The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean

by David Abulafia

  There was another side to Trieste that was distinctive. Aware of the success of Livorno, Charles VI created an enclave in which buinessmen of all faiths could settle and prosper. After Joseph II proclaimed his Edicts of Toleration in the 1780s, the Jews and other ethnic groups were guaranteed their security.30 The ghetto of Trieste, squeezed on to the hillside beneath the castle, was abolished in 1785. One Jewish writer, Elia Morpurgo, who was also a silk producer, praised Maria Theresa as the ‘woman of valour’ described in the Book of Proverbs, for she had caused commerce to flourish to the advantage of her subjects: ‘open ports, roads made short, convenient and easy, the flag at sea respected and secure’. The other religious groups to be found in Trieste included Armenians, Greek Orthodox, Lutherans, Calvinists, Serbian Orthodox. Each group was organized as a nazione which was expected to consider the well-being of the city before admitting more settlers, who should be economically useful, not vagabonds. Behind the religious labels could be found any number of ethnic groups, notably Slovenes and Croats from close by, but also German, Dutch, English, Albanian and Turkish migrants or visitors, a guazzabuglia, or disordered mix of peoples and tongues, though the languages that dominated public life were Italian and German.31

  The city of Italo Svevo is particularly famous for its Jewish community, which was well integrated into local society by the 1830s, while it retained its own schools and institutions. Indeed, the rabbis became very exercised about standards of religious observance, whether breaches of the Sabbath or a casual attitude to the Jewish dietary laws.32 The Jewish population grew substantially, from just over 100 in 1735, when the town had a total population of fewer than 4,000, to 2,400 in 1818, when Trieste had grown to contain over 33,000 inhabitants. Freer from restrictions than elsewhere in the Habsburg dominions, the Jews of Trieste played a significant role in the economic development of the city. Theory as well as practice appealed to them – G. V. Bolaffio wrote a book about currency exchange, and Samuel Vital wrote about insurance, while in later decades Triestino Jews were prominent in the development of the study of accounting, economics and commercial law. Jews also took an active part in the Borsa, or Stock Exchange, and were involved in the foundation of Austrian Lloyd: the founders included the Jews Rodrigues da Costa and Kohen, the Greek Apostopoulo, the Slav Vučetić, the Rhinelander Bruck and the Ligurian Sartorio, the last two of whom pleased the monarchy so much that they were ennobled.33 This mixing of peoples provided a cultural stimulus as well. By the end of the century Trieste was famous for its literary cafés, beginning with the Caffé degli Specchi, ‘of the mirrors’, founded in 1837, and intellectual and political life at the end of the nineteenth century was dominated by the question whether Trieste belonged in Italy or Austria, quite apart from the presence within the city of an increasingly self-conscious Slovene population.34

  Viewed from Vienna, another city where many peoples managed to coexist in varying degrees of tension, Trieste appeared the ideal gateway to the East. The thirty years after 1830 saw a gradual expansion of business through its port: the tonnage of imports more than doubled, while the number of steamships began to increase at the expense of sailing vessels, showing that steamships gradually found space for merchandise. In 1852 nearly 80 per cent of goods arrived on sailing ships, but by 1857 only about two-thirds did so. The major trading partner of Trieste was the Ottoman Empire, accounting for around one third of exports in the 1860s, but the United States, Brazil, Egypt, England, Greece all enjoyed regular contact with Trieste; its shipping took third place after Great Britain and France in the commerce of Alexandria, ahead of Turkey and Italy, nor did this business slacken in the late nineteenth century. The range of goods is also impressive, though most were simply forwarded to Vienna and the Habsburg heartlands: coffee, tea and cocoa, large quantities of pepper, rice and cotton.35 Between the year the canal opened and 1899, the quantity of goods transported almost quadrupled.36

  The history of Trieste and of Austrian Lloyd reveals the opportunities and frustrations faced by those seeking to exploit the new conditions in the Mediterranean during the nineteenth century. Mediterranean navigation had changed beyond recognition: the Great Sea was now a passage-way to the Indian Ocean, and making the passage was an entirely different experience from anything in past times; information shuttled back and forth as the mail networks developed; there was a greater degree of peace and safety than at any time since the heyday of the Roman Empire. Yet it was not the Austrians, nor the Turks, nor even the French, who dominated the Mediterranean, but imperial Britain.

  2

  The Greek and the unGreek,

  1830–1920

  I

  An important feature of the Fifth Mediterranean was the discovery of the First Mediterranean, and the rediscovery of the Second. The Greek world came to encompass Bronze Age heroes riding the chariots described by Homer, and the Roman world was found to have deep roots among the little-known Etruscans. Thus, during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries entirely new perspectives on the history of the Mediterranean were opened up. An early lead was given by the growth of interest in ancient Egypt, discussed in the previous chapter, though that was closely linked to traditional biblical studies as well. In the eighteenth century, the Grand Tour introduced well-heeled travellers from northern Europe to classical remains in Rome and Sicily, and Englishmen saw it as an attractive alternative to time spent at Oxford or Cambridge, where those who paid any attention to their studies were more likely to be immersed in ancient texts than in ancient objects.1 On the other hand, aesthetic appreciation of ancient works of art was renewed in the late eighteenth century, as the German art historian Winckelmann began to impart a love for the forms of Greek art, arguing that the Greeks dedicated themselves to the representation of beauty (as the Romans failed to do). His History of Art in Antiquity was published in German in 1764 and in French very soon afterwards, and was enormously influential.

  In the next few decades, discoveries at Pompeii and Herculaneum, in which Nelson’s cuckolded host, Sir William Hamilton, was closely involved, and then in Etruria, further enlarged northern European interest in ancient art, providing interior designers with rich patterns, and collectors with vast amounts of loot – ‘Etruscan vases’, nearly all in reality Greek, were shipped out of Italy as the Etruscan tombs began to be opened up. In Greece, it was necessary to purchase the consent of Ottoman officials before excavating and exporting what was found; the most famous case, that of the Parthenon marbles at the start of the nineteenth century, was succeeded by other acquisitions for northern museums: the Pergamon altar was sent to Berlin, the facings of the Treasury of Atreus from Mycenae were sent to the British Museum, and so on. The survival of so many sculptures of naked men and women aroused aesthetic and, not surprisingly, erotic passions. It became possible to make proxy visits to the ancient sites of the Mediterranean by wandering through the great museums of England, France and Germany, where the ancient collections were suffused with the principles of Winckelmann: to understand classical art, it was vital to appreciate its beauty.2 The Mediterranean world was also imported into northern Europe by way of the imaginative reconstructions of the classical past painted by artists such as Lawrence Alma-Tadema and J. W. Waterhouse in England. Alma-Tadema’s almost photographic attention to carefully researched detail made him extremely popular, as, undoubtedly, did the inclusion of naked young women in several of his canvases.3

  It was not considered important to tread the soil of ancient Hellas. The legends of Troy were myths about nonexistent gods and heroes, but romantic assumptions about Greece and the Greeks gained strength as the Greeks emancipated themselves from Ottoman rule. The most famous exponent of this romantic view was Lord Byron, who died of fever in 1824 in Greece while campaigning against the Turks. He had been fully exposed to the classical past a decade earlier, while he was engaged on a Grand Tour that encompassed much of the northern Mediterranean – Italy, Albania, Greece. Yet it would be hard to argue that his interest in Greece was moti
vated by a profound attachment to its classical past, rather than a romantic belief in liberty. Indeed, the British could be quite unromantic about Greece. Between 1848 and 1850 Lord Palmerston, who had favoured Greek independence, unleashed his fury on the Greek government after it failed to compensate a Gibraltarian Jew, Don Pacifico, for damage done to his property by a rioting mob. The Royal Navy blockaded Athens until the Greeks gave way, to the fury of the French and the Russians, who, with Great Britain, were the co-guarantors of Greek independence. But Palmerston knew best, resoundingly appealing to the classics against, not in favour of, the behaviour of the Greeks:

  As the Roman, in days of old, held himself free from indignity, when he could say, civis Romanus sum, so also a British subject, in whatever land he may be, shall feel confident that the watchful eye and the strong arm of England will protect him from injustice and wrong.

  Something of the spirit of ancient Hellas could be assumed to have persisted in the Greek love of liberty, but it was not easy to see the descendants of Perikles and Plato in the Greeks of the early nineteenth century. And if one wanted true Romans, one needed only to turn to the British.

  II

  There were a few who believed literally in the tales of Troy. The discovery of the civilizations of the Aegean Bronze Age began, as has been seen, with the literalist obsessions of Heinrich Schliemann, who first visited Troy in 1868 and who, five years later, unearthed what he declared to be the ‘Treasure of Priam’. At a time when the principles of stratigraphy and dating were still undeveloped, Schliemann happily applied instinct in the identification of whatever he found. Passing through Ithaka, he pulled out of the ground a score of ancient urns; the problem was not whether they were the urns of Odysseus’ family, but which member’s ashes lay in which urn.4 In 1876 he was already digging at Mycenae, which was easier to identify than Troy, for the Lion Gate had remained partially visible over the millennia. There, predictably, he found the tombs of Agamemnon and family. He was more interested in validating Homer than in the political implications of his discoveries, but racial theorists soon began to capitalize on his revelations, arguing that the founders of the first Greek civilization, and therefore of high European culture, had been blond, blue-eyed Aryans.5 In scholarly circles, though, it took a long while – eighty years – to convince anyone that the Mycenaeans were closely related to later Greeks and even spoke an early form of Greek. And here the arguments turned on the peculiar scripts that excavators began to find in Greece and Crete: it was tiny hieroglyphs to which his short-sighted eyes were well suited that drew Sir Arthur Evans to Crete, and led him to uncover and, no less importantly, reconstruct what he called the ‘palace of Minos at Knossos’.

  Evans’s career in Crete is best understood against the background of political and social changes that were taking place on the island at the end of the nineteenth and start of the twentieth centuries. By 1900 around 30 per cent of Cretans were Muslim, mostly Greek-speaking and of Greek descent. The Muslims included the major landholders and a high proportion of merchants, and the Muslim population was concentrated in the towns, while the Christians were traditionally scattered in the countryside.6 The winning of independence by the Greeks of the mainland raised hopes among Christian Cretans that they would be able to enter the new kingdom. Their aim was enôsis, ‘union’; and following a Greek rebellion against the Ottomans in 1821, which lasted a good nine years, trouble simmered in Crete throughout the century. Greek historians note the ruthless reprisals of the Turks, though neither side had clean hands – at the end of the century the Muslims of eastern Crete suffered horribly. The European powers recognized that Crete could not simply be added to the Greek kingdom; with Turkish consent, it was conferred on Muhammad Ali, and for ten years from 1830 the island was governed from Egypt. A committee of Greeks offered the island to Great Britain, which had no interest in governing Crete or in upsetting the eastern Mediterranean apple-cart.7 The Ottomans were perfectly aware of the need to compromise, and permitted the Cretans ever greater autonomy from 1868 onwards, though this did not satisfy the advocates of enôsis, and by 1897 they were recruiting volunteers to their cause from as far away as Scandinavia, Britain and Russia.

  In 1898 the war-torn island was finally granted complete autonomy under a High Commissioner, Prince George of Greece, under French, Italian and British protection, but the sultan in Constantinople remained the nominal suzerain, for he simply would not let go of his lands, still less when the beneficiaries would mainly be Greek Christians. The island government, on which both communities were represented, tried with all its energy to stimulate the economy, but many Muslims left Crete now peace had come, and many had already fled while civil war was being waged. Reconstructing the economy was understood to involve a reconstruction of Cretan identity as well. In 1898 Arthur Evans required plenty of hands to help him excavate Knossos, and among its first acts the Cretan government obligingly passed a series of laws encouraging foreign archaeological projects and even permitting the export of artefacts.8 The Cretans saw this as a public relations exercise, a chance to make Crete’s presence known through revealing its past in the museums of the protecting powers.

  Here was an island in search of peace, and, as his diggers exposed Knossos, Evans conjured up an image of a peaceful Crete in his attempt to interpret the puzzling ruins that he found. Evans’s Crete was a kingdom ruled by someone he assumed to be named Minos. His interpretation reflected his sincere wishes for the future of Crete as much as his assumptions about its past; he viewed Minoan Crete as a gentle, nature-loving matriarchal society, in which even the king’s male courtiers became feminized: dedicated followers of fashion whose delight, like that of the court women, was in pirouetting on the great ‘Dancing Floor’ he had identified. He made his workmen dance for him in an attempt to recover the magic of Minoan Crete.9 Out of small fragments of Minoan frescoes big, bold paintings of peace-loving princes and chattering court ladies were reconstructed. The reconstructed palace at Knossos, which owed so much to his fertile imagination, was thus a modernist temple of peace.

  III

  Cyprus, whose history in many respects mirrored that of Crete, was another island where the Turks found themselves under increasing pressure, although the Muslim proportion of the population remained a little lower. There, events within mainland Greece had a great impact: from 1821 onwards the Greek Cypriots became restive, and the Turkish governor prohibited non-Muslims from carrying arms. Up to 25,000 Cypriots left for Greece in the 1830s, aiming to acquire Greek citizenship before returning to the island as subjects of the Greek king, which brought them the protection of the British, Russian and French consuls as guarantors of Greek independence, to the irritation of the Ottoman authorities.10 Even so, the sense of ‘Greekness’ of the Orthodox majority on Cyprus should not be exaggerated: ideas of union with a Greek motherland were generated more in Greece than in Cyprus, where for long periods inter-community relations had been quite peaceful. The British consulate in Cyprus cooperated with the Turkish authorities to ensure that Greek advocates of enôsis were kept under control: in 1854 the British vice-consul supplied the governor with information about a treasonable pamphlet attributed to the principal of the Greek high school in Nicosia. The warm ties between the vice-consul and the governor were also expressed in an invitation from the governor to a party in honour of his son’s circumcision in 1864: ‘I beg to invite you for the whole duration of the festival, which will begin on Monday and continue until Thursday, and also to dinner on the four days.’11 Given its position between Anatolia, Syria and Egypt, the value of Cyprus was primarily strategic. It produced a surplus of some basic agricultural goods such as barley, exported to Syria, and carob, exported to Alexandria, but the standard of living was not high, and – to cite a late eighteenth-century visitor – ‘imports were of very small consequence, because Cyprus imported just enough for the wants of its own scanty inhabitants’: some fine cloths, tin, iron, pepper and dyestuffs.12 By the late nineteenth century dyes
were put to good use in local industry: white English calico cloths were brought across from Beirut and dyed in local workshops, and quite an active silk industry developed. But Cyprus formed part of a local, eastern Mediterranean, network, and its international connections were rather limited.13 However, with the growth in interest in antiquities, a new and largely illicit trade out of Cyprus began to grow. Between 1865 and 1875, the American consul, General Louis Palma di Cesnola, was one of the most assiduous collectors of what he called ‘my treasures’; much of his plunder from the magnificent site at Kourion reached the Metropolitan Museum in New York.14