more specialized, a trend which was already visible by the Mesolithic period; this speaks for growing specialization, including a caste of skilled toolmakers whose training in what seems a deceptively simple craft was no doubt as long and as complex as that of a sushi chef. Neolithic societies were perfectly capable of creating complex, hierarchical political institutions such as monarchy, and of dividing society into castes defined by status and labour.
Concentrated settlements developed, permanent, walled, dependent on local supplies but also on goods brought across distances: the first, around 8000 BC, was Jericho, with about 2,000 inhabitants in the early eighth millennium; its obsidian was Anatolian rather than Mediterranean. From around 10,000 BC, the inhabitants of Eynan (Ayn Mallaha) in what is now northern Israel cultivated crops, ground flour and also had the time and inclination to produce schematic but elegant human portraits carved on stone. As the population of the eastern Mediterranean grew, fattening on the new sources of food, competition for resources led to more frequent conflict between communities, so that weaponry was used increasingly against fellow-humans rather than animal prey.8 Conflicts generated migrations; folk from Anatolia or Syria moved towards Cyprus and Crete. By 5600 BC a community of several thousand people had settled in Cyprus, at Khirokitia, making pots not from clay but from carved stone; these first Cypriots imported some obsidian, but they mainly concentrated on their fields and flocks. They built houses out of mud-brick, on stone foundations, with bedrooms on a first-floor gallery, and the graves of their ancestors under the hut floor. Less impressive was the first Neolithic settlement in Crete, at Knossos, dating to around 7000 BC; but it marked the beginning of the process of intensive settlement of the island which would dominate the eastern Mediterranean in the Bronze Age. The inhabitants arrived already equipped with seed grain and animals, from the coast of Asia Minor, for the animals they raised had no wild cousins on Crete itself. They grew wheat, barley and lentils. Pottery was a skill they did not develop for about half a millennium; weaving was practised by the first half of the fifth millennium. The lack of pottery suggests an isolated community which did not copy the methods of its neighbours further east; obsidian arrived from Melos, which lay not far to the north-west. Generally, though, the Cretans looked away from the sea: the relatively few sea shells that have been discovered in the lowest stratum of Knossos show water wear, indicating that they had been collected for decorative use long after the molluscs they once contained had died.9 But external contacts started to transform the lives of early Cretans. When pottery began to be produced, around 6500 BC, it was of a dark, burnished variety that has some similarities to Anatolian styles of the period; the craft does not seem to have developed gradually, but to have been imported wholesale. During later Neolithic phases, further settlements emerged in other parts of the island, such as Phaistos in the south; but the process took 3,000 years, during which Crete turned increasingly outwards to the sea. The extraordinary civilization that eventually emerged in Crete can best be understood as an interplay between a slowly evolving native culture with a powerful local identity and growing contacts with the outside world which provided new technology and models, idiosyncratically adapted by the Cretans to meet their own uses.
Querns and mortars had to be fashioned; stone foundations were built for houses which now became permanent dwelling-places; potters needed equipment for moulding and firing their vessels. Specialization increased the demand for specific types of tool, and demand for obsidian grew. Its attractions were many, and compensated for the trouble involved in acquiring it: it was easy to flake, and the edges were exceedingly sharp. The obsidian quarries of Melos, which were exploited for about 12,000 years, reached their peak of popularity in the early Bronze Age, when one might expect metal tools to have become more fashionable. But obsidian was appreciated precisely because of its low value: in the early Bronze Age, metals we
re scarce and the technology to produce copper and bronze was not widely available, and difficult to set in place. Even allowing for increased specialization within Neolithic villages, quarrying on Melos long remained casual and lacked any commercial character. Although a settlement developed on the island, at Phylakopi, it emerged when the extraction of obsidian was already long established, and flourished just as the obsidian quarries began to decline; the first settlers were not obsidian merchants but tuna fishermen.10 Melos offered no special port: those in search of obsidian found a suitable cove, beached their vessel, and came to the quarries, where they hacked off pieces of the volcanic glass.