The waters that nurtured humanity

The first time Americans ever raised their flag in victory on foreign soil was, interestingly enough, in the land that became known as Libya, following the defeat, even more interestingly, of a Muslim enemy.

When US Marines sing of their triumphs “from the halls of Montezuma to the shores of Tripoli”, they’re referring to (Mexico and) the Barbary states of North Africa, including this province of the Ottoman Empire.

And, perhaps most interesting of all, money was the reason for the conflict, or, more accurately, greed of it. One of the unavoidable facts recurring countless times in “The Great Sea”, David Abulafia’s extraordinary history of events on and around the Mediterranean, is that everything boiled down to making a profit.

The forays of religious pilgrims notwithstanding, no one ever sailed the sea without treasure in mind, and that included the Crusaders. While the rank and file Christian warriors might have thought they were off to the Holy Land to rescue Jerusalem from Islam, the popes and kings who convinced them of such had far more secular goals in their sights. The seven wonders of the ancient world were built with the profits from trade as much as from conquest.

So commerce made for strange bedfellows all down the centuries, and diplomacy and even the sciences of exploration were subservient to it.

One of the most unholy of alliances was forged in the early 1500s by King Francis I of France and the infamous Muslim pirate Barbarossa (whose legend is so ornate that two different men were required to carry it). It was an astonishingly mercenary turn of events that prods us to seek out further reading, like so many other tales glimpsed in “The Great Sea”.

And yet the common goals of commerce also fostered religious, ideological and social tolerance. One surprising aspect now largely forgotten in our polarised world is the sturdy harmony in which Islam and Christianity existed. The socio-economic intercourse of religions forms some of the most compelling parts of this book. 

In this context I also learned that Alexandria survived long after the destruction of the great lighthouse and library. It wasn’t just a place of antiquity but a vibrant hub of trade well into the Ottoman era of the 19th century, with Jews, Christians and Muslims thriving in a peaceful tumult of profit-making. 

The author vows at the outset to cling to the sea and its coasts in this “history of conflict as well as contact” – though Britain joins the parade of masters of the sea, despite having no Mediterranean shore. He never ventures inland, so the Crusades roll ashore at Tyre and we say farewell and wish them luck (or at least as much luck as is coming to them).

It’s just as well that we don’t have to follow, because the sea serves up so much else, in a dizzying pageant of events through time. Unrecognisable place names give way to familiar locales. It seems we’ve just finished examining the nuraghe stone watchtowers of ancient Sardinia when the original Maltese falcon flits past. We track the routes of Cairo’s “Genizah Jews” from the written records of the voyages that they casually tossed into a storeroom afterward. 

We see the earliest Arsenal in Venice that helped inspire Dante’s Hell, and hear disturbing tidings of the Grimaldi family that now rules Monaco. Here are the amazing Merchant of Prato and the messianic rebel Shabbetai. We witness the end of the Ottoman Empire and the birth of Tel Aviv. We note with a mixture of mirth and nostalgic dismay the arrival of bikinis and cheap air travel.

At the turn of the 18th and 19th centuries, the Spanish royal court convinced Thomas Jefferson that, if he wished to trade with the Barbary rulers so they would call off their pestilent pirates, he had to pay tribute to them. So he dispatched ships laden with sugar, coffee and herring. The sultans scoffed at the meagre offerings. The “dey” of Algiers was appeased only when the skipper of the man-of-war George Washington agreed to carry a cargo for him to Constantinople – a “Noah’s Ark” of domesticated animals plus tigers, lions, antelope, 12 parrots and 100 black slaves.

When this sort of nonsense eventually became too much for proud, young America, a Department of the Navy was formed and war was declared. “The victories against the men of Barbary,” writes Abulafia, “were a defining moment in the emergence of an American identity.”

These episodes are just snapshots from an 800-page book that encompasses all the millennia of human civilisation, and every century yields a wealth of startling information alongside Abulafia’s robust commentary.

 

The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean

By David Abulafia

Published by Penguin, 2014

Available at Asia Books, Bt595

Reviewed by Paul Dorsey