‘Mediterranean history’ can mean many things. This book is a history of the Mediterranean Sea, rather than a history of the lands around it; more particularly, it is a history of the people who crossed the sea and lived close by its shores in ports and on islands. My theme is the process by which the Mediterranean became in varying degrees integrated into a single commercial, cultural and even (under the Romans) political zone, and how these periods of integration ended with sometimes violent disintegration, whether through warfare or plague. I have identified five distinct periods: a First Mediterranean that descended into chaos after 1200 BC, that is, around the time Troy is said to have fallen; a Second Mediterranean that survived until about AD 500; a Third Mediterranean that emerged slowly and then experienced a great crisis at the time of the Black Death (1347); a Fourth Mediterranean that had to cope with increasing competition from the Atlantic, and domination by Atlantic powers, ending around the time of the opening of the Suez Canal in 1869; finally, a Fifth Mediterranean that became a passage-way to the Indian Ocean, and found a surprising new identity in the second half of the twentieth century.
My ‘Mediterranean’ is resolutely the surface of the sea itself, its shores and its islands, particularly the port cities that provided the main departure and arrival points for those crossing it. This is a narrower definition than that of the great pioneer of Mediterranean history, Fernand Braudel, which at times encompassed places beyond the Mediterranean; but the Mediterranean of Braudel and most of those who have followed in his wake was a land mass stretching far beyond the shoreline as well as a basin filled with water, and there is still a tendency to define the Mediterranean in relation to the cultivation of the olive or the river valleys that feed into it. This means one must examine the often sedentary, traditional societies in those valleys that produced the foodstuffs and raw materials that were the staples of trans-Mediterranean commerce, which also means taking on board true landlubbers who never went near the sea. The hinterland – the events that took place there, the products that originated or came through there – cannot of course be ignored, but this book concentrates on those who dipped their toes into the sea, and, best of all, took journeys across it, participating directly, in some cases, in cross-cultural trade, in the movement of religious and other ideas, or, no less significantly, in naval conflicts for mastery over the sea routes.
Inevitably, in what is still a long book, difficult choices have had to be made about what should be included and what should be excluded. Words used less often than they should be are ‘perhaps’, ‘possibly’, ‘maybe’ and ‘probably’; a great many statements about the early Mediterranean, in particular, can be qualified this way, at the risk of generating a fog of uncertainties for the reader. My intention has been to describe the people, processes and events that have transformed all or much of the Mediterranean, rather than to write a series of micro-histories of its edges, interesting as that might be; I have therefore concentrated on what I consider important in the long term, such as the foundation of Carthage, the emergence of Dubrovnik, the impact of the Barbary corsairs or the building of the Suez Canal. Religious interactions demand space, and plenty of attention is naturally given to the conflicts between Christians and Muslims, but the Jews also deserve close attention, because of their prominent role as merchants in the early Middle Ages and again in the early modern period. I have given roughly equal coverage to each century once I reach classical antiquity, since I wished to avoid writing one of those pyramid-shaped books in which one rushes through the antecedents to arrive at comfortably modern times as quickly as possible; but the dates attached to chapters are highly approximate, and separate chapters sometimes deal with events at the same time at different ends of the Mediterranean.
The Mediterranean we know now was shaped by Phoenicians, Greeks and Etruscans in antiquity, by Genoese, Venetians and Catalans in the Middle Ages, by Dutch, English and Russian navies in the centuries before 1800; indeed, there is some strength in the argument that after 1500, and certainly after 1850, the Mediterranean became decreasingly important in wider world affairs and commerce. In most chapters, I have concentrated on one or two places which I believe best explain broader Mediterranean developments – Troy, Corinth, Alexandria, Amalfi, Salonika and so on – but the emphasis is always on their links across the Mediterranean Sea and, where possible, on some of the people who effected or experienced these interactions. One result of this approach is that I say less about fish and fishermen than some readers might expect. Most fish spend their time below the surface of the sea, and fishermen tend to set out from a port, make their catch (often at some distance from their home port) and return to base. By and large, they do not have a destination the other side of the water where they will make contact with other peoples and cultures. The fish they bring home may well be processed in some way, as salted or pickled food, or even as a strong-tasting sauce, and the merchants who carried these products abroad are often mentioned; fresh fish must very often have been standard food for naval crews. Frankly, though, the data are scanty; my attention has only switched to what happens beneath the surface of the Mediterranean with the arrival of submarine warfare in the early twentieth century.
My hope is that those who pick up this book will enjoy reading it as much as I have enjoyed writing it. For the invitation to do so and for their enthusiastic encouragement thereafter, I am deeply indebted to Stuart Proffitt at Penguin Books and my agent, Bill Hamilton, at A. M. Heath, and for further encouragement to Peter Ginna and Tim Bent at my American publisher, Oxford University Press in New York. One special pleasure has been the opportunity to visit or revisit some of the places I mention. I have benefited greatly from the hospitality of a number of hosts in the Mediterranean and beyond: Clive and Geraldine Finlayson, of the Gibraltar Museum, were as welcoming as ever, and enabled me not just to revisit Gibraltar but to make a foray across the Straits to Ceuta; Charles Dalli, Dominic Fenech, their colleagues in the History Department at the University of Malta, HE the British High Commissioner and Mrs Archer and Ronnie Micallef of the British Council were exemplary hosts in Malta; HE the Maltese Ambassador to Tunisia, Vicki-Ann Cremona, was also a superb host in Tunis and Mahdia; Mohamed Awad, rightly famous for his hospitality, opened my eyes to his city of Alexandria; Edhem Eldem revealed unsuspected corners of Istanbul (and Alexandria); Relja Seferović of the Croatian Historical Institute in Dubrovnik was enormously helpful there, in Montenegro (at Herceg Novi and Kotor) and in Bosnia-Hercegovina (at Trebinje); Eduard Mira shared his knowledge of medieval Valencia in situ; Olivetta Schena invited me to Cagliari to commemorate my late friend and distinguished Mediterranean historian Marco Tangheroni, enabling me also to visit ancient Nora; further afield, the History Department of Helsinki University and the Finnish Foreign Ministry invited me to expound my views about Mediterranean history in a city whose great fortress is often called the ‘Gibraltar of the North’; Francesca Trivellato allowed me to read her excellent study of Livorno in advance of publication. Roger Moorhouse identified a host of suitable illustrations, often difficult to run to earth; Bela Cunha was an exemplary copy-editor. My wife Anna explored Jaffa, Neve Tzedek, Tel Aviv, Tunis, Mahdia and large swathes of Cyprus with me. Anna tolerated growing mountains of books on the ancient and modern Mediterranean in a house already full of books on the medieval Mediterranean. My daughters Bianca and Rosa have been delightful companions on travels to various corners of the Mediterranean, and fed me material on diverse topics such as the Moriscos and the Barcelona Process.
I am also very grateful to audiences in Cambridge, St Andrews, Durham, Sheffield, Valletta and Frankfurt-am-Main who responded so helpfully to a lecture I hawked around on ‘How to write the history of the Mediterranean’. In Cambridge, I received bibliographical and other advice from Colin and Jane Renfrew, Paul Cartledge, John Patterson, Alex Mullen, Richard Duncan-Jones, William O’Reilly, Hubertus Jahn and David Reynolds, among others, while Roger Dawe very kindly gave me a copy of his magnificent translation of and commentary on the Odyssey. Charles Stanton read the first draft and set me right on a number of points – needless to say, the errors that remain are mine. Alyssa Bandow engaged enthusiastically in lengthy discussions of the ancient economy which helped me clarify my ideas. No institution can compare with the colleges in Cambridge and Oxford in offering an opportunity to discuss one’s ideas with people in a great variety of disciplines, and I owe more than I can say to the stimulus of having among my colleagues at Caius not just a host of History Fellows but Paul Binski, John Casey, Ruth Scurr, Noël Sugimura and (until recently) Colin Burrow, as well as Victoria Bateman, whose comments on the text I much appreciate, and Michalis Agathacleous, whose guidance around southern Cyprus was enormously helpful. The Classics Faculty Library was especially generous in providing for my needs, as were Mark Statham and the staff of Gonville and Caius College Library. When in the final stages of preparing the manuscript, I found myself unable to leave Naples owing to a volcanic eruption – not Vesuvius! – Francesco Senatore and his delightful colleagues (Alessandra Perricioli, Teresa d’Urso, Alessandra Coen and many more) offered magnificent hospitality including the use of an office at ‘Frederick II University’, and lively conversation. Soon after the skies cleared, I benefited enormously from a chance to discuss the themes of this book at a gathering at Villa La Pietra, the seat in Florence of New York University, thanks to the kindness of Katherine Fleming, and refined my ‘Concluding Thoughts’ further in Norway, following an invitation from the ever-courteous organizers of a symposium held in Bergen in June 2010 to celebrate the award of the Holberg Prize to Natalie Zemon Davis.
This book is dedicated to the memory of my ancestors who travelled back and forth across the Mediterranean over the centuries: from Castile to Safed and Tiberias in the Holy Land, with intervals in Smyrna; and then, with my grandfather, from Tiberias westwards again and after him, with my grandmother, back across the sea to Tiberias, also including my forebear Jacob Berab, who reached Safed from Maqueda in Castile, and sundry Abulafias, Abolaffios and Bolaffis in Livorno and across Italy. The title is of the book is taken from the Hebrew name for the Mediterranean, which appears in a blessing to be recited on setting eyes on it: ‘Blessed are you, Lord our God, king of the Universe, who made the Great Sea’.
David Abulafia
Cambridge, 15 November 2010