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, gold 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, acted 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.
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.