For over three thousand years, the Mediterranean Sea has been one of the great centres of world civilization. From the time of Troy until the middle of the nineteenth century, human activity on and around the Sea has decisively shaped much of the course of world history. David Abulafia's The Great Sea is the first complete history of what has happened on and immediately around the Mediterranean, from the erection of the mysterious temples on Malta around 3500 BC to the recent reinvention of the Mediterranean's shores as a tourist destination.
The focus of the book is on places and individuals, and shows the degree to which human beings have decisively shaped this extraordinary environment. Abulafia describes the teeming port cities that have been particularly influential or representative during particular periods - cities such as Amalfi, Alexandria, Venice, Trieste and Salonika - which he argues have prospered because of their ability to allow many different peoples, religions and identities to co-exist within sometimes very confined spaces right up to the twentieth century. He also brilliantly populates the book with identifiable individuals whose lives illustrate with great immediacy the wider developments he is describing - Muslim and Jewish pilgrims heading east from Spain in the twelfth century AD, a deluded Messiah in seventeenth-century Smyrna, as well as the kings of Norman Sicily, Ottoman sultans and naval commanders from Britain, France and Tsarist Russia.
The Great Searanges stupendously across time and the whole extraordinary space of the Mediterranean from Gibraltar to Jaffa, Genoa to Tunis. Rather than imposing a false unity on the sea and the human activity it has sustained, the book emphasises diversity - ethnic, linguistic, religious and political - and traces how it became 'probably the most vigorous place of interaction between different societies on the face of the planet'. Readers will leave it with their understanding of those societies, their histories and their connections, enormously enriched.
