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.
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.
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.
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.
