When, some five or six years ago, it was first suggested to me that I should write a history of the Mediterranean, my heart sank. The subject seemed so huge, the time span so vast; how could the whole thing possibly be compressed into a single volume? Where should it begin? Where should it end? And how–since it would obviously have to be mercilessly selective–would the selecting be done?
Somewhat to my surprise, these questions–together with many others that arose along the way–answered themselves. I had at one moment considered an introductory chapter that would deal with the formation of the Middle Sea, that majestic moment when the waters of the Atlantic crashed through the barriers at what are now the Straits of Gibraltar and flooded the immense basin which they have occupied ever since. It would have gone on to describe the seismic upheaval, almost equally dramatic, which split Europe from Asia in the northeastern corner, linking the Mediterranean with its neighbour–so close in physical terms, but so immeasurably distant in character–the Black Sea. But I am no geologist, and rather than launch my story some six million years ago I decided to begin, not with rocks and water, but with people.
And not the first people, either–simply because the first people were prehistoric, and I have always found prehistory a bore. (If an author tries to write about a subject that bores him, you can be perfectly certain that his readers will be bored too.) How much more sensible, I thought, to start with ancient Egypt, a culture which has fascinated the West ever since it was first effectively discovered by Napoleon’s expedition in 1798–99. From there we have easy stepping stones leading via Crete, Mycenae and the Trojan War to ancient Greece and Rome–and then we are away.
The other vital question was where to stop. This was a problem that I had never had to face before. In the past I have written histories of a kingdom, a republic and an empire, each of which came eventually to its appointed end. Since, however, the Mediterranean can be confidently expected to continue for several million more years at least, it was clear that I should have to choose an arbitrary cut-off point; and after long hesitation, I chose the end of the First World War. One could argue forever over whether this changed the Western world more radically than did the Second; my own feeling is that it did, bringing down three mighty empires and, incidentally, making its successor inevitable. But there was another, more practical consideration too. Had I continued the story through the interwar years and on to 1945, this book would have had to be at least half as long again, and had I taken it even further–perhaps to the creation of the state of Israel in 1948–history would have started to merge into current affairs. In such an event what I hope will prove a smooth and happy voyage might well have ended in shipwreck.
Throughout the thirty-three chapters that follow, I have done my best to keep the centre of attention on the Mediterranean itself. Once again I have as far as possible avoided physical geography. Let no one think that I underestimate the importance of tides, winds, currents and other oceanographical and meteorological phenomena; these things have shaped the whole art of navigation, they have dictated trade routes and they have decided the outcome of many a naval battle. But they have no place in these pages. All I have tried to do here is to trace the main political fortunes of the lands of the Middle Sea, insofar as their history was affected by their positions around it. This in turn means a number of perhaps surprising changes of emphasis. France, for example, is unquestionably a Mediterranean country, but its political centre is far away to the north; the French Revolution consequently receives only a passing mention, and you will find no references at all to Joan of Arc or the Massacre of St Bartholomew. The county of Provence, with the great city of Marseille and the magnificent port of Toulon, matters to us far more than does Paris.
Spain is something of a special case. Ferdinand and Isabella are of huge importance for a number of reasons: their destruction of the Kingdom of Granada, their wholesale expulsions of Muslims and Jews which profoundly affected the demography of western Europe, and not least their sponsorship of Columbus–the first step in the downgrading of the Mediterranean to the comparative backwater which it was to become in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. Later Spanish dynastic problems are also all too relevant to our story, throwing as they did much of the continent into confusion. The Peninsular War, on the other hand, principally centred as it was on northwest Spain and Portugal, I deemed to be no concern of ours.
There was no doubt about Constantinople. The city itself may command only the Bosphorus and the Sea of Marmara, but the two successive empires of which it was the capital, the Byzantine and the Ottoman, occupied at various times well over half the shoreline of the Mediterranean. Each, therefore, constitutes an integral part of our story. And we have only to think of the great historic islands: Sicily, Cyprus, Malta and Crete. The first was part of the Byzantine Empire for several centuries (and, for one brief moment, its capital);1 the other three all suffered appalling sieges by the Ottoman Turks, two of which were successful. Only Malta survived unconquered until the time of Napoleon.
The two Mediterranean countries par excellence are Italy and Greece. No reader of this book will be surprised at the prominence given to the former–the more so since before the second half of the nineteenth century Italy was merely, in Metternich’s words, ‘a geographical expression’. Between Savoy in the north and Sicily in the south, the peninsula was, for some fourteen centuries, a constantly shifting kaleidoscope of kingdoms, principalities, duchies, republics and city-states, all liable to major or minor invasions by their Italian neighbours or by others: the French, the Spanish, and even–if we count Nelson’s fleet as invaders–the British. I have tried, in the Italian chapters, to keep the issues as simple as possible; but history is a cruel and remorseless taskmaster, and if an occasional paragraph has to be read twice I can only plead force majeure. It was with immense relief that I finally reached the Risorgimento and the unification of Italy–a goal for which I personally had longed every bit as much as Mazzini. By then my work was almost done.
Greece, by contrast, makes only four major appearances in this book: in Chapters II, VIII, XVIII and XXV. The reason is not far to seek: for some five centuries it lay, like the rest of eastern Europe, under Turkish rule. Thus, from the time of the Ottoman conquest of the mainland (and most of the islands) in the late fourteenth century, it was condemned to a state of near stagnation; not until the first years of the nineteenth did the Greek spirit revive. The ensuing fight for independence was not, perhaps, the epic of uninterrupted heroism that is sometimes depicted, but it succeeded; and the capture of Salonica in 1912 gave us, in all its essentials, the Greece that we have today.
We are left with North Africa–or most of it. Egypt is of course a special case, thanks very largely to the river Nile. Had there been other, parallel streams to the west, the history of the entire region would have been radically different; as there are not, the countries bordering the Mediterranean on its southern side consist very largely of desert, apart from the cities and towns ranged along a fairly narrow coastal strip. It is, of course, with this strip that we are chiefly concerned. In the days of antiquity it managed to have a remarkably distinguished history. As early as the sixth century BC, in what is now Cyrenaica in eastern Libya, several Greek cities were already flourishing; Cyrene, with its port of Apollonia, was one of the most prosperous in the Greek world. A hundred years later, Carthage–in what is now Tunisia–dominated well over half the North African coast and was soon to constitute a major threat to Rome, while by the third century AD Roman Africa extended from the Atlantic coast to Tripolitania–whose capital, Leptis Magna, was the birthplace of Septimius Severus, one of the most distinguished of the later Roman Emperors.
Further to the west, Algeria and Morocco have, I fear, received comparatively short shrift. Algerian history was much as might have been expected: Roman–as part of what the Romans called Mauretania Caesariensis–then Vandal, Byzantine, Umayyad, Almoravid, Almohad and Ottoman until the arrival of the French in 1830. In Morocco the situation was much the same in the earlier centuries; in the later, there was one crucial difference: this was the only country in North Africa that never suffered Turkish domination, keeping its own native rulers until the nineteenth century. This simple fact has had an extraordinary effect on the character of the country which–though it extends further to the west than anywhere in mainland Europe and is indeed far more an Atlantic country than a Mediterranean one–is somehow infused with an oriental exoticism unique in the modern Islamic world.
I feel a little guilty, too, about one indisputably Mediterranean country which I have most unjustly overlooked. The principality of Monaco may measure only one square mile, but it can claim to have been an independent nation since the fifteenth century, with a reigning royal house, that of the Grimaldis, going back even earlier, to 1297–the oldest in Europe. It certainly deserves a mention, and it has not had one. I thought at one moment of introducing a few light-hearted pages about the growth of the Riviera, in which I should certainly have given the principality its due, but I realised that they would have settled only very uneasily into their surroundings and regretfully gave up the idea. I hope at least that this paragraph will reassure the Monegasques that they have not been entirely forgotten.
A word about proper names. In a book of this kind there can be no rules; far too much, it seems to me, can be sacrificed on the altar of consistency. I have therefore allowed myself to be guided by familiarity alone. Greek names have tended to be Latinised (Comnenus rather than Komnenos), Christian names to be Anglicised (William of Sicily rather than Guglielmo) and Arabic names where possible simplified (Saladin). To avoid confusion, on the other hand, I have made countless exceptions: thus you will find Lewis, Louis and Ludwig; Francis, François and Franz; Isabella and Isabel, Peter and Pedro, Caterina and Catherine. Where places have an English name I have normally used it (though I draw the line at Leghorn); where the names changed, as it were, in midstream (Adrianople to Edirne, Zante to Zakynthos) I have changed with them, but where necessary have given the older name in brackets. This is all very unscholarly, but as I have pointed out in almost every book I have ever written, I am no scholar.
There is a special problem about Constantinople. In theory, after the Turkish conquest of 1453, it should be called by its Turkish name, Istanbul. In fact, however, it was invariably referred to as Constantinople by the British government–and fairly generally in this country–until well after the Second World War. I have therefore used whichever name seemed most suitable in the context.
I cannot hope to thank all those who have helped me to write the pages that follow, but one debt in particular cannot go unrecorded. Soon after I started work, my wife and I were invited to dinner at the Spanish Embassy. I told the Ambassador, my dear friend Santiago de Tamarón, that while I was fairly familiar with the eastern Mediterranean (having written a history of Byzantium) and with the central (having written one of Venice) I was shamefully ignorant of the western, knowing little of Spanish history and speaking no Spanish. ‘Oh,’ he said, ‘I think we might be able to do something about that.’ A few weeks later there came an invitation for my wife and me to spend ten days in Spain as guests of the Fundación Carolina, going wherever we wanted. Those days–for which we are both more than grateful–proved of immense value; even though my lack of Spanish scholarship will still, I fear, be all too apparent, I trust that thanks to them I have not actually disgraced myself.
My daughter Allegra Huston copy-edited this book from New Mexico and put me through a grilling such as I have never suffered before. I am hugely grateful to her, as to Penny Hoare and Lily Richards at Chatto. Virtually every word in the pages that follow–and in nearly all my previous books, for that matter–has been written in the Reading Room of the London Library. My thanks go, as always, to all members of its staff for their unfailing helpfulness and courtesy. What would I do without them?
John Julius Norwich