The Great Sea: A Human History of the Mediterranean (review)

When I was asked to review this addictive book by David Abulafia, I did not realize how much it would have the power to affect me emotionally. Perhaps this is easily understandable as I am a child of the Mediterranean. I was born in Trieste of an Italian father and a Croatian mother, both from Dalmatia, and, in addition, have spent a significant portion of my professional life living along the various shores of the “great sea”: from Italy and the former Yugoslavia to Tunisia, Syria, and Albania, with various extended work-related visits to Spain, Greece, Turkey, Israel, Libya, Egypt, and Morocco.

I heard stories of Ragusa and the glories of Venice as a child. The Great Sea was both familiar and revealing—a mix of oft-heard old stories and fascinating new ones. As I read this book, absorbing the perspective of thousands of years of history, played out on the same streets I have walked that were once peopled by my antecedents, it made me feel my personal ties to history in a very real way, as is the case, I suspect, with the very dedicated author, who also traces his roots to the Mediterranean. He could not have written such an amazing book without a deep passion for the subject. Reading this book, I yearn to return again soon, to revisit places I know well, to see them again through the eyes of this writer who can evoke vividly not only time and place but also epoch and civilization.

Viewed, as Abulafia presents them to us, from the broadest possible span of Mediterranean history, contemporary issues that seem so vitally important today, so life-and-death-in-the-balance, seem to fade in significance. The Mediterranean has seen it all, and truly there is nothing new under the sun. The author condenses millennia into 650 pages packed with many vibrant examples of history’s ups and downs, but it also leaves you hungry for more. I have read the history of the Mediterranean, been fascinated by it, but felt, as I read The Great Sea, as if I would never think of Mediterranean history in quite the same way again.

Abulafia paints the many-layered history of the Mediterranean as Tintoretto or Cara-vaggio might have used pigments to convey depth and complexity in order to draw the viewer into the emotion and drama of a painting. He makes familiar history fresh and new while adding a great deal of lesser known history, creating a rich and full picture, valuable to the scholar but also eminently accessible to the interested, nonscholarly reader. From different eras and civilizations, he weaves a cohesive tapestry of the many peoples who have created Mediterranean history. He uncovers new patterns from a multitude of events, all taken from a singular perspective, seeing those events as they unfolded on the sea and its shores rather than on the land.

It is enormously difficult to choose only a few illustrative examples to convey adequately the powerful impact of reading this book, a book that makes you stop and think so frequently. I highlight a few I found to be of particular interest. For instance, the Mediterranean in Neolithic times, especially the Maltese culture that produced temples and sanctuaries predating the pyramids, was a revelation. In fact, the first few chapters of the book were of intense interest, partly due to my own ignorance of the very early history of the region.

This book places a great deal of emphasis on the movement of peoples across the Mediterranean Sea and the ethnic, linguistic, and cultural influences that traveled with them. Abulafia studies the economic and political factors that played a role in the movement of individuals and peoples and how trade routes, political exile, and demand for basic resources as well as luxury goods all had their impact. In the Mycenaean world, trade created bridges between very different...