Untitled - UTSC Humanities Research Projects server - University of ...

80 Mediterraneans
precise models from the workshops of the van Eycks and their
contemporaries, or the experience gained by Antonello da Messina
in northern workshops.
It is hard not to be struck by the structural similarities between
the Classic Mediterranean and the Mediterranean of the
North, regions which constituted frontiers between Christians
and non-Christians, and which therefore were the theatre of
holy wars, Mediterranean crusades and Baltic ones, but also of
commercial penetration by town-based merchants, predominantly
Low German in the north and predominantly north Italian
or Catalan in the south. In both areas, trade and crusade
went hand-in-hand. In both, the exchange of luxury goods for
raw materials was the foundation of trade, though of course
there was a massive difference between doing business as a
guest of the Mamluk sultan or caliph of Tunis and trading in
forest products along the barely developed shores of Estonia
and Livonia. The distinctive style of brick-built gabled housing,
suitable for warehouses and living quarters combined together,
spread from the Netherlands and northern Germany
eastwards across the Baltic, along with the Low German languages.
This created a degree of cultural homogeneity among
the trading elites, not dissimilar to the way that Catalan trade
brought Catalan building styles and pockets of Catalan settlers
speaking the Catalan tongue to Sicily, Sardinia, and even in
some measure Greece, or to the way that the towns of Sicily
became impregnated with the culture of northern Italy, to
which a significant proportion of the population traced their
ancestry.
5. the mediterranean atlantic
The interest of the waters beyond the Straits of Gibraltar lies, in
part, in the way that western European colonists adapted the
islands they found (principally the Madeira group, the Azores,
the Canaries, with southward extensions to the Cape Verdes
and São Tomé) to the needs of the European economy, at a time
when access to eastern Mediterranean goods was being
hindered by the advance of the Ottomans. The area is defined
not by coasts, except to the east, but by the lines linking the
island archipelagoes that make up this region. Still, this has not