History and Theory 50 (May 2011), 220-228 © Wesleyan University 2011 ISSN: 0018-2656

Forum: Holberg Prize Symposium

Doing Decentered History

4.

Mediterranean History as Global History

David Abulafia

ABSTRACT

Mediterranean history, and the history of other closed seas, is seen here as the experience of
those who traversed the sea and arrived as decentered aliens on the other side. Mainly these
have been men, with merchants generally as pioneers who introduced the goods, ideas, and
religion of one region to another. From antiquity onwards, port cities such as Carthage,
Alexandria, Smyrna, and Livorno acted as links among the three continents facing the
Mediterranean, and visitors from other lands were sometimes free to roam, sometimes
ghettoized.

Keywords: Mediterranean, Braudel, merchants, slaves, Jews

A fundamental problem exists in writing the history not just of the Mediterranean
but of Mediterranean-like spaces—seas such as the Baltic, larger maritime spaces
such as the Atlantic, dry open spaces such as the Sahara Desert. Put briefly, the
problem is how to write a history of the sea without writing a compendium of
the history of the lands surrounding it, something that will inevitably have fuzzy
edges, especially compared to the sharply defined edges of a sea. Is the subject
of study the Mediterranean Sea or the Mediterranean region—and pari passu for
the Atlantic, Indian Ocean, and so on? Looking at journals such as the Mediter-
ranean Historical Review and Mediterranean Studies, we encounter any number
of excellent articles on the Mediterranean region, many of the most memora-
ble of which do not actually mention the sea. The history of the Mediterranean,
however defined, has become something of an industry in the last few years, as
seminars on Mediterranean history have proliferated in universities and institutes
not just around the Mediterranean but across the English-speaking world and in
areas remote from the Mediterranean such as Finland and Japan. Yet this remains
an ill-defined field of study, and the concepts of decentered history and the global
in the local will help us give a sharper definition to the history of the Mediterra-
nean and of other Mediterraneans. This discussion will draw on my most recently
completed book, The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean, which

. David Abulafia, “Mediterraneans,” in Rethinking the Mediterranean, ed. William V. Harris

(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 64-93; cf. Bernard Bailyn, Atlantic History: Concept and
Contours (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005).
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Mediterranean History as Global History 221
begins with a Neanderthal woman who lived on Gibraltar about 24,000 years ago,
and ends not with extinct humans but with nearly extinct fish, the bluefin tuna that
the Doha conference in 2010 failed to save. I shall therefore be citing examples
from Paleolithic times to the present day, in the hope of showing that the Mediter-
ranean was a space in which not just goods but identities were traded, processed,
and repackaged. This discussion will also concentrate on what might be called the
“classic Mediterranean,” leaving largely implicit the suggestion that the Baltic,
the Caribbean, the Sahara, and so on can be approached in similar ways.
My Mediterranean is resolutely the sea itself, its shores and its islands, particu-
larly the port cities that provided the main departure and arrival points for those
crossing its surface. This is a narrower definition than that of Braudel, which at
times encompassed places beyond the Mediterranean such as Madeira and Cra-
cow, for cogent enough reasons; but the Mediterranean of Braudel and most of
those who have followed in his wake was a land mass stretching far beyond the
shoreline, as well as a basin filled with water, and there is still a tendency to define
the Mediterranean in relation to the cultivation of the olive or to the river valleys
that feed into it. This means one must examine the often sedentary, traditional
societies in those valleys that produced the foodstuffs and raw materials that were
the staples of trans-Mediterranean commerce, which also means taking on board
true landlubbers who never went near the sea. But an alternative approach would
concentrate on those who dipped their toes into it and, best of all, took journeys
across it, participating directly, in some cases, in cross-cultural trade, in the move-
ment of religious and other ideas, or, no less significantly, in naval conflicts for
mastery over the sea routes. The question then becomes the way human beings di-
rectly experienced the sea. How far this includes fishermen is a moot point, since,
within the Mediterranean, most fishing expeditions set out for fishing grounds
and return from them without necessarily touching land; they are not, then, an
automatic way of making contact across the waters, though there are important
exceptions such as the long-standing Genoese colony at Tabarka, off the coast
of Tunisia. More important to those interested in contact is the way their catch
travels between communities, whether as Roman fish sauce or in the form of the
sardines consumed in staggering quantities by the citizens of fifteenth-century
Barcelona, especially during Lent.
It is tempting to try to reduce the history of the Mediterranean to a few com-
mon features, to attempt to define a “Mediterranean identity” or phenomenon of
“Mediterraneanism,” and to insist that certain physical features of the region have
molded human experience there (as Braudel in particular emphasized). Yet this
search for a fundamental unity starts from a misunderstanding of what the Medi-
terranean has meant for the peoples who have inhabited its shores and islands or
have crossed its surface. Rather than searching for unity, we should note diversity:
. David Abulafia, The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean (London: Penguin; New
York: Oxford University Press, 2011).
. Fernand Braudel, The Mediterranean and the Mediterranean World in the Age of Philip II,
transl. S. Reynolds, 2 vols. (London: Collins, 1972–73); P. Horden and N. Purcell, The Corrupting
Sea: A Study of Mediterranean History (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 36.
. R. Salicrù i Lluch, El tràfic de mercaderies a Barcelona segons els comptes de la Lleuda de
Mediona (febrer de 1434) (Anuario de estudios medievales, annex no. 30, Barcelona: CSIC, 1995).
 14682303, 2011, 2, Downloaded from https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/j.1468-2303.2011.00579.x by Readcube (Labtiva Inc.), Wiley Online Library on [19/06/2023]. See the Terms and Conditions (https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/terms-and-conditions) on Wiley Online Library for rules of use; OA articles are governed by the applicable Creative Commons License
222 david abulafia

at the human level, this ethnic, linguistic, religious, and political diversity was
constantly subject to external influences from across the sea, and therefore in a
constant state of flux, while movements from the interior toward the sea (“bar-
barian invasions” and the like) introduced the cultures, languages, and political
traditions of areas close and remote in the hinterland of Europe, western Asia, and
North Africa. From the first Paleolithic settlers in Sicily to the ribbon develop-
ments along the Spanish costas, the edges and islands of the Mediterranean Sea
have provided meeting points for peoples of the most varied backgrounds who
have exploited its resources and learned, in some cases, to make a living by trans-
ferring its products from better-endowed to ill-endowed regions. These “connec-
tivities,” as Peregrine Horden and Nicolas Purcell have termed such links, have
brought not just commodities such as grain, oil, and wine but individual migrants
and merchants, missionaries and mercenaries, mystics and pilgrims, conquerors
and slaves, from one shore to another, sometimes merging into an apparently
dominant culture, but often transforming it by their presence, not to mention more
transient modern visitors, such as tourists, who have also altered the Mediterra-
nean by their demand for certain goods, facilities, and services. Those individuals
who transformed this space were sometimes visionaries, such as Alexander the
Great or St. Paul, to cite two very different cases; but I want to look at some over-
lapping groups, mostly very large ones.
My first group is enormous: men. My second, for reasons I shall explain, seems
much tinier, and is women. How male is the Mediterranean I am describing?
Sedentary merchants might be women, as the evidence from the plentiful letters
left by the Jews of eleventh-century Egypt (the Cairo Genizah documents) and the
evidence from twelfth- and thirteenth-century Genoa indicate. In that era, at least,
wives did not accompany their husbands on trading expeditions, let alone travel
for trade in their own right, though attitudes to participation in business varied
among Jews, Christians, and Muslims. A few European women could be found
in the well-documented Genoese trading colony in late thirteenth-century Tunis,
but most of those we know about appear to have offered sexual services to the
Christian trading community. Female participation in naval warfare is apparently
a twenty-first century phenomenon that has not been tested within the Mediterra-
nean. But among migrants, whether the Alans and Vandals invading Africa at the
time of St. Augustine, or the Sephardim expelled from Spain in 1492, there was
often, though not invariably, a large female component—even the armies of the
early crusades were accompanied by both noblewomen and bands of prostitutes.
It is less clear whether the Bronze Age raiders known as the Sea Peoples came ac-
companied to the lands in Syria, Palestine, and elsewhere that they settled; indeed,
a likely explanation for the rapid abandonment of their Aegean culture by the ear-
ly Philistines is that they intermarried with the Canaanites, adopted their gods, and

. S. D. Goitein, A Mediterranean Society: The Jewish Communities of the Arab World as Por-
trayed in the Documents of the Cairo Geniza, vol. 1, Economic Foundations (Berkeley: University
of California Press, 1967); Steven A. Epstein, Wills and Wealth in Medieval Genoa, 1150–1250
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1984).
. Notai genovesi in oltremare: atti rogati a Tunisi da Pietro Battifoglio (1288–1289), ed. G.
Pistarino (Genoa: Istituto di Medievistica, 1986).
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Mediterranean History as Global History 223
learned their language. Much the same applies to the Normans who took control
of southern Italy in the eleventh century ce. Yet one group of women has a particu-
lar importance for the history of the Mediterranean: female slaves, whose fortunes
varied enormously, from the extraordinary power it might be possible to exercise
within an Ottoman harem to the sad exploitation and debasement of those used for
sexual purposes or assigned lowly work in the villas of prosperous Romans. Dur-
ing the Middle Ages, many of these slaves, both male and female, were brought
out of the Black Sea, but those who inhabited the shores of the Mediterranean in
the age of the Barbary corsairs (and at many other periods) also knew the horror
of raiding parties that picked people off the shore—Christians off the coasts of
Italy, France, and Spain, Muslims off the coasts of Morocco, Algeria, and Tunisia.
When King Francis I of France permitted the Turks to visit Marseilles and occupy
Toulon in 1543, they kidnapped the nuns of Antibes, among other victims. Still,
the relative maleness of the traversed Mediterranean is something to ponder—the
Italians seem to be right to say il mare, as opposed to the French la mer or indeed
the neutral Latin mare.
My third group, mainly male as we have seen, is merchants. It hardly needs to
be said that there is a massive literature on the transformative role of trade in all
societies, even if it sometimes takes the form of a denial that long-distance trade
in antiquity and the Middle Ages had a significant effect on economic develop-
ment (as in the works of Moses Finley or Larry Epstein, both influenced by Marx-
ist theory—in the latter case, the debate about the transition from feudalism to
capitalism).10 But I want to concentrate here on the people who traded, not on the
goods they carried. Among all those who traversed the Mediterranean, merchants
offer the best starting point, for several reasons. One rather positivistic one is
that, even before Phoenician merchants spread the art of alphabetic writing across
the Mediterranean, merchants had been anxious to record their transactions; we
simply know a great deal about them, whether in Roman Puteoli, near Naples, in
medieval Genoa and Venice, or modern Smyrna and Livorno. But—and here the
issue of decentered history comes to the fore—the merchant pioneer is almost by
definition an outsider, someone who crosses cultural and physical boundaries,
encountering new gods, hearing different languages, and finding himself (much
more rarely, herself) exposed to the sharp criticisms of the inhabitants of the plac-
es the merchant visits in search of goods unavailable at home, or seeking to sell
what his homeland and lands often far beyond have produced.
The ambiguous image of the merchant as a desirable outsider is there in our
earliest sources. Homer was uneasy about merchants. On the one hand, Athena

. A. Yasur-Landau, The Philistines and Aegean Migration and the End of the Late Bronze Age
(Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2010).
. Jacques Heers, Esclaves et domestiques au Moyen Âge dans le monde méditerranéen (Paris:
Fayard, 1981).
. Jacques Heers, The Barbary Corsairs: Warfare in the Mediterranean, 1480–1580 (London:
Greenhill, 2003).
10. Philip D. Curtin, Cross-cultural Trade in World History (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 1984); Moses I. Finley, The Ancient Economy (London: Chatto and Windus, 1973);
Stephan R. Epstein, An Island for Itself: Economic Development and Social Change in Late Medieval
Sicily (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992).
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224 david abulafia

appeared at the start of the Odyssey before Odysseus’s son Telemachos, posing
as a princely trader: “I call myself Mentes, son of the clever Anchialos, and I
rule over the Taphians who are fond of rowing, and I have come here now with a
ship and comrades, sailing over the sea that sparkles like wine, to foreign men, to
Temese, to get bronze: I am bringing flashing iron.”11 On the other hand, Homer
showed contempt for mere traders of Phoenicia, suggesting that they were deceit-
ful and unheroic, despite glorying, paradoxically, in the trickery of Odysseus; and
the somewhat hypocritical sense that trade dirtied one’s hands remained strong
among patrician readers of Homer in ancient Rome. It was these Phoenicians,
however, who ventured as far as southern Spain, establishing colonies side-by-
side with but often apart from the native populations of the western Mediterra-
nean—typically, on offshore islands, easy to guard, for one never knew how long
relations with neighboring peoples would remain warm.12 The Phoenicians pro-
vide a good example of what is being argued here, and are worth looking at fur-
ther. In a first phase, around the ninth to seventh centuries, there is a strong sense
that these Levantine merchants are foreigners, outsiders, introducing peoples far
from their own native land to exotic goods (in return for local silver and copper);
but, over time, the goods they brought transformed native cultures, notably in
Tuscany, where the Etruscans were hungry for eastern artifacts, and in southern
Spain, the home of the remarkable Iberian civilization. Then, as the Phoenician
colony at Carthage became an economic and political power in its own right,
relationships were transformed in a number of ways. Carthage itself became the
hub of new networks of communication, a cosmopolitan meeting point between
Levantine and north African cultures, a place where divergent cultures fused and
a new identity may be said to have emerged, even if the city elite continued to
describe themselves as “people of Tyre.” Greek culture too gained a purchase in
Carthage, whose citizens identified the Phoenician god Melqart with Herakles.
Gods and goddesses as well as merchants crisscrossed the ancient Mediterranean.
Additionally, the presence of Phoenicians and Greeks on the shores of Italy, in-
dividuals with a distinct cultural identity, acted as a yeast that transformed the
villages of rural Etruria into cities whose richer inhabitants possessed an insatia-
ble hunger for the foreign: for Greek vases, Phoenician silver bowls, Sardinian
bronze figurines.13 Alongside merchants who came for the metals of Italy, we can
soon detect artisans who traveled west to settle in the lands of the barbaroi, know-
ing that their skills would probably earn them greater esteem than at home, where
each was one of many.
There are striking parallels in later centuries. Alien merchants are an obvious
feature of the medieval Mediterranean, where we have the intriguing phenomenon
of the ghettoized merchant visiting Islamic or Byzantine territory, enclosed in an

11. Homer, Odyssey, book 1, 180-185, in The Odyssey: Translation and Analysis, transl. Roger
Dawe (Lewes, Sussex, UK: Book Guild, 1993), 59.
12. M. E. Aubert, The Phoenicians in the West: Politics, Colonies, and Trade, 2nd ed. (Cambridge,
UK: Cambridge University Press, 2001).
13. See, for example, Mauro Cristofani, Gli Etruschi del Mare (Milan: Longanesi, 1983); Robert
Leighton, Tarquinia: An Etruscan City (London: Duckworth, 2004); David Ridgway, The First
Western Greeks (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992); Robin Lane Fox, Travelling
Heroes: Greeks and Their Myths in the Epic Age of Homer (London: Penguin, 2008).
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Mediterranean History as Global History 225
inn or fonduk that also functioned as a warehouse, chapel, bakehouse, and bath-
house, with one for each major “nation”: Genoese, Venetian, Catalan, and so on.14
Here we are looking at the Mediterranean when Muslims, Greeks, and increas-
ingly self-assured Italians were competing for control of the routes across the sea
and the ports along its shores. The sense that the merchant might be a source of
religious contamination and political subversion led the rulers of Egypt to lock
the doors of these inns at night (the keys being held by Muslims on the outside).
Of course, this only enhanced the solidarity and sense of community that held
these merchants together, while underlining the differences between the differ-
ent groups of Italians and Catalans, who coexisted in a rivalry that Muslim emirs
proved adept at exploiting. The Byzantines too set the Italian merchants apart in a
walled compound during the twelfth century, feeding xenophobia in their capital
city, with the ugly consequences of anti-Latin pogroms. The idea of enclosing
distinct communities behind walls was not, then, particularly novel when the king
of Aragon first segregated the Majorcan Jews around 1300, and I do not doubt
that these merchant communities provided a useful model for the ghetto.15 These
enclosed areas, whether of Jews or of European merchants, were places where a
certain amount of privilege—self-government, freedom to practice one’s religion,
tax exemptions—were counterbalanced by constraint—limitations on free move-
ment, reliance on often capricious public authorities for protection, and so on.
To speak of the Jews is to speak of merchants who had an unusual ability to
cross the boundaries between cultures, whether in the early days of Islam, during
the period of ascendancy of the Genizah Jews from Cairo, with their trans- and
ultra-Mediterranean connections, or in the period of Catalan commercial expan-
sion, when they could exploit their family and business ties to their co-religionists
and penetrate deep into the Sahara in search of gold, ostrich feathers, and other
African products that were beyond the reach of their Christian compatriots still
stuck within their trading compounds. The prominence and mobility of a minor-
ity group is intriguing. Possibly we are victims of the imbalance in the surviving
sources, which in the age of the Genizah are predominantly Jewish documents
from Cairo.16 But there are good grounds for seeing Jewish merchants as pioneers
at a time when the Islamic authorities strongly discouraged travel into Christian
lands, and, before about 1050, Christian merchants lacked the capital and infra-
structure (including merchant fleets) necessary to conduct intensive business in
the Islamic Mediterranean, with the exception of Venice and Amalfi. At the same
time Jewish law encouraged maritime trade, by placing much lighter restrictions
on sea travel during the Sabbath day than applied for those traveling by land,
since the wind and the ship did the work, not the traveler. And then these Jew-
ish merchants were able to bring back information about the world beyond the

14. Olivia Remie Constable, Housing the Stranger in the Mediterranean World: Lodging, Trade,
and Travel in Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press,
2003).
15. David Abulafia, “From Privilege to Persecution: Crown, Church and Synagogue in the City
of Majorca, 1229–1343,” in Church and City, 1000–1500: Studies in Honour of Christopher Brooke,
ed. D. Abulafia, M. Rubin, and M. Franklin (Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 1992),
111-126.
16. On which see Goitein, Mediterranean Society, vol. 1.
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226 david abulafia

Mediterranean ports that was recorded and disseminated across Mediterranean

Europe and beyond in the remarkable portolan charts and world maps produced
in late medieval Majorca. As merchants moved around, so did information about
the physical world.
Often able to speak a number of languages, and communicating by letter across
great swaths of the Mediterranean and beyond, these Jewish merchants perhaps
deserve the label “cosmopolitan.” But we also need to consider the port cities
that, as it were, made a profession of cosmopolitanism: port cities of very var-
ied political loyalties in which merchants and settlers from all over the sea and
far beyond gathered and interacted.17 One port city that features again and again
across the centuries is Alexandria, which from the very start possessed a mixed
identity, combining Greeks, Jews, and Egyptians, and which only lost that identity
in the second half of the twentieth century, as rising nationalism destroyed the
cosmopolitan communities of the Mediterranean.18 These port cities acted as vec-
tors for the transmission of ideas, including religious ideas, bringing Greek gods
and ideas about how to represent them physically to Etruscan harbors, or bringing
the worship of Egyptian gods such as Isis and Serapis (himself an extraordinary
state-initiated fusion of Osiris, Herakles, Hades, and sundry other deities) to Ro-
man Ostia. They became focal points for the spread of proselytizing Judaism,
Christianity, and Islam, each of which left an extraordinarily powerful imprint
on the societies of the lands around the Mediterranean, including, again, Ostia,
where the remains of an ancient synagogue that functioned for several hundred
years have been excavated.
The concept of the Mediterranean as a “faithful sea,” to cite the title of a recent
collection of essays, needs to take into account its role as a surface across which
not merely poor and anonymous pilgrims moved but also charismatic missionar-
ies such as Ramon Llull, who died in 1316 after writing hundreds of books and
pamphlets on how to convert Muslims, Jews, and Greeks to the true faith, without,
it must be said, ever converting anyone.19 Yet Llull’s career is a reminder that
religious friction and confrontation is only part of the picture. He imitated Sufi
verses and hobnobbed with kabbalists; he was at once a keen missionary and an
exponent of old-fashioned Iberian convivencia, recognizing the God of the three
Abrahamic religions as the same single God.20 A different sort of convivencia
existed in the minds of members of the religious communities that were expelled
or forced to convert as Spain asserted its Catholic identity in 1492 and afterwards:
the Marranos and Moriscos, Jews and Muslims who might or might not adhere to
their ancestral religion in private, while being expected to practice the Catholic
faith in public. The ascendancy of the Sephardic merchants in the early modern

17. Jews and Port Cities 1590–1990: Commerce, Community and Cosmopolitanism, ed. David
Cesarani and G. Romain (London: Frank Cass, 2006).
18. Alexandria Real and Imagined, ed. A. Hirst and M. Silk, 2nd ed. (Cairo: American University
of Cairo Press, 2006).
19. A. Husain and K. Fleming, A Faithful Sea: The Religious Cultures of the Mediterranean,
1200–1700 (Oxford: Oneworld, 2007).
20. Harvey Hames, The Art of Conversion: Christianity and Kabbalah in the Thirteenth Century
(Leiden: Brill, 2000); Dominique Urvoy, Penser l’Islam: les présupposés islamiques de l’art de Lull
(Paris: Vrin, 1980).
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Mediterranean History as Global History 227
Mediterranean is astonishing in any number of ways: their ability to acquire and
shed different identities, as “Portuguese” able to enter Iberia and as Jews resident
in Livorno or Ancona—an ability to cross cultural, religious, and political bound-
aries reminiscent of their forebears in the Cairo Genizah six centuries earlier. A
sideways glance at the oceans makes one notice the role of these Sephardim in the
trade of the Atlantic world and the Indian Ocean as well.21 These multiple identi-
ties, profitably studied in a recent book by Yirmiyahu Yovel, The Other Within,
are an extreme case of a wider Mediterranean phenomenon: there were places
where cultures met and mixed, but here were individuals within whom identities
met and mixed, often uneasily.22 This was not a novelty. If we want to find earlier
examples, we could point to Maimonides, whether or not we believe that he was
for a time a forced convert to Islam, for the imprint of Islamic philosophy on his
thought was profound whatever his personal history; intriguingly, Sarah Stroumsa
has subtitled her new study of his career Portrait of a Mediterranean Thinker, but
disconcertingly admits to puzzlement about what this might signify.23 Or there is
the extraordinary Anselmo Turmeda, a friar who discovered Islam in a convent in
Bologna and subsequently became a noted early fifteenth-century Muslim scholar
under the name of ‘Abdallah at-Tarjuman.24 One of the most interesting cases
is that of al-Hasan al-Wazzan, Yuhanna al-Asad, Leo Africanus, so delightfully
expounded by Natalie Zemon Davis in her book Trickster Travels: here we have
someone who could also convey to Western audiences the physical realities of the
Islamic world way beyond the Mediterranean, and who switched back and forth
from Islam to Christianity and back to Islam.25
The advantages of creating centers where merchants of all nations and beliefs
were made welcome were not lost on early modern princes, whether in western
Europe or the Ottoman lands. Livorno, with its extraordinary privileges positively
encouraging settlement by Greeks, Armenians, Jews, and (though less explicitly)
Dutch and English Protestants, provided a model for later port cities such as Tri-
este under Maria Theresa.26 Within the Ottoman world, Smyrna, or Izmir, enjoyed
close ties to Livorno, and its rulers extended an equally generous welcome to all
nations. A French visitor observed in 1700: “The Turks are seldom seen in the
Franks’ Street, which is the whole length of the city. When we are in this street,
we seem to be in Christendom; they speak nothing but Italian, French, English or
Dutch there. Everybody takes off his hat when he pays his respects to another.”27

21. D. Studnicki-Gizbert, A Nation upon the Ocean Sea: Portugal’s Atlantic Diaspora and the
Crisis of the Spanish Empire 1492–1640 (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007).
22. Yirmiyahu Yovel, The Other Within. The Marranos: Split Identity and Emerging Modernity
(Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).
23. Sarah Stroumsa, Maimonides in His World: Portrait of a Mediterranean Thinker (Princeton:
Princeton University Press, 2009).
24. Mikel de Epalza, Fray Anselm Turmeda (‘Abdallāh al-Tarȳumān) y su polémica islamo-cris-
tiana: edición, traducción y studio de la Tuḥfa, 2nd ed. (Madrid: Hiperión, 1994).
25. Natalie Zemon Davis, Trickster Travels: A Sixteenth-century Muslim between Worlds (New
York: Hill and Wang, 2006).
26. Francesca Trivellato, The Familiarity of Strangers: The Sephardic Diaspora, Livorno, and
Cross-cultural Trade in the Early Modern Period (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009).
27. D. Goffman, Izmir and the Levantine World, 1550–1650 (Seattle: University of Washington
Press, 1990), 137.
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228 david abulafia

The Christians were free to operate their own churches and taverns, but they did
so rather tactlessly, leaving the taverns open all day and all night, and irritating
the Turks by singing too boisterously in church. Toleration also produced tensions
when communities exceeded the tacit limits of tolerance.
There is an understandable tendency to romanticize these meeting places, and
the darker reality of trans-Mediterranean contact in (say) the early modern period
also needs to be borne in mind: the ascendancy, between the fifteenth and the early
nineteenth century of the Barbary corsairs, and the close intersection between
piracy and trade, reminding one of Marx’s dismissive view that the early suc-
cesses of the medieval Italian traders were really based on naked piracy—which
may well be fairly accurate. Before the final suppression of the Barbary corsairs
(partly by the newly founded United States Navy), 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 or Leo Africanus, 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 becomes dangerous. Its opposing shores are close enough
to permit easy contact, but far enough apart to allow societies to develop distinc-
tively 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
the word “typical” has any meaning anyway). If they are not outsiders, in some
sense decentered, 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, intro-
ducing something of the culture of one continent into the outer edges, at least, of
another.

Gonville and Caius College,

Cambridge, UK