The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean

by David Abulafia

  To speak of the Jews is to speak of traders who had an unusual ability to cross the boundaries between cultures, whether in the early days of Islam, during the period of ascendancy of the Genizah Jews from Cairo, with their trans- and ultra-Mediterranean connections, or in the period of Catalan commercial expansion, when they could exploit their family and business ties to their co-religionists and penetrate deep into the Sahara in search of gold, ostrich feathers and other African products that were beyond the reach of their Christian compatriots still stuck within their trading compounds. The prominence and mobility of a minority group is intriguing. These Jewish merchants were able to bring back information about the world beyond the Mediterranean ports that was recorded and disseminated across Mediterranean Europe and further afield in the remarkable portolan charts and world maps produced in late medieval Majorca. As merchants moved around, so did information about the physical world.

  The concept of the Mediterranean as a ‘faithful sea’, to cite the title of a recent collection of essays, needs to take into account its role as a surface across which moved not merely poor and anonymous pilgrims but also charismatic missionaries such as Ramon Llull, who died in 1316 after writing hundreds of books and pamphlets on how to convert Muslims, Jews and Greeks to the true faith, without, it must be said, ever converting anyone.2 Yet Llull’s career is a reminder that religious friction and confrontation are only part of the picture. He imitated Sufi verses and hobnobbed with kabbalists; he was at once a keen missionary and an exponent of old-fashioned Iberian convivencia, recognizing the God of the three Abrahamic religions as the same single God. A different sort of convivencia existed in the minds of members of the religious communities that were expelled or forced to convert as Spain asserted its Catholic identity in 1492 and afterwards: the Marranos and Moriscos, Jews and Muslims who might or might not adhere to their ancestral religion in private, while being expected to practise the Catholic faith in public. The ascendancy of the Sephardic merchants in the early modern Mediterranean is astonishing in any number of ways: their ability to acquire and shed different identities, as ‘Portuguese’ able to enter Iberia and as Jews resident in Livorno or Ancona – an ability to cross cultural, religious and political boundaries reminiscent of their forebears in the Cairo Genizah six centuries earlier. These multiple identities are an extreme case of a wider Mediterranean phenomenon: there were places where cultures met and mixed, but here were individuals within whom identities met and mixed, often uneasily.

  There is an understandable tendency to romanticize the Mediterranean meeting-places, and the darker reality of trans-Mediterranean contact in (say) the early modern period also needs to be born in mind: the ascendancy, between the fifteenth and the early nineteenth centuries, of the Barbary corsairs, and the close intersection between piracy and trade. Before the final suppression of the Barbary corsairs, the Mediterranean had only ever really been free of a serious threat from piracy under Roman imperial rule, as a result of Rome’s political control of more or less all its shores and islands. But piracy reveals some of the most extraordinary cases of mixed identity: corsairs from as far away as Scotland and England who, outwardly at least, accepted Islam and preyed on the shipping of the nation from which they came. This darker side of Mediterranean history also encompasses the history of those already mentioned whom the pirates carried back and forth: male and female slaves and captives, though they too, like the historian Polybios, could play a notable role in cultural contact between the opposing shores of the Mediterranean.

  The unity of Mediterranean history thus lies, paradoxically, in its swirling changeability, in the diasporas of merchants and exiles, in the people hurrying to cross its surface as quickly as possible, not seeking to linger at sea, especially in winter, when travel became dangerous, like the long-suffering pilgrims ibn Jubayr and Felix Fabri. Its opposing shores are close enough to permit easy contact, but far enough apart to allow societies to develop distinctively under the influence of their hinterland as well as of one another. Those who cross its surface are often hardly typical of the societies from which they come. If they are not outsiders when they set out, they are likely to become so when they enter different societies across the water, whether as traders, slaves or pilgrims. But their presence can have a transforming effect on these different societies, introducing something of the culture of one continent into the outer edges, at least, of another. The Mediterranean thus became probably the most vigorous place of interaction between different societies on the face of this planet, and it has played a role in the history of human civilization that has far surpassed any other expanse of sea.

  Further Reading

  A bibliography based on this book would be enormous and shapeless. This short note simply points out several works that have looked at the Mediterranean as a whole, though more often the surrounding lands than the sea itself. Peregrine Horden and Nicholas Purcell’s The Corrupting Sea: a Study of Mediterranean History (Oxford, 2000) is the first part of an ambitious and richly textured account of the localities around the Mediterranean and their interaction. Its main focus is antiquity and the early Middle Ages. A valuable set of essays edited by William Harris ponders their conclusions: Rethinking the Mediterranean (Oxford, 2005). Fernand Braudel’s The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, translated by Siân Reynolds, 2 vols. (London, 1972–3), shaped research on the Mediterranean not just in the late medieval and early modern periods for a whole generation. Braudel’s thought-world is well explained by E. Paris, La genèse intellectuelle de l’œuvre de Fernand Braudel: ‘La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II’ (1923–1947) (Athens, 1999). Further perspectives on the historiography of the Mediterranean are provided by S. Guarracino, Mediterraneo: immagini, storie e teorie da Omero a Braudel (Milan, 2007). A rich study of the economic and ecological changes in the Mediterranean between about 1350 and 1900 was provided by F. Tabak, The Waning of the Mediterranean 1550–1870: a Geohistorical Approach (Baltimore, MD, 2008) – the dates do not do justice to the timespan he covered. On the Mediterranean environment, A. Grove and O. Rackham, The Nature of Mediterranean Europe: an Ecological History (New Haven, CT, 2001) is especially worthwhile and thought-provoking. A short but important book within the Braudelian tradition is J. Pryor, Geography, Technology, and War: Studies in the Maritime History of the Mediterranean 649–1571 (Cambridge, 1988).

  Several volumes of collected essays should be added to that edited by Harris: my own The Mediterranean in History (London and New York, 2003; also French, Spanish, Turkish and Greek editions), with excellent chapters by Torelli, Balard, Greene and many others; and J. Carpentier and F. Lebrun’s Histoire de la Méditerranée (Paris, 1998), which is rather skewed towards modern times but contains some vivid source material. On the religious setting, see the essays collected by A. Husain and K. Fleming, A Faithful Sea: the Religious Cultures of the Mediterranean, 1200–1700 (Oxford, 2007). More specialized is A. Cowan, Mediterranean Urban Culture 1400–1700 (Exeter, 2000), with fine studies by Sakellariou, Arbel, Amelang and others; and Trade and Cultural Exchange in the Early Modern Mediterranean, edited by M. Fusaro, C. Heywood and M.-S. Omri (London, 2010). There is a marvellous collection of sources in English translation, edited by miriam cooke (spelt thus), E. Göknar and G. Parker: Mediterranean Passages: Readings from Dido to Derrida (Chapel Hill, NC, 2008).

  More popular accounts of the Mediterranean, often well illustrated, include Sarah Arenson, The Encircled Sea: the Mediterranean Maritime Civilisation (London, 1990), making good use of marine archaeology, and David Attenborough, The First Eden: the Mediterranean World and Man (London, 1987), whose real strength is the illustrations; both books were based on television series. Captivating musings on the Mediterranean are offered by P. Matvejević, Mediterranean: a Cultural Landscape (Berkeley and Los Angeles, CA, 1999). John Julius Norwich, The Middle Sea: a History of the Mediterranean (London, 2006), wanders rather far from the shores of the Mediterra
nean and is not my favourite book by this author. P. Mansel, Levant: Splendour and Catastrophe on the Mediterranean (London, 2010) looks at Smyrna, Alexandria and Beirut, in the era of ethnic and religious coexistence.

  Lively travel accounts of the whole Mediterranean have been provided by the always readable Paul Theroux, The Pillars of Hercules: a Grand Tour of the Mediterranean (London, 1995), by Eric Newby, On the Shores of the Mediterranean (London, 1984), and by Robert Fox, The Inner Sea: the Mediterranean and its People (London, 1991). Lastly, no one with affection for the Mediterranean can ignore Elizabeth David, A Book of Mediterranean Food (London, 1950) and more recent accounts of Mediterranean cuisine such as Claudia Roden’s Mediterranean Cookery (London, 1987).

  Notes

  INTRODUCTION

  1. F. Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II, trans. S. Reynolds, 2 vols. (London, 1972–3), vol. 2, p. 1244; P. Horden and N. Purcell, The Corrupting Sea: a Study of Mediterranean History (Oxford, 2000), p. 36.

  2. E. Paris, La genèse intellectuelle de l’œuvre de Fernand Braudel: ‘La Méditerranée et le monde méditerranéen à l’époque de Philippe II’ (1923–1947) (Athens, 1999), pp. 64, 316.

  3. J. Pryor, Geography, Technology, and War: Studies in the Maritime History of the Mediterranean 649–1571 (Cambridge, 1988), pp. 7, 21–4; Horden and Purcell, Corrupting Sea, pp. 138–9.

  4. Pryor, Geography, Technology, and War, pp. 12–13.

  5. Ibid., p. 14, fig. 2.

  6. Ibid., p. 19.

  7. Ibid., pp. 12–24; C. Delano Smith, Western Mediterranean Europe: a Historical Geography of Italy, Spain and Southern France since the Neolithic (London, 1979).

  8. See F. Tabak, The Waning of the Mediterranean 1550–1870: a Geohistorical Approach (Baltimore, MD, 2008), and Braudel, Mediterranean, vol. 1, pp. 267–75; C. Vita-Finzi, The Mediterranean Valleys: Geological Change in Historical Times (Cambridge, 1969).

  9. A. Grove and O. Rackham, The Nature of Mediterranean Europe: an Ecological History (New Haven, CT, 2001); O. Rackham, ‘The physical setting’, in D. Abulafia (ed.), The Mediterranean in History (London and New York, 2003), pp. 32–61.

  10. Pryor, Geography, Technology, and War, pp. 75–86.

  11. S. Orvietani Busch, Medieval Mediterranean Ports: the Catalan and Tuscan Coasts, 1100–1235 (Leiden, 2001).

  PART ONE

  THE FIRST MEDITERRANEAN, 22000 BC–1000 BC

  1. Isolation and Insulation, 22000 BC–3000 BC

  1. D. Trump, The Prehistory of the Mediterranean (Harmondsworth, 1980), pp. 12–13.

  2. E. Panagopoulou and T. Strasser in Hesperia, vol. 79 (2010).

  3. C. Finlayson, The Humans Who Went Extinct: Why Neanderthals Died out and We Survived (Oxford, 2009), pp. 143–55.

  4. L. Bernabò Brea, Sicily before the Greeks (London, 1957), pp. 23–36; R. Leighton, Sicily before History: an Archaeological Survey from the Palaeolithic to the Iron Age (London, 1999).

  5. Trump, Prehistory of the Mediterranean, p. 19.

  6. Ibid., p. 20.

  7. S. Wachsmann, ‘Paddled and oared ships before the Iron Age’, in J. Morrison (ed.), The Age of the Galley (London, 1995), p. 10; C. Perlès, The Early Neolithic in Greece: the First Farming Communities in Europe (Cambridge, 2001), p. 36; R. Torrence, Production and Exchange of Stone Tools: Prehistoric Obsidian in the Aegean (Cambridge, 1986), p. 96; C. Broodbank, An Island Archaeology of the Early Cyclades (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 114–15.

  8. W. F. Albright, The Archaeology of Palestine (Harmondsworth, 1949), pp. 38, 62; Trump, Prehistory of the Mediterranean, pp. 24–6.

  9. C. F. Macdonald, Knossos (London, 2005), p. 3.

  10. Torrence, Production and Exchange, pp. 96, 140–63.

  11. C. Renfrew, in Malta before History: the World’s Oldest Freestanding Stone Architecture, ed. D. Cilia (Sliema, 2004), p. 10.

  12. A. Pace, ‘The building of Megalithic Malta’, in Cilia, Malta before History, pp. 19–40.

  13. J. Evans, Malta (Ancient Peoples and Places, London, 1959), pp. 90–91.

  14. A. Pace, ‘The sites’, and A. Bonanno, ‘Rituals of life and rituals of death’, in Cilia, Malta before History, pp. 72–4, 82–3, 272–9.

  15. Evans, Malta, p. 158.

  16. D. Trump, ‘Prehistoric pottery’, in Cilia, Malta before History, pp. 243–7.

  17. Bernabò Brea, Sicily, pp. 38–57; Leighton, Sicily before History, pp. 51–85.

  18. Leighton, Sicily before History, p. 65.

  19. Trump, Prehistory of the Mediterranean, p. 80.

  20. Wachsmann, ‘Paddled and oared ships’, p. 10; C. Broodbank and T. Strasser, ‘Migrant farmers and the Neolithic colonization of Crete’, Antiquity, vol. 65 (1991), pp. 233–45; Broodbank, Island Archaeology, pp. 96–105.

  21. Trump, Prehistory of the Mediterranean, pp. 55–6.

  2. Copper and Bronze, 3000 BC–1500 BC

  1. R. L. N. Barber, The Cyclades in the Bronze Age (London, 1987), pp. 26–33.

  2. C. Broodbank, An Island Archaeology of the Early Cyclades (Cambridge, 2000), pp. 301–6; Barber, Cyclades, pp. 136–7.

  3. C. Renfrew, The Cycladic Spirit (London, 1991), p. 18; J. L. Fitton, Cycladic Art (London, 1989).

  4. F. Matz, Crete and Early Greece (London, 1962), p. 62.

  5. Broodbank, Island Archaeology, pp. 99–102; Renfrew, Cycladic Spirit, p. 62.

  6. C. Moorehead, The Lost Treasures of Troy (London, 1994), pp. 84–6; J. Latacz, Troy and Homer: Towards a Solution of an Old Mystery (Oxford, 2004).

  7. C. Blegen, ‘Troy’, Cambridge Ancient History, vols. 1 and 2, rev. edn, pre-print fascicle (Cambridge, 1961), p. 4.

  8. D. Easton, ‘Introduction’, in C. Blegen, Troy (2nd edn, London, 2005), p. xxii.

  9. Blegen, Troy, pp. 25–41; T. Bryce, The Trojans and Their Neighbours (London, 2006), pp. 39–40.

  10. Blegen, Troy, p. 40; Bryce, Trojans, p. 40; Matz, Crete and Early Greece, p. 37; L. Bernabò Brea, Poliochni, città preistorica nell’isola di Lemnos, 2 vols. (Rome, 1964–71); S. Tiné, Poliochni, the Earliest Town in Europe (Athens, 2001).

  11. Latacz, Troy and Homer, p. 41.

  12. Blegen, Troy, pp. 47–8, 55.

  13. Ibid.

  14. Moorehead, Lost Treasures, pp. 128–30.

  15. Bryce, Trojans, pp. 51–6; Blegen, Troy, pp. 56–61, 77–84, noting Easton’s comments, ibid., p. xvii.

  16. Thucydides 1:4.

  17. Matz, Crete and Early Greece, pp. 57–8, 69.

  18. A. Morpurgo Davies, ‘The linguistic evidence: is there any?’ in The End of the Early Bronze Age in the Aegean, ed. G. Cadogan (Leiden, 1986), pp. 93–123.

  19. R. Castleden, Minoans: Life in Bronze Age Crete (London, 1990), pp. 4–7; C. F. Macdonald, Knossos (London, 2005), pp. 25–30.

  20. Matz, Crete and Early Greece, p. 57; Castleden, Minoans, p. 29; Macdonald, Knossos, pp. 43–7.

  21. Macdonald, Knossos, pp. 50–52; Castleden, Minoans, p. 69, fig. 18 (plan of Gournia), p. 112.

  22. Reported in Archaeology (Archeological Institute of America), vol. 63 (2010), pp. 44–7.

  23. Macdonald, Knossos, pp. 58–9, 87–8; Castleden, Minoans, pp. 169–72.

  24. C. Gere, Knossos and the Prophets of Modernism (Chicago, IL, 2009), and the discussion in part 5, chap. 2 below.

  25. Macdonald, Knossos, pp. 134, 173; Castleden, Minoans, p. 12.

  26. Morpurgo Davies, ‘The linguistic evidence’; L. R. Palmer, Mycenaeans and Minoans: Aegean Prehistory in the Light of the Linear B Tablets (2nd edn, London, 1965).

  27. L. Casson, ‘Bronze Age ships: the evidence of the Thera wall-paintings’, International Journal of Archaeology, vol. 4 (1975), pp. 3–10; Barber, Cyclades, pp. 159–78, 193, 196–9.

  28. Barber, Cyclades, pp. 209–18.

  29. Macdonald, Knossos, pp. 171–2, 192.

  3. Merchants and Heroes, 1500 BC–1250 BC

  1. W. D. Taylour, The Mycenaeans (London, 1964), p. 76.

  2. Homer, Iliad, 2:494–
760.

  3. J. Chadwick, The Decipherment of Linear B (Cambridge, 1958).

  4. F. Matz, Crete and Early Greece (London, 1962), p. 134, plate 32; Taylour, Mycenaeans, plates 3–4.

  5. Taylour, Mycenaeans, pp. 139–48.

  6. Ibid., p. 100.

  7. T. Bryce, The Trojans and Their Neighbours (London, 2006), pp. 100–102; J. Latacz, Troy and Homer: Towards a Solution of an Old Mystery (Oxford, 2004), p. 123; cf. O. R. Gurney, The Hittites (London, 1952), pp. 46–58; A. Yasur-Landau, The Philistines and Aegean Migration and the End of the Late Bronze Age (Cambridge, 2010), p. 180.

  8. G. F. Bass, ‘Cape Gelidonya: a Bronze Age shipwreck’, Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 57, part 8 (1967); G. F. Bass, ‘A Bronze Age shipwreck at Ulu Burun (Kas): 1984 campaign’, American Journal of Archeology, 90 (1986), pp. 269–96.

  9. R. Leighton, Sicily before History: an Archaeological Survey from the Palaeolithic to the Iron Age (London, 1999), pp. 141, 144, 147–8; cf. L. Bernabò Brea, Sicily before the Greeks (London, 1957), pp. 103–8.