Abulafia has undertaken an extremely ambitious project: to write a summary of the entire history of the Mediterranean, from the first people to cross its waters all the way to today. He mostly succeeds, which makes this a very impressive book.
Prerequisites: Basic Mediterranean history will be helpful for context.
Originally Written: February 2021.
Confidence Level: Not my ideas.
The Great Sea about the people who have traveled across the surface of the Mediterranean.
Geographically, this extends from the Straits of Gibraltar to the Bosporus. Neighboring seas like the Black Sea, the Red Sea, and the Atlantic between Portugal and Morocco are only occasionally mentioned.
Mostly, it is a story of traders and navies. Empires that border the Mediterranean but did not develop a significant naval presence are de-emphasized, as are island societies that mostly look inwards. Fishermen are also de-emphasized, both because they typically return to their home port, and because they are mostly interested in what happens under the sea, not on the surface.
Abulafia divides Mediterranean history into five periods:
- First Mediterranean: 22000 BC – 1000 BC.
- Second Mediterranean: 1000 BC – AD 600.
- Third Mediterranean: 600 – 1350.
- Fourth Mediterranean: 1350 – 1830.
- Fifth Mediterranean: 1830 – 2014.
Abulafia tries to write at a more consistent pace than most other history books, instead of emphasizing certain periods more than others. This is not a rigid rule and the chapters are not organized by century. He does slow down as he gets closer to the present: The First Mediterranean averages 500 years per page, the Second averages 12 years per page, the Third 6 years per page, the Fourth 3 years per page, and the Fifth 2 years per page. It gives an good feel for how far apart events are in time and just how long Rome or Venice were dominant. There were several events that are actually much closer to each other than I had realized: the fall of the Western Roman Empire (476) and the Arab invasions of the Eastern Roman Empire (634) – or the sack of Constantinople by the Fourth Crusade (1204) and the ultimate fall of Constantinople to the Turks (1453). These are typically in different chapters of history textbooks, so they seem farther apart.
There are miscellaneous biases in this book, as is inevitable in any history text. Charlemagne is introduced as an “incestuous mass-murderer”. Constantinople is never renamed Istanbul. The Napoleonic Wars are told from the perspective of the Russian Navy. But most events are presented from a fairly neutral perspective and the biases are rarely consistent across the centuries. The only noticeable recurring bias is that Sephardic Jews are over-emphasized, although this is not surprising because the book is dedicated to Abulafia’s own Sephardic ancestors who repeatedly crossed the Mediterranean.
Abulafia’s pace is fast. It has to be to fit this much history into a single book. It does make me wonder how hard it would be to read this book if you didn’t already have a decent understanding of Mediterranean history. One thing that definitely helps in this regard are the maps. Every chapter includes a map with a few of the major cities and sometimes islands labeled. I would prefer even more labels, in particular, it would be better not to assume that people know where larger areas are, like the Tyrrhenian Sea or Catalonia.
The Great Sea contains stories of many particular individuals, which give the book a much more human character. It seems to be showing the lives of typical people who crossed the sea during each time period. But I don’t think that these particular people were chosen because they are representative. They instead seem to be the individuals from each era or region who left behind the best records. History is not just the study of the past – it’s the study of the people who left records for historians.
Abulafia definitely looks at history from a humanities perspective, not from a social science perspective. As a scientist myself, I have the opposite bias. I think that including a few graphs could make the book much stronger – for example, how many Roman shipwrecks have been discovered from each century or how many trips there were from Venice to Alexandria each year. There don’t need to be very many (although there could be) and they could be included with the color pictures instead of interspersed within the chapters. One of the main benefits of the plots would be to justify how he divides Mediterranean history. If there really was a sea change in 1000 BC, AD 600, 1350, and 1830, this should be visible as some sort of dramatic change on a plot. If there are other dramatic changes visible, then those are certainly events that need to be described in the text itself.
The First Mediterranean began when people first began to cross the water. Since this is before the invention of writing, our only evidence is archaeological. Evidence of human activity on islands, whether camps of hunter-gatherers on Sicily or making tools from the obsidian found on a small volcanic island in Greece, means that people crossed the sea to get there. The First Mediterranean continued through the Neolithic Revolution, when farming began in nearby river valleys, and then farming and farmers spread across the sea. It continued into the Bronze Age. Bronze is an interesting material because it requires tin to make, and tin is fairly rare. There are a few small tin deposits along the Mediterranean coast, but the closest large sources of tin are in Afghanistan and Britain. The Bronze Age civilizations of the Mediterranean (Egypt, Minoan Crete, Mycenaean Greece, Troy, the Hittites, and early Canaanites) developed extensive trading networks, mostly to access tin.
Between about 1200 BC – 1100 BC, Late Bronze Age civilization collapsed. Troy and the Hittite Empire fell, never to rise again. Almost every city in Greece and Syria was destroyed. Egypt alone survived, but weakened, and lost effective control over the Nile Delta. It took hundreds of years to rebuild the trading networks and maritime cities. The original cause of this collapse is heavily debated, but plagues, climate change, and a series of volcanoes & earthquakes have all been suggested. Mass population movements followed, most famously the Sea Peoples, although there were plenty of Land Peoples too. Our best records are monuments celebrating Ramesses III’s victory that kept the Sea Peoples out of Egypt. They seemed to be armed refugee camps, bringing entire populations, and mixing people from many ethnicities. They traveled around the Eastern Mediterranean, sacking cities everywhere, and scattering peoples. For example, the Philistines were Cretans who adopted Canaanite culture. But once the trading routes collapsed, so did the tin supplies. When civilization rebuilt, it was using iron. Iron technology already existed, but it is hard to make and wasn’t needed on battlefields dominated by chariot archers.
The re-creation of the trading networks of the Second Mediterranean was dominated by three peoples: the Phoenicians, the Greeks, and the Etruscans (in northern Italy).
As the Second Mediterranean progressed, major empires began to exert their control over the Mediterranean. First, Persia conquered the Phoenicians and unsuccessfully tried to conquer Greece. Then, the Macedonians conquered Persia and spread Greek culture across the eastern Mediterranean. Farther west, the Roman Republic conquered their Italian neighbors, then the major Phoenician colony of Carthage, and finally the new Roman Empire unified the entire Mediterranean. The Roman Empire was unusual both because it was the only time the entire Mediterranean was politically united and because of its longevity. It unified the Mediterranean for 500 years (~25 BC to ~AD 475), and continued in the East for another 1000 years. Political unification meant that the grain needed to feed Rome and later Constantinople was secure and ensured that the pirates who raided, mostly for slaves, in other eras were eliminated.
The unification of the Mediterranean collapsed with the Germanic migrations into & invasions of the Western Roman Empire. They mostly stayed on land. The one exception were the Vandals, who traveled from Germany through Gaul and Hispaniola, across the Straits of Gibraltar, and eventually established their kingdom in modern Tunisia (400s). They were the dominant naval power in the western Mediterranean until Justinian conquered their territory for the Eastern Roman / Byzantine Empire (500s). Then, the Arabs united under Islam shattered the unity of the eastern Mediterranean (600s), seizing Syria, all of North Africa, and eventually Spain.
The Third Mediterranean was characterized by many small actors. While the Arabs were initially united, they soon fragmented. The Europeans were divided even more. The Italian city states rose to prominence, first dominated by Venice and Amalfi, then by Venice, Pisa, and Genoa. They were typically located in difficult to access locations: in marshlands or on cliffs. While these locations would not have been strategic in the Second Mediterranean, their natural defenses made them valuable in the Third. The feudal states of mainland Europe were drawn into the Mediterranean by the crusades, and founded a collection of small states, mostly along the Syrian coast, which depended on Italian naval support. Despite the frequent violence, the Third Mediterranean also had numerous merchants and pilgrims, from all three Abrahamic religions, who traveled across the political and religious divides.
I now have a favorite example of how feudal relationships were overlapping and non-hierarchical: the count-kings of Aragon-Catalonia. Catalonia was a highly productive region along the Spanish coast, ruled by the Count of Barcelona, who owed fealty to the King of France. Aragon was a less productive highland region, which was independent and had its own king. For generations, the same person was both the Count of Barcelona and the King of Aragon. Their greatest title came from Aragon, but their greatest resources came from Catalonia, which they used to expand their regime across the islands of the Western Mediterranean and into southern Italy.
The Third Mediterranean ended in 1350, with the coming of the Black Death, a pandemic which killed a third to half the population of the Mediterranean. I am somewhat confused by how Abulafia treats this transition. He first mentions it in a not entirely negative light:
The Black Death has sometimes been seen as a natural check on the excessively rapid expansion of the economy of Europe and the Mediterranean lands in the High Middle Ages.
– p. 366
Then, after describing its spread and the death toll in major cities, Abulafia says that much remained the same:
Yet the plague, though it had transformed the Mediterranean, had not produced a lasting recession. Old institutions such as the merchant fonduk remained in place; the Genoese, Venetians, and Catalans continued to snipe at one another; Christians drew up elaborate plans for crusades against the Mamluks, whose power remained for the moment firm. Underneath all this, there were subtle but important changes in the way that the old networks operated, and the first signs emerged that a rival trading zone was emerging beyond the Straits of Gibraltar.
– p. 369
Is this the right place to mark the transitions from Third to Fourth Mediterranean? One of the most severe pandemics in world history is an obvious place to put a transition. But if the institutions don’t change much, then maybe it is not. Based on how Abulafia describes the Fourth Mediterranean, I think that the transition would work better at 1450.
This is one place where using a more scientific method, including a few plots, would really help. Is there a more obvious change around 1350 or around 1450, or maybe around 1280 when compasses were adopted, or maybe some other time?
While the Third Mediterranean had many small states, the Fourth Mediterranean was dominated by fewer, larger states. The Ottoman Turks conquered Constantinople in 1453 and then dominated the eastern Mediterranean. In the late 1400s and early 1500s, Spain was unified, expelled the remaining Muslims and Jews, and began expanding in the Americas. Southern Italy and the islands of the Western Mediterranean were already ruled by the Spanish. France invaded northern Italy. The Fourth Mediterranean can mostly be understood by the interaction between Spain, France, and the Ottoman Empire – only a few smaller powers, like Venice, survived.
The Knights Hospitallers were the most interesting of the smaller powers. They started as a crusading order, with a special focus on medicine. Then they became a naval enemy of the Turks operating from the fortified island of Rhodes. The Turks managed to drive them out of Rhodes after several attempts, so they established themselves on Malta instead. Abulafia thinks that the failed Turkish siege of Malta was even more important at halting the Ottoman advance than the great naval battle of Lepanto. The Hospitallers survived and are still considered a sovereign entity today, although they have held more hospitals than territory since the Napoleonic Wars. Abulafia neglects to mention that they at one point had a air force: the treaties ending WWII severely limited the Italian Air Force, but the West didn’t want to dismantle it at the start of the Cold War, so they (temporarily) gave all of the support aircraft to the Hospitallers.
There is a weird technological quirk during this period: despite increasingly coming into contact, the Atlantic and Mediterranean still used wildly different war ships. The Mediterranean war ships would have been recognizable in Ancient Greece: low and long, powered by many oars (and slaves), with a ram on the front just below the water line. The Atlantic war ships were Viking ships plus cannons: taller and broader, powered completely by sail, designed for long voyages over rough seas. France and Spain had both types of ships, while Venice only ever had Mediterranean ships.
The Fifth Mediterranean starts in 1830. I have no clue why. Abulafia points to the opening of the Suez Canal, but that didn’t happen until 1869. The French invasion of Algeria and the success of the Greek revolt both happened in 1830, but they seem to have more local importance instead of being a full sea change. I think that this transition works better in 1800. Along with being a rounder year, this is also during the Napoleonic Wars. Napoleon invaded Egypt, demonstrating that the Eastern and Western Mediterranean were no longer military equals. This invasion was understood as colonial, rather than a religious war. During the Napoleonic Wars, the British decisively defeated the French and Spanish fleets off the Nile Delta and Trafalgar, and seized strategic islands across the Mediterranean. For the first time, the Mediterranean was dominated by a foreign naval power.
The Fifth Mediterranean does not dominate its own region: it is in between regions. Maps centered on the Mediterranean are far fewer than maps of Europe, the Middle East, or Africa with the Mediterranean on the edge. Most of the Middle East and North Africa were colonized, but they were an afterthought of the colonial empires. When the Ottoman and colonial empires retreated, they were replaced by modern nation-states. Cosmopolitan trade cities were once the quintessential Mediterranean, but they have suffered the most from nationalism: one group is now dominant and the rest have fled or assimilated. Alexandria became Egyptian (originally, it was ‘next to Egypt’); Salonika became Greek Thessaloniki; Smyrna became Turkish Izmir; and Jaffa became Israeli Tel Aviv. Migrants across the Mediterranean today are most often refugees aiming for Europe, not a distinctly Mediterranean community. The Mediterranean is no longer its own center for trade: it is now just part of the journey through the Suez Canal between Europe and Asia. Most of the people on its shores are on vacation, taking a break from economic activity elsewhere. The Mediterranean has become a means instead of an end itself.
