In Paperback: The Great Sea
The Great Sea: A Human History of the MediterraneanBy David AbulafiaOxford University Press, 2013 Although countless peoples have tacked across its currents, harvested its bounties, and claimed it as their own property, the Mediterranean, at least in bookish circles, belongs to one person, French historian Fernand Braudel, and one book, his monumental La Mediterranee et le Monde Mediterraneen a l’epoque de Philippe II, which broke upon the scholarly world like a howitzer shell when it was published in 1949 and only increased in impact when it was finally translated into English as The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II. The book was immediately hailed as one of those lengthy and intimidating masterpieces that change the very geography of all ensuing scholarship, a glittering altarpiece that both discourages heretics and requires genuflection. All future writers on the subject, whether they approached it from the benighted uplands of Anatolia or the wind-scorched wastes of Algeria or battered height of Gibraltar, have felt compelled to pause and pay tribute to Braudel.And even then, the cheek of it, like deciding to write about the origin of species, or the wealth of nations, or the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. Braudel’s book is so monstrously inimitable that it can feel like a door slammed and bolted closed. But because it’s landlocked, because it lacks the mind-emptying enormity of the Pacific or the ship-eating ferocity of the Atlantic, the Mediterranean has been the common water of the West since well before Homer’s heroes plied it to sack the topless towers of Troy; it’s been the battlefield and trade route for the Egyptians, the Greeks, the Romans (who famously dubbed it “Our Sea” mainly because they hadn’t read Braudel), the Byzantines, the Ottomans, the Venetians, and countless others; Braudel or no Braudel, it’s an irresistible lure for writers of fat books.David Abulafia, Professor of Mediterranean History at Cambridge University, is one such writer, an expert and a popularizer, whose The Great Sea is now out in a handsome paperback from Oxford University Press. He’s not so much of an expert as Braudel was, and he’s not so handy a popularizer as John Julius Norwich (whose 2006 book on the Mediterranean, The Middle Sea is in no way supplanted here), but he’s more approachable than Braudel and more scholarly than Norwich, and after all it’s a roomy bit of water.Braudel book (which Abulafia dutifully calls “one of the most original and influential works of history composed in the twentieth century”) famously spends a great deal of time making an almost Ovidian inventory of the Mediterranean’s physical features, its tides and currents and natural history. Abulafia, who rightly maintains that “Human history involves the study of the irrational as well as the rational,” clearly considers this emphasis what the wayfarers of County Wicklow used to refer to as wrong-pointed. “The human hand,” he points out, “has been more important in moulding the history of the Mediterranean than Braudel was ever prepared to admit.”Hence the sub-title of his book, “the human history of the Mediterranean,” and hence that book’s most persistent charm, its massive, swarming cast of human characters. His chapters follow the history of the basin in stately chronological sweep, but always his stories have a piquant humanity to them:
The Venetians, alarmed that Roger [I, the “Great Count,” who conquered Sicily in 1091] now controlled the Adriatic exit, sent naval aid to Manuel Komenos, who had no option but to renew the trade privileges that he already considered excessive. His distrust of the Venetians strengthened when he received reports of how they spent their time during the siege of Corfu: making fun of Manuel’s swarthy features, they dressed a black African in magnificent robes, installed him on one of the imperial flagships, and mockingly acted out the sacred ceremonies of the Byzantine court. Unwittingly, Roger was forcing the Byzantines and the Venetians to realize how much they disliked one another.
He’s likewise not shy about giving proper emphasis to the main human upheaval that convulsed the Mediterranean during the 400-years of its apogee:
A glance at the naval forces arrayed in the sixteenth century Mediterranean reveals that the coming of the Ottomans had created a new order, reminiscent, if anything, of the early days of Islam. Now that a Muslim empire was once again seeking to expand its power by land and sea in all directions, navies under Muslim command gained control of the waters of the eastern Mediterranean and challenged Christian navies in the western Mediterranean by means of their proxies, the rulers of the Barbary coast. It was an extraordinary transformation. After centuries in which Muslim navies had exercised tentative control of waters close to the Islamic states – Mamluk fleets off Egypt and Syria, Moroccan ships in the far west, Turkish emirs within the Aegean – Muslim sea power had expanded outwards on a massive scale.
In any huge historical study of the Mediterranean like this one, it’s impossible to avoid a sense of anticlimax. The captains and the kings have long since departed from these waters; history is no longer made here. It hardly matters from a factual standpoint – that debt isn’t going anywhere – but in narrative terms it’s inevitably depressing to descend from Barbary corsairs and Venetian men-o-war to the hordes of sweating, lycra-clad barbarians who now hold the whole area in their grip. Even Abulafia, usually the most even-handed of presenters, can’t quite muffle his dismay at the ending to the epic story he’s been telling:
In the second half of the twentieth century the Mediterranean, no longer a vital seat of commercial or naval power, found a new vocation: mass tourism. Mass tourism first took off in the Mediterranean, and it now attracts over 230 million visitors each year. The temporary migration of millions of northern Europeans, Americans and Japanese in search of sun, or culture, or both, has taken place alongside the more permanent immigration of retired Germans, Britons and Scandinavians who hope to spend their last days in apartments and villas along the Spanish coast or in Majorca, Malta and Cyprus, forming distinctive communities with their own clubs, pubs and beer cellars – even, in Majorca, a political party for Germans.
The Great Sea has no doubt found its way onto the side tables and into the libraries of some of those villas in Majorca and Malta. Let’s hope it gets read there, and that the surge of its stories imparts some much-needed humility.
