The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean

by David Abulafia

  56. Andrea Doria came from one of the most eminent Genoese families. He entered the service of the king of France but then abandoned him in 1528 for Charles V. He was a tough rival to Hayrettin Barbarossa and scored significant victories, such as the recovery of Coron in southern Greece in 1532.

  57. Hayrettin commanded an Ottoman fleet sent to Tunis after a succession struggle broke out in 1534. Charles V intervened and recaptured Tunis in 1535; the Spaniards built a fort in the Lac de Tunis near Goleta that still stands. This cartoon for a series of tapestries shows the Spanish capture of Goleta.

  58. About 150,000 Spaniards of Muslim descent, the Moriscos, were expelled between 1609 and 1614, even though some protested that they were devout Christians. This painting shows their departure by sea from Vinaròs, a flourishing port north of Valencia City.

  59. Venetian painting recording the victory of a small Venetian squadron over seventeen Turkish ships off Crete in May 1661. By this time the Venetians had lost the second and third cities of Crete and were holding on to Candia (Heraklion) by their fingernails; they lost the island in 1669.

  60. French assault on Mahón in British-held Minorca, 1756. St Philip’s Fort, guarding the entrance to the largest natural harbour in the Mediterranean, can be seen in the foreground. France saw the British presence close to Toulon as a direct threat to its Mediterranean fleet.

  61. The execution of Admiral Byng on 14 March 1757 on the quarterdeck of HMS Monarch. Byng was the scapegoat for the British government and Admiralty, which had sent him on an impossible mission to relieve Minorca with inadequate numbers of ships and men. As Voltaire famously said, he was executed pour encourager les autres.

  62. Admiral Fyodor Ushakov (1744–1817), commander of the Russian fleet in the Mediterranean, who captured the Ionian islands from France. In 2000 he became the patron saint of the Russian navy.

  63. Viscount Hood, commander of the British fleet in the Mediterranean from 1793. Like Nelson, he was the son of a clergyman. Under his command the British occupied Toulon and brought Corsica under the British Crown.

  64. The German nobleman Ferdinand von Hompesch was the last Grand Master of the Sovereign Military Order of Malta, or Knights of St John, to rule Malta. Elected in July 1797, his rule lasted only a year before Napoleon seized the island.

  65. Stephen Decatur was the first American naval hero, and his name is still borne by US warships. In 1803 and 1804 he led celebrated attacks on Tripoli harbour in Libya; his acts of bravery symbolized the victory of American courage over the brute strength of the Barbary pirates.

  66. Port Said was a new town built to service the Suez Canal. In this photograph from 1880 ships wait to enter the Canal. The ship at centre left is an ironclad vessel combining sail and steam power.

  67. Trieste, with its mixed population of German-speakers, Italian-speakers and Slavspeakers, of Christians and Jews, gave the Austro-Hungarian empire access to the Mediterranean. This photograph of around 1890 shows the quayside belonging to Austrian Lloyd, the city’s most important navigation company, whose leading shareholders were drawn from a variety of ethnic backgrounds.

  68. The Grand Square, also known as Place Mehmet Ali, in Alexandria in the 1910s. The square neatly expressed the wish to make Alexandria into a European city perched next to Africa. Here stood the multinational court that dealt with commercial cases, and here Colonel Nasser delivered a rousing speech in 1956 announcing the nationalization of the Suez Canal.

  69. Italian attempts to portray the occupation of Turkish Libya as part of a European civilizing mission were reinforced by illustrations such as this one from a French magazine of October 1911. The mere presence of Italian officers, inspired by the goddess bearing the flame of liberty, is sufficient to scare away the cowardly and primitive natives.

  70. The refusal of the French navy to join the British fleet or to withdraw to neutral waters led Churchill to authorize the attack on the French warships moored at Mers el-Kebir in October 1940. Resentment at British actions not only led to a final break in diplomatic relations but soured relations between the defeated French and Great Britain throughout much of the Second World War.

  71. In July 1943 British troops landed in Sicily in the first stage of a campaign that would take Allied armies slowly up the Italian peninsula. Feint attacks on Sardinia had led the Germans to imagine that it rather than Sicily was the intended target.

  72. Ship carrying 4,500 Jewish refugees from central and eastern Europe, seen docking at Haifa on 7 October 1947 after its seizure by the British authorities. Many of those attempting to reach Palestine were sent to camps in Cyprus.

  73. Charles de Gaulle, having led Free French forces during the Second World War, seized power in 1958 as the Third Republic grappled with the problem of French rule over Algeria, which he initially promised to maintain. Here he is seen visiting Algeria in June 1958, to the delight of the French settlers.

  74. From the 1960s onwards, Spain exploited the rise of the package holiday and then came to regret some of its effects: concrete hotels, restaurants and bars on the Costas, along with impossibly crowded beaches, such as this one at Lloret de Mar in Catalonia. Similar scenes now regularly appear in parts of France, Italy, Greece, Cyprus and Israel.

  75. By the end of the twentieth century the Mediterranean lands of the European Union had become a tightly guarded frontier across which the movement of migrants from Africa and Asia was strictly controlled. Here a group of migrants from Africa is trying to land on Spanish soil near the Straits of Gibraltar.

  Conclusion: Crossing the Sea

  It is tempting to try to reduce the history of the Mediterranean to a few common features, to attempt to define a ‘Mediterranean identity’ or to insist that certain physical features of the region have moulded human experience there (as Braudel strongly argued).1 Yet this search for a fundamental unity starts from a misunderstanding of what the Mediterranean has meant for the peoples who have inhabited its shores and islands, or have crossed its surface. Rather than searching for unity, we should note diversity. At the human level, this ethnic, linguistic, religious and political diversity was constantly subject to external influences from across the sea, and therefore in a constant state of flux. From the earliest chapters of this book, where the first settlers in Sicily were described, to the ribbon developments along the Spanish costas, the edges of the Mediterranean Sea have provided meeting-points for peoples of the most varied backgrounds who have exploited its resources and learned, in some cases, to make a living from transferring its products from better-endowed to ill-endowed regions. From within its waters came fish and salt, two ingredients of the much-traded garum sauce of ancient Rome, and the basis for the early prosperity of one of the greatest of Mediterranean cities, Venice. As predicted in the preface, fishermen have not featured prominently in this book, in part because the evidence they have left behind is often very slight, but in part too because fishermen seek what is by definition under the surface of the sea and are less likely to make contact with communities on the opposing shores of the Mediterranean. The great exceptions are within the narrows near Malta, where the Genoese established a colony at Tabarka on the coast of Tunisia between 1540 and 1742 specializing in coral-fishing, and where Tunisian fishermen have now joined Sicilian fleets in the matanza, the great seasonal slaughter of tuna. Even more than fish, which keeps well only after salting or drying, grain has long been the major product carried across the sea, originally grown around its shores or brought down from the Black Sea, but, by the seventeenth century, increasingly of north European origin. Access to supplies of vital foodstuffs and other primary materials enabled cities to grow, whether Corinth, Athens or Rome in antiquity, or Genoa, Venice and Barcelona in the Middle Ages. For these cities and many others, denial of access to basic supplies by one’s enemies meant strangulation. Less glamorous than the famous and better documented spice trade, the trade in wheat, wood and wool provided a sure foundation on which it was then possible to build commerce in silk, g
old and pepper, items often produced far from the shores of the Mediterranean itself. The struggle for access to all these commodities set off bloody conflicts between rivals, while the more the Mediterranean was criss-crossed by ships full of rich cargoes, the more these vessels were likely to be preyed upon by pirates, whether ancient Etruscans or early modern Barbary corsairs and Uskoks.

  Keeping the sea safe was thus an important function of governments. It could be achieved the Roman way, by actively suppressing pirates in a series of vigorous campaigns, and then policing the sea; or, in times when no one was master of great tracts of the sea, merchant fleets could demand the protection of armed convoys, such as the Venetian muda. Pirate states in Barbary and elsewhere could be the object of eager negotiation, in the hope of securing guarantees for the safety of those with whom the ruler had treaties, or they could be confronted aggressively, as the Americans successfully chose to do at the start of the nineteenth century. There were bigger dangers to shipping as well, when great land empires reached the shores of the Mediterranean and began to interfere with movement across its surface: the Persians in antiquity, the Ottoman Turks from the late fourteenth century onwards, and (though attempts to acquire permanent bases failed) the Russians in the eighteenth century. Perhaps the most extraordinary case of imperial expansion within the Mediterranean is that of Great Britain, a kingdom with no Mediterranean shores, which, thanks to its acquisitions stretching from Gibraltar to Suez, managed to exercise a degree of control that aroused the ire and envy of powers whose lands actually bordered the Mediterranean, notably France. This book has been a history of conflict as well as contact.

  Control of the Mediterranean must be understood as control of the key routes across the sea. To achieve this, it was essential to establish bases from which ships could be supplied with fresh food and water, and from which patrols could be sent out against pirates and other interlopers. Thus from very early times settlements on offshore islands provided merchants with vital staging-posts as they ventured deeper into Mediterranean waters. Equally, loss of control of the shoreline could mean loss of access to timber and other materials essential for the building of a war fleet or merchant navy, as the rulers of Egypt were apt to find. Maintaining control of sea-lanes was especially difficult when competing powers dominated the shores and islands of the Mediterranean. Under Rome, a single political dominion created a single economic zone. But it was a unique occurrence.

  The history of the Mediterranean is also the story of the port cities of very varied political loyalties in which merchants and settlers from all over the sea and far beyond gathered and interacted. One port city that has featured again and again in these chapters is Alexandria, which from the very start possessed a mixed identity, and which only lost that identity in the second half of the twentieth century, as rising nationalism destroyed the cosmopolitan communities of the Mediterranean. These port cities acted as vectors for the transmission of ideas, including religious beliefs, bringing Greek gods to Etruscan Tarquinia, and much later acting as focal points for the spread of proselytizing Judaism, Christianity and Islam, each of which left an extraordinarily powerful imprint on the societies of the lands around the Mediterranean.

  Those individuals who transformed the Mediterranean world were sometimes visionaries, such as Alexander the Great or St Paul, to cite two very different cases. It is noticeable that they always seem to be men. At a time when gender has become the focus of so much historical debate, one might ask: how male is the Mediterranean? Sedentary merchants might be women, as among the Jews of eleventh-century Egypt and the Christians of twelfth-century Genoa. In that era, at least, wives did not accompany their husbands on trading expeditions, let alone travel for trade in their own right, though attitudes to participation in business varied between Jews, Christians and Muslims. A few European women could be found in the Genoese trading colony in late thirteenth-century Tunis, mainly offering sexual services to the Christian business community. Female participation in naval warfare, a twenty-first-century phenomenon, has not been tested within the Mediterranean. But among migrants, whether the Alans and Vandals invading Africa at the time of St Augustine, or the Sephardim expelled from Spain in 1492, there was often, though not invariably, a large female component – even the armies of the early crusades were accompanied by both noblewomen and bands of prostitutes. Female pilgrims appear in the record as early as the first decades of the Christian Roman Empire: a fragment from the late fourth-century records the travels of the intrepid Egeria (or Aetheria) from either Gaul or northern Spain to the Holy Land. It is less clear whether the Bronze Age raiders known as the Sea Peoples came accompanied by women to the lands in Syria, Palestine and elsewhere that they settled; indeed, a likely explanation for the rapid abandonment of their Aegean culture by the early Philistines is that they intermarried with the Canaanites, adopted their gods and learned their language. Yet one group of women has a particular importance for the history of the Mediterranean: female slaves, whose fortune varied enormously, from the extraordinary power it might be possible to exercise within an Ottoman harem to the sad exploitation and debasement of those used for sexual purposes or assigned lowly work in the villas of prosperous Romans. During the Middle Ages, many of these slaves, both male and female, were brought out of the Black Sea, but those who inhabited the shores of the Mediterranean in the age of the Barbary corsairs (and at many other periods) also knew the horror of raiding parties that picked people off the shore – Christians off the coasts of Italy, France and Spain, Muslims off the coasts of Morocco, Algeria and Tunisia. When King Francis I of France permitted the Turks to visit Marseilles and occupy Toulon in 1543, they kidnapped the nuns of Antibes, among other victims. Still, the relative maleness of the traversed Mediterranean is something to ponder – the Italians seem to be right to say il mare, as opposed to the French la mer or indeed the neutral Latin mare; and the principal Greek, Etruscan and Roman sea gods – Poseidon, Fufluns and Neptune – were male.

  Among all those who traversed the Mediterranean, merchants generally reveal most, for several reasons. One is simply that ever since Phoenician merchants spread the art of alphabetic writing across the Mediterranean, traders have been anxious to record their transactions; we therefore know a great deal about them, whether in Roman Puteoli, near Naples, in medieval Genoa and Venice, or modern Smyrna and Livorno. But the merchant pioneer is almost by definition an outsider, someone who crosses cultural and physical boundaries, encountering new gods, hearing different languages, and finding himself (much more rarely, herself) exposed to the sharp criticisms of the inhabitants of the places he visits in search of goods unavailable at home. This ambiguous image of the merchant as a desirable outsider is there in our earliest sources. It has been seen that Homer was uneasy about merchants, showing contempt for mere traders of Phoenicia, and suggesting that they were deceitful and unheroic, despite glorying, paradoxically, in the trickery of Odysseus; the somewhat hypocritical sense that trade dirtied one’s hands remained strong among patrician readers of Homer in ancient Rome. It was the Phoenicians, however, who ventured as far as southern Spain, establishing colonies side-by-side with but often apart from the native populations of the western Mediterranean – typically on offshore islands that were easy to guard, for one never knew how long relations with neighbouring peoples would remain warm. Then, as the Phoenician colony at Carthage became an economic and political power in its own right, this booming city became the hub of new networks of communication, a cosmopolitan meeting-point between Levantine and North African cultures, a place where divergent cultures fused and a new identity may be said to have emerged, even if the city elite continued to describe themselves as ‘people of Tyre’. Greek culture too gained a purchase in Carthage, whose citizens identified the Phoenician god Melqart with Herakles. Gods and goddesses as well as merchants criss-crossed the ancient Mediterranean. Additionally, the presence on the shores of Italy of Phoenicians and Greeks, individuals with a distinct cultural identity, a
cted as a yeast that transformed the villages of rural Etruria into cities whose richer inhabitants possessed an insatiable hunger for the foreign: for Greek vases, Phoenician silver bowls, Sardinian bronze figurines. Alongside merchants who came for the metals of Italy, we can soon detect artisans who travelled west to settle in the lands of the barbaroi, knowing that their skills would probably earn them greater esteem than at home, where each was one of many.

  There are striking parallels in later centuries. Alien traders are an obvious feature of the medieval Mediterranean, where we have the intriguing phenomenon of the ghettoized merchant visiting Islamic or Byzantine territory, enclosed in an inn or fonduk that also functioned as a warehouse, chapel, bakehouse and bath-house, with one inn for each major ‘nation’: Genoese, Venetian, Catalan and so on. The sense that the merchant might be a source of religious contamination and political subversion led the rulers of Egypt to lock the doors of these inns at night-time (the keys being held by Muslims on the outside). This only enhanced the solidarity and sense of community that held these merchants together, while underlining the differences between the various groups of Italians and Catalans, who coexisted in a rivalry Muslim emirs proved adept at exploiting. The Byzantines too set the Italian merchants apart in a walled compound during the twelfth century, feeding xenophobia in their capital city, with the ugly consequences of anti-Latin pogroms. The idea of enclosing distinct communities behind walls was not, then, particularly novel when the king of Aragon first segregated the Majorcan Jews around 1300, and was quite venerable by the time the government of Venice enclosed the Jews in the ghetto nuovo in 1516; these merchant communities provided a useful model for the ghetto. The enclosed areas, whether of Jews or of European merchants, were places where a certain amount of privilege – self-government, freedom to practise one’s religion, tax exemptions – was counter-balanced by constraint – limitations on free movement and reliance on often capricious public authorities for protection.